9.30 Albany
9.30 Elizabeth Drew in the Times: Speaker Pelosi and her allies argue that a narrow, Ukraine-based impeachment agenda is more likely to attract wider public support than a collection of grievances because it “is easier for the public to understand.” They’re spooked by the failure of the report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to galvanize public opinion, but there are several reasons for that, including that Mr. Mueller, bogged down in legalisms, didn’t try. In fact, a speedily adopted Ukraine-based impeachment might repel possible Republican supporters. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, urges that the drafters of even just a Ukraine article take their time. “Speed is less important than professional thoroughness,” he says. “A well-prepared case could assure all Democratic votes and get Republican votes in the Senate. The atmosphere there now is too partisan for that.”
9.30 Bernie Sanders proposes to impose a tax on companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue where the chief executive earns more than 50 times the wage of the median employee. “It is time to send a message to corporate America: If you do not end your greed and corruption, we will end it for you.”
9.30 Michael Gerson in the Post: For all his flag waving, Trump seems to lack the instinct for patriotism. It is one thing — as the president does with regularity — to throw people who work for him under the bus. This displays the absence of downward loyalty. But in his 2017 meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, Trump effectively threw his country under the bus — endorsing the Russian perception of American hypocrisy on election tampering. This indicates a lack of upward loyalty. It doesn’t seem to matter to Trump that American “meddling” in foreign elections generally consists of promoting regular and fair elections, encouraging the protection of minority rights and speaking up for press freedom. None of these objectives holds much appeal or urgency for Trump. He calls for the renewal of nationalism, but in a manner that has little to do with our national values. He wants us to take pride in blood and soil rather than in a set of universal ideals. His calls for loyalty are based on geography not morality. He urges us to love America because it is powerful, and because it is ours, not because it is good.
9.30 John Bolton: “When you ask for consistent behavior from others, you have to demonstrate it yourself.”
9.30 The House subpoenas Giuliani
9.29 Ginny and I visited the Capital District. In Waterford, we saw the Erie Canal. I have written about the thing so much, I thought I’d take a picture.
9.29 Stephen Miller on Fox News Sunday: “The president of the United States is the whistleblower, and this individual is a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government,”
9.29 Sen. John Kennedy on Meet the Press: “No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. I can’t speak for Mr. Giuliani. He’s wild as a March hare. I do not speak for Mr. Giuliani. I speak for John Kennedy.”
9.29 Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who served in Iraq and is a pilot in the Air National Guard, tweeted that Trump‘s tweet was “beyond repugnant”: “I have visited nations ravaged by civil war. @realDonaldTrump I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President.”
9.29 Trump via Twitter: “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal,” Trump tweeted, adding a parenthetical in his paraphrase of words by Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist pastor.
9.29 Trump via Twitter: “I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely incorrect, to the ‘Whistleblower.’ Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!”
9.28 David Frum in The Atlantic: Robert Mueller built a failure machine because he defined his job as punishing crimes rather than discovering the truth. If he found something that was very bad, but not criminal, he ignored it. If he could not establish a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, the criminal got away with it. If the crime was committed by the president, he in effect protected it. Mueller’s logic was amazingly self-defeating: Because the president cannot be indicted, he will never be heard in court; because the president will never be heard in court, it is unfair even to present evidence of crimes that will never be litigated. Impeachment busts out of this ridiculous trap.
9.28 Downton Abbey movie. Meh.
9.27 David von Drehle in the Post: When I referred to impeachment as “rare” in a recent column, a reader reminded me that this is the third such proceeding in less than 50 years, each more divisive than the one before. A successful impeachment would be a blunt trauma to the republic. It would exacerbate the alienation of Trump’s supporters and deepen the cultural divide. The authors of the Constitution made elections frequent and impeachment difficult for good reason. It’s not too late to settle this at the ballot box.
9.27 Adios Tom
0.26 Dani Lever: “It is no longer an option or a political decision: the House must investigate. The Governor has further said, which is also indisputable, that early calls for impeachment from the far left flank members of the caucus were more aggressive, and Nancy Pelosi was taking a deliberative path which the Governor agreed with. However, that all changed once the Ukraine revelations came to light,” she said. “Now, there’s no question that the investigation must follow all leads.”
9.26 Greg Sargent in the Post: From the moment the whistleblowerlearned about President Trump’s attempts to extract political dirt on former vice president Joe Biden from the newly elected leader of Ukraine on July 25, the CIA officer behind the whistleblower report moved swiftly behind the scenes to assemble material from at least a half-dozen highly placed — and equally dismayed — U.S. officials. He wove their accounts with other painstakingly gathered material on everything from the intervention of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to alleged efforts by American diplomats sent to Kiev and attorneys in the Office of the White House Counsel to contain or suppress the accruing damage. On Aug. 12, he delivered his document — a nine-page version of which was made public on Thursday — to the intelligence community’s inspector general, triggering an almost immediate clash between the executive branch and Congress. Six weeks later, the whistleblower has by some measures managed to exceed what former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III accomplished in two years of investigating Trump: producing a file so concerning and factually sound that it has almost single-handedly set in motion the gears of impeachment.
9.26 Rudy Giuliani to the Atlantic: “It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero!
9.26 Rep. Devin Nunes: “Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.”
9.26 Susan B. Glaser in The New Yorker: he most interesting moments to be in Washington are when the conventional wisdom is shifting and not everyone knows it yet, or when an old certainty has been shredded and nothing has emerged to replace it. As of Monday morning, the political world was pretty sure that Donald Trump would not be impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives, and that he would enter the 2020 campaign and race to win reëlection, before the economy betrayed him with a recession that forecasters increasingly see as inevitable. Instead, over a remarkable day and a half, a new reality emerged: Donald Trump appears to have got himself impeached. Trump now seems all but certain not only to face an impeachment investigation but an actual impeachment vote in the House. And, whenever it happens, and whatever the specifics of the indictment turn out to be, the impeachment vote will have been triggered by a new scandal very much of his own making.
9.26 Mike Allen in Axios: Here’s Trump‘s six-part playbook to make Ukraine 2016’s sequel: 1. Argue that your opponent is guilty of something as bad or worse than the accusations against you. 2. Create constant fog, amplified by Twitter. Allege the media is guilty, too. 3. Convince party leaders and Fox News to fall instantly in line, focused solely on your opponent’s supposed transgressions. 4. Demand documents and testimony, fostering an “everyone’s dirty and hiding something” atmosphere. 5. Stymie anyone on your side who’s thinking of dissenting by torching them on Twitter, like he did to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). 6. Bet that your own standing, while getting no better, gets no worse.
9.26 The Whistleblower’s Complaint: In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room. . . . White House officials told me that they were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for co-ordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials. Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.
9.25 Masha Gesson in The New Yorker: We have a way of talking about elections as though they were synonymous with democracy. They are not: they are merely a very imperfect way of creating the possibility of democracy, which is the government of the governed. Ideally, democracy is what would happen between elections.
9.25 CNN: in truth, Corbyn is trapped, with no way of triggering an election on his terms. Ordinarily, you would expect an opposition leader, confronted with a weak and floundering Prime Minister, to schedule a vote of no confidence. In theory, that could happen as soon as this week.However, the constitutional process that follows could allow Johnson to sit out the October 31 Brexit deadline and have the UK leave without a negotiated deal — something Corbyn has pledged to avoid. Some Labour sources believe that in this scenario, they would be able to work with the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, to remove Johnson from power and secure the extension. But it’s far from clear that this would be possible, legally or constitutionally.
9.25 Visited Moynihan Train Station construction site with Kelly Cummings et al
9.25 New York Times: A cluster of three suicides in less than a week among the crew of the USS George H.W. Bush has shocked the United States Navy, raising questions about why the suicide rate in the service has climbed sharply in recent years, despite sustained efforts at prevention. The three deaths were all sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier, which is in dry dock in Norfolk, Va., for extensive repairs. The suicide rate in the Navy, which once ran well below national averages, has worsened rapidly in recent years, more than doubling since 2006. The annual rate is now 20.1 suicide deaths per 100,000 service members, according to Defense Department figures. That is lower than in the Army or Marine Corps, but higher than the civilian rate of about 14 deaths per 100,000.
9.24 The Guardian: An early Renaissance masterpiece by the Florentine painter Cimabue has been discovered in a kitchen on the outskirts of a town north of Paris, where it might have been binned during a house clearance if an auctioneer had not spotted it. Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century artist who taught Giotto, is estimated to be worth £3.5m-£5.3m. The painting has been in the posession of its owner, an elderly woman, for so long that no one could remember ho it had been acquired.
9.24 Rep. Adam Schiff: “The transcript of the call reads like a classic mob shakedown.”
9.24 Nancy Pelosi: “I can say with authority the Trump administration’s actions undermine both our national security and our intelligence and our protections of the whistleblowers, more than both. This Thursday, the acting DNI will appear before the House Intelligence Committee. At that time, he must turn over the whistleblower’s full complaint to the committee. He will have to choose whether to break the law or honor his responsibility to the Constitution. . . . In the darkest days of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, “The times have found us.” The times found them to fight for and establish our democracy. The times have found us today, not to place ourselves in the same category of greatness as our founders but to place us in the urgency of protecting and defending our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And the words of Ben Franklin, to keep our republic.
9.24 Robert Kagan in The Washington Post: Only certain kinds of countries would even accede to the kind of request President Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani made, and they are precisely the countries whose judicial systems are least trustworthy. No U.S. president could ever ask Britain or France or Japan or any other deeply rooted democracy with an impartial justice system to investigate an American whom those governments had not already decided on their own to investigate. Much less would such governments be willing to investigate a U.S. president’s political opponents at the president’s behest. The only kinds of countries that would conceivably succumb to such pressure — and it is to this Ukrainian president’s great credit that he did not — are precisely those whose judicial systems were already corrupt and easily manipulated for political purposes. Again, how reliable could such an investigation be? Why would we not expect it to produce whatever answer was most conducive to that government’s interests? The U.S. president wants an investigation to prove that his opponent is dirty. Okay. Done. He’s dirty. Now release the aid.
9.24 Trump, speaking at the UN, on impeachment talk: “I think it’s ridiculous. It’s a witch hunt … That call was perfect. It couldn’t have been nicer … There was no pressure put on them whatsoever. But there was pressure put on with respect to Joe Biden.”
9.24 Trump: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
9.24 Britain’s highest court ruled that Prime Minister Boris Johnson‘s decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful
9.23 Washington Post: President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden
9.22 Phoebe Waller-Bridge won three of the four Emmys for which she was nominated
9.23 Greta Thunberg to world leaders at the UN: ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’
9.22 George Will: “We have to clear the ground and remove this awful presence from our lives. . . . [the Republican Party has] become a cult ― it’s become a cult because of an absence of ideas. . .[T]hey’ve jettisoned the ideas.”
9.22 In his NFL debut, Daniel Jones leads the Giants to victory over Tampa Bay.
9.22 Trump: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine. And Ukraine, Ukraine’s got a lot of problems.”
9.20 George Conway and Neal Katyal in The Washington Post: it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States. If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. The president’s efforts were impeachable because, in committing those obstructive acts, he put his personal interests above the nation’s: He tried to stop an investigation into whether a hostile foreign power, Russia, tried to interfere with our democracy — simply because he seemed to find it personally embarrassing. Trump breached his duty of faithful execution to the nation not only because he likely broke the law but also because, through his disregard for the law, he put his self-interest first.The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse. Unlike the allegations of conspiracy with Russia before the 2016 election, these concern Trump’s actions as president, not as a private citizen, and his exercise of presidential powers over foreign policy with Ukraine. Moreover, with Russia, at least there was an attempt to get the facts through the Mueller investigation; here the White House is trying to shut down the entire inquiry from the start — depriving not just the American people, but even congressional intelligence committees, of necessary information. It is high time for Congress to do its duty
9.21 To mark the 80th anniversary of the appearance of crimefighter Bruce Wayne and his masked identity, DC Comics last night staged bat-signal illuminations in Melbourne, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Paris, London, Montreal, São Paulo, Johannesburg, New York (Domino Sugar Refinery) and L.A.
9.21 Vice President Mike Pence used an eight-vehicle motorcade to travel around historically car-free Mackinac Island
9.21 Washington Post: In a crowded field of Democratic candidates for president, Elizabeth Warren now has something no one else does. She’s the only candidate with a communications director longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. Camonghne Felix’s debut collection, “Build Yourself a Boat,” has been hailed as a powerful examination of black womanhood. Hearing the NBA news about Felix, Warren tweeted, “I’m honored to have you on my team.”
9.19 North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds representing hundreds of species over the past five decades, in an enormous loss that signals an “overlooked biodiversity crisis,” according to a study from top ornithologists and government agencies. This is not an extinction crisis — yet. It is a more insidious decline in abundance as humans dramatically alter the landscape: There are 29 percent fewer birds in the United States and Canada today than in 1970, the study concludes. Grassland species have been hardest hit, probably because of agricultural intensification that has engulfed habitats and spread pesticides that kill the insects many birds eat. But the victims include warblers, thrushes, swallows and other familiar birds.
9.19 The Atlantic: 277 New York City metro-area residents left every day in 2018, for a total of 100,000 that year. During the same period, Chicago and Los Angeles lost an average of 161 and 201 per day, respectively. More than 3 million people have moved to the big Texas metro areas (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin) since 2010. the Democratic advantage in the Texas counties housing those cities (plus Fort Worth), as of the 2012 presidential election, was 130,000 votes. By the 2018 Senate election, that advantage was 800,000 votes–whicj happens to be the same number by which Trump carried Texas in 2016.
9.19 Washington Post: A whistleblower complaint has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress. It involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call. . . . Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of “urgent concern,” a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees. But acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire has refused to share details about Trump’s alleged transgression with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public view and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president.
9.18 Amber Phillips in the Post: Lewandowski basically refused to answer anything, and the Democratic lawmakers on the panel didn’t seem to have a way around his stonewalling to get information. (A lawyer for the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee did manage to get Lewandowski to say under oath that the president asked him to tell Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ’s probe, but that confirmed what the Mueller report already said.) Elsewhere in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, former White House counsel Donald McGahn — a key player in the Mueller report — is refusing to testify. House Democrats are suing him instead. That’s one part of Democrats’ impeachment dilemma: How do they conduct an impeachment inquiry when potential witnesses would rather get sued and yelled at by Congress than say anything bad about Trump? Democrats don’t seem to have an answer.
9.18 Nancy Pelosi on Corey Lewandowski: “I would have held him in contempt right then and there,
9.17 Corey Lewandowski, during Congresional testimony: “I have no obligation to be honest with the media because they’re just as dishonest as anyone else.”
9.17 Cokie Roberts dies at 75.
9.17 Chris Churchill in the Albany Times-Union: Regular readers know that I’ve been intensely critical of Cuomo and how he has governed. I certainly think he has been overly attentive to his donors. He certainly isn’t loved by voters, especially upstate, which is losing population under his watch. Still, I don’t see how anybody could watch the Democratic debates, with Biden stammering and faltering, and not think Cuomo would be a force on the stage. The governor would talk about his three landslide victories in one of the country’s biggest and most important states. He would tell everybody how his governing experience is directly relevant to the presidency. He would talk about how a guy from Queens could best take it to a guy from Queens. Warren talks about free college, raising the minimum wage and banning fracking for natural gas. But Cuomo has actually enacted versions of those policies — and yet would be savvy enough to realize that proposing a federal ban on fracking, as Warren has, will keep Pennsylvania red and make it that much harder for Democrats to win. There’s still time for Cuomo to enter the race. He won’t unless Biden soon quits, which isn’t going to happen. Still, Biden will not be the nominee. Warren will — and Donald Trump should feel good about that.
9.17 Nancy Pelosi, quotes in The Washington Post: “What is America? America’s our Constitution, our separation of powers, our Bill of Rights, our liberties, our freedom of the press. [Trump and McConnell] don’t respect that. . . .America’s this land from sea to shining sea, this beautiful place and beyond. And what did they do? Degrade it. They dishonored the Constitution. They degrade our land. They denigrate our people, who we are, a nation of immigrants, by and large. And they undermine our values.” She concluded, “So this isn’t about a shared-values situation. This is about using your leverage. Do they have something that we want, and do we have something that they want?”. . . .I don’t want to characterize the president for what he is or isn’t. I just want to defeat him in the election. I just want to just make sure that we can reverse as soon as we possibly can some of the damage he’s done to America, whether it’s our values, our people, our environment or our Constitution.”
9.16 Elizabeth Warren in Washington Square Park: “Climate change. Gun safety. Health care. On the face of it, these three are totally different issues, But despite our being the strongest and wealthiest country in the history of the world, our democracy is paralyzed. Why? Because giant corporations have bought off our government.”
9.16 Warren: “We need to take a deep breath and recognize that a country that elects Donald Trump is already in serious trouble.”
9.15 Ric Ocasek dies at 75
9.14 A solid gold toilet, part of an art exhibit called “America,” was stolen yesterday from Blenheim Palace
9.14 Drones, allegedly launched by Houthi rebels, later traced to Iran, set Saudi refineries ablaze
9.14 Tom McTague in The Atlantic: The United States holds a reputation in large parts of Europe as the epitome of winner-takes-all capitalism, yet it operates variants of a proto-socialist model for all of its major sports. Success is hailed, yet curtailed, and failure rewarded: The worst-placed teams get the first pick in the following season’s draft of new players, allowing them to restock on talent, a form of redistribution rejected elsewhere in the American economy. There is no relegation for those who finish last. Salary caps ensure something of a level playing field each year, and rules are collectively agreed upon by the franchises. There is even, in some cases, a salary floor to ensure that clubs remain competitive.
9.13 Actress Felicity Huffman was sentenced to 14 days behind bars for her role in the college admissions scam.
9.12 Elizabeth Warren: “I have three older brothers who all served in the military. I understand firsthand the kind of commitment they have made. They will do anything we ask them to do. But we cannot ask them to solve problems that they alone cannot solve.”
9.12 Julian Castro: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.”
9.12 Amy Klobochar: “While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill. And on page eight — on page eight of the bill — it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. And that means that 149 million Americans will no longer be able to have their current insurance. I don’t think that’s a bold idea. I think it’s a bad idea.”
9.12 Pete Buttigieg: “When I first got into this race, I remember President Trump scoffed and said he’d like to see me make a deal with Xi Jinping. Well, I’d like to see him make a deal with Xi Jinping. It’s another example of a deal never made.”
9.12 Buttigieg: The problem, Senator Sanders, with that damn bill that you wrote, and that Senator Warren backs, is that it doesn’t trust the American people. I trust you to choose what makes the most sense for you. Not my way or the highway. Now look, I think we do have to go far beyond tinkering with the ACA. I propose Medicare for all who want it. We take a version of Medicare, we make it available for the American people, and if we’re right, as progressives, that that public alternative is better, then the American people will figure that out for themselves. I trust the American people to make the right choice for them. Why don’t you?
9.12 Beto O’Rourke: “Hell, yes! We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
9.12 David Axelrod in the Times: Wrestling is Mr. Trump’s preferred form of combat. But beating him will require jiu-jitsu, a different style of battle typically defined as the art of manipulating an opponent’s force against himself rather than confronting it with one’s own force. …There is a legion of arguments on moral, ethical and policy grounds for Mr. Trump’s defeat … But the most effective question for Democrats to get voters to ask is simply whether the country can survive another four years like this. …To win, the Democrats will have turn Mr. Trump’s negative energy against him without embodying it themselves.
9.12 Anthony Scaramucci in the Post: You’re there more as an annoyance to him because he has to fill some of these jobs, but you’re not there to do anything other than be backlighting. He wants, like, a catatonic loyalty, and he wants you to be behind the backlights. There’s one spotlight on the stage, it’s shining on Trump, and you’re a prop in the back with dim lights.”
9.12 The Washington Post: The number of children attending U.S. public schools with students of other races has nearly doubled over the past quarter century, a little-noticed surge that reflects the nation’s shifting demographics, a Washington Post analysis has found.At the same time, children in most big cities and many suburbs remain locked in deeply segregated districts, with black students more likely to be enrolled in segregated districts than Hispanics or whites, The Post found.In 2017, 10.8 million children attended highly integrated public schools, up from 5.9 million in 1995, an 83 percent increase that stems largely from rising diversity outside metropolitan areas. The finding reflects profound demographic change, as Latinos move into small towns and suburbs that once were overwhelmingly white. These place are far more likely to have schools that mirror the new diversity of their communities than their big-city counterparts, which have long been home to a diverse population but have run schools that are profoundly segregated.
9.12 Washington Post: It’s Elizabeth Warren’s catchy code for how little she’s asking of the rich: The Massachusetts senator said “two cents” no fewer than 16 times Tuesday night in pitching her wealth tax to a crowd of cheering Texans. Warren’s message was that the superwealthy, those worth more than $50 million, would pay just pennies on the dollar — a 2 percent annual tax on assets — to fund the vast array of social programs she’s proposing, from universal child care to free college tuition. At her prompting, crowds recently have held up two fingers and chanted, “Two cents!” to express their support for the tax, and the programs it would pay for.
But there’s another way of looking at how this tax would impact the country’s wealthiest families: The 15 largest fortunes in the country would be, on average, half their current size if the tax had been in place since 1982, according to new figures published by a pair of economists who helped Warren write her wealth tax proposal.Instead of $97 billion, Microsoft founder Bill Gates would now have $36.4 billion, according to the figures. Rather than $44.9 billion, Walmart heiress Alice Walton would be sitting on $15 billion. Instead of $160 billion, Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos would have $86.8 billion. Some economists, seizing on such numbers, say Warren’s tax could do more than just make the wealthy uncomfortable: It could erase great fortunes. “This is not some small little tax,” said Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. “If it was successfully enforced — and there are questions about whether it would be — this would be an extremely burdensome tax on wealth.” [NOTE; 70 of the world’s nations have a GNP les than $15 billion.
9.11 Lorena Gonzalez in the Post: California taxpayers already fund a number of programs — Medi-Cal, CalWorks, CalFresh, subsidized housing, free lunch programs and even the earned-income tax credit — to help those left behind by society. But the gig economy — and the absence of worker protections that come with it — is nothing short of a modern-day sharecropping business. And the model costs California $7 billion annually in lost tax revenue. It puts businesses that abide by the law at a competitive disadvantage.
9.11 Charlie Warzel in the Times: What started as a Steve Jobs TED Talk has become a parody — a decadent pageant of Palo Alto executives, clothed in their finest Dad Casual, reading ad copy as lead-ins for vaguely sexual jump-cut videos of brushed aluminum under nightclub lighting. The events are exhausting love letters to consumerism complete with rounds of applause from the laptop-lit faces of the tech blogging audience when executives mention that you (yes you!) can hold the future in your hands for just $24.95 per month or $599 with trade-in. The entire event is at odds with our current moment — one in which inequality, economic precarity and populist frustration have infiltrated our politics and reshaped our relationships with once-adored tech companies. But it’s not just the tech backlash. When the world feels increasingly volatile and fragile, it feels a little obscene to gather to worship a $1,000 phone. Serving journalists pastries topped with gold leaf doesn’t do much to help either.
9.11 The African-American electorate has been undergoing a quiet, long-term transformation, moving from the left toward the center on several social and cultural issues, while remaining decisively liberal, even radical, on economic issues, according to a series of studies by prominent African-American scholars. “There has been a shift in the attitudes of black masses about the extent to which systematic discrimination and prejudice are the primary reasons blacks continue to lag behind whites,” Candis Watts Smith, a political scientist at Penn State, wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Black Studies in 2014, “Shifting From Structural to Individual Attributions of Black Disadvantage: Age, Period and Cohort Effects on Black Explanations of Racial Disparities.” Smith argues that older black Americans with deeply ingrained memories of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s have been joined by a younger generation, with the result that African Americans’ attention has increasingly shifted from structural reasons of black disadvantage (e.g., systematic discrimination in the job or housing markets) to individual-based explanations (e.g., lack of individual motivation; oppositional attitudes to school and learning) of these disparities, especially in the post – civil rights era.
9.11 A man whose mother died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks criticized Rep. Ilian Omar, during a memorial service held at Ground Zero. After reading a list of people who were killed during the attacks, including his mother, Nicholas Haros Jr. criticized Omar for using the phrase “Some people did something” at a March fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization. “‘Some people did something,’ said a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota,” Haros told the group, referencing Omar’s words. “Today I am here to respond to you exactly who did what to whom. Madam, objectively speaking, we know who and what was done. There is no uncertainty about that. Why your confusion? On that day, 19 Islamic terrorist members of al-Qaida killed over 3,000 people and caused billions of dollars of economic damage. Is that clear? But as to whom, I was attacked, your relatives and friends were attacked, our constitutional freedoms were attacked and our nation’s founding on Judeo-Christian principles were attacked. That’s what some people did. Got that now?”
9.10 Washington Post: Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced a charred political landscape Tuesday morning that offers few viable options for achieving his “do or die” exit from the European Union, hours after Parliament crushed his dreams of an election that could clear the path to departure. In a chaotic final session — marked by scenes of pandemonium in the wee hours of Tuesday — Johnson’s bid for a new vote was soundly defeated, continuing a remarkable streak in which the once-swaggering prime minister has lost every key vote of his young premiership. Tuesday was the second time in as many weeks that Johnson had asked for Parliament to allow a fresh election, only to be rebuffed by a unified opposition
9.10 Washington Post: Here is the net approval/disapproval for several groups, compared with Trump’s 2016 results: white college graduates: -24 vs. +3 in 2016; white college-educated women: -21 vs. -7 in 2016; white non-college-educated women: -11 vs. +27 in 2016; suburban voters: -15 vs. +4 in 2016
9.10 Trump fires John Bolton
9.10 Jim Sciutto on CNN: The CIA spent decades cultivating an informant who became so close to Vladimir Putin that the individual could photograph documents on his desk and send them back to U.S. intelligence officials. The unnamed source quickly became one of the CIA’s most important assets as the informant rose through the ranks of Russian politics, providing essential information for decades, including intelligence about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. But the spy agency became worried about the informant’s safety shortly after Trump was elected and ultimately waged a secret mission in 2017 to extract the source from Russia.
9.9 Washington Post: President Trump said Monday that negotiations over U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan are dead, two days after he called off a secret meeting at Camp David with Afghan and Taliban leaders to secure a deal “They’re dead,” Trump said. “They’re dead. As far as I’m concerned, they’re dead.”
9.9 Trump, about storm refugees from the Bahamas. : “We have to be very careful. Everybody needs totally proper documentation. Because, look, the Bahamas had some tremendous problems with people going to the Bahamas that weren’t supposed to be there. I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States — including some very bad people and very bad gang members.”
9.9 Axios: “For the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color, according to a Washington Post analysis of data the Labor Department began collecting in the 1970s.” Why it’s happening: “Women are predominantly driving this trend.” “Minority women … have begun to reshape the demographics of the U.S. workforce, especially because many white baby boomers have been retiring.” The key stat: “There are 5.2 million more people in the United States with jobs than at the end of 2016, and 4.5 million of them are minorities.”
9.9 Bloomberg: The top 15 richest Americans could have seen their net worth decline by more than half — hundreds of billions of dollars — had Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan been in place since 1982, according to a new paper by two French economists who helped her devise the proposed tax. “The authors’ figures don’t take into account any steps billionaires might have taken to reduce their exposure to the tax, including saving less or giving more money away.”
9.9 Michael Gerson in the Post: America’s story is not one of initial purity and eventual decay. It is the story of a radical principle — the principle of human equality — introduced into a deeply unjust society. That principle was carried forward by oppressed people who understood it better than many of the nation’s Founders. Denied the blessings of liberty, African Americans became the instruments by which the promise of liberty was broadly achieved. The victims of America’s moral blindness became carriers of the American ideal.
9.9 Harold James in “The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression” (2001): “Globalism fails because humans and the institutions they create cannot adequately handle the psychological and institutional consequences of the interconnected world.”
9.8 James Poniewozik in the Times: If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want? It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full. Some presidential figure-outers, trying to understand the celebrity president through a template that they were already familiar with, have compared him with Ronald Reagan: a “master showman” cannily playing a “role.” The comparison is understandable, but it’s wrong. Presidents Reagan and Trump were both entertainers who applied their acts to politics. But there’s a crucial difference between what “playing a character” means in the movies and what it means on reality TV. Ronald Reagan was an actor. Actors need to believe deeply in the authenticity and interiority of people besides themselves — so deeply that they can subordinate their personalities to “people” who are merely lines on a script. Acting, Reagan told his biographer Lou Cannon, had taught him “to understand the feelings and motivations of others.”Being a reality star, on the other hand, as Donald Trump was on “The Apprentice,” is also a kind of performance, but one that’s antithetical to movie acting. Playing a character on reality TV means being yourself, but bigger and louder.
9.8 Axios: “At a meeting last week with about 20 operatives and strategists, DNC chair Tom Perez said he plans to focus the party’s messaging on Trump’s performance, not “awfulness,” according to a source in the room: “Prosecute the case that he is bad at his job and it is hurting people in real ways.”‘
9.8 The Atlantic: Millennials and Gen Z are not only unlikely to call themselves Protestants and patriots, but also less likely to call themselves Democrats or Republicans. They seem most comfortable with unaffiliation, even anti-affiliation. They are less likely than preceding generations to identify as “environmentalists,” less likely to be loyal to specific brands, and less likely to trust authorities, or companies, or institutions. Less than one-third of them say they have “a lot of confidence” in unions, or Silicon Valley, or the federal government, or the news, or the justice system. And don’t even get them started on the banks. This blanket distrust of institutions of authority—especially those dominated by the upper class—is reasonable, even rational, considering the economic fortunes of these groups were pinched in the Great Recession and further squeezed in the Not-So-Great Recovery. Pundits may dismiss their anxiety and rage as the by-products of college-campus coddling, but it flows from a realistic appraisal of their economic impotency. Young people today commit crimes at historically low rates and have attended college at historically high rates. They have done everything right, sprinting at full speed while staying between the white lines, and their reward for historic conscientiousness is this: less ownership, more debt, and an age of existential catastrophe. The typical Millennial awakens many mornings to discover that some new pillar of the world order, or the literal world, has crumbled overnight. And while she is afforded little power to do anything about it, society has outfitted her with a digital megaphone to amplify her mordant frustrations. Why in the name of family, God, or country would such a person lust for ancient affiliations? As the kids say, #BurnItAllDown.
9.7 Political scientist Shawn Rosenberg: “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”
9.7 ‘The Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades,’ says Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale
9.7 Raiders release Antonio Brown, who immediately signs with the Patriots
9.7 Axios: The deadliest American mass shootings in the past 20 years have had one thing in common: The perpetrator used an assault rifle. These weapons amplify the destructive will of the person who carries out an attack. Nine people died and 27 were injured in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in a shooting that lasted 32 seconds. The killer used an AR-15 style assault rifle. Since 1999, the U.S. has had 115 mass shootings (defined as at least three people killed). 941 people were killed; 1,431 were injured. Of those 115 attacks, 32 — just over a quarter — involved semi-automatic rifles. But those attacks accounted for 40% of all deaths and 69% of all injuries. Since 2017, 12 of the 31 mass shootings involved assault rifles — which caused 39% of the deaths and 92% of the injuries. That includes the Las Vegas massacre of 2017 — which alone accounts for almost 40% of all mass shooting injuries since 1999. The perpetrator of that shooting used over 20 assault rifles.
9.6 Fareed Zakaria in the Post: We are living now in a new ideological era, one defined by an “open-closed” divide — between people comfortable in a world of greater openness in trade, technology and migration and those who want more barriers, protections and restraints. Parties of the future will likely be positioned along this new spectrum.
9.5 Washington Post: he report from HHS’s inspector general says the massive influx of children and longer stays at federal facilities posed a particular challenge in addressing children’s mental health needs. The report is based on visits to 45 facilities in August and September 2018, a couple months after the administration ended the policy. “According to program directors and mental health clinicians, separated children exhibited more fear, feelings of abandonment, and post-traumatic stress than did children who were not separated,” the report says. “Separated children experienced heightened feelings of anxiety and loss as a result of their unexpected separation from their parents after their arrival in the United States. For example, some separated children expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably,” it continues.
9.6 President Trump suggests that NBC fire Debra Messing, who has apologized for a tweet in which she promoted an Alabama church sign that said “a black vote for Trump is mental illness.”
9.5 Washington Post: He posted nine tweets and five maps about Alabama and the big storm. He defended a doctored hurricane map that had been altered with a black Sharpie to include the state. And he had his White House release a 225-word statement defending his erroneous warnings that Alabama was “going to get a piece” of the storm. As Hurricane Dorian battered the Carolinas with torrential rain and wind Thursday, President Trump remained fixated on sunny Alabama — a state he falsely claimed was in the storm’s crosshairs long after it was in the clear. For a fourth straight day, Trump’s White House sought to clean up the president’s mistaken warnings to Alabama from Sunday, seeking to defend Trump’s tweets by releasing statements, disseminating alternative hurricane maps and attacking the media.
9.6 Albany
9.5 Altmar/Albany
9.4 Altmar NY
9.4 Washington Post: The Pentagon is defunding Hurricane Maria recovery projects at military installations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to pay for President Trump’s border barrier and is also taking money from construction projects across Europe designed to help allies deter Russia. The details of the 127 military construction projects that stand to lose funding to free up $3.6 billion for fencing and barriers on the southern border with Mexico were made public late Wednesday by the Defense Department. The list features projects in 23 states, three U.S. territories and 20 countries. The decisions deal a particular blow to Puerto Rico, which stands to see more than $400 million worth of planned projects lose funding. Roughly $770 million of the money will be taken from projects in allied European nations aimed at helping them deter a possible attack from Russia.
8.4 General James Mattis: “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.”
9.2 Guardian: Cornered Johnson Suffers Triple Defeat
9.1 Trump expressed shock at Hurricane Dorian’s intensity, saying: “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of a Category 5. I knew it existed. And I’ve seen some Category 4s. You don’t even see them that much. But a Category 5 is something that, uh, I don’t know that I’ve never even heard the term, other than I know it’s there. That’s the ultimate. And that’s what we have, unfortunately.” This isn’t the first time that Trump has expressed shock at a Category 5 storm. When Hurricane Irma struck Florida in 2017, Trump said he “never even knew a Category 5 existed.” Then when Hurricane Michael struck the Florida Panhandle last year as a Category 5 storm, Trump again said he hadn’t heard of a Category 5 storm. Oddly, though, when it comes to Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, obliterating the island’s infrastructure, Trump has repeatedly called the storm a Category 5 — though it was a Category 4 storm at landfall.
9.1 Salma Hayek turns 53
9.1 Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker in the Washington Post: When President Trump presided over the battle tanks and fighter jets, the fireworks and adoring fans on July 4, he couldn’t have known that the militaristic “Salute to America” — as well as to himself — would end up as the apparent pinnacle of the season.
What followed was what some Trump advisers and allies characterize as a lost summer defined by self-inflicted controversies and squandered opportunities. Trump leveled racist attacks against four congresswomen of color dubbed “the Squad.” He derided the majority-black city of Baltimore as “rat and rodent infested.” His anti-immigrant rhetoric was echoed in a missive that authorities believe a mass shooting suspect posted. His visits to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso after the gun massacres in those cities served to divide rather than heal. Trump’s economy also began to falter, with the markets ping-ponging based on the president’s erratic behavior. His trade war with China grew more acrimonious. His whipsaw diplomacy at the Group of Seven summit left allies uncertain about American leadership. The president returned from his visit to France in a sour mood, frustrated by what he felt was unfairly negative news coverage of his trip. The two months between Independence Day and Labor Day offered a fresh and vivid portrait of the president as seen by Trump’s critics — incompetent, indecisive, intolerant and ineffective.
