Trump's only looking out for himself: foreign policy edition

Trump's foreign policy is a window into his management style (and soul): he ignores information and expertise; he routinely contradicts himself after a day or two, undermining his own negotiating positions. He doesn't care about the country; he only cares about what'll get him the most media coverage (and bribes). Ilan Goldenberg on Twitter:

Continued:

North Korea: first he undercuts Tillerson’s negotiating effort. Calls Kim Jung Un “Little Rocket Man,” and escalates for no reason. Then out of nowhere with no consultation with advisors he agrees to a summit that everyone thinks is a bad idea & is a big concession to the North Koreans sending his advisors scrambling. Then without consulting Japan or South Korea, he unilaterally walks isolating us from our allies. But his letter to KJU is so pathetic & clearly shows a desire to do the summit that even while trying to look tough and walking away, he manages to weaken the US position. All the while he refuses to take actual briefings on the details of North Korea’s nuclear program, which after all is a central subject of the summit.
Israel/Palestine: he talks for months about doing the ultimate deal. Gets Kushner, Greenblatt and a whole team working on it at the White House. He meets with Abbas at the UN in September and privately tells him that he can get him a great deal. He can get him 1967 lines with swaps that give him better land than the land he is giving up. Total nonsense for anyone who knows anything about the conflict. And then boom. Out of nowhere. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem with no political concessions for the Palestinians. He blows everything up. Again, doing it all last minute with little consultation with his advisors. Palestinian senior delegation was at the White House 2 days before the announcement and Trump’s team didn’t even raise this possibility. No wonder they were so angry. And since then just making it worse. Choosing the day Palestinians commemorate the “Nakba” (catastrophe) as the day to move the embassy & needlessly throwing fuel in the fire while cutting off aid to UNRWA further destabilizing Gaza.
Iran: announcing time and again that he will only stay in the deal if he gets concessions from Europe & Congress to “fix” the deal. Intense negotiations followed and The Europeans made significant concessions that could have allowed Trump to declare victory & push Iran. But when Macron & Merkel came to visit Trump in April & try to convince him to stay in the deal, they came away with the impression he wasn’t even familiar with any of the details of the negotiations. Two weeks later Trump unilaterally walked away. Now Iran is working with the other powers to save the deal while isolating the US even as Pompeo has laid out an achievable list of demands with no plan on how to achieve them.
China: he pushes us into new trade negotiations by threat of sanctions and tariffs. But then he refuses to engage in any detail and give his negotiators guidance. So they all disagree amongst themselves & the Chinese see it & try to split the negotiating tram. Then he publicized through twitter major US concessions causing immediate Hill backlash & reducing his negotiating space. To compensate, administration then leaks the major Chinese concessions which of course causes the Chinese to walk them back & negotiations blow up.
Syria: he undercuts our position & leverage by announcing out of nowhere we are pulling out of Eastern Syria. If we were to do that the big winners would be ISIS, which would have new opportunities to come back & Iran which would have greater battlefield flexibility. Cuts off all support for opposition groups in Southwest Syria who have played key role in keeping a buffer that protected JOrdan & Israel. And even held $200 million for things such as the White Helmets - a group that bravely digs Syrians out of the rubble after air strikes. By doing all that he’s dramatically reduced US leverage, creates opportunities for Russia/Iran/Assad/ISIS. And it will inevitably draw us in deeper when it blows up in his face.
In all of these cases there has been no strategy. No plan. No consultation. The President wakes up and decides on his own & everyone scrambles. This is not a “playbook.” It is pure ignorance, ego & stupidity. Fortunately we have yet to have a REAL foreign policy crisis like an Ebola outbreak or a genuine military standoff. Terrifying to think what happens at that point. 

The raging controversy over whether to call Trump’s lies “lies,” explained →

Every politician I can think of has, at some point, said something that isn’t true. But almost all of them seem to mostly adhere to at least defensible interpretations of the facts. They do so to avoid obtaining a reputation for dishonesty, in part because they fear that obtaining a reputation for dishonesty would hurt their future efforts at communication. 
Trump, thus far, has avoided this penalty. He says untrue things. The falseness of his statements is revealed and reported on. And then his future pronouncements are nonetheless treated as deserving the same presumption of truth that we grant to normal people. 
That’s a big mistake. Presidents naturally end up making representations about things where the facts are not fully knowable to the public. When Trump does that, we need, as a country, to remember that our president is a huge liar.
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Generally speaking, for a statement to be a lie, it needs to be false and it needs to be something that the speaker knows to be false. That distinguishes it from a wide range of other kinds of false statements that people make:...
This last one is a “demonstrable falsehood,” though to know whether or not it’s a lie, you would have to know, subjectively, what the person saying it knows. Since this is impossible in most cases, it serves as an argument for journalists to avoid the ascription of knowledge and intent inherent in the word “lie.”
But while this is true on a case-by-case basis, we really can know that Trump lies deliberately because he says so himself.
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Trump, in short, lied for personal gain and not only isn’t ashamed of it but actually bragged about it repeatedly in books. During depositions taken as part of a 2007 libel lawsuit against Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, Trump admitted to lying publicly more than 30 times in order to avoid lying under oath and perjuring himself.
In other words, while it’s hard to know the mental state behind any particular untrue thing Trump says, it’s easy to know that Trump is a person who knows the difference between telling the truth and lying. He knows how to tell the truth when it suits him but frequently prefers to lie.
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Trump frequently makes representations about things where it’s simply not possible to immediately know for sure whether he’s telling the truth, typically because they refer to his private plans or activities. As president, for example, Trump has said that he would develop a plan to provide every American with health insurance, that the North Korean government had agreed to denuclearize, that he would promote a “bill of love” to help DREAMers, that he would take on the National Rifle Association to reduce school shootings, and that he would develop a tax plan that rich people would not benefit “at all” from.
None of this was true. Critically, none of it was demonstrably false at the time Trump said it. But equally critically, a reasonable person would have known better than to believe in any of it because Trump lies all the time. 
Yet the troubling thing about media coverage of Trump isn’t that the press has failed to label lies as lies once they are proven to be lies. It’s that these kinds of statements continue to be taken at face value when they are made, as if they were offered by a normal, reasonably honest person. But Trump is not a reasonably honest person. He is someone who flings around unconfirmed accusations and demonstrable falsehoods with abandon — and who does so, by his own admission, for calculated strategic purposes. 
Nobody can stop him from acting this way if he wants to, but we don’t need to act naive about it. When a hardcore serial liar says something new, treat his claim with the extreme skepticism it deserves.

The Stacey Abrams Test →

What made the battle between “the two Staceys” so captivating was its clear connection to larger debates within the Democratic Party. Abrams embodies the Democratic base, especially in the South, where black Americans—especially black women—are a core constituency and critical to statewide victories. Her general election strategy relies on base turnout, reaching rank-and-file Democrats with a strong liberal message and registering nonvoters in an effort to change the complexion and composition of the Georgia electorate. There’s a reason Abrams won support from Sen. Bernie Sanders and his organization, Our Revolution: Her approach is in line with those who believe the path to power depends on mobilizing left-leaning voters who sat out the 2016 election.
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Abrams’ candidacy—more than any other this cycle—will test the traditional view that black candidates are suboptimal with white electorates, who perceive them as too liberal and too racially sectarian. That perception did not appear to hurt her in the primary, which, despite the overwhelming media attention, wasn’t especially competitive in the end. Abrams won 76.5 percent of the vote to Evans’ 23.5 percent, a complete sweep of nearly every county in the state, including counties that are almost entirely white. She also vastly improved the overall primary turnout among Georgia Democrats—more than 550,000 people voted in the primary, compared with the roughly 330,000 who cast ballots in 2014 and 2010.
...Can she split the difference, neither drawing attention to nor away from her identity while making race-neutral appeals on liberal policy and using the promise of a black woman in the governor’s mansion to generate excitement with Democratic voters?
If she can do the latter, then Abrams’ campaign will be of serious national significance. Indeed, the potential for such a campaign may be one reason she has the attention of two high-profile Democrats in particular: Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. For both, Abrams’ effort isn’t just a test of Georgia’s progress, it’s a potential example for the kind of campaign they might run in the near future.

The False Promise of Term Limits →

This is a fairly robust conclusion in political science: it's better to just "vote the bums out" than to have term limits for legislators: "fresh" legislators are far more easily swamped or wowed by flashy lobbyists who seem to know everything; and it helps maintain the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.

O’Rourke’s amendment, like every push for term limits, is likely dead in the water. But there’s a reason the idea endures. Congress isn’t responsive to ordinary voters, and too many lawmakers have beencaptured by corporate interests. Incumbency rates are high, and extreme partisan gerrymandering insulates too many congresspeople from electoral competition. And while some of our long-serving legislators are competent stewards of the public interest, others are more known for their offensive outbursts than anything else.
It’s not unreasonable to look at these problems and conclude that Washington needs term limits to restore a measure of accountability and responsiveness. It helps too that term limits are easy to understand: When your time is up, you leave, opening the door to fresh blood and new ideas.
Except that, in actual practice, term-limiting congresspeople is a cure far worse than the disease. Fifteen states have term limits on their legislatures, giving us a chance to compare performance. The results are unambiguous. “Term limits weaken the legislative branch relative to the executive. Governors and the executive bureaucracy are reported to be more influential over legislative outcomes in states where term limits are on the books than where they are not,” concludes a 2006 study on the subject. The researchers, who compared legislators in all 50 states, found important behavioral shifts as well: Term-limited lawmakers spent less time on constituent services but equal time on campaigning and fundraising.
Power under term limits doesn’t just accrue to executive-office holders and bureaucrats, who hold more experience and knowledge of governance than term-limited lawmakers; it also shifts further toward lobbyists and others outside government. Lawmaking, like any profession, requires time and practice to do well. Even routine legislation involves considerable expertise, to say nothing of big ambitious policies. Term limits keep lawmakers from building that knowledge, producing representatives who rely even more on the “permanent establishment” of industry interests and their representatives, especially in states with weak legislatures. And without the specific subject expertise that comes with a career of lawmaking, elected officials become far less adept at oversight, impeding democratic accountability of the executive branch.

A Federal Court Just Ruled Trump Can't Block People On Twitter →

We've barely begun to think about the legal rights of users of social networks. If Trump, as a public official, uses Twitter as an open political forum, should the law require it to remain open to his political detractors (barring threatening or otherwise illegal behavior)?

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled it is unconstitutional for President Donald Trump to block critics on his personal Twitter account, deeming tweets from @realDonaldTrump to be a "public forum" under partial governmental control and therefore people cannot be excluded based on their political beliefs.
"This case requires us to consider whether a public official may, consistent with the First Amendment, 'block' a person from his Twitter account in response to the political views that person has expressed, and whether the analysis differs because that public official is the President of the United States," wrote US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York. "The answer to both questions is no."
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Trump established the @realDonaldTrump account in March 2009, long before he sought the presidency, but has since continued to use it since entering the Oval Office. He announced he was nominating Christopher Wray to be FBI director on Twitter and on Sunday he even issued an order to the Department of Justice via a tweet. The White House has also called Trump's tweets official statements.

Congress Passes ‘Bank Lobbyists Bill’ – An Unnecessary Giveaway to Banks →

Congress is captured by mega megacorporations.

...It rolls back key regulations on financial institutions that were put in place with the Dodd Frank financial regulation bill of 2010, which was passed in order to prevent another financial crisis similar to the one of 2008. Critics of the bill have called it the bank lobbyist bill, because as was largely written by them. However, defenders of the bill argue that it is badly needed in order to support community banks which are being hampered by too much regulation.
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DEAN BAKER: Well, a couple of points in that. First off, the idea of calling a bank with $50 billion in assets a community bank is kind of a joke. I mean, this is a very large bank. It’s not the largest, it’s not a JP Morgan. But these are very large banks, $50-250 billion. So PNC here, and you know, the East Coast. American Express falls into this category. There’s a lot of very large banks or financial institutions that fell into this category. They are not at all community banks. So that’s just silly.
...The main part of the law that they changed was that they had to undergo stress tests, I believe was every year... What that means is they just put their assets on a spreadsheet. So they say how many mortgage loans they have, how many car loans, business loans. And then they’re told, they say, assume, you know, they’re given a number by the Federal Reserve Board. Assume 10 percent of those go bad. And then they’ll have an extreme case, assume 15 percent. I’m taking those numbers out of the air. But they’re given numbers, and then they go, OK, how would our books look if that were the case.
That’s a very simple exercise, or at least it should be for any institution that size. So the idea this is some huge regulatory burden is basically utter nonsense. And then you say, why did the banks fight so hard to get that? Well, presumably because they want more risky, to hold more risky assets that might not look very good if they put them up on the spreadsheet. So yes, we should be worried about that, because there is no good reason for them to be fighting against this sort of regulation. It’s not an onerous burden.

He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill. →

We have one of the most complex, inefficient healthcare systems in the world, which is routinely brutally unfair to individuals who need help. What this article describes is insane, and should be illegal. Yet, it's just one teensy problem among hundreds which ensure that medical bills are the #1 driver of bankruptcy in this country.

On January 28, 34-year-old Scott Kohan woke up in an emergency room in downtown Austin, Texas, with his jaw broken in two places, the result of a violent attack the night before.Witnesses called 911, which dispatched an ambulance that brought him to the hospital while he was unconscious.
“The thing I remember most was my lips were caked in blood and super dry,” Kohan says. “My head was throbbing, so I touched the top of my head, and I could feel staples there.”
Kohan called for a nurse, who explained that he would need jaw surgery that night. In the meantime, he tried to check whether the hospital — Dell Seton Medical Center — was in his insurance network. 
“I was on my iPhone lying there with a broken jaw, and I go on the Humana website and see the hospital listed,” Kohan says. “So I figured, okay, I should be good.”
Except he wasn’t: While the emergency room where Kohan was seen was in his insurance network, the oral surgeon who worked in that ER was not. That’s how Kohan ended up with a $7,924 bill from the oral surgeon that his health plan declined.
“In hindsight, I don’t know what I could have done differently,” Kohan says. “I couldn’t go home. I had a broken jaw in two places. I tried to check if the hospital was in network.”
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“It does happen quite a lot in the emergency room,” says Christopher Garmon, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City. 
Garmon published a study last year that found as many as one in five emergency room visits led to a surprise bill from an out-of-network provider involved in the care.
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Unless states have laws regulating out-of-network billing — and most don’t — patients often end up stuck in the middle of these contract disputes. 

These surprise bills appear to be especially common in Texas, where Kohan lives. Garmon’s research, for example, finds that as many as 34 percent of emergency room visits lead to out-of-network bills in Texas — way above the national average of 20 percent.

Separate data from the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based think tank, finds that a staggering number of Texas emergency rooms have zero in-network emergency physicians — meaning that patients are guaranteed to see a doctor who does not accept their health insurance.

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis →

Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel. In one year, that racial gap adds up to more than 4,000 lost black babies. Education and income offer little protection. In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.
This tragedy of black infant mortality is intimately intertwined with another tragedy: a crisis of death and near death in black mothers themselves. The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. Each year, an estimated 700 to 900 maternal deaths occur in the United States. In addition, the C.D.C. reports more than 50,000 potentially preventable near-deaths, like Landrum’s, per year — a number that rose nearly 200 percent from 1993 to 2014, the last year for which statistics are available. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts, according to the C.D.C. — a disproportionate rate that is higher than that of Mexico, where nearly half the population lives in poverty — and as with infants, the high numbers for black women drive the national numbers.
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The crisis of maternal death and near-death also persists for black women across class lines. This year, the tennis star Serena Williams shared in Vogue the story of the birth of her first child and in further detail in a Facebook post. The day after delivering her daughter, Alexis Olympia, via C-section in September, Williams experienced a pulmonary embolism, the sudden blockage of an artery in the lung by a blood clot. Though she had a history of this disorder and was gasping for breath, she says medical personnel initially ignored her concerns. Though Williams should have been able to count on the most attentive health care in the world, her medical team seems to have been unprepared to monitor her for complications after her cesarean, including blood clots, one of the most common side effects of C-sections. Even after she received treatment, her problems continued; coughing, triggered by the embolism, caused her C-section wound to rupture. When she returned to surgery, physicians discovered a large hematoma, or collection of blood, in her abdomen, which required more surgery. Williams, 36, spent the first six weeks of her baby’s life bedridden.
The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades. But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.
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Though it seemed radical 25 years ago, few in the field now dispute that the black-white disparity in the deaths of babies is related not to the genetics of race but to the lived experience of race in this country. In 2007, David and Collins published an even more thorough examination of race and infant mortality in The American Journal of Public Health, again dispelling the notion of some sort of gene that would predispose black women to preterm birth or low birth weight. To make sure the message of the research was crystal clear, David, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois, Chicago, stated his hypothesis in media-friendly but blunt-force terms in interviews: “For black women,” he said, “something about growing up in America seems to be bad for your baby’s birth weight.”