RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leave it to John McCain to pour fuel on an anti-Trump fire. Said the senator yesterday on Fox News:

With the appointment of Mr. Mueller, we are now at that stage of a scandal. And now the question is how is it handled. Is it handled the way Watergate was where drip, drip, drip with every day, more and more?

Or do we handle it like Ronald Reagan handled Iran-Contra? It was a scandal. He fired people. He went on national television and said we made mistakes, we did wrong, and we’re not going to do it again and the American people let him move forward.

Here’s the video:

For all the talk of scandal, McCain and his establishment friends are glossing over the major detail: there is absolutely no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to win last year’s election.

Yes, he’s a bit too friendly toward Putin for my taste, but attempting diplomatic relations with an adversary does not a traitor make. If it did, Hillary Clinton should’ve been jailed years ago when she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a bizarre “reset” button in 2009.

McCain and the rest of the irrational Trump opposition — there’s a difference between being critical of the man, as I am, and being unable to assess his performance reasonably — are making fools of themselves with talk of “scandal” and “Watergate.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly an even worse malady than Bush Derangement Syndrome, the version that infected so many liberals in the first decade of this century. And that’s saying something.

Republicans in Congress can’t control President Trump’s rolling controversies, but they are getting plenty of bad advice on how to handle them. Democrats and Never Trumpers agree that the GOP should denounce Mr. Trump, try to remove him from office, and if that fails wait for the Pelosi Democratic Congress to arrive in 2018. This is supposed to be requisite punishment for trying to work with a duly elected if deeply flawed President.

We trust Republicans will reject this counsel of suicide, because there is a better way: Get on with passing the agenda they campaigned on. The Trump investigations will proceed at the same time, and Republicans can respond to new facts as they develop. Whatever happens on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Republicans have an obligation to fulfill their reform mandate while they still have the political power to do so.
***This has the added advantage of being good for the country. The U.S. has struggled with subpar economic growth for more than a decade, and Republicans won in part because they said they’d do better.
Tax reform and deregulation are prime opportunities to unlock the growth and business investment that increase middle-class incomes. On Obama Care, the GOP can provide relief from surging insurance premiums and diminished choices by replacing the failing entitlement with a more market-based system.

Confirming conservative judges would correct for President Obama’s progressive tilt on the federal bench and perhaps restrain the runaway administrative state. And rebuilding the military is crucial to U.S. security in a world of increasing threats.

Going on policy offense is also the best defensive politics. Democrats want to talk about Mr. Trump all the time because they know this gives the public the impression that nothing else is happening in Washington. Paralysis is their strategy.

If Republicans start to move on policy, they automatically change at least some of the political conversation away from Mr. Trump. Debating tax cuts sure beats discussing Michael Flynn. Democrats would have no choice but to respond on the issues, and even the media would have to cover the tax and health debates. OK, maybe not the media, but that would also mean less relentless opposition on policy.

Speed is also increasingly vital as Mr. Trump’s difficulties mount. Perhaps he’ll recover if the Russia charges are overblown, but the news could also get worse and the media will play up every detail as potential impeachment fodder. Republicans can’t wait for Mr. Trump’s approval rating to rise.

Health care and tax reform would ideally both pass this year so their impact will be visible in 2018. The tax cut should be effective immediately so it doesn’t delay investment decisions as businesses wait for lower rates to kick in later; no phase-ins as with the 2001 George W. Bush tax cut.

Republicans also have to assume they’ll contest next year’s midterms with an unpopular President and a Democratic base eager to repudiate him by retaking Congress. Republicans are bound to suffer some collateral damage if the Trump scandals are still florid, but that’s all the more reason to have something else to talk about. The best defense against scandal by association with Mr. Trump is to point to accomplishments that Republicans and independents will support. That’s also the only way to get enough GOP voters to the polls.

Democrats and the Never Trumpers will continue to berate Republicans for not being sufficiently anti-Trump, but Republicans shouldn’t apologize for trying to work with a GOP President on shared goals. His character flaws aren’t theirs. Republicans in Congress ran on their own agenda, and House Republicans won millions of more votes than Mr. Trump did. They have every right to follow through on that agenda.

It would certainly help if Mr. Trump behaved better and controlled himself, but Republicans can’t count on that. Their best option is to plow ahead anyway and present Mr. Trump with legislation to sign. That’s what Democrats did when they controlled Congress while they investigated Richard Nixon, and they piled up significant policy wins.

No one knows how the various Trump investigations will play out, but Republicans can adapt and criticize or defend as new facts arise. Whatever happens, they’ll be in a stronger position if they don’t squander their current majorities as Democrats hope they will.

What is being described as one of the biggest voter fraud investigations in Texas history is currently unfolding in Dallas.

For the past couple of months prosecutors in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office have been looking into allegations of voter fraud. Their investigation accelerated last week when more criminal and voter fraud allegations stemming from the May 6 election emerged. The D.A.’s office last week filed a notice of investigation of criminal conduct which reads in part:

The Dallas County Elections Department has in excess of 700 “Mail-In Ballots” that are directly linked to applications assisted by “Jose Rodriguez,” or are suspicious in nature.

Workers say the volume of complaints about questionable mail-in ballots has been “off the charts.”

“It’s totally frustrating,” said Dr. Pat Stephens of West Dallas. “You know, we all feel violated.”

Stephens is speaking out. She is still bothered about her signature being forged on an mail-in ballot application.

She’s among the 60 to 90 Dallas residents who investigators say have come forward over the past month, saying they received mail-in ballots which they did not request.

Stephens says red flags were raised when a suspicious man came to her home, saying he worked for Dallas County and wanted to pick up the ballot.

“I got a knock on my door and the guy was saying that he was coming to pick up the mail-in ballots and I told him, ‘Well I didn’t order one,'” she tells WFAA.

“Our forefathers fought for us to have this privilege, and for somebody to come along at take it away from us,” she continued.

The probe is beyond frustrating, not only for residents. It’s also keeping District Attorney Faith Johnson’s staff busy.

“There have been persistent rumors of voter fraud and messing around with mail-in ballots for years. But to the extent that I’ve been involved in Dallas County, this is off the charts,” Assistant District Attorney Andy Chatham said.

Dallas County prosecutors have been trying to discover the identity of the man who signed perhaps hundreds of the mail-in ballots, the mysterious “Jose Rodriguez.” Now a whistleblower has come forward, saying he knows who the culprit is.

Before the election, Sidney Williams, 33, made secret audio recordings of his interactions with Jose Barrientos, a campaign worker who suggested on tape that he pay off someone inside the county elections office to find out when mail-in ballots get sent out. “He’s not supposed to but yeah,” Barrientos told Williams. “But then you’ve got to drop a hundred or two or three. Whatever it is. He can’t do it for free.”

Barrientos also suggested in a phone call with Williams that he was the mysterious Jose Rodriguez, admitting that the signatures on the absentee ballots look just like his own. “You’re talking to the master, bro,” he boasted.

Williams shared the tape with the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office and WFAA ABC. According to his Facebook page, Williams also had an interview with the FBI.

Barrientos back-pedaled furiously when asked for comment: “I don’t do that stuff. I know that looks bad, me and Sidney talking s*** or trash. That looks bad. And I know it does, but that’s just talk,” he told WFAA.

Williams explained how he thinks Barrientos does it:

“He goes in there. He speaks to this county employee. The county employee tips him off by ZIP code, lets him know which precincts are dropping,” explained Williams. “Either he’s stealing them from the mailbox, yanking them from a little old lady who probably has them, says he’s going to assist her in a specific way for a specific candidate.”

In the secret recordings, Barrientos gave county prosecutors a lot to work with:

Williams: What do we do, chase the mailman or how does that work?

Barrientos: Your homeboy that’s at the elections office. He tells you when the f*****g ZIP codes are dropping. He’ll tell you like 75221 fixing to hit. Today. They’re going out.

Williams: He tells you that?

Barrientos: He’s not supposed to, but yeah. But then you’ve got to drop a hundred or two or three. Whatever it is. He can’t do it for free.

Barrientos also strongly suggested he has forged applications for mail-in or absentee ballots.

Williams: Where did you get this from?

Barrientos: Umm. You ask too many questions. What are you trying to be a cop or something?

Williams: No.

Barrientos: I just got a copy of it. That’s the first absentee ballot that was filed as a fraudulent absentee. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Corporate insiders should not be able to use investor money as a piggybank to advance political agendas.”

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said the disclosure of corporate political spending would have “obvious value” for America’s democracy.

“It adds transparency – cleans up campaign finance and it keeps the election process fair and free of super-funded outside influences here in the United States or from elsewhere. But even setting aside the benefits to democracy, the case for disclosure is clear and convincing, purely as a matter of corporate governance and investor protection,” Menendez said on a conference call briefing last week that focused on attempts to require the “largest mutual fund companies” to disclose political spending records.

“This information is material to how shareholders decide where to invest their money and how to vote in corporate elections. As it currently stands, corporations can funnel shareholders’ money to organizations that do not have to disclose their political contributions, and investors have no way of knowing whether executives are spending their money on political causes that may be directly adverse to the shareholders’ interests,” he said. “Corporate insiders should not be able to use investor money as a piggybank to advance their personal political agendas without any oversight from shareholders.”

For the last six years, Menendez said he’s been “pushing” the Securities and Exchange Commission to begin working on a rule to require public companies to disclose all of their political spending to shareholders.

“Some corporations have stridently fought this initiative. They’ve sounded the alarm bell and called upon their allies in Congress to fight common sense disclosure,” he said.

Menendez said new SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has not provided any “assurances” that he would take public support for a disclosure rule seriously. Menendez voted against Clayton’s confirmation.

“He wouldn’t commit to holding an innocuous public roundtable on the issue. He wouldn’t comment on whether he believes this disclosure is material to shareholders and I find that to be entirely inadequate when so many investors, both retail and institutional, are demanding this information,” he said. “Investors can’t rely on the shareholders’ proposal process alone to affect corporate change on this issue.”

Menendez, a member of the Senate Finance and Banking Committees, said the nation needs an SEC that will truly “stand up for investors and corporate governance principles and finally require this disclosure.”

“At the end of the day, those that choose not to support such a disclosure are working to silence the voices of hardworking Americans in favor of amplifying the speech and magnifying the influence of corporations in our politics, and that just simply can’t be the case,” he said.

Menendez said the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision “opened the floodgates” for unlimited, unchecked and “often undisclosed” corporate spending on campaign advertisements, federal and state advocacy efforts and other political communication methods. CONTINUE AT SITE

Scene: The lab-coated man comes in from the room. “It was a troubling case,” he admits. “This question of why you voted for Trump.” He snaps on his surgical glove and probes his patient’s mouth in the usual way “A real brain crusher! The boys and I really went a few rounds on the diagnosis. Were you the sympathetic sort? You know, just down on your luck, jobless maybe. Suffering from inequality. Or were you the ‘take my country back’ type. You know? Worked up about Central Americans or whatever. In other words, were you more a case of inequality?”

“You mean you wanted to know whether I had problems or whether I was the problem?” the patient offers.

The doctor: “More or less. So, we came up with a new battery of tests. A whole new data set!” The man in the lab coat was clearly excited about the new spreadsheets — he loved them. But then he turned to the man in the chair and started to wince. “We’ve run the numbers, and it turns out . . . ”

“No, doc, give me a chance!” the patient protests.

“You’ve come back deplorable,” the doctor sighs. “It’s really unfortunate.

“If the test had shown that you were financially put-out enough, we might have tried a trade policy, some shovel-ready infrastructure projects, or maybe a handout. But, owing to your manifest condition, I can recommend only a limited number of options.”

The patient: “Diversity training?”

The doctor laughs, “Oh no! Liable to make things worse, really. You’d resist. It’s complicated. No, perhaps we could try the implementation of a fairness doctrine, to turn off your Fox News. After observing your gut health, that’s an option we should explore. But the other way is just to let nature take its course, you know. Deplorables are generally older and so, closer to the end.”

“I’m a goner, then? No future.”

“It’s painful to contemplate. But pain, we can treat. Would you like a prescription opioid?” the doctors says with a faint leer.

And . . . scene!

And so it goes. The political and chattering classes, mostly exiled from official positions of power are still trying to figure out why they lost. And so they’ve returned to a debate that never needed to take place: Were Trump’s base of voters motivated primarily by “economic anxiety” or by racism and a host of other backward cultural attitudes?

Emma Green, a staff writer at The Atlantic, summed up the new surveys conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and her magazine.

Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.

Green adds:

Polling is a notoriously clumsy instrument for understanding people’s lives, and provides only a sketch of who they are. But it’s useful for debunking myths and narratives — particularly the ubiquitous idea that economic anxiety drove white working-class voters to support Trump.

She goes on to argue that working-class white voters are “attuned to cultural change and anxiety about America’s multicultural future.” It’s a very strong conclusion and the Twitterati immediately jumped all over it, essentially saying, “They’re just racists after all.”

The Republican-party establishment is caught in an existential paradox.

Without Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist 2016 campaign, the GOP probably would not have won the presidency. Nor would Republicans now enjoy such lopsided control of state legislatures and governorships, as well as majorities in the House and Senate, and likely control of the Supreme Court for a generation.

So are conservatives angry at the apostate Trump or indebted to him for helping them politically when they were not able to help themselves?

For a similar sense of the paradox, imagine if a novice outsider such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had captured the Democratic nomination and then won the presidency — but did not run on either Bernie Sanders’s progressive redistributionism, Barack Obama’s identity politics, or Hillary Clinton’s high taxes and increased regulation. Would liberals be happy, conflicted, or seething?

For now, most Republicans are overlooking Trump’s bothersome character excesses — without conceding that his impulsiveness and bluntness may well have contributed to his success after Republican sobriety and traditionalism failed.

Republicans concentrate on what they like in the Trump agenda — military spending increases, energy expansion, deterrence abroad, tax and regulatory reform, and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act — and they ignore the inherent contradictions between Trumpism and their own political creed.

But there are many fault lines that will loom large in the next few years.

Doctrinaire conservatives believe that unfettered free trade is essential, even if it is sometimes not fair or reciprocal.

Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.

Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.

In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.

The Pretexts

We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.

Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.

Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.

In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.

He has a very good message! rsk

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal announced plans to run for sheriff on Friday, although it is unclear where in the country he will do so. The bombshell came after he denied plans to run for mayor of Atlanta, Ga.

“Mayor no, I would never run for mayor,” O’Neal told 11Alive News. But then the basketball start dropped a bombshell. “In 2020, I plan on running for sheriff.”

The NBA star explained his goal — to support the public image of police. “This is not about politics. This is about bringing people closer together,” Shaq said. “You know, when I was coming up, people love [sic] and respected the police, the deputies. And, I want to be the one to bring that back, especially in the community I serve.”

Shaq added that he would do well, because he can relate to everyone. “I can put on a suit and have a conversation with Bill Gates. I can go in the hood and talk to the homies, and talk to the children.”

As a prominent black celebrity, O’Neal can speak to the racial tensions inspiring the Black Lives Matter movement and defend police against the accusations that law enforcement across America is racist.

In an interview with Esquire in November, Shaq put forth his answer on the police-race tension in America. “As an African-American male, I understand. I’ve been through it. As a police officer, I understand. I’ve been through it. I understand people. I listen. We’re not put on this Earth to change people’s minds—we just have to listen to them,” he said.

The NBA star explained his respect for the police, and why he is not afraid of traffic stops.

When I get stopped by the cops, I’m not worried. And it has nothing to do with being Shaq. You know why? I show respect. “Yes, sir. No, sir.” That’s how I was taught. I was raised by a drill sergeant, and that’s who I am. Doesn’t matter if it’s a black guy, white guy, whatever. I’m not going to make it uncomfortable for you, because I don’t want it uncomfortable for me. There’s not going to be any talking back—none of that.

Chelsea Victoria Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning,” and as of the spring of 2017, it’s Chelsea Morning in America. Boom, she’s in Variety . . . CBS This Morning . . . The New York Times Book Review. She even picked up a Lifetime award! Okay it was from Lifetime, as in the cable channel, not for a lifetime of achievement, but still, Chelsea Clinton is everywhere. America, whether it asked for it or not, has become the setting for an invasion-from-inside thriller: The Chelsening.

She’s not just a little girl anymore, you know, not just someone’s daughter or campaign prop. Chelsea Clinton is a person, no, a citizen, no, a global citizen, and she is done being quiet. Hear, world, as Chelsea speaks out. She is speaking out about social media: “I’ve recognized, as a lot of people have, that Twitter is a vehicle for me to share my thoughts.” She’s speaking out on movies: “Of course I’m going to see Furious 8. I’ve already seen Logan. I love that Logan is being succeeded by a little girl.” She’s speaking out on the Clinton Foundation: “At its most distilled level, we try to make a positive, impactful, empowering difference in whatever ways we can.” She’s speaking out on speaking out: “This is not the time to be silent or stay on the sidelines.”

With the exception of a few resentful Twitter pokes at the man responsible for rendering her mom an isolated forest monster — Chappaquatch — instead of the most powerful woman in the history of the planet, everything Chelsea says is pretty much like this. The positions she articulates on progress (pro), climate change (anti), and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better-place-for-girls-and-women goodness (super-duper pro) are verbal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a cliché washed down with a bromide. She’s the dusty end of the greeting-card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the champion dullard of our time. This didn’t happen by chance: We’re talking about the ever-calculating Clintonworld here. The dullness is a strategy, a demented post-last-ditch effort by the Clinton gals to finally power Hillary into the Oval Office. But I’ll come back to that.

It’s not like Chelsea Clinton lacks for interesting things she could talk about. What’s it like being in college when your dad humiliates your mom with an intern your own age? What’s it like watching said mom humiliate herself by losing the presidency, after a lifetime of preparation for the task, to a cheesy reality-television star running on a whim? What’s it like living in a $10 million New York condo with 250-foot-long hallways? Oh, and do you have any comment on longtime Clinton Foundation officer Doug Band’s claim, in a private e-mail uncovered by WikiLeaks, that the foundation paid for your “wedding and life for a decade”?

Yet Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, after spending much of the spring and summer of 2012 with Chelsea, was so lost for a juicy anecdote about her that he led off his lengthy profile with this tidbit: “I am pretty intrigued by Joplin Avenue Coffee Company,” Chelsea told him in Joplin, Mo., adding, “When in doubt, coffee.” Van Meter italicized the final noun in a heroic attempt to make the remark sound a little more electrifying than it was.

Variety’s writer Ramin Setoodeh whipped up this pulse-pounder to open his profile: “Chelsea Clinton is about to tell you some things you may not know about her. In an interview with Variety, she lists the last great movie she saw (Hidden Figures), her most surprising job (an internship at a cattle ranch in 1999), and her favorite food growing up (cheddar cheese).”

Supposedly the media have an intriguing new angle. After 20 years of declaring that Chelsea has at last found a niche for herself, they’re now saying that Chelsea has at last really found a niche for herself. Said niche is her new social-media role as the tart-tongued Trump tormentor of Twitter. “Now on Twitter: Chelsea Clinton, Unbound,” proclaimed the New York Times in a story of more than 1,100 words — longer than the same newspaper’s April 18 story about the Fresno Islamist who slaughtered three people while yelling “Allahu akbar.”