Going Going

Julia Ioffe at The Atlantic

The flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues. (“The cafeteria is so crowded all day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle.

“It just feels empty,” a recently departed senior State official told me.

This week began with reports that President Donald Trump’s budget proposal will drastically slash the State Department’s funding, and last week ended with White House adviser and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon telling the attendees of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that what he and the new president were after was a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” At the State Department, which employs nearly 70,000 people around the world, that deconstruction is already well underway.

Defend the institutions or see them topple like dominos.

Today's Tweet

Follow as much of this thread as you can. The basic premise of civilian control over the military is mildly important to the care and feeding of our little democracy here.

This ain't about saving time. It's a dangerous desire to pass the buck. Let me lay this out in a few tweets. https://t.co/MlFuVM6rnb

— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) March 1, 2017

Read Your Charlie

...it's a lot better'n eatin' vegetables.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

Presidential, was it?

Even I didn't believe they could lower the bar far enough that an otherwise sensible fellow like Van Jones would take the indecent exploitation of a war widow's fresh sorrow and turn it into Lincoln's Second Inaugural. Even I didn't believe they could sink the bar far enough into Middle Earth that otherwise critical observers would look at a pile of deceptive leaves and see a coherent tree. Every day in every way, this administration and this president* taxes the far limits of even my cynicism. For example, it is not true that nobody profits from "lawless chaos." How do you think Vladimir Putin created the gangster's paradise that helped Rex Tillerson and Wilbur Ross get even more wealthy?

When one calls that speech "presidential," whose presidency are you summoning? Pierce? Buchanan? Rufus T. Firefly? Jesus, people, at least try to sound like you graduated middle school.

President No-Show

There's Mr Bombast - the showboating salesman who promises all your dreams will come true if you just hand everything over to him.

And there's Mr Forgetful - the guy you'll never find when it's time to settle up.

And then there's Mr No-Show - the guy who does whatever he wants, with no regard for what he promised anybody.  And worse, is very much aware that he's pullin' shit, and so he knows he'll have to hide what he's really doing at every opportunity.

Yesterday, before Mr Bombast did his thing at the Joint Session, Mr No-Show got busy.

NBC News:

President Donald Trump quietly signed a bill into law Tuesday rolling back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase a gun.

The rule, which was finalized in December, added people receiving Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database.

Had the rule fully taken effect, the Obama administration predicted it would have added about 75,000 names to that database.

So Wayne LaPierre gets at least 75,000 new prospects for the gun manufacturers - who'll put some of that new money in the pockets of Congress Critters, of course - and we get what would be a measurable increase in gun violence if the GOP hadn't already cut the funding needed for CDC to study such things.

And here I thought the rule was No More Blow Jobs In The Oval Office.

Silly me.

Today's Quote

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.

--Helen Keller ca 1911

On President Showboat

So, OK, I'm starting to warm up to Matthew Yglesias.  And not just because he's lined up with me on the anti-Trump thing. That's very nearly enough, but I think he's writing better stuff - trying to get at more than the usual shit we hear and see from the Press Poodles.

This is some good old fashioned nerd porn.

Vox:

If you take any one moment from the Trump Show out of context, it’s striking. But together, Trump’s antics are now banal. He says, tweets, and does weird things. He gets attention. He pisses people off while thrilling others. Tonight, he even managed to attract attention and garner praise for slightly dialing it down. But speeches are supposed to be tools to help do the work of actually being president — learning about the issues, making decisions about trade-offs, and collaborating to get things done.

Amid the nonstop and increasingly tedious theatricality, Trump is only ever performing the role of the president; he’s never doing the job.

-- and --

You can’t parse a president who doesn’t sweat the details.

In a normal address of this sort, the role of a policy reporter is to serve as a kind of translator. Having spent days, weeks, and months following policy debates in Washington, we are able to catch the quick references in the president’s speech and understand them in fuller context. In that spirit, for example, I might note that Trumps’ reference to creating “a level playing field for American companies and workers” appears to be a move toward endorsing a controversial corporate income tax reform that big exporters like but retail chains hate.

The problem is that to draw that conclusion would require us to believe the speech went through a traditional drafting process. That the Treasury secretary and the National Economic Council director and the legislative liaison staff all briefed the president on the meaning of the line, and that he therefore made a coherent, deliberate effort to embrace this plan.

But here’s another theory. The speech seems to be largely the product of tensions between Reince Priebus’s traditional Republican Party ideology and Steve Bannon’s populist nationalism. Priebus is close to Paul Ryan, who likes the controversial tax reform. But one interpretation of the tax reform idea is that it’s protectionist trade policy, which Bannon likes. So the two of them may have put the line into the speech even though Senate Republicans and the Trump administration economic team seem to think it’s a bad idea.

The premise of taking a close look at these speeches to read the tea leaves, in short, is that the president actually understands the policy issues facing him and cares about the words he’s speaking. With Trump, that’s far from true. He doesn’t like to read briefing books or make hard choices. His words about clean air or infrastructure or anything else are completely meaningless until we see real plans. And there’s no real indication that we ever will. The show is an increasingly meaningless spectacle.

 

It's Changing

It doesn't matter if you believe it or you don't - climate change is not some global conspiracy of thousands of scientists and hundreds of national governments being valiantly resisted by a plucky band of billionaires.

National Phenology Network (USANPN.org)

Nobody's trying to snooker you out of a few extra tax bucks and your F-350 Super Duty. Get over yourself.  We'd just like your help figuring out how we can all keep what we've got without committing suicide-by-toxic-waste. Can we try that for a while?

Today's Tweet

bury me with this screencap pic.twitter.com/gU5cTlf48O

— crumb dumpster (@xylodemon) February 28, 2017

Alive And Well

These idiot groups always get puffed up when there's a Democratic POTUS, but then for whatever reason they settle down a bit when the Repubs take over. 

Not this time.

Van Jones at New Republic:

These groups—Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white nationalists—did more than talk and meet and march. They plotted to turn their hatred into violence. “They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water-treatment plants, and power grids,” reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives, and grenades.”

It would be all too easy to turn away from this reality, or consign it to the distant past. But Milano turned his camera lens directly toward it. For many, these images will be shocking. Others will be more saddened than surprised. But thanks to his work, we are all met with the direct evidence that white supremacist groups are thriving in America.

This goes on not more than 2 hours south of my place:

Today's GIF

In keeping with how weird it's been lately, here's a bear playing tetherball: