Aside from the bizarre turns taken by any one story in the Trump era, the news can be hard to follow because of the “wait, what?” factor, where stories get buried under all the other news one day and then take over everything else the next. This is a bite-sized update on the stories that might have made you go “wait, what?” in the first two weeks of 2018.
You
know Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner from Looney Tunes? How the roadrunner
always just confidently runs off a cliff, and then the coyote runs
off after him, but the coyote always goes “wtf” and looks down
and then he falls while the roadrunner keeps on going? And yet
somehow the coyote never a) just lets the road runner go or b) dies of
his injuries?
Congressional Republicans remind me a lot of the coyote.
As
of this writing we haven’t come up on the red line, which is if
Trump moves to fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller. That’s not
because we hope he will #lockthemup. I mean, we do hope that, but
it’s not the core issue. Getting rid of Mueller would be an
announcement that Trump and his Republican enablers are no longer
interested in pretending that they are bound by the rule of law.
So
whether or not you care about Trump-Russia, you need to care about
this. If this happens, there are rapid response events planned all
over the country, so you need to be ready to hit the streets. I’m serious. If it’s
cold where you live, go find your warmest coat. Put gloves, a scarf,
a hat, and a couple of protein bars in the pockets now. Go
find your snow boots or your old sneakers or whatever you wear in the
snow and put a pair of clean socks in them. If your state ACLU has a
mobile justice app, download it now. Keep your phone charged.
If
you’re sick of or overwhelmed by this story: If you can focus on
something else, great! There’s plenty of other work to do. All you
need to know is that yes, it did get louder this week, in large part
because the entire Republican establishment has joined in the
shouting in Trump’s defense. If something happens that you do need
to know, trust me, it’ll be impossible to miss.
If
you do care about Trump-Russia, you might still be overwhelmed and
confused. That’s because the entire Republican establishment is
making a deliberate effort to overwhelm and confuse you. So we’re
going to walk through recent developments, because fuck them.
The
big Trump-Russia development this weekend is email protocol, because of course it is. News came out on Saturday that back in August, special prosecutor
Mueller’s got all the Trump transition team’s emails. Because he
did it through the government agency that hosts those email accounts,
nobody knew about it, including the White House. Trump’s lawyers
have written a characteristically incoherent complaint to Congress,
and the special prosecutor’s office has answered it saying they’ve
followed the letter of the law in their criminal investigation.
Relevant
details:
There
is a reason we are hearing about this now, though as of Sunday
afternoon we don’t know what it is. There are other reasons we have
not heard about it before now. We can make a pretty good guess that’s
because Mueller’s team wanted to interview Trump’s staff before they realized that Mueller had all their emails. If any of
them lied, they’re already caught.
Something
that seems like a tell is the fact that we learned about this on a
Saturday, which is usually the slowest news day. That is, you’d
usually drop a bomb like this on a weekday right before close of
business, so it would make the evening news. That could be a signal
that there are bigger stories to come this week, or it could be a
response to last week’s escalating attacks on the special
prosecutor’s investigation. (Of course, it’s entirely possible
that the right-wing cranked up the attacks on Mueller last week
because they believe something major is going to come out of
his office next week.)
During recent House Judiciary Committee oversight hearings of Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the
Republican majority filled up their time with poisonous attacks on
Mueller’s impartiality and professionalism, some of them going so
far as to demand that Rosenstein use his oversight authority to fire
the special counsel. It’s worth nothing that the House Judiciary
Committee is the committee which would initiate impeachment
proceedings. By shouting that Mueller should be fired, they’re
telling Trump that they’ll protect him if he shuts down the
investigation.
This
is not a fucking drill. A critical mass of American
right-of-center political institutions have made it clear that they
want Trump to plunge us into a major constitutional crisis. Get ready
to hit the streets.
The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget…
The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
…Several key departments — including Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, as well as Justice, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — have changed some federal policies and how they collect government information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans….
Other CDC officials confirmed the existence of a list of forbidden words.It’s likely that other parts of HHS [Health and Human Services] are operating under the same guidelines regarding the use of these words, the analyst said…
The ban is related to the budget and supporting materials that are to be given to the CDC’s partners and to Congress, the analyst said. The president’s budget for 2019 is expected to be released in early February. The budget blueprint is generally shaped to reflect an administration’s priorities.
Federal agencies are sending in their budget proposals to the Office of Management and Budget, which has authority about what is included…
The longtime CDC analyst, whose job includes writing descriptions of the CDC’s work for the administration’s annual spending blueprint, could not recall a previous time when words were banned from budget documents because they were considered controversial.
The reaction of people in the meeting was “incredulous,” the analyst said. “It was very much, ‘Are you serious? Are you kidding?’ ”
“In my experience, we’ve never had any pushback from an ideological standpoint,” the analyst said.
Former
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to
the FBI is a big fucking deal on its own. In the few days since it
happened, it kind of feels like the break shot at the beginning of a
game of pool – this one strike sends things rolling in different
directions. There’s a lot of other news which is no less important.
This week, though, those other stories have been easier to
distinguish, while Trump-Russia is the rat king.
So, here’s your Trump-Russia cheat sheet for the first week of December:
Most of my Trump-Russia posts so far have been “if you’re going to spend five minutes on this story” Cliffs Notes posts. A few have been more comprehensive examinations of specific aspects of this story, which are longer, but still boiled down. This is not like that. This is a timeline of events happening during the 2016 election which were a part of the Russian interference in the election, may have been part of Russian interference in the election, or which are important to understanding how the various tentacles of the conspiracy played out.
This page has a few goals.
It’s a compilation of sources which might help make fact-checking the key parts of the story a little bit easier.
It should also provide context as stories about the 2016 campaign come out. This story is so bonkers that it can be a pain to get a grip on the basic facts when you start reading about it, and once you do read about it for a while the facts can start to blend together. I know it’s helpful for me to have a list of sources when I start going “wait, did that really happen?”
You also have to see it all laid out to appreciate the chaos of the attack. This is not about cracking some complex code. It is not an imagining of Putin’s Bond villain monologue where he reveals he planned it all along, muahahaha! It’s just a collection of facts which seem relevant.
Disclaimer: I am nobody. I have no inside knowledge. I don’t have any specialization in intelligence, I haven’t worked on a campaign. This is a 100% open source attempt to catalog events as they’re reported by reputable sources, which you should by all means check out for yourself.
Senate rules say the tax cuts can only add $1.5 trillion to the deficits over the next decade.
The Republicans had gotten rid of the corporate alternative minimum tax – which is the floor of tax rates corporations can pay after all of their deductions. (current standard tax rate is 35% – lowest they can go with deductions is 20%.
With McConnell’s deals made with individual senators to get the bill passed, the addition to the deficit added up to more than $1.5 trillion.
So he added the corporate alternative minimum tax back into the bill to offset the $ going into deals.
And forgot to reduce it. So the minimum tax a company can pay AFTER deductions is back to 20%, which is exactly the same as the new standard, starting corporate tax rate of, you guessed it, 20%.
Which means that corporations can’t use any of the fancy smancy deductions their lobbyists got inserted into the new tax cut plan, or any other tax plan, for that matter, if the bill passes without revision.
Next in “They just don’t know when to shut up, do they”:
Paul Manafort attempts to publish an op-ed under a ghost writer “to influence public opinion about his political consulting in Ukraine, work at the heart of the criminal case against him. The op-ed was being drafted as late as last week, prosecutors say. They did not name the colleague but noted the person is based in Russia.” All in violation of the judge’s Nov 8th gag order.
“At the time [of seeking to get the op-ed published], Manafort was working to secure his release from home confinement by posting more than $10 million in bond, and according to court papers, he had reached a tentative agreement with the government. But after discovering the op-ed, Mueller’s team is now opposing Manafort’s proposed bond agreement.”
It’s
okay to take a beat. It’s necessary to take these things one at a
time, as much as possible, so that you can actually understand how
they fit together. This is an explanation of the least depressing of
the major threads of news this week, which is what we learned about
the disinformation campaign on social media during last year’s
election.
Hearseeno 