Donald Trump did a rally for his rival yesterday.
John Bel Edwards, Democrat, Reelected Governor In LouisianaPost + Comments (89)
Cheryl Rofer wrote at Balloon Juice from 2017-21.
Cheryl is a retired chemist who has has been particularly active with nuclear policy. Cheryl has her own blog, Nuclear Diner, and she also posts at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Twitter: @CherylRofer
Donald Trump did a rally for his rival yesterday.
John Bel Edwards, Democrat, Reelected Governor In LouisianaPost + Comments (89)
This post is in: Open Threads, Tax Policy, Warren for President 2020
Here’s my first contribution from this side of things. Let’s see if it works.
So far today, two billionaires have become very upset.
I took a screenshot of the Blankfein tweet because I figured that someone would tell him about the racism and he would take it down, but it’s been up for four hours now.
Elizabeth Warren Is Doing Something RightPost + Comments (118)
Donald Trump has wondered why the United States didn’t take Iraq’s oil to pay for our invasion. He has insisted that the United States must TAKE THE OIL!
The United States didn’t take the oil because pillaging, theft during war, is a war crime (more here). If a practical reason is needed, oil production and pipelines are extremely vulnerable to sabotage and military action. A continuing military presence would be needed to protect the seized oilfields. Trump seems to believe that the oil can be rapidly pumped from the ground and removed. It can’t.
Trump came into office promising to get American troops out of the Middle East. Many people support that goal. We have been in Afghanistan for eighteen years now. It’s not clear that our presence in the region has improved American security, and now our Saudi partners are dragging us into a war in Yemen.
But Trump knows nothing about military action or our relations with the countries in the region and refuses to learn. Nor does he care to use the decision-making aids available to the President. He has some longstanding prejudices, however, along with his willingness to make decisions impulsively.
After a telephone conversation with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Trump broadcast his decision via tweet to remove American troops from northeast Syria. The withdrawal leaves the Kurds vulnerable to the Turks, who want the Kurds out of the way. Trump assured us that Erdoğan would not harm the Kurds; he would punish Erdoğan with sanctions if he did.
Then Trump changed his mind and sent Erdoğan a letter that sounded like it came from a middle-school bully. Not all the troops were withdrawn. Some were sent to Saudi Arabia. And now the military is concerned that Trump may want to send them all back.
Trump’s ignorance and impulsiveness in this matter have caused problems from the logistical to the constitutional.
Trump’s tweet surprised the American military. They appear to have had no plans for withdrawal, although Trump has been talking about it since his campaign. A case can be made that withdrawal from northeastern Syria, particularly as abruptly as Trump required, is the wrong thing to do. But the military is subject to the civilian Commander-in-Chief, and they should have made a plan. It’s a bit puzzling, because the military is famous for having plans for actions as improbable as invading Canada.
Trump should have known that armies cannot withdraw from combat in the space of time it takes to send a tweet, or even over a few days. Trump could have instructed the military to make plans for withdrawal at the beginning of his presidency, since that was one of his promises. A plan would have dealt with how to protect the Kurds and how long a withdrawal would be likely to take under various circumstances. It could have even covered protecting the oil.
Military and other advisors seem to have used the idea of taking the oil to convince Trump to maintain a presence in the area after his tweet. Trump feels no obligation to the Kurds, and seems convinced that ISIS is defeated and cannot return. But he does want to take the oil. A National Guard unit from South Carolina is now guarding northeast Syria’s tiny oilfields with armored vehicles unsuited to dealing with ISIS.
This corrupts the chain of command. The President made a decision. The military is supposed to take his orders. But they and others have argued back and effectively rescinded the decision, although the troops now in place have a different mission than before. Trump began the corruption by ignoring the National Security Council process for decision-making that would have taken recommendations from the military, the State Department, and others before the decision was made.
Nobody seems now to know what the mission is. Protecting the oilfields is the stated reason the National Guard troops are there. Are there American rules of engagement for encounters with Syrian government troops? Turkish troops? ISIS? Russian troops? Is any of this consistent with the existing Authorization for the Use of Military Force?
Once upon a time, wars in the Middle East were cynically characterized as “blood for oil.” Now that charge is irrefutable, supported by the words of the President.
A Pentagon spokesperson says that the income from oil wells in the Kurdish areas will go to the Kurds. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the United States from “taking the oil.” Trump has said that he wants American companies to develop the oilfields, but they have no interest in doing that illegally, nor in a combat zone.
Trump knows nothing of international law, the geology of northeast Syria, the production of oil, or loyalty to allies. He sees the American military as a profit center. The number of American troops in Syria has remained constant since his pronouncement, but their mission has become less clear. Trump’s ego demands that he proclaim some sort of victory. His ignorance results in inappropriate decision-making by the Department of Defense. He can’t even achieve his own objective of removing the troops from the Middle East.
He is unfit to be president.
This post is in: Open Threads, Russia, Trump Crime Cartel, Our Failed Media Experiment
It’s not enough that Donald Trump extorted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to manufacture dirt on the Bidens if he wanted the military aid he desperately needed to continue to defend eastern Ukraine. To add insult to injury, a bunch of American journalists who know nothing about Ukraine have descended on Kyiv to report on how all this affects the United States, with maybe a little local color and perhaps a misstep from Zelensky.
Christopher Miller, who is based in Ukraine and has been reporting from there for years, has had it with the parachuted-in journalistic troops.
Besides hounding Zelensky, reporters have also bombarded those of us who’ve reported in Ukraine for years. “Hey! Love your Ukraine reporting! Wanna grab a coffee or a drink?” they’ve said — code for “Tell me all your secrets and give me your sources, and I’ll put your $1 Lvivske beer on the company card.” And when we’ve offered contacts — some whose trust we’ve spent years trying to earn — these outsiders have bombarded them with queries too, and often mischaracterized their words, actions that ultimately forced many underground.
The reporters come flying in like flaming meteorites. And they leave with the earth scorched behind them.
Do they even care? That’s not me wondering (although I do wonder); it’s the many Ukrainians whom I see every day asking me for insight into just what the fuck is going on. They’re worried about the picture that reporters and talking heads are painting of their country of 40 million people, which is struggling to root out corruption, trying to jumpstart its economy, and fighting for literal survival in a war fueled by an authoritarian ruler — Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who is hell-bent on seeing it collapse. And a scan of US media suggests their concerns are warranted.
I have great sympathy for this, having been anywhere from annoyed to horrified at articles on Estonia, a place I know quite a bit about that is perhaps even more obscure to American reporters than Ukraine. I’m having a flashback to a New York Times article about Sillamäe, the town where I helped get an enormous tailings pond cleaned up. There were a number of things wrong or questionable about the town and the processing plant that had caused the environmental problems – I don’t recall them all. The most inexcusable error, though, was the claim that the reporter had seen the lights of Narva across the bay from Sillamäe. Nope. No way. He never even looked at a map.
Highway 1 (E20 in Russia) goes more or less straight east to Narva, the town that our newsies like to use as the place that the Russian invasion/ subversion will take place. I disagree with that, but will do so at length some other time.
What probably confused our intrepid reporter was that the lights he saw were from Narva-Jõesuu, which means “the mouth of the Narva River,” which he would have known if he had learned just a little bit of Estonian. (“Is it like Russian?” “No.”)
Narva-Jõesuu is a resort town, and Narva is a typical city. Narva-Jõesuu lost much of its clientele when the border between Estonia and Russia (the Narva River in this area) became less passable. Narva has a couple of cool castles glaring across the river at each other, though.
Anyhoo, take what American reporters write about Ukraine with a grain of salt, and think about the real people who live in Ukraine and are trying to deal with some very difficult issues.
Open thread!
This post is in: Russia, Something Good Open Thread, War
As the world watched the Soviet Union breaking apart in the late 1980s – early 1990s, there was much fear that things could go badly wrong and even escalate to nuclear war.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, had introduced reforms that he believed would reinvigorate the Soviet economy. But movements in the satellites, like Solidarity in Poland, wanted independence. There were similar movements in the Soviet republics. Those movements used Gorbachev’s reforms for their own interests.
This month is the 30th anniversary of Gorbachev’s releasing the satellites – Poland, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany – from Soviet rule. Two years later, the 15 Soviet republics became independent countries.
Hard-liners in Moscow would have used force to prevent those outcomes. There were some clashes with the Soviet internal police, OMON, and military forces were ordered into some of the republics as demonstrations took place. But Gorbachev decided against major force and allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve, even though it was not the outcome he wanted.
The United States has become too accustomed to using force to solve problems. Russia has become an international spoiler, looking for ways to create chaos. With 14,000 nuclear weapons between them, this is unsustainable.
Gorbachev is speaking out.
And Don’t build a wall between Russia and the West.
He will always be a hero to me for handling the Soviet Union’s breakup peacefully. Not so much in Russia, where that breakup led to misery for many.
What he’s saying isn’t outstandingly new, but it’s always worth hearing, especially from someone who stared war in the face and walked away.
This post is in: NANCY SMASH!, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Democratic Cowardice
Yesterday Nancy Pelosi had to balance out her strong showing on Colbert by once again attacking the “left wing” of the Democratic Party.
NEW: Speaker Pelosi warns her party’s presidential hopefuls that ideas like Medicare For All and free college may fire up the left but won’t beat Trump.
“Remember November,” she says. “You must win the Electoral College.”https://t.co/A0BVnTxsov
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 2, 2019
There’s a whole thread there. It’s the usual – don’t go for Medicaid for All or anything else that might fire up the base. Remember those folks in the Midwest diners!
There are so many things wrong with that.
I would like to hear Pelosi’s basis for this. I would like to see polling data. I would like to see a strategy for getting the votes.
That she presents none of this – just her concern that the Democrats not be too lefty for the San Francisco liberal she claims to be – makes me suspicious that she is simply enunciating the deep lack of confidence that many older Democrats feel, partly justifiably. But they need to ask whether times have changed.
Her comments occasioned lively discussions on Twitter. One of the things I observed is that people worry about other people being turned off by things like M4A, even though they themselves back social justice measures. This is where I would like to see polling data. Do those imagined people exist outside of media scolds? For example,
I fear this is poison in the key states. https://t.co/KcGdnFlRgs
— Kim Masters (@kimmasters) November 3, 2019
A confounding variable, even if there were data, would be the presence of unconscious racism or sexism. Polling can fail to uncover this. And some of the “lefty” things that Pelosi and others are worried about have to do with racism and sexism, which we are not to speak of because they make people uncomfortable.
That’s a difficult conundrum. Many voters are women and people of color. Pelosi, in that Twitter thread is quoted as saying “What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan. What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”
Which workers? Ideally, all of them. But the pitch for workers that Trump has made has been to white male workers in extractive industries. The workers in San Francisco are more likely to be women of color who work in health care. Their interests are different. Workers’ rights and wages should be part of the campaign, but the specifics will touch on that unconscious racism and sexism and thus be too lefty.
Pelosi is also doubtful about a Green New Deal because it would eliminate fossil fuels. It may be the timeline that she is objecting to, or it may be displacing those Trumpian laborers; it’s not clear. But yes, we have to eliminate fossil fuels, and the faster, the better.
I keep thinking about that San Francisco-y song, “The Times, They Are A-Changing.” Yes, let’s fire up the base to get them to vote in the general election and maybe drag along those young voters who feel they and their future are being ignored. Let’s present a vision of the future that people can sign on to. Trump has trashed the government. We’ve got an opportunity to build something better than what we had before.
This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads
More of this, please!
The only places Trump is not likely to get booed at are his own rallies & maybe white evangelical churches. Wide swaths of the population see him as toxic.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 3, 2019
All my NYC people say he’s loathed there. One read he’s leaving reputedly is his attorneys got through to him about inherent jury pool bias.
— GeorgeWilliamHerbert (@GeorgeWHerbert) November 3, 2019
yeah, I know. perhaps unfairly I thought the political makeup of a ufc crowd might self-select differently, and I feel bad about that now
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) November 3, 2019
Open Thread: Trump Gets Booed At Ultimate Fighting ChampionshipPost + Comments (110)