Monday, April 9, 2018

Sweet and secret financial rescue

Judd Legum on Twitter summarizes an article from Think Progress. Jared Kushner, the nasty guy’s son-in-law who works in the White House but can’t get security clearance, owns an office building in Manhattan. He supposedly “divested” it when he started working at the WH, but not really. The building is outdated, has a high vacancy rate, it is bleeding money, and a $1.2 billion mortgage comes due in 10 months. He bought it just before the Great Recession. The Chinese, Qataris, and a few others have refused to rescue Kushner’s investment. But somebody has! No idea who.

Big question: Who wants to, and can, spend $1.2 billion on a bad investment to receive the thanks of the son-in-law of the nasty guy?



A big spending bill was passed last month. Since the GOP wanted to boost military spending Democrats were able to get a boost to all the agencies to help the poor and working class. The nasty guy signed it, grumbling about Democrats all the way.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports the nasty guy and the GOP are now working out how to undo all that spending that Dems bargained into the bill. They have a few options.

* The nasty guy could freeze spending on a budget line item. He can do that for 45 days in which Congress is working (which actually spreads it out over months).

* He could ask Congress to vote on these freezes. Those need only a majority to pass, no filibuster. But Republicans would have a hard time before voters if they vote for programs that help their constituents and then vote against them.

* Or he could simply not spend the money. He already has a record of doing that. And the GOP already has a record of ignoring him when he does it.



This is a curious dynamic…

Markos, the head of Daily Kos, explains: Among GOP voters the nasty guy’s approval rating is pretty steady at above 80%, currently at 88%. Yet the approval of the GOP Speaker of the House and GOP Majority Leader in the Senate has stayed pretty low. Both, according to GOP voters, are under 25%. How do Ryan and McConnell campaign to keep their jobs?
But if you’re a congressional Republican, with a demoralized and dejected base and nothing of substance to run on, what do you do? You can’t really talk about a tax law that has done nothing for rank-and-file voters. You can’t talk about repealing Obamacare, because oh yeah, that didn’t happen. You can’t talk about reining in deficits, because unified Republican control of Congress has now delivered trillion-dollar deficits through Trump’s entire term. You can’t even talk about competent governance, because every budget in the Trump era has needed Democratic votes to pass, hence giving the minority party outsized power!
The one thing they can run on: They put the nasty guy on the ballot by saying if you voters let Democrats take over Congress they’ll impeach the guy you love. Even though you hate Ryan and McConnell you had better vote for them.

So the one thing Dems are not campaigning on is impeachment. Why help the GOP base? With that out of the way there is a lot the Dems can campaign on – which is everything else.



Recently on the TV show Late Night with Seth Meyers political reporter McKay Coppins, who writes for The Atlantic, revealed that the nasty guy sometimes calls him and will say the next bit should be attributed to “a senior White House official.” And Coppins will print it.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville finds this alarming. That’s because the nasty guy is a compulsive liar. Which means Coppins and his fellow journalists are enabling those lies.

We’ve heard stories of the chronic chaos and incompetence in the White House with relentless leaking. Now consider that the leaks and stories of chaos are from the nasty guy. McEwan concludes:
We are vulnerable because we are being denied relevant information — namely that Donald Trump is feeding lies to the media who then report those lies as though they may be true.

We are vulnerable because we have an expectation of safety and security and normalcy, all of which Trump has undermined and continues to subvert with the assistance of the compliant cadre of stenographers who have abandoned all pretense of challenging power on behalf of the powerless.

We are vulnerable — and we are fucked. Because our president is a goddamned liar, and, instead of reporting that, the media endeavors to conceal it.

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