Laila Lalami at The Nation writes—We Can’t End Sexual Harassment if We Make It a Partisan Issue:
The men who have been named in these scandals represent a very broad range of backgrounds: Republican and Democrat; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim; gay and straight. You would think that with such a wide spectrum of abusers, we would finally understand and treat sexual harassment and violence as the systemic problems they are. In reality, however, the issue has turned partisan.[...]
What we are witnessing at the moment is nothing short of an uprising of women against sexual assault. They are revealing its epidemic frequency in our society and all the ways in which it is enabled by a culture of silence. If we allow sexual misconduct to become a partisan issue, we risk obfuscating these causes and leaving the problem to fester for the next generation. In order for this revolution to be successful, we must listen to the victims of sex crimes whether the perpetrators share our politics or not. We must call out predators even when—especially when—they are beloved or respected figures.
Doyle MacManus at the Los Angeles Times writes—Is there anything stopping Trump from launching a nuclear strike? Nope:
Here, in a nutshell, are the laws and procedures that limit President Trump’s power to launch a nuclear strike against North Korea anytime he likes:
There aren’t any.
If the president wakes up one morning, turns on Fox News and decides that Kim Jong Unhas ignored his warnings of “fire and fury” — by announcing, for example, that he has built a nuclear warhead that can reach California — Trump can annihilate the people of North Korea entirely on his own.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes—The Senate Questions the President’s Power to Launch Nukes:
President Trump and North Korea have prompted Congress to do something it hasn’t done in more than four decades: formally consider changes to the law that gives American presidents the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.
In a governing system that relies on checks and balances, that may strike some people as odd. But the uncomfortable truth is that Mr. Trump, like all his post-World War II predecessors, is uniquely empowered to order a pre-emptive strike, on North Korea or anywhere else. We’re talking about the authority to unleash thousands of nuclear weapons within minutes. And with scant time to consult with experienced advisers.
As the first formal hearing on the issue in 41 years unfolded before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Senator Christopher Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, bluntly outlined the stakes with a president who “is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests.”
Republicans were not as harsh nor so Trump-centric. But Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is the committee’s chairman, and recently expressed concern that Mr. Trump could lead the country to World War III, said it was important to examine the “realities of this system” by which the use of nuclear weapons is decided. He’s right.
Amanda Brohmanin at Bust writes—Why "Good Boys" Need To Stop Getting Away With All The Bad Things They Do:
Boys will be boys.
And good boys will always be good.
I heard those words for the first time when I was seven.The boys in my class had for many days repeatedly, and loudly, been shouting, “Take off your shirts, show us your boobs!” to me and my friends as we were playing in the schoolyard. We had the same flat chests they had at the time, but their shouting, those words, and the way they said them made us uncomfortable — and we stopped playing. A few days later, when I had mustered up all the courage my seven-year old body could fit inside of its tiny frame, I repeated the story to my teacher. Her initial response was big, hearty laughter. The kind of laughter you have when someone tries to fool you but you won’t let yourself be fooled. Followed by, “Oh, don’t be silly! Those boys are the nicest boys in school, they would never say anything like that!”
Boys will be boys.
And good boys will always be good, she told me.
I felt confused. Why didn’t she believe me? I heard my mother’s words in the background noise as she sat beside me and told my teacher that she knew I would never lie about anything like that, that her daughter wasn’t a liar. No, I wasn’t a liar. The words had been true, I had heard them for days, repeated to me like unwanted phrases from an old, scratched vinyl. Yet the shame poured into my blood and replaced the courage that had been there just minutes before. Shame and guilt and embarrassment that I felt without knowing why I felt it when I realized my teacher had already made up her mind. “Well, sometimes you can’t be so sensitive. I know those boys didn’t mean anything bad by saying that,” she told me.
Boys will be boys.
And good boys will always be good.
Girls who attempt to break the silence surrounding good boys who do bad things will sooner or later (but almost always sooner) be punished for it.
Nicole Hockley at The Guardian writes—President Trump, please listen to a Sandy Hook mom on gun reform:
Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are one way to protect families and communities from gun violence. With ERPOs in place, family members or local law enforcement can support someone who is adjudicated as at-risk to themselves or others – as in the case of domestic violence, suicide or homicide – and temporarily remove their access to firearms and block attempted purchases until they are no longer a risk. ERPOs have been proven to save lives and to protect due process and second amendment rights.
ERPOs are established and have been successfully managed by several states including California, Oregon, Washington and Connecticut. Extreme Risk Protection Orders are legislation both Republicans and Democrats can, and should, support. The federal government should be doing everything it can to encourage states to enact such legislation that’s been proven to save lives, using the carrot or stick of federal grant money.
Historically, when the president and Congress have wanted to mandate national safety rules, like a highway speed limit or minimum drinking age, it has used the power of the purse, making funding contingent on states taking certain actions. So, if the government is serious about combatting gun violence, it should put its influence where its money is.
Use federal public safety grants – like highway or law enforcement funding – as a carrot to incentivize states to pass ERPOs. In the end, everyone wins – the federal government gets states to do what it wants, the states get the money they need, and people’s lives will be saved by a commonsense law.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Is the Trump administration afflicted with 'Moscow memory'?
For so many people who are close to Donald Trump, Russia is the Bermuda Triangle of their memory.
Conversations and meetings seem to pass through this mysterious quadrant of their brains and simply disappear. Even when the wreckage is found on some server or other, they profess ignorance, confusion or innocence. And sometimes all three at once. [...]
The slow reawakening of the Trump campaign’s recollections about Russia is something of a mystery to those of us who are forced to listen to the man who led the campaign and now purports to lead the nation.
According to Donald J Trump himself, he has “one of the great memories of all time”. Unfortunately his great memory somehow failed him when it came to recalling the existence of his point man on Russia, George Papadopoulos.
Since so much of TrumpWorld is a legacy of the 1980s, this seems to be a good time to recall that classic line in The Bonfire of the Vanities about grand juries indicting ham sandwiches.
Now that we have Robert Mueller’s team engaged with grand juries, we seem to have stumbled on a bumper delivery of quite delicious sandwiches.
Steven Greenhouse at The Guardian writes—Trump's tax breaks for the rich won't trickle down to help working Americans:
It’s time to drive a stake through the heart of President Trump’s and Republicans’ misleading assertion that their tax cuts are for the middle class and for workers. These tax cuts are overwhelmingly designed to help the rich, to further comfort the already very comfortable.
If the tax plan were truly a plan for the middle class and not a plan for the rich, it wouldn’t lavish nearly as many benefits on the wealthiest Americans: phasing out the estate tax, eliminating the alternative minimum tax, cutting the business pass-through tax rate. The Trump-GOP plan would also chop the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 20% – a move that heavily favors affluent people because they own a disproportionate share of corporate stocks.
The GOP plan does include some measures that will help many middle-class Americans, like doubling the standard deduction and modestly increasing the child tax credit, but in truth those measures do little to undo the huge tilt toward the rich.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 5% of households will receive 61% of the tax cuts in 2027 under the House plan. The middle fifth of households would get 8% of the cuts, just one-sixth of the 48% share going to the top 1%. The bottom 60% of Americans would get just 14% of the cuts in 2027, less than a third of what the top 1% gets. Does that seem like a plan for the middle class and for workers?
Eric Levitz at New York magazine writes—Our Government’s Last Powerful, Progressive Regulator Just Resigned:
Donald Trump has delivered the regulatory state into the arms of its enemies. The president made Big Energy’s favorite attorney general his head of environmental protection; a lawyer who made millions representing banks and hedge funds his SEC director; an evangelist for the prosperity gospel his head of public housing; Microsoft’s former attorney his top enforcer of antitrust law; and a skeptic of “government schools” his Education secretary.
But there was one arm of the administrative state that Trump couldn’t — or wouldn’t — dismantle: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).Dreamed up by Elizabeth Warren, and implemented by the Obama administration, the agency enjoys broad, independent authority to protect American consumers from financial scams.
So, of course, our populist president was eager to gut the bureau. But the progressive head of the CFPB, Richard Cordray, was set to remain in place until July 2018. Trump could, technically, fire him for cause before that date. And the administration considered it, but quickly concluded the politics were too toxic. [...]
But now, Cordray is gone. On Wednesday, one of the federal government’s last powerful progressives announced that he will be resigning by month’s end.test
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Democrats Have a Reason to Be Mobilized by Hope:
Yesterday in a special election, a 26 year-old Democratic lesbian mental health worker won a seat in the Oklahoma state senate, turning a district Trump had won 62-27. Allison Ikley-Freeman ran on mental health care, housing, and opposition of bathroom bills and won by targeting voters she knew would turn out for her in a low-volume election.
This marks the fourth pick-up by Democrats in special elections in deeply red Oklahoma this year, and the 14th this cycle nationally. Those numbers don’t count the wins in the off-year elections to the Virginia House of Delegates, which are likely to at least double the number once recounts are completed. If, as Martin suggested last week, it is critical to win back state legislatures all over the country, it looks like the effort has begun.
Will this winning streak carry forward into the 2018 midterms? That is the question of the hour, and since a lot can happen over the next twelve months, it is impossible to predict with any certainty. But other signs are pointing to a positive outcome for Democrats. [...]
In other words, the electorate that gave us Trump and dominance by Republicans is changing. That isn’t happening on its own. As we’ve seen, Democrats are organizing all over the country in countless different ways and candidates are lining up to run for office in droves, often for seats that have been so red that Republicans ran unopposed in the past. And people are turning out to vote for Democrats. Trump and the Republicans have taken complacency off the table.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Democrats Can Win in Alabama—and Everywhere:
The trick to mastering the constantly shifting American political landscape is to get ahead of the changes that are sure to come. That’s not always easy, as the evolutions have grown more erratic and more rapid. The last three major off-year elections (2006, 2010, and 2014) produced “waves” that resulted in dramatic shifts in Congress and the states. In the first wave, Democrats surged with a strength that foretold their reclamation of the White House two years later. But the second and third waves locked in Republican hegemony in both Congress and state legislatures.
By many indications, 2018 is on track to be the next wave election, one that could produce a Democratic surge sufficient to disempower Donald Trump and disrupt the agendas of the billionaire Koch brothers and their conservative minions. For that to happen, however, Democrats must stop playing on the margins and start playing everywhere. While the party hasn’t won every contest in Trump’s first year—there were serious stumbles in the spring special elections for House seats—it is now clearly on a winning streak in unexpected places. [...]
One year after Trump and the Republicans won in places where no one gave them a chance, Democrats have reversed that calculus: They are winning in places where the party struggled not just in 2016 but in the election cycles that preceded it. That’s giving Democrats a sense of what is possible. After November 7, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released an expanded list of 91 House districts that it will target in the drive to win the 24 seats needed to take back the chamber. Among the 11 new districts on the list was that of House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Carl Bildt at The Washington Post writes—How Donald Trump is making things worse in the Middle East:
The Trump administration has now revealed its Middle East strategy for all to see. The Europeans aren’t happy.
So far, at least, the United States has decided to focus on fighting extremism and checking Iran. The best way to achieve these aims, the White House has decided, is by deepening its previous reliance on its regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to the exclusion of just about everything else.
It should come as little surprise that both Riyadh and Tel Aviv are thrilled by the shift. Both countries are busily using their influence with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner to push their advantages as far as possible.
Consider the ill-advised Saudi intervention in Yemen. It started under the Obama administration, which occasionally tried to warn the Saudis that they were going too far. Under President Trump, however, even these cautious criticisms have ceased entirely. Instead, Washington seems to be stepping up its efforts to support the ill-fated war. The result has been a military quagmire and a humanitarian disaster of extraordinary proportions.
Then there’s Qatar.
Danny Sjursen at TruthDig writes—Lies We Tell Ourselves:
Seven of my soldiers are dead. Two committed suicide. Bombs got the others in Iraq and Afghanistan. One young man lost three limbs. Another is paralyzed. I entered West Point a couple of months before 9/11. Eight of my classmates died “over there.”
Military service, war, sacrifice—when I was 17, I felt sure this would bring me meaning, adulation, even glory. It went another way. Sixteen years later, my generation of soldiers is still ensnared in an indecisive, unfulfilling series of losing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Niger—who even keeps count anymore? Sometimes, I allow myself to wonder what it’s all been for.
I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who sees it. Nonetheless, you hear few dissenting voices among the veterans of the “global war on terror.” See, soldiers are all “professionals” now, at least since Richard Nixon ditched the draft in 1973. Mostly the troops—especially the officers—uphold an unwritten code, speak in esoteric vernacular and hide behind a veil of reticence. It’s a camouflage wall as thick as the “blue line” of police silence. Maybe it’s necessary to keep the machine running. I used to believe that. Sometimes, though, we tell you lies. Don’t take it personally: We tell them to each other and ourselves as well. [...]
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The Cause and Consequences of the Retail Apocalypse. Private equity firms overburdened businesses with debt, and now workers are paying the price. Will policymakers do anything about it?
The Macy’s near my house is closing early next year. The mall where it’s located has seen less and less foot traffic over the years, and losing its anchor store could set off a chain reaction. Cities across the country are facing this uncertainty, with over 6,700 scheduled store closings; it’s become known as the retail apocalypse.
This story is at odds with the broader narrative about business in America: The economy is growing, unemployment is low, and consumer confidence is at a decade-long high. This would typically signal a retail boom, yet the pain rivals the height of the Great Recession. RadioShack, The Limited, Payless, and Toys“R”Us are among 19 retail bankruptcies this year. Some point to Amazon and other online retailers for wrestling away market share, but e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2017 only hit 8.9 percent of total sales. There’s still plenty of opportunity for retail outlets with physical space.
The real reason so many companies are sick, as Bloomberg explained in a recent feature, has to do with debt. Private equity firms purchased numerous chain retailers over the past decade, loading them up with unsustainable debt payments as part of a disastrous business strategy.
Billions of dollars of this debt comes due in the next few years. “If today is considered a retail apocalypse,” Bloomberg reported, “then what’s coming next could truly be scary.” Eight million American retail workers could see their careers evaporate, not due to technological disruption but a predatory financial scheme. The masters of the universe who devised it, meanwhile, will likely walk away enriched, and policymakers must reckon with how they enabled the carnage.
David Lazarus at The Los Angeles Times writes—Swamp deepens as Trump names former drug industry exec to be health secretary:
Alex Azar, President Trump’s pick to serve as Health and Human Services secretary, represents everything wrong with the incestuous relationship that often exists between government officials and the industries they oversee.
This is a guy who, after being active in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, landed a plum job with the Department of Health and Human Services despite being a lawyer with no background in healthcare.
He’s a guy who, in the grand tradition of Washington revolving doors, jumped ship to become the top lobbyist for a drug company he previously regulated.
Now he’s on his way back to run the agency he used to fight, where he’ll be charged with keeping tabs on the company that, for a decade, paid his bills.
Swampy? You bet.
“This certainly simplifies the industry’s lobbying,” said John C. Coffee Jr., director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “It eliminates the middleman.”
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Republicans: Enrage your colleagues: Say “no” to a tax bill that would impose real sacrifice on your constituents:
The GOP bill that should be called the Cut Taxes on President Trump and Other Very Rich People Act of 2017 always had a secondary purpose: to jack up the deficit so Republicans could later cry out in horror, “Look at that awful debt!” They would then use the pools of red ink they created to justify deep cuts in social programs. [...]
Let’s take a step back and ponder the exceptional irresponsibility of what’s transpiring here. The same people who complained that more than a year of hearings, analysis and debate around Obamacare constituted “rushing” the bill are now recklessly spiriting through the system a gigantic piece of legislation that would touch all corners of the American economy.
They are changing it willy-nilly, day by day, to accommodate this or that political problem. They are rationalizing their thrown-together product with false claims about everything from whom it will benefit to how it will affect the long-term deficit. They are using a tax bill to punish their political enemies (people in high-tax blue states, major universities, low-income Americans) and reward their friends and donors (corporations and the very affluent).
And the allegations of outrageous past conduct by Roy Moore, their Senate candidate in Alabama, and the shifting stories about all things Russian from Attorney General Jeff Sessions are consuming so much media energy that these truly radical policies and procedural abuses are floating by with minimal public scrutiny.