The Commentariat -- May 31, 2016
Afternoon Update
Nora Kelly, in the Atlantic, wonders where Donald Trump sent all the money, including his own, he claims to have raised for veterans, a couple of days after he hijacked an event for veterans for his own self-aggrandizement. Very strange..."Donald Trump has a problem following through. He advocated for banning Muslims from U.S. soil, before qualifying all his policy proposals as 'a suggestion.' He campaigned on the premise he would self-fund his race, before deciding to raise money after all. So when news reports suggested Trump hadn't donated all $6 million he said he raised for veterans' groups at an event this past winter, the revelation seemed to follow his pattern....Trump repeatedly blamed the 'dishonest' and 'unfair' political press on Tuesday for misconstruing the donation process."
...Akhilleus: Drumpf knows all about dishonesty and unfairness. They constitute the core of his being.
The Turtle is Right! Leah Barkoukis, at the Confederate toilet paper site, Town Hall: "Speaking with radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reassured listeners that Donald Trump will not change the nature of the Republican Party.... Trump is not going to change the institution. He's not going to change the basic philosophy of the party."
...Akhilleus: Quite right. Trump won't change the party. McConnell and the rest of the cynical, anti-American, anti-democratic calculators have already done that. Trump has merely watered the seeds they have sown. But it's a hoot to watch the Turtle Man pretend that he's still in charge. He's the Maginot Line of the Republican Party, and here come the Trump Panzers. Buh-bye, Mitchy.
*****
Julie Davis of the New York Times: President "Obama, who has made a point of speaking out against anti-immigrant sentiment..., has instructed his top advisers that they must not fall short of meeting his goal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States by the fall. But an onerous and complex web of security checks and vetting procedures, shared among several government agencies, has made the target difficult to reach." -- CW
Adam Edelman of the New York Daily News: "Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder thinks fugitive leaker Edward Snowden actually performed a 'public service' when he passed on classified NSA secrets to journalists. 'We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,' Holder told David Axelrod on his CNN-produced podcast 'The Axe Files.'" -- CW
Presidential Race
Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed: "In a memo to top supporters, Hillary Clinton's top official sought to clarify the campaign's response to a new report from the State Department inspector general and move past a controversy that has dogged the candidate now for 15 months. The 600-word letter from John Podesta, Clinton's chairman and longtime adviser, addresses the IG report;s various findings, but comes back to a single point again and again: that Clinton knows the use of a personal email server was a 'mistake.'" -- CW
Paul Waldman: "For all her many skills, Hillary Clinton is just not that good at running for president. That doesn't mean she won't be good at being president, and it's a reminder that the two are not the same thing.... A different candidate would probably be farther ahead of Trump.... Clinton is also simply not very good at ... delivering speeches.... Clinton ha[s] yet to come up with a resonant theme for her campaign." -- CW ...
... Rebecca Traister of New York: On the campaign trail, "I watched [Hillary Clinton] do the work of retail politics -- the handshaking and small-talking and remembering of names and details of local sites and issues -- like an Olympic athlete. Far from seeing a remote or robotic figure, I observed a woman who had direct, thoughtful, often moving exchanges.... The dichotomy between her public and private presentation has a lot to do with the fact that she has built such a wall between the two. Her pathological desire for privacy is at the root of the never-ending email saga, to name just one example.... [Clinton's] pervasive defensiveness ... gets in the way of her projecting authenticity, an intense desire for privacy that keeps voters from feeling as if they know her -- especially problematic in an era in which social media makes personal connection with voters more important than ever." CW: This is a fullblown profile of Hillary, & it's a pretty good read.
Maryalice Parks of ABC News: "Five animal rights protesters jumped over barricades and rushed the podium at a Bernie Sanders rally in East Oakland, California, on Monday night, prompting the Vermont senator's Secret Service detail to intervene. One of the protesters appeared to be hit by one of the security member's baton, while another was carried out of the venue by his arms and legs. For his part, Sanders did not seem rattled." -- CW
International Man of Misery. Farah Stockman & Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: "Donald J. Trump ... often portrays himself as uniquely capable of wringing concessions out of China through hard-nosed business tactics he has honed over the years. 'I beat China all the time,' Mr. Trump declared in a speech the day he announced his candidacy. 'I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.'... Court documents and interviews with people involved in the deal tell a very different story of how he ended up with it." CW: Naturally. It reads as if some Hong Kong billionaires made a chump of Trump. That dinner with the fish heads? Definitely designed to discomfit the Ignorant Abroad. -- CW ...
... Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post: "If elected, Trump would be the first U.S. president to preside over a global business empire, one that includes seven resorts, hotels and other projects in foreign countries, 11 more under construction and plans for many more. Among them are properties in nations where the United States has important economic and national security concerns -- such as Turkey, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan -- that could put Trump's personal business interests on a collision course with the duty of a president to act solely in the best interest of the United States." In Azerbaijan, his business partners are mafia-like despots. -- CW
Ed Kilgore: "Veteran journalist Ron Brownstein looked at the internals of some recent general election polls and found that adding gender to education levels among white voters produced a shocking gap between the two candidates.... Brownstein argues that each candidate is reaching or in some cases exceeding the all-time records for their party in these demographics -- which means the gap could be larger than ever, too.... If the election does come down to a contest between women and men of any race or level of educational achievement, a Clinton victory would be not only historic, but a demonstration of the power of sisterhood against an opponent who's a cartoon-character representation of The Man." --safari
Emma Green of the Atlantic: "Predictions are dangerous business, especially in the hall of mirrors that American politics has become. Suffice it to say, no one called this U.S. presidential election cycle notTrump, not Sanders, not any of it. Except, perhaps, in a round-about way, a 1979 book about the presidential-primary system [by] James Ceaser, a University of Virginia professor. I spoke with Ceaser about Trump and the unintended effects of trying to make democracy more democratic." Includes interview. --safari (Thanks to PD Pepe for the link.)
Michael Gerson, the WashPo's mild-mannered conservo-columnist, is very, very upset with Little Marco & Paul the Weasel Ryan: "Some Republicans keep expecting Trump to finally remove the mask of misogyny, prejudice and cruelty and act in a more presidential manner. But it is not a mask. It is his true face. Good Republican leaders making the decision to support Trump will end up either humiliated by the association, or betrayed and attacked for criticizing the great leader. Trump leaves no other options." CW: It is good to see a Republican-in-Good-Standing willing to write, "The GOP has selected someone who is unfit to be president, lacking the temperament, stability, judgment and compassion to occupy the office."
Seung Min Kim of Politico: "Donald Trump and his incendiary immigration rhetoric was supposed to send Latino voters to the polls in droves for Democrats this fall. But the Obama administration's controversial immigration raids are threatening to weaken the Democrats' advantage." --safari
Daniel Politi of Slate: "Donald Trump did not wait to reply. Less than two hours after Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol sent out a tweet that said there would soon be news of an 'impressive'independent presidential candidate, the presumptive Republican nominee went on the attack. In a series of tweets, the real estate mogul called Kristol a 'dummy' and an 'embarrassed loser.' He then said Republicans can 'say good bye to the Supreme Court' if an independent contender does materialize." --safari
Beyond the Beltway
Prisons vs. Prisoners. Rachel Poser of the New Yorker: "The P.L.R.A., [a Clinton-era piece of criminal-justice legislation known as the Prison Litigation Reform Act (P.L.R.A.)] passed by Congress in 1996, was designed to reduce the number of lawsuits brought by inmates against prisons....Prisoners' advocates have argued for years that the P.L.R.A. makes it nearly impossible for inmates to get a fair hearing in court, and that it has crippled the federal judiciary's ability to act as a watchdog over prison conditions...the number of federal lawsuits by inmates against prisons has fallen by sixty per cent in the twenty years since the P.L.R.A.'s passage...[I]n practice, critics say, these systems create a tangle of administrative procedures that discourage or disqualify inmates from filing lawsuits." --safari
Alexia Fernández Campbell of The Atlantic: "Girl Scouts has been losing members for more than a decade as it struggles to reach the new American girl, who is more likely than ever to be an ethnic minority or come from poor, immigrant families. Even though the organization's researchers have highlighted the need to reflect the 'changing face of girls' in America, Girl Scouts are still mostly white. The percentage of Latina scouts (12 percent) and African American scouts (11 percent) has hardly budged in the past four years. Meanwhile, nearly half of girls aged 5 to 17 in the United States are now ethnic minorities, up from 38 percent in 2000...[W]hy this recruitment failure matters: Many of these girls, who already face so many obstacles, are missing out on a program that has given millions of others the confidence and some of tools they need to succeed." --safari
Way Beyond
Marina Koren of The Atlantic: "Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, has been found guilty of crimes against humanity committed during his eight-year-rule and sentenced to life in prison. Habré was convicted Monday of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and rape, the BBC reported, nearly a year after his trial began...The trial was a landmark event in international criminal justice. In Africa, it marked the first time in which the courts of one country prosecuted the former ruler of another for alleged human-rights abuses." --safari
Tim Radford of the Guardian: "One in three children in Europe between the ages of six and nine are either overweight or obese, according to a report that also warns that by 2025 the number of under-fives worldwide who are overweight will have risen from an estimated 41 million now to 70 million.... The cost of treating disorders related to obesity now amounts to a tenth of total healthcare costs in Europe, and, according to the report, threatens the sustainability of public health services in all nations." --safari
Michael Klarein Salon from TomDispatch.com: "Pity the poor petro-states. Once so wealthy from oil sales that they could finance wars, mega-projects, and domestic social peace simultaneously, some of them are now beset by internal strife or are on the brink of collapse as oil prices remain at ruinously low levels. Unlike other countries, which largely finance their governments through taxation, petro-states rely on their oil and natural gas revenues.... Now, with oil below $50 and likely to persist at that level, they find themselves curbing public spending and fending off rising domestic discontent or even incipient revolt.... In 2016, one thing is finally clear, however: the business model for these corporatized states is busted." --safari