Author: A.T.

Ron:  “Not to distract from Trump coverage (and have you mentioned the April 15 Tax March requesting release of Trump’s tax returns or the April 22 Earth Day March for Science?) . . .

. . . but here’s a financial comment/question: It’s been a few years since your guru commented on NKTR, which jumped this week to about double from where you suggested it in 2013.  Its non-addictive opioid alternative passed phase 3 trials well.  Now what?”

☞ Guru suggests hanging on.  “They will likely sign a big partnership.  The product is a version of oxycodone that has been altered so it can’t get into the brain quickly.  You can take a huge dose iv or snort it, but it won’t get into the brain any faster than if you take the recommended dose.  In the human abuse liability test, this drug registered close to the level of a placebo and dramatically below oxycodone.  Thus, it could become a new gold standard for lower back pain. $10 billion is spent each year in the US on these drugs.  The sales potential is quite large.”

Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935, a dozen years before Trump was even born — but it’s about him and the millions who, yearning to believe, voted for him.

“The [candidate] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic. . . . [He would] jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

He won, and it did not go well.

Four score and two years later, we have a president who has us winning so much we’ve already begun to tire of winning; who’s protecting us from the kind of terror Swedes faced last month; who’s giving us all better health care at lower cost even as he transfers hundreds of billions back to the uber-rich Obama forced to help pay for it; whose victory by the widest margin of anyone since Ronald Reagan was witnessed in person on the Mall by the largest crowd in history.

Tom Friedman here calls upon a few good men — Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to stand up to him.

Have a great weekend.

As you probably know — watch the story here — Russia aimed tens of millions of demoralizing, defamatory tweets, seemingly from American humans but actually from Russian “bots,” at potential Hillary voters.  One more reason Trump came within 3 million votes of her total and now feels he has a mandate to shift hundreds of billions of dollars from people who are struggling to billionaires like himself and his Cabinet.

(How might the election results have been different if the FBI, in breaking its practice of not commenting on an ongoing investigation, had broken it more even-handedly?  “We are investigating Hillary’s emails. Separately, we are investigating ties between Trump, his associates, and a relentless, sprawling Russian cyberattack on our democracy.”)

In that context, the resistbot is pretty tame stuff.  But check it out.  “This New Anti-Trump Tech Is The Most Genius Thing Of 2017.”

Dick W.: “You said it: Gorsuch’s brilliance and experience qualify him for the Court, and ‘policy differences come with the territory.’  So let’s not be petty.  Let’s not sink to their level.  Let’s pick our fights.  Let’s save our energy for the big stuff.  Let’s show some restraint.  Let’s show some leadership.”

☞ Thanks, but I don’t think this is petty.  I think we should either have played by the rules set in the Constitution – not a petty thing — in which case Obama would have gotten to name Scalia’s successor . . . or, since Senate Republicans failed to honor the Constitution, choosing to set their own rules instead, we should hold them to those rules.  There is a huge difference between Garland, a mainstream judge, and Gorsuch, who some have said is to the right of Scalia.  It matters which we get.  Theft of the Court is not a petty thing.  Any more than theft (by Putin) of an election.  These are really consequential things.  No?”

Which is why, when I get a note like this one . . .

Tristan A.: “I’ve been a non-paying subscriber for almost 20 years. (And an owner of BOREF for almost the same. I was prepared for it go to zero; I was not prepared to wait this long.) However, I’m drifting on your post. It’s like reading Rachel Maddow–snark, angry, telling us things we already know, apocalyptic. Could be, but in the past you’ve told us the world won’t end and to bet against it.”

. . . my feeling is that I should acknowledge the feedback with thanks — which I do — but have to keep annoying you anyway.  Because (a) the world probably won’t end, but stands a much better chance if we all recognize the danger we now find it in; and (b) I’m always surprised to see how many of my well-educated, well-informed don’t know all these things . . . e.g., that our President for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. I would have thought something so colorful would have become common knowledge, but it hasn’t.

So . . . even though I guess most of us already know the President of the United States is a pathological liar — an enormous problem for mankind, if you ask me — I feel compelled to share columns like this one, by David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times (subscribe!):

The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar.

The director, the very complicated James Comey, didn’t use the L-word in his congressional testimony Monday. Comey serves at the pleasure of the president, after all. But his meaning was clear as could be. Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones, and Comey explained there is “no information that supports” the claim.

I’ve previously argued that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism they got).

But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.

He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies

Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.”

Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds.

Which brings us to Russia.

Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was an attack on the United States. It’s the kind of national-security matter that a president and members of Congress swear to treat with utmost seriousness when they take the oath of office. Yet now it has become the subject of an escalating series of lies by the president and the people who work for him.

As Comey was acknowledging on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump was lying about it. From both his personal Twitter account and the White House account, he told untruths.

A few hours later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign.

The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth.

The House of Representatives, unfortunately, will not be doing so. I was most saddened during Comey’s testimony not by the White House’s response, which I’ve come to expect, but by the Republican House members questioning him. They are members of a branch of government that the Constitution holds as equal to the presidency, but they acted like Trump staff members, decrying leaks about Russia’s attack rather than the attack itself. The Watergate equivalent is claiming that Deep Throat was worse than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon.

It fell to Adam Schiff, a Democratic representative from Southern California, to lay out the suspicious ties between Trump and Russia (while also hinting he couldn’t describe some classified details). Schiff did so in a calm, nine-minute monologue that’s worth watching. He walked through pro-Putin payments to Michael Flynn and through another Trump’s aide’s advance notice of John Podesta’s hacked email and through the mysterious struggle over the Republican Party platform on Ukraine.

“Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible,” Schiff said. “But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out.”

Comey, as much as liberals may loathe him for his 2016 bungling, seems to be one of the few public officials with the ability and willingness to pursue the truth. I dearly hope that Republican members of the Senate are patriotic enough to do so as well.

Our president is a liar, and we need to find out how serious his latest lies are.

Have a nice day!

Let’s stipulate that Judge Gorsuch is a fine, upstanding guy.

Let’s stipulate, too, that his brilliance and experience qualify him for the Court.

There are loads of places I’d surely hate his decisions, if he were confirmed.  (He’s written a whole book on why I shouldn’t be allowed to get help, if I ever encounter such agony or despair that I want to end my life. That decision, he believes, should be left up to him, not me.)

But policy differences come with the territory.  That’s not the line along which Democrats should unanimously reject his nomination. This is:

We should play by Mitch McConnell’s rules.

We hate them, but he set them — hours after Scalia’s death — and his Republican Senate colleagues aggressively adopted them, so we should hold them to their word.

Those rules were: We must wait to see what the PEOPLE think.

It wasn’t enough that the people expressed their preference for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. The Republicans insisted, Constitution be damned, Obama should not be allowed to select the next Justice.  We should wait for the next election to see which way the American PEOPLE were leaning.

(Not how the Electoral College was leaning – the people.)

And now we know.

The PEOPLE again confirmed in 2016 – by 3 million votes — that they leaned the Democrat.

(It would have been by yet more millions if it had not been for Vladimir Putin. Still more millions if the media hadn’t assured everyone Trump had no path to 270. Safe to stay home, Hillary would win.  Safe to vote third-party.  Safe, even — knowing there was no real risk of his actually becoming president — to “send a message” and vote for Trump.)

Democrats should insist we play by Mitch McConnell’s rules: Wait to see the will of the people.  And it is: MERRICK GARLAND. That’s the only Justice we should vote to confirm.

Next time there’s a vacancy, if Gorsuch is nominated, there’s a good possibility he would be confirmed.

But for now?  We’re with Mitch.

Jim Burt: “One of the late Jimmy Breslin’s most quotable characterizations was of Rudy Giuliani as ‘A small man in search of a balcony.’  Rudy has company.  One wonders if the root of the expression ‘Il Duce ha sempre ragione‘ (‘the Leader is always right’) might not have been that he, like our current orange malediction, never admitted error and never apologized. For anything.”

From New York Magazine:  Trump Health Secretary Says States Should Only Require Vaccines If They Feel Like It.

. . . If the government of Pennsylvania decides that it isn’t going to require its residents to vaccinate their school children against measles, that poses a threat for people living just across the border in Maryland. President Trump’s Health secretary does not seem to recognize this problem. . . .

Trump’s team also seems not to recognize climate change is a problem.  At the end of the day, what do “scientists” know?

Or generals!

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do” — he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS “very, very quickly.”

Except that he didn’t, anymore than he released the tax returns he “absolutely” would — the man lies constantly, about everything, from having investigators in Hawaii finding incredible stuff about Obama’s phony birth certificate to having had the largest Electoral College victory since Reagan — there are so many lists of Trump lies someone is doubtless compiling a list of those.

Politifact scores him at 16% true-or-mostly-true for the items they’ve checked, 34% half-true-or-mostly-false, 50% false-or-pants-on-fire.

Frighteningly, the Breitbart / Fox / Limbaugh crowd largely believe him.

And cheer when he calls journalists “the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

Trump’s buffoonery would be laugh-out-loud, “you’re-making-it-up,-again,-Arnold” entertaining — delightful, indeed — who doesn’t love that song? — only, it’s not “The Book of Mormon,” it’s a fiendishly complex world with urgent problems in which a single man could literally cause nuclear winter that ends human life on the planet.  Or launch a trade war that leads to global depression.  Or merely transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from struggling Americans to those, like Trump himself and his Cabinet, in the top tenth of 1%, leading to a depression that way. (The last time we saw such inequality was 1929.)

And it’s not just the lying.  “You’re-making-it-up-again-Arnold” didn’t have a vindictive bone in his body. Trump, like a spoiled 6-year-old, lashes out at anyone who keeps him from getting his way.

We have a delusional, pathological, grossly undignified, erratic, incompetent president who for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside . . . who claimed the despicable Roy Cohn as his mentor . . . and who — with big help from the successor agency to the KGB — came within 3 million votes of his opponent*.

Most of the country and the world see this clearly.  They saw before he was elected — and see now even more clearly — that Trump is everything Republicans said he was: a national disgrace, a pathological liar, an unstable narcissist, a dangerous con man, “undercutting everything that we stand for.”

The sooner he can be impeached (if, say, it turns out he colluded with Russia) or “Section Four-ed” (see: the 25th Amendment), the more easily most of us would breathe.

But back to ISIS for a second.

Trump is for torture (“Trump calls for ‘hell of a lot worse than waterboarding’“) — a wonderful ISIS recruiting tool, as Abu Ghraib was for Al-Qaeda.

And now we have the travel ban — the “blessed” travel ban, ISIS calls it — another great gift to those trying to radicalize young people born here and around the world.

But leaving aside how stupid it is to give them this gift, when we already have extreme vetting, I’d like to note that it was billed as an urgent 90-day ban, imposed to give the Trump team time to evaluate, and perhaps tighten, the vetting procedures for travel from those seven, now six, countries.

Well, guess what?

The 90 days are almost up.

And surely, given the threat, Trump’s team haven’t been waiting for the ban to take effect to START that assessment.  They must have started immediately.

What’s more, they might not have needed the full 90 days to do the job.  A good deal maker asks for more than he needs.  So could it have been completed in 60 if they asked for 90?

In short: why waste even another dime on the legal wrangling?  Whatever would have been done during those 90 days must already have been done, or will be within days.

You can dispute the urgency of the reevaluation.  (“There have been zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries President Donald Trump targeted.”)  But even assuming Trump was right abut its urgency, that reevaluation must now be complete, or nearly complete.  Good for him for keeping us safe.  Can we move on?

Perhaps to the beautiful — and deeply stupid — wall that Mexico will not pay for?

*Partly because everyone was assured it was safe to vote for him — or not to vote for her — or simply not to vote — because he couldn’t win.  He had “no path to 270.”  Had the pollsters and news media not gotten that wrong, and 5% of those who voted for Trump as a harmless way of saying, “hell yeah I’m pissed, listen to us!” voted for her instead (or not voted) . . . and millions who threw their votes away voting for Stein and Johnson chosen what they would have described as “the lesser of two evils” . . . and millions more who stayed home because they knew Hillary didn’t need their help . . . the popular vote would have been more like 80 million to 60 million. Still appallingly high for Trump/Putin/Pence/FBI, etc., but wide enough to swear in the best-prepared, rather than the least-prepared president in our history.

I assume you’ve already seen this two-minute drug commercial (“Impeachara”).  And this one, for perfume, from Saturday Night Live (“Complicit”).

But did you know that 83% Of America’s Top High School Science Students Are The Children Of Immigrants? That one’s not a joke.

Not a joke either — the Republican push to forgo hundreds of billions of dollars in health care for the struggling in order to fund hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich.

Or Trump’s pledge to eliminate the alternative minimum tax — a move that, had it then been in effect, would have cut his own 2005 tax bill by 90%.

Or his plan to make America great again by slashing research — “Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.”

Or to slash the EPA — because who really drinks water or breathes air any more? And why believe General Mattis when he calls climate change a national security threat?

How could any of this be happening? 

How could this man be president?

Did you read yesterday’s absolutely must-read story?*

That’s how.

Have you seen “Spamilton“?

Until this week, you could only see it in New York, but now you can see it in Chicago, too — and after reading this review, you will probably want to.  (Full disclosure: I get a few pennies if you do.)

Have a great weekend!

*No?  What is there about “must read” you don’t understand? (Here, insert a smiley face. You know I love you. But everyone needs to read this.)

Kris McCormack: “Here is an article about Robert Mercer, the money man behind Trump, and the person who introduced Cambridge Analytica to the Trump campaign.”

It’s long, and you absolutely have to read every word of it.  This is how Brexit happened.  This is how Trump came within 3 million votes of Hillary.  This may start wars, pit one community against another, shape your children’s future.

. . . On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its Unique Selling Proposition is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine” . . .

. . . “It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

. . . This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops.”

. . . “Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

. . . One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.” . . .

But read it all.

From the age of 5 and for two decades more, she was picketing with the Westboro Baptist Church (God hates fags and Jews, etc.).  But I’ll bet you’ll like her. And her TED Talk. And want to spread her message.

Because Jon Stewart is about the sharpest, most righteous guy out there, his chosen “The Daily Show” successor a couple of years ago — the South African, Trevor Noah — had to be a pretty interesting character.

But why him?  What’s his story?

Well, now I know — he just spent 8 hours telling me his story* . . . Trevor Noah: Born A Crime — and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Yours free if new to Audible.com.

Or you could read it with your eyeballs, but you’d lose his amazing delivery.

Either way:  Don’t miss it.

Or this piece in Foreign Affairs, “How America Lost Faith In Expertise,” by Tom Nichols, which begins:

In 2014, following the Russian invasion of Crimea, The Washington Post published the results of a poll that asked Americans about whether the United States should intervene militarily in Ukraine. Only one in six could identify Ukraine on a map; the median response was off by about 1,800 miles. But this lack of knowledge did not stop people from expressing pointed views. In fact, the respondents favored intervention in direct proportion to their ignorance. Put another way, the people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about using military force there.  . . .

*Only, I listened at 1.25X speed, so just 6.4 hours.

Just so it’s clear, “Trump’s” 235,000 net job increase for February is a tiny bit LOWER than Obama’s February increases in all but one of the previous five years.  (Raw data, here.) Basically just a continuation of the economic success Trump inherited: 76 consecutive months of net private sector job growth . . . now, with February, 77.

The real story is how Trump now accepts the numbers he once derided. (“Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear four point nine and five percent unemployment, the number’s probably twenty-eight, twenty-nine, as high as thirty-five” — he’s “read as high as 42%.”)

I watched Spicer live as he told the press what Trump, he said, had instructed him to say on this point: the jobs report “may have been phony in the past,” he laughed, “but it’s very real now.”  Watch Lawrence O’Donnell put that laugh into context.  Of course we shouldn’t take this man seriously. He’s an entertainer! A demagogue! A pathological liar! A national disgrace!*  Have fun with it!

And then there’s the health care farce.  Paul Krugman rightly calls the Republican bill “so bad it’s awesome.”

But most of the outrage misses the really big picture — just as that same really big picture was largely missed, in reverse, when Obamacare was enacted.

The really big picture is that Obamacare is a major transfer from the wealthy, whose taxes it raised, to everyone else, in the form of health care you can no longer be denied if you develop a pre-existing condition or hit your lifetime cap.

That may be terribly unfair to the wealthy and mega-wealthy, who now pay an extra $380,000 on every $10 million in dividends and capital gains they receive . . . but it goes a long way — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars — toward providing free preventive care and subsidies to millions of Trump voters who previously could not afford coverage.

The Republican plan cancels that wealth transfer.

There’s been some focus on the paltry $40 million/year tax break it gives insurance executives — Outrage Over $400 Million Tax Break for Insurance Executives Under GOP Obamacare Replacement Plan.  But $40 million a year? That’s barely a rounding error. 

The real story is repeal of the 3.8% surcharge on dividends and capital gains, saving tens of billions a year for people like the Kochs and the Trumps and the DeVoses and the Wilbur Rosses and the Carl Icahns and the Steve Bannons and the Gary Cohns and the Steve Mnuchins and the current and former partners of Goldman Sachs.

(Most of whom are wonderful.  I just don’t think they’ve been overtaxed. Even with the 3.8% Obamacare surcharge, today’s 23.8% top rate on investment income is lower than the 28% top rate in effect when Ronald Reagan left office.  And it is well known Ronald Reagan was God.)

So before descending into the weeds*, just ask yourself and your friends this:

Obamacare shifts hundreds of billions from the wealthy and uber-wealthy to help people get health care.  Should we reverse that?

The Republicans say . . . yes!

What do you say?

*Obamacare’s weeds include lots of measures designed to bend health care inflation downward over time while improving care.  And there’s evidence of some success.  (“. . . The Kaiser study shows that average family premiums rose 20% from 2011 to 2016. That rate of increase is actually much lower than the previous five years . . . up 31% from 2006 to 2011 . . . and the five years before that . . . up 63%. . . .“) But Obamacare clearly need improvement — negotiations to lower drug prices, for example — and a sensible bipartisan debate would focus on that.

He’s gutted the State Department and installed Putin’s guy.  (Trump had never even met Tillerson before coming within 3 million votes of Hillary.  What a coincidence that we’d wind up with the only American Putin awarded the Order of Friendship.)

“Gutting the State Department” doesn’t take long to say — just as “burning the library of Alexandria” is just a few words.  But for so much institutional knowledge needlessly to have been lost?

It is to cry.

Watch Rachel explain.  This is hugely consequential stuff.

And speaking of Trump and Russia . . . the President apparently lied when he denied involvement in softening the Ukraine plank at the Convention.

That’s a separate must-see clip.  Watch!

Oh!  And that giant CIA dump from WikiLeaks which would appear to be a tremendous blow to our national security?

There appears to be exactly one degree of separation between Donald Trump and Julian Assange.  His name is Nigel Farage — sitting with the President at a small dinner a couple of weeks ago, visiting Assange in London Thursday. It comes around 16:30 into this 18-minute clip. 

As he was exiting the Ecuadorian embassy (Assange’s asylum for the past five years), Farage told a reporter he “couldn’t remember” why he’d been there. And White House press secretary Sean Spicer had no clue either (an amusing 60-second clip).  But given Farage’s history with Assange, it was probably not to discuss coffee imports.

“WikiLeaks.  I love WikiLeaks!” — Donald Trump October 10th, 2016.

How does this end well?

With millions of new, high-paid jobs created by finally getting Mexico’s boot off our neck?

USA TODAY:

A Border Tax Could Make Your Next Car Cost $2,500 More

DETROIT — Proposals for a border tax to pay for a wall with Mexico and encourage increased manufacturing in the U.S. would add hundreds to thousands of dollars to the cost of every car and truck sold here, including those assembled in American factories.

There’s even a risk the tax could raise prices and reduce sales so much that the U.S. loses manufacturing jobs, according to the Motor Equipment Manufacturers Association, the umbrella group for several supplier associations representing 1,000 companies. . . .

I know we’re going to win so much we’ll get tired of winning, but so far the winners have been ISIS, whom he’s handed a “blessed” recruiting tool; China, to whom by abandoning the TPA he’s handed leadership in the Pacific region; and Russia, whose journalist-murdering dictator hopes to see Western liberal democracies thrown into disarray.  (“What,” says our President.  You think we don’t kill people?”)

Have a great weekend.