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Why the Presidency Can’t Just Go Back to ‘Normal’ After Trump
The “norms and traditions” that Trump has incinerated aren’t timeless features of American democracy; they’re actually quite new—and brittle.
Under President John F. Kennedy, the Department of Justice approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. and ordered the IRS to audit Richard Nixon, JFK’s once and presumed future opponent. On President Lyndon B. Johnson’s watch, the FBI illegally bugged King’s hotel rooms, attempted to blackmail him into suicide, and famously infiltrated and attempted to sabotage the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Under LBJ, the CIA also ran extensive, extralegal sabotage of domestic political organizations, while the FBI placed violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.
President Nixon, whose abuses of office are well-documented, instructed the IRS to audit wealthy Jewish Democrats, whom he privately denounced as “cocksuckers.” At White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s request, the agency subjected Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington Post’s attorney in the Pentagon Papers case, to three consecutive audits. (“I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’ … position after this election,” Nixon told his staff members. “I think we’re going to fix the son-of-a-bitch. Believe me. We’re going to. We’ve got to, because he’s a bad man.”) On the advice of Pat Buchanan, a conservative White House speechwriter, Nixon ordered the IRS to investigate the finances of liberal organizations like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution; the agency complied, compiling data on over 1,000 institutions and 4,000 individual citizens.
It wasn’t just the IRS. When news of the highly secret bombing campaign in Cambodia broke on the pages of the New York Times in late 1969, then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered FBI wiretaps on 13 of his own aides and four journalists. When even the FBI balked at tapping the phone of Joseph Kraft, a highly respected syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser, hired a private detective to do the job without the cloak of legal authority.
Nixon also ordered the FBI, CIA and NSA to surveil New Left organizations and instructed the Justice Department to arrest several thousand anti-war protesters who marched on Washington, D.C., in May 1971. The federal courts overturned many of the convictions. But the judges did not know the half of it. Coordinating the arrests from the Oval Office, Nixon heartily approved of plans by Charles Colson, a top political aide, to have rank-and-file teamsters rough up the protesters before their detention. “They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” the president beamed. Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, confirmed this point. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do … they’re going to beat the shit out of some of these people.”
In the wake of Nixon’s disgrace, Congress undertook a sweeping investigation of these abuses, leading to new congressional oversight mechanisms and restrictions on FBI and CIA political activity.
All of which is to say, the idea of independent agencies staffed by nonpartisan career public servants, free of political interference, is a very recent development. Once unraveled, it is not certain to be reassembled.
More at www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/15/why-presidency-cant-go-back-
normal-trump-115362
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why the Presidency Can’t Just Go Back to ‘Normal’ After Trump
The “norms and traditions” that Trump has incinerated aren’t timeless features of American democracy; they’re actually quite new—and brittle.
Under President John F. Kennedy, the Department of Justice approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. and ordered the IRS to audit Richard Nixon, JFK’s once and presumed future opponent. On President Lyndon B. Johnson’s watch, the FBI illegally bugged King’s hotel rooms, attempted to blackmail him into suicide, and famously infiltrated and attempted to sabotage the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Under LBJ, the CIA also ran extensive, extralegal sabotage of domestic political organizations, while the FBI placed violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.
President Nixon, whose abuses of office are well-documented, instructed the IRS to audit wealthy Jewish Democrats, whom he privately denounced as “cocksuckers.” At White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman’s request, the agency subjected Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington Post’s attorney in the Pentagon Papers case, to three consecutive audits. (“I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’ … position after this election,” Nixon told his staff members. “I think we’re going to fix the son-of-a-bitch. Believe me. We’re going to. We’ve got to, because he’s a bad man.”) On the advice of Pat Buchanan, a conservative White House speechwriter, Nixon ordered the IRS to investigate the finances of liberal organizations like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution; the agency complied, compiling data on over 1,000 institutions and 4,000 individual citizens.
It wasn’t just the IRS. When news of the highly secret bombing campaign in Cambodia broke on the pages of the New York Times in late 1969, then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger ordered FBI wiretaps on 13 of his own aides and four journalists. When even the FBI balked at tapping the phone of Joseph Kraft, a highly respected syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser, hired a private detective to do the job without the cloak of legal authority.
Nixon also ordered the FBI, CIA and NSA to surveil New Left organizations and instructed the Justice Department to arrest several thousand anti-war protesters who marched on Washington, D.C., in May 1971. The federal courts overturned many of the convictions. But the judges did not know the half of it. Coordinating the arrests from the Oval Office, Nixon heartily approved of plans by Charles Colson, a top political aide, to have rank-and-file teamsters rough up the protesters before their detention. “They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” the president beamed. Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, confirmed this point. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do … they’re going to beat the shit out of some of these people.”
In the wake of Nixon’s disgrace, Congress undertook a sweeping investigation of these abuses, leading to new congressional oversight mechanisms and restrictions on FBI and CIA political activity.
All of which is to say, the idea of independent agencies staffed by nonpartisan career public servants, free of political interference, is a very recent development. Once unraveled, it is not certain to be reassembled.
More at www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/15/why-presidency-cant-go-back-
normal-trump-115362
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Trump didn't start that fire. GWB did. Obama ran with it.
Let's stop re-writing history here.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America’s monopoly problem, explained by your internet bill
We should be asking the government and corporate America how we got here. Instead, we just keep handing over our money.
Seriously, be mad about your internet bill.
In 2019, New York University economist Thomas Philippon did a deep dive into market concentration and monopolies in The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. And one of his touch points for the book is the internet. Looking at the data, he found that the United States has fallen behind other developed economies in broadband penetration and that prices are significantly higher. In 2017, the average monthly cost of broadband in America was $66.17; in France, it was $38.10, in Germany, $35.71, and in South Korea, $29.90. How did this happen? In his view, a lot of it comes down to competition — or, rather, lack thereof.
That’s where the government could come in by regulating the network or forcing the company that built it to lease out parts of it to rivals. As Philippon notes, that’s what happened in France — an incumbent carrier was compelled to lease out the “last mile” of its network — basically, the last bit of cable that gets to your hours or apartment building — and therefore letting competitors have a chance at also appealing to customers.
In the US, however, just a few big companies, often without overlap, control much of the telecom industry, and the result is high prices and uneven connectivity.
Experts and advocates have laid out a range of ideas for restoring healthy competition in the economy. Some of it would entail new laws, which, given the current state of affairs in Washington, seems unlikely — Congress can barely agree to fund the government, let alone enact a major overhaul of the workings of the US economy. But it has happened in the past. “What happened in the New Deal was a systemic attack on every aspect of the old order, and the old order was somewhat similar to what we have now,” Stoller noted.
Competition is lacking across countless industries, including baby formula, agriculture, candy, beer, just to name some examples. When you look, monopolies and oligopolies (meaning instead of one dominant company, there are a few) are everywhere. They’re a systemic feature of the economy.
More at www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/18/21126347/antitrust-monopolies-internet
-telecommunications-cheerleading
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
My monthly internet bill is $20. That's $10 less than South Korea.
Not only are their different tiers of service, and many Americans are paying for higher tiers than they're ever going to use, but there are also discounts for setting up auto-pay, paperless billing and doing a contract.
I wasn't even aware of this and had been paying $50 per month for years, month to month without any of the discounts.
All it took was one 20 minute call to Customer Retention and I'm now paying little more than I would be paying if my service were subsidized (which requires proving you have a child on the student lunch program in school).
If you feel you're paying too much, which you almost certainly are, call and ask for the Customer Retention department and see what they have to offer you.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Per your usual, you completely missed the point about monopolies charging high prices for inferior products. It's one of those things that Congress and the President either take care of or else, when the GOP has any control in either the Senate or the White House, it is not taken care of.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My monthly internet bill is $20. That's $10 less than South Korea.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Given the increased White House involvement in judicial matters, Yale University's Timothy Snyder, a historian and author who has devoted much of his career to understanding the rise of tyranny in different parts of the world, sits down with Ana Cabrera to discuss his concerns about a worrying trend taking root in the U.S.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Senator Mitch McConnell is about to plunge the Senate into the nation’s culture wars with votes on bills to sharply restrict access to late-term abortions and threaten some doctors who perform them with criminal penalties, signaling that Republicans plan to make curbing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy a central theme of their re-election campaigns this year.
Mr. McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, is expected to bring the bills up for votes on Tuesday. Both lack the necessary 60-vote supermajority to advance, and the Senate has voted previously to reject them.
But by putting them on the floor again, Mr. McConnell hopes to energize the social conservatives who helped elect Mr. Trump and whose enthusiasm will be needed to help Republicans hold on to the Senate this year, while forcing vulnerable Democrats to take uncomfortable votes on bills that frame abortion as infanticide. The rhetoric around the measures is hot; Mr. Trump, for instance, has pointed to one of the bills to falsely assert that Democrats favor “executing babies AFTER birth.”
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mcconnell-looking-to-energize-social-c
onservatives-forces-votes-on-abortion/ar-BB10looV?ocid=spartanntp
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Bernie and the Filibuster
During a conversation on gun control, wherein former Vice President Joe Biden bragged about beating the NRA in the ’90s, he said he’d do it again as president. What he didn’t mention is that the Obama administration repeatedly sought, and failed, to pass gun control in the aftermath of horrific mass shootings. Biden was part of that effort, and he was unsuccessful. It fell to Warren to explain why:
We have to talk about what it’s really going to take to get something done. I’ve been in the Senate. What I’ve seen is gun safety legislation introduced, get a majority, and then doesn’t pass because of the filibuster. Understand this: The filibuster is giving a veto to the gun industry. It gives a veto to the oil industry. It’s going to give a veto on immigration. Until we’re willing to dig in and say that if Mitch McConnell is going to do to the next Democratic president what he did to President Obama, and that is try to block every single thing he does, that we are willing to roll back the filibuster, go with the majority vote, and do what needs to be done for the American people. Understand this: Many people on this stage do not support rolling back the filibuster. Until we’re ready to do that, we won’t have change.
Warren is right, on all counts. Among those who oppose rolling back the filibuster are Biden, and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar.
Pete Buttigieg tried to press the point a few minutes later, saying:
I want to come back to the question of the filibuster because this is not some long-ago bad vote that Bernie Sanders took. This is a current bad position that Bernie Sanders holds. And we’re in South Carolina. How are we going to deliver a revolution if you won’t even support a filibuster rule change?
Sanders got the next word and, again, ignored the issue. The tension between Sanders’s revolutionary rhetoric and his more institutionalist approach to Senate rules on the filibuster is unexplored in his candidacy, but would be a serious problem for his presidency. The only place he has sought to resolve it is Medicare-for-all, where he’s offered a complex plan to use the budget reconciliation process by instructing his vice president to try overturning the Senate parliamentarian’s rulings. But since Senator Bernie won’t support ending the filibuster, President Bernie won’t have Medicare-for-All. The filibuster will bloody murder any hope Bernie and his supporters have about a transformative Presidency. Senator Bernie should murder the filibuster, but he won’t do it because he is a fake revolutionary.
www.vox.com/2020/2/25/21153846/filibuster-south-carolina-debate-democr
atic-primary-2020
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Per your usual, you completely missed the point about monopolies charging high prices for inferior products. It's one of those things that Congress and the President either take care of or else, when the GOP has any control in either the Senate or the White House, it is not taken care of.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My monthly internet bill is $20. That's $10 less than South Korea.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Yup. I clearly remember Obama being known for all of that monopoly busting he did.
Oh... wait...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, you never stop missing the point, do you? Trump is Doubling Down on Obama and Bush's Legacy of Going Soft on Antitrust Problems. If you keep missing the point, 6ix, you will end up dead sooner rather than later. While thinking about that, go have a smoke, then suddenly realize you must give up smoking.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Per your usual, you completely missed the point about monopolies charging high prices for inferior products. It's one of those things that Congress and the President either take care of or else, when the GOP has any control in either the Senate or the White House, it is not taken care of.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My monthly internet bill is $20. That's $10 less than South Korea.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Yup. I clearly remember Obama being known for all of that monopoly busting he did.
Oh... wait...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.vice.com/en_us/article/evmqye/trump-is-doubling-down-on-obama-and-
bushs-legacy-of-going-soft-on-antitrust-problems
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you never stop missing the point, do you? Trump is Doubling Down on Obama and Bush's Legacy of Going Soft on Antitrust Problems. If you keep missing the point, 6ix, you will end up dead sooner rather than later. While thinking about that, go have a smoke, then suddenly realize you must give up smoking.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Per your usual, you completely missed the point about monopolies charging high prices for inferior products. It's one of those things that Congress and the President either take care of or else, when the GOP has any control in either the Senate or the White House, it is not taken care of.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My monthly internet bill is $20. That's $10 less than South Korea.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Yup. I clearly remember Obama being known for all of that monopoly busting he did.
Oh... wait...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.vice.com/en_us/article/evmqye/trump-is-doubling-down-on-obama-and-
bushs-legacy-of-going-soft-on-antitrust-problems
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I like smoking. I have zero plans on quitting.
I'm not missing the point. You just made it for me.
There isn't anybody on that Democrat debate stage that is going to do a goddamned thing about breaking up monopolies, so in light of the fact that Democrats are just awful in every other thing they say or do I'm going to be voting for Republicans.
Hopefully when they lose both the popular vote and the electoral college to Trump and get crushed in November, they'll start coming around and being a better party for the next cycle.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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