AMERICA GOES SMALL

AMERICA GOES SMALL

On December 12, 2015, the Paris Accord was adopted at the 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

At the time, the agreement was considered a world-wide political and diplomatic breakthrough. Phoenix-like, it rose from the ashes of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose mandated reductions in carbon emissions resulted in the rejection of  that Protocol by the second Bush Administration in 2001, and then resurrected the possibility of world-wide consensus on both the issue of climate change and a modest framework to (possibly) reduce it.

The operative words here are "modest" and "possibly."  

The Accord was not binding in any legal sense.  It did not require any nation to meet any specific reduction in carbon emissions.  And  the Accord's goal of  limiting global warming to less than 1.5C compared to pre-industrial era levels was just that -- a goal.  

But, as commentators pointed out at the time, that the Accord was ultimately aspirational did not make it meaningless.  

The hope was that nations, in agreeing to limit their specific individual emissions so as to meet their respective portions of the overall needed reduction, would create a universe in which the cost of non-compliance, measured both economically and morally, would itself engender adherence.  

For a number of reasons,  moreover, the hope was entirely rational.   

First, the scientific consensus on global warming as an established fact was itself irrefutable.   Climate deniers had been reduced to the category of cranks and charlatans, the 21st century's version of a flat earth society that continued to deny the truths of Copernicus. 

Second, the costs of global warming were being calculated and published.  The now famous Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change reported in 2006 that unabated global warming would cause 5-20% annual  reductions in global gross domestic product for the rest of the century, and a 2015 study from Tufts University projected a loss to America alone in the range of 1-3%, along with a global loss of 10%. 

Third, the benefits themselves were large, both in terms of the improved health that would come from less pollution and in terms of the economic growth from green technologies and clean energy.

Finally, the Accord mandated transparency.  Nations could choose their individual (and different) paths to carbon reduction, allowing, for example,  China to pursue clean coal while Norway embraced hydroelectric and the United States developed plains states wind farms.  But they all had to announce their results, and those that failed would presumably suffer the shame of a global citizenry intent on insuring that our world not be destroyed in a sea of melting ice.

Yesterday, Donald Trump ended America's participation in the Paris Accord.  

We now join Syria and Nicaragua as the only two countries that are not a part of the deal.  

The reaction from around the world was swift and universally negative.  The European Union issued a statement deriding Trump's decision as "a sad day for the global community."  The UN Secretary-General called it "a major disappointment."  Leaders from Japan, China, Russia and Europe reiterated their own nation's commitment to the agreement, with France's President Macron, speaking in English, noting -- and not too subtly -- that the Accord was designed to "make the planet great again."

Trump, however, is not interested in the planet.

His speech announcing the departure was his usual bromide of exaggerated claims and rhetorical nonsense.  He trotted out statistics from National Economic Research Associates (NERA) that more than 2 million American jobs would be lost on account of the Accord, with compliance being especially damaging in heavy manufacturing sectors (including iron, steel and coal).   He claimed the Accord had no teeth and would effectively result in American compliance while India and China failed to live up to their commitments.  

The NERA study, however, had already been debunked.  It overstates job loss and doesn't remotely account for expected gains in the clean energy sector.   For that reason, it had been roundly dismissed by the business community, large sectors of which are committed to the Accord.  In fact, over thirty companies -- including notables like GE, Dow Chemical, Citigroup and B of A --  re-stated their commitments yesterday.  As one commentator noted, "This is not a tree hugger group."

The cheating claim is particularly silly.  On the one hand, it was the United States, in the presence of the Obama Administration reacting to pressure from Republicans, which refused to allow the Accord to mandate compliance or impose penalties if nations did not meet their obligations.  The Chinese actually wanted a legally binding deal and didn't get one.  For Trump to now claim that others will cheat while we blindly adhere ignores this history.  On  the other, the whole point of the Accord was to embrace a new form of diplomacy where decentralized compliance and implementation was enforced with transparency and moral suasion.  

It wasn't perfect.

But it wasn't a "nothin' burger" either.  

Nor was there an alternative.  

Trump thinks he can negotiate a new deal but the evidence for that is thin to non-existent.  In his comments yesterday, France's Macron made clear that "there is no Plan B."  And the other signatories have decided to go on without us, willing to lead as we fall behind, but hoping (with some basis in reality) that states, localities and businesses here in the US take up the baton that Trump has just thrown away.

At the end of his speech, Trump asked, "At what point does America get demeaned. At what point do they start laughing at us. We want fair treatment . . . for our taxpayers."  He then finished with a flourish, saying "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

I don't know when the rest of the world started laughing.  With Trump, there has been no shortage of opportunities.  But Hillary supported the Paris Accord and Pittsburgh voted overwhelmingly for her last November.  

So when he ended there . . .

That's when I started.

TRUMP AGONISTES

TRUMP AGONISTES

Trump has escaped.

To the Middle East and Europe.

Trying to flee from himself.

We learned a week ago that, on the day after he fired James Comey as Director of the FBI, the President met with Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and its ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.  In that meeting, according to reports in both the Washington Post and New York Times,  Trump  -- in an unplanned comment that was not scripted beforehand -- disclosed highly classified information obtained from Israel regarding ISIS plots to blow up airliners with bombs implanted in laptop computers.

Lavrov, Kislyak and Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly -- and predictably -- denied they had obtained anything confidential. But Trump -- as is his wont -- essentially confirmed that they had. The next day he noted that he had the "absolute right" to disclose classified material, effectively admitting that he had, and today he asserted that he had never mentioned to the Russians that  Israel was the source of his information, thus confirming that Israel in fact was the source.

For its part, Israel never gave Trump permission to disclose the secret, an act that breaches the terms under which the secret was shared with the United States in the first place.  Nor was the disclosure planned out beforehand or discussed with the CIA or National Security Agency (NSA).  Instead, it came in the course of one of Trump's signature off the cuff ad libs as he bragged to Lavrov and Kislyak about what "great intel" he, Trump, had.

For the next twenty-four hours, the "shows," as Trump calls them, were all abuzz about this "thousand palms to a thousand foreheads" moment of idiocy.  The Israelis were angry.  No doubt some spies in Syria and/or Iraq, namely, the ones who had told Israel about the plot, were very nervous, having either been outed or subject to the strong risk of such by a President whose narcissism may now be matched only by his negligence.

Trump, however, just hunkered down . . .

And sent out his minions to claim that the real villains were the intelligence "sources" who had leaked his loose lips to the press in the first place.

The President then waited for this latest storm to pass  . . .

Which it did late on Tuesday afternoon . . .

When we found out that James Comey had kept notes of his post-Inaugural meetings with the President.

In those notes, Comey states that Trump in effect  asked him, in a February meeting at the White House,  to end the FBI's investigation into General Michael Flynn's contacts with the Russians during and after the Presidential campaign. Trump's exact words to Comey were "I hope you can let this go." And though that was bad enough,  the even more damning fact was that Trump asked Attorney General Sessions and Vice President Pence to leave the room before he spoke to Comey.

That is what prosecutors call "consciousness of guilt."

For his part, Trump immediately denied asking Comey to stop any investigation.

He did not, however, deny asking Sessions and Pence to leave the room beforehand.

So inquiring minds are now wondering what it was the Donald was so eager to tell Comey on the QT that the Veep and AG had to be escorted out before it could be said.

Maybe one of those minds was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein has recently become famous in his own right, having authored a memo outlining Director Comey's putative malfeasance in publicly discussing last year's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails during the summer and just before the November election. Trump initially claimed that this memo, and Sessions' agreement with it, was the reason he, Trump, fired Comey.  Trump, however, being Trump, blew that excuse up a day after it had been floated, admitting in an interview with NBC that (i) he intended to fire Comey regardless of the memo and (ii) he was doing so because of the Russian investigation, not because Comey had violated DOJ policy in the Hillary email investigation.

In any case, on Wednesday, Rosenstein set off the week's third bomb, appointing Ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller III as special counsel to take over the Russian investigation. 

The scope of Mueller's writ is broad.  The order appointing him allows him to investigate (i) any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; (ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and (iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a). Section 600.4(a) provides that "The jurisdiction of a Special Counsel shall also include the authority to investigate and prosecute federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel's investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses; and to conduct appeals arising out of the matter being investigated and/or prosecuted."

Trump was given no real heads-up on the appointment, told of it only an hour before it was released.   He was also informed of the order, not asked whether it was a good idea.  

Nevertheless, Trump's first reaction was surprisingly muted. Said the President on Wednesday night:

"As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know - there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity.  I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.  In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country."

Then he went to bed.

And woke up the next morning

And reverted to type.

At 7:52 am, he tweeted "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" By mid-morning, he was supporting this claim with the false tweet that special counsels should have been appointed to investigate "all of the illegal acts that took place in the . . . Obama Administration", oblivious to the fact that there were none. At lunch, oblivious to the fact that his own political appointee, Rosenstein, had appointed Mueller, he called the appointment an "excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way. That's all this is." And later in the day, at a joint press conference with Colombia's President Santos, he was back to saying "The entire thing is a witch hunt."

He also claimed that the appointment "hurts our country terribly, because it shows we're a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country."  He's right about the division.  In fact, he is the largest cause of it, having catapulted himself into the White House on a tweetstorm of personal invective, ad hominem insult, and applauded thuggishness.

There's no division, however, on this issue . . .

Where 78% of those polled favor a special prosecutor.

On Friday, Trump left for the Middle East.  As his plane headed east, the reminder of the week that was came from the White House's own documentary record of the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. "I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job," said Trump to the Russians. “I faced great pressure because of Russia," he continued, "That’s taken off."

And so, in one fell swoop, the real motive for the firing -- the Russian investigation -- was again made self-evident.  As was the perverse character of the man for whom the term "low blow" knows no limit.

Trump spent the weekend basking in the adulation of Saudi princes. And for him, that was no doubt a welcome respite.

Because, of the many things we know about Donald John Trump, one is that . . .

Adulation is his tonic.

Another is that . . .

Honesty -- certainly -- is not.

COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

COWARDS ON THE POTOMAC

Donald Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director this week.

Trump did so because the FBI is investigating Trump's fall Presidential campaign and its connections, if any, to the Russian government's interference in the national election.

After receiving news of Comey's ouster, sources within the FBI reported that Trump had summoned Comey to a dinner meeting at the White House a week after the Inauguration and had demanded Comey's loyalty.  

Comey refused.

At a number of points this past week,  people speaking on Trump's behalf -- including his press secretary (Spicer), principal deputy press secretary (Huckabee-Sanders), counselor (Conway) and Vice-President (Pence) -- denied that the so-called "Russian investigation" had anything to do with the firing of Comey.  In denying that motive, they also claimed that the firing had been caused by a report given to Trump by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That report criticized Comey for discussing -- last July and last October just before the election -- the agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails.

We now know that all of those denials, as well as the claim that Rosenstein's report caused Comey's ouster, were false.  We know this because, in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt on Thursday, Trump admitted the Russian investigation was the reason he fired Comey. As Trump put it to Holt, "When I decided to just do it, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'"  We know the Rosenstein report had nothing to do with the firing because, in that same interview with Holt, Trump said that "regardless of [Rosenstein's] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey."

For those of you scoring at home, that's Lies - 8, Truth - 0.

Trump has also denied, albeit implicitly,  that he attempted to exact any loyalty pledge from Comey at that White House dinner. He did that today when he tweeted that Comey "better hope there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" The implication was that those "tapes" would rebut Comey's claims regarding the ostensible loyalty pledge.  The implication was also that "tapes" would support Trump's assertion that Comey told Trump, again at the dinner (but also on the phone on two other occasions), that Trump was not under investigation. 

Responding to the tapes tweet, Comey  is reported to have said he hopes there are "lots of" them. He has, however, not commented on whether he ever said Trump was not under investigation.   Nor has the Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe commented on this subject (though, in testimony on Thursday, McCabe did say it was not the sort of conversation the FBI usually had with anyone). McCabe also denied that agents or other employees at the FBI had lost confidence in Comey, which rebutted claims to the contrary made by the President and his seconds repeatedly over the last two days.

Trump is a pathological liar and lives in the gutter.   

The likelihood here is that there are no tapes. And certainly no complete or unaltered ones. 

Because . . .

If there were, and if they were complete and  unaltered, they no doubt would support Comey's claims, not Trump's. 

When asked at today's press briefing whether, in fact, the White House had tapes of any Trump-Comey communications, the press secretary, Spicer,  refused to comment.  He said, "The tweet speaks for itself. I'm moving on."

It certainly does.

Trump wants his veiled threat to just hang out there.

To intimidate Comey . . .  

Or anyone else who discloses what Comey told about his conversations with Trump months ago.

Were the FBI conducting a criminal investigation, Trumps' interview with Holt and his morning "tapes" tweet would result either in a letter from a prosecutor warning Trump to stop talking to witnesses or an indictment of Trump for having attempted to intimidate them. He'd also have received a subpoena for any tapes. And meanwhile, in a normal world,  the House of Representatives would be wondering about impeachment and everyone in Congress would be demanding an independent investigation by a special counsel.

But the FBI isn't conducting a criminal investigation. It's conducting a counter-intelligence investigation, ostensibly without criminal targets.

And the world we live in ceased to be normal long ago.

Apart from the usual handfull,  there has been no unified call for a special counsel from the GOP leadership or rank and file, and certainly no mention of the I-word.  They are waiting to see who Trump will appoint to replace Comey, apparently oblivious to the reality that any independent director will suffer the same fate as Comey and anyone else will simply do Trump's bidding.

I'm reminded of Churchill's view of the British government in the 1930s.

As their world was rocked then . . .

By what is  rocking ours now.

The un-sought, the un-expected.

The un-hinged.

"So they go on in strange paradox," said Churchill,  "decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

We have a word for this.  It's called . . .

Cowardice.

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

LOOKING FOR THE PONY

About a decade ago, I was speaking to one of my best friends.  Like me, he is an Irish-Catholic from the middle class.  He excelled in high school and then went to a top-ranked college and an Ivy League law school.  Today, he is a partner in a major white-shoe law firm.  And all those years ago, in the course of giving some advice, he offered a pessimistic aside.

"Just remember," he said, "things can always get worse."

That's the sort of prognosis we Americans tend to reject out of hand. We see ourselves as a can-do people, constantly marching forward in an un-ending spiral of progress.  We roll our eyes at the pessimists among us, pretty much casting them aside for failing to sing from the hymnal of American exceptionalism.  We praise the optimists, those boys happily digging through the proverbial pile of horse manure on the theory that there's got to be a pony in there somewhere.

And then comes yesterday, and the "by one vote" repeal in the House of Representatives of Obamacare . . .

And, with that, my friend from all those years ago is looking more prescient than pessimistic.

Things can get worse.

In fact, they just did.

The American Health Care Act passed by the House yesterday is an unmitigated disaster, both as a matter of policy and for what it says about the sorry state of American politics.

The Act itself was born in the aftermath of the Republican Party's failure six weeks ago to bring an Obamacare repeal bill to the floor for an up or down vote.  Hard right conservatives did not like the bill that was then being proposed because it did not repeal enough of the Affordable Care Act, and some moderate Republicans did not like it because it repealed too much.  

The principal dispute between the two groups appeared to be whether insurance companies would be freed from enough requirements so that the GOP could claim premiums overall would fall.  The hard right wanted to allow states to allow companies to charge higher rates to those with pre-existing conditions, arguing that requiring subsidized state based high-risk pools for that group could be used to cover a group that Obamacare now precludes insurance companies from excluding, and that charging more for that coverage would allow companies to charge less for everyone else (or, principally, less for the younger, healthy folks who are not at as great a risk for getting sick in the first place).  The moderates claimed that those high-risk pools would not be remotely adequate to insure those with pre-existing conditions, and that an Obamacare replacement resulting in 24 million un-insured -- which is what the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said would be the result of the GOP replacement bill over time -- was unacceptable.

So, unable to corral enough Republicans in favor of replacement, no vote was taken.

This was viewed, predictably and accurately, as a major failure for the Republicans in general and for the Trump Administration in particular.  Trump himself had made a vigorous, albeit last quarter, effort to convince the GOP's hard-right Freedom Caucus to accept the bill, and when he failed, his "I alone can fix it" braggadocio took its first -- but by no means last -- direct hit.  The dealer -in-chief had produced . . .

No deal.

Now, when Trump fails, he doesn't accept it.  Instead, he assigns blame.

To everyone but himself.

And so he did here. 

The culprits he held responsible for this failure were Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and Reince Priebus, Trump's chief staff.  The pair had been unable to herd the cats that constitute the GOP's House majority in order to vote for the repeal of Obamacare and thus honor a promise the GOP has been making for the past seven years.  

The fact that Priebus and Ryan  had to herd only Republican cats was, of course, part of the problem. No Democrats would vote for the replacement bill, or for that matter for any bill that eliminated the individual mandate and cut Medicaid expansion, both of which are the principal reasons Obamacare reduced the number of un-insured by more than 20 million over the past seven years but neither of which are or will be part of any GOP replacement.  In fact, though the individual mandate was their own Heritage Foundation's idea, and was actually turned into law in Massachusetts by none other than its Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney, once Barack Obama endorsed the mandate, the Republican Party, in an act that gave hypocrisy new meaning,  decided it wouldn't. Similarly, though Obamacare used federally-funded Medicaid expansion to cover those who would still be unable to afford policies marketed through state-based insurance exchanges, nineteen Republican-controlled states refused to accept the money in an intentional effort to make Obamacare fail.  

Thus did GOP politics trump -- and for many actually kill -- health care in those nineteen states.

As they did with the Donald in the aftermath of the failure of the House to hold a vote on repeal and replace. 

The order from His Hairness afterward was to pass a bill, any bill.  His petulance demanded it and his ego required it.

So they passed one.

Yesterday.

By a one vote margin.

After no hearings, and no CBO score on how many would lose coverage (the number was 24 million with the first bill six weeks ago).

And then all the House Republicans got in a bus and drove to the White House to celebrate.

In truth, there was nothing to celebrate.  Yesterday's bill was no better than the bill they couldn't get to the floor six weeks ago.  In fact, it is worse.  Like the first bill, it eliminates the individual mandate and rolls back Medicaid expansion.  Unlike the first bill, however, it also effectively eliminates the ban on exclusions based on pre-existing conditions.   The first bill retained the ban but eliminated the individual mandate, which was the Obamacare provision that made the ban affordable in the first place; insurance companies obtained a larger, healthier overall pool of premium paying policyholders in exchange for being required to cover everyone.  In the first bill, the GOP tried to mitigate the elimination of the mandate with subsidies and a provision that taxed those who re-applied for insurance after allowing their coverage to lapse.  It's this last subsidy and tax provision that the right wing couldn't stomach.  So they replaced it with one allowing states to allow companies to charge more to those with pre-existing conditions and then added money to the stabilization fund designed to help states create high risk pools. The subsidies, however, are not remotely adequate to fund those pools, so the net effect is that the exclusion for pre-exisitng conditions has been re-born.  

Meanwhile, it is likely that the new bill will have the same overall effect as the first one.

In other words, more than 20 million will over time lose their insurance.

We do not know for sure yet what the actual numeric loss will be because the new bill has not been "scored" yet by the CBO.  Along with the GOP's refusal to hold any hearings at all on any version of repeal-and-replace, this too, however, was intentional.  Republicans know that the CBO score will show millions losing coverage and did not want that data available as Trump, Priebus and Ryan sought a vote on a measure they knew could fail and would succeed, if at all, only by the thinnest of margins.

Trump's and the House's victory dance at the White House was, of course, obviously premature. The House bill is by no means law and the issue must now go to the Senate.  Optimists are predicting the Senate will kill the House bill;  in fact, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yesterday said the House bill is "going nowhere fast" in the Senate.  

I, however, am not as sanguine.

We live in a country where, as a practical matter, an aggressive and strategically located minority is now governing the majority.  The last two Republican Presidents,  Bush II and Trump, have been elected only because a piece of 18th century arcana known as the Electoral College allowed the majority-vote loser to assume the office inasmuch as his votes were located more optimally than his opponent's.  Similarly, because of computer-based gerrymandering, the GOP has a sizable forty-five vote majority in the House even though it only gets about 45% of all the votes cast in House elections. Though the Electoral College has only produced a President without a popular vote victory on five occasions, two of them have come in the last sixteen years; and though gerrymandering has always existed, technology has improved line-drawing to the point where the districts themselves may no longer allow for majoritarian corrections.

In this world, anomalies such as these would not threaten democratic governance were the winners -- in this case, the Republicans -- cognizant of them and willing to tailor their program accordingly. Jefferson once said that "Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities."  And that is doubly the case when those who would do the forcing enjoy no majority at all.

And when the forced result hardly amounts to an "innovation."

Which is the case here.

60% of America likes Obamacare. And, given that more than 80% did not approve of the GOP's first replacement, yesterday's second act by the House is not likely to fare any better.  Especially in view of how bad the first measure was and the second is.

But this Republican Party is not humble.  The Senate last year literally stole a Supreme Court appointment from President Obama; the House yesterday approved a measure without a single Democratic vote, or even any effort to craft reforms to Obamacare that Democrats might have approved; and the GOP agenda going forward is all right wing all of the time  -- tax cuts for the wealthy who do not need them (including those for Trump himself, who would have paid $31 million less in 2005 had the GOP's current tax plans then been law), draconian cuts in funding for environmental protection and education, and the continuing denial of science that allows them to ignore climate change even as its consequences regularly announce themselves in hundred-year floods, dying coral reefs, arctic ice melts, species extinctions, and warmer temperatures.

And on top of all that, Trump is a fact-free President interested only in the perceived "win."  That's why he celebrated yesterday.  He didn't get a new law but he got a win and a picture.  And though Republicans showed up to stoke his ego on the White House lawn, it's not even clear he understands what is in the bill or why it is so ridiculously bad. Indeed, later yesterday evening, at a black tie press conference with Australia's Prime Minister Turnbull in New York City (where the two were meeting at dinner on the Intrepid to celebrate the American/Australian alliance during World War II),Trump launched into his usual tirade about our currently "failing" health care system, only to stop himself mid-way and turn to the Prime Minister. Said our policy-challenged President: "Right now Obamacare is failing. We have failing health care. I shouldn't say this to our great gentleman and my friend from Australia cause right now you have better health care than we do."

Trump was right about that.  Australia's system is better than ours.

Australia has Medicare for all and provides universal coverage.

Something Obamacare approached but the House bill passed yesterday does not remotely come close to providing.

In other words, something that already exists down under.

But about which Donald Trump obviously had . . .

Not a clue.

Under all these circumstance, I am having a hard time finding my inner boy . . .

Looking for that pony.

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

There are many outrages in the (now 99 day old) Trump Administration.

They include hypocrisy,  nepotism,  corruption,  incompetence and dishonesty.

Just to name a few.

But the biggest outrage, and the one that gains the least attention, is the outrage inherent in how he does it.  

Trump's approval rating is at 40% and was lower for much of the past few months, it having advanced ever so slightly in the last two weeks largely as a consequence of the bombing in Syria. These are historically low approval numbers.  In fact, they are the lowest in the history of presidential polling for the first 100 days of any administration.  They reflect Trump's practiced and continuing aversion to the truth, his rampant narcissism and in-your-face "I am the greatest" sheer boorishness, and the fact that, lacking any real commitments on policy that extend beyond a video clip designed to boost ratings, he has been captured by the far right in the Republican Party and is supporting their extreme agenda.  That agenda includes gutting health care, enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, de-funding environmental protection and education, and a somewhat schizophrenic foreign policy in which the Commander-in-Chief talks tough and threatens unilateral action in his service to "America first" nationalism,  while his seconds tour the planet re-assuring a nervous world that we remain committed to our longstanding strategic alliances.

The domestic side of that agenda is radically unpopular and, on foreign policy, the Administration is at no better than break even.

  

As an example of the former, Trump's and the GOP's on-going effort to repeal Obamacare comes in the face of the Affordable Care Act now being supported by 60% of the country.  Americans understand that Trumpcare -- or, more accurately, Ryancare -- would eliminate insurance for more than 20 million people and, in the latest proposal now being bantied about on Capitol Hill, would also likely eliminate coverage for many with pre-existing conditions. The right-wing GOP's new proposal allows states to avoid the ban on exclusions for those conditions that Obamacare enacted and the public overwhelmingly supports.  It does so by allowing states to claim their own plans will result in lower premiums overall and ostensibly equal or greater coverage as a consequence of that lower cost. 

Conservatives claim they can accomplish this hat trick through the creation of high risk insurance pools. 

Good luck with that.  Because . . .

Absent enormous government-funded subsidies, those high risk pools into which all those "pre-existing" diabetics and cancer patients will be thrown will be pools where premiums will  be extraordinarily high and therefore unaffordable for many who need the coverage most.

And when was the last time Mississippi ever voted to subsidize those who can't afford something?

Nevertheless, among the 62 million or so who actually voted for Trump last November, 96% still support him.

This is what is known as a disconnect.

It exists for two reasons. 

First, among that portion of those 62 million voters who are wealthy, Trump is a windfall waiting to happen.  They are willing to forgive and forget his transparent personal failings (narcissism, sexism, dishonesty, and ignorance) in exchange for the millions in tax cuts he promises and the right wingers in Congress are eager to enact. Second, among the middle and poor swaths of that voting group -- in other words, among the rural, white working class that hasn't had a raise in thirty years and is moving down, not up, the economic ladder -- Trump has sold them a bill of goods that holds immigrants abroad, minorities at home, and globalists in D.C. responsible for their economic plight.

The sale was and is fraudulent.  

But those who want to repeal Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society have been making this same  pitch for more than thirty years.

And it is working.

There are really only two ways to improve economic conditions for those in the middle and at the bottom.  The first is to improve economic productivity as a whole, and the second is to both  insure that the gains from any improved productivity are distributed widely on the one hand while re-distributing wealth to those who still lose out on the other.  Fair productivity distribution depends largely on the existence of equal bargaining power between capital, the investing class, and laborers, the working class, and  re-distribution can take many forms -- unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing subsidies, college loans, increased payments under social security, increases in the minimum wage, even old-fashioned work of the sort created by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  

But you can't improve without both.  

And for thirty years we haven't had both.  

Unions have been weakened to the point of practical non-existence and globalism without labor standards has arbitraged wages down even as cheap imports have helped consumers.  You can't consume if you don't have a job, and as a consequence, the lives of all those West Virginians living in poverty (18% of the state's population at last count) have not been improved much merely because tchotchkes in Wal-Mart became cheaper.  Meanwhile, the GOP's love affair with tax cuts and inflated defense spending has put enormous and predictable pressure on any spending designed to redistribute or level the playing field.  In fact, that was the whole point of their tax cuts in the first place.  They were designed to "starve the beast" of government, as President Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, admitted in a moment of honesty back in the '80s. With high deficits and lower revenues, the safety net has been gutted and even Social Security and Medicare have been put on the potential chopping block.

None of this should sell in West Virginia.

But it does.

Because the right wing's corrupt bargain between Wall Street's rich and West Virginia's poor is that the former get their tax cuts and de-regulation windfalls so long as the latter believe their poverty has its roots in illegal immigration and affirmative action.

Trump did not create that bargain.  

But his neo-fascist campaign and Presidency by insult, thuggish rallies, and fact free propaganda has done more than anything in the last thirty years to seal it.

PRETENSE AND REALITY

PRETENSE AND REALITY

Sooner or later, it happens to them all.

Reality intervenes.  

And what, until then, at least resembled the assumed menu of challenges and options on which one had puzzled for some time and about which arguably workable solutions existed, becomes the rough equivalent of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.

For JFK, that day came in April 1961, only months into the New Frontier, when he authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA trained para-militarists who counted on igniting ostensibly homegrown opposition to the Castro regime in the expectation that this would lead to the regime's fall.  

For George W. Bush, it came on September 11, 2001, again months in, when a mildly unpopular Presidency  focusing on the education of elementary and middle schoolers in Florida was startled by news that what the CIA had warned them about in August, and about which the President himself had been somewhat dismissive, turned into a full blown terrorist attack on New York City and the Pentagon.

For Donald Trump, that day came yesterday, when Bashar Al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on rebels in Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria,  and North Korea test launched yet another ballistic missile mere days before a scheduled meeting between Trump and China's President Xi.  

Assad's attack killed sixty-five, including eleven children, all of whom writhed in pain from inhaling either sarin gas or chlorine, and injured another 350.   Meanwhile, Trump's Secretary of State appeared to have invited Assad's attack and ignored North Korea's launch.  The day before, he said that Assad's fate was up to the Syrian people, implying that America's long-stated policy that Assad must go had been jettisoned.  And in the wake of the North Korean launch, he said nothing (or, as he put it, "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.").

For his part, Trump did not do any better.

Though he condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, he spent a large part of his statement on the attack blaming President Obama. On this view, Obama's unheeded "red line" warning to Assad years ago, before chemical weapons had been used, followed by his accession to an internationally negotiated protocol (under which Syria's chemical weapons were to be destroyed) in lieu of an international military operation, after chemical weapons had been used, is the cause of yesterday's attack, and Tillerson's pass on Assad's on-going status -- along with the implied change in American policy -- is beside the  point.  As to North Korea, among the Administration's words "spoken enough" about the subject have been Trump's own, in an interview two days ago with the Financial Times: "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."

Trump is in a box.

In his pretend Presidency of tweets and bombast, everything is clear, winning is inevitable, and all that stands between the (way more often than not) invented failures of yesterday and the promised successes of tomorrow is Trump himself.  In that world, there is health care for everyone without the Affordable Care Act, Executive Orders banning travel from six (and at first seven)  majority-Muslim countries without deference to the Constitution, a right-wing Supreme Court without loss of the Senate filibuster,  and enormous economic growth (north of annual rates of 4%) without trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP. 

He has already failed in his effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare and (thus far) in his effort to turn his campaign promise of a ban on Muslim entry into a legal travel ban.  The former effort failed because the replacement was almost universally despised. It would have resulted in the loss of insurance for about 24 million Americans while providing enormous tax breaks to the wealthy. That alone should have been sufficient to kill it.  But, in addition, the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House (a group of forty or so hard-right legislators) objected because the replacement bill did not go far enough in getting rid of Obamacare; in addition to getting rid of the individual mandate, the right wingers wanted to in effect repeal the ban on insurance company exclusions for pre-existing conditions and end essential benefits requirements.

Similarly, on the travel ban, Trump's second order has fared no better than his first, even though the second was supposedly written to avoid the constitutional infirmities which plagued the first. Those infirmities were stark -- the first ban created a religious test by favoring Christians in any post-ban entry petitions.  In the case of the second ban, the explicit religious test is gone but Trump's words haunt him (and the courts); put differently, when Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, the judges believed him and now think the second travel ban is just a "Muslim ban" in not particularly good disguise.

How quaint!  

Maybe words matter after all.

Meanwhile,  the GOP's Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, plows on with his pledge that Judge Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed "this week" to the Supreme Court.  The Democrats have announced they will filibuster Gorsuch, thus precluding an up or down determination, and they have the votes to do it.  In response, McConnell has told the Democrats that, if they do this,  he will have the Senate eliminate the filibuster.

In which case, the old politics of personal destruction will merely have led to the new politics of institutional destruction.

The US Senate is considered the "greatest deliberative body" for a reason.  The reason is that it takes sixty votes, a more or less super-majority these days, to cut off debate on most issues.  In other words, if you can't get to sixty, you have to talk some more, i.e., deliberate, and persuade your colleagues that the time has come to vote.  Eliminate the filibuster and the Senate turns into another version of the House of Representatives, where there is no real debate and a gerrymandered majority controls the floor.  This is not to say that the filibuster does not have real costs -- for liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, for much of the century following the Civil War, it effectively made the passage of any Civil Rights bills impossible.  Now, however, it is just standing in the way of the theft of a Supreme Court appointment that President Obama was entitled to make last year.

Either Gorsuch or the Senate loses here.   Both can't win.

More reality.

And you can't understand it -- or change it -- with tweets.

The same is true with Assad and North Korea.  On the first, Trump has few if any options and none that will be acceptable to Vladimir Putin, whom Trump never criticizes (itself extraordinary inasmuch as he seems to criticize everyone else).  You can put American boots on the ground, enforce a no-fly zone to protect humanitarian enclaves, and/or arm some rebels.  The first option is opposed by the country in view of our less than stellar results in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also runs the risk of becoming open ended inasmuch as the middle east's locals never seem to get around to peacefully resolving disputes the American military is effectively containing by its presence.  The second risks military run-ins with Russian and Turkish fighter jets now up in that air space.  And the third could result in arms winding up in the hands of ISIS or other terrorists.

On the second, the only thing Trump can do to North Korea if he acts alone is bomb their missile sites or invade, and he will do neither, mostly because either approach would likely provoke an attack on Seoul, as well as the re-emergence of China as a real supporter of the North.  The Chinese are not perfect on this issue but they are, as they say, "all we got."  They are keeping Kim Jung Un on a short economic leash and have on occasion voted in favor of UN sanctions against North Korea's earlier missile tests. But China won't allow the fall of the Communist party in the north.  

And since they are what "we got," Trump had better find a way to work a deal with them . . .

In other words,  do what  The Art of the Deal said he was good at.

Unfortunately, in this tweetstorm of a Presidency, where the lead guy -- in love with lies, pre-occupied with past opponents and score settling, and looking at personal poll numbers that drive him to distraction -- has an attention-span not all that large to begin with and infinitesimal knowledge on questions of actual policy . . .

Maybe that too was just pretense.

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

Today is St. Patrick's Day.

This means the Irish diaspora across the world will parade, drink and . . .

Talk.

All the parade go-ers -- and watchers -- will be festooned in sweaters, hats and shamrocks  that form  a sea of kelly green. Whether fueled by grain or grape, or by their own unquenchable desire to share, many will be loud.  A large number will sport buttons that read "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." 

Pay those buttoneers no heed.  They don't mean it.  What they're really saying is . . .

"Listen to me, I'm Irish."

Talk -- I have discovered --  is the activity that most closely captures the Irish soul.  It's an escaping soul.  You cannot be the product of organized famine, or suffer the pain of separation its survival ordained, without an almost genetic need to run away.  

So, we Irish have been running away.  

For centuries.    

From the land and language of our birth. And from the arms and British nation that enslaved and impoverished us.

But you cannot run from memories.  You cannot escape them.  

So ours is also a becoming soul.  We tell the stories of our history. We invent and regale.  We massage our past so that it does not poison our future.  We . . .

Talk.

At home, I am known as a storyteller.  This is not always a compliment . . .

Essentially because I tell the same stories . . .

Again and again. 

Sometimes the stories change.  Actually, they change in some respect, minor or major, all of the time. That's because stories are as much about what is happening now as they are about the facts recounted from some far away (or near-away) . . .

Then.

My father once told me that you "should never let the facts f**k up a good story."  At the time, I found this bit of advice either incongruous . . . or the product of the martini he was then drinking. Later, however, and long after he gave up the martinis, he soberly repeated the injunction.  The oddity is that he was a journalist.  He made his money getting the facts right. 

So . . .

Why this disdain for facts, for the very bread and butter of his (and my) life?

I figured that out today, St. Patrick's Day.

Fact must be respected.  They cannot be ignored.  

But neither can they be allowed to enslave.  

They have to empower us, not paralyze us.

In a weird way, the current President of the United States gets this. That may be the reason Irish Catholics voted for him in substantial numbers last November.  He never lets the facts get in his way. 

But we Irish need to be very careful here.  Trump isn't engaged in Irish story telling. To the contrary, he is massaging the past in a way that will poison the future.  In grossly distorting Obamacare, defaming immigrants, insulting his opponents (all of them), belittling the intelligence services, demonizing Muslims, and falsely accusing his predecessor of felonious wire-tapping, he is inventing a past that did not exist and was not tragic in order to create a future that will be.  

And we Irish cannot afford to aid and abet him in this effort. 

Because . . .

Between hope and history, the former is always the better choice when the latter is a tragic one.

But only then.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.