Polar Vortex

Baby It’s Cold Outside:   Earlier this week, Trump once again reminded us of his intellectual limitations and disdain for science by tweeting “In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!”  In an attempt to school Trump, the scientists at NOAA slapped back with a tweet of their own reminding him that winter storms don't prove that global warming isn't happening. Given their targeted audience the NOAA crowd included a snappy little cartoon in their tweet.  Perhaps it’s time for Trump’s intelligence officials to resort to a similar strategy. Yesterday, in response to their Senate testimony, testimony that provided a remarkably candid assessment of the risk’s facing the country, one that differed in almost every respect from Trump’s inverted views of who is an enemy and who is a friend, Trump questioned the intellect and capabilities of his handpicked intelligence leaders tweeting that they were “extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!" and “should go back to school.”  He bragged about his fine relationship with North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un saying its “the best it has ever been,” claiming a “decent chance of denuclearization” despite virtually every expert’s assessment that North Korea believes that maintaining its nuclear arsenal is its best and perhaps only chance of continued survival.  He then went on to laud his “tremendous progress on ISIS,” despite the Intelligence community’s belief that the US remains firmly in their all too devious crosshairs.  In response to his off base and scathing criticism, Senator Schumer suggested that it was Trump who needed tutoring. He sent a letter to Director of National intelligence Dan Coats, calling Trump's criticism of the testimony he and the other intelligence leaders provided to Congress “extraordinarily inappropriate," adding that "it is incumbent on you, (FBI) Director Wray and (CIA) Director Haspel ... to impress upon him how critically important it is for him to join you and the leadership of our Intelligence Community in speaking with a unified and accurate voice about national security threats."  Schumer said that it was time for them to stage an intervention.  Good luck with that, absent a hand from Putin, Trump’s mind is set.

The Russian Front: Yesterday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy finally announced the Republican appointments to the House Intelligence Committee.  With the composition of the committee now set, Chairman Adam Schiff can move forward with his planned vote to authorize the sending of all of last year’s testimony over to Special Counsel Mueller.  McCarthy’s foot dragging has been viewed as an intentional effort on his part to delay future indictments against those Trumpkins who had lied to the committee during their House testimony, one of those likely prevaricators is named Donald Trump Jr. Mueller certainly doesn’t need any more impediments.  Yesterday we learned that the Russians have been waging an internet campaign against his investigation, particularly targeting his credibility. That information came out in a filing concerning Concord Management, a company owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, also known as Putin’s chef.  Concord is one of the three Russian entities that was accused last February of “masterminding the social media meddling” into the 2016 presidential election.  At the time that Concord was accused, thirteen Russian citizens were also indicted for their role in the interference. After the indictments, Concord took the unusual step of hiring US lawyers from Reed Smith to fight the indictments, unexpected because generally the Russians don’t fight these charges in court, they just evade punishment by remaining outside the reach of US law enforcement.  Yesterday Mueller accused the lawyers from Reed Smith of sharing the documents that they received through their discovery process with some of Prigozhin’s “Russian trolls” who then posted a manipulated version of them online, circulating where they could be found via emails to a few media outlets in an effort to make it appear that Mueller’s server had been hacked, it hasn’t been, and that the basis for his investigation and indictments was questionable.  Mueller has now gone to court to limit Concord’s lawyers access to additional documents and to limit the venue where they can continue their limited discovery.  The judge overseeing the case, Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee who has already called out Concord’s lawyers for some of their other questionable behavior is not expected to be pleased with the lawyer’s involvement in the Russian’s disinformation campaign.  For his part Senator Lindsay Graham who is now the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked FBI Director Wray to justify the amount of forces he used to bring in Trump crony, admitted dirty trickster Roger Stone.  He’s clearly taking a page out of Trump and Stone’s book, to that end Trump who told the Daily Caller yesterday that he’ll let the Department of Justice and his handpicked Attorney General, assuming he is confirmed, decide whether or not Mueller’s eventual report gets released, may ask the FBI to review its policies so that good people like Stone who has frequently touted his gun ownership and shooting prowess, don’t get arrested by armed SWAT teams going forward.

Investment Failure:   Last year to much fanfare, Trump joined with then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in announcing a major investment in the state by Foxconn, the Chinese technology equipment manufacturer.  To obtain that commitment Walker had made a number of hugely expensive concessions that he justified because of the “huge” number of manufacturing jobs that would be brought to his state.  Over the past year it has become more and more evident that Walker has been duped, that Foxconn, a company with a reputation for overpromising, had no plans to bring as many high end manufacturing jobs as promised.  Yesterday, they announced that they had “changed” their plans, given the cost of producing televisions in the US, they’ve decided to move their manufacturing elsewhere.  They are still bringing a jobs to Wisconsin, but far fewer high paying ones than promised. No word from Trump about how he feels about this, likely because he cares less about the jobs and more about the initial photo op of him lifting a shovel at the ersatz plant groundbreaking.  But then again that’s not all that shocking, he rarely talks truth about the miners who are still waiting for their jobs to reappear.   

2020:  Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his advisors have been taking the news show circuit by storm.  Schultz continues to talk up his “plan” to consider running for president as an independent and based upon what he’s been saying it’s growing increasingly clear why he’s not all that interested in running as a Democrat.  Schultz is more of an old style New England Republican than a new style progressive Democrat.  His views on social issues are fairly liberal but his views on health care and taxation are out of synch with the new Democratic mainstream, even with some of the more moderate members of the party.  He touts his own personal success in rising from the projects to billionaire status as evidence that anyone who works hard enough can do the same.  He acknowledges that his family benefited from assistance during their hard times, but fails to understand that some of that assistance came from government programs funded by the higher tax rates prevailing during his youth because that doesn’t fit his narrative. Yesterday, a Seattle paper reported that Schultz, who has touted the importance of voting to his baristas isn’t all that politically active himself, his record indicates that he is at best an occasional voter.  Shortly after saying that although he’s donated to many Democratic campaigns but never to Senator Elizabeth Warren, he deleted an insulting tweet he’d resent from his twitter feed, one where he used a Trumpian slur to describe her and another in which he called Senator Kamala Harris shrill. His spokesmen were out on the stump yesterday, defending his decision to run as an independent and promising that he would pull out if his polling indicated that his run would tilt the election to Trump, and they may be right for all the wrong reasons. Given Schultz’s comments and insults, he may be long gone before November 2020, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.