Varsity Blues

Operation Idiot: So it looks like the Kushner family overpaid to get son Jared into Harvard.  It cost them about $2.5 million to get their less than stellar student admitted to the Ivy League while a number of impressive, or at least once impressive, lawyers and actresses including a Willkie Farr senior partner, Aunt Becky and a really Desperate Housewife paid far less, “only” $75,000 to $250,000 to get their kids into a range of schools including some California state universities, Yale and Stanford. Given that she works for Kushner’s father-in-law, the Penn graduate who is so concerned that his high school and college transcripts might reveal his academic inadequacies, you’d think that White House consultant Kellyanne Conway would stay out of this scandal, but no, she weighed in tweeting that the actresses in question were as stupid as their daughters.  What does that say about the Kushner and Trump families?  Anyway, she wasn’t the only one to weigh in on a subject outside of her area of expertise.  In the aftermath of the second crash of a 737 Max 8, Trump, who hasn’t yet appointed a permanent head of the FAA because even his biggest supporters thought that appointing his personal pilot, something he really wanted to do, was a step too far, weighed in on plane technology tweeting that it has gotten too complicated, adding that “the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!”  It’s worth noting that contrary to FAA regulations Trump once proposed eliminating one member of the flight crew for his short lived Trump Shuttle venture in order to offset added fuel costs associated with flying planes made heavier by their Trump mandated excessive gold plated décor.  As to the 737 Max 8s, as of now every country except the US and Canada has grounded the models  pending further investigation into whether or not there is a fatal flaw in their technology, a training failure or both, concerns that aren’t unreasonable given that Boeing now recommends that pilots switch off the auto-pilot feature under certain circumstances and has been working on a technology fix that it plans to roll out in about a month, a rollout that would have happened already were it not for the delay caused by January’s government shutdown.  Moreover, at least two pilots flying US routes on the same model have filed incident reports with the federal government that raised concerns about safety and criticized a lack of training related to the Max 8 model.  Unfortunately, instead of focusing solely on the risks of leaving the US Max 8s in operation, to the extent that those risks are real, focus has turned to the possibility that Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s too close relationship with Trump is influencing the US decision to keep them in the air.  Weighing in on whether the Max 8s should be allowed to keep flying falls way outside of Trump’s wheel house, he would be wise to leave this one to the experts but then again wise decision making is not his thing.        

International Messes:  Despite the Trump administration’s plans, recognizing Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s leader has not led the country’s military to stop supporting the government of strongman President Nicolas Maduro.  If anything things have deteriorated further.  Yesterday Secretary of State Pompeo pulled the remaining US diplomats out of the country over concerns about their safety.  At the same time he announced that constraints against US action are being lifted, for now that appears to mean more sanctions, but it could also mean that the Trump administration is planning some kind of military action to push regime change along.  This situation is likely to get worse.   Also, getting worse is the whole Brexit mess. Yesterday, the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister May’s most recent plan.  It’s unclear what happens next, but absent some action, one that involves an extension of the withdrawal deadline and possibly a decision to vote again on the whole Brexit thing, the UK is due to drop out of the European Union on March 29.  To state the obvious, a “hard” exit won’t be pleasant. As to North Korea, in the run up to the Hanoi Summit, concerns had been raised that Trump would agree to anything in order to secure his much coveted Nobel Peace Prize.  At least for now that concession strategy is over.  Stephen Biegun, the US envoy tasked with laying the groundwork for a nuclear deal with North Korea, says the U.S. is committed to an all-or-nothing approach in which sanctions relief would only follow complete denuclearization, a demand North Korea has said it will never meet, and one that could put a deal beyond reach.  Things are messy in Israel too, elections are scheduled to take place on April 9 and fairly poisonous dialogue is dominating their news cycle as Prime Minister Netanyahu battles to hold on to his position in the face of his impending indictment by moving further to the right and embracing hateful coalition partners.  Sound familiar?  As to his good buddy Trump, he’s coined a new term “Jexodus,” part of his strategy to scare Jews away from voting Democrat in the next election.  It’s worth noting that as usual Jewish Americans overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, in the last election with Trump getting a smaller percentage of the Jewish vote than Mitt Romney and about the same as John McCain.  Given his “good people on both sides” shtick and other policies, that is unlikely to change.