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The sheer size of the military establishment and the habit of equating spending on it with patriotism make both sound management and serious oversight of defense expenditures rare. As a democracy, we are on an unusual and risky path. For several decades, we have maintained an extraordinarily high level of defense spending with the support of both political parties and virtually all of the public. The annual debate about the next year’s military spending, underway now on Capitol Hill, no longer probes where real cuts might be made (as opposed to cuts in previously planned growth) but only asks how big the increase should be.

A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget.

When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget.

When the president is proud to close government and proud to slash taxes for the rich, American workers get shafted

Federal spending accounts for just over 20% of the total economy. When that spigot is turned halfway off, as it is now, demand for goods and services necessarily drops. The result is less investment and slower growth.

Right now some 800,000 government employees aren’t collecting paychecks. Nor are hundreds of thousands of government contractors being paid. None of them can buy as much as before.

It’s just another aspect of Trumponomics, which stands for the highly dubious proposition that prosperity comes from cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy, while squeezing American workers – the people who do most of the buying.

I fought the law, and the law won The Clash As a serious comedian *a true oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one), I’ve always had a fa

justtrynakeepup

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is more responsible for the decay in basic American decency than any other person in that supposedly distinguished body. When our intelligence communities were warning that Russian spies and propaganda teams were seeking to undermine a United States election, it was Republican Mitch McConnell who warned the last president that if our leaders tried to more fully warn the public about those threats, Mitch McConnell would claim those efforts to be partisan efforts aimed at hurting the stupid, amoral, crooked Donald Trump. When a Supreme Court justice died in his sleep, it was Mitch McConnell who invented the new rule that the nation’s first black president was not allowed to fill that seat, for over a year, simply because Mitch McConnell did not want him to.

It is Mitch McConnell who is guiding his party into slow-walking the investigation into whether the Trump campaign team committed an act of treason against their nation, despite ample public evidence that they did. It is Mitch McConnell who is stonewalling all efforts to hold the Trump administration to any ethical standards whatsoever, whether it be profiting from foreign governments funding Trump’s own private hotel chain to the Trump refusal to abide by any other prior long-held national norm.

But more than that: Sen. Mitch McConnell, more than any other American senator, is a shameless, flagrant, and prolific liar. He, more than any other American senator, is a dishonest man. His speeches are Christmas trees ornamented with lies, half-truths, and fervent opinions he happens to have that he did not have yesterday and will argue bitterly against tomorrow. He is a living monument to the doctrine of party over country—that there is no law, no ethical boundary, no act of corruption or treason that cannot be overlooked if he, Mitch McConnell, can squeeze a little personal power out of the deal for himself. He is the Dignified Trump. He is the Genteel Racist. He is the reason the “intellectuals” of the Republican Party, at least the ones not running for office, have continued to denounce their own party for its shameless acts.

Here is Mitch McConnell being interviewed by Playbook on the “immigration debate”:

McConnell: There does seem to be a kind of high level of just … anger. And some behavioral issues I would say. … I am disturbed by the feeling that we can’t just have a good old fashioned argument without losing our temper.

He is speaking here about the policies of forcibly separating children from their refugee parents at the border and throwing them in detention camps. He is “disturbed” that that is causing anger among the peasantry. And behavioral issues for those that so fervently object to this international human rights crime.

Here is a message to Mitch McConnell, who has broken his oath to defend and uphold the Constitution on more occasions than he has had lunch in the Capitol. A message to one of the prime current protectors of those that committed acts of treason against the country, and who considers every ethical boundary one that must not be crossed by his political opponents, and one that can be glibly crossed without consequences for his allies. A special note to the man whose party obsessed incessantly about imagined Democratic crimes—and is now bear-hugging the man who provably has been doing worse while bragging that he could. Fake charities. Profiting from lobbyists. Administration-wide grifting. Cover-ups. Lying to the public. And, in the golden hallways of Trump Tower, that treason thing.

Go to hell. Sod off, and take your disturbed with you. You built Trump, and you protect him. You built your party’s new double-down into neo-Confederacy and open racism, and you protect it and nurture it. The president attacks companies and citizens for daring to defy him, and you say nothing. He spits at the ethical boundaries that have constrained every other leader, and you block the nation from responding. A sitting president came to you with an urgent warning that a foreign power was hip-deep in attempting to befoul the underpinnings of our democracy itself, and you did not only say nothing: you warned him that if he spoke up, you would act against him.

Go to hell. You are an enemy of the nation and to decency alike, a crooked, Nixonian man who has not yet found a boundary he would not cross in order to gain just a little more power. You are a cultist, a hack, a fool, and a coward forever hiding in your office and behind your staff, a cheap wax figure of a man who has not once mustered up a voice during any of the times in history, ever, when it might have mattered. May the history books mention you with the same distain as Joe McCarthy; may your family have to build an iron fence around your grave to keep all the people you have harmed in your life from pissing on your headstone.

justtrynakeepup

On the other hand, the Trump Administration is not a normal Presidential Administration. This is the essential and easily fudged fact of our historical moment. The Trump Administration is—in ways that are specific to incipient tyrannies—all about an assault on civility. To the degree that Trump has any ideology at all, it’s a hatred of civility—a belief that the normal decencies painfully evolved over centuries are signs of weakness which occlude the natural order of domination and submission. It’s why Trump admires dictators. Theirs are his values; that’s his feast. And, to end the normal discourse of democracy, the Trump Administration must make lies respectable—lying not tactically but all the time about everything, in a way that does not just degrade but destroys exactly the common table of democratic debate.

That’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s chosen role in life—to further those lies, treat lies as truth, and make lies acceptable. This is not just a question of protesting a particular policy; in the end there are no policies, only the infantile impulses of a man veering from one urge to another. The great threat to American democracy isn’t “policy” but the pretense of normalcy. That’s the danger, for with the lies come the appeasement of tyranny, the admiration of tyranny, and, as now seems increasingly likely, the secret alliance with tyranny. That’s what makes the Trump Administration intolerable, and, inasmuch as it is intolerable, public shaming and shunning of those who take part in it seems just. Never before in American politics has there been so plausible a reason for exclusion from the common meal as the act of working for Donald Trump.

And what about civility? Well, fundamental to, and governing the practice of, civility is the principle of reciprocity: your place at my table implies my place at yours. Conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers, Jews and Muslims and Christians and Socialists and round- and flat-Earthers—all should have a place at any table and be welcome to sit where they like. On the other hand, someone who has decided to make it her public role to extend, with a blizzard of falsehoods, the words of a pathological liar, and to support, with pretended piety, the acts of a public person of unparalleled personal cruelty—well, that person has asked us in advance to exclude her from our common meal. You cannot spit in the plates and then demand your dinner. The best way to receive civility at night is to not assault it all day long. It’s the simple wisdom of the table.

justtrynakeepup

I am an Alabamian and a lifelong conservative. I am 56, and have never voted for a Democrat in a presidential election. I am a white, middle-aged attorney living and working where I was born. I’m an evangelical Christian. I am pro-life. I cling to my guns and religion.

Some may call me a “deplorable.” My life is a caricature of a Donald Trump supporter. But I am not. I never have been. From day one, I knew enough about his celebrity act, his business and personal practices, and his prior support of liberal causes to know he was not a person I would want as commander in chief.

President Trump has lived his entire life as a man to whom the rules do not apply, be they rules of polite behavior, rules of marital fidelity, rules against sexual exploitation and rules of law. The president now threatens to be the judge of his own campaign’s conduct, acting as a medieval king who is above the law and takes what he wants, answering to no one. When a man reveals his true character, believe him, and react accordingly.

Here’s my reaction: Trump’s attack on the investigation headed by Robert Mueller is wrong, and fails to put America first. He and his campaign are subject to scrutiny for wrongdoing, just like every other American. Far from the investigation being a disgrace as the president claims, it would be a disgrace to not thoroughly evaluate possible wrongdoing.I seriously doubt the president colluded with any Russians, and he knows best what a completed investigation will reveal on that point. I do not have that same confidence level in his subordinates. As the president himself noted at one point, he needs to know if any subordinates were disloyal and involved a foreign power in our election. Insistence on a thorough vetting would be putting America first.

I naively thought Trump’s campaign was over when he slandered Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain’s service because he was captured with his body broken into pieces. It obviously was not. Now Trump is attacking another decorated war hero, Mueller, who despite being wounded in battle as a young man, kept heroically leading his troops. Since his military service, Mueller has spent decades in public service acclaimed by all — especially Republicans.

The efforts to delegitimize the investigation represent a precursor to ending the investigation by presidential fiat. We’re reading a page from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s playbook to attack those who investigate wrongdoing and witnesses who speak to that misconduct.

Compare the Clintons’ attacks on “that woman” (a barely adult Monica Lewinsky) and other women they labeled as bimbos, with Trump’s verbal assaults on those who speak against him. Compare the president’s missives against Mueller and those working with him to the Clintons’ attacks on Ken Starr. The Republican leaders now are just like the Democratic leaders then. God has a sense of humor: Trump’s base, in its hatred of the Clintons, nominated and elected the only Republican who can approach the Clintons in mendacity and dishonor.And the dishonesty cannot be understated. Trump falsely states that Mueller — a lifelong Republican — has a conflict of interest, without bothering to identify that conflict. Perhaps the “conflict” is the gall to aggressively investigate his campaign and associates.

The president also claims the investigation is “headed up by Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama.” Fact check: None of them worked for former president Obama, any more than they now work for Trump. If employment during any given administration translates to bias for federal officials, can we then say that Trump is being investigated by his own employees who are biased for him? The reality is that any experienced public servant will serve under multiple administrations.

Most egregiously, the president has stated the Mueller investigation is “an attack on our country in a true sense, it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” This statement provides a succinct example of why I disagreed with his Republican nomination and object to much of his current “leadership.” While claiming to make America great, he does not know what already has made America great — we are a nation of laws, not men. That is what we stand for: Equality of all before the law. The Mueller investigation goes to the very core of why America has been a beacon of freedom over two centuries.

We should all let Trump know we are Americans, not loyal subjects. The Mueller investigation must run its course, and let the chips fall where they may.

justtrynakeepup

It’s kind of trivial, perhaps, but one of my favorite odd facts about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the epic event that produced Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — is that not one but two college kids in the bobbing sea of faces crammed around the Reflecting Pool listening to King’s immortal words would grow up to become U.S. senators many years later.

One future senator would — over the course of his 50-year-long, 1000-1-shot rise to political prominence — remain remarkable true to the expansive vision of that 1963 march, with an almost annoyingly loud but consistent, laser-like focus on expanding economic opportunity and fighting for the working classes.

The other young man in the shadows of MLK grew up to become Mitch McConnell.

Unlike the young Bernie Sanders, McConnell must have been taking a dip in the Reflecting Pool or even dozing off when King said that “with this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” To the contrary, the Kentucky Republican has risen to the pinnacle of U.S. power, as Senate majority leader, by turning up those “jangling discords” to a nearly deafening level — with no moral or ideological compass other than following the Big Money that promises political power in our warped 21st century, with a win-at-all costs mentality that crushes norms of basic democracy that had survived for a couple of centuries. It is Mitch McConnell, more than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into comedy.

The latest episode in McConnell’s sad odyssey came this week, when senators from both parties started circulating a bill that would curb the power of the executive branch — now in the person of one Donald John Trump — to fire a Justice Department special counsel such as Robert Mueller, who is probing the events surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possible role of all the president’s men and women, including perhaps Trump himself.

The fire alarms for democracy are clanging all across America. The notion that a president can arbitrarily fire the prosecutor looking at possible criminality in that president’s campaign is the power reserved for a dictator, not the leader of a democratic republic. The public gets that — literally hundreds of thousands have pledged to hit the streets if Trump makes a move on Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing him, Rod Rosenstein. (Police brass in Pittsburgh even told cops to bring their riot gear to work — an overreaction, but it does speak to the gravity of the potential constitutional crisis.)Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t take the threat to our democracy as seriously as the Pittsburgh police. Indeed, the only threat he sees from the tangled politics of Trump and Mueller is the threat to the only thing that matters to McConnell anymore — his 51-49 hold on the Senate majority. He is dead set on using his considerable power over the legislative process to make sure that protecting Mueller and averting this crisis never comes up for a vote, even though it seems that a majority of lawmakers in his upper chamber currently support it.

“We’ll not be having this on the floor of the Senate,” McConnell told Fox News on Tuesday. His logic is that the bill isn’t necessary because he doesn’t believe that Trump is planning to fire Mueller. As one of my astute Twitter followers pointed out, the majority leader’s stance is akin to refusing to buy car insurance because you have no plans to get into an auto accident anytime in the future. But trying to apply common sense to virtually anything that happens in Congress these days is a waste of time. I’ve followed politics closely for all of McConnell’s career in Washington, and I’m hard pressed to think of anything the Kentuckian stands for — beyond self-preservation.And yet despite this profile in cowardice — because of it, really — McConnell has cut a swatch of destruction through the now quaint idea that things might happen on Capitol Hill can actually help the American people, rather than helping the 51 or so people who work instead for billionaires and their lobbyists survive the next Election Day.

McConnell was still in the Senate minority — and the GOP’s overall prospects looked dim with Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 victory — when a group of key Capitol Hill Republicans gathered in a pricey D.C. steakhouse on the night of the new president’s inauguration, January 20, 2009. They mapped out a strategy to use the Senate’s filibuster power — the only effective tool Republicans had left — to block any and all legislation, regardless of the merits, and then blame the ensuing gridlock on Obama. The fact that the U.S. economy was in shambles at that very moment, with millions out of work and looking to Washington for help, merely amplified the cruelty.

McConnell wasn’t at that meeting, but he quickly became the biggest proponent of this party-above-principle Big Idea. That same year, 2009, in the depths of the economic crisis, McConnell was asked about the top priorities for Senate Republicans. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” the Kentuckian said, maybe the worst instance of a politician saying the quiet part out loud, at least until Trump arrived at center stage.

Obstruction worked. Republicans gained control of the House in 2011, the Senate in 2015 (making McConnell majority leader) and the White House in 2017. The success of the GOP’s cynical gridlock scheme helped inspire the next downward dive for democracy, the torpedoing of Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016. Confirming Garland would have given the High Court a center-left tilt, to be sure — but American voters had empowered Obama to pick new justices when they re-elected him in 2012. McConnell’s refusal to give Garland even a hearing — let alone an up-or-down vote — was an unconstitutional power grab.

But he got away with it.Yet McConnell’s machinations to keep the Supreme Court in conservative hands would have been all for naught if Trump had lost the 2016 election. And a Trump defeat certainly would have been more likely if American voters had known — when they went to the polls on November 8, 2016 — how alarmed Obama and other officials were at the extent of Russian interference in the election, or that the FBI had launched a full-blown investigation. But one man stood up and used his power to block that information from coming out that fateful autumn.

Mitch McConnell.

That September, top officials including then-FBI director James Comey and Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson went to Capitol Hill pleading for a bipartisan statement about the Russian interference, but McConnell led the opposition, expressing skepticism about both the intelligence and the utility of voters having this information. Most of what we know now about the Russian scheme to aid Trump didn’t come out until after Trump had secured 304 electoral votes. And the man you can thank for that is Mitch McConnell.

And so now McConnell is tripling down with his refusal to protect Mueller. It’s a reminder that Trump didn’t start the fire, that — alarming as his corrupt and autocratic tendencies are — the threat now posed by the 45th president didn’t begin in 2015. Rather, it’s the culmination of more than a generation of immoral divide-and-conquer politics, incubated in the toxic echo chamber of Fox News and talk radio, and surfed by shallow opportunists like McConnell.

It’s just a shame that MLK’s words merely went in one of McConnell’s ears and out the other on that fateful day, 55 years ago. Because history will judge this senator not by the longevity of his stint on office, but by the content of character. And it will not be kind.

UNTIL HE WAS stripped of his top-secret security clearance in February, presidential adviser Jared Kushner was known around the White House as one of the most voracious readers of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified rundown of the latest intelligence intended only for the president and his closest advisers. Kushner, who had been tasked with bringing about a deal between Israel and Palestine, was particularly engaged by information about the Middle East, according to a former White House official and a former U.S. intelligence professional. In June, Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman ousted his cousin, then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and took his place as next in line to the throne, upending the established line of succession. In the months that followed, the President’s Daily Brief contained information on Saudi Arabia’s evolving political situation, including a handful of names of royal family members opposed to the crown prince’s power grab, according to the former White House official and two U.S. government officials with knowledge of the report. Like many others interviewed for this story, they declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about sensitive matters to the press. In late October, Jared Kushner made an unannounced trip to Riyadh, catching some intelligence officials off guard. “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy,” the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported at the time. What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown. Kushner, through his attorney’s spokesperson, denies having done so. “Some questions by the media are so obviously false and ridiculous that they merit no response. This is one. The Intercept should know better,” said Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell. On November 4, a week after Kushner returned to the U.S., the crown prince, known in official Washington by his initials MBS, launched what he called an anti-corruption crackdown. The Saudi government arrested dozens of members of the Saudi royal family and imprisoned them in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, which was first reported in English by The Intercept. The Saudi figures named in the President’s Daily Brief were among those rounded up; at least one was reportedly tortured. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to questions from The Intercept. The White House referred questions to National Security Council spokesperson Michael Anton. Anton declined to comment, referring questions on Kushner’s discussions with MBS to Lowell. It is likely that Crown Prince Mohammed would have known who his critics were without Kushner mentioning them, a U.S. government official who declined to be identified pointed out. The crown prince may also have had his own reasons for saying that Kushner shared information with him, even if that wasn’t true. Just the appearance that Kushner did so would send a powerful message to the crown prince’s allies and enemies that his actions were backed by the U.S. government. One of the people MBS told about the discussion with Kushner was UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, according to a source who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers. MBS bragged to the Emirati crown prince and others that Kushner was “in his pocket,” the source told The Intercept. Access to the President’s Daily Brief is tightly guarded, but Trump has the legal authority to allow Kushner to disclose information contained in it. If Kushner discussed names with MBS as an approved tactic of U.S. foreign policy, the move would be a striking intervention by the U.S. into an unfolding power struggle at the top levels of an allied nation. If Kushner discussed the names with the Saudi prince without presidential authorization, however, he may have violated federal laws around the sharing of classified intelligence. On November 6, two days after the detentions in the Ritz began, Trump took to Twitter to defend the crackdown:In the months that followed, the arrestees were coerced into signing over billions in personal assets to the Saudi government. In December, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that Maj. Gen. Ali al-Qahtani had been tortured to death in the Ritz. Qahtani’s body showed signs of mistreatment, including a neck that was “twisted unnaturally as though it had been broken,” bruises, and “burn marks that appeared to be from electric shocks,” the New York Times reported earlier this month. SENIOR U.S. GOVERNMENT officials have long worried about Kushner’s handling of sensitive foreign policy issues given his lack of diplomatic experience. They have also raised concerns about the possibility that foreign officials might try to influence him through business deals with his family’s real estate empire. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly examining Kushner’s business ties as part of his ongoing probe. The Washington Post reported this week that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster “expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy.” According to the Post, Tillerson once asked staffers in frustration: “Who is the secretary of state here?” Indeed, Kushner has grown so close to the Saudi and Emirati crown princes that he has communicated with them directly using WhatsApp, a reasonably secure messaging app owned by Facebook and popular in the Middle East, according to a senior Western official and a source close to the Saudi royal family. Asked about Kushner’s use of WhatsApp to communicate with foreign officials, his attorney’s spokesperson Mirijanian said, “Without commenting on who he talks with and how he does his work, Mr. Kushner is in conformity with the Presidential Records Act and other rules.” Kushner’s attorneys have since told him not to use the app for official business, according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchange. Kushner’s unconventional communications with regional leaders excluded diplomats during the summer of 2017, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE initiated an economic blockade aimed at weakening their Gulf neighbor Qatar. Tillerson’s attempts to mediate the crisis were quickly undercut by Trump and Kushner, who supported the blockade. Three State Department officials told The Intercept that Tillerson was largely in the dark about Kushner’s communications with MBS during that period. In the wake of MBS’s crackdown in Saudi Arabia, the National Security Council’s policy coordination committee suggested that Tillerson intervene and try to reason with the crown prince, according to a former White House official and a former State Department official. Tillerson declined, telling colleagues doing so would be “pointless” given that Kushner was already in close and direct contact with him. The National Security Council’s Middle East adviser, retired U.S. Army Col. Michael Bell, has also complained in recent months that he was out of the loop on the Gulf crisis and the Arab-Israeli conflict, the former White House official said. Bell has told colleagues that Kushner frequently micromanaged those subjects through direct interaction with regional leaders, without offering Bell any worthwhile readout on their interactions. Bell, speaking through National Security Council spokesperson Anton, denied that Kushner has kept him out of the loop and said he respects Kushner’s lead role in the region.KUSHNER’S SUPPORT FOR Saudi Arabia and the UAE over Qatar in the Gulf crisis has raised questions about a possible conflict of interest. Kushner backed the blockade a month after Qatar’s ministry of finance rebuffed an attempt by Kushner’s real estate firm, Kushner Companies, to extract financing for the firm’s troubled flagship property at 666 Fifth Avenue. In 2007, Kushner bought the landmark Manhattan building for $1.8 billion, putting down $500 million in cash raised largely by selling thousands of rental units the family had owned in New Jersey. It was widely regarded as overpriced at the time, and when the financial crisis hit, the value plummeted, wiping out much of the initial investment. The clock is now ticking toward a February 2019 deadline when a major mortgage payment will come due. Since 2011, Kushner and his relatives have been searching the globe for a new investor. As recently as the spring of 2017, Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, asked former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani to invest in the building. Then in April 2017, Charles Kushner made a direct pitch to the Qatari government through the country’s minister of finance. Qatar rejected the deal as not financially viable. In May, Trump traveled to Riyadh with Kushner, where the famous glowing orb photo was taken. In the wake of the meeting, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a handful of allied countries announced the blockade of Qatar, which is aligned with Iran, a key Saudi adversary. The crisis continues today. “We could not understand why the Trump administration was so firmly taking the Saudis’ side in this dispute between the Saudis, the Emiratis, and Qatar, because the United States has very important interests in Qatar,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” after The Intercept reported on Kushner Companies’ efforts to obtain financing from Qatar. Murphy was referring to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, home of U.S. Central Command, where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed. “If the reason this administration put U.S. troops at risk in Qatar was to protect the Kushners’ financial interests, then that’s all the evidence you need to make some big changes in the White House,” Murphy said. MBS is in Washington this week. On Tuesday, he was warmly received by Trump, who told reporters that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is “probably the strongest it’s ever been.”

#Jared Kushner #foreign policy #United Arab Emirates #Qatar #Saudi Arabia #Mohammed bin Salman #MBS #Donald Trump

WASHINGTON — Of all the State Department employees who might have been vulnerable in the staff reductions that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has initiated as he reshapes the department, the one person who seemed least likely to be a target was the chief of security, Bill A. Miller. Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state. But in his first nine months in office, Mr. Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him, according to several former top officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Finally, Mr. Miller, the acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security, was forced to cite the law’s requirement that he be allowed to speak to Mr. Tillerson. Mr. Miller got just five minutes with the secretary of state, the former officials said. Afterward, Mr. Miller, a career Foreign Service officer, was pushed out, joining a parade of dismissals and early retirements that has decimated the State Department’s senior ranks. Mr. Miller declined to comment. The departures mark a new stage in the broken and increasingly contentious relationship between Mr. Tillerson and much of his department’s work force. By last spring, interviews at the time suggested, the guarded optimism that greeted his arrival had given way to concern among diplomats about his aloofness and lack of communication. By the summer, the secretary’s focus on efficiency and reorganization over policy provoked off-the-record anger.Now the estrangement is in the open, as diplomats going out the door make their feelings known and members of Congress raise questions about the impact of their leaving. In a letter to Mr. Tillerson last week, Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee, citing what they said was “the exodus of more than 100 senior Foreign Service officers from the State Department since January,” expressed concern about “what appears to be the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks.” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, sent a similar letter, telling Mr. Tillerson that “America’s diplomatic power is being weakened internally as complex global crises are growing externally.” Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has made no secret of his belief that the State Department is a bloated bureaucracy and that he regards much of the day-to-day diplomacy that lower-level officials conduct as unproductive. Even before Mr. Tillerson was confirmed, his staff fired six of the State Department’s top career diplomats, including Patrick Kennedy, who had been appointed to his position by President George W. Bush. Kristie Kenney, the department’s counselor and one of just five career ambassadors, was summarily fired a few weeks later. None were given any reason for their dismissals, although Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Kenney had been reprimanded by Trump transition officials for answering basic logistical questions from Nikki R. Haley, President Trump’s pick as United Nations ambassador. Mr. Tillerson is widely believed to dislike Ms. Haley, who has been seen as a possible successor if Mr. Tillerson steps down. In the following months, Mr. Tillerson launched a reorganization that he has said will be the most important thing he will do, and he has hired two consulting companies to lead the effort. Since he decided before even arriving at the State Department to slash its budget by 31 percent, many in the department have always seen the reorganization as a smoke screen for drastic cuts. Mr. Tillerson has frozen most hiring and recently offered a $25,000 buyout in hopes of pushing nearly 2,000 career diplomats and civil servants to leave by October 2018. His small cadre of aides have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether. Among those fired or sidelined were most of the top African-American and Latino diplomats, as well as many women, difficult losses in a department that has long struggled with diversity. One of them was Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to Liberia under Mr. Bush and as director general of the Foreign Service and assistant secretary for African affairs during the Obama administration. Ms. Thomas-Greenfield was among those asked to leave by Mr. Tillerson’s staff, but she appealed and remained until her retirement in September. “I don’t feel targeted as an African-American,” she said. “I feel targeted as a professional.”For those who have not been dismissed, retirement has become a preferred alternative when, like Mr. Miller, they find no demand for their expertise. A retirement class that concludes this month has 26 senior employees, including two acting assistant secretaries in their early 50s who would normally wait years before leaving. The number of those with the department’s top two ranks of career ambassador and career minister — equivalent to four- and three-star generals — will have been cut in half by Dec. 1, from 39 to 19. And of the 431 minister-counselors, who have two-star-equivalent ranks, 369 remain and another 14 have indicated that they will leave soon — an 18 percent drop — according to an accounting provided by the American Foreign Service Association. The political appointees who normally join the department after a change in administration have not made up for those departures. So far, just 10 of the top 44 political positions in the department have been filled, and for most of the vacancies, Mr. Tillerson has not nominated anyone.“Leadership matters,” said Nancy McEldowney, a former ambassador who retired in June after a 30-year career as a Foreign Service officer. “There’s a vacuum throughout the State Department, and the junior people now working in these top jobs lack the confidence and credibility that comes from a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.” Even more departures are expected as a result of an intense campaign that Mr. Tillerson has ordered to reduce the department’s longtime backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests. CNN reported that the task had resulted from Mr. Trump’s desire to accelerate the release of Mrs. Clinton’s remaining emails. Every bureau in the department has been asked to contribute to the effort. That has left midlevel employees and diplomats — including some just returning from high-level or difficult overseas assignments — to spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns. Mr. Tillerson’s spokesman, R. C. Hammond, dismissed any suggestion that the departures had had a negative effect. “There are qualified people who are delivering on America’s diplomatic mission,” Mr. Hammond said. “It’s insulting to them every time someone comes up to them and says that the State Department is being gutted.” Former State Department officials disagree. “The United States is at the center of every crisis around the world, and you simply cannot be effective if you don’t have assistant secretaries and ambassadors in place,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat who was an under secretary of state for President George W. Bush. “It shows a disdain for diplomacy.” One result is that there is no one in place with responsibilities for some key trouble spots. Although the North Korean nuclear crisis is the Trump administration’s top priority, the administration has yet to nominate an assistant secretary for East Asia or an ambassador to South Korea, crucial positions to deal with the issue. In the midst of the war in Syria and growing worries over a possible conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, there is no confirmed assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs or ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt or Qatar. And as Zimbabwe confronts the future after the departure of Robert Mugabe, the department is lacking a confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs or an ambassador to neighboring South Africa.And the department’s future effectiveness may also be threatened. As more senior officials depart, interest in joining the Foreign Service is dwindling. With fewer prospects for rewarding careers, the number of people taking its entrance exam is on track to drop by 50 percent this year, according to the Foreign Service Association. “The message from the State Department right now is, ‘We don’t want you,’ and students are hearing that,” said James Goldgeier, former dean of the School of International Service at American University. For many at the State Department, their experience under Mr. Tillerson has been a particular shock because their hopes for him were initially high. Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry, her successor, were both seen as focused on their own priorities and were not particularly popular within the department. The model secretaries in recent history have been Colin Powell, James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, Republicans who cared about management. “Everyone who called me, I said: ‘Listen, guys, this is going to be great, and maybe he’ll finally get the department in shape,’” said Dana Shell Smith, the ambassador to Qatar, who recently resigned. Since then, Ms. Smith has changed her mind. “These people either do not believe the U.S. should be a world leader, or they’re utterly incompetent,” she said. “Either way, having so many vacancies in essential places is a disaster waiting to happen.”

The Guardian has reported that John Le Carre, the famed British spy novelist, recently said of the Trump presidency: “something truly, seriously bad is happening and we have to be awake to that.” Chillingly, he expressed alarm about the “toxic” parallels between the rise of President Trump and hard right regimes in Poland and Hungary and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Mr Le Carre may be overstating the risk of rising fascism but he is surely right to warn that many of Mr Trump’s early actions and words challenge fundamental tenets of democracy. These challenges include his assertion that the media is “the enemy of the people”, that news he doesn’t like is “fake news,” that there were “good people” among the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, and that the Senate should change its rules to abolish the requirement for 60 votes to end a filibuster, thus eliminating the single most important protection of minority interests in our system of government. At the same time, the Trump administration has mounted a systematic effort to “deconstruct the ‘administrative state’” as his recently departed chief strategist, Steven Bannon, was fond of saying. Much of this effort has been focused on the regulatory agencies rather than the national security agencies. But make no mistake; the president’s words and actions are deconstructing those agencies with perhaps even greater consequences. President Trump’s destructive impact on the national security agencies has two dimensions. First, his foreign policy of “America First” has called into question our commitment to our allies and the international framework and norms that have kept us safe and prosperous for 70 years. In turn, the American institutions and individuals who must execute this policy are undermined. Second, some of his actions and utterances are so far outside the bounds of responsible presidential conduct that many professionals who serve in the national security agencies lack confidence in him as commander-in-chief. Much damage has been done and whether it can be repaired, and if so how, is not clear. The world is wobbling on its axis under stresses caused by wars, ethnic tensions, instability, climate change and economic pressure in virtually every region. The liberal international order, largely established and led by the United States since the end of World War II, is fraying. Mr Trump’s America First policy pays scant heed to international cooperation and appears to believe that if we have enough military might we can make anything right. We can’t.The US military is already carrying a vast load and badly needs rest and replenishment. The Trump proposed defense budget is a step in the right direction. But the shallowness of the America First policy, coupled with the president’s intemperate statements that loosen us from our moral and ethical moorings, present a much deeper problem for the national security agencies. Much of our power comes from our values, our concern for minorities and our respect for the rule of law - at home and abroad. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea and many others care not for such things. Indeed, they are contemptuous of them. Former presidents and Secretaries of State and Defense know that we must wisely use all of the tools in the “national security tool box,” a useful concept coined by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Our values and moral leadership are among our most effective tools. As former president George W Bush recently said: “when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.”We also must lead. To do so, we need allies and skillful diplomacy carried out by adroit and experienced diplomats who are adequately resourced, supported and respected. Mr Trump appears to have little or no appreciation of the value of diplomacy or foreign aid. If anything, the Trump administration seems oddly determined to cripple the department of state. Consider, for example, the president’s tweet that Secretary Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man”, a foolish utterance that makes any resolution of the North Korean threat vastly more difficult. On top of this brilliant strategic move, Mr Trump has proposed cuts of nearly 30% in the state department budget and the elimination of 2,300 jobs. Furthermore, Secretary Tillerson’s use of outside management experts to restructure the Department as if Exxon Mobil had just acquired a new oil drilling subsidiary has had the predictable affect. Diplomacy is sputtering on one cylinder and many of our best and brightest Foreign Service Officers have quit in disgust. The administration is having a difficult time finding talented and experienced individuals to serve in the appointed jobs at state and defense. Applications for the Foreign Service are reportedly down and the department’s intention to no longer participate in the Presidential Management Fellows program is deeply disturbing. Countless highly talented young Americans who were once inspired to serve our country now may go to Wall Street rather than Foggy Bottom. This is good for real estate values in the Hamptons, but very bad for our country. Roger Cohen’s column in the New York Times of July 28 chronicled this tragic exodus. He quoted several career ambassadors who described “a toxic, troubled organization” and “complete and utter disdain for our expertise.” Mr Cohen concludes that “an American jewel (the State Department) is at stake, a place where honorable patriots take an oath to the Constitution” – not to any given president. Fortunately, Congress is having none of this tomfoolery. The Senate Appropriations Committee recently adopted a budget that adds $11bn to Trump’s request, but is still less than last year’s budget. It now goes to the House who will hopefully agree. Regardless, the message to State Department career employees is clear: “you are not important.” Secretary of State Tillerson is scheduled to unveil his proposed reorganization soon and there is great apprehension that his changes will gravely weaken the role of the state department and centralize power in political appointees at the expense of career professionals. All of this plays well with much of Mr Trump’s base who are hostile to globalization. But a weakened and demoralized foreign service is a serious blow to American long term interests and security. The president’s foreign policy and his tweets are often hard to defend. Our allies wonder whether “America First” means “I’m last”. The president says he’ll honor America’s commitments, but that’s not what he said earlier. Does he mean it now, or is he just saying it because he’s been told to say it. Over the objection of our strongest allies, he backed out of the Paris climate accord and abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that took years to negotiate. The Chinese are delighted at that move as it opens the field for them. It is no surprise that other countries, including many of our closest allies, have determined they must fend for themselves. There are media reports that several states, including South Korea and Japan, are considering developing nuclear weapons. In the absence of clear American leadership, more of the international fabric will unravel with potentially disastrous consequences. Mr Trump’s curiously lackluster response to Russia’s major effort to interfere in our recent election causes many national security professionals to privately question his leadership and fitness for the office. Some senators, notably John McCain, Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, are now expressing these sentiments publicly. Will their colleagues have the courage to speak up? How will history judge those who do not? The president’s refusal to consider any of the Republican former senior foreign policy officials who signed letters during the campaign expressing concern for his fitness to serve is a major mistake. The president should set aside his pique and bring them in. He and the country need them. This said, there are some hopeful signs. President Trump has assembled a first rate foreign policy team. There is criticism that it is too “general heavy” but that is not well placed. Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster are combat proven leaders and thinkers who have confronted the maddeningly complex wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The president seems to be listening to them on vital matters such as North Korea, Afghanistan and the value of the Iranian Nuclear Deal. We must all hope he continues to listen to them. Generals McMaster and Kelly have, by most reports, done a good job of organizing the policy process at the National Security Council. Whether careful decision making processes will hold in a crisis, where actions must be managed closely to avoid unintended escalation, remains to be seen. And in a crisis, the president’s inexperience and his tendency to tweet from the hip could be calamitous. If we stumble into an unnecessary nuclear war with North Korea because of poor presidential decisions, God help us all. In other national security agencies, things seem to be going well. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, for example, gets high marks, although some career CIA officers worry that he is spending too much time in the Oval Office thus risking the independence of his advice. But in many ways, Mr. Trump is causing intangible damage that may have the most lasting consequences. A recent article in Foreign Policy by Jon Cheatwood on the challenge of teaching cadets at West Point (my alma mater) in the age of Trump is deeply troubling. Mr Cheatwood describes cadets who ask whether they could serve under this president. Other cadets, taking the lead of their Commander-in-Chief cite “false news” as why they don’t trust the major media. Mr Cheatwood worries that Mr Trump’s actions and tweets, such as belittling Democrats in front of Air Force Academy cadets, suggests his disregard for the norms of his office and “risks politicizing the military”. Military officer ranks were rattled by Mr Trump’s shameful response earlier this year to the death of Navy Seal William Ryan Owens in a mission in Yemen that Mr Trump had authorized. He told Fox News the “generals” wanted to do the operation and “they lost Ryan.” Contrast this response with that of President Kennedy who publicly accepted full responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion early in his administration. Hopefully Mr Trump now understands that a Commander-in-Chief must shoulder success and failure alike. Another example was the president’s repeated calls in a tense meeting with Secretary Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford to fire General John Nicholson, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, because we were “losing”. How can General Nicholson command, and how can his soldiers fight, if they hear the limb being sawed off behind them? The Trump administration is now past the initial days when confusion and “rookie mistakes” are excusable. We are beginning to see what the true character of the man and his administration are. Echoing the concerns of John Le Carre, Secretary Mattis recently told a small group of soldiers, “You just hold the line - my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines - you just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.” We must all “hold the line”. Jeffrey H Smith counsels US and foreign companies on a wide range of national security issues. This piece is part of a series of essays entitled ‘While you weren’t looking - how Trump is dismantling the administrative state’

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obama rocking that BASQUIAT SHIRT thooo

By Kyle Whitmire | [email protected] Roy Moore is poison in the bloodstream of the Republican Party. If he isn't stopped, he will kill it. And if you take any joy from that prospect, then understand, too, he will kill Alabama first. It has been obvious for 20 years. The man autographs Bibles. That should have been enough for anyone to accurately measure his character. But it wasn't enough. Nothing it seems is enough for Alabama Republicans to say, "Enough!" He was removed from the bench once for refusing to follow the law. But voters put him right back so he could be removed a second time. His rabid attacks against the LGBT community, going so far as to say in court decisions that homosexuality is a crime that could be punished by death -- those didn't faze folks, either. Instead, it only endeared him to his base. Then the tax records from his non-profit showed that he used it as an income stream for himself and multiple members of his family. State and national Republicans opened their wallets to his campaign. When he wrote that a duly elected congressman shouldn't be allowed to take office because he was a Muslim, nary an eyebrow raised. And even after Donald Trump conceded that Barack Obama had been born in America, Moore refused to believe it. He has lent his office space out for Confederate apologists to use when celebrating "Secession Day." It didn't even matter that he successfully campaigned against an amendment to remove Jim Crow language from Alabama's state constitution. To be fair, his racism has been obscured by ... well, just about everything else. This has been the world's sickest game of Would-You-Could-You-Ever? Could Alabama vote for a Democrat if Roy Moore were the nominee? Nope. But what if Moore were a pedophile? Probably not. What if he tried to rape somebody? Uhm, well ... It will be at least a month before we get an answer, but some things are clear. No one in the Alabama Republican Party has a lick of courage, principle or conviction. The closest was Kay Ivey, who said she wouldn't endorse Moore and that she believed the accusers, and yet she said she intended to vote for him anyway. To be fair, a precedent has been set. When Rep. Martha Roby came out against Donald Trump last year when the Access Hollywood tapes became public, it nearly cost her reelection, and she's on the ropes for her next one. But some things are more important than reelection, and any elected official who demonstrates they can't tell the difference should be voted out. Yes, Moore is poison in the bloodstream of the Republican Party, and if Alabama can't stop it from traveling toward the party's heart, the national GOP will have to amputate. If Alabama elects Roy Moore, the Republican Senate majority will be forced to make a decision: Allow an alleged attempted rapist and accused child molester to take a seat among them, or invoke a rule to unseat him not used since the outset of the Civil War. That would leave Alabama with only one Senator, and would probably begin a new Civil War within the GOP. Either way, the GOP loses. Worse than that is what's already happening to Alabama. As it went down, I was on vacation when the news broke last week. Whatever restaurant I went for a meal, whatever bar I sat at simply to have a drink in peace and spend some quality time with my wife, it followed. The guy down the bar talking loudly of enough for me to pick out the names -- Moore, Sessions. The muted TV playing in every establishment, with that silly goon in his cowboy hat, waving his little gun in the air. Finally, the Saturday Night Live cold open. It wasn't funny and I didn't laugh. Instead, I was heartbroken for my state, a place I love that, like a drug-addict, can't help but destroy itself. Alabama is killing itself, suicide by Roy Moore. Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. You can follow his work on Facebook through Reckon by AL.com.

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A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.” — Malcolm X

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