Pages

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Year-End Message From Heather Cox Richardson

I HATE this new iteration of Blogspot. I can't figure out how to insert a video, and now I find I can't insert a link to an email from Heather Cox Richardson. So I've cut-and-pasted her year-end message, dated December 30, here:

And so, we are at the end of a year that has brought a presidential impeachment trial, a deadly pandemic that has killed more than 338,000 of us, a huge social movement for racial justice, a presidential election, and a president who has refused to accept the results of that election and is now trying to split his own political party.

It’s been quite a year.

But I had a chance to talk with history podcaster Bob Crawford of the Avett Brothers yesterday, and he asked a more interesting question. He pointed out that we are now twenty years into this century, and asked what I thought were the key changes of those twenty years. I chewed on this question for awhile and also asked readers what they thought. Pulling everything together, here is where I’ve come out.

In America, the twenty years since 2000 have seen the end game of the Reagan Revolution, begun in 1980.

In that era, political leaders on the right turned against the principles that had guided the country since the 1930s, when Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt guided the nation out of the Great Depression by using the government to stabilize the economy. During the Depression and World War Two, Americans of all parties had come to believe the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure.

But reactionary businessmen hated regulations and the taxes that leveled the playing field between employers and workers. They called for a return to the pro-business government of the 1920s, but got no traction until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the Supreme Court, under the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren, unanimously declared racial segregation unconstitutional. That decision, and others that promoted civil rights, enabled opponents of the New Deal government to attract supporters by insisting that the country’s postwar government was simply redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to people of color.

That argument echoed the political language of the Reconstruction years, when white southerners insisted that federal efforts to enable formerly enslaved men to participate in the economy on terms equal to white men were simply a redistribution of wealth, because the agents and policies required to achieve equality would cost tax dollars and, after the Civil War, most people with property were white. This, they insisted, was “socialism.”

To oppose the socialism they insisted was taking over the East, opponents of black rights looked to the American West. They called themselves Movement Conservatives, and they celebrated the cowboy who, in their inaccurate vision, was a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone to work out his own future. In this myth, the cowboys lived in a male-dominated world, where women were either wives and mothers or sexual playthings, and people of color were savage or subordinate.

With his cowboy hat and western ranch, Reagan deliberately tapped into this mythology, as well as the racism and sexism in it, when he promised to slash taxes and regulations to free individuals from a grasping government. He promised that cutting taxes and regulations would expand the economy. As wealthy people—the “supply side” of the economy-- regained control of their capital, they would invest in their businesses and provide more jobs. Everyone would make more money.

From the start, though, his economic system didn’t work. Money moved upward, dramatically, and voters began to think the cutting was going too far. To keep control of the government, Movement Conservatives at the end of the twentieth century ramped up their celebration of the individualist white American man, insisting that America was sliding into socialism even as they cut more and more domestic programs, insisting that the people of color and women who wanted the government to address inequities in the country simply wanted “free stuff.” They courted social conservatives and evangelicals, promising to stop the “secularization” they saw as a partner to communism.

After the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, talk radio spread the message that Black and Brown Americans and “feminazis” were trying to usher in socialism. In 1996, that narrative got a television channel that personified the idea of the strong man with subordinate women. The Fox News Channel told a story that reinforced the Movement Conservative narrative daily until it took over the Republican Party entirely.

The idea that people of color and women were trying to undermine society was enough of a rationale to justify keeping them from the vote, especially after Democrats passed the Motor Voter law in 1993, making it easier for poor people to register to vote. In 1997, Florida began the process of purging voter rolls of Black voters.

And so, 2000 came.

In that year, the presidential election came down to the electoral votes in Florida. Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 540,000 votes over Republican candidate George W. Bush, but Florida would decide the election. During the required recount, Republican political operatives led by Roger Stone descended on the election canvassers in Miami-Dade County to stop the process. It worked, and the Supreme Court upheld the end of the recount. Bush won Florida by 537 votes and, thanks to its electoral votes, became president. Voter suppression was a success, and Republicans would use it, and after 2010, gerrymandering, to keep control of the government even as they lost popular support.

Bush had promised to unite the country, but his installation in the White House gave new power to the ideology of the Movement Conservative leaders of the Reagan Revolution. He inherited a budget surplus from his predecessor Democrat Bill Clinton, but immediately set out to get rid of it by cutting taxes. A balanced budget meant money for regulation and social programs, so it had to go. From his term onward, Republicans would continue to cut taxes even as budgets operated in the red, the debt climbed, and money moved upward.

The themes of Republican dominance and tax cuts were the backdrop of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. That attack gave the country’s leaders a sense of mission after the end of the Cold War and, after launching a war in Afghanistan to stop al-Qaeda, they set out to export democracy to Iraq. This had been a goal for Republican leaders since the Clinton administration, in the belief that the United States needed to spread capitalism and democracy in its role as a world leader. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq strengthened the president and the federal government, creating the powerful Department of Homeland Security, for example, and leading Bush to assert the power of the presidency to interpret laws through signing statements.

The association of the Republican Party with patriotism enabled Republicans in this era to call for increased spending for the military and continued tax cuts, while attacking Democratic calls for domestic programs as wasteful. Increasingly, Republican media personalities derided those who called for such programs as dangerous, or anti-American.

But while Republicans increasingly looked inward to their party as the only real Americans and asserted power internationally, changes in technology were making the world larger. The Internet put the world at our fingertips and enabled researchers to decode the human genome, revolutionizing medical science. Smartphones both made communication easy. Online gaming created communities and empathy. And as many Americans were increasingly embracing rap music and tattoos and LGBTQ rights, as well as recognizing increasing inequality, books were pointing to the dangers of the power concentrating at the top of societies. In 1997, J.K. Rowling began her exploration of the rise of authoritarianism in her wildly popular Harry Potter books, but her series was only the most famous of a number of books in which young people conquered a dystopia created by adults.

In Bush’s second term, his ideology created a perfect storm. His administration's disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people and caused $125 billion in damage in and around New Orleans in 2005, revealed how badly the new economy had treated Black and Brown people, and how badly the destruction of domestic programs had affected our ability to respond to disasters. Computers permitted the overuse of credit default swaps that precipitated the 2008 crash, which then precipitated the housing crisis, as people who had bet on the individualist American dream lost their homes. Meanwhile, the ongoing wars, plagued with financial and moral scandals, made it clear that the Republicans optimistic vision of spreading democracy through military conflict was unrealistic.

In 2008, voters put Black American Barack Obama, a Democrat, into the White House. To Republicans, primed by now to believe that Democrats and Black people were socialists, this was an undermining of the nation itself, and they set out to hamper him. While many Americans saw Obama as the symbol of a new, fairer government with America embracing a multilateral world, reactionaries built a backlash based in racism and sexism. They vocally opposed a federal government they insisted was pushing socialism on hardworking white men, and insisted that America must show its strength by exerting its power unilaterally in the world. Increasingly, the Internet and cell phones enabled people to have their news cater to their worldview, moving Republicans into a world characterized by what a Republican spokesperson would later call "alternative facts."

And so, in 2016, we faced a clash between a relentlessly changing nation and the individualist ideology of the Movement Conservatives who had taken over the Republican Party. By then, that ideology had become openly radical extremism in the hands of Donald Trump, who referred to immigrants as criminals, boasted of sexually assaulting women, and promised to destroy the New Deal government once and for all.

In the 2016 election, the themes of the past 36 years came together. Embracing Movement Conservative individualist ideology taken to an extreme, Trump was eager enough to make sure a Democrat didn't win that, according to American intelligence services, he was willing to accept the help of Russian operatives. They, in turn, influenced the election through the manipulation of new social media, amplified by what had become by then a Republican echo chamber in which Democrats were dangerous socialists and the Democratic candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was a criminal. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which permitted corporate money to flow into election campaigns, Trump also had the help of a wave of money from big business; financial institutions spent $2 billion to influence the election. He also had the support of evangelicals, who believed he would finally give them the anti-abortion laws they wanted.

Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes but, as George W. Bush before him, won in the Electoral College. Once in office, this president set out to destroy the New Deal state, as Movement Conservatives had called for, returning the country to the control of a small group of elite businessmen who, theoretically, would know how to move the country forward best by leveraging private sector networks and innovation. He also set out to put minorities and women back into subordinate positions, recreating a leadership structure that was almost entirely white and male.

As Trump tried to destroy an activist government once and for all, Americans woke up to how close we have come to turning our democracy over to a small group of oligarchs.

In the past four years, the Women’s March on Washington and the MeToo Movement has enabled women to articulate their demand for equality. The travel ban, child separation policy for Latin American refugees, and Trump’s attacks on Muslims, Latin American immigrants, and Chinese immigrants, has sparked a defense of America’s history of immigration. The Black Lives Matter Movement, begun in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering teenager Trayvon Martin, has gained power as Black Americans have been murdered at the hands of law enforcement officers and white vigilantes, and as Black Americans have borne witness to those murders with cellphone videos.

The increasing voice of democracy clashed most dramatically with Trump’s ideology in summer 2020 when, with the support of his Attorney General William Barr, Trump used the law enforcement officers of the Executive Branch to attack peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C. and in Portland, Oregon. In June, on the heels of the assault on the protesters at Lafayette Square, military officers from all branches made it clear that they would not support any effort to use them against civilians. They reiterated that they would support the Constitution. The refusal of the military to support a further extension of Trump's power was no small thing.

And now, here we are. Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by an Electoral College split of 306 to 232. Although the result was not close, Trump refuses to acknowledge the loss and is doing all he can to hamper Biden’s assumption of office. Many members of the Republican Party are joining him in his attempt to overturn the election, taking the final, logical step of Movement Conservatism: denying the legitimacy of anyone who does not share their ideology. This is unprecedented. It is a profound attack on our democracy. But it will not succeed.

And in this moment, we have, disastrously, discovered the final answer to whether or not it is a good idea to destroy the activist government that has protected us since 1933. In their zeal for reducing government, the Trump team undercut our ability to respond to a pandemic, and tried to deal with the deadly coronavirus through private enterprise or by ignoring it and calling for people to go back to work in service to the economy, willing to accept huge numbers of dead. They have carried individualism to an extreme, insisting that simple public health measures designed to save lives infringe on their liberty.

The result has been what is on track to be the greatest catastrophe in American history, with more than 338,000 of us dead and the disease continuing to spread like wildfire. It is for this that the Trump administration will be remembered, but it is more than that. It is a fitting end to the attempt to destroy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Don't Sugar-Coat It, Ali

I wish I could figure out Blogspot since its wonderful update so that I could show a video, but so far I've been unable to do so. For a righteous rant by Ali Velshi, paste the following into your address bar:

 https://twitter.com/i/status/1343593733896372236

Adjectives Must Be In Order!

 I cut-and-pasted this from a Quora post:

The order of adjectives in English, at first, doesn’t seem to be fixed. However, as quoted by Mark Forsyth in The Elements of Eloquence, adjectives in English ‘absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.’

Some examples:

a French silver lovely rectangular green old whittling little knife.

a silver green old French lovely whittling little rectangular knife.

a lovely rectangular silver French little whittling old green knife.

Friday, December 25, 2020

Deck Us All!

Deck us all!


Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Senators Voting Against The COVID Relief Bill

 Marsha Blackburn

Rick Scott

Ron Johnson

Mike Lee

Rand Paul

Ted Cruz

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Bach In The Forest

 Click here

to watch an enormous xylophone in the woods of Kyushu, Japan play Bach as a wooden ball rolls down each "key."

Saturday, December 12, 2020

RIP Henri, Le Chat Noir

 In memoriam: Henri, Le Chat Noir, has passed away at the age of 17.

 Henri, Paw de Deux:

https://crooksandliars.com/2020/12/rip-henri-le-chat-noir

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Paul Krugman: Exit Trump

Click here for an article by my favorite economist, Nobel-winner Paul Krugman of The New York Times, entitled "Yes, we have gone banana."

Good Day For Heather Cox Richardson - And For The Democrats

Click here for a particularly good article from Heather Cox Richardson, after a particularly good day for the Democrats.

Saturday, November 7, 2020

A Republican Lie (Just One Of Many)

 Jonathan Oosting tweeted: 

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel: “Just last night in Oakland County, we found 2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats, that were Republican ballots, due to a clerical error. And this took place in Rochester Hills.”

This is a lie.  Click here for a video posted by Tina Barton, the City Clerk of Rochester Hills, a Republican,  in response (44 seconds). Her accompanying post:

As the City Clerk of the City of Rochester Hills, this is my response to the inaccurate statement of [Ronna McDaniel].

 She also posted the following written response:

As a Clerk, my job is to run the elections fairly and securely. All ballots are and have been accounted for. There were no missing ballots. The accusation that 2,000 ballots were found is categorically false.

As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process.

This was an isolated mistake that was quickly rectified once realized.

Every voter should have complete confidence in our voting system. Every vote that was cast was counted accurately and there is a paper ballot backup.

I stand by our reported results.

Tina Baron, MMC, MiPMC II, City Clerk

We can expect a whole lot of lies and vitriol spouting from Donald Trump and his loyal henchmen over the next few days, as the reality of Biden's election sinks in.

Trump Losing The Military Vote

Click here for a video (1 minute, 22 seconds) explaining why Trump is losing the military vote, usually a bedrock for Republicans. It was tweeted by Jon Soltz, retweeted by Alexander S. Vindman.

David Frum - 2011 - A Repudiation Of The Republican Party

Click here for an article by David Frum from 2011 in New York magazine, entitled "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?" It's as good a takedown of the Republican party in the Tea Party days as I can remember, and it stands up to scrutiny today. The GOP is a failed party. (Frum looks back on pre-W days as a golden era for Republican politics, and I'd dispute that -- I think it goes back to Reagan.) But that's a quibble; the article's well worth reading.

Sunday, November 1, 2020

Election Night: What Will Happen In Fox World?

 I'm copy/pasting a big chunk out of Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources" column which makes a number of good points for those of us who don't watch Fox:

The Fox factor

 

Right now anything is possible, but a Joe Biden win is probable. Reporters and anchors up and down the dial are being careful with their language, adding all the appropriate caveats and hedges, but virtually all the data is pointing in the direction of President Biden. Which is why the Fox factor is so important right now.

 

Fox News is the preferred media outlet of President Trump's America. The president views the world through Fox goggles. His base is the Fox base. His rants and raves come straight from what he hears on his favorite TV shows. So Fox's editorial choices have outsized importance right now. Here's what you need to know: Fox viewers are being misled about Trump's chances of winning the election in the following ways.

 

 – The network is so chock full of pro-Trump commentary and rally coverage that viewers come away with the impression that this race is a whole heck of a lot closer to 50/50 than it actually is.

 

 -- The network's highest-rated shows are portraying Biden as "sleepy" and crooked and corrupt. They are painting Kamala Harris as an un-American, un-electable radical.

 

 -- The network's talk shows are constantly suggesting that a minority of people are actually the "silent majority." Case in point, Sunday's "Fox & Friends" featured Trump voter after Trump voter at a diner in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The segment was not at all representative of a blue state.

 

 -- The shows are also emphasizing state polls that are outliers.

 

 – And about the lies: I was about to write that Trump's lies are being treated with kid gloves, but that's insulting to gloves. The lies are barely even touched at all.

 

Fox's coverage is one of the reasons why Trump's base might believe that any Biden victory is a fraud, a crime, a hoax. For all the talk of anxious Democrats refusing to believe the polls, there are lots of aggrieved Republicans who feel the same way, due to distorted right-wing media coverage. That's the Fox factor...

 

 

Fox's weekend narrative

 

One of the banners during Tucker Carlson's special Sunday hour asserted "BIG ENTHUSIASM FOR TRUMP DESPITE CONFLICTING POLLS." Sean Hannity's show carried the same message: "MASSIVE ENTHUSIASM FOR TRUMP." And on Laura Ingraham's show too: "TRUMP CLOSING THE GAP IN KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES." All night long, the hosts insisted that the race is tightening. Bret Baier said on Carlson's show that "in these battleground states, it is narrowing and narrowing fast." Is it, really, and can anyone say that for sure? I asked CNN's Harry Enten, who responded, "This race has been fairly consistent for a long period of time."

 

 -- Important reminder: Nearly 100 million votes have already have cast...

 

 

Concerns about Fox's Election Night coverage

 

Will Fox play it straight on Election Night or will the coverage be bent in Trump's favor? Whenever I am asked this question, I point out that the network's political anchors and journalists are in charge of election coverage – not Trump's flacks. Anchors like Baier and Martha MacCallum care about their reputations. So do the decision desk staffers, led by Arnon Mishkin, who is well-respected by his peers. Mishkin is not going to cave to pressure. In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Wallace asked him, "What role will politics play in making any calls on election night?" Mishkin's answer: "Zero. Arithmetic is more important than politics when it comes to making a decision. You've just got to check your preferences at the door and decide who has won this thing."

 

That's what he will do. My concern is not about the Election Night coverage per se. It's about what happens on Wednesday and beyond, in the event of a nail-biter election, when the stars of "Fox & Friends" and "The Five" and the prime time shows all repeat Trump's talking points. The fire-breathing partisans will be a lot louder than the sober number-crunchers. And that could have a really destabilizing impact. If the journalists at Fox are saying "be patient" and "let the votes be counted," but the higher-rated propagandists are saying "Biden is trying to steal the election from Trump," the Fox base will dismiss the former and trust the latter.

 

 

All eyes on the Murdochs

 

No matter what happens this week, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch will have the ultimate responsibility for keeping the network tethered to the truth. They must not let the network's talk shows devolve into "rigged" conspiracy theories and civil war talk. As Philip Bump said on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," the Murdochs have "a strong moral responsibility" in the coming days.

 

 >> In his Monday NYT column, Ben Smith says "the approaching election has executives around Lachlan Murdoch, Fox's chief executive, preparing to battle on several fronts: with left-wing critics, with what senior executives fear could be regulatory retribution from Democrats and perhaps most of all from James Murdoch, Lachlan's more liberal brother and critic, according to a person familiar with the company's plans." He also notes that Lachlan has "no real control of the network's high-profile talent..."

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Trump Said These Things

 A 25-part tweet from Miles Taylor, lifelong Republican, formerly Chief of Staff to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen: 

A (very incomplete) thread of foolish, unethical, un-American, and/or illegal things @realDonaldTrump asked us to do during my tenure...to which the only appropriate response was, “NO.” (1 of 25)


Trump told us: Bus thousands and thousands of illegal immigrants (especially those with criminal records) to Democratic sanctuary cities to create instability and strife. (2 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Cut off disaster aid to Democratic states and territories (specifically CA & Puerto Rica) because their people and their elected leaders don’t support me. (3 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s consider trading those poor Puerto Ricans & their broken island for Greenland. (4 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Don’t worry about Congress & wiretap laws. Just break the law and do what you need to over at homeland security. (5 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s cut the number of refugees we let into the United States to ZERO. They don’t add anything to our country and are a drain on our welfare system. (6 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Cut off all foreign aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, even the critical law enforcement cooperation (which helps thwart human smuggling, drug cartels, & sex trafficking) because they’re making me look bad on immigration. (7 of 25)
 

Trump asked: Can we find a way to spy on the personal phones of White House staff to catch leakers? (8 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Make this “weak ass travel ban” “much bigger” to include “a lot” of countries. (9 of 25)
 

Trump told us: We need to bring in more immigrants from Europe, fewer from Somalia, Haiti, Ethiopia and those types places. We’re letting too many poor people in. (10 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s get the hell out of Afghanistan (despite the persistent terror threat to America). (11 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s get the hell out of Syria (despite the persistent terror threat to America). (12 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s ditch these NATO countries (despite it being the backbone of the U.S. global defense alliance). (13 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Stop talking about Russian “election interference,” and I’m going to fire those people that do. Putin is our friend. (14 of 25)
 

Trump told us: “Fucking punish” the Mexicans. (No further information.) (15 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Write and send a bill to Congress to reduce the number of federal judges, especially those which have treated me badly. (16 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Why don’t we award this massive border wall contract to [favored Trump contractor]? They say they can do it so cheap. (17 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Shoot migrants in the legs at the border to slow them down. (18 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Only let the “good” asylum-seekers in, not the ones with “missing toes” or “funny foreheads.” (19 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Gas migrants at the border to keep them away & electrify the Wall to shock them if they touch it. (20 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Make the spikes on top of the Wall so sharp that they pierce human flesh in the most gruesome way to scare away other migrants. Make sure there are pictures of it. (21 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Let’s look at sending illegal immigrants to the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. (22 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Build a castle-like mote [sic: moat] across the border in front of the Wall. (23 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Deploy alligators & snakes in the border “mote” to attack migrants. How much would it cost to maintain that? (24 of 25)
 

Trump told us: Deliberately rip the children and parents apart at the border to keep them from coming back. Reinstate the policy and make it harsher. (25 of 25...and there are many more.)

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson On The Prospect Of "Court Packing" By Biden

Click here for an article by Heather Cox Richardson on "court packing." (It's a really good article on the history of SCOTUS appointments -- and the importance of the Powell memo in 1979, and the creation of the Federalist Society in 1982 -- cannot be underestimated.)

Here are a couple of interesting little tidbits from another HCR article:

Five of the 8 current members of the Supreme Court—Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh—and now Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett, are members of the Federalist Society.

And:

Since the Nixon administration began in 1969, Democrats have appointed just 4 Supreme Court justices, while Republicans have appointed 15. 

Kind of shocking, no? 

(I'd have single-spaced the list, but with this new Blogger format, I don't know how.)


Monday, October 12, 2020

Hard To Vote? Naw . . .

Claire McCaskill tweets:

This is a picture of voter suppression. Why do Americans have to wait in lines this long? This is the line in Suwannee Georgia today to vote.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1315691917817139206

(paste into your address bar)

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

A Herman Cain Reminder

A tweet (from someone called Marijan@samosvijet:

REMINDER!!! “A humbling Herman Cain/coronavirus timeline: 

6/24: Attends Trump rally, maskless 

7/2: Tests positive for Covid-19 

7/10: Says he’s improving 

7/15: Says his doctors seem happy 

7/27: Says he’s really getting better 

7/30: Dies”

Secret Service - Take a Bullet for the President?

Possibly apocryphal story from a Secret Service agent after Trump's joyride around the block at Walter Reed Hospital in the SUV hermetically sealed against chemical attack: "We're there to take a bullet for the president, but we never agreed to take a bullet FROM him."

Friday, October 2, 2020

Donald Trump, CEO (spectacular failure)

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Drew Harwell entitled "As its stock collapsed, Trump's firm gave him huge bonuses and paid for his jet."

Although Trump's empire has always been mostly family-owned and private, Trump was CEO of one publicly traded company, from 1995 to 2009 -- Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. The operations of that company are a matter of record, not veiled the way privately owned companies are. 

Surprise, surprise -- his performance as a CEO, responsible to shareholders and a board of directors, was terrible, but he, personally, did great. He made tens of millions of dollars as the share price, $14 on opening, initially rose to $35 -- and then dropped to a low of 17 cents.

It was a gigantic fraud, as Trump looted the company after sucking in hundreds of millions of dollars from naive investors who believed in the Trump brand.

Monday, September 28, 2020

Please Help With Personal Finances!

Tweet from Kevin M. Kruse:

Please, can someone who's good at the economy help me figure this out? My family is starving.

Rent $2,000
Utilities $300
Internet $80
Cell phone $60
Groceries $600
Hair styling $70,000

Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" Was NOT Inspired by "People of Praise"

Trump's new nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Comy Barrett, belongs to a weird Catholic sect known as "People of Praise." I myself believed for several weeks the story going around that "People of Praise" was the inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel of female subjugation, "The Handmaid's Tale."

Turns out that's not the case. Rather, "The Handmaid's Tale" was inspired by a different weird Catholic sect known as "People of Hope."

The story is debunked in this article, by Constance Grady, of Vox:

On Saturday, President Donald Trump chose Notre Dame law professor and federal appellate judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The news threatens to reignite a storm of controversy around Barrett’s religion that has been building since 2017.

Barrett is a devout Catholic. She has written before about her belief that Catholicism should affect a judge’s jurisprudence, and Democrats discussed her views widely when she was nominated to the federal bench in 2017. In a moment that has become infamous on the right, Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared that “the dogma lives loudly within you” during Barrett’s hearing, a phrase some conservatives took to be an attack on Barrett’s Catholicism.

Barrett is also part of a small Catholic group known as People of Praise, and that’s where her religious affiliations get especially touchy. Some liberals argue Barrett’s membership in this group, which teaches that husbands are the heads of families and have authority over their wives, signals that she will hand down religiously motivated conservative opinions if confirmed to the Supreme Court, particularly when it comes to women’s reproductive freedom and the rights of the queer community.

Meanwhile, conservatives reply that Barrett is a high-powered federal judge who is also married, so she can’t be all that oppressed by her husband, and that liberal critiques of the way Barrett’s religion affects her judicial obligations are nothing more than anti-Catholic prejudice at work.

One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group she belongs to, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The group isn’t an established inspiration for the book — but the story has developed legs anyway.

The inaccurate link between the People of Praise and Atwood’s story, perpetuated by a series of confusing coincidences and uneven fact-checking, first emerged in a Newsweek article and was later picked up by Reuters. Both articles have since been corrected, but the right was furious at both. The Washington Examiner called it a “smear that just won’t die.” Fox News noted several other outlets have mentioned Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale in the same story.

To be absolutely clear: People of Praise is not an inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, and the group does not practice sexual slavery or any of the other dystopian practices Atwood wrote about in her novel. But the argument over whether or not the two are connected reflects the deeply contentious atmosphere in which Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court occurs — and the immense symbolic weight The Handmaid’s Tale carries in American popular culture.

The Handmaid’s Tale is actually inspired by People of Hope. They’re different from People of Praise.

Two coincidences led to the idea of a People of Praise–Handmaid’s Tale connection. The first coincidence is that the People of Praise once had a religious rank called “handmaid.” As reported by the New York Times in 2017, People of Praise members are all accountable to a personal adviser. Those advisers offer guidance on major life decisions, including, per the Times, “whom to date or marry, where to live, whether to take a job or buy a home, and how to raise children.” And these advisers used to be called “heads” when they were men and “handmaids” when they were women. They have since been renamed “leaders.”

The second coincidence is that when Margaret Atwood explained her Handmaid’s Tale inspirations to the New York Times in 1987, she described one of them as “a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids.” Atwood did not at the time name the sect, so when her quote resurfaced in 2020, it was very easy for some readers to think, Well, People of Praise is a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect that calls the women handmaids, so there you go. Accordingly, on September 21, Newsweek reported that People of Praise was one of Atwood’s inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Asked about her inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale by Politico as the controversy heated up, Atwood said she wasn’t sure which group she was talking about in 1987. Her archive of work and research is at the University of Toronto, where she can’t currently access it due to Covid-19 restrictions. But she’s on the record as going through her Handmaid’s Tale archives for journalists plenty of times in the past, and during those interviews, she’s always cited People of Hope, a different Catholic charismatic spinoff that calls women handmaids.

Specifically, People of Hope is a fundamentalist group in New Jersey that some former members have said behaves like a cult and which has allegedly arranged marriages between teenagers. The People of Hope call wives “handmaids,” and when Atwood saw that word in an Associated Press clipping about the group, she underlined it in pen. It’s rumored that it’s here that she developed the idea of using the name to begin with.

In a weird wrinkle, the timing of the lore here doesn’t quite work out. Reporting for the Star-Ledger in 2017, Tom Deignan found that the story didn’t hit the AP until after The Handmaid’s Tale came out in 1985, meaning that Atwood couldn’t have pulled the word “handmaid” from that mythical news article after all. But regardless, the AP clipping in Atwood’s archives, the one that she always shows reporters, is about People of Hope. And while it’s plenty plausible that Atwood has indulged in a little self-mythologizing about her creative process over the years, it’s not really that relevant to any questions about Amy Coney Barrett and her religious leanings today.

The outrage over the controversy speaks to the symbolic weight Handmaid’s Tale holds today in American pop culture

The slippage between People of Praise handmaids, People of Hope handmaids, and Margaret Atwood handmaids is where this whole misunderstanding originated. And it is, in its own way, telling about the world Atwood was writing about in 1984 when she built Gilead, her theocratic dystopia.

Atwood was drawing from the cultural norms of lots of different North American charismatic Christian groups at the time, including harmless ones. The reason there’s so much confusion about exactly where she took the word handmaid from is that handmaid is the kind of word a lot of North American charismatic Christian groups were into in 1984: suggestive of purity, duty, and feminine obedience to divine will.

Again, that does not mean these groups were practicing sexual slavery. It means they were working with a very specific vocabulary, and the way Atwood made her dystopia feel real was by skillfully mimicking them.

But that this slippage occurred in 2020 is also telling about how immensely fearful people are, on both the right and the left, about America’s future — and how powerful The Handmaid’s Tale is as a symbol of what that future might look like.

People on the left look at Amy Coney Barrett and see someone who has denounced both abortion and marriage equality in explicitly religious terms, someone who they fear will, if seated on the Supreme Court, turn back the clock on both those issues. They see a symbol of the same fear that drove protesters to don Handmaid robes at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018: the fear that women are going to lose control of their bodies, and that when that day comes, we might just as well be in Gilead. So they have linked Barrett to The Handmaid’s Tale because The Handmaid’s Tale is now our culture’s most potent symbol for the idea of a world in which women’s bodies are not their own.

People on the religious right, meanwhile, see the left’s focus on Barrett’s Catholicism as confirmation that American Christianity is losing its cultural power, and that they may soon become a persecuted minority. Articles that mistakenly link Barrett’s People of Praise to The Handmaid’s Tale, seen through this lens, become examples of the left trying to make Barrett’s religion a disqualifying mark against her, and by extension to make all Christian faith disqualifying for higher office.

The result is a controversy about two political parties that increasingly see themselves as pushed to the breaking point — and who believe they have no space left to interact with the other side in good faith.



Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Helpful, Positive Input From The Right (well, maybe not so much)

This is taken from Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources," a collection of comments by our friends on the right last spring, when the CDC predicted there would be 200,000 American deaths from COVID-19. 

 

The United States hit a tragic milestone on Tuesday, surpassing 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus. It is difficult to process that vast loss of life. The figure represents mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, cousins and uncles, friends and coworkers.

 

It's a number no one ever wanted to hit. But it didn't blindside us. The early models did predict it. It's hard to forget the White House press conference back in March in which the task force told the public to brace for 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.

 

Most news organizations soberly reported the warning and took it seriously. But many top personalities in right-wing media did not. Instead, they attacked the models and suggested health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci were alarmists. And when one model briefly lowered its projection to 60,000 deaths (with some caveats), these figures seized on the news, touting it as supposed proof of how great the White House's response had been and how unreliable the health experts had been.

So as the US crosses this terrible milepost of 200,000 dead, it's worth looking back at those who attacked the models, the health experts, and the media. Here are some comments made in April from top conservative commentators and personalities: 

>> Rush Limbaugh: "It's now down to 60,000. What happened to 240,000? What happened to 100,000 to 200,000? What happened to 240,000?" 

>> Brian Kilmeade: "The fact is, when someone says 200,000 people die, oops, I mean 60,000. And it's not going to be right away, it's going to be in August. That's how good we are doing and how off the models were..."

 >> Bill O'Reilly: “The [death toll] projections that you just mentioned are down to 60,000, I don’t think it will be that high..."

>> Candace Owens: "FACT: we went from 2.2 million, to 100,000, to 60,000 predictive #coronavirus deaths because the models were always bulls**t, the media was always lying, and the virus was never as fatal as the experts that are chronically wrong about everything, prophesized..." 

 >> Laura Ingraham: "They were off by a factor of 33 from 2.2 million projected COVID deaths at the top, which was terrifying to a little bit more than 60,000 deaths projected today..." 

 >> Mark Levin: "We've seen these numbers, these so-called models and the data over the last six to eight weeks. They have fluctuated wildly. Millions might die. Hundreds of thousands might die. Now, they're saying 60,000 give or take, maybe less than 60,000...." 

 >> Tucker Carlson: "Sixty thousand deaths -- that's a very big number. ... Yet, at the same time, it is far fewer than many expected. It is a much lower number...." 

 >> Martha MacCallum: "You cannot help but look at the numbers that caused it and the models which were incorrect that really were one of the biggest push points to shut down the United States economy. It is quite possible that you’re going to end up with numbers of fatalities in this Covid-19 tragedy of those that have been affected that will be south of the numbers in the 2018 flu season..." 

 >> Dinesh D'Souza: "Most people have no idea how way off the #Coronavirus models have been. A nutcase virus denier who predicted ZERO deaths would be closer to the mark (ie to the current 60,000 projection) than the best-case scenarios, taking into account social distancing, of 100-240,000 deaths..." 

>> Jim Hoft: "STUNNING! IHME Reduces Their Model Predictions AGAIN! — Now Say Peak Is ON EASTER and Only 60,000 Deaths …Like a Typical Flu!" 

 It's important to revisit these comments, given how many of these commentators are still misleading the public on the coronavirus and the administration's response today. Fox News, talk radio, and right-wing websites were brimming with commentary playing down the virus back in April — and, in many respects, they still are today, even with a staggering death toll of 200,000 deaths. The arguments have changed, but the dishonesty has not.

Corrections or apologies from these folks? Crickets . . .

 

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

RT (Russia Today) Deepfakes Trump

Trump video:

Sunday, September 20, 2020

Democratic Domination Of The Popular Vote

Since 1992 (28 years ago), there have been 7 presidential elections. They were won by the following:

1992: Bill Clinton
1996: Bill Clinton
2000: George W. Bush
2004: George W. Bush
2008: Barack Obama
2012: Barack Obama
2016: Donald Trump

The Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in 6 of those 7 elections. 

In those 7 elections, Republicans received 374,290,307 votes; Democrats received 403,086,894 votes. Democrats received 28,796,587 more votes than Republicans, an average of 4,113,798 more votes per year.

In those 7 elections, Democrats have won 4 times (16 years); Republicans have won 3 times (12 years). The only time a Republican president won the popular vote was Bush over Kerry, 2004, by a margin of 3,000,176 votes.

 

Saturday, September 19, 2020

Notorious RBG: The Umbrella

In 2013, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts voted to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act (declaring the Day of Jubilee, as Charlie Pierce puts it). In a scathing dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote:

Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today. The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. … One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation’s signal piece of civil-rights legislation...Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
It's raining -- hard.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

The "Lost Cause"

 Here's the Wikipedia entry for "The Lost Cause":

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology which advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. This ideology furthered the idea that slavery was just and moral, under the ruse that it brought worthwhile economic prosperity. The ideology was used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era in the American South.  It endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South and views the war as a struggle that was primarily waged in order to save the Southern way of life or to defend 'states' rights,' such as the right to secede from the Union, in the face of overwhelming 'Northern aggression.' At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery and white supremacy in both the buildup to and outbreak of the war.

The southern states seceding from the Union in 1861, immediately prior to the Civil War, issued proclamations giving reasons for their course of action. Modern-day revisionists try to gloss over the issue of slavery, maintaining that the principal causes of secession were related to economics; the industrial north was determined to subjugate the agrarian south, treating it as a colony to be exploited.

If you read the declarations of secession, you will find that they are quite pointed: The rebellion was principally in opposition to the North forcing the abolition of slavery.

Here is the declaration of Mississippi (read it; it's short), adopted during a convention of State delegates from January 7-26, 1861:

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

You decide: was slavery a central reason for Mississippi's secession?

 

Monday, September 14, 2020

Funny Papers? Not So Much ...

 Click here for an article entitled "Totally Under Control": a comic strip presentation of how Trump and the U.S. on one side, and South Korea on the other, reacted to the COVID-19 virus.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Paul Krugman: Trump Does Not Deserve Credit For "Booming Economy"

 This is an article by Paul Krugman, published in The New York Times on August 25, 2020, entitled "Republicans, businesspeople, and other bad economists":

The U.S. economy just experienced the worst slump in its history. It has partially bounced back, but employment and output are still far lower than they were at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, early data suggest that the partial recovery has slowed if not stalled, and there will be widespread distress soon as expanded unemployment benefits run out.

Yet Donald Trump still, according to most surveys, has a net positive rating on the economy. How is that possible?

Before I get there, a few points on why giving Trump positive marks on the economy is absurd.

First, a picture. Here’s total employment since the end of the 2007-9 recession, which was brought on by the collapse of the Bush-era housing bubble and the financial disruption that followed. As you can see, there was steady growth under Barack Obama, but with the election of Trump … absolutely nothing happened. The trend continued as before, and nothing in the economic data would lead you to suspect that there had been any change in management.

In 2017, nothing happenedBureau of Labor Statistics

The only change came with the coronavirus, about that more in a minute.

Second, the key point about Trump’s economic policy was that mostly he didn’t have one. Oh, he got us into a trade war with China, which seems to have had some negative effect on manufacturing. And he passed a huge tax cut for corporations, which basically seems to have, well, cut corporate taxes; there was no sign of an acceleration in investment, productivity, or anything else.



Now, there was a huge policy response to the coronavirus: The CARES Act, which greatly cushioned the blow by expanding unemployment benefits. But that was basically a Democratic bill, designed by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, that Republicans let by because they didn’t have any better ideas.

And when key provisions of the CARES Act expired at the end of last month, Trump responded with some executive orders that seem likely to do almost nothing to alleviate a sharp increase in hardship.

So what, exactly, are voters approving of?

Part of the answer is that the G.O.P. is still the party of big business and the wealthy, and the general public suffers from the persistent delusion that people who can run businesses and/or make a lot of money for themselves also know how to run an economy.



The truth is that the knowledge and talents required for, say, being a successful CEO are very different from those required to make good economic policy. Corporations are command-and-control organizations in which executives can tell subordinates what to do; market economies aren’t. Corporations compete with each other, while countries mostly don’t, because they are their own main customers — my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. So the principles of good economic policy are nothing at all like the principles of good management, which is why even genuinely great businessmen like Herbert Hoover have made terrible economic leaders.

And don’t tell anyone, but Donald Trump is not, in fact, a great businessman.

I also suspect that there’s a form of media bias here that isn’t explicitly partisan but has the same practical effect. Where, after all, does economic policy get discussed most? In business publications, on TV shows catering to business audiences, and so on. And these venues naturally give more credence to politicians who praise business and promise to cut rich peoples’ taxes. So an innumerate Ayn Rand fanboy like Paul Ryan was long the darling of business media, while an infinitely more knowledgeable figure like Elizabeth Warren can barely get a word in edgewise.

So I’m disappointed but not surprised that Trump is still getting much better marks than he deserves on the economy. And I’ll be equally disappointed but not surprised if Joe Biden gets much less credit than he deserves if, as seems likely, he gets the chance to clean up Trump’s mess.







Senate Intelligence Committee: Russia Meddling In 2016 Election

The following is information concerning the release of a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  This committee is bipartisan, chaired by Republican Marco Rubio. In addition to Rubio and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (Democrat), there are 7 Republican and 6 Democratic members of the committee: Republicans Richard Burr, James Risch, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Tom Cotton, John Cornyn, and Ben Sasse; and Democrats Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Martin Heinrich, Angus King (Independent), Kamala Harris, and Michael Bennet, Colorado.

Here is the statement released on August 18, 2020:

Miami, FL — U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Acting Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) released the fifth and final volume of the Committee’s bipartisan Russia investigation titled, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,” which examines Russia’s attempts to gain influence in the American political system during the 2016 elections.

Rubio released the following statement and a video message, which is available for download here:

“Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.

“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.

“What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling. And we discovered deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing. 

“Now, as we head towards the 2020 elections, China and Iran have joined Russia in attempts to disrupt our democracy, exacerbate societal divisions, and sow doubts about the legitimacy and integrity of our institutions, our electoral process and our republic.

“We must do better in 2020. The Committee’s five reports detail the signs and symptoms of that interference and show us how to protect campaigns, state and local entities, our public discourse, and our democratic institutions. I join with Vice Chairman Warner in urging everyone — our colleagues, those in the Administration, state and local elections officials, the media, and the American public — to read them and take the recommendations seriously.”

You can read “Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities” here.

Key Findings:

  • The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

  • WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.

  • The FBI gave the Steele Dossier unjustified credence, based on an incomplete understanding of Steele’s past reporting record. The FBI used the dossier in a FISA application and renewals, and advocated for it to be included in the Intelligence Community Assessment before taking the necessary steps to validate assumptions about Steele’s credibility.  

  • The FBI lacked a formal or considered process for escalating their warnings about the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack within the organization of the DNC.

  • The Committee assesses that at least two participants in a June 9, 2016, meeting with Trump Campaign officials, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, have significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.  The Committee, however, found no reliable evidence that information of benefit to the Campaign was transmitted at the meeting, or that then-candidate Trump had foreknowledge of the meeting.

  • The Committee found no evidence that anyone associated with the Trump Campaign had any substantive private conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the April 27, 2016, Trump speech held at the Mayflower Hotel.

  • Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.

  • George Papadopoulos was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services, but nonetheless presented a prime intelligence target and potential vector for malign Russian influence.

  • Russia took advantage of members of the Transition Team’s relative inexperience in government, opposition to Obama Administration policies, and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct diplomacy.

Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s previous reports: