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Wonder how these meddlers will respond, if Trump suddenly were to implement sanctions against Russia?

¿Too bad Kushner's backchannel link was exposed before it was used?

Memphis Trace

Here are some early returns that will help individuals decide whether Trump's policies—GOP policies similar to Reagan's—will provide them with better lives:

President Trump has finally released his comic book

By Dana Milbank

In a Republican presidential debate in the fall of 2015, moderator John Harwood of CNBC asked Donald Trump about some of his more outlandish claims, such as making another country pay for a border wall and enacting huge tax cuts that wouldn’t increase the deficit.

“Let’s be honest,” Harwood memorably said. “Is this a comic-book version of a presidential campaign?”

Harwood got a lot of grief for that from Trump and his supporters, but—Great Caesar’s ghost! —would you look at this? President Trump’s comic book came out on Monday, in the form of his budget proposal. It is quite a marvel. In fact, we haven’t seen a comic like this in D.C. in ages.

Remember Trump’s boast that he would “get rid of the $19 trillion in debt ... over a period of eight years”?

Odin’s beard! He just hammered that promise to pieces. His budget would add $7 trillion to the debt over a decade—$2 trillion in the next two years alone—and even those numbers are based on the peculiar assumption that the economy will never again go into recession.

Remember Trump’s promise that “I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid” and his boast about being “the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid”?

That promise has gone up, up and away. Trump proposes to cut more than $500 billion together from Medicare—health care for old folks—and Medicaid, which provides health care to the poor.

Remember Trump’s constant “Mexico will pay for the wall” vows?

Cowabunga! His budget made quick work of that promise, requesting 18 billion American dollars for that wall.

And remember just two months ago when the administration said the tax cut would pay for itself and the Treasury Department said it would actually increase tax receipts by $300 billion over 10 years?

Shazam! Quick as a flash, the administration now says tax receipts will be $314 billion lower in 2018, $400 billion lower in 2019 and even $200 billion lower in 2027 when the plan was supposed to be paying for itself.

But the really comic part is the way Trump would offset the big tax cuts for the wealthy and the huge increase for the Pentagon. These range from the villainous—billions of dollars taken from food stamps, college tuition assistance for poor kids and clean-air and clean-water protection—to the absurd—selling off airports and roads and magically saving $139 billion by reducing “improper payments.” Few if any of these will ever happen, so the actual increase in debt will be even greater.

It is, all in all, a super-heroic achievement, proving that the government can cut taxes and spend freely on whatever it wants, nobody will ever have to pay for it and nobody will suffer adverse consequences (except those unlucky fools who happen to be old, or poor, or consumers of, say, air and water).

This is a comic-book budget—but not a terribly good one. If the president is going to promise the stars and pay with peanuts, couldn’t he at least make it more interesting? If wild promises and unrealistic offsets are the stuff of a good budget, he could do much better:

All Americans of driving age shall be given a Tesla, and all Americans shall be entitled to elite status in a frequent-flier program of their choosing. The cost of this shall be offset by grounding EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for one month.

To improve access to affordable housing, HUD shall subsidize stays at Trump hotel properties at the rack rate. If funds remain unspent after Trump hotels reach capacity, the secretary shall subsidize rounds of golf. The cost of this program will be offset by the elimination of prosecutions at the Justice Department against all who, in the president’s view, are not guilty.

All U.S. citizens shall be given 60-inch ultra-HD TVs. All Americans shall also be granted free subscriptions to Hulu, Netflix and HBO. The cost of this program shall be offset by the sales of organs harvested from those in the lowest quintile of wage earners.

All American families shall be provided with an armed Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile, as well as a launchpad, for the purpose of displaying them on homemade floats in military parades across the country. The cost of this program will be offset by eliminating the president’s intelligence briefings.

In addition to their obvious merits, these proposals have another thing going for them: They have exactly as much chance of becoming law as the Trump budget.

Already Trump is preparing the country yobs for a hard landing from all this winning he promised, and for making America Great Again.

Oh, did you read Trump is defending another serial sex abuser =Rob Porter= to go along with his defense of Roy Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilley, and himself?

Memphis Trace

President Trump, if You’re Innocent, Why Act So Guilty?
By Nicholas Kristof

Feb. 7, 2018
President Trump and Devin Nunes have been muddying the waters of the Russia investigation, so let’s try to clarify those waters so that they’re as clear as vodka.

Here are a dozen things we know.

1. Russia interfered in the U.S. election. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that President Vladimir Putin had “a clear preference” for Trump and “ordered an influence campaign” to hurt Hillary Clinton. The Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states that Russian hackers (mostly unsuccessfully) had targeted their election systems before the 2016 election.

Russia oversaw an online campaign using fake American accounts to spread anti-Clinton messages. Twitter found that 50,000 Russian accounts fired off 2.1 million election-related tweets in the fall of 2016, and in the final weeks around the election accounted for 4.25 percent of retweets of Trump’s own account.

2. Trump has longstanding business interests in Russia. The Times has explored these, beginning with a trip to Moscow in 1987 to try to build a hotel there. As recently as 2013 on another Moscow visit he was still optimistic, tweeting “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next,” but the buildings have never come to fruition.More successfully, Trump has attracted murky investments from Russia, raising speculation that Russia might have gained some leverage over him. A Russian oligarch paid Trump an eyebrow-raising $95 million for one Florida property. A Reuters investigation found that people with Russian addresses or passports had invested nearly $100 million in seven Trump properties in southern Florida.

“I know the Russians better than anybody,” Trump boasted in 2014.

3. Trump has consistently displayed a soft spot for Putin. At various times, Trump has described Putin as “so nice,” “so smart” and doing “an amazing job.” Trump defended Putin from allegations that he interfered in elections and killed journalists. “You think our country is so innocent?” he scoffed. Trump told another interviewer, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

4. Trump picked people with ties to Russia. He named as a foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who was investigated by the F.B.I. as far back as 2013 for possible ties to Russian intelligence (Page denies any wrongdoing). To run his campaign, Trump selected Paul Manafort, who had long experience working for Russian interests and once wrote a memo offering a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government.” Trump’s aides also tweaked the Republican Party platform in a way that would please Moscow.

5. Russia confided in the Trump campaign. In April 2016, the Russians told George Papadopoulos, another Trump foreign policy adviser, that they had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” It’s not clear what Papadopoulos did with that information.

6. Trump aides secretly met with Russians. In June 2016, Russia offered the Trump campaign “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.” Instead of calling the F.B.I., Donald Trump Jr. responded, “I love it,” and arranged a meeting with the Russians and top campaign officials.

7. A Trump ally secretly communicated with a Russian mouthpiece. In August 2016, Trump ally Roger Stone communicated with Guccifer 2.0, believed to be an outlet for Russian military intelligence. Separately, Stone tweeted that “it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in a barrel”; seven weeks later, WikiLeaks began releasing emails Russia had hacked from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.

8. … more secret contacts. WikiLeaks, presumably representing Russian interests, engaged in secret correspondence with Donald Trump Jr.

9. Kushner met a Putin ally. Jared Kushner met in December 2016 with a Russian, Sergey Gorkov, who is close to Putin. Kushner also privately asked the Russians about using Russian equipment to establish a secret communications channel to the Kremlin.10. Trump aides falsely denied contacts. Campaign officials denied innumerable times that there had been any contact with Russia. “Of course not,” said Mike Pence shortly before the inauguration. “Why would there be any contacts?”

Good question. In fact, there were at least 51 such contacts, including 19 face-to-face interactions, by the count of CNN.

11. Russia is still at it. Russian bots are joining Trump supporters in tweeting hashtags like #MAGA and #FullOfSchiff. These same Russian bots are promoting Fox News links that disparage the Russia investigation.

12. This is not normal!

Actually, I doubt that there was anything so straightforward as a secret quid pro quo. Indeed, some of these links are so blatant that they seem confusingly exculpatory: Why would anybody conspiring with Putin raise suspicions by publicly praising him?

Yet the Russian interference itself is beyond doubt. The Mueller investigation has led to two guilty pleas and two indictments so far, and it must continue. Frankly, it’s suspicious that Trump is throwing up so much dust and trying so hard to delegitimize the investigation.

He is not acting innocent.

¿Or to excite your emotions we could reprise your Seahawks' convincing first Superb Owl win over the 2nd best QB in NFL history?

Memphis Trace

PS After your Superb Owl, I will never be able to call this annual bacchanalium the Super Bowl again.

I just joined dagnee's group.

Memphis Trace

Great to find out about this, Dagnee.

Memphis Trace

The Memo Doesn’t Vindicate Trump. It’s More Proof of Obstruction.
By Renato Mariotti

For weeks, allies of President Trump ratcheted up pressure to “release the memo.” The impact, according to supporters, would be monumental: It would shake the F.B.I. “to its core” (Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina) or it would reveal abuses “100 times bigger” than what incited the American Revolution (Sebastian Gorka, a former White House official).

The president himself said, after the memo’s release on Friday, that it “vindicates” him in the probe.

But it does no such thing. The memo from House Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes, fell well short of the hype. Its main argument is that when the Justice Department sought a warrant to wiretap the former Trump adviser Carter Page, it did not reveal that Christopher Steele—the author of a controversial opposition-research dossier—was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign through a law firm.

This is actually a fairly common—and rarely effective—argument made by defendants who seek to suppress evidence obtained by a warrant.

What might be the lasting legacy of the Nunes memo is how President Trump reacted to it. According to reports, Mr. Trump suggested “the memo might give him the justification to fire [the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein]—something about which Trump has privately mused—or make other changes at the Justice Department, which he had complained was not sufficiently loyal to him.”

In fact, Mr. Trump’s approval of the release of the memo and his comments that releasing it could make it easier for him to fire Mr. Rosenstein could help Robert Mueller, the special counsel, prove that Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, with a “corrupt” intent—in other words, the intent to wrongfully impede the administration of justice—as the law requires.

After all, Mr. Trump is now aware that he is under investigation for obstruction, and he knows that Mr. Comey said that Mr. Trump wanted “loyalty” from him. Mr. Mueller could argue that the president’s comments that Mr. Rosenstein was not “loyal” and his desire to fire Mr. Rosenstein suggest Mr. Trump’s unlawful intent when he fired Mr. Comey.

The memo also offers the outlines of a broader probable cause case against Mr. Page. The Nunes memo suggests that there was substantial additional evidence, even though it avoids discussing that evidence. The memo indicates that the investigation of Mr. Page began well before the warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was sought, and that the Russia investigation was initiated because of the statements of George Papadopoulos.

The warrant was issued and then renewed three separate times. Each time, as is standard in seeking a FISA warrant, a judge reviewed extensive information before issuing it. The fact that the warrant was renewed three times indicates that the F.B.I. obtained useful intelligence each time—a judge wouldn’t have approved a renewal if the prior warrant came up empty. That suggests that once the warrants were issued, they revealed important evidence.

In addition, the timeline set forth in the memo indicates that the FISA warrants were submitted by both the Obama and Trump administrations. The initial surveillance began before Mr. Rosenstein was deputy attorney general, and by the time he was at the Justice Department, he approved renewal applications that were based on the intelligence gathered from the earlier surveillance—not the dossier.

On the issue of bias, whenever the Justice Department seeks a warrant, they must present extensive evidence to a judge, who decides whether to issue the warrant based on that evidence. After the fact, defendants can challenge warrants by arguing that the government recklessly excluded information that would have caused the judge not to sign the warrant.

Courts have repeatedly held that even when the government omitted the criminal history of the informant or the fact that the informant was paid, it didn’t matter unless the omitted information would have caused the judge not to sign the warrant.

The Nunes memo claims to show that the warrant was obtained unlawfully, but there is no way of knowing that without examining the extensive evidence submitted in conjunction with the warrant, which the memo does not do. Given that Mr. Steele was a former intelligence officer, not a flipper with an extensive criminal history, it will be hard to show that a judge would have believed he was lying if the source of his funding was included in the application.

Given how little substance there is to the Nunes memo, the Republicans made a misstep by pushing through its release in a partisan manner. The specter of an unreleased memo was more menacing than the thin allegations revealed in the memo itself, which are hotly disputed by congressional Democrats.

Although at least one Republican maintains that the memo shows that Mr. Rosenstein, Mr. Comey and others committed “treason,” the memo itself does not allege that the F.B.I. or Department of Justice knowingly used false information or even that the information they used was false. Because the allegations in the memo are legally irrelevant, I would be surprised if the memo was more than a short-lived publicity stunt.

This is not the result Mr. Nunes expected when his staff wrote the memo, but that could be its lasting impact.

Memphis Trace

Is this

to what you refer?

How do you believe punishing the wealthy political foes of Republicans by taking money from middle class Californians who moved to Silicon Valley—to give it to the wealthy scions of  Donald Trump with his pass through real estate income building up the estate his heirs will no longer have to pay taxes on—helps the country?

Memphis Trace

I am puzzled by what you purport to show by citing Jonah Goldberg's article showing that it costs almost 60% more to rise to the level of poor in California than it does in Mississippi?

Are we still talking about

A cursory look at the median income of households in California and Mississippi show that  shows that the median family income of Mississippi households in an almost identical 60% of median family incomes in California?

The question we should be trying to answer is how efficiently the taxes paid by the wealthy are being used help those in poverty.

Memphis Trace

That paragraph reads:

Since Glenn Harlan Reynolds didn't, can you link me up with the evidence that the actual beneficiaries of the welfare agency budgets have been the highly-educated social workers and lawyers?

I note well that almost everything you cite comes directly or indirectly from Instapundit, described in a 2007 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee as one of the five best-read national conservative blogs.

If in our free range Democrat v. Republican discussion, you intend to rely on Glenn Harlan Reynolds to support your Republican gospel, please support Reynolds' raw opinions with links to a modicum of evidence to support those opinions.

Now that we are exposing pimps, how hot is the air Reynolds blows onto the Naval officer pimps??
The article:
Twenty-five thousand dollar watches? Six hundred dollar a night hotel rooms? “A rotating carousel of prostitutes”? No one told us that joining the Navy and seeing the world was so decadent, but then again, no one told the Navy or the Department of Justice either. That could be why the DoJ rounded up eight officers yesterday., including the admiral who served as director of intelligence operations, and indicted them for corruption in the infamous “Fat Leonard” scandal:
The Justice Department unsealed a fresh indictment Tuesday charging eight Navy officials — including an admiral — with corruption and other crimes in the “Fat Leonard” bribery case, escalating an epic scandal that has dogged the Navy for four years.

Among those charged were Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, a senior Navy intelligence officer who recently retired from a key job at the Pentagon, as well as four retired Navy captains and a retired Marine colonel. The charges cover a period of eight years, from 2006 through 2014.

The Navy personnel are accused of taking bribes in the form of lavish gifts, prostitutes and luxury hotel stays courtesy of Leonard Glenn “Fat Leonard” Francis, a Singapore-based defense contractor who has pleaded guilty to defrauding the Navy of tens of millions of dollars.

It’s not just corruption, either. The eight, including the man who ran intelligence operations for the Navy, are accused of passing along classified information to Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), the DoJ said in its statement yesterday (received by e-mail):
According to the indictment, the Navy officers allegedly participated in a bribery scheme with Leonard Francis, in which the officers accepted travel and entertainment expenses, the services of prostitutes and lavish gifts in exchange for helping to steep lucrative contracts to Francis and GDMA and to sabotage competing defense contractors. The defendants allegedly violated many of their sworn official naval duties, including duties related to the handling of classified information and duties related to the identification and reporting of foreign intelligence threats.  According to the indictment, the defendants allegedly worked in concert to recruit new members for the conspiracy, and to keep the conspiracy secret by using fake names and foreign email service providers. According to the indictment, the bribery scheme allegedly cost the Navy – and U.S. taxpayers – tens of millions of dollars.

The indictment can be found here. Bear in mind that indictments are not convictions, and that these men will have a chance to answer these charges in court. However, the DoJ already has guilty pleas from ten other Navy personnel indicted earlier in the scandal, as well as three GDMA officials. Based on what appears in the indictment, some of them may have been cooperating with investigators, as the allegations appear detailed and, er … intimate, especially when it comes to Douglas MacArthur memorabilia (page 23, lines 5-7). Yecch.

This solves an earlier mystery from almost fourteen months ago, too. The Washington Post reported in January 2016 that the Navy’s top man in intelligence, Admiral Ted “Twig” Branch, had his clearances revoked in 2013 and could no longer access any classified information — but yet remained in his post in intelligence work. Loveless was one of his deputies at that time and included in the same report. Craig Whitlock reported that the three-year probe into “Fat Leonard” had not yet been completed, and so the Navy was “frozen” on Branch and Loveless. Branch finally retired later in 2016, after getting passed up for promotion, and in July the Navy finally had an intelligence chief that could access intelligence again.

Perhaps this round of indictments spells an end to the scandal, and Branch can enjoy his retirement. It still leaves lots of questions about why the Navy left him in that position for years while being prevented from performing the vital job assigned to him, and how Branch somehow missed his own deputy’s corruption.

Memphis Trace

"Undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born."
— Antonio Villaraigosa on Monday, July 31st, 2017 in an interview on MSNBC

MOSTLY TRUE: Undocumented immigrants less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens
By Chris Nichols on Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 at 4:04 p.m.

Candidate for California governor Antonio Villaraigosa jumped into the nation’s heated debate on immigration reform during a recent interview on MSNBC.

The Democrat and former Los Angeles mayor rejected the idea that deporting undocumented immigrants was a sound strategy for reducing crime.

His statement followed President Trump’s speech about combatting MS-13 gang members. The gang started in poor Los Angeles neighborhoods where many refugees from civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua lived in the 1980s. It’s grown into an international criminal organization with more than 30,000.

Trump campaigned on the promise to deport millions of undocumented residents, often describing them as threats to public safety.

Here’s what Villaraigosa said on July 31, 2017 on MSNBC.

"I think we all agree that people that commit violent crimes ought to be deported. But going after the undocumented is not a crime strategy, when you look at the fact that the National Academy of Sciences in, I think it was November of 2015, the undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born. That’s just a fact."

We decided to examine this last point as part of our Tracking The Truth series, which fact-checks claims in the 2018 California governor's race.

We interpreted Villaraigosa’s statement to mean undocumented people commit crimes at a lower rate than the native born.

But we wondered whether this was really a settled matter.

We set out on a fact check.

Our research

We started by checking out the 2015 National Academy of Sciences study Villaraigosa cited.

Emphasis mine
It found: "Immigrants are in fact much less likely to commit crime than natives, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants seems to lower crime rates." The study added that "This disparity also holds for young men most likely to be undocumented immigrants: Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men."

It continued: "Today, the belief that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes is perpetuated by ‘issue entrepreneurs’ who promote the immigrant-crime connection in order to drive restrictionist immigration policy."

The academy is a nonprofit research organization charged with providing independent advice to the nation. It is funded largely by the federal government.

Findings in a March 2017 study by the libertarian Cato Institute also support Villaraigosa's statement:

"Illegal immigrants are 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal immigrants are 69 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal and illegal immigrants are underrepresented in the incarcerated population while natives are overrepresented."

The Cato study used information from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for immigrants aged 18 to 54 who are incarcerated in the United States.

To examine Villaraigosa's claim, we also relied on research into similar claims by our partner national PolitiFact. In July 2016, it rated Mostly True a statement by Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson that Mexican immigrants "are more law-abiding than U.S. citizens and that is a statistic."

PolitiFact found several studies that back up this claim by citing incarceration rates. It also found groups that challenged those studies or said more research is needed.

PolitiFact’s findings

PolitiFact pointed to a July 2015 report by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant nonprofit in Washington. The council analyzed data from the Census’ 2010 American Community Survey and found that about 1.6 percent of all immigrant males (Census does not specify legal status) between 18 and 39 years old were incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born population.

Looking at California prisons, immigrants are also underrepresented. U.S.-born men are incarcerated in the state at a rate of more than two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The American Immigration Council also reported that 2010 Census data shows incarceration rates of young, less educated Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan men — which comprise the bulk of the unauthorized population — are "significantly lower" than incarceration rates of native-born young men without a high-school diploma.

Specifically for Mexican men ages 18 to 39, the incarceration rate in 2010 was 2.8 percent, compared to 10.7 percent for native-born men in the same age group, the council’s report said.

Immigrants come to the United States to build better lives for themselves and their children, said Walter A. Ewing, a senior researcher at the American Immigration Council and one of the report’s authors.

"They are very motivated to not blow that opportunity by getting in trouble with the police," he told PolitiFact. "This is especially so for unauthorized immigrants, who can be deported at any time for unlawful presence."

Crime trends

PolitiFact also noted that as the immigrant population has increased, crime has gone down, citing Ewing’s report.

Between 1990 and 2013, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population increased from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent, and the number of unauthorized immigrants went up from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. At the same time, the violent crime rate (murder, rape and aggravated assault) decreased 48 percent and property crime rate fell 41 percent, the report said, citing FBI data.

Bianca E. Bersani, an assistant professor and director of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, says her research also shows that crime involvement among foreign-born residents is lower than that of U.S.-born citizens.

"The rhetoric of the ‘criminal immigrant’ does not align with the bulk of empirical research," Bersani said.

According to Bersani’s research, while first-generation immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population, the second generation (individuals born in the United States to at least one foreign-born parent) more closely resemble patterns of their native-born peers (three or more U.S.-born generations).

"This does not suggest that the second generation is uniquely crime prone, but instead that they are acting in ways that are no different from the rest of the U.S.-born population," Bersani said.

Datasets with information on both crime and immigrant status are rare, Bersani said, though more research and data are becoming available.

More research needed?

The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports stricter immigration policies, in a 2009 study said that overall understanding of immigrants and crime "remains confused" due to lack of data and contrary information.

Unless inmates are identified as immigrant or native-born, incarceration rates are a poor way to measure links between immigrants and crime, the study said.

As PolitiFact reported in 2015, there isn’t exact data on how many undocumented immigrants are currently incarcerated.

PolitiFact California spoke about this critique with Ewing of the American Immigration Council, whose research supports Villaraigosa’s claim. He said he’s confident in the work that’s been done and said critics have used anecdotes, rather than full-blown research, to try to make their points.

Ewing added that the studies backing up Villaraigosa’s statement are "from such a wide range of researchers using so many different methodologies and sources of data -- not everyone can be wrong."

Our ruling

Villaraigosa said "undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born."

He cited a 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences that backs up this claim.

In a fact check last year, PolitiFact rated a similar claim Mostly True. It cited additional studies by scholars and partisan groups that show that the foreign-born population is less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

It also found that researchers agree more data is needed to get a better understanding of immigration and crime. It said this was a needed clarification.

PolitiFact California agrees with these findings.

We rated Villaraigosa’s claim Mostly True.

Memphis Trace