THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/10/17

Note: Next week’s TWIPN will come out on some day other than Thursday. Plan accordingly!

TRUMP NEWS CONFERENCE: At lunch today, I said to a colleague (hi Emma!), “Huh, I really don’t have that much to put in the newsletter this week.” Her response: “Ali, there are still six-plus hours left in the day.” Ah, wise, wise Emma. Wouldn’t you know it but sometime during my walk home, Trump put on a suit and appeared before reporters at his New Jersey golf club, where he took questions for about 20 minutes. And in that 20 minutes, he managed to squeeze in a LOT of alarming stupidity:

• Thank god, Trump continued to bring The Crazy re: North Korea. Because I had just started getting my breath back to normal -- and that’s just a boring way to live! He said that his completely improvised statement yesterday -- that any “threats” from North Korea would be met with “fire and fury” -- was perhaps “not tough enough.” !!! “With me, he’s not getting away with it. . . . It’s a whole new ballgame. And he’s not going to be saying those things and he’s certainly not going to be doing those things. . . . Let’s see what he does in Guam. If he does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody’s seen before what will happen in North Korea.” But don’t worry, guys, there’s surely lots of checks and balances on a president’s power to launch nuclear weapons. Wait, what’s that now?
• Trump thanked Putin for expelling hundreds of United States embassy employees. This one is truly insane. On Saturday, in response to the latest American sanctions, Putin declared that the U.S.’s diplomatic mission must cut 755 employees, “an aggressive response to new American sanctions that seemed ripped right from the Cold War playbook and sure to increase tensions between the two capitals,” as the Times put it. Trump did not quite see it that way. “I want to thank him [Putin] because we’re trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I’m concerned I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. . . . I greatly appreciate the fact that they’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’re going to save a lot of money.” State Department employees and diplomats are not happy with Trump’s flippant remarks.
• He declared the opioid crisis to be a national emergency, undercutting his own HHS Secretary Tom Price, who declared just two days ago that such a declaration was unnecessary.
• He said that he hadn’t “given it any thought” when asked if he was going to fire Robert Mueller, and then declared, “No, I’m not dismissing anybody.” But he continued to insist that the investigation centered on “something that never took place.”

A REALLY DESPICABLE NOMINEE: Today, CNN published a deep dive into Sam Clovis, Trump’s pick to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist and a certified crazy and despicable person. Some highlights from the article: He suggested that Obama was not born in the U.S. and then insisted that the media was giving him a pass because he was black. “How incredibly racist is that?” he wrote in a blog post in 2012. “In a 2013 episode of [his radio show] ‘Impact with Sam Clovis,’ Clovis called [Eric] Holder ‘a racist black’ and [now-DNC Chair Tom] Perez ‘a racist Latino.’” Before the 2012 election, Clovis warned that Obama “wants to be a dictator and he wants to enslave all who are not part of his regime.” Clovis also (obviously) dismisses climate change. But this discussion of the issue, from 2013, is particularly bizarre given that he is being tapped to be the chief scientist of a Federal agency. Does a scientist talk this way?:

"What we have to examine is how the language changes, and when you start to go away from 'global warming' to 'climate change,' this goes right into the heart of progressive thinking because what it says, or what the implication is, is that somehow the progressives are going to figure out a way to create the ideal climate in all regions of the earth," he said. "And so how nonsensical is that? If you follow that logic to its logical conclusion, that's the conclusion in which you arrive -- is that there is some perfect weather or some perfect climate that we will have for everyone -- everyone will thrive."

Um...what??

UNDER THE RADAR: INDIANA VOTER SUPPRESSION: An investigation by the Indiana Star finds that the GOP-led Indiana government engaged in blatant voter suppression after Obama’s 2008 victory, by closing down early voting in Democratic areas and expanding early voting in Republican areas. “And the results were immediate. Most telling, Hamilton County [a GOP county] saw a 63 percent increase in absentee voting from 2008 to 2016, while Marion County [a Democratic county] saw a 26 percent decline. Absentee ballots are used at early voting stations.” From 2008-2016, while early voting locations were expanded in GOP areas, “the number of early voting stations declined from three to one in Marion County, as Republican officials blocked expansion.” The Republicans’ bad faith is indisputable, as Ed Kilgore pointed out: “State law requires a unanimous vote from county election boards to create more than one early voting site. The Democrats on the boards in both urban Marion and suburban Hamilton Counties voted for more sites. The Republicans in Hamilton did, too — but not the sole Republican in Marion.”

UNDER THE RADAR -- NEEDLESS CRUELTY ALERT: This summer, HHS announced that it was doing away with an Obama-era rule that barred arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts that accepted Medicaid and Medicare. What had been happening is that nursing homes were routinely abusing their residents; when family members discovered the abuse and tried to sue, they were told that the contract they had signed to place their loved one in the home contained a mandatory arbitration clause, stripping them of their right to a full court process. The Obama Administration didn’t like that, and passed a rule barring any facility accepting Medicaid/Medicare payments from enforcing mandatory arbitration clauses. Now Trump’s administration wants to eliminate the rule -- because, as Charles Pierce puts it, they are doing the bidding of those “who have prospered from an arbitration system that they could rig to their advantage, those profits coming at the expense of considerable human misery.”

A SOBERING LOOK AT HOW SCREWED DEMS ARE: This week, 538 published an incredibly dispiriting analysis of the congressional map’s bias against Democrats, and warned that it would not get much better in 2020. Not only do we have gerrymandered House districts that favor the GOP (after the GOP seized control of so many state legislatures in 2010), but, according to 538, “The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.” Here’s the scariest sentence: “Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.” There’s lots of interesting (and very, very depressing) stats in this piece, which I recommend to you (I don’t really feel like copying and pasting the entire thing here). The bottom line, I guess, is that we need to work super hard and also have realistic expectations. I guess? Ugh.

Endorsements:

• This fabulous, dispiriting, well-paced, enraging article about prosecutorial misconduct by Emily Bazelon.
• Al Franken’s memoir, Giant of the Senate, ON AUDIO. I honestly cannot recommend this book highly enough. I listened to it during my vacation (I was so annoyed at myself for forgetting to include it in last week’s Endorsements, given that I spent all 10 days of vacation extolling its virtues to every family member around me, over and over) and it is a SHEER DELIGHT. Franken narrates the audio, and his reading is dry, conversational, and peppered with impersonations (come for his Tom Coburn, stay for his Dana-Carvey-Doing-George-HW-Bush). And not only is the book hilarious, it provides a truly insightful and fascinating insider’s account of political campaigning and governing. I honestly learned a lot about the Senate, about health care policy, and (of course) about Franken. GET THEE TO AN AUDIOBOOK PROVIDER NOW. Seriously. Right now.
• The Week’s Best Use of a GIF.
• Taylor Swift’s refuse-to-be-victimized (or played by opposing counsel) courtroom testimony. (Sample: “Mueller’s [not that Mueller] attorney Gabe McFarland asked Swift why the photo shows the front of her skirt in place, not lifted up, if Mueller was reaching underneath to grab her butt. ‘Because my ass is located in the back of my body,’ Swift replied.”)