Author: ProfJerry

Andrew Sullivan, commenting on why he likes the Mueller Report, provides some good advice for all of us:

Give it up for old-school WASP Republican values! And in this, Mueller is someone we should study if we want to see how to oppose this president effectively. You can’t out-tweet or out-insult the clinically narcissistic and characterologically disgusting. You cannot beat him at his own game. But you can consistently refuse to take his boorish bait and maintain your own standards of conduct. You can calmly stare down a bully, and you can let your actions speak louder than your words.

Andrew Sullivan: Mueller Summary Is a Big Win for America

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a President who knew how trade works? Link

During a brief news conference he held at Mar-a-Lago on Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump claimed that closing the border with Mexico would be a “profit-making operation” because of the United States’ trade deficit with its southern neighbor.

“I’ll just close the border, and with a deficit like we have with Mexico and have had for many years, closing the border will be a profit-making operation,” Trump said,

Greg Sargent in the Washington Post reports that Trump’s decision to go after the Affordable Care Act again came about as the result of a bitter fight within the WH.

A fight inside the White House exposes Trump’s depravity and unfitness – The Washington Post Link

What is especially telling is how the Sargent describes the role of WH Chief of Staff Mulvaney and how he persuaded Trump to take the action he did.

What’s telling is the argument that Mulvaney used to prevail against it. He told Trump not just that blowing up Obamacare would thrill his base, but also that Trump and Republicans could take the health-care issue back for themselves — which, of course, would require having an actual plan.

But the White House doesn’t have any plan. And the Washington Examiner reports that Senate Republicans concede that the White House has not provided assurances that one is forthcoming. Indeed, this is precisely why Pence argued against fully endorsing the lawsuit!

Yet Mulvaney was able to manipulate Trump into backing it. Mulvaney likely played on Trump’s ignorance about the complexities of health care, and his unshakable confidence that he can simply make things come true if he says so, to persuade him that he’ll be able to conjure one up. And sure enough, Trump has been suggesting this will happen, blithely asserting: “The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care.”

The idea that coming up with an alternative plan would magically mitigate the consequences of total repeal at this point is itself daft. That’s because those consequences would be truly dire.”

And Trump acted without any plan for a replacement for the ACA! And as Greg Sargent describes the implications:

either he actually believes Republicans might come up with a plan to mitigate all this damage (in which case he’s dangerously incurious about the policy complexities involved and is willing to take a preposterous risk, given the GOP’s failures on this front), or he doesn’t care if they do not (in which case he’s dangerously venal and reckless).

Truly appalling.

But will dRump listen?

CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats testified at a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They spoke with authority, command of the facts and precision. They put forth what many Americans know to be true: The Islamic State is not defeated, North Korea isn’t giving up its nukes and Iran is in compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

A scary and depressing view from The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/02/the-devastation-of-human-life-is-in-view-what-a-burning-world-tells-us-about-climate-change-global-warming

Just off the top of his head, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth can recount many of the weather disasters that hit the planet in 2018. Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.

I’d like to think that this would wake up enough people that we’d start getting serious about making the necessary changes to slow down climate change. I’d like to think so, but…

The deadly “dance plague” of 1518 took place in a rapidly changing world where suddenly old verities were in question and a new media brought all manner of unconfirmed, superstitious ideas. Sound familiar?

A fascinating article about the “plague” that struck at the beginning of “the modern world” and what it might signify.

The Deadly “Dance Pague” at 500

An article in Mother Jones details the progress China is making in developing solar energy and how the current administration in the U.S. is hampering the development of solar energy here in favor of trying to revive the dying (if not already dead) coal industry.

Some highlights from the article:

“Made in China” has long been seen as shorthand for shoddy. Whether it was fast fashion or toys, the rap on Chinese manufacturing used to be that it was all about leveraging cut-rate labor to knock off products designed in the West. Cheaper, certainly. Better, hardly. But that is changing fast—especially in the booming clean-energy sector. From solar to batteries to electric vehicles, China is rapidly gaining on the West in the most important arena of all: innovation.

In part that’s due to dysfunction in US clean-energy policy—which began before President Donald Trump but is intensifying under his watch. It’s also a result of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s belief that clean-­energy innovation is critical to economic growth and the Communist Party’s survival.

…for decades, the United States was the clear world leader in clean-energy research and development. But America has fared poorly at moving those technologies from lab to market. That’s in part because government R&D grants have focused on basic research, on the theory that companies can do applied research themselves. China has taken the opposite approach, focusing public money on the technologies it thinks are likeliest to find a market fast.

Now, under President Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese “hoax,” the United States appears content to cede its lead. America has more than twice as many jobs in solar as in coal, and its installed solar capacity is expected to more than double over the next five years. Yet Trump’s 2019 budget proposes slashing the Energy Department’s renewable-­energy and energy-efficiency funding by about 75 percent and killing ARPA-E altogether. (According to the Government Accountability Office, the Trump administration also violated federal law by withholding $91 million in fiscal year 2017 ARPA-E funding.) The administration wants to eviscerate several clean-energy loan-guarantee programs as well. Even if Congress staves off some of those cuts, Trump, by rolling back clean-power regulations and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, has undermined market forces that could spur invention.

That’s the conclusion one might reasonably reach: the toddler-in-chief and his administration just don’t seem to care about school safety.

On Thursday President Trump met with residents of Santa Fe, Texas, including family members of students killed in the shooting at the town’s high school last month. The hour-long conversation on Houston’s Coast Guard base was closed to the press, and Trump left without giving comment, heading immediately to a $5,000-a-plate Republican fundraising luncheon at the St. Regis Hotel. The only thing that was evident was that he’d started his day off in high spirits: “We are going to have a little fun today,” he told a gaggle of reporters that morning before boarding Air Force One near Washington, D.C.

There were two other major Trump administration developments related to school shootings within hours of the president’s Texas visit, and neither helped to clarify what policy direction, if any, the White House is taking on school shootings and gun violence. At a briefing Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was vague in her response to a 13-year-old boy in the audience who pushed her to address “what steps the White House [is] taking to fix this issue.” As she held back tears, the press secretary emphasized how much she, a mother of three, sympathized with the boy’s fear of being killed and was determined to make schools safer; she didn’t, however, offer specifics, simply noting that the White House’s school-safety commission would soon be convening to start coming up with a game plan.

Paul Krugman offers an answer:

In the end, I don’t believe there’s any policy justification for the attack on food stamps: It’s not about the incentives, and it’s not about the money. And even the racial animus that traditionally underlies attacks on U.S. social programs has receded partially into the background.

No, this is about petty cruelty turned into a principle of government. It’s about privileged people who look at the less fortunate and don’t think, “There but for the grace of God go I”; they just see a bunch of losers. They don’t want to help the less fortunate; in fact, they get angry at the very idea of public aid that makes those losers a bit less miserable.