These two guys with nuclear bombs in their hands. Yea, this is good.
It is only a surface observation to make this a conversation about two men. I was probably six years old when I decided that nuclear bombs had no rational place in humanity. Soon after, as I realized the magnitude of nuclear weapons on our planet, and reflected on the wars after wars that killed its people, I concluded the human animal was, if nothing else, an irrational, flailing form of so-called intelligent life. How else could it be oblivious to its own self destruction?
(CNN)North Korea will not relinquish its nuclear weapons until the US eliminates its own “nuclear threat,” according to a commentary published by state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“The proper definition of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is completely eliminating the American nuclear threat to North Korea before eliminating our nuclear capability,” the commentary says.
The US and North Korea are deadlocked in negotiations over how Pyongyang will denuclearize in return for the easing of sanctions.
Seven years ago, a former aide to Ralph Reed — who also worked, briefly, for Paul Manafort — published a tawdry, shallow memoir that is also one of the more revealing political books I’ve ever read. Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”
It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.
Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms. (“Outfits would be planned around the news of the day,” she wrote.) Reading Baron’s story helped me realize emotionally something I knew intellectually. It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn’t forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.
That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego. A former big-ticket Democratic fund-raiser, White went straight from Hillary Clinton’s election night party to Donald Trump’s when he realized which way the wind was blowing. (“I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie,” he said of the dreary vibe at the Clinton event.) Another turning point came earlier this year when, he claims, Chelsea Clinton snubbed him at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar in Manhattan, leading him to call Donald Trump Jr., who offered to come to him right away.
This story, like Baron’s book, is arresting in its picture of shameless, unvarnished thirst. White and Eure mouth some talking points about disliking “identity politics” and valuing “authenticity.” Like a lot of Trump apologists, White insists the president isn’t racist because African-American employment figures have improved during his administration. But the lurid opportunism that’s driving him and his husband to embrace Trump is obvious. Such opportunism is far from rare; it’s just not often that we see it exhibited so starkly.
Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers — White and Eure, after all, used to be Clintonites. (The guest list at their lavish wedding, The Times once wrote, “read like a telephone book, if the White Pages printed a version containing only the rich and influential.”) But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral. There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity.
In many ways, the insincere Trumpists are the most frustrating. Because they don’t really believe in Trump’s belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories, we keep expecting them to feel shame or remorse. But they’re not insincere because they believe in something better than Trumpism. Rather, they believe in very little. They are transactional in a way that makes no psychological sense to those of us who see politics as a moral drama; they might as well all be wearing jackets saying, “I really don’t care, do u?”
Baron’s book helped me grasp what public life is about for such people. “I loved being in the middle of something big, and the biggest thing in my life was Ralph,” she wrote in one of her more plaintive passages. “Without him, I was nobody.” Such a longing for validation is underrated as a political motivator. Senator Lindsey Graham, another insincere Trumpist, once justified his sycophantic relationship with the president by saying, “If you knew anything about me, I want to be relevant.” Some people would rather be on the wrong side than on the outside.
Protestors holding pictures of people who died from use of paint removers, including Drew Wynne, protest outside a Portland, Maine, Lowe’s store on May 10, 2018. They were trying to persuade the retailer to stop selling paint strippers containing methylene chloride
The voluntary action of large retailers is a positive sign for consumers concerned if their health in light of inaction by the government. The takeaway of this fragmented outcome of action is an old one. Corporate money is powerful. Corporate fiscal interests outweigh public health. Most unfortunately, and disappointedly, the human instinct to protect one another is overpowered by the capitulation to greed and fear of losing political stature by government employees and elected officials.
All of this is most evident in the current administration, but it’s nothing new.
Via NPR
In October 2017, Drew Wynne collapsed inside a walk-in refrigerator at his coffee business in North Charleston, S.C. By the time his business partner found him crumpled on the floor, Wynne was dead. He had suffocated on a chemical called methylene chloride.
The 31-year-old’s death is one of dozens blamed on popular paint removers sold under the brand names Goof-Off, Strypeeze, Klean Strip and Jasco among others.
In recent months, some retailers have said they will stop selling products that contain methylene chloride, also known as DCM, and a second chemical, N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, or NMP. But under the Trump administration, federal regulators have repeatedly delayed a ban that has been in the works for years.
The EPA began a risk assessment of methylene chloride in 2014. In January 2017 the agency proposed banning the use of methylene chloride and NMP in paint removers. In the proposed rule, the agency wrote that the chemicals posed “unreasonable risks” to consumers.
Since 1980, more than 50 deaths had been attributed to methylene chloride, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and Slate.
The General James M. Gavin Power Plant, a coal-fired facility in Cheshire, Ohio. New rules would weaken restrictions on mercury emissions from coal-burning plants.
Trump Administration Prepares a Major Weakening of Mercury Emissions Rules
By Coral Davenport, NYTimes
The Trump administration has completed a detailed legal proposal to dramatically weaken a major environmental regulation covering mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants, according to a person who has seen the document but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.
The proposal would not eliminate the mercury regulation entirely, but it is designed to put in place the legal justification for the Trump administration to weaken it and several other pollution rules, while setting the stage for a possible full repeal of the rule.
Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is now the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected in the coming days to send the proposal to the White House for approval.
The move is the latest, and one of the most significant, in the Trump administration’s steady march of rollbacks of Obama-era health and environmental regulations on polluting industries, particularly coal. The weakening of the mercury rule — which the E.P.A. considers the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry — would represent a major victory for the coal industry. Mercury is known to damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses.
The details of the rollback about to be proposed would also represent a victory for Mr. Wheeler’s former boss, Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, one of the nation’s largest coal companies. Mr. Murray, who was a major donor to President Trump’s inauguration fund, personally requested the rollback of the mercury rule soon after Mr. Trump took office, in a written “wish list” he handed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
The proposal would also hand a victory to the former clients of William Wehrum, the E.P.A.’s top clean air official and the chief author of the plan. Mr. Wehrum worked for years as a lawyer for companies that run coal-fired power plants, and that have long sought such a change.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. did not respond to a request for comment.
The proposal also highlights a key environmental opinion of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the embattled Supreme Court nominee, whose nomination hearings have gripped the nation in recent days.
The coal industry initially sued to roll back the mercury regulation, and in 2014 its case lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. However, Judge Kavanaugh wrote the dissenting opinion in that case, highlighting questions about the rule’s cost to industry.
Should the legal battle over the proposed regulatory rollback go before the Supreme Court, some observers expect that Judge Kavanaugh, if elevated to a seat on the high court, would side with the coal industry.
Specifically, the new Trump administration proposal would repeal a 2011 finding made by the E.P.A. that when the federal government regulates toxic pollution such as mercury from coal-fired power plants, it must also, when considering the cost to industry of that rule, take into account the additional health benefits of reducing other pollutants as a side effect of implementing the regulation. Under the mercury program, the economic benefits of those health effects, known as “co-benefits,” helped to provide a legal and economic justification for the cost to industry of the regulation.
For example, as the nation’s power plants have complied with rule by installing technology to reduce emissions of mercury, they also created the side benefit of reducing pollution of soot and nitrogen oxide, pollutants linked to asthma and lung disease.
The Obama administration estimated that it would cost the electric utility industry an estimated $9.6 billion a year to install that mercury control technology, making it the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth by the federal government. It found that reducing mercury brings up to $6 million annually in health benefits — a high number, but not as high as the cost to industry. However, it further justified the regulation by citing an additional $80 billion in health benefits from the additional reduction in soot and nitrogen oxide that occur as a side effect of controlling mercury.
The new proposal directs the E.P.A. to no longer take into account those “co-benefits” when considering the economic impact of a regulation.
Should the proposal become final, it would mean that the mercury rule would, on paper, incur far greater economic cost than it would provide quantifiable health benefits. The Trump administration would then be legally justified in weakening the rule.
And that change could also give companies like Murray Energy a legal justification to sue for its deletion entirely, while giving the E.P.A. the legal basis to craft weaker pollution regulations that no longer take into account the co-benefits of eliminating additional pollutants.
“This is a sweeping attack on considering the benefits of cutting hazardous pollution from coal plants,” said John Walke, a legal expert on the Clean Air Act with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group that expects to take a lead role in the legal effort to uphold the mercury standard. “This is the first legal step toward eliminating the standard entirely.”
A spokesman for Murray Energy cheered the expected move.
“E.P.A.’s proposal to revisit the outsized role that so-called ‘co-benefits’ play in the cost-benefit analyses used to justify costly regulations targeting pollutants such as mercury is appropriate and long overdue,” wrote the spokesman, Cody Nett, in an email. He said the process is “nothing less than double-counting,” since the E.P.A. already controls pollutants such as soot and nitrogen oxide in other regulations. He also called on the E.P.A. to review what he called “the questionable scientific foundation” for calculating the co-benefits.
Supporters and opponents of the proposal believe that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold it, particularly if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed. In his 2014 dissent to the mercury ruling, he wrote, “The benefits of this rule are disputed.” He added: “Industry petitioners focus on the reduction in hazardous air pollutant emissions attributable to the regulations, which amount to only $4 to $6 million dollars each year. If those figures are right, the rule costs nearly $1,500 for every $1 of health and environmental benefit produced.”
The following year, in a decision that echoed Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent, the Supreme Court blocked the Obama-era mercury rule, ordering the E.P.A. to conduct a new cost analysis. The Obama administration did so, and ultimately reinstated the rule in 2016.
Murray Energy then sued to block it, but last year, the E.P.A.’s administrator at the time successfully petitioned the United States Circuit Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia to delay the oral arguments for that case, as the Trump administration sought to rewrite the rule entirely.
A disgusting man who is stealing money or withholding it from government funds that should be helping people, not serving political purposes or lining one’s pockets.
Central American migrants at the border in Tijuana. The money from the Trump administration will help Mexico increase deportations of Central Americans.
Via NYTimes, Gardiner Harris and Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Sept. 12, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump has promised for years that Mexico would pay for a vast border wall, a demand that country has steadfastly refused. Now, in the Trump administration’s campaign to stop illegal immigration, the United States plans instead to pay Mexico.
In a recent notice sent to Congress, the administration said it intended to take $20 million in foreign assistance funds and use it to help Mexico pay plane and bus fare to deport as many as 17,000 people who are in that country illegally.
The money will help increase deportations of Central Americans, many of whom pass through Mexico to get to the American border. Any unauthorized immigrant in Mexico who is a known or suspected terrorist will also be deported under the program, according to the notification, although such people are few in number.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the program was intended to help relieve immigration flows at the United States border with Mexico.
“We are working closely with our Mexican counterparts to confront rising border apprehension numbers — specifically, a 38 percent increase in families this month alone — directly and to ensure that those with legitimate claims have access to appropriate protections,” Ms. Waldman said. A spokesman for the Mexican Embassy did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
The plan, which has been debated internally for months, is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to redirect billions in foreign assistance to other priorities. The administration has yet to spend nearly $3 billion in foreign aid, money allocated last year by Congress with broad bipartisan support. Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to help stabilize Syria and support Palestinian schools and hospitals has already been redirected.
While the administration has made several announcements about not spending on priorities Congress intended, it has mostly kept quiet about what it will do with the money. But it has long been frustrated that Congress provides billions for foreign aid while refusing to fund its immigration priorities. The money will be transferred from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security, and then sent to Mexico.
“Congress intended for this money to lift up communities dealing with crime, corruption and so many other challenges, not to expand this administration’s deportation crusade,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I want answers about why the State Department thinks it can ignore Congress and dump more cash into deportation efforts. Until then, I’ll do whatever I can to stop this.
The maneuver is the latest by the administration to reduce the number of immigrants crossing the southwestern border. The most prominent piece of the effort has been the “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute any immigrant who enters the country without authorization. That led to the widely criticized practice of separating children from their parents at the border, which spurred a humanitarian and political crisis for Mr. Trump.
But the president’s advisers have also employed other strategies to deter immigrants, including revamping the rules surrounding who can qualify for asylum and trying to strike an agreement with Mexico that would disqualify any migrant who had not sought asylum there from claiming it in the United States.
Under the program, Mexico would be responsible for detaining and providing judicial review of immigrants before deporting them. The sometimes cumbersome and lengthy legal process in the United States to deport asylum seekers has long frustrated Mr. Trump, who has often said the laws must be changed to speed deportations. Getting Mexico to do deportations instead would bypass that process.
Immigrant advocacy groups called the deportation aid for Mexico a misguided and wasteful use of money that would fail to address the problems prompting migrants to travel to Mexico and the United States in the first place.
“We shouldn’t be paying another country to do our dirty work; we should actually be fixing our immigration system and helping these countries get back on solid footing,” said Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “It smacks of desperation.”
Anti-Trumpers long ago stopped needing reasons to reject this presidency and it’s administration. Most saw it coming from day one of his candidacy. Let alone nearly two years in.
