Even though local officials had said publicly as early as Sept. 20, the day of the storm, that the island was “destroyed,” the sense of urgency didn’t begin to penetrate the White House until Monday, when images of the utter destruction and desperation — and criticism of the administration’s response — began to appear on television, one senior administration official said.
Christ almighty.
This, let me point out, is one of the things that happened in 2005 after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans: there was a complete lack of concern, at the White House level, about the actual suffering of the people affected. Team Bush showed no sense of urgency about the natural and humanitarian disaster until it became a PR disaster for them. As with, evidently, Buttercup’s administration, they waited until the media had started filling everyone’s screens with human suffering and asking where the federal response was to start addressing the situation, and many of the early efforts at addressing the situation were focused on improving the coverage rather than the actual situation.
From the response to Harvey it appeared that Buttercup’s team had learned at least a few lessons from Katrina, including: 1) Don’t install an incompetent crony as the head of FEMA and 2) when you know a catastrophic hurricane is in the works, fucking prepare for it in advance and 3) respond as fast as you can, and make sure someone is there to take pictures.
Apparently, though, none of these lessons applied to Puerto Rico. Team Buttercup has been, on the evidence of this article, more effective practically than Team Heckuva Job Brownie would have been in this situation; but that’s an extremely low bar. As most of the people actually involved in the effort say in this article, the military and FEMA underestimated the severity of the disaster and the difficulty of the support mission and are now playing catch-up. Again, compared to Katrina, it is somewhat cheering that at least the people involved in responding know what they have to do in order to play catch-up. Still, part of the reason they’re playing catch-up now is that there was initially no Presidential attention focused on Puerto Rico, in part because there was so little mainstream media attention focused on it. And that it is why it is dangerous to have people in charge who care more about their own PR than they do about anything or anyone else.
There is, however, more going on here. As various commentators have pointed out, from what Buttercup has said about the disaster, it’s not clear that before this happened he was aware that Puerto Ricans were American citizens, despite the fact that he had done business there. Everything he’s said about it since, as other commentators have pointed out, indicates that he conceived of Puerto Rico as a remote and alien land populated by foreigners. He talks as if he has no idea where Puerto Rico is actually located relative to the mainland US. And I would ask why…but let’s face it, we all know the answer to that question.
And that was also the answer to the question of why it took Bush’s team so long to take Katrina seriously. Most of the people most affected by Katrina were poor people of color. Kanye West, years before interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammys, had an era-defining moment during a televised appeal for Katrina aid when he summed up what everyone was pretty much thinking about Bush’s Katrina response:
I know Kanye has been all over the place since then, but this one time, he used his interrupting powers for good. Because he was absolutely right, and it needed to be said, and I’m still grateful to him for saying it on national TV…while Mike Myers, his cohost, looked on aghast and tried to stick to the script.
So that’s one reason that Buttercup has not been quicker out of the gate to help Puerto Rico–because if there is one thing that we know about Buttercup, it’s that his feelings about Spanish-speaking brown people go way beyond ‘not caring.’
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about all this, though, is the nonsensical statements he keeps making about Puerto Rico’s bad debts and lousy infrastructure. Initially, this was kind of baffling to me. But it makes more sense in light of something covered in this article:
“The level of devastation and the impact on the first responders we closely work with was so great that those people were having to take care of their families and homes to an extent we don’t normally see,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want his statement to be interpreted as criticism of authorities in Puerto Rico. “The Department of Defense, FEMA and the federal government are having to step in to fulfill state and municipal functions that we normally just support.”
Whether or not this is accurate, this is evidently the explanation being offered about why the relief effort has thus far been inadequate and ineffective: because Maria has made an effective local response impossible, we have to go in and create the conditions for effective distribution of aid as well as providing the aid itself. With his unerring narcissism, however, what Buttercup obviously took away from this is: This is all Puerto Rico’s fault and it’s not fair that everyone’s blaming me for it. Observe:
I read this tweet and I was like, WTF? Why bring up the broken infrastructure and massive debt in a tweet about the hurricane response? It’s like he’s trying to blame Puerto Rico for the fucking hurricane. And now I realize: He is. Some part of his brain got a hold of the idea that Puerto Rico’s destroyed infrastructure was part of the reason that the response was being slowed down, and then another part of his brain went, “NOT MY FAULT!”, and that part of his brain then pushed out a Tweet about how if Puerto Rico only hadn’t been such a dump before the hurricane hit, it too would be ‘doing great’ and people wouldn’t be all on his BACK about it.
Oh, and by the way, Buttercup wants everyone to know he’s not on the hook for rebuilding this broken infrastructure, either:
And this is another ingredient of the Katrina disaster: the failure to provide long-term federal assistance during the rebuilding phase. It wasn’t just the initial horror of federal incompetence and neglect. It was the way the Bush administration left it up to private charity and a battered local government to rebuild a major American city. For years, charity groups were going down there and rehabbing people’s homes one at a time because the federal government was doing nothing and people felt SOMETHING ought to be done. But no charitable response, however committed or well-funded, could hope to address the scale of that disaster, and the same will be true for Puerto Rico.
No wonder the major of San Juan called him out. It must be fucking infuriating to watch Team Buttercup out there managing what they see as the REAL disaster–his public image–and calling this a “good news story.” Like West’s intervention, it was a much-needed reality check for this administration. And Buttercup has responded to this reality check exactly the way you would expect him to: by attacking her on Twitter:
There, again, you see what has happened to the official explanation after it entered Buttercup’s brain. “We’ve been slow because the severity of the hurricane has made it impossible for the local authorities to help us” has become “these lazy, ungrateful, poor brown people just want a government handout.”
I think I’m just going to leave this here and go out and scream into the night. I mean it’s actually morning here, but I feel like basically until Buttercup leaves office it’s always going to be a dark and stormy night.
Do you want to know the context behind why that email from Felix Sater asking for help getting Trump Tower Moscow restarted is a big deal, why Trump kept trying to establish backchannels with Russia, and why Trump is desperate to keep his financial dealings from Mueller? This thread lays it out very nicely.
Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s budget director, walked into the Oval Office in early May on a longshot mission. The slash-government conservative wanted to persuade the president to break one of his most popular campaign promises.
During his populist run for the White House, Trump had vowed to leave Social Security and Medicare alone. But Trump had also vowed to rein in America’s national debt, which Mulvaney didn’t think was possible without reining in the two biggest chunks of the federal budget. So Mick the Knife brought a cut list to his meeting in the Oval.
“Look, this is my idea on how to reform Social Security,” the former South Carolina congressman began.
“No!” the president replied. “I told people we wouldn’t do that. What’s next?”
“Well, here are some Medicare reforms,” Mulvaney said.
“No!” Trump repeated. “I’m not doing that.”
“OK, disability insurance.”
This was a clever twist. Mulvaney was talking about the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which, as its full name indicates, is part of Social Security. But Americans don’t tend to think of it as Social Security, and its 11 million beneficiaries are not the senior citizens who tend to support Trump.
“Tell me about that,” Trump replied.
“It’s welfare,” Mulvaney said.
“OK, we can fix welfare,” Trump declared.
Sure enough, the Trump budget plan that Mulvaney unveiled a few weeks later would cut about $70 billion in disability benefits over a decade, mostly through unspecified efforts to get recipients back to work. That may sound like welfare reform, but the program isn’t welfare for the poor; it’s insurance for workers who pay into Social Security through payroll taxes. The episode suggests Trump was either ignorant enough to get word-gamed into attacking a half-century-old guarantee for the disabled, or cynical enough to ditch his promise to protect spending when it didn’t benefit his base.
The story is also revealing about the source who told it on the record: Mulvaney himself, an ideological bomb-thrower from the congressional fringe who has become an influential player in the Trump administration. Republicans have said for years that government should only take people’s money to provide absolutely vital services, but Mulvaney truly believes it—and as the head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, he’s got the perfect job to try to act on it. For all the focus on race, the Russia scandal and the president’s latest tweets, this administration’s lasting impact on American lives will likely depend much more on how often Mulvaney can push his conservative ideas into national policy.
Judge Bolton convicted Arpaio of criminal contempt. She found he had “willfully violated” the federal court’s order “by failing to do anything to ensure his subordinates’ compliance and by directing them to continue to detain persons for whom no criminal charges could be filed.” And she held that Arpaio had “announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”
This is the crime that Trump is suggesting he might pardon: willful defiance of a federal judge’s lawful order to enforce the Constitution.
It’s one thing to pardon a criminal out of a sense of mercy or on the belief that he has paid his debt to society.
It’s trickier when the president pardons someone who violated the law in pursuit of governmental policy, the way George H.W. Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra participants, including Oliver North.
But it would be an altogether different matter if Trump pardoned Arpaio for willfully refusing to follow the Constitution and violating the rights of people inside the U.S.
…
From this analysis it follows directly that pardoning Arpaio would be a wrongful act under the Constitution. There would be no immediate constitutional crisis because, legally speaking, Trump has the power to issue the pardon.
But the pardon would trigger a different sort of crisis: a crisis in enforcement of the rule of law.
The Constitution isn’t perfect. It offers only one remedy for a president who abuses the pardon power to break the system itself. That remedy is impeachment.
James Madison noted at the Virginia ratifying convention that abuse of the pardon power could be grounds for impeachment. He was correct then – and it’s still true now.
Between Jan. 22 and Jan. 28, 2016, as Trump consolidated his early support on the eve of the Republican caucuses and primaries, ANES conducted a special pre-election survey. To explore the role of white voters for whom racial identity was especially important, three political scientists — John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck — analyze the ANES data in their forthcoming book, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.”The survey, they write,
asked four questions that captured dimensions of white identity: the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites. We combined those questions into a scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.
NEWS: Steve Bannon will be leaving the White House today
President Donald Trump told senior aides on Friday that Bannon would no longer serve his administration, according to the New York Times and several other news outlets.
The details of exactly when and how this decision will be rolled out were not immediately clear.
In a statement, the White House said “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
Miller and Gorka are still in the White House – so it’s not because of Bannon’s racist views.
Steve Bannon (Steven BANNON?!?) failed to say this is “off the record” so soon after Scaramucci’s meltdown and its fallout?
Steve Bannon called an MSM, but much less LIBERAL(?!?) magazine’s reporter to drop his nonsense out there into the world? That seems to give him a lot of room to deny or minimize the insults he directed to the alt-right.
All together it just seems like Bannon fell on a foam sword for Trump. With Kelly in the White House, I’m sure he’s feeling like he could do a lot more outside the administration.
Still
true (for now): American government is divided into two systems, the federal
system and the individual states. The federal and state governments
are each divided into three branches. The legislature (Congress)
makes the laws, the judicial branch interprets the laws, and the
executive branch (the president and governors) enforces the laws. To
wildly oversimplify, the separation of powers into those three
branches is supposed to work like rock-paper-scissors: every game
eventually has a winner, but there’s no one option that’s
always the winner. The thing is, the game depends on people
actually playing by and enforcing the rules. If one player is a
spoiled brat who won’t throw on “shoot” or always has a
screaming tantrum about how he won because he has the best rock,
the biggest, most beautiful rock, and the other player just caves
every time, it’s no good.
Hearseeno 