Trump 19: Please Cry for Us Montenegro (and We Are so Sorry!)

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good opinion piece: "Lies vs. B.S."

Spoiler

Three decades ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an essay that would eventually become widely read — and that today offers insight into President Trump. The work was called, “On B.S.” (Well, not quite, but this is a family newsletter.)

Matthew Yglesias of Vox published a long reflection on Frankfurt and President Trump yesterday, and it began like so: “Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar. But that’s not quite right.”

A lie is a conscious effort to mislead someone, usually in the service of persuasion. But Trump often isn’t trying to persuade. He is instead creating a separate language meant to distinguish his allies from his enemies. A Trump lie, Yglesias writes, is “a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly.”

It’s a smart essay, and I encourage you to read it. But I do think the B.S. Theory of Trump gives short shrift to one aspect of his lies.

Even if they are not meant to persuade, they are typically intended to distract people from reality. That is, his untruths about the House’s health care bill aren’t merely intended to distinguish his supporters from his opponents. They are also intended to obscure the reality that the bill would deprive millions of people of health insurance.

His untruths about his tax plan, immigrants, voter fraud, crime and many other subjects serve a similar purpose. They attempt to create enough confusion about basic facts that Trump’s preferred policies, and his kleptocratic approach to government, can start to sound sensible. In reality, those policies would benefit the affluent (starting with his own family) at the expense of most Americans.

In this way, Trump’s untruths resemble classic lies. They aren’t merely unconcerned with truth. They are opposed to it. A crucial response, insufficient though it may be, is to document the falseness of his statements with simple evidence.

Speaking of which: Kate Shaw, a legal scholar, writes in today’s Times about how federal judges have held Trump accountable for some of his lies about immigration, and Avik Roy touches on some of his lies about health care.

...

Yeah, the TT is well beyond BS; he's "liar, liar, pants on fire".

[JMarie]

7 hours ago, VixenToast said:

This is an example of how we go high.

Hell, his supporters don't care about my needs as a single mom with two jobs. They don't care about the intellectually disabled. They don't care about innocent children in Syria. They don't care about the needs of the world. They hate the LGBT. And they don't care about the needs of anyone but themselves. I am ashamed that some of my fellow citizens treat POC like you as dirt. You are not dirt, nor is anyone else. We have a new girl at work I am training. She is from Ethiopia, so it's been disheartening to see how differently some of the customers treat her compared to me. Older people have a hard time composing their face, and won't look at her. Body language in others tells me they are conscious of her skin tone and are uncomfortable in some way, not necessarily in a hostile way. I'm certain she notices, but I secretly hope she's doesn't.

There is nothing wrong with peaceful protests, demanding political accountability, etc either, but stooping to violence and obstinacy will only close out the people who want in. We need to fight, but not be so black and white about the whole thing, there IS grey area, and we need more common ground so that more right-centrists join and and left-centrists more likely to stay.

We aren't giving up the fight, nor should we. But we shouldn't fight dirty like the nut jobs that are infiltrating our society.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/06/trump-decides-pride-month-not-worthy-recognition/

Quote

During the campaign, Donald Trump was asked if he would issue a Pride Month proclamation if elected. He said he’d “look into it.”

It appears we now have our answer: There will be no such proclamation coming from the Trump White House.

The White House website shows five proclamations for June: “National Homeownership Month,” “National Ocean Month,” “African-American Music Appreciation Month,” “National Caribbean-American Heritage Month,” and “Great Outdoors Month.”

Note the irony of “National Ocean Month” and “Great Outdoors Month” proclamations the day before announcing America would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting analysis: "Why Trump Actually Pulled Out Of Paris"

Spoiler

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was not really about the climate. And despite his overheated rhetoric about the “tremendous” and “draconian” burdens the deal would impose on the U.S. economy, Trump’s decision wasn’t really about that, either. America’s commitments under the Paris deal, like those of the other 194 cooperating nations, were voluntary. So those burdens were imaginary.

No, Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. He was thrusting the United States into the role of global renegade, rejecting not only the scientific consensus about climate but the international consensus for action, joining only Syria and Nicaragua (which wanted an even greener deal) in refusing to help the community of nations address a planetary problem. Congress doesn’t seem willing to pay for Trump’s border wall—and Mexico certainly isn’t—so rejecting the Paris deal was an easier way to express his Fortress America themes without having to pass legislation.

Trump was keeping a campaign promise, and his Rose Garden announcement was essentially a campaign speech; it was not by accident that he name-dropped the cities of Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, factory towns in the three Rust Belt states that carried him to victory. Trump’s move won’t have much impact on emissions in the short term, and probably not even in the long term. His claims that the Paris agreement would force businesses to lay off workers and consumers to pay higher energy prices were transparently bogus, because a nonbinding agreement wouldn’t force anything. But Trump’s move to abandon it will have a huge impact on the global community’s view of America, and of a president who would rather troll the free world than lead it.

Of course, trolling the world is the essence of Trump’s America First political brand, and Thursday’s announcement reinforced his persona as an unapologetic rebel who won’t let foreigners try to tell America what to do, even when major corporations, his secretary of state, and his daughter Ivanka want him to do it. He was also leaning into his political identity as Barack Obama’s photographic negative, dismantling Obama’s progressive legacy, kicking sand in the wimpy cosmopolitan faces of Obama’s froufrou citizen-of-the-world pals.

But it’s important to recall what Obama did and didn’t do when he led the community of nations to a deal in Paris. He didn’t let the world dictate U.S. energy policy, because Paris is only a mechanism for announcing national commitments to cut emissions, not for enforcing those commitments. He didn’t commit America to unrealistically ambitious emissions goals, either, just a 27 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2025, not that drastic considering that the U.S. led the world in emissions before Obama and led the world in emissions reductions under Obama. Our electricity sector has already achieved that 27 percent goal, thanks to the continuing decline of coal power, and while our transportation sector has a long way to go, Obama’s strict fuel-efficiency standards and the expansion of electric vehicles has it heading in the right direction. The real triumph of Paris wasn’t America’s promises; it was the serious commitments from China, India and other developing nations that had previously insisted on their right to burn unlimited carbon until their economies caught up to the developed world.

Similarly, it’s important not to exaggerate the substantive impact of Trump’s decision to bail on Paris, which will officially remove the United States from the agreement in late 2020 at the earliest. It’s a signal that the U.S. government no longer cares about the climate, but that’s been abundantly clear ever since Trump won the election and appointed an energetic fossil-fuel advocate named Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Leaving Paris won’t reverse the rapid decline of coal or the boom of cleaner energy in America, because the economics of coal have fallen apart while the cost of wind and solar have plummeted, and it won’t stop that same trend in China, India and the rest of the world. By the same token, if Trump had announced he was staying in the Paris deal, that wouldn’t have meant that Trump was abandoning his efforts to gut Obama’s climate regulations (like the Clean Power Plan for the electricity sector) and other climate policies (like those fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks). Really, it would have been pretty weird for Trump to remain in the deal while trying to undermine everything the U.S. was doing to live up to its commitments.

Meanwhile, the earth is still warming, the polar ice caps are still melting, and the seas are still rising, heedless of the inspiring words committed to paper in Paris, and just as heedless of a noisy American politician’s decision to reject them. Trump may believe climate change is a hoax manufactured in China, and congressional Republicans may continue to oppose any action to address it, but that won’t make the physical realities of climate-driven droughts, floods, pandemics and refugee migrations any less brutal. It’s reminiscent of the old riddle: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? Four, because a tail is not a leg. Trump can call global warming a hoax, but 2014 was nevertheless the hottest year on record, until it was displaced by 2015, which was overtaken by 2016. That tail is not a leg.

Still, it matters that the president of the United States seems to think it is, and no matter what he thinks, it matters more that he’s announcing to the nations of the world that he intends to ignore an issue they consider vital to the planet. He is creating an intentional leadership vacuum, dispensing with the long-standing notion of the United States as the indispensable nation—just as he did when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in Asia, with his tepid commitments to NATO on his trip to Europe, and with his proposal for drastic budget cuts in foreign aid and international diplomacy. He is making it clear that America First means the problems of the world are not America’s problems. He’s opening the door for China and Europe to take over the role of global leaders on climate change, and maybe the world’s other major problems.

The thing is, climate change is absolutely America’s problem, not just in the long run but now; scientists believe it has already exacerbated the human and economic losses from California’s drought, Superstorm Sandy, and the Zika virus. At the same time, the battle against climate change is an American opportunity; the U.S. solar industry already employs twice as many workers as the U.S. coal industry, and climate solutions in general—not just renewables but energy-efficient products and materials, batteries and other storage, sustainable forestry, carbon capture, and much more—will be one of the biggest growth sectors of the 21st century. Trump is basically telling clean-energy innovators they should go create jobs somewhere else.

The entire debate over Paris has twisted Republicans in knots. They used to argue against climate action in the U.S. by pointing out that it wouldn’t bind China and other developing-world emitters; then they argued that Paris wouldn’t really bind the developing world, either, but somehow would bind the United States. In fact, China is doing its part, dramatically winding down a coal boom that could have doomed the planet, frenetically investing in zero-carbon energy. And it will probably continue to do its part even though the president of the United States is volunteering for the role of climate pariah. It’s quite likely that the United States will continue to do its part as well, because no matter what climate policies he thinks will make America great again, Trump can’t make renewables expensive again or coal economical again or electric vehicles nonexistent again. California just set a target of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, and many U.S. cities and corporations have set even more ambitious goals for shrinking their carbon footprints. Trump can’t do much about that, either.

What Trump can do is remind his supporters—and everyone else on the planet—which side he’s on, and, more to the point, which side he’s fighting. He’s taking a shirts-and-skins stand against liberals, against goo-goos, against condescending scolds in Birkenstocks who don’t like Styrofoam or hulking SUVs or real Americans, against naive globalists who want the U.S. to suck up to the French and the Chinese and the United Nations. Climate change will affect the entire earth, from drought-ravaged farm villages in Africa to flood-prone condo towers in Miami, but for Trump it’s just a symbol of the stuff that people who don’t like Trump care about. Paris is just an Obama legacy that he can kill, when he doesn’t have the votes to kill Obama’s health reforms or Wall Street regulations or tax hikes on the wealthy. Whatever damage Trump’s climate policies cause to the planet will be collateral damage, shrapnel from his political war on elites and the left and Obama.

But that won’t make the damage any less real. The United States happens to be located on that planet, and it’s the only known planet with pizza, whether the president wants to protect it or not. The United States is also part of the community of nations, and it’s a community with many common interests, whether the president wants to lead it or not.

Yeah, I agree with the author. The announcement was a big middle finger to the rest of the world. However, I think it was also done partly to distract from the Russia investigation.

[GreyhoundFan]

YES: "Trump is abdicating all the country’s moral power"

Spoiler

With his backward policies and his tiresome antics, President Trump seems to be trying his best to do something that ought to be impossible: make the U.S. presidency irrelevant to world progress.

Climate change offers one example. Trump tried hard to build suspense for Thursday’s announcement about whether he would honor or trash the landmark Paris accord; doubtless he’d rather have attention focused on greenhouse gases than on the snowballing Russia investigations. At this point, however, I have to wonder what difference the decision to leave the agreement actually makes.

Trump’s pro-coal program of deregulation — a quixotic attempt to revive an industry being strangled by global market forces, not politicians — and his boosterish advocacy of oil and gas mean the United States has little chance of meeting its Paris emissions targets anyway. The real-world impact of Trump’s choice is more diplomatic than environmental.

More important are his domestic policies. And even if Trump succeeds in weakening federal fuel-economy standards, automakers will be unable to ignore California’s tougher requirements, which are also imposed by about a dozen other states — making up more than one-third of the U.S. vehicle market. The administration can seek to override the California standards, but such a move would lead to a lengthy court battle. George W. Bush filed such a challenge in 2007, but California sued, and the case was still pending when Barack Obama took office in 2009 and abandoned it.

The only other nations that have rejected the Paris pact are Syria and Nicaragua — not the kind of company the United States usually keeps. The rest of the world is going about the business of making big investments in clean-energy technology. The next breakthrough in solar power is likely to be made in China or Germany, not here.

Energy policy is just one area where Trump is encouraging the rest of the world to go on without us. Much more urgently, Trump has called into question the U.S. commitment to the transatlantic alliance, which for seven decades has been the world’s most important guarantor of peace and engine of prosperity.

Following Trump’s first overseas trip as president, which included NATO and Group of Seven summit meetings, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.” She said the time when the continent could rely on others, meaning the United States, was “over to a certain extent.”

Merkel is a cautious politician who carefully measures her words. There have been many times over the years when Europe and the United States were not on the same page, but this moment feels different. Trump has raised doubts about the relationship in a way none of his predecessors did even at moments of sharp disagreement.

Trump scolded European leaders for not spending more on defense, saying that they have failed to meet their “financial obligations” and that the status quo is “not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States.” He failed to offer an unconditional guarantee of European security. In private talks, he harshly complained about Germany’s trade surplus with the United States.

Britain’s Brexit vote and Trump’s “America first” rhetoric appear to have ironically brought the continental members of the European Union closer together. Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the other nations in the bloc have the wherewithal to provide for their own defense — and surely will do so if they don’t believe they can rely on the United States. Someone tell me how this would make the world safer.

Part of the problem is that the Europeans see Trump as going out of his way to forge a friendlier and more cooperative relationship with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, whom E.U. members such as Poland and the Baltic states rightly consider a threat.

Trump got a warmer welcome, and did less to give offense, during the Middle East leg of the trip. The speech in which he sought to address the Muslim world could have been better but also could have been worse, given his previous antipathy toward the 1.6 billion followers of Islam.

But Trump has given responsibility for forging peace between Israelis and Palestinians to a total amateur, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The president declines to adopt the customary U.S. stance in favor of democracy and human rights, instead offering autocratic leaders such as Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul Aziz and Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi his uncritical embrace. Such realpolitik has come back to haunt the United States in the past, and it will again.

Trump is abdicating all moral power. The world has no choice but to move on.

Of course, I'm sure he has no idea what the word moral means.

[candygirl200413]

So completely random but last night when they played part of his speech on the news and it just hit me how he has no facial hair. I googled it and read all these articles how he really rarely hires men with facial hair (bannon is the only one quickly comes to mind that has it). It's just another layer of his fragile masculinity but like damn.

Also I feel so many of you who are constantly upset, one of my friends said how you need to remember how there is enjoyable things in life which is totally important and understandable, but it's just hurts when almost everyone is affected one way or another so how can you?

[JMarie]

I'm starting to feel sick every time I hear "withdrawal" and "pull out".  I could say something really snarky, but I won't.

[Rachel333]

There's a story alleging that Macron beating Trump at his handshake game is part of what pushed Trump to abandon the Paris accord. http://theweek.com/speedreads/702983/trump-apparently-felt-nudged-scrap-paris-accord-by-french-presidents-aggressive-handshake

It's absolutely pathetic if true, and sadly not hard to believe. It also makes sense with Trump's statement, "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris." I think he might actually think the Paris accord literally comes from Paris.

Also...

[GreyhoundFan]

@Rachel333 -- I wouldn't doubt it. He has a fragile ego.

 

"Trump’s snowflakery is infecting the GOP"

Spoiler

First they demanded participation trophies. Now, they’re whining that the ref is totally unfair.

Coddled millennial snowflakes? Nope. Members of the Trump administration.

Perhaps the worst sports in America, White House officials refuse to accept that their health-care plan is a huge, stinking, hopeless failure.

Or in more Trumpian terms: a loser.

A month ago, House Republicans — at the White House’s urging — shoved a terrible health-care bill through to a vote. They did so without knowing how much it would cost, how many people would lose insurance under the bill, whether it would meet Senate rules required for a budget reconciliation vote or even what was in the legislation. Some legislators admitted that they had not read it before voting.

This collective ignorance was deliberate. They didn’t want to know the verdict on any of these matters, because if they did, they might have to admit to the public — and to themselves — that they’d come up short. Better to celebrate that they did something than learn how shoddy that something was.

Then, once they passed a bill of unknown quality or consequences, they threw themselves a party.

In the political equivalent of awarding themselves a ribbon just for showing up, White House officials and Republican representatives hugged and cheered in the Rose Garden. They asked the country to celebrate their own gutless underachievement.

A month later, thanks to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, we know what a failure their celebrated plan actually is. 

According to the CBO’s best estimates, Trumpcare would cause the number of uninsured to rise by an estimated 23 million in 2026, relative to what would happen if Obamacare were kept as is. 

What about those lucky enough to remain insured? If they’re sick, old or poor, they’re going to need more luck than that.

That’s because the bill slashes their health-care subsidies, both for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. It also allows states to opt out of key Obamacare provisions designed to protect these vulnerable groups. States could allow insurers to charge higher premiums to people with preexisting conditions, for example, or to stop covering prescription drugs and chronic disease management services. 

The result is that premiums for these groups would skyrocket, the coverage they receive would be worse, or both. 

So what’s the White House’s response to these ugly estimates? Not to say sorry, we goofed, and we’ll make sure the Senate does better. 

Instead, the administration is claiming that the CBO — whose director was handpicked two years ago by now-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price — simply can’t be trusted. 

When the CBO score came out, the White House first bad-mouthed the institution as inaccurate, bumbling, incompetent. (Some of this may be projection.) 

“History has proven the CBO to be totally incapable of accurately predicting how healthcare legislation will impact health insurance coverage,” a White House statement said. This claim ignores analyses showing that the CBO’s Obamacare forecasts, however imprecise, were more accurate than those from competing forecasters. 

Now the administration alleges that the CBO budget wonks are not incompetents but cunning conspirators. 

In an interview with the Washington Examiner this week, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney accused the agency of rigging its analysis.

“It’s almost as if they went into it and said, ‘Okay, we need this score to look bad. How do we do it?’ ” he said.

Ignoring the fact that his own Cabinet colleague chose the top CBO official, Mulvaney suggested that an agency underling might be a Democratic mole. He pointed out that one of the leaders on the agency’s health-care team had once been a health-care analyst in the Clinton administration and more recently helped score the Affordable Care Act. She has always, however, been a career civil servant, never a political appointee. 

Not that that stopped Mulvaney’s paranoid machinations. 

“If the same person is doing the score of undoing Obamacare who did the scoring of Obamacare in the first place, my guess is that there is probably some sort of bias in favor of a government mandate,” he said.

Mulvaney argued that his own office could produce a better and fairer analysis, though he conveniently omitted the fact that it has so far declined to do so. 

Such tantrums are consistent with what we’ve seen from both candidate and now President Trump: claims of a rigged system, persecution and victimhood, and a refusal to take responsibility for failure and to pledge to do better.

In other words, Trump’s snowflakery appears contagious. Maybe Mulvaney and colleagues should get that checked out. 

They are snowflakes, aren't they?

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent analysis: "Trump’s war against the checks on his power keeps expanding"

Spoiler

President Trump is used to being a king.

For decades, his word was the final word in his domain. His advisers, princes and princess might offer their insights, but the decision of what would happen in the Trump Organization was his alone, if he chose to weigh in. No board of directors, no stockholders, just Donald Trump, unchecked.

On the campaign trail, it seemed pretty clear that he assumed that the presidency worked the same way. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he said during his speech at the Republican convention in July, a marked break from the traditional appeal to getting Congress to unite behind an agenda. He repeatedly dismissed endemic problems as being easy — and, if he had the authority of a chief executive, of a king, perhaps they would have been.

Unfortunately for Trump’s ambitions, that’s not how the American government works. On Friday morning, we got another reminder of Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of the limited and constrained power of the chief executive of the United States — the latest in a long series.

Politico reported that the administration had issued a blanket ban on oversight requests sent by Democratic lawmakers. In other words, if Rep. John Smith (D-Somewhere) from the House Intelligence Committee wants the Department of Justice to provide information on an FBI investigation, the department has been informed not to respond to the request. A spokesman for the administration told Politico that departments were told “to accommodate the requests of chairmen, regardless of their political party,” which is a neat trick since the chairmen of committees of a Republican-controlled Congress are all Republicans.

This is the oversight that comes with the job of being president, one of the more nuanced aspects of the checks-and-balances system that was central to the Founding Fathers’ construction of the United States. The point of the Constitution, after all, was to prevent a president who could act with the impunity of a king, not to allow the presidency to be used in that way.

This is only one example of Trump’s bristling at the formal and informal checks that exist on his power. Others include:

Investigations. Trump has repeatedly railed against the investigations into his campaign and the behavior of his administration being run by congressional committees and the FBI. He has dismissed investigations into Russian meddling as being a “total hoax” and told NBC’s Lester Holt that the Russia investigation at the FBI was one reason he decided to fire FBI Director James B. Comey.

Information. The administration’s block on requests from Democratic members of Congress is only one way in which the White House hopes to prevent unhelpful information from getting out. Last month, The Washington Post reported that the administration had “removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency and animal-welfare abuses.”

The judiciary. The judicial check on the chief executive’s power is explicit in the Constitution, and the judiciary’s willingness to weigh in on things Trump wants to do has earned it the repeated ire of the president.

He’s complained about judicial blocks on his immigration ban…

...

The filibuster. Senate rules allowing a member to block legislation indefinitely through the use of a filibuster have unquestionably been abused in recent years to allow for a sort of casual filibuster that forces 60-vote cloture requirements on most pieces of significant legislation. Trump, frustrated by the need to cobble together policies that can earn that 60-vote margin, has repeatedly argued that the Senate should simply unilaterally eliminate the filibuster and adopt a 51-percent margin to pass any legislation.

Approval of his Cabinet. That frustration was evident during the early days of Trump’s administration when he was hoping to have his Cabinet approved. He repeatedly complained that Democrats were holding up his nominees, which, of course, is the constitutional prerogative of the Senate. (He also accused the Democrats of blocking his full Cabinet before he’d formally nominated a full Cabinet.)

Ultimately, the Republican Senate majority changed filibuster rules to approve several of Trump’s Cabinet picks without needing to gain any support from the minority.

Executive orders. Despite years of pejorative Republican rhetoric about the use of executive orders by President Barack Obama, Trump seized on the tool during his first weeks in office as a way of demonstrating a willingness to take action without waiting for Congress to pass legislation. The boundaries of those executive actions were often constrained specifically because Trump’s powers were limited, but, on occasion, he pushed those boundaries. He did so most notably in the case of his immigration ban, with the result we already have addressed above.

The media. While not stipulated in the Constitution, the media’s free-ranging role in questioning and challenging elected officials is a clear and historically validated check on power. Few things frustrate Trump as viscerally and frequently as reporting that positions Trump’s policies or actions in a negative light.

Most famously:

...

Those are the words of a king who is being challenged by a peasant. In the old days, high in his castle on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, such insolence could be waved away.

Now, as a president bound by rules, law and custom, his authority is not so sweeping and the opposition more robust — even as he scrambles to constrain it.

There are lots of good tweets and screenshots in the article to illustrate the points. The author is correct -- the TT would rather be a king than a president.

[GreyhoundFan]

"I can’t stop laughing at the Trump administration. That’s not a good thing."

Spoiler

It is worth remembering that after Donald Trump won the election last November, there was reason for America’s foreign policy community to engage in some introspection. After all, petition after petition of national security and foreign policy professionals had been issued warning that Trump would be a foreign policy disaster. As I wrote in “The Ideas Industry”:

If America’s foreign policy community judged Trump harshly, he judged them right back. During the Republican primary, his campaign rejected most outreach efforts by GOP- friendly think tanks to help tutor him on questions of world politics. In his own rhetoric, Trump explicitly disavowed the value of existing foreign policy expertise. In an April 2016 foreign policy speech, Trump argued, “It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy. It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold.” He went on to state that his foreign policy advisers would not be “those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.” By the end of the general election campaign, Trump had framed the foreign policy debate as one between populist nationalists and elite globalists, warning about “a small handful of special global interests rigging the system.”

Despite these warnings, Trump won — which suggested that maybe foreign policy professionals and experts needed to do some soul-searching. This notion was compounded when Trump assembled a foreign affairs Cabinet of respected generals, financiers and CEOs. Maybe, just maybe, there was a different way to run foreign policy.

I’m someone who has defended the system for the past few years and mocked those who talked about the foreign policy Blob. Still, after 16 years of war in Afghanistan, 14 years of war in Iraq, policy fiascoes in Yemen, Syria and Libya, and a global financial crisis to boot, even I had to acknowledge that some reflection was in order. Perhaps Donald Trump and his foreign policy team shaking the rust off of foreign policy shibboleths would be a productive step forward.

That was then. Now, however, introspection is a thing of the past. Because I look at this president and his foreign policy team, and I just can’t stop laughing.

...

Let’s consider his team first. Rex Tillerson has given zero indication that he knows how to run the State Department. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross made clueless comments about Saudi Arabia that left the impression of him as a doddering fool. As secretary of homeland security, John F. Kelly keeps saying things designed to scare the hell out of people rather than make them feel more secure. He seems to have fallen victim to the worst pathologies of the Bush administration — and at least 9/11 could explain the behavior of those officials. National security adviser H.R. McMaster and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn seem to be focused far more on pleasing the president than offering cogent advice. Whatever influence they had over the national security team seems to be on the wane. Jared Kushner? Please. The rest of the White House staff is busy trying to be more absurd propagandists than Kim Jong Un’s flacks. So far, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are the only foreign policy hands who have managed to retain their dignity, and that’s mostly because what they say contradicts Trump. And their assurances to allies do not seem to be working.

Then there’s the president himself. Just a glance at the decision-making process he used on withdrawing from the Paris climate change accord makes it clear how manifestly unfit he is to do his job. Trump seems not to have understood how the Paris treaty worked (kind of like how he doesn’t understand NATO). As for his process of deciding, Kellyanne Conway’s explanation — “He started with a conclusion, and the evidence brought him to the same conclusion” — unintentionally sums up just how bad it was. Today’s press reports are all about how Trump did this primarily to troll the world.

And what are the foreign policy results of Trump’s rust-shaking? Mostly that he’s getting played left and right. According to Matt Bai, “Trump is weak, and our rivals have figured it out. They’re walking all over the American president in a way we haven’t seen since at least the days of disco and Space Invaders.” On economic deals, Trump’s supposed strength, he keeps taking steps that undermine America’s bargaining position and make it harder for partners to want to cut a deal in the first place.

...

It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump has navigated the global stage. The Chinese and Saudis have figured out how to buy him off with a couple billion dollars and some flattery. There is zero evidence of any appreciable policy gains. U.S. leadership is being constantly questioned. Whatever soft power resided in the United States has dissipated. Outside of the Persian Gulf, Trump’s approach has done nothing but alienate allies and bolster potential rivals.

...

How bad is this situation? I look at Trump, at McMaster, at Tillerson, and conclude, “Yeah, I could do better.”

I cannot stress enough how much I should not be thinking this. I am an international relations professor: The biggest deliverables I’ve ever managed is the occasional conference and handing my grades in on time. In the past, whenever the prospect of a policy position has come up, I start getting the hives because of the myriad ways I know how to screw things up. I know my skill set, and am rather dubious that ably managing the foreign policy process is part of it.

All that said, do I think I could run American foreign policy better than the current team? Yes. Heck, I could be on Twitter all day and only pay partial attention to briefings and still do a better job than the current clown show.

Many smart critics of American foreign policy disdained Trump but disdained the smugness of the foreign affairs elite at least as much. Trump’s performance to date has probably been the worst of all worlds for them. They know that Trump is incompetent. And now they’re seeing the foreign policy community shed any doubts that might have emerged about their core beliefs. Because the Trump administration’s performance to date suggests that yes, the alternatives were far worse.

In his remarks yesterday, Trump said:

At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be. They won’t be.

Oh yes they will. They are laughing at Trump right now. And so am I. To use a word I’ve used a lot since January, Trump is beclowning American foreign policy. His foreign policy cabinet has disgraced itself.

The choice is to laugh or weep.

Laugh or weep, yeah, that sums it up.

[fraurosena]

Another thread in that tangled web of collusion, corruption and money-laundering.

A Kazakh dirty-money suit threatens to reach Trump’s business world 

This is an extremely lengthy article. It's so lengthy and detailed you could almost call it an essay. This is how it starts:

Quote

The net is closing around a duo of fugitive oligarchs and their kin accused of laundering Kazakh money in posh U.S. real estate — including Trump Organization properties.

In a complicated case with potential implications for President Donald Trump’s business empire and associates of the real-estate-developer-turned-president, Switzerland has revealed it is considering an extradition request from Ukraine to hand over the son of a former Kazakh energy minister — and both men are facing money-laundering allegations in the United States and charges in Kazakhstan.

It’s the latest development in a saga that is reaching into Bayrock Group, an international real estate and investment company that paid the Trump Organization a license fee for the use of its name and an 18 percent ownership stake in the New York hotel and condo project.

The Khrapunov family is accused in U.S. lawsuits of “cleaning” illicit money through the purchase and quick resale of U.S. luxury properties, including daughter Elvira Kudryashova’s purchase of three Trump-branded condos in New York and a 9,000-square-foot Studio City mansion flipped in months to pop singer Bruno Mars for $6.5 million.

An investigation by McClatchy and reporting partners, involving interviews with officials representing legal matters against the accused in four countries, reveals:

▪ Ukraine has recently asked Switzerland to extradite Ilyas Khrapunov, son of former Kazakh Energy Minister Viktor Khrapunov, for alleged computer hacking.

▪ Ilyas Khrapunov and his wife secured unusual diplomatic posts representing the Central African Republic in Geneva, a move that helped provide them with a means of travel.

▪ Court documents tie Felix Sater — a Trump associate, Bayrock partner and twice-convicted Russian émigré — to some of the Khrapunovs’ transactions.

▪ Kazakh authorities asked the United States for information on Bayrock as part of the ongoing attempt to recover funds.

▪ A New York court decision may further reveal details about the Kazakh family’s financial flows into condos in the Trump SoHo building, developed and sold by Bayrock. Bank records include large transfers from a now-sanctioned Cyprus lender.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I toyed with putting this in the governors thread, but since it features quite a bit about the TT, I thought I'd post it here. What is remarkable is that Northam is a very quiet, genteel, low-key person. For him to be so outspoken is quite a change. "Why this Democratic candidate, who has an M.D., calls Trump a “narcissistic maniac”"

Spoiler

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, has grabbed attention by repeatedly calling President Trump a “narcissistic maniac” at campaign events and in a commercial airing statewide and in the metropolitan Washington region, which includes the White House.

“We want to be medically correct,” Northam quipped on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show last month when asked about his use of the term.

In the ad, “Listening”, Northam speaks in his laconic Virginia drawl about the importance of listening as a doctor, and in his current position as lieutenant governor. Then he looks at the camera and calmly says, “I’m listening carefully to Donald Trump and I think he’s a narcissistic maniac.”

By suggesting the unpredictable and braggadocious president has a narcissistic personality disorder, Northam is not only startling TV viewers, he is crossing into a heated debate within the medical profession about whether it is appropriate to speculate about the health of public figures.

It was an especially hot topic during the 2016 election cycle, when many were questioning both Hillary Clinton’s physical well-being and Donald Trump’s mental health.

The American Psychiatric Association in March reaffirmed its decades-old guidance that mental health professionals refrain from commenting on a person’s mental state without an evaluation and consent. Other medical professionals have criticized the rule as outdated and say it’s their civic duty to speak up when the most powerful person in the world appears unfit for office.

A spokesman for Northam says the lieutenant governor coined the phrase ‘narcissistic maniac’ himself, drawing on both his medical training and his conversational way of speaking.

“It’s part-doctor, part-Eastern Shore,” said David Turner, Northam’s communications director.

Northam started calling Trump a maniac in speeches in front of Democratic activists in early March. Tom King, a consultant for Northam, said he took note of crowds “going nuts” at the line and then helped create the ad. On social media, reactions to the line have ranged from along the lines of ‘he speaks the truth’ to ‘he said WHAT?’

King acknowledged there was a potential for backlash from Democrats, but says so far he hasn’t seen evidence of it harming the campaign. Northam is competing against former congressman Tom Perriello for the Democratic nomination in the June 13 primary.

“It says who Ralph is. He doesn’t say it in a mean way,” said King. “It’s not like it’s over the top.”

Northam leaned into his medical expertise when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd grilled him about the use of ‘narcissistic maniac’ in an interview this week.

“Isn’t narcissism a technical term? Are you using the term the way your medical training would tell you?” Todd asked

“You know, I’m a pediatric neurologist, there’s a lot of overlap between psychiatry and neurology, and I would invite the viewers to look up the criteria for narcissism...”

“You believe he meets the clinical--” Todd interrupted.

“I think they’ll see some familiarity with what they’ll see,” Northam finished.

After the appearance, Northam tweeted “Yeah, I said it” above a gif of him repeating the attention-grabbing line in his commercial.

...

Susan Goold, a bioethicist and medical professor at the University of Michigan, said physicians who are running for public office should avoid second-hand diagnoses. But she said Northam appears to be on solid footing because he’s encouraging voters to look up the disorder themselves and stopping short of a formal diagnosis.

“Could he be a little more careful? Sure,” Goold said. “Has he violated standards? No, not really.”

The “Goldwater Rule” for mental health professionals dates back to 1973 after Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater successfully sued FACT magazine for defamation after publishing the results of a survey of psychiatrists assessing whether he was psychologically fit for the office.

But the Goldwater Rule doesn’t apply to physicians like Northam, experts said.

“A neurologist really can say whatever she wants about a public figure, hopefully not in a way that seems like she’s overstepping," said Claire Pouncey, a Philadelphia psychiatrist who has studied and criticized the Goldwater Rule.

Another ethicist urged Northam to avoid the phrase, in the spirit of reducing stigma surrounding mental disorders and keeping politics out of medicine.

Trump “really seems to love himself; you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that. But to put a label on it is an easy way for politicians and psychiatrists, especially politicians who are health professionals, to gain a political advantage,” said Stuart J. Youngner, a psychiatrist and medical ethicist at Case Western University. “The use of psychiatry in politics has a long and very sad troubled history.”

No, the TT doesn't "seem" to love himself, he has demonstrated that he loves himself at every turn.

[onekidanddone]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I toyed with putting this in the governors thread, but since it features quite a bit about the TT, I thought I'd post it here. What is remarkable is that Northam is a very quiet, genteel, low-key person. For him to be so outspoken is quite a change. "Why this Democratic candidate, who has an M.D., calls Trump a “narcissistic maniac”"

No, the TT doesn't "seem" to love himself, he has demonstrated that he loves himself at every turn.

I saw that ad and started wondering what it will be like next year for Barbra Comstock. Going to brutal.  

[GreyhoundFan]

@onekidanddone -- I know, Babs is going to struggle in 2018. I hope she gets turned out on her ear.

"Trump’s Paris decision was an accidental call to action"

Spoiler

A curious thing happened on President Trump’s way out of the Paris climate accord. American mayors, governors, corporate leaders and others immediately committed to meeting the agreement’s terms anyway.

All politics is local, they say, and personal responsibility begins at home. Hasn’t this always been one of the operating principles of conservatism and anti-federalism? It is but a hop and a skip from opposing the concentration of federal power to the perceived concentration of power in other nations that many Americans view as NOCD — not our class, dear.

That these localized pledges resulted from Trump’s blundering into anti-federalism on an international scale is a function of Gumpian invention. Andrew Jackson would be pleased as punch. Not only did Jackson have no interest in fashioning other countries in America’s image, as Peter Beinart has written, but he (and every other American) undoubtedly wasn’t much interested in the converse, either.

Trump’s Paris decision should have surprised no one — as a candidate, he promised as much — although his daughter did create suspense by arranging discussions with tech and climate experts to try to convince him otherwise.

When will we ever learn that Donald Trump is always gonna be Donald Trump? To the glee of some who hired him, The Donald doesn’t evolve. Indeed, methinks at times, Eureka! Herewith, the missing link!

If nothing else, Trump has kept his promises to the approximately 37 percent of Americans who, seemingly no matter what, can find no fault in the man. If Trump told these loyalists that Russia had nothing to do with the 2016 election, by Godfrey, they’d believe it.

Many of these same good citizens also believe that climate change is a hoax — because The Donald said so. That the consensus of scientists worldwide confirms that climate change is real (and dangerous) — and despite mounting evidence (melting ice caps, rising seas, increasingly powerful and frequent storms, etc.), Trump’s persistent base is content to cry “fake news” and let loose its havoc on more palatable prey. The “fake media,” for instance.

Killing the messenger seems never to go out of style.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on climate change. This would be foolish and irresponsible. In a previous life as a science writer, I learned enough to question the integrity of a study according to accepted protocols and peer review. Given those qualifications, I nevertheless find it wiser to defer to the preponderance of evidence, assuming adherence to standards of scientific integrity, than to politicians and lobbyists.

Whether the accord was “fair” to the United States, as opposed to, say, China or India, can be debated. But the need for a cooperative, global approach to reducing human contributions to climate change is irrefutable. And, contrary to Trump’s alleged strategy, the accord is not available for renegotiation. It’s a done deal, a concept that may be difficult for Trump to embrace.

As of this writing, about 100 businesses, 80 university presidents, three governors and 30 mayors have announced their intention to stick with the Paris program. Although the group hasn’t named itself yet, defying the laws of hashtag and beingness, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is leading the charge. Ever the optimist, Bloomberg predicts that this joint effort could still reduce America’s contributions to greenhouse-gas emissions by 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Keeping in mind that this would be a voluntary effort, as is the Paris agreement signed by more than 190 nations, Trump’s decision was more theatrical than immediately consequential. A full withdrawal reportedly will take years, and the president could have achieved the same result by merely ignoring the pledge.

But pulling out to Rose Garden applause was both more cinematic and more likely to distract interest from that Russia mess. Meanwhile, however, Trump has signaled in the starkest terms yet that he’s not interested in continuing America’s historical leadership role in the world. As French President Emmanuel Macron called for making the planet great again — and Germany’s Angela Merkel hinted that Europe could no longer rely on the United States — Trump and his minions proudly trumpet “America first.”

The appeal of Trump’s message is manifest and perhaps summons the same logic of an airline attendant’s instruction to secure one’s own oxygen mask before helping others. The irony is that Trump, out of sheer political stubbornness, may have inadvertently reignited the spirit that made the nation great in the first place.

Which is not the same as saying he knew what he was doing — or that he’s right.

I love it -- Making the planet great again. #MTPGA

[onekidanddone]

17 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@onekidanddone -- I know, Babs is going to struggle in 2018. I hope she gets turned out on her ear.

"Trump’s Paris decision was an accidental call to action"

I love it -- Making the planet great again. #MTPGA

I have Jamie Raskin, so I figure he is going to be in Congress for quite a while.  I have my sights on Hogan.  He needs to be a one term Governor. 

[fraurosena]

Here's our WUT of the day. Beware. It's a doozy.

 

[fraurosena]

I absolutely love this tweet from Reagans daughter. 

 

Angling for the Antichrist, indeed. 

 

(would that be eligible for a post-count title?)

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- thanks for sharing that one by Patti Davis. Yes, you should put that in the post count title request thread!!

 

An interesting analysis: "Why so many white evangelicals in Trump’s base are deeply skeptical of climate change"

Spoiler

President Trump announced Thursday that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, alarming religious leaders here and around the globe who decried the decision as a departure from the nation’s leadership role.

Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, denounced the president’s actions. Major Jewish, Muslim and Hindu organizations also condemned the president’s withdrawal from the agreement.

Several Catholic leaders also denounced the move, which came just a week after Pope Francis at the Vatican personally handed the president his encyclical urging care for the planet. In the 2015 document, Francis called for an “ecological conversion,” saying Christians have misinterpreted Scripture and “must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

But many evangelicals do not hold this view.

Christians are called to be both dominions over the earth and be stewards of it, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Al Mohler said on his podcast on Friday. Mohler said the secular-dominated environmental movement sees human beings as the problems to climate change. This worldview, he said, denies the purpose of creation, which was for humans to take dominion over it.

“We do have a responsibility to our planet,” Mohler said. “And we have a responsibility to our neighbor.”

He believes market forces — as opposed to the government — will create an economy for renewable energy.

While Catholics find common cause with evangelicals on many issues like abortion and their religious freedoms, many evangelical leaders remained mostly silent after Trump’s decision on Thursday.

While evangelical beliefs about whether climate change is occurring vary, the environment has not been a priority for many evangelical leaders in recent decades. Over the past decade, some leaders have taken up the issue and several major statements have been issued, but the environment is not usually a high concern for them and many are openly skeptical of the government’s involvement in the issue. Depending on who you ask, evangelical attitudes on climate changed tend to be shaped by a combination of politics, race, theology and beliefs about science.

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a graduate of evangelical schools Taylor University and Wheaton College, said at a town hall last week in Coldwater, Mich. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

Half of white evangelicals say global warming is occurring, according to a 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center, but only a quarter of them say it is caused by humans. And just 24 percent say global warming is “a serious problem.”

For many conservative Christians, climate change taps into a deeper mistrust they have of science over issues like abortion and transgenderism.

...

A tweet from Erick Erickson, editor of the conservative website the Resurgence, earlier this week about how he doesn’t have to care for global warming set off a debate over whether faith and environmentalism overlap.

...

Erickson on Thursday said he believes man-made climate change exists, but he doesn’t see it as a priority. He said he recycles and talks with his children about conservation, but he thinks the scientific community has been fatalistic about climate change. They remind him, he said, of the end-times preachers.

“We are adaptable and innovative enough to get out of any problem,” Erickson said.

Most of his evangelicals friends, however, do not believe climate change is real. They are deeply skeptical of scientists because they believe scientists are anti-Christian, he said.

“They see it as another political movement out to get them, one that hates big families,” Erickson said.

Skepticism of man-made global warming is high among pastors, especially younger ones, according to a 2013 poll from LifeWay Research. Just 19 percent of pastors ages 18 to 44 agree with the statement, “I believe global warming is real and man made.”

The Christian right has been actively promoting climate change skepticism, especially on Christian radio and television, said Robin Globus Veldman, a religious studies professor at Iowa State University who is working on a book on evangelicals and climate change.

“Environmentalists were caught in the crossfire because they were positioned on the other side of the aisle and tend to be less religious,” Veldman said. “They started to be described as allied with the people who were trying to push Christianity out of the public square.”

Some environmentalists believe that evangelicals don’t care about the Earth because they believe Jesus is going to come back, so humans don’t need to focus on keeping the planet sustainable. But she said she hasn’t seen much evidence for this view.

And some people believe that evangelicals have had a deep skepticism of science going way back to the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” when the American Civil Liberties Union defended a teacher convicted of teaching evolution, a landmark case addressing the roles of science and religion in the classroom.

“A lot of people portray evangelicals as anti-science,” Veldman said. “Evangelicals accept a lot of science, just not the parts that conflict their faith.”

The evangelicals Veldman has spoken to oppose evolution because they see it as a threat to their faith, contradicting the Bible. And many oppose climate change because they see it as a threat to God’s omnipotence.

The mid-20th century ushered an era of skepticism in which people began to trust radio hosts more than they trusted scientists, according to Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University who does climate change education among evangelicals.

“Climate change has been painted as an alternate religion” with phrases like, “Do you believe in global warming?” she said.

Evangelicals will often tell her things like “God’s in control,” “God gave us dominion over the Earth” or maybe “God told Noah he would never flood the Earth.” Oil was seen by some Christians in the late 1800s as God’s gift to the United States.

But Hayhoe believes evangelicals’ political affiliations drive their attitudes more on climate change than their religious beliefs. “Somehow evangelicalism got politicized to the point where, [for] many people who call themselves evangelicals, their theological statement is written by their political party first,” she said.

Those who don’t identify with a religious tradition are particularly likely to say the Earth is warming because of human activity, while white evangelical Protestants are the least likely religious group to share the same view. However, political party identification and race and ethnicity are stronger predictors of views about climate change beliefs than religious identity or observance, according to a 2015 analysis from the Pew Research Center.

Evangelicals tend to believe climate change is a liberal issue, said Rev. Mitch Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network. “Many think it’s about the government, Al Gore and taking away our freedoms,” he said. Evangelicals have strongly identified with the Republican Party in recent decades, and exit polls showed 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump in November.

Hescox and his network have been working on showing conservative ways to address the environment, framing it as a “pro-life issue” due to its impact on children’s health, citing ozone pollution and warmer temperatures’ link to asthma and Lyme disease. The network has focused on people’s individual responsibility to reduce their environmental footprint and conservative solutions to climate change, such as cap and trade, which lets the market find the cheapest way to cut emissions. More evangelicals, he said, are seeing clean energy as a way to build the economy.

“Purer air, pristine water are about following God’s commandments,” Hescox said, citing the biblical passage Isaiah 24 where the destruction of Earth is predicted.

But Cal Beisner, spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a group declaring that the consequences of global warming have been exaggerated, said that he was not surprised Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement because of the economic costs involved, including reductions in fossil fuels.

“It’s not a good bargain,” Beisner said. “It’s not surprising that the author of ‘The Art of the Deal’ would recognize that.”

The agreement, he said, will reduce global average temperature by a small amount compared to the amount of money it will cost to implement it.

“We should want to see our neighbors climbing out of poverty,” Beisner said. “If they can, they can adapt to changing climates.”

 

[sawasdee]

Quote

41 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a graduate of evangelical schools Taylor University and Wheaton College, said at a town hall last week in Coldwater, Mich. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

 

Haven't they heard the old story of the woman on the roof of her house in a flood, who turns away the boat and the helicopter because 'God will provide'? And when she drowns and  gets to the Pearly Gates God says 'but I sent you a boat and a helicopter'?

That's what these climate change deniers are all about. Their God has sent scientists to warn them, Governments to try and help them - but they are waiting for this Almighty Hand to come and save them - ignoring what he has already sent.

I wonder what he will say to them at their Pearly Gates. It's a shame they are trying to take the rest of us with them.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@fraurosena -- thanks for sharing that one by Patti Davis. Yes, you should put that in the post count title request thread!!

 

An interesting analysis: "Why so many white evangelicals in Trump’s base are deeply skeptical of climate change"

  Hide contents

President Trump announced Thursday that he is withdrawing the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, alarming religious leaders here and around the globe who decried the decision as a departure from the nation’s leadership role.

Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, denounced the president’s actions. Major Jewish, Muslim and Hindu organizations also condemned the president’s withdrawal from the agreement.

Several Catholic leaders also denounced the move, which came just a week after Pope Francis at the Vatican personally handed the president his encyclical urging care for the planet. In the 2015 document, Francis called for an “ecological conversion,” saying Christians have misinterpreted Scripture and “must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.”

But many evangelicals do not hold this view.

Christians are called to be both dominions over the earth and be stewards of it, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Al Mohler said on his podcast on Friday. Mohler said the secular-dominated environmental movement sees human beings as the problems to climate change. This worldview, he said, denies the purpose of creation, which was for humans to take dominion over it.

“We do have a responsibility to our planet,” Mohler said. “And we have a responsibility to our neighbor.”

He believes market forces — as opposed to the government — will create an economy for renewable energy.

While Catholics find common cause with evangelicals on many issues like abortion and their religious freedoms, many evangelical leaders remained mostly silent after Trump’s decision on Thursday.

While evangelical beliefs about whether climate change is occurring vary, the environment has not been a priority for many evangelical leaders in recent decades. Over the past decade, some leaders have taken up the issue and several major statements have been issued, but the environment is not usually a high concern for them and many are openly skeptical of the government’s involvement in the issue. Depending on who you ask, evangelical attitudes on climate changed tend to be shaped by a combination of politics, race, theology and beliefs about science.

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a graduate of evangelical schools Taylor University and Wheaton College, said at a town hall last week in Coldwater, Mich. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

Half of white evangelicals say global warming is occurring, according to a 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center, but only a quarter of them say it is caused by humans. And just 24 percent say global warming is “a serious problem.”

For many conservative Christians, climate change taps into a deeper mistrust they have of science over issues like abortion and transgenderism.

...

A tweet from Erick Erickson, editor of the conservative website the Resurgence, earlier this week about how he doesn’t have to care for global warming set off a debate over whether faith and environmentalism overlap.

...

Erickson on Thursday said he believes man-made climate change exists, but he doesn’t see it as a priority. He said he recycles and talks with his children about conservation, but he thinks the scientific community has been fatalistic about climate change. They remind him, he said, of the end-times preachers.

“We are adaptable and innovative enough to get out of any problem,” Erickson said.

Most of his evangelicals friends, however, do not believe climate change is real. They are deeply skeptical of scientists because they believe scientists are anti-Christian, he said.

“They see it as another political movement out to get them, one that hates big families,” Erickson said.

Skepticism of man-made global warming is high among pastors, especially younger ones, according to a 2013 poll from LifeWay Research. Just 19 percent of pastors ages 18 to 44 agree with the statement, “I believe global warming is real and man made.”

The Christian right has been actively promoting climate change skepticism, especially on Christian radio and television, said Robin Globus Veldman, a religious studies professor at Iowa State University who is working on a book on evangelicals and climate change.

“Environmentalists were caught in the crossfire because they were positioned on the other side of the aisle and tend to be less religious,” Veldman said. “They started to be described as allied with the people who were trying to push Christianity out of the public square.”

Some environmentalists believe that evangelicals don’t care about the Earth because they believe Jesus is going to come back, so humans don’t need to focus on keeping the planet sustainable. But she said she hasn’t seen much evidence for this view.

And some people believe that evangelicals have had a deep skepticism of science going way back to the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” when the American Civil Liberties Union defended a teacher convicted of teaching evolution, a landmark case addressing the roles of science and religion in the classroom.

“A lot of people portray evangelicals as anti-science,” Veldman said. “Evangelicals accept a lot of science, just not the parts that conflict their faith.”

The evangelicals Veldman has spoken to oppose evolution because they see it as a threat to their faith, contradicting the Bible. And many oppose climate change because they see it as a threat to God’s omnipotence.

The mid-20th century ushered an era of skepticism in which people began to trust radio hosts more than they trusted scientists, according to Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University who does climate change education among evangelicals.

“Climate change has been painted as an alternate religion” with phrases like, “Do you believe in global warming?” she said.

Evangelicals will often tell her things like “God’s in control,” “God gave us dominion over the Earth” or maybe “God told Noah he would never flood the Earth.” Oil was seen by some Christians in the late 1800s as God’s gift to the United States.

But Hayhoe believes evangelicals’ political affiliations drive their attitudes more on climate change than their religious beliefs. “Somehow evangelicalism got politicized to the point where, [for] many people who call themselves evangelicals, their theological statement is written by their political party first,” she said.

Those who don’t identify with a religious tradition are particularly likely to say the Earth is warming because of human activity, while white evangelical Protestants are the least likely religious group to share the same view. However, political party identification and race and ethnicity are stronger predictors of views about climate change beliefs than religious identity or observance, according to a 2015 analysis from the Pew Research Center.

Evangelicals tend to believe climate change is a liberal issue, said Rev. Mitch Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network. “Many think it’s about the government, Al Gore and taking away our freedoms,” he said. Evangelicals have strongly identified with the Republican Party in recent decades, and exit polls showed 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump in November.

Hescox and his network have been working on showing conservative ways to address the environment, framing it as a “pro-life issue” due to its impact on children’s health, citing ozone pollution and warmer temperatures’ link to asthma and Lyme disease. The network has focused on people’s individual responsibility to reduce their environmental footprint and conservative solutions to climate change, such as cap and trade, which lets the market find the cheapest way to cut emissions. More evangelicals, he said, are seeing clean energy as a way to build the economy.

“Purer air, pristine water are about following God’s commandments,” Hescox said, citing the biblical passage Isaiah 24 where the destruction of Earth is predicted.

But Cal Beisner, spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a group declaring that the consequences of global warming have been exaggerated, said that he was not surprised Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement because of the economic costs involved, including reductions in fossil fuels.

“It’s not a good bargain,” Beisner said. “It’s not surprising that the author of ‘The Art of the Deal’ would recognize that.”

The agreement, he said, will reduce global average temperature by a small amount compared to the amount of money it will cost to implement it.

Quote

“We should want to see our neighbors climbing out of poverty,” Beisner said. “If they can, they can adapt to changing climates.”

Yeah, but do you really want that? I think not. Another thing that God just needs to take care of.

 

 

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The mid-20th century ushered an era of skepticism in which people began to trust radio hosts more than they trusted scientists, according to Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University who does climate change education among evangelicals.

Dr. Hayhoe's husband is the pastor of an evangelical church in Lubbock, and I read an article a few years ago where she talked about the first time she met the congregation. One of the members of the church wanted her to explain to everyone how climate change was just a big hoax. Dr. Hayhoe grimaced and said that she was sorry, but climate change really is happening.

Dr. Hayhoe regularly receives hate mail and the occasional death threat because of her work, but she doesn't let it dissuade her from her work. I'm a big fan of her efforts to change the minds of evangelical Christians about climate change. Since she is an evangelical Christian herself, they are more inclined to listen to her than other speakers on the subject.

[GreyhoundFan]

Maureen Dowd wrote an excellent column about our least favorite orange being: "Trump Stomps Planet Earth"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to confidently tell us how he will combat the existential threat to the planet — be it aliens, asteroids, tidal waves, volcanoes, killer sharks, killer robots or a 500-billion-ton comet the size of New York City.

So it was quite stunning to see the president of the United States step up to the lectern to declare himself the existential threat to the planet.

And with a calming band playing us to our doom, just like on the Titanic.

You know you’re in trouble when beclouded Beijing, where birds go to die, replaces you as a leader on climate change.

America is living through a fractured fairy tale, in the grip of a lonely and uninformed mad king, an arrogant and naïve princeling, a comely but complicit blond princess and a dyspeptic, dystopian troll under the bridge.

On climate change, the troll, Steve Bannon, got control and persuaded Donald Trump to give a raspberry to the world. Bannon had better watch out or rising waters will wash out his bridge to the past.

Even though Jared, Ivanka, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Elon Musk, Bob Iger and Lloyd Blankfein pressed the president to stay in the Paris climate accord — which is merely aspirational about the inhalational — Bannon won the day because Trump loves to act like the fired Mr. Met.

As his biographer Tim O’Brien recalled on ABC’s “This Week,” Trump once pointed out a dozen six-foot-high speakers by the pool at Mar-a-Lago blasting classic rock and said: “You know, when I moved here to Palm Beach, nobody wanted me around. And I love cranking this music as loud as I can because it bugs the heck out of all of these so-and-sos and I love it.”

It is a familiar pattern. “He wanted to get out of Queens to come to Manhattan,” O’Brien said. “He wanted to be accepted by the real estate class in Manhattan, but then he thumbed his nose at them.” He wanted to run for president as a Republican and get the G.O.P. establishment’s approval, but then he thumbed his nose at it.

The same with The New York Times, seeking favor and then dubbing us “failing.” And now it’s the turn of our aghast European allies.

The more he is labeled a boor and a brute by his critics at home and abroad, the more Trump digs in, trying to drag America back to a time when black smoke belched, women scrambled for birth control, sick people were out of luck, reefer madness reigned and Cuba was shunned.

In the year 2017, the American president is leading us into a bold new future, saying he can’t wait to party hardy at “a big opening of a brand new mine.”

Trump was goaded in the direction of dropping out of the Paris accord by a couple things that irritated him.

As Mark Landler and Michael Shear reported in The Times, Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, had told reporters in Sicily that Mr. Trump might be coming around. “His views are evolving” on climate change, Cohn said. “He came here to learn. He came here to get smarter.”

That smarted and made Trump want to blast classic rock.

Then the president read an interview with Emmanuel Macron in a French newspaper, bragging about how he had prepared to give Trump an Iron Man grip because it was “a moment of truth” showing that he “won’t make small concessions, even symbolic ones.”

Comparing Trump to strongmen Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Macron made it clear that he was determined to face down the bully, pushing back hard on Trump, just as he would a few days later with Putin. He scolded the Russian president for his state-controlled media’s “lying propaganda” and warned that France would use military force if Putin’s ally Bashar al-Assad unleashed chemical weapons on civilians again.

As Ashley Parker, Phil Rucker and Michael Birnbaum reported in The Washington Post Thursday: “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said. A few days later, Trump got his revenge. He proclaimed from the Rose Garden, ‘I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.’”

Whether Macron is being coached by his wife, whom he met when she was his drama teacher in high school, is not clear. But he understands the signs and symbols of power.

Trump is the president with a background in entertainment, but the 39-year-old French president is the one who has mastered theatrics, from the splendor of “Ode to Joy” playing at the Louvre on election night as he made his slow victory walk, to his steely six seconds of arm wrestling with Trump, to his dramatic swerve to embrace Angela Merkel, leaving Trump nonplused and waiting to shake his hand, to his dressing down of Trump’s pal Putin at Versailles, to his televised exhortation aux barricades on Thursday in English: “Make our planet great again.”

As The Times’s Adam Nossiter wrote, Macron has a “deeply held belief that France in some sense has been missing its king since the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793.” And he has consciously cultivated a regal air as he champions “radical centrism,” globalization and protecting the environment. The Post dubs him “the prince regent of Paris and Pittsburgh alike.”

Trump, on the other hand, has rattled the world with his crude manner, cruel policies, chaotic management style, authoritarian love-ins and antediluvian attitudes, cementing his image as the highchair king.

For once, the French have a right to be condescending toward the United States.

"...the highchair king." I love it.

[ShepherdontheRock]

@GreyhoundFan man that makes me so excited to vote for Ralph Northam in the VA primary. 

 

TBH I've just come to the conclusion that everything 45 does is just for the purpose of being extra/being a troll. 

Like we could literally just stop following the Paris guidelines if we wanted to. He didn't need to make this show of "pulling out."

[47of74]

Meanwhile a Nashville gas station showed off its own speshul brand of snowflakery the other day...

tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2017/06/02/gas-station-offers-reward-kathy-griffins-head/366033001/

Quote

Lewis Country Store is no stranger to controversy, but one of its latest scrolling digital signs outside the gas station at 5106 Old Hickory Boulevard has some passersby wondering whether it's an issue of free speech or illegality.

Early Friday morning, one such motorist, who wishes to remain anonymous, took photographs of the sign which read "$50,000 reward for Kathy Griffin's head delivered."

"I know this seems like a bad joke, but is this legal?" he wrote in an email to The Tennessean. "I'm not sure if this is covered by free speech."

In October of 2016, controversial signs including "#Trump that b****" and "Never Forget Benghazi" were posted before Shell Oil cut ties with the gas station.

Yeah, this douche cannon of an owner might wanna read up on what Tennessee says about solicitation to murder;

http://law.justia.com/codes/tennessee/2010/title-39/chapter-11/part-1/39-11-117

 

[GreyhoundFan]

No surprise: "Written Proof That the President’s Lobbyist Ban Is Worthless"

Spoiler

We wanted to believe that President Trump was doing the right thing when the White House announced in January that executive branch officials would be banned for two years from working on policy or regulations they once were paid to influence as lobbyists and lawyers.

His pledge now seems worthless. On Wednesday, after weeks of prodding, the administration released waivers it had granted to White House staff members to let them violate the rule. The waivers — for at least 16 staff members — are further evidence of the White House’s disregard, even contempt, for good government.

Ideally, waivers are granted when an appointee has unusual skills, like a lawyer with expertise in offshore banking rules needed for tax law enforcement. The Obama administration also granted waivers for industry lobbyists, and had to be prodded to release them as they were filed.

But in just four months, the Trump administration has granted to White House staff members about a quarter of the number granted by the Obama administration to the whole executive branch in eight years. Mr. Trump’s waivers include one giving blanket coverage on one issue to the Executive Office of the President.

Despite Mr. Trump’s promises to avoid lobbyist influence, his waivers let former lobbyists create policy for industries that once employed them. More waivers granted to federal agency appointees are expected to be posted on Wednesday.

The White House paperwork looks suspiciously as if it was thrown together as cover for a president who routinely ignores his own ethics promises. The waivers were posted after a scorched-earth standoff between the Office of Government Ethics and the White House, which wrongly maintained that the ethics office had no right to ask for them and, by extension, that the public had no right to see them.

One of the White House waivers, covering the entire Executive Office of the President, is explicitly retroactive to Inauguration Day, violating the legal principle that underlies issuing waivers in the first place. “A retroactive waiver is as strong a suggestion of guilt as you can get; if you need a retroactive waiver, you’ve violated a rule,” said Walter Shaub Jr., director of the ethics office.

That waiver allows staff members to “participate in communications and meetings with news organizations regarding broad policy matters.” That would ostensibly allow Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and the former Breitbart boss, to keep in close touch with one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable media cheerleaders — a situation that drew a complaint from a watchdog group in March. The retroactivity would let the waiver predate the complaint.

Most of the waivers are undated and unsigned. They could have been written on Inauguration Day, or last week, to cover violations that had already occurred. The White House disputed that it is skirting its own rules.

There’s an unsigned, undated waiver allowing Andrew Olmem, a lawyer and financial industry lobbyist formerly with Venable L.L.P., to meet with former clients like American Express and MetLife as he works on issues including the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s treatment of insurers. An unsigned, undated waiver allows Michael Catanzaro, a former lobbyist for coal-burning utilities, to work on Mr. Trump’s effort to kill regulations on coal-burning utilities. Shahira Knight, a former lobbyist for Fidelity Investments, got an unsigned, undated waiver allowing her to work on tax and retirement policy.

Leave it to Mr. Trump to take an exception to a rule and make it the rule. “Ethics waivers” are now presidential permission to ignore ethical standards.

Yeah, we certainly can't expect anyone in this dumpster fire of an administration to be ethical.