Last Call For Uncle Ben's House Of Pain

Meanwhile, the Trump regime continues to reverse every Obama-era policy it can find, and in the end few people in the cabinet will have done more damage to black people in America than HUD Secretary Ben Carson.

In a press release on Monday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development made its firmest commitment yet to tear down the Obama-era framework for enforcing the Fair Housing Act.

In a public notice dated Thursday, Aug. 9, HUD outlined its reasons for quashing the 2015 “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule (AFFH), which had been the strongest effort in decades to crack down on segregation and discriminatory practices in and by American cities and suburbs. HUD Secretary Ben Carson cited the Obama administration’s “unworkable requirements” in a statement, saying the rule “actually impeded the development and rehabilitation of affordable housing.” Under AFFH, Carson said, cities and other HUD grantees had “inadequate autonomy” according to his understanding of federalism.

Neither criticism, fair housing experts say, is accurate. The AFFH rule told cities to set fair housing goals, but not how to meet them. It was flexible on doctrinaire questions like: Should assistance go to people or places?

Neither did the rule seem likely to dampen the supply of affordable housing. “It’s important and worthwhile and corresponded to the importance of what it’s designed to do,” says Andrea Ponsor, the COO of Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future, which advocates for the preservation and production of affordable rental housing. “We were very supportive of the rule and we don’t feel like it had its opportunity to work yet.”

It's the usual conservative bromide: protections against discrimination are always bad for business.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Monday, Carson framed the change as a way to bolster housing production across the board. “I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” he told the paper. While it’s true that the affordability crisis is in part rooted in housing starts per capita hitting a 60-year low, the Fair Housing Act is intended to attack segregation, not scarcity.

That comment does not mesh with Carson’s established philosophy. In his only published commentary on housing policy before his appointment to HUD, he called the 2015 AFFH rule “social engineering” that would “fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas.” Fair housing advocates would have found that a dreamy, if outlandish scenario. Recipients of Community Development Block Grants have been required for decades to “affirmatively further fair housing,” but have rarely if ever been punished by HUD for not doing so.

A quick glance at the notice reveals that while the secretary contradicts himself, the outlines of a policy—to the extent they can be read that way—hew closely to conservative orthodoxy on housing, which is to reject federal efforts to demolish the walls that wealthy white suburbs have built. HUD’s new approach does not appear likely to increase production or decrease segregation. Instead, it poses a series of questions that appear almost painfully rudimentary on the heels of the Obama administration’s six-year effort to draft the AFFH rule (and 50 years of rampant local disregard for the FHA), such as:

• “Instead of a data-centric approach, should jurisdictions be permitted to rely upon their own experiences?”

• “How much deference should jurisdictions be provided in establishing objectives to address obstacles to identified fair housing goals, and associated metrics and milestones for measuring progress?”

One of HUD’s new goals is to “provide for greater local control,” a phrase understood to conjure the strict, racially-motivated land use laws that were developed by American suburbs to keep out minority populations.

So protecting affordable housing from discrimination is destroying affordable housing, the same way protecting lenders from discrimination by banks and mortgage shops "caused the 2008 Great Depression".  The "Community Reinvestment Act wrecked the economy because banks were forced to give loans to poor black and Latino people who couldn't afford them" is the worst zombie lie of the last decade.

Now Carson is resurrecting it to do the same thing to housing.  It's sickening.  But this is who the Trump regime is.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

With 83 days until the 2018 Midterm elections, it's time to check in with the Cook Political Report after primaries this week in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Vermont, and it's not just shaping up to be a Blue Wave in the House, it's a Blue Tsunami.

For Republicans, the 2018 House playing field is a lot like a game of Whack-a-Mole: everywhere they turn, new problems keep popping up in surprising places. In January, we rated 20 GOP-held seats as Toss Ups or worse, including three leaning towards Democrats. With today's changes, we now rate 37 GOP-held seats as Toss Ups or worse, including ten leaning towards Democrats.

Republicans are relieved that state Sen. Troy Balderson appears to have eked out a win in Ohio's 12th CD special election last week. But a new round of polls shows several more GOP incumbents, including Reps. Mimi Walters (CA-45) and Tom MacArthur (NJ-03) highly vulnerable. Their seats, along with Rep. Robert Pittenger's open NC-09, move from Lean Republican to the Toss Up column.

On the bright side for Republicans, a handful of their battle-tested incumbents appear to be defying the "blue wave" in Democratic-leaning seats. Recent campaign polling shows Reps. David Valadao (CA-21), Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), John Katko (NY-24) and Will Hurd (TX-23) with impressive initial leads in districts Hillary Clinton carried. This week, Curbelo moves from Toss Up to Lean Republican.

Here's the latest Cook chart:

Even if the Dems lose in PA-14, just by taking the ten GOP seats that now lean Dem and splitting the toss-ups 50/50 you get 22 seats, just shy of retaking the House.

Democrats will do a lot better than splitting the toss-ups.  Should the dam break as I expect it to with Dems getting 75% of the toss-ups, 50% of the lean GOP seats, and a quarter of the likely seats, that's somewhere around 45 seats, well more than enough to retake the House.

And should it be a 2010 bloodbath, that could turn into 60+ seats very quickly.  If the primary turnout last night was any indication, the Republicans are in dire straits.

While measuring primary turnout isn’t a perfect way to gauge how the general election will play out — primary voters, after all, don’t necessarily equal general-election voters — it’s unmistakable that more Democratic voters participated last night. (And while Scott Walker, for example, faced little opposition in his GOP primary in Wisconsin, there was a competitive Republican contest for Senate.) Here’s a look at the turnout in last night’s gubernatorial primaries: 

• Minnesota: Dem 580,962; GOP 319,276
• Wisconsin: Dem 537,840; GOP 456,007
• Connecticut: Dem 211,499; GOP 142,890
• Vermont: Dem 57,102; GOP 35,840

But that scenario only happens when we vote.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman predicts Trump will pardon Paul Manafort, and he's nearly assured to be correct in that assumption as Manafort's defense in his tax evasion trial has rested without calling a single witness.

Going on the stand himself was probably never under consideration, since cross-examination would have been a nightmare. It’s unclear whether Manafort had any fact witnesses who could refute the evidence that was offered in the prosecution’s case. And there may not be anyone around who would testify to Manafort’s sterling character, both because few people want to be associated with him today and because he has long been known as a particularly immoral schemer, almost a walking caricature of the mercenary lobbyist willing to do anything for a buck. It’s unclear whether, even if they had wanted to, his defense could find someone to stand up and say Manafort is a great guy who would never do the things he is accused of.

From the beginning, there has been a question hanging over Manafort’s case: Why won’t he flip? After all, other Trump aides have when faced with possible jail time, and Manafort is facing more than anyone. There’s a real possibility he’ll never see another day as a free man. One popular explanation is that he’s afraid that if he tells everything he knows, some people in Russia would become displeased enough to kill him. The oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whom Manafort supposedly owes $19 million, allegedly has links to a Russian organized crime group.

So Manafort may have decided that it’s better to take his chances with a jury than to find a strange substance smeared on his door handle one day. It’s also possible Manafort really has nothing to offer special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about Trump, that his activities, criminal though they might have been, never actually involved the president. That would mean he has no one to flip on.

So where does Trump fit in to all this if Manafort doesn't have incriminating evidence to give to Mueller?  Simple: Trump still has to pardon him.

But let’s imagine for a moment that he knows something incriminating about the president — or even that the president isn’t sure what Manafort knows, but suspects that he might know something. (This, by the way, is Adam Davidson’s extremely plausible theory of Russian kompromat: Trump acts the way he does toward Vladimir Putin not because he knows Putin has damaging information on him, but because he just isn’t sure what Putin might have.) Would Trump actually go so far as to pardon Manafort, given the firestorm of criticism he’d get?

There are some lines even Trump is unwilling to cross. For instance, while he complains loudly about Attorney General Jeff Sessions not being able to protect him by shutting down the Mueller investigation, so far he hasn’t actually fired Sessions and replaced him with someone more pliable, presumably at least in part because his aides have convinced him that doing so would be a political disaster.

At the same time, Trump has spent the past 15 months since Mueller was appointed trying to discredit the investigation, in a campaign designed less to persuade the broader public than to convince his base that it is a witch hunt from start to finish and therefore everything it produces, no matter how factual and supported by evidence, should be ignored and discounted. He has obviously calculated, and rightly so, that if he can keep that base firmly behind him, Republicans in the House will never vote to impeach him, and even if Democrats took control of the chamber and did so, Republicans in the Senate would never vote to convict.

You can already see the argument he’ll make: The whole thing is a witch hunt, the charges are bogus, the jury was a bunch of Angry Democrats, and I’m intervening in the interests of justice. Trump also seems to genuinely believe that the investigation is unfair, and pardoning Manafort would be a great way for him to both assert control and stick it to Mueller.

And this right here is why I believe Waldman is correct.  Trump will have to pardon Manafort in order to keep his base behind him.  The political kayfabe means Trump has to save Manafort from the evil witch hunt.  If he doesn't, he risks losing his base.  The second that happens, he's done.  And if he doesn't pardon Manafort now, he certainly will soon.

It’s important to remember that no matter what the jury in this case decides, it’s only the first of two trials Manafort faces. The next one, in a federal court in Washington, will deal more directly with Manafort’s relationships in the former Soviet Union. That’s when Trump may start feeling the heat and feeling oppressed, and look for a way to let everyone know who’s really in charge. And that’s the day Manafort, sitting in his jail cell, is fervently hoping for.

Manafort may end up serving some time, or remain free on appeal, as he faces his second trial, and that's scheduled to begin just about a month from now.  That's the one where Donald Trump could take real damage, and there's always the risk that Manafort, if convicted, will suddenly have every reason to tell Mueller everything he knows about Trump and Russia.  Trump may not have a political choice but to pardon Manafort on both federal cases.

Martin Longman makes the argument that a pardon won't help Trump.

Waldman thinks Trump will ultimately pardon Manafort, but only after the second trial which will cover his dealings with Ukrainians and Russians. The problem with this prediction is that Manafort needs charges hanging over him in order to invoke his right against self-incrimination. If he’s pardoned for most of what he could conceivably be charged with, he could be compelled to tell the special counsel what he knows or face fresh charges of contempt and obstruction of justice. Is he really going to count on Mueller to give up or Trump to counter every new charge with a fresh pardon?

Maybe things really will get this weird and broken, but I think the reason Manafort hasn’t already been preemptively pardoned is that it would not solve Trump’s problems and probably would exacerbate them. Even for congressional Republicans, there’s a limit to how nakedly Trump can obstruct the investigation and get away with it. He has not fired Jeff Sessions or Rod Rosenstein, for example, and he’d run into similar problems if he started pardoning Manafort for refusing to cooperate with investigators when he faces no prospect of self-incrimination.

Add to this that Manafort can still face state charges, particularly in New York State, and I don’t see the pardon card as much of an option for Trump. If he’s desperate enough, maybe he uses it and maybe Manafort can avoid spending his life in prison. But it would not solve Trump’s problems or make all Manafort’s problems go away.

That's true, but again, this theory relies on the GOP having an upper limit to Trump's mendacity.  Pardoning Manafort will cause problems, but Republicans will eventually shrug and get behind him, because otherwise the base will eviscerate them in November.  If I were Trump, I would definitely make this move before the midterms and dare the GOP not to do anything in his defense.

They've defended every action Trump has taken so far, and for the same reason, the GOP base is a cargo cult.

Anyway, we'll see.  I don't expect the jury will take long either way.

StupidiNews!

• Vermont Democrat Christine Hallquist will be the first major party transgender nominee for governor in the US, she'll face Republican Gov. Phill Scott in November.
• A natural gas explosion at a Denver apartment building injured ten and trapped several in the rubble, search crews are combing the scene for survivors.
• Pennsylvania has released a report detailing the results of a two-year investigation into seven decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and a systematic cover-up by bishops.
• Kansas GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer is conceding last week's primary to Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Colyer says that a recount will "not serve the people of Kansas".
• Intel's data security answer to speculative execution attacks discovered in January is itself vulnerable to a new speculative execution attack, according to experts.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump regime can't stop lying, and tens of millions will believe its every lie because they want to believe.  It's a cargo cult for America, and history tells us at the end of this road there's nothing but mass bloodshed.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders falsely claimed that President Donald Trump has created three times as many jobs for black workers as his predecessor Barack Obama did during his entire time in office.

Sanders asserted at a White House press briefing Tuesday that Trump had tripled Obama’s eight-year job creation record in just 18 months, quoting numbers that are not even close to accurate.

“This president since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders told reporters Tuesday. “That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans.”

The claim isn’t true, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Sanders backtracked hours later in a tweet. While the U.S. economy has added about 700,000 jobs held by black workers since Trump took office, it added about 3 million while Obama was in office, according to BLS data.

But it'll make your local news and you FOX-watching uncle will believe it until his dying day.  The regime lies with impunity and will continue to do so until it is deposed.

A Supreme Scandal In West Virginia, Con't

Last week I covered the growing state Supreme Court scandal in West Virginia, where the state House of Delegates, overwhelmingly under GOP control, was moving to impeach the entire state Supreme Court over lavish spending.  This week, the WV House of Delegates made good on their threat and voted to impeach all four remaining justices.

West Virginia lawmakers completed the extraordinary move of impeaching all four state Supreme Court justices Monday night for spending issues, including a suspended justice facing a 23-count federal indictment.

The state House of Delegates voted to impeach Justice Allen Loughry on eight articles, setting the stage for a trial in the state Senate.

Beth Walker became the final justice to be impeached when an article was approved stating all four justices abused their authority. It said they failed to control office expenses, including more than $1 million in renovations to their individual offices, and not maintaining policies over matters such as working lunches and the use of state vehicles and office computers at home.

Walker had dodged impeachment earlier Monday night when lawmakers decided to overlook her $131,000 in spending on office renovations. A short time later, another article was withdrawn against Chief Justice Margaret Workman, who spent $111,000 in renovations.

Justice Robin Davis was impeached for $500,000 in office renovations. And lawmakers approved articles against Loughry for spending $363,000 in renovations to his office; having a $42,000 antique desk and computers, all owned by the state, at his home; lying to the House Finance Committee about taking home the desk and a $32,000 suede leather couch; and for his personal use of state vehicles.

Loughry, Workman and Davis also were impeached for their roles in allowing senior status judges to be paid higher than allowed wages. Lawmakers say the overpayments violated state law and stopped when they were challenged by the Internal Revenue Service.

Another impeachment article was withdrawn dealing with an accusation Loughry used state money to frame personal items at his office.

Minority Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that approved the articles last week had tried to speed up the impeachment process in the hopes of beating an Aug. 14 deadline for arranging a special election in November if any justice is removed from office or leaves office. Instead, the committee took its time, even conducting a tour of the state Supreme Court offices earlier this month.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice will be allowed to appoint new justices to replace any who are impeached — with no requirement that they be from the same party as the incumbent.

 It's that last part that makes this a coup against the judicial in the state.  Still, despite the impeachment vote, at least one justice is retiring now in order to force a special election.

A West Virginia Supreme Court justice has announced her retirement just hours after her impeachment.Justice Robin Davis announced her departure Tuesday at the state Capitol, saying the citizens of West Virginia now “will be afforded their Constitutional right to elect my successor in November.”

That means two of the five justices will be up for special election in November, but it also means Justice can appoint the other three should the Senate trials result in removal from office.

Needless to say, there's a lot going on here, and this is an absolute mess.

The Social(ist) Network

There's a lot of screaming, laughing, and pointing from the right about this latest Gallup poll on Democrats and "socialism".

For the first time in Gallup's measurement over the past decade, Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism. Attitudes toward socialism among Democrats have not changed materially since 2010, with 57% today having a positive view. The major change among Democrats has been a less upbeat attitude toward capitalism, dropping to 47% positive this year -- lower than in any of the three previous measures. Republicans remain much more positive about capitalism than about socialism, with little sustained change in their views of either since 2010.

These results are from Gallup interviewing conducted July 30-Aug. 5. Views of socialism among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are particularly important in the current political environment because many observers have claimed the Democratic Party is turning in more of a socialist direction.

Socialist Bernie Sanders competitively challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, and more recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a candidate with similar policy views and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won the Democratic nomination in New York's 14th Congressional District. Several candidates with socialist leanings lost their primary bids in Aug. 7 voting, however, raising doubts about the depth of Democrats' embrace of socialism.

As several people have pointed out, "Socialism" to anyone older than myself means "The failed Soviet states, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and crippling poverty brought on by corrupt Communism" while "Socialism" to anyone younger than myself means "Scandinavia, the European Union, Australia, the UK, Canada, and a government that provides many basic services, the US being the one developed country on Earth that hasn't taken this route."

Right-wing bad faith critics all believe that Democrats want the former and not the latter, conveniently ignoring the fact that Europe and Oceania and our northern neighbor that we share thousands of miles of border with, you know, exist.

But that's how the right rolls, guffawing at the "stupid socialists" (You ever notice how Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is always called "stupid" or "ignorant" by these clowns?)

StupidiNews!

• The FBI is warning banks and credit unions that ATMs worldwide could be susceptible to hackers who could withdraw most, if not all cash in a machine.
• Cuba will overhaul its Constitution for the first time since 1976 as thousands will be able to vote for a new draft in 2019.
• The Trump regime's $716 billion defense bill rolls back US government controls on Chinese tech companies and authorizes spending on 77 new F-35 strike fighter jets.
• The Congressional Budget Office is cutting growth forecasts for the US based on increasing economic uncertainty due to US tariffs.
• Bitcoin has now lost two-thirds of its value from December highs of $20,000 to under $6,250 today as a broad selloff of cryptocurrency continues in 2018.

Last Call For Trump's State Media

FOX News is Trump State Media, and they're not even pretending anymore that there's any separation between the White House and the cable network.

It is “in the public interest” for the White House's top communicator to be excused from federal ethics laws so he can meet with Fox News, according to President Donald Trump’s top lawyer.

Bill Shine, Trump’s newly minted communications director, and Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economist, who worked at CNBC before his White House post, have both been excused from provisions of the law, which seeks to prevent administration officials from advancing the financial interests of relatives or former employers.

“The Administration has an interest in you interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

Kudlow, a former CNBC host, received a similar waiver allowing him to communicate with former colleagues.

Including Shine and Kudlow, the White House has granted a total of 20 waivers to provisions of various federal ethics laws and the ethics pledge that President Trump instituted by executive order the week he took office. Federal agencies have granted many more such waivers.

The news media has been a particular object of those waivers. Early in the administration, after The Daily Beast questioned the propriety of then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s communications with employees of Breitbart News, the pro-Trump outlet he led before and after his White House tenure, the White House issued a blanket ethics waiver allowing all senior West Wing appointees to freely communicate with the press.

That move was widely seen as an effort to retroactively cover Bannon for previous meetings that would’ve otherwise run afoul of ethics rules—a move that may itself have constituted a violation of those rules.

FOX News employees run the White House, and the White House runs FOX News.  Considering nearly half of Republicans want Trump to have the power to exterminate news organizations, it won't be long before FOX News is the only game left in DC.  Who will stop him?  A Roberts Court with Kavanaugh on board as the fifth vote?  A GOP Congress?  None of the checks and balances work right now.  Our last chance is November, and both sides know it.

Should Trump succeed in making sure the Democrats don't control the House or Senate in January, we're done as a nation and a republic.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who was one of the lead FBI investigators into the Trump-Russia case, has been fired by Trump-appointed Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich despite the agency policy recommending his temporary suspension.

The FBI has fired Agent Peter Strzok, who helped lead the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election until officials discovered he had been sending anti-Trump texts.

Aitan Goelman, Strzok’s lawyer, said FBI Deputy Director David L. Bowdich ordered the firing on Friday — even though the director of the FBI office that normally handles employee discipline had decided Strzok should face only a demotion and 60-day suspension. Goelman said the move undercuts the FBI’s repeated assurances that Strzok would be afforded the normal disciplinary process.

“This isn’t the normal process in any way more than name,” Goelman said.

The FBI declined to comment.

The termination marks a remarkable downfall for Strzok, a 22-year veteran of the bureau who investigated Russian spies, defense officials accused of selling secrets to China and myriad other important cases. In the twilight of his career, Strzok was integral to two of the bureau’s most high-profile investigations: the Russia case, and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

But when a Justice Department inspector general investigation uncovered politically charged messages that Strzok had exchanged with another FBI official, he was relegated to a position in human resources. Conservatives soon made Strzok the face of their attacks against the special counsel investigation into the president’s campaign, and the FBI took steps to remove him from its ranks.

The Trump regime finally got their head for the wall in a chilling message to the rest of the Justice Department: if you do your job and investigate this regime's criminality, you will be targeted and your career destroyed.  Add Strzok to the list along with Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and of course James Comey.

Strzok’s position in the bureau had been precarious since last summer, when Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz told Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III that the lead agent on his team had been exchanging anti-Trump messages with an FBI lawyer. The next day, Mueller expelled Strzok from the group.

The lawyer, Lisa Page, had also been a part of Mueller’s team, though she left a few weeks earlier and no longer works for the FBI. She and Strzok were having an affair.

President Trump has derided the pair as “FBI lovers,” and he and his conservative allies have pointed to their conduct in an attempt to discredit the Mueller probe. As recently as Saturday, Trump tweeted an attack on Strzok, Page and former FBI director James B. Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe.

“Will the FBI ever recover it’s once stellar reputation, so badly damaged by Comey, McCabe, Peter S and his lover, the lovely Lisa Page, and other top officials now dismissed or fired?” Trump wrote. “So many of the great men and women of the FBI have been hurt by these clowns and losers!”

This time though, Strzok has a case.  Trump has tweeted on more than one occasion that Strzok needed to be fired.  If I'm Goelman, I'm seeing if Trump violated civil service protections.

The bigger issue is of course firing agents investigating the White House because they said mean things about the White House in private.

Nobody's Business But The Turks, Con't

The Trump regime's economic sanctions and tariffs on Turkey this month has quickly gone from punishment over a detained US pastor to an economic wildfire in Ankara as the Turkish lira has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its value compared to the US dollar in just a few weeks.  But the main problem is Erdogan himself, who is treating this as an opportunity to remake Turkey's economic sector in his image by letting it be demolished.

Turkey is set for another week of financial-market turmoil with its face-off with the U.S. showing no sign of abating.

While officials in Ankara, Istanbul and Washington have the means to stem the mayhem that sent the lira down 25 percent in the past month, the will to deploy them was absent through much of the weekend, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan maintaining his defiance toward the U.S. and financial-market orthodoxy in speeches Sunday.

Pressured by U.S. sanctions and a new constitutional order that concentrates power in Erdogan’s hands, Turkey’s central bank and finance ministry did little more than monitor the worst market beating since the rout that took out much of the country’s financial sector in 2001. The nation’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency did step in early Monday to limit the amount of foreign currency and lira swaps, and swap-like transactions, to 50 percent of banks’ legal shareholder equity.

Finance Minister Berat Albayrak sought to calm investors Sunday evening in a newspaper interview. He said the ministry has prepared an action plan that will be announced Monday, with the nation’s institutions ready to take the “necessary steps” to calm markets.

Turkey is “living very dangerously,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “If the central bank in Ankara was truly independent, I think that it’d be raising interest rates now and rapidly so.

Turkey’s lira extended its precipitous slide Monday, with the selloff spreading to other emerging market currencies. It weakened past 7.23 per dollar to a new record low in thin trading in Asia, before paring losses to 7.0060 at 11:09 a.m. in Singapore. The South African rand also fell to its weakest in more than two years, while the Mexican peso dropped almost 2 percent against the greenback.

While investors are pleading for dramatic central bank action to bolster the lira, Turkish officials fear that even a huge increase in borrowing costs could be quickly offset by another round of U.S. sanctions, according to two people familiar with the thinking of the country’s economic administration.

The bottom line in this line of thinking in Ankara: Until relations between the two NATO allies are restored, no policy lever is worth pulling.

As of Sunday, Erdogan showed no willingness to meet President Donald Trump’s condition for mending ties: releasing a U.S evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, who’s been imprisoned in Turkey for almost two years on charges of participating in a 2016 attempted coup.

Given Erdogan’s rhetoric — he called for resistance and vowed not to give in to threats — a solution requires either a gesture from the Trump administration allowing Erdogan to save face, or a humiliating reversal by the Turkish president. Neither looks likely.

Erdogan wants to allow as much damage as possible, to blame Trump for it, and to swoop in and claim even more power for himself.  He's done it before when his "failed coup" vaulted him from strongman to dictator two years ago. But let's keep in mind that the real reason Trump and Erdogan hate each other is that Turkey is Michael Flynn's former employer, and Ankara is neck-deep in the Mueller probe.

If you think Trump is going to lift a finger to save the Erdogan regime, you're nuts.  Erdogan is playing with thermite and nitroglycerine, and when it all blows up, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• A fire at a hospice in Taiwan has left nine dead and more than a dozen injured, officials believe the sprinkler system in the building may have malfunctioned.
• A magnitude 6.4 quake hit Alaska's North Slope early Sunday, centered near the village of Kaktovik, no damage to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline or to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was reported.
• The prosecution in the Paul Manafort fraud trial is expected to wrap up on Monday, the defense may not call witnesses and the trial could go to jury by mid-week.
• A massive plunge in the Turkish lira over the weekend was caused by as US sanctions on the Erdogan regime, the currency has lost more than a quarter of its value.
• Climate change is changing how communities prepare for more 100-year and 1000-year flooding as warmer temperatures bring more rain to the US Mountain West and Canadian prairie.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

It's safe to say that race in America right now is the dividing issue between the two parties.  One party is fine with Trump and his racism, the other party vehemently opposes him according to a new CBS/YouGov poll out this weekend.

Today, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump's handling of race relations and racial issues, but these views – like many others on the president – are dramatically split by partisanship and by race.

Eighty-two percent of blacks disapprove and 73 percent of Hispanics disapprove. Whites are evenly split (49 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove) and views among them fall along party lines.

Americans are divided on how they read the president's intentions on matters of race. Forty-five percent of Americans feel the president tries to treat whites and racial minorities the same, including eight in 10 Republicans who describe his intentions that way. But 51 percent of Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites over racial minorities – including more than eight in 10 Democrats who feel this way.

Understand that a majority of Americans believe Trump champions white nationalism, and that this is the intent of his policies and actions.  White voters are split on this of course.

Seventy-three percent of African-Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities, and 58 percent of Hispanics feel the president tries to put whites ahead of minority groups.

Americans who think the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities overwhelmingly say they disapprove of this.

Views on how the president handles race are connected to overall views of him, particularly for his political opponents. Six in 10 Democrats say the way that the way the president handles race relations matters a lot in their overall opinion of him, and they give him low marks overall. Republicans report little connection: only 18 percent of Republicans say the way that the president handles race relations matters a lot to how they evaluate him.

And this is really the key.  Fewer than one in five Republicans think Trump's handling of race matters.  They are okay with it.

 

Trump Cards, Con't

If you hire nothing but opportunistic liars and dispose of them when their usefulness to you ends, you automatically have plausible deniability when they inevitably turn on you.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway responded to allegations that President Donald Trump is a racist, saying "none of us would be" at the White House if that were true.

Conway also told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl on "This Week" that in the two years she has worked for Trump, she has “never a single time heard him use a racial slur about anyone.”

Conway was responding to a new book by former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman who describes Trump as a racist and that she has heard him use racial slurs.

“I think that Omarosa unfortunately has undercut her own credibility,” Conway told Karl. “This is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of 'The Apprentice,' the candidate, and indeed the president of the United States. She told your own network, Jon, ABC News, the day after she was fired from the White House that she had resigned … She said she never heard him use the N-word.”

Conway is lying of course about never hearing Trump use a racial slur, but she's actually correct about Omarosa Manigault Newman having no credibility and being a liar as well. "You can't believe the liars calling me a liar now, who lied for me previously when they were working for me, because we all know they are liars" has been Trump's defense for decades, and he knows exactly how to play that game.

It's the same defense Trump's people are using in the Manafort trial this week.

Rick Gates, former associate and protege of Paul Manafort, is testifying in the latter’s trial. Gates has already pleaded guilty to felony charges and is cooperating with the government. Under questioning by the prosecution he admitted committing multiple financial crimes with Manafort, as well as stealing from Manafort himself. On cross examination the defense hammered Gates, forcing him to further admit to his own many frauds and deceptions, including an extramarital affair.

Gates is a liar and a fraud. He’s testifying to help himself out in his own case. He carries a lot of baggage to that witness stand.

And he’s the government’s star witness.

Although that may seem bizarre, it’s a common occurrence in complex criminal cases. Often the best way — and sometimes the only way — for the government to learn what happened is to persuade someone who was on the inside to plead guilty and cooperate. Participants in an illegal enterprise may provide the crucial details necessary to convict others involved — typically those a few rungs higher up the criminal ladder. But such witnesses are subject to withering attacks on their own credibility and present real challenges for the government.

No matter where Mueller goes from here, whatever evidence presented against Trump that is obtained from Manafort or Gates or Michael Flynn for example, Trump and his supporters will scream LIARS and FAKE NEWS and ignore it.

Whether or not our media actually cuts through that noise, I have no idea.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

For my generation, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11 are the defining events of our lives, all the way back to the first Gulf War when I was in high school.  We've always been at war in Baghdad and Kabul it seems, I've known dozens of friends over the years who have served in those wars and some who never came back.  Our Sunday Long Read this week is C.J. Chivers's piece in the NY Times Magazine on the War Eternal, and in 2018, we're still in Afghanistan, still fighting, and we'll never, ever leave.

In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began.

More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.

As the costs have grown — whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost or blood shed — the wars’ architects and the commentators supporting them have often been ready with optimistic or airbrushed predictions, each pitched to the latest project or newly appointed general’s plan. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns abroad would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, keep violence away from Western soil, spread democracy, foster development, prevent sectarian war, protect populations, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists.

Aside from displacing tyrants and leading to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, none of this turned out as pitched. Prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old thugs fell. Corruption and lawlessness remain endemic. An uncountable tally of civilians — many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 — were killed. Others were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action and then by violent social forces American action helped unleash.

The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington’s enemies. Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.

Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed, large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.

Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.

Now a second generation enters the war they have known every day since they were born.  It's no way to run a country, I figure, it's a far greater tragedy than Vietnam or Korea ever was for my parents and grandparents, but here we are, still fighting, and there's zero chance we'll ever stop.