The book goes on sale November 12. I got my advance copies yesterday.

It has been just over three years since I first started writing this thing. It’s almost unreal to me that it’s really done. And the book got some great endorsements from some great Zen people.

Purchase from an independent bookseller here.

Purchase from the publisher here.

Purchase from Amazon here.

Also: I will be watching the debate tonight and providing a place for a comment thread.

I’m sorry I have no information about the photo; I found it on this page. The photo is illustrating a passage on the Lakota Sioux, so maybe the people in the photo are Lakota.

Somebody on social media said that he would observe Columbus Day, thank you very much. Someone responded, What do you do to “observe” Columbus Day? Get lost in a grocery store looking for spices?

On to Stuff to Read — Josh Marshall has a good synopsis of the Trump-Ukraine-Russia entanglement that neatly explains all the nonsense going on right now.

Jackson Diehl points out that all of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives have fallen apart in just over a month — “maximum pressure” on Iran, a treaty with the Taliban, North Korean denuclearization, the victory over ISIS. The exceptions are things that had already fallen apart, such as ousting the government of Venezuela, which Trump screwed up last spring, and peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which never went anywhere.  See also The Demolition of U.S. Diplomacy: Not Since Joe McCarthy Has the State Department Suffered Such a Devastating Blow by William Burns in Foreign Affairs.

Fiona Hill, the former senior director for Russia at the National Security Council, is testifying right now behind closed doors to the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida Man) attempted to crash the party, saying that as a member of the Judiciary Committee he is automatically entitled to be in on anything touching on impeachment. He was ejected. See Charles Pierce, Matt Gaetz Thinks His Audience Is as Big a Box of Rocks as He Is.

The situation in Syria seems to be unraveling quickly, and I can’t say I understand it all. Here is something just published at WaPo:

Trump must have heard he’s losing support of farmers.

….Other aspects of the deal are also great – technology, financial services, 16-20 Billion in Boeing Planes etc., but WOW, the Farmers really hit pay dirt! @ChuckGrassley @joniernst @debfisher @BenSasse Thank you to all Republicans in Congress for your invaluable help!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2019

This is Trumpspeak for um, this is not going as I planned. Word is that the Chinese have tentatively agreed to buy between $40 billion to $50 billion in U.S. agricultural goods, although exactly when isn’t clear. That’s great, but it’s not going to erase the damage done to the U.S. farm sector.

Basically, Trump is announcing that he’s put out some of his own fire. But there’s nothing in writing yet. According to the Financial Times,

In return for a series of modest concessions, most of which had been offered by President Xi Jinping’s administration in previous negotiating rounds, Donald Trump agreed to suspend another set of tariff increases originally scheduled to take effect on October 15.

The Financial Times article goes on to say that the Chinese believe they have the upper hand, especially now that Trump is only a year away from facing re-election.

Following up yesterday’s post — in addition to all the hits Trump took before noon Friday, later in the day Trump piled up more: One, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the national emergency declaration to build a border wall was unlawful.

Today, a Texas federal court ruled that President Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency along the Southern border violated federal law. The court declared that the president’s proclamation is invalid because it illegally sought to override Congress’s decision to not fund further border wall construction. The court invited the plaintiffs, El Paso County, Texas, and the Border Network for Human Right to propose terms for an injunction that would prevent the government from using funds to build border barriers that Congress specifically refused to authorize.

In addition,  two federal courts blocked implementation of a Trump administration rule that would make it more difficult for immigrants who rely on public assistance to obtain legal status.

And it’s not even noon:

This morning a federal appeals court has agreed with a federal district court that Congress must have access to Trump’s financial records, including his tax returns. I believe there’s no where else for Trump to go except to SCOTUS. And I’d be willing to bet money that SCOTUS won’t touch this.

Former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch showed up this morning to testify to the House, in spite of attempts by the State Department, which still employes her, to block her. She is testifying behind closed doors, but she’s testifying. One suspects she is pissed.

Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor and ambassador to the EU who is up to his eyebrows in the Ukraine scandal, also has agreed to testify next week in spite of being ordered not to. One suspects he is cutting his losses.

Trump has yet to tweet about these developments, but he did tweet about the Kurds again. He must be getting hell from a lot of people.

….We have one of three choices: Send in thousands of troops and win Militarily, hit Turkey very hard Financially and with Sanctions, or mediate a deal between Turkey and the Kurds!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2019

The choice, moron, was not to greenlight a Turkish invasion of Kurdish territory. And what excuses will you have when all those ISIS fighters are set free? Neocon Max Boot is so put out with Trump that he’s defending Barack Obama.

Two scholars of the Middle East, Michael Doran and Michael A. Reynolds, suggested in the Wall Street Journal that the fault was really President Barack Obama’s for aligning with the Kurds in 2016 — despite the success of that strategy and the lack of any realistic alternatives.

See also New revelations about Trump test Pelosi’s narrow impeachment strategy.

In the past 24 hours alone, The Washington Post reported that Trump sought to enlist then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the fall of 2017 to work with Rudolph W. Giuliani to help stop the prosecution of a Turkish Iranian gold trader represented by the former New York mayor and current Trump lawyer, according to people with knowledge of the request.

The Financial Times reported that Michael Pillsbury, one of Trump’s China advisers, said he had received information on Hunter Biden during a visit to Beijing shortly after Trump called on China to investigate the former vice president’s son. Pillsbury later offered a conflicting account.

And then there were the two Guiliani associates who were arrested trying to leave the country. They’ve been indicted for violating campaign finance laws and also appear to be mixed up in the Ukraine mess.

There are reports that the Turkish assault of Syria has already killed more than 100 Kurdish fighters. The Trump-sanctioned genocide has begun. And, of course, by now we’ve all heard Trump’s excuse for why we don’t owe the Kurds anything:

The Kurds are fighting for their land, just so you understand. They’re fighting for their land and as someone wrote in a very, very powerful article today: They didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example… but they’re there to help us with their land. And that’s a different thing. And in addition that, we’ve spent tremendous amounts of money on helping the Kurds, in terms of ammunition, in terms of weapons, in terms of money, in terms of pay. With all of that being said, we like the Kurds.

I take it slaughtering Kurds is not something Trump considers to be off limits, as I see he is taking no steps to obliterate the economy of Turkey.

As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019

But I was thinking this morning of how we’ve come full circle, and how an attack on the Kurds was used as an excuse to start our endless Middle Eastern wars.

You might remember that in the period before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, right-wing hacks on the cable politics talk shows babbled incessantly that Saddam gassed his own people! G.W. Bush brought it up frequently in his own arguments for the invasion. Saddam gassed his own people! He’s thumbing his nose at the world!

And you might remember that the “his own people” Saddam Hussein gassed were Kurds living in Iraq.

I think a lot of Americans got the impression that the gassing was an ongoing thing, and we had to ride to the rescue. But the gassing had occurred many years earlier, mostly during the Reagan Administration. The gassing of the Kurds began in 1987 and continued into 1989. The worst episode was the massacre at Halabja on 16 March 1988. An estimated 5,000 people, mostly women and children, were killed by poison gas dropped from Iraqi jets.

And the Reagan Administration was just fine with this. In fact, the Reagan Administration fabricated evidence to argue that the gas had been dropped by Iran, not Iraq. Iran was our enemy at the time; Saddam Hussein was considered an ally. I wrote an article about this for Democratic Underground back in 2003.

I got one thing wrong in the DU article; Reagan didn’t veto the The Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, but his Administration lobbied so hard against it that it failed. The bill, sponsored by senators Claiborne Pell, Jesse Helms, Christopher S. Bond, Wendell H. Ford, Al Gore, Carl Levin, Richard G. Lugar and William Proxmire — almost all Republicans, you might note — would have sanctioned the hell out of Iraq, and Reagan (or whoever was running things in the face of Reagan’s creeping dementia) wasn’t having it. We needed Sadam Hussein on our side, The Reaganites thought. Note that one of those Reaganites was Gen. Colin Powell, who served as National Security Adviser from 1987 to 1989.

Protecting Saddam Hussein was the official policy of the George H.W. Bush Administration as well, until Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait. Some said (under their breath) at the time that Saddam had come to believe the U.S. would sign off on anything he did.

See also tthe original Gassing Our Own People post from The Mahablog archives, June 26, 2006.

And some of you will remember the glorious episode that occurred after the Persian Gulf War, in which President Bush I encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then stood by while Saddam crushed the rebellion, ruthlessly. I believe some of the mass graves found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion — the ones that didn’t date to the Iran-Iraq War or the Persian Gulf War — held the bodies of Kurdish rebels.

In 2003, before the invasion, I remembered Halabja, and I remembered the crushed Kurdish rebellion. The righties who were fired up to to go war had never heard of these things before; they seemed to think the Kurds were still being gassed, and we had to invade quickly to rescue them. And after the invasion, whenever troops found a mass grave of Kurdish rebels, the righties would dance about and yell See? We told you Saddam was evil. But the mass graves were no surprise. The righties were always oblivious to the rest of the story, and wouldn’t listen, and wouldn’t believe us if they did listen.

But it strikes me now that all of the trouble surrounding Iraq going back 20 years resulted from Republican presidents being soft with a ruthless dictator. Appeasing, even. It’s a damn shame the Dems didn’t push that point through the Noise Machine years ago, because not doing so allowed the next generation of soft little Republican fatasses to portray themselves as hardened he-men warriors, even as they call Democrats “weak” and swift-boat any real warriors who dare oppose them.

And nothing seems to change. Well, one thing has sorta changed. A great many prominent Republicans, including many serving in the Senate, are livid about Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds. They still aren’t supporting impeachment, but they are breaking with him regarding Turkey and Syria. Well, sorta. They are calculating this won’t come at a political cost.

 “The litmus test for Trump is the personal politics,” a GOP Senate aide told Power Up of the way their boss views handling differences with the president. “People who want to come out against Access Hollywood, or tweets about the Squad, or impeachment — that is the test. Not policy. So you can break with [Trump] on policy if it’s a position on principle, you just can’t break with him on the little stuff he cares about.”

How pathetic is that?

It should be noted that senators Lindsey Graham and Chris Van Hollen have introduced a bill to impose financial penalties on Turkey’s political and military leaders, including Trump’s buddy President Erdogan, since Mr. Great and Unmatched Wisdom isn’t likely to do anything about it.

The bill introduced on Wednesday, then, aims to compel Turkey to end its airstrikes and ground invasion. Graham’s spokesperson Kevin Bishop told me he’s unsure if there will be other similar efforts pushed in the Senate, but he “expect[s] our bill will have bipartisan, bicameral support.” A Senate Democratic aide, however, told me this was the main effort in that chamber.

Bishop also noted the legislation wasn’t written in conjunction with the White House, but it seems to have the president’s support anyway.

“I do agree on sanctions, but I actually think much tougher than sanctions if he doesn’t do it in as humane a way as possible,” the president told reporters on Wednesday when asked about Graham’s sanctions legislation. Trump doubled down on that position Thursday, tweeting “I say hit Turkey very hard financially & with sanctions if they don’t play by the rules! I am watching closely.”

And if thousands of ISIS fighters escape because the Kurds aren’t able to guard them, that won’t be a problem, says Great and Unmatched.

Asked whether he was concerned about ISIS fighters fleeing Kurdish custody and becoming a threat elsewhere, Trump said during a press conference on Wednesday: “Well they’re going to be escaping to Europe. That’s where they want to go, they want to go back to their homes.”

Whatever.

So many chickens are coming home to roost on the White House that the Trumps could go into the rotten egg business. Even the Trumps’ sordid history as intractable deadbeats may be finally about to bite them.

For example, the Guardian reported recently that the Trumps owe Scottish courts a bill of tens of thousands of pounds that they have, so far, refused to pay. The bill came from Trump’s 2014 suit to stop a windfarm from being built near his Aberdeenshire golf course. Trump lost the suit in 2015, and per Scottish law he is on the hook to pay for all court expenses. But the Trump organization will not accept the bill because they are disputing the amount.

So the bill is now in the hands of a court-appointed adjudicator. I assume Scotland could eventually seize the property if the Trumps continue to refuse to pay. This may be doing the Trumps a favor, since the Scottish golf resorts lose millions of dollars a year. Recently Scotland also shot down a pitch from Eric Trump to build luxury housing around the Turnberry resort.

The Scotsman reports that local officials like the rolling agricultural fields along the Firth of Clyde coastline more than they like pleasing the son of the United States president. Eric Trump had pitched local authorities on a plan to transform farmland surrounding the resort into villas and golf homes. The development play was an effort to juice revenues at Trump Turnberry, which has lost roughly $40 million since Trump acquired it in 2014.

Turnberry is, of course, the place made infamous when it was revealed the U.S. military was using the resort and its nearby airport for refueling stops — money pouring into Trump pockets, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Very likely they’ve made enough on pit stops to pay the Scottish court bill.

But Trump has a long-standing aversion to paying bills even when he clearly owes them.

A USA Today analysis published Thursday uncovered 60 lawsuits by ordinary Americans who say Trump and his businesses failed to pay them for their work.

The list includes plumbers and painters, waiters and bartenders, real estate brokers and even law firms who helped him defend such suits.

The documents reviewed by the newspaper include:

• More than 200 liens since the 1980s that were filed by contractors and workers who said they were stiffed.

• Records released by casino regulators in 1990 that show 253 subcontractors on a single project were not paid in full or on time.

• Twenty-four Fair Labor Act violations by the Trump Plaza casino and Trump Mortgage for failure to pay minimum wage or overtime. The cases were resolved with an agreement to pay back wages.

The deadbeatery now extends to the Trump campaign, which refuses to reimburse cities for security at Trump rallies.

In city after city, across the nation, Trump has failed to pay local officials who provide thousands of dollars’ worth of security assistance to the president’s campaign during his Make America Great Again rallies.

In total, at least 10 cities have complained that the campaign has not reimbursed them for services provided by local police and fire departments, totaling more than $840,000, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity in June.

Some of these bills go back to 2016, note. The fiscal damage to some local municipalities has been significant.

Trump has scheduled one of his MAGA rallies for tomorrow in Minneapolis. Trump narrowly lost Minnesota in 2016, and according to many accounts he believes he can win the state in 2020. But Mayor Jacob Frey, clearly nobody’s fool, demanded the city be paid $530,000 for security and other costs associated with the rally in advance.

And, of course, the Trump campaign refused and instead went to war with the mayor of Minneapolis.

It’s not as if the Trump campaign can’t pay $530,000. At least, it ought to be able to. Trump and the RNC raised $125 million in third quarter fundraising, which is a presidential fundraising record. Altogether, the various parts of Trump’s campaign efforts have raised more than $308 million in total in 2019, and boast more than $156 million cash on hand. A mere $530,000 shouldn’t break the bank. Yet Trump is going to war against the mayor of Minneapolis, unleashing one of his trademark twitter rage tantrumps and threatening to sue the city for extortion. To which the mayor responded:

Yawn… Welcome to Minneapolis where we pay our bills, we govern with integrity, and we love all of our neighbors. https://t.co/v1cXvoD9uR

— Jacob Frey (@Jacob_Frey) October 8, 2019

One suspects this is a public relations mistake on Trump’s part. Minnesota may be a mostly rural state, but most of the population lives in cities, and winning the state’s electoral votes means winning the cities. And now most news outlets in Minnesota are explaining to citizens that Trump doesn’t pay his bills.

Even better, the white terrorist group Oath Keepers is planning on sending heavily armed thugs to the rally to “protect” it. The city is going to need that security.

As of this writing Trump is, apparently, getting away with the use of the city’s Target Center without paying in advance, which pretty much means he will never pay at all. Although the city owns the Target Center, the contract to host the rally is with the management company, AEG Worldwide, and AEG is honoring the contract. It is possible the city eventually will bill AEG for whatever it will cost to keep Minneapolis safe.

Some businesses in the neighborhood of the Target Center, notably a couple of popular night spots, are honoring the event by pledging to donate their profits for the evening to Planned Parenthood.

Trump’s sycophants are blasting Mayor Frey and badmouthing Minneapolis as fast as they can move their lips, or thumbs, as it were. But again, if the whole point of this rally is winning votes for Trump, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to just pay the bleeping $530,000? How is pissing off Minneapolis going to help him win the state? Aaron Ruper writes at Vox that while Minnesota isn’t completely beyond Trump’s reach, most indicators suggest he’s much less popular there than in 2016, and his brand of nasty campaigning really doesn’t work that well in the state.

See also Trump’s 2016 campaign was run on a shoestring. His reelection machine is huge — and armed with consultants. While Trump probably will never pay Minneapolis, he is paying an army of consultants very handsomely. I assume they insist on being paid up front.

This is a real tweet:

….the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019

If others in the region of great wealth are to protect their own territory, why the bleep are we sending troops to protect Saudi Arabia? And I do like the part about “great and unmatched wisdom.”

Also, what’s with the claim that 100% of the “ISIS Caliphate” are captured? According to the Pentgagon, ISIS actually has made a comeback in Syria and Iraq, thanks to Trump.

What’s going on here? Juan Cole:

Trump likes to play imaginary gangsters, likes to talk tough, likes to praise and kowtow before strongmen. But in the real world he is a milquetoast, letting other countries walk all over the United States. …

…The White House itself is now announcing that Turkey is planning to invade the Kurdish-majority region of northern Syria to establish what Ankara calls a “security zone.” This is actually a plan for a monstrous sort of ethnic cleansing and population displacement, as Reese Erlich reported from Istanbul in a syndicated column carried here by Informed Comment.

Trump clearly has signed off on this plan, apparently afraid to take Erdogan on.

From Axios:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accepted an invitation from President Trump to visit the White House next month, Reuters reports.

Driving the news: Erdogan accepted the invitation during a call with Trump in which the Turkish president expressed dissatisfaction over the U.S military’s apparent failure to implement a safe zone agreement in northeast Syria. Erdogan wants the safe zone to be established to eliminate threats from the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which is supported by the U.S. but considered a terrorist organization by Turkey.

The last time Erdogan visited the U.S., Trump let Erdogan’s bodyguards get away with attacking Kurdish protesters. Fifteen of the bodyguards were indicted, but under pressure from the State Department the indictments were dropped.

An Ivanka Trump tweet thanking Erdogan for attending the grand opening of Trump Towers Istanbul has re-surfaced. And let us not forget that “betraying the Kurds” is a recurring pattern of U.S. foreign policy.

For more background, see Trump’s WTF? Foreign Policy, Syria Edition, from December 2018 in the Mahablog archives.

This announcement has seriously riled Senate Republicans, including Trump’s favorite lapdog Miz Lindsey Graham:

In a rare public break with Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham criticized the partial pullout on “Fox & Friends,” saying the “impulsive decision by the president has undone all the gains we’ve made, thrown the region into further chaos.” He added, “I hope I’m making myself clear how shortsighted and irresponsible this decision is in my view.”

Graham, a vocal defender of the president and frequent adviser on matters of foreign policy, predicted the administration’s move would ensure a “comeback” of ISIS, force the Kurds to align themselves with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iran, damage the relationship between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and Congress, and become “a stain on America’s honor for abandoning the Kurds.”

He also threatened to introduce a Senate resolution opposing the administration’s decision, and accused the White House of being dishonest about the nature of the ISIS threat.

“I don’t know all the details regarding President Trump’s decision in northern Syria,” the South Carolina Republican wrote on Twitter, adding that he was in the process of scheduling a phone call with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and warning: “If press reports are accurate, this is a disaster in the making.”

See also these tweets from Brett McGurk, Trump’s former envoy for the fight against the Islamic State.

The WH statement tonight on Syria after Trump spoke with Erdogan demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of anything happening oUIn the ground. The “United States” is not holding any ISIS detainees. They are all being held by the SDF, which Trump just served up to Turkey. pic.twitter.com/vYr7j0q6mR

— Brett McGurk (@brett_mcgurk) October 7, 2019

The SDF refers to the Syria Democratic Forces, which is led by a mostly Kurdish militia. Basically, all these ISIS prisoners Trump brags about are being held mostly by Kurds, and the stable genius just betrayed the Kurds. See also Donald Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Could Help ISIS Stage Mass Prison Breaks, Experts Say.

Trump did acknowledge that “the Kurds fought with us” against Islamic terrorism, but that they “were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.” So, in Trump’s mind, we have no further obligations to them. And we all know that if Erdogan acts as predicted and begins an ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, Trump won’t do a damn thing to stop him.

In other news: For a brief, shining moment it looked as if we’d finally see Trump’s taxes, when a federal judge ordered Trump to give eight years of tax returns to the Manhattan District Attorney. However, almost immediately an appeals court issued a stay pending a review.

Kuridsh fighters in Syria. Posted to Flickr by Kurdishstruggle, https://flickr.com/photos/112043717@N08/15318975992

In case you missed it — Chris Hayes did a great standup routine on Trump’s Ukraine, um, problem.

Greg Sargent wrote that the batch of State Department texts released by House Democrats provided three significant revelations:

First, the texts show that State Department officials, taking direction from the White House, explicitly conditioned a meeting with Trump — which Zelensky badly wanted — on Ukraine helping to rig the next U.S. election on Trump’s behalf, by carrying out the investigations Trump wanted. …

…Second, and importantly, the texts also show that Ukraine understood that the fate of its country’s relations with the United States rested on whether it carried out Trump’s political marching orders to interfere in a U.S. election and investigate Trump’s political opponent. …

…Third, the texts set up a clear line for further inquiry that will likely produce even more damning revelations. They strongly suggest that Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine directly contingent on that country doing his political bidding.

See Greg Sargent’s column for details.

News stories report that a second whistleblower with direct knowledge of Trump’s interactions with Ukraine has come forward.

Josh Marshall writes about State Department officials coming forward to testify.

Secretary Pompeo threatened a dogged fight against any attempt to depose State Department officials or get documents for the House inquiry. Volker, Yovanovitch, Sondland and others could have used that shield Pompeo threw up around them to refuse or at least delay or negotiate over testifying. That was clearly the intention. But they haven’t. Volker resigned his appointment and quickly testified. Now Sondland, much more of a Trump partisan and apparently much more of a driving force in the extortion scheme, is doing the same.

Yovanovitch, of course, is Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador to Ukraine who was dismissed by Trump because she wouldn’t go along with his extortion scheme. Yovanovitch will testify to three House committees this Friday, October 11. Gordon D. Sondland is a Trump supporter who became Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, and he was on the “team” of Trump officials, along with Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, who were pressuring Ukraine President Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.  It seems some people have decided they aren’t going down with the ship.

See also Mounting evidence buttresses claims in whistleblower complaint and Donald Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Has Its Roots in Russia.

Elsewhere — this got little attention, but it pissed me off mightily — CNN reported Trump promised Xi US silence on Hong Kong democracy protests as trade talks stalled.

During a private phone call in June, President Donald Trump promised Chinese President Xi Jinping that the US would remain quiet on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong while trade talks continued, two sources familiar with the call tell CNN.

The remarkable pledge to the Chinese leader is a dramatic departure from decades of US support for human rights in China and shows just how eager Trump is to strike a deal with Beijing as the trade war weighs on the US economy.

This is cowardly and shameful, is what it is. See also A scathing new Pentagon report blames Trump for the return of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Trump is absolutely worthless.

For a fun read, see Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America by Bob Moser at Rolling Stone. Sounds like Mitch is in big trouble.

I mentioned yesterday that Trump announced a plan to expand Medicare Advantage plans, which I found suspicious. Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times explains what I suspected — Trump is trying to privatize Medicare.

The main point is that despite his claim to be the protector of Medicare, he’s merely associating himself with Republican proposals that have been aimed at disemboweling the program for years. …

… The victims will be the 60 million seniors who depend on Medicare for their healthcare. Their costs would go up, and their access to benefits shrink.

Step one is to raise reimbursements paid for medical care to be in line with what is paid in the private health insurance market. Yeah, you read that right. “Put another way, if your intention is to bankrupt Medicare, you can hardly find a better way to do so than this,” Hiltzik writes.

Step two is to promote Medicare Advantage plans, which are administered by private companies, over regular Medicare. Medicare Advantage plans are able to offer “extra” goodies like vision benefits and health club memberships, with the trade-off that they limit customers to small networks.

Trump’s executive order provides only broad outlines; it will take a while to work out details. And I don’t believe Trump can make big structural changes to the program without a vote in Congress, so I suspect nothing will happen before the 2020 election.  This is basically about Trump getting something to run on that makes it seem he is doing something about health care. But this needs to be closely watched — and fought against.