We Didn't Start the Fire

On the Road Again: Trump is due to leave soon for this weekend’s G7 summit in Biarritz soon where he is expected to continue to act like a bull in a china shop.  In anticipation of his boorish behavior, French President Macron has already said there are no plans to issue a joint communique at the end of the meeting largely because no one expects Trump to sign-off on one that the rest of the members can live with. Trump continues to insist that Russia should be invited back into the group because who really cares about that whole Crimea annexation and anyway it was that other guy Obama’s fault. In an effort to bolster his argument, Trump’s insisted that Macron told him that he wants Russia to be invited back in too, only Macron says he didn’t say that.  In any case, next year’s meeting is scheduled to take place in the US and the host gets a lot of leeway about who is invited, so Vlad shouldn’t be too disappointed about missing out on Biarritz, he’ll probably get an invite to attend next year.  At Mar a Lago or Trump Doral Miami?  Odds are that the other world leaders will avoid bringing up Trump’s Greenland/Denmark fiasco though that story has legs, we learned yesterday that Trump didn’t come up with the idea of buying Greenland on his own, he got it from Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton who boasted to a group of businessmen at a Little Rock luncheon that he’s the one who told Trump that he should try to buy the island because its “economic potential is untold,” it’s “vital to our national security” and “anyone who can’t see that is blinded by Trump derangement.” Republican groups are now raising money selling t-shirts that include Greenland as part of the map of the US, I did you not. It looks like Senator Cotton is still angling for a position in the Trump cabinet, and his aspiration isn’t all that unrealistic as reports have surfaced again that Secretary of State Pompeo is still considering a run for the Kansas Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Senator Pat Roberts.  That could be a problem for Trump and the rest of us because Pompeo is considered a “voice of reason” or at least reasonable when compared to the other people whispering in Trump’s ears.  One of those other whisperers, “Acting” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had been pushing for Trump to cut foreign aid by $4 billion, but had his hopes dashed after Pompeo together with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin convinced Trump that it would be “detrimental to national security and to bipartisan negotiations ahead of another shutdown deadline.“  Still another one of Trump’s whisperers, his sometime legal advisor Rudy Giuliani who also aspires to be the Secretary of State but who could never get confirmed, has been back to Ukraine, where with the help of State Department officials, he “strongly urged” Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak, to investigate whether there was any impropriety in Joe Biden’s diplomatic activities in Ukraine while his son worked for a gas company in the country because having benefited and so far gotten away with getting help from Russia during the last election the collective Trump team sees nothing wrong with seeking help from still another country this time around.  To be fair to the Ukrainians, they don’t appear all that interested in helping Trump’s team out but are fearful that failing to do as asked could cost them some much needed military assistance. 

2020: Getting back to Pompeo and his “will he or won’t” he run for the Senate dance, he is being pressured to run by Moscow/NRA Mitch McConnell who is growing increasingly concerned that the Republicans really could lose control of the Senate in 2020.  He wants Pompeo running for the Kansas seat because he fears that if he doesn’t the Republicans could end up with Trump stooge Kris Kobach, the guy who once headed the phony election fraud commission, as the Republican candidate and is fearful that Kobach would lose the seat to almost any Democrat opponent.  We know that McConnell is particularly concerned about the outcome of the 2020 election because of his NY Times op-ed, the one where he warns Democrats that they should leave the filibuster intact if they take over control of the Senate.   He argues that the filibuster is important because of its role in preserving the Senate’s treasured tradition of deliberation over efficiency, which he calls “one of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House.”  This from McConnell, who proudly brags about effectively preventing anything not related to tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, or confirming “his” judges from coming to a vote.     

Burning:  Fires are raging in the Amazon, not the warehouse but the rainforest.  Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, a climate change denier who believes that deforestation is okay especially if it leads toconomic growth, has, without any evidence, blamed the raging fires on non-governmental organizations, claiming that they set them to undermine his leadership.  He also struck out at France’s Macron asserting that Macron’s statement that “Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire, it is an international crisis. Members of the G-7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency” is just proof of Macron’s “colonialist mindset.”  Trump, who ironically has been accused of colonialism for his attempt to buy Greenland, is a supporter of Bolsonaro, in addition to their shared views on climate science, Trump admires his nationalistic policies and his disdain for his own indigenous population.  Just another reason that the upcoming G 7 meeting will be very testy.  On the US front, yesterday Bernie Sanders released his version of the Green New Deal, an ambitious $16 trillion plan to transition the US to 100 percent renewable electricity and phase out traditional gasoline-powered engines over the next ten years.  Since the plan is from Bernie, it relies chiefly on the government with far less involvement from the private sector than other plans.  He insists that his plan would “end unemployment” by creating 20 million jobs and offering assistance to displaced fossil fuel workers.  Unrealistic and prohibitively expensive, probably, but then again right now half of Brazil is covered in smoke and San Paolo is “dark and stormy” from the smoke so everything should be on the table, that is everything except for denial and doing nothing.