Responding to reports that Russia's election-meddling hackers targeted Pokemon Go, Late Night's Stephen Colbert said on Friday that in hindsight, "we should have seen this coming."
"After all, a 'Squirtle' isn't just a Pokemon -- it's also what Trump requested in that Russian hotel room," he said, referencing the infamous "golden showers" dossier to applause and laughter from the audience and his band.
"If only there was someone who could have warned us how important this was," Colbert said, cutting to a campaign clip of Hillary Clinton imploring a crowd to "'Pokemon Go' to the polls."
"So they hacked her too," he said. "If only she'd Pokemon Gone to Michigan and Wisconsin."
He had one more Pokemon-related pun left in him, however.
"Who knows how this whole Russia thing is gonna play out," Colbert concluded. "But I'm hoping Robert Mueller is gonna 'catch 'em all."
Watch Colbert display his knowledge of the popular anime franchise below.
Tonight: The Late Show monologue is evolving! Stephen looks into Russian interference in the 2016 election by way of Pokémon Go. #LSSCpic.twitter.com/Parb5S8YfQ
On Friday, word of an Uppsala University study suggesting that some ancient Vikings were Muslim converts went rocketing around the Internet and hit Twitter like a bomb.
Uppsala researchers found Vikings buried in Sweden with cloth inscribed with the word "Allah," the Muslim word for "God," suggesting that as they roamed the world, Vikings encountered adherents to Islam and perhaps some of them converted.
Vikings are one of white supremacists' most favorite things, embodying the "racial purity" and ferocity in war that thousands of 4chan keyboard warriors aspire to. Nazi websites like The Daily Stormer regularly truck in Viking imagery and Norse myth when appealing to disaffected whites, so the news that some Vikings could be Muslim was bound to hit some racists pretty hard.
Indeed, reactions on Twitter broke down into two categories, gleefully cackling liberals and dubious, skeptical people with "Deplorable" in their screen name or tiny U.S. flags next to their avatars.
The conservative consensus on the news was that Vikings might have plundered some Muslim fabrics to take back home, but that Vikings would never, ever, ever worship those brown people's God, what are you thinking?
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In fact, there was at least one woman Viking, and she was apparently a high-ranking officer. But don't let that stop you, Deplorables.
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On the other side were liberal onlookers to the carnage -- who were clearly relishing some schadenfreude stirred into their Friday morning coffee.
EPA chief Scott Pruitt recently announced he would repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era initiative to limit carbon pollution from power plants, and he promised to “assess whether further regulatory action is warranted.”
Pruitt has been largely successful in undermining the core mission of the agency, and by that measure, he is perhaps the most competent member of the president’s staff. But any consideration of his waffling on climate science makes clear that he is woefully unfit for his office.
Scientists, business leaders and the large majority of Americans are worried about climate change. The transition to electric cars and renewable power is already underway, and there is little that policymakers can do to slow the inevitable demise of coal. And yet, Pruitt isn’t going down without a fight. He has dismantled regulations, championed the U.S. exit from the Paris Agreement and called for an end to the wind energy tax credit — much of it in secret.
Pruitt’s views on climate change are subordinate to policy goals. Because the science is so robust and so many Americans are worried about the problem, he can’t outright deny climate change. Instead, he suggests doubt and disagreement among scientists, using this view to support his deregulatory agenda.
Thus, while his policies clearly conform to his free-market philosophy, his statements on climate science range from inconsistent to incoherent. Pruitt’s climate denial is a form of incompetence. Cabinet officials are supposed to be technocrats, not ideologues. As a technocrat, Pruitt is failing. He is failing to acknowledge basic scientific facts and to produce policy that accords with those facts. Instead, he is producing policy and generating talking points to support those policies. Because the facts come second, his views on climate science are utter nonsense.
Scientists, advocates and climate-conscious politicians broadly share a coherent and scientifically informed view of the carbon crisis. Researchers at Yale and George Mason summarized climate change in five short sentences: It’s real. It’s us. It’s bad. Scientists agree. There’s hope.
It’s real.
Global temperatures have risen around 1 degree C since 1880, with most of the warming happening in the last half-century. No one born after February 1985 has lived through a month where global temperatures were cooler than the historical average. Each of the last three years ranked as the hottest ever recorded.
Humans are cranking up the global thermostat primarily by burning coal, oil and natural gas, pouring heat-trapping carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide have led to a rise in temperature. Scientists say that evidence linking carbon pollution to climate change is as conclusive as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer.
Rising temperatures are producing oppressive heat, persistent drought, powerful storms and coastal floods. So far, this year has delivered 15 storms, floods, droughts and wildfires that racked up more than a billion dollars in damages, putting 2017 on track to set a new record. If we don’t immediately and drastically reduce carbon pollution, we will endure conditions that were previously unimaginable, a level of warming climate scientist Kevin Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.”
U.S. sailors deliver water to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Source: Department of Defense
Scientists agree.
Study after study has shown that around 97 percent of climate scientists believe that humans are driving the warming trend. Some scholars say that estimate is too low. A 2016 analysis suggests the number is even higher.
Between 90 and 100 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. Credit: University of Queensland, John Garrett
There’s hope.
Despite the grim outlook for the future of life on Earth, there are small signs of hope. Americans are more worried about climate change than ever. Worldwide, energy-related carbon emissions have stayed flat for the last three years, and the cost of clean energy has plummeted. It will be incredibly hard to reign in climate change, but it can be done.
The levelized cost of energy (LOCE) for wind and solar has dropped substantially over the past decade. Source: Lazard
The problem is clear. The solution is necessary, and Americans understand these facts to varying degrees. Among climate deniers, however, there is no coherent view of the issue. Some say the Earth isn’t warming. Others say that it is, but humans are not to blame. Still others say that humans are to blame, but the problem is manageable. Most like to say that scientists disagree.
The only thing these views have in common is that they all point to the same outcome: do nothing. This is the unifying theory of climate change denial. Pruitt offers a case in point.
Pruitt has no coherent view of climate change.
Pruitt has contradicted his own view at every turn. Here are his statements on climate change, broken down according to the rubric laid out above.
It’s real.
Pruitt’s usual talking point is that some amount of climate change is always occurring. In a June press conference he conceded that the Earth is warming.
“ I don’t know if you guys caught my confirmation process or not, but… I indicated that in fact, global warming is occurring.”
But later in that same press conference, he falsely claimed that warming stopped two decades ago.
“We’ve actually been on hiatus since the late 1990s, as you know.”
Set aside the fact that this statement is untrue, that recent years have consistently broken temperature records. Either the Earth is warming now or the climate is stable. If the climate is stable, then talk of climate change only makes sense in light of human-caused carbon pollution.
It’s us.
On the one hand, Pruitt has said that it’s hard to determine how much impact humans are having on the climate.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.”
On the other hand, Pruitt has suggested that it’s possible to determine exactly how much impact humans are having on the climate. In a June press conference, Pruitt falsely claimed that if countries fulfilled their pledges under the Paris Accord, it would only reduce temperatures by two-tenths of 1 degree C.
“And even if all of the targets were met by all nations across the globe, it only reduced the temperature by less than two-tenths of one degree.”
Set aside the fact that scientists have debunked this claim. It is internally inconsistent. If it is impossible to gauge the human contribution to climate change, then it is also impossible to determine the effect of cutting carbon pollution. What’s more galling is that Pruitt also brags about recent reductions in U.S. emissions, which, by his own reasoning, are meaningless.
It’s bad.
During his Senate confirmation, Pruitt was asked what he thought of the Pentagon’s assessment that climate change is a “threat multiplier” and a “growing security threat.” He said he did not disagree.
“I have no reason to disagree with the statements from the listed security experts.”
At the same time, Pruitt has dismissed the threat of climate change. In a September appearance on Fox and Friends, he said experts can’t assess the threat posed by climate change.
“We know the climate’s always changing. We know that humans contribute to it in some way… Is it unsustainable with respect to what we see presently? Let’s have a debate about that.”
Pruitt has acknowledged that climate change is a “threat multiplier” and “growing security threat,” but he has also suggested that climate change may pose no serious risks. If he’s unsure which is which, he might ask his colleague, Defense Secretary James Mattis, who said that “climate change is a challenge that requires a broader, whole-of-government response.”
Scientists agree.
As part of his Senate testimony, Pruitt said that scientists disagree about climate change. Since then, he has said he will put together a team of deniers who will challenge scientists on climate research. In an interview with Breibart, Pruitt said the subject deserves to be debated.
“What the American people deserve is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.”
Presumably, Pruitt would look to the outcome of that debate to guide his decision-making as EPA chief. But, in an interview with a Texas radio program, Pruitt said that science should not direct public policy.
“Science should not be something that’s just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”
Pruitt’s objection to climate science is that it makes clear we need to stop burning fossil fuels. If he could find an expert who supports the view that fossil fuels are benign, he would happily embrace his findings.
There’s hope.
While Pruitt has dismissed the idea that carbon pollution is responsible for climate change, he has also bragged that the United States has cut carbon emissions through it’s embrace of natural gas, which produces less carbon pollution than coal. He bragged about this in his June press conference.
“We have reduced our CO2 footprint to levels of the early 1990s... And that’s been largely accomplished through innovation and technology, not government mandate.”
And yet later in that same press conference, he said that the United States had little hope of meeting its targets under the Paris Agreement.
“You may not know this, but Paris set targets of 26 to 28 percent. With the entire agenda of the previous administration, we still fell 40 percent short of those targets.”
Pruitt has taken the position that the United States is making progress on carbon pollution — which he says has little to do with climate change — but at the same time, the goals of the Paris Agreement are too ambitious. He says that even if the Paris goals were met, it would have minimal impact on warming, but he also says that it’s impossible to determine the relationship between carbon pollution and climate change. He says that Americans deserve a debate about climate science, but he also says that science shouldn’t inform public policy.
Pruitt has no clear, coherent view of climate change. But it doesn’t matter. His mission is to dismantle the EPA from the inside. He is only willing to accept facts to the extent that they align with that mission.
Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.
The new rules allow any employer or insurer to stop covering contraceptive services if they have religious beliefs or moral convictions against covering birth control. It would be up to states to determine how companies should make these decisions.
In a statement, the agency said “these rules will not affect over 99.9% of the 165 million women in the United States.” Senior Health and Human Services (HHS) officials said some large companies, including Pepsi and Exxon, had pre-ACA plans that will continue and not have to cover contraception. Some church groups were already exempt from the law and not providing this coverage.
Taking the administration at its word, then, this regulation is a cynical ploy more for show than any practical effect. If it won’t affect many consumers, why bother with it? It’s meaningless. The Obama administration already exempted religious organizations from this requirement—as anyone but the completely intransigent has long since realized—and the Supreme Court added “closely-held, for profit corporations” to the list. So even the most benign explanation is that Trump is playing to his base’s fears of cultural displacement, including the displacement of losing the ability to police women’s sexuality, without really doing much of anything.
What seems more likely (not taking the White House at its word) is that this is another in a long series of efforts by the president to undermine the ACA. Trump wants to drive as many companies and consumers out of ACA-compliant policies as he can, to spike rates and send the ACA into a “death spiral.” He’s willing to screw over even Republican governors to do that. Given that the new order leaves it up to the states to decide whether to grant conscience clause exemptions to the contraceptive mandate, it seems likely that Trump is willing to stick other governors with the cost of implementing his order.
Trump’s campaign to kill the ACA might work, but it will come at a terrible political cost, to himself and to his party. As Paul Waldman points out, the contraceptive mandate is quite popular, with nearly 70% approval in one poll, including a majority of Republicans. The ACA itself is somewhat less popular, but has been gaining strength ever since the GOP-led Congress started taking whacks at it with a fire axe earlier this year.
Which leaves the question: what the hell are they doing? This makes little political sense. Again, Waldman’s got the best explanation:
They’re doing all this after it has become clear they won’t be repealing the ACA any time soon. From a political standpoint it’s impossibly stupid, because it gives Democrats all kinds of ammunition to say that Trump and the Republicans are destroying your health care. A different Republican administration would grudgingly implement the ACA and look for conservative ways to allow states to improve their systems. The Trump administration, and Donald Trump personally, seem to want to make things as awful as they can for as many Americans as they can.
If you’re a venomously anti-government Trump voter, this is great news. Screw all those lazy freeloaders who want to suckle on government’s teat and think they have a right to help affording health care! Take that, Obama! But if you care about whether the Republican Party is going to hold Congress and the White House, it’s a terrible idea.
“If you’re a certain kind of Trump voter, he’s coming through for you, bigly,” Waldman concludes. “At least for now.” That certainly goes for Trump’s conservative Christian base. Hilariously, while they and their supporters welcomed the news, the Little Sisters of the Poor—the chief religious antagonists of the contraceptive mandate—are continuing their Becket Fund-supported battle in the courts, where they’ve found far less friendly ears than in the Executive Office.
What happens when the ACLU, which has already announced that it will sue to block enforcement of the new regulations, carries the day, and the administration has to go back to the base empty-handed? Or worse, when they have to come up with some half-baked “compromise” after the president gets frustrated and abruptly changes course, revealing in the process he never really gave a damn about their “moral objections”? Whatever the short-term benefits, in the long run, this will more than likely turn out to be a spectacular failure, enraging liberal opponents and frustrating conservative supporters.
But that’s the price you pay when you set out to please your base without considering the long-term costs. Trump does seem to have concluded that he can’t survive without the conservative evangelicals and Catholics, and they have come to the same conclusion about him. We’ll see if this turns out to be a beautiful swan dive or an ugly confrontation with the concrete reality residing directly below the diving board. Place your bets, due in November 2018.
For Donald Trump, lying comes as easily as breathing, and perhaps it's even more effortless. He makes up falsehoods about not only big political issues or even sensitive personal matters, but everything. That includes the small stuff, especially if he thinks the lie will make him look good.
If he were smarter, he might choose not to lie about things that can be disproven with a Google search. As it stands, Trump’s claims about his achievements are pretty easy to discredit. That includes his lies about things he’s invented, a list that includes words, ideas, even nicknames. Because the only thing Trump has ever really invented was the idea of selling steaks through the Sharper Image catalog.
Here are five things Trump has lied about inventing.
1. The word 'fake.'
On Sunday, Trump sat down with Mike Huckabee for an "interview,” if that is what you call it when one person compliments and stares adoringly at another person for half an hour. During this "conversation"—if that’s the word for a meeting between a sycophant and a narcissist fully acting out their respective roles—Trump decided to discuss his invention of the word “fake.”
"The media is—really, the word, one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with, is 'fake,'" Trump said. "I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I've never noticed it."
The most fascinating thing about Trump’s contention is not that it’s patently untrue, but the unvarnished blend of insanity and stupidity in its suggestion that Trump invented a word that’s been in common parlance for hundreds of years. Merriam-Webster points out that usage of the word “fake” dates back to the 15th century. Even giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and assuming he actually meant to take credit for the term “fake news,” the claim still doesn’t hold up. Merriam-Webster points to specific citations of that phrase in the late 1800s.
If you want to watch the entire Trump-Huckabee “discussion”—if that is the way to describe what happens when an owner makes a dog sit very still with a treat on its nose in some cruel, torturous approximation of a trick—it’s in the video below. It includes Huckabee calling Trump a “rock star,” among other embarrassments.
2. An 84-year-old economic theory.
In May, Trump spoke with editors from the Economist, a publication staffed by people who know a lot about economics, the dead giveaway being the fact that it’s called the Economist. Unfortunately, there were no cameras running during the interview, so we can’t see the look on the editors’ faces when Trump insisted he invented a well-established economic theory.
ECONOMIST: But beyond that it’s OK if the tax plan increases the deficit?
TRUMP: It is OK, because it won’t increase it for long. You may have two years where you’ll… you understand the expression “prime the pump”?
ECONOMIST: Yes.
TRUMP: We have to prime the pump.
ECONOMIST: It’s very Keynesian.
TRUMP: We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?
ECONOMIST: Priming the pump?
TRUMP: Yeah, have you heard it?
ECONOMIST: Yes.
TRUMP: Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just… I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.
ECONOMIST: It’s—
TRUMP: Yeah, what you have to do is you have to put something in before you can get something out.
Is there anything better than the end of the exchange, when the Economist editor, befuddled and stunned by the whole dumb conversation, starts to repeat Trump’s own words back to him, and instead of listening, Trump plows onward, proudly ignorant and obnoxious? Congratulations, America! You elected Michael Scott president.
There’s also the fact that Trump says he “came up with [‘prime the pump’] a couple of days ago,” despite the fact that he used the phrase multiple times before the Economist interview. Once while he was on Fox News a month prior, and twice during media appearances in 2016.
For the record, the New York Times notes that prime the pump “was in wide use by 1933, when President Roosevelt fought the Great Depression with pump-priming stimulus.”
3. The border wall.
During the election, Trump riled his base of racists and xenophobes with promises of a useless, costly southern border wall to keep brown immigrants out. It wasn’t a new idea—a barrier that runs 850 miles along the dividing line was erected by Bush 43 in 2006, and the border patrol was put in place in 1924. But Trump accused his GOP primary competitor Ted Cruz and others for stealing an idea that hadn’t been his to begin with.
"People are picking up all of my ideas, including Ted, who started talking about building a wall two days ago," Trump told Politico in January 2016.
During an episode of Face the Nation, Trump said, "I was watching the other day. And I was watching Ted talk. And he said, 'We will build a wall.' The first time I've ever heard him say it. And my wife, who was sitting next to me, said, 'Oh, look. He's copying what you've been saying for a long period of time.'”
"Every time somebody says we want a wall, remember who said it first," Trump said at a New Hampshire rally. "Politicians do not give credit."
That seems to include “politicians” named Trump who rip off the many racist politicians who have come before them.
4. The nickname 'Rocket Man' for the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
Hilariously, White House staffers have talked up Trump’s use of “Rocket Man” as a nickname for Kim Jong-un as proof that he’s a real-life Don Draper. “That's a President Trump original,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Fox & Friends. “As you know, he’s a master in branding.”
Is he, though?
Actually, this one may come as a bit of a surprise because it seemed just dumb enough to be a believable Trump (via Elton John) invention. But even this Trump creation originated somewhere else.
The cover of the July 8, 2006, issue of the Economist featured then-North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il blasting off toward the sky, clouds of smoke billowing from his feet. “Rocket Man” the caption read, an allusion to the dictator’s nuclear ambitions. Trump has reapplied the moniker to his successor and son, Kim Jong-un, who by all indications he seems to think is the same guy. What a shock that a raging racist can’t tell two totally different Asian men apart.
This isn’t to suggest Trump ever read an issue of the Economist aside from the one he was featured in (and even then, he probably only skimmed one-third of his interview). Maybe he saw it when he did an image search for “The Economist” the night before his interview.
5. The whole 'Make America Great Again' nonsense.
Trump told the Washington Post that the day after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, he got to work on a new slogan for his campaign.
"I said, 'We'll make America great.' And I had started off 'We Will Make America Great.' That was my first idea, but I didn't like it. And then all of a sudden it was going to be 'Make America Great.' But that didn't work because that was a slight to America because that means it was never great before. And it has been great before. So I said, 'Make America Great Again.' I said, 'That is so good.' I wrote it down. I went to my lawyers…. said, 'See if you can have this registered and trademarked.'"
When Trump says America was “great before,” he is obviously referring either to the days of Jim Crow or slavery or Native American genocide, because that pretty much covers America up until this moment. For the record, "Let's Make America Great Again" was used by Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election campaign. It seems fairly likely that Trump, who was a fully grown adult of voting age at the time, picked it up there. Realizing he might be called out on this, he responded with proactive defensiveness.
“You know, everyone said, “Oh, it was Ronald Reagan's." And then they found out they were wrong. His was—and I didn't know this at the time, I found it out a year ago. I found it out a year after I—his was, “Let's Make America Great.”
The Trump administration has a clear economic objective: deregulate. Loosening regulations on industries, the White House believes, will lead to faster growth and more jobs. This is the stated reason for pulling the U.S. from the international climate accord, and the economic justification for seeking to rescind the EPA Clean Power Plan that limits carbon emissions from plants.
But an examination of history shows that government regulations are not always harmful to industry; they often help business. Indeed, government regulation is as central to the growth of the American economy as markets and dollars.
Robber barons and the Progressive Era
The late 19th century in the United States was the heyday of robber barons – John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and many others – who secured exorbitant wealth by building unregulated monopolies. They controlled the country’s oil, steel and railroads, and they used their wealth to bankrupt competitors, buy off politicians and fleece consumers. They manipulated a growing market economy that had weak rules and even weaker legal enforcement.
The progressive movement of the early 20th century took aim at the robber barons, calling upon government to regulate their activities in the interest of the public welfare. Writing on the eve of the First World War, journalist Walter Lippmann famously explained that Americans had a choice to continue their economic drift into ever-deeper corruption and inequality, or they could empower their elected representatives to master the challenges of their age and create a more just and sustainable economic order. Lippmann and other progressives wanted a more active government, led by men of intelligence, who would regulate the most powerful corporations and ensure that they served the public interest.
President Theodore Roosevelt was a creature of both the New York business elite from which he came and the progressive reform movement which he eloquently embraced with his calls for a “square deal” to help the poor and “strenuous” efforts by the well-endowed to enter “in the arena.” Roosevelt saw himself as part of an intelligent and energetic elite who would take the reins of government to improve society as a whole.
From the Executive Mansion, which he renamed the “White House,” Roosevelt pushed the federal government to expand its regulatory role over oil, steel, railroads and numerous other industries. He was not anti-business. His efforts proved that government regulation could improve the lives of citizens while allowing businesses to continue to prosper.
Historians of the period like me have, in fact, shown that the progressive era regulations often helped businesses by providing them with a more stable, predictable economic environment, where government regulations enabled increased capital investments and expanded consumer purchases. Progressive regulations of the robber baron market were good for businesses and consumers.
Regulatory ‘capture’
The same is true for regulations a century later. Government activities to ensure competition, transparency and safety in various industries give the American economy stability almost unparalleled in any other country.
Investors send their capital to American companies because government regulations ensure that capital is not stolen or siphoned for corrupt purposes. Talented workers travel to the United States to work in American companies because government regulations protect safe and humane working environments, where businesses are held accountable for fulfilling their obligations to employees. Consumers buy products from American businesses – from food and drink to cars and houses – confident that they are receiving value for their money because of government regulations against cheating, lying and fakery in product sales. Investors buy stocks in the auto companies, workers seek employment in the auto industry and citizens buy cars because government helps protect the integrity of the process at all levels. The federal government bails out shareholders, workers and purchasers when everything goes wrong.
This is not to say that all regulation is good. Sometimes regulation chokes innovation by slowing change and prohibiting risk taking. This was evidently true for regulated monopolies in mid-20th-century America, including the venerable Bell telephone company.
In other circumstances, regulations empower special interest groups who gain power from laws that protect them and hurt potential competitors. This is true for pharmaceutical and insurance companies who drive the massive and troubled health care industry in the United States today. Government regulations actually disempower doctors, who have reduced control over treatments, and patients, who cannot shop for price when they are choosing health options.
Extensive research shows that business leaders often “capture” regulation. Large companies – particularly in communications, real estate, pharmaceuticals and defense – use clever legal practices, control over information and often brute force to make regulators bend to their will.
The classic case is how lobbyists for Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other military contractors pressure members of Congress, with thousands of constituents employed in the industry, to limit restrictions on their production and sales. The regulators get bought off and bullied into becoming the advocates of the companies they are supposed to control.
Perhaps college athletics is the best example. Does the NCAA really regulate the big college sports programs, or does it advocate for them, and defend them when they bend the rules? As for the fate of the Clean Power Plan, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is an unabashed champion of the fossil fuel industry, declaring the “war on coal is over” when announcing plans to roll back regulations to limit carbon emissions from power plants.
Consumer benefits
This short history of government regulation shows how complex the issue really is.
The historical record reveals that regulation is generally beneficial to big established businesses: It often solidifies their dominance in markets, stabilizing basic practices. However, regulation will frequently hurt small startup competitors, who cannot mobilize as much influence over the regulators as their bigger counterparts. For consumers, regulation can help or hurt, depending on how it is carried out.
When we look forward to the next decade, the question is not whether to have federal regulations. Less regulation will only mean more instability, uncertainty and losses for businesses and consumers. The real question is what kind of regulations, and how can federal, state and local governments administer them to serve the public interest as a whole, preventing excessive red tape, special interest domination and big business “capture.”
With the determined political leadership of a leader like Theodore Roosevelt, regulations can indeed make workplaces safer and products more reliable for citizens, while providing the stable conditions corporations need to do business. But vigilance is necessary, and a number of government boards and agencies emerged to play this role. Hence the creation of federal bodies from the Federal Communications Commission (1934) and the National Labor Relations Board (1935) to the Federal Aviation Administration (1958) and the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), and many others.
What the United States needs is less ideology and more detailed attention among politicians to matching regulatory processes with public purposes. That was, of course, the goal of the progressives more than a century ago. If we don’t return to their model, chances are we will continue the current drift into another age of robber barons.
After one panelist on Nicolle Wallace's "Deadline: White House" show on MSNBC was "way too polite" to a Trump supporter who blamed the president's disastrous response to Puerto Rico's post-hurricane crisis on "Mother Nature" and the island's leaders, the host took matters into her own hands.
"Matt, we don't wanna nationalize everything, but when people are begging for their lives, it's not the right time for the president of the United States to trash talk them on Twitter," Wallace responded, referencing those same Twitter barbs shot from the president's Bedminster golf course the weekend after Hurricane Maria hit the island territory.
"That's gonna have to be the last word, when you get your own show here you can get the last word," she said, shutting him down.
Watch Wallace and her co-panelists slam the conservative lobbyist below.
Nina Kruscheva, an international affairs professor at New York's The New School and granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev, has drawn parallels between President Donald Trump and the USSR's Joseph Stalin.
"Here, President Trump defined 'fake news' the way Joseph Stalin defined 'enemies of the people': if they offer a slightest objection to his rule they must be wrong," Kruscheva told the Washington Examiner. "And they must be silenced."
"Somewhere on the way to his real estate/reality TV career he forgot his lessons in civics and American democracy from high school," Khrushcheva told The Examiner. "Or maybe he always had an ‘F' in those subjects; being rich, he didn't and still doesn't think they apply to him."
"For that we are all paying dearly," the professor continued. "And the longer he stays in, offering more and more somewhat Stalinesque amendments to American democracy, the more autocratic erosion to this once wonderful system we will experience."
But he is also in control of the most powerful institution in world history, the U.S. government. To get there, he endured a grueling 17-month campaign in which he blew up the establishment of both major parties, trounced 16 Republican candidates, made the media, pollsters, and experts look foolish, and edged past Hillary Clinton who was backed by Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and two of the most popular presidents of the modern era, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Trump has a glaring lack of erudition. But he is an evil genius who keeps suckering the public and very smart people alike. Trump’s latest chumps are his newest besties, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
A month ago Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, were all smiles. They believed they had struck a deal with Trump to protect 800,000 immigrant youth, whose protected status Trump had just revoked, while refusing to fund a border wall with Mexico.
Schumer was caught on a hot mic all aflutter at Trump’s attention, “He likes me,” and proud of himself for explaining to Trump how to triangulate Congress — “sometimes step right and sometimes step left.”
It didn’t occur to Chuck that Trump had already mastered “step right, step left” in his rise to power. Trump appealed to antiwar and anti-interventionist sentiment by calling the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake” and blaming Bush for 9/11. Trump promised to lower prescription drug prices and provide health insurance for everyone. He said he would bring back manufacturing jobs and make Mexico pay for the wall. Trump met with Al Gore to talk climate change, and vowed to “win” against the opioid crisis, whatever that means.
In every instance, and many more, Trump has done nothing or the exact opposite when it comes to fulfilling his promises for the forgotten men and women of America.
And he did the same to Chuck and Nancy, backtracking the day after he seduced them over a dinner of honey sesame crispy beef. Trump disputed their claim there was an agreement, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted, “excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to,” and Stephen Miller, Trump’s minister of ethnic cleansing, reportedly said prior to the dinner that “the administration would never allow a version of the replacement legislation, known as the Dream Act, to pass.”
It was classic Trump telling people what they want to hear. Despite the blatant bait and switch, Chuck and Nancy believed they had “little to lose” in negotiating with Trump. Schumer told the Washington Post, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained … We’re very hopeful that they will keep their word.”
That hope was a delusion. When Trump showed his cards on immigration, it was a white nationalist Christmas. He is demanding “the construction of a wall across the southern border, the hiring of 10,000 immigration agents, tougher laws for those seeking asylum and denial of federal grants to ‘sanctuary cities,’” along with turning state and local police into a deportation force, cutting legal immigration, lowering the cap on refugees, and new punitive measures against children fleeing violence in Central America and families trying to reunite.
Chuck and Nancy got suckered, just like everyone else who has crossed paths with Trump, whether it’s hundreds of workers and contractors he stiffed, casino creditors he bamboozled for hundreds of millions of dollars, telling them “it’s going to be great,” more than 6,000 Trump University students he fleeced, the public he ripped off with a $916 million tax write-off, or the 63 million people who fell for his “Make America Great Again” schtick.
At least those who voted for Trump have the excuse of being desperate or dumb or racist or greedy or just sadistic. Democratic leaders have no excuse. Chuck and Nancy are supposed to be savvy operators with 65 years of combined experience on Capitol Hill.
But they got played by the Washington neophyte. Far from “nothing to lose,” they fell into Trump’s trap. By agreeing to a vague deal on immigration, they legitimized whatever proposal he put forward. They burnished Trump’s image as a dealmaker. And they set themselves up to be villains in Trump’s reality TV White House. He will harangue the Democrats for not wanting to save the Dreamers, reneging on their deal, and letting drug dealers and criminals flood over the border to take Americans’ jobs, steal their taxes, and poison their youth.
By enabling Trump, Chuck and Nancy have handed him a win either way. If any immigration bill is passed, no matter how watered down, it’s proof Trump is fulfilling his promises. If nothing is passed, he’ll rant and tweet about how the swamp needs to be drained.
Hillary Clinton lost to the raging man-child because she didn’t stand for anything other than being anti-Trump. Nearly a year later, a majority of voters still think the Democrats don’t stand for anything. They have not figured out how to counter Trump and he controls the agenda.
Chuck and Nancy are stuck in the pre-Trump era, where power involves horse-trading behind the scenes, instead of the bloodsport spectacle Trump excels at. Dominated by Wall Street, the Democrats have no bold ideas. The Onion aptly skewered their politics as, “Americans Are Tired Of The Same Old Pandering And Stale Ideas We’re Going To Keep Offering Them.”
Liberals seem to believe Trump’s con game will wear thin as he fails to deliver and alienates more and more groups that he insults. That would be a grave mistake. Despite his dumpster fire presidency, Trump’s approval rating is in the high 30s, close to what it was on election day. He juices his base with bombastic decisions like withdrawing from the Paris climate accords or decertifying the Iran deal because they look dramatic even if they lack substance. Same with twitter fights he uses to divide, polarize, and distract.
In 2020, Trump will have the power of the presidency behind his campaign, using every dirty trick in the book, particularly voter suppression and electoral fraud, and possibly inventing new ones like violence on election day or encouraging terrorist attacks, to keep his grip on power.
Trump may be a f***ing moron. But Democrats like Chuck and Nancy are proving to be the bigger fools.
Arun Gupta contributes to The Washington Post, YES! Magazine, In These Times, The Progressive, Telesur English, and The Nation. He is author of the forthcoming, Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A Junk-Food Loving Chef’s Inquiry into Taste, from The New Press.
Follow him @arunindy or email at arun_dot_indypendent_at_gmail_dot_com.
Trump and conservatives in Congress are planning a big tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. To justify it they’re using the oldest song in their playbook, claiming tax cuts on the rich will trickle down to working families in the form of stronger economic growth.
Baloney. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. Just look at the evidence:
1. Clinton’s tax increase on the rich hardly stalled the economy. In 1993, Bill Clinton raised taxes on top earners from 31 percent to 39.6 percent. Conservatives predicted economic disaster. Instead, the economy created 23 million jobs and the economy grew for 8 straight years in what was then the longest expansion in history. The federal budget went into surplus.
2. George W. Bush’s big tax cuts for the rich didn’t grow the economy. In 2001and 2003, George W. Bush lowered the top tax rate to 35 percent while also cutting top rates on capital gains and dividends. Conservative supply-siders predicted an economic boom. Instead, the economy barely grew at all, and then in 2008 it collapsed. Meanwhile, the federal deficit ballooned.
3. Obama’s tax hike on the rich didn’t slow the economy. At the end of 2012, President Obama struck a deal to restore the 39.6 percent top tax rate and raise tax rates on capital gains and dividends. Once again, supply-side conservatives predicted doom. Instead, the economy grew steadily, and the expansion is still continuing.
4. The Reagan recovery of the early 1980s wasn’t driven by Reagan’s tax cut. Conservative supply-siders point to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. But the so-called Reagan recovery of the early 1980s was driven by low interest rates and big increase in government spending.
5. Kansas cut taxes on the rich and is a basket case. California raised them and is thriving. In 2012, Kansas slashed taxes on top earners and business owners, while California raised taxes on top earners to the highest state rate in the nation. Since then, California has had among the strongest economic growth of any state, while Kansas has fallen behind most other states.
So don’t fall for supply-side, trickle-down nonsense. Lower taxes on the rich don’t generate growth and jobs. They only make the rich even richer, at a time of raging inequality, and they cause bigger budget deficits.
[*Our thanks to Alexandra Thornton and Seth Hanlon from the Center for American Progress]
Donald Trump sat down with Forbes magazine this week, and as with all of his interviews, it's a real doozy. Perhaps the only expectation Trump has ever exceeded is that he'd be the worst president in modern history, and each of these remarks reminds us why. The man is wrong on stats, wrong on facts, incompetent at his job, and just an all-around terrible person.
Here are eight of his more deranged moments, affirming the shallow, petty and ignoble motivations that guide his presidency.
1. He challenges his secretary of state to an IQ test.
Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” (or to be more specific, a “f**king moron”), a phrase that has been uttered about Trump billions of times by people in his administration and around the world. Obviously still smarting from having a staffer state the obvious, Trump suggested perhaps he and Tillerson should take an IQ exam to prove he’s smarter, as adult human beings are wont to do.
"I think it's fake news, but if he did that, I guess we'll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win."
Yes, the winner will be anyone but you.
2. He brought his gauche gold obsession to the White House.
“The Oval Office,” Forbes points out, has been “freshly renovated with drapes, carpet and fixtures that lean heavily on gold.”
3. He’s still lying about his legislative success as a president.
"I've had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that's ever served. We had over 50 bills passed. I'm not talking about executive orders only, which are very important. I'm talking about bills."
Like most Trump claims, this is false. Forbes notes it’s “a dose of hyperbole”—a nice of way of labeling a lie—“that any student of FDR or even Barack Obama could undercut.” The New York Times also previously rebutted this Trump fabulation.
President Jimmy Carter signed 70 bills in [just] the first six months, according to an analysis of bills signed by previous White House occupants. Bill Clinton signed 50....Mr. Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both had signed more bills into law by their 100-day mark than Mr. Trump did in almost twice that time. Truman had signed 55 bills and Roosevelt had signed 76 during their first 100 days.
CNN adds even more on just how hollow and misleading Trump’s contention is, noting that the bills he’s passed are mostly just congressional rollbacks of regulations imposed by the Obama administration, the erasure of America's first black president’s legacy (and if he had his druthers, existence) being Trump's singular obsession. Compare that with the major legislation Obama had passed at this juncture in his presidency, which the Times points out included “an $800 billion stimulus program to confront an economic disaster, legislation to make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, a bill to give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco and an expansion of the federal health insurance program for children.”
4. He displays a general difficulty with words.
While discussing plans to penalize companies that move abroad, Trump attempts to use the word “reciprocity." He fails, to wit:
"What I want to do is reciprocal. See, I think the concept of reciprocal is a very nice concept.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has struggled with the word “reciprocity.” Back in May, during the same interview in which he lied about coining a phrase that’s been in use since the 1930s, Trump also flubbed the term. (“We need reciprocality in terms of our trade deals.”)
But Trump isn't one to learn from his mistakes, no matter how insignificant.
5. He lies about the United States' GDP in another failed attempt to diminish President Obama.
At one point, Trump boasts that the gross domestic product last quarter hit 3.1 percent, claiming, “Obama never hit the number." Trump is, as always, wrong, and Forbes reporter Randall Lane sets him straight.
When informed that his predecessor did [hit 3.1 percent GDP], several times, Trump pivots immediately. "He never hit it on a yearly basis. Never hit it on a yearly basis. That's eight years. I think we'll go substantially higher than that. And I think this quarter would have been phenomenal, except for the hurricanes."
6. He lies about praise for his hurricane response efforts, which were abysmal.
"Well, I've gotten very high marks for the hurricanes," Trump tells Forbes, which is patently untrue. As casualties mount and 90 percent of the island of Puerto Rico remains paralyzed without electricity and basic resources, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has had to plead for aid from this administration, taking to Twitter as recently as Monday out of desperation.
Trump ignored the disaster for nearly a week—he was busy warring with NFL players protesting racial injustice—and when he finally did pay attention, it was to tweet insults, make excuses and demand adulation. On two separate weekends, as Puerto Ricans continued to send out help requests, Trump visited his golf club to chillax. The whole heartbreaking spectacle has motivated other organizations to step up and fill the immense void that is Trump’s failure, including Oxfam America and a German renewable power storage company, which are taking on disaster relief the Trump administration neither cares nor can be bothered to provide.
7. He continues to try to make Obamacare a problem.
Trump’s fixation with Obama again surfaced during the interview on the subject of health care. Trump refers to Obamacare as "a total mess," which is par for the course with the GOP. But when asked if he will ensure the program serves Americans as well as possible until a better alternative is drafted, Trump suggests his administration will do less than the bare minimum, hinting it will hobble the program to harm his predecessor's legacy.
"What we're doing is trying to keep it afloat, because it's failing," he says. "I mean the insurance companies are fleeing and have fled. They fled before I got here. But with that being said, no, Obamacare is Obama's fault. It's nobody else's fault...I've always said Obamacare is Obama's fault. It's never going to be our fault."
8. Trump admits he couldn’t really care less about keeping the country running smoothly.
Sixty-three million people voted for this man (never forget!), who has no scruples or principles, and who couldn't care less how this country fares:
The same approach comes through in foreign policy, again and again, whether it's the Iran deal, the Paris climate agreement or, especially, free-trade deals. Doesn't he feel a responsibility to honor agreements from previous administrations?
President Trump has a quick response: "No."
It's a dangerous precedent: an America where each administration, rather than building on the agreements of its predecessors, undoes each other's deals—effectively undermining the authority of any American head of state. Again, Trump shrugs.
Vice President Mike Pence's this weekend was a "cheap, cynical" and "sleazy political stunt," Keith Olbermann said on Monday's installment of "The Resistance."
That stunt “disrespected and desecrated the flag of this country,” Olbermann said, inverting the charge Pence, President Donald Trump and their supporters use against NFL protests that take a knee.
"Protest is protest," he continued. "You are not loyal or patriotic because you stand during an old British drinking song nor because you salute a flag that might have been made in China."
"Since this dictator-in-training Trump began to urinate on our flag and our constitution, now using the vice president as the proverbial organ-grinder used to use the proverbial monkey, opposition to the National Football League players protesting has become support," Olbermann said, citing a USA Today survey that found 51 percent approve of the protests over the 42 percent who disapprove.
"The people disrespecting the flag are not the athletes," he concluded. "The people disrespecting our flag are Donald Trump and Mike Pence and their clan of white supremacists who see their chance to whip up unthinking, blind-saluting white robots into believing the flag is theirs' and theirs' alone."
Watch Olbermann's impassioned takedown of the two most powerful men in the country below.
Donald Trump weighed in on the scandal engulfing movie mogul and Democratic funder Harvey Weinstein, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment (Weinstein has been fired from his company). “I’ve know Harvey Weinstein a long time. I’m not at all surprised to see it,” Trump said.
Trump was subsequently asked by CNN’s Elizabeth’s Landers how Weinstein’s conduct differed from the conduct Trump bragged about on the “Access Hollywood” tape, where he said “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Trump responded that the tape was just “locker-room talk.”
Rubbish. It wasn’t just “locker-room talk.” At least 15 women have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment and assault, and People Magazine Natasha Stoynoff has six independent witnesses to back up her allegation that Trump “pushed her against a wall, shoved his tongue in her mouth, and told her they were going to have an affair.”
Trump is actively assaulting women in other ways. The Trump administration’s Education Department has moved to make it harder for women at universities to prove sexual harassment. Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has made it harder for women to get contraceptives. Trump has nominated 32 men and just one woman to become U.S. Attorneys. Trump’s 2018 budget calls for a 93 percent cut in funding for federal programs that aid survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Trump and Weinstein are both sexual harassers and predators. But Trump is also president of the United States. That makes him even more dangerous to women.
What the United States needs is less ideology and more detailed attention among politicians to matching regulatory processes with public purposes. That was, of course, the 