On this Memorial Day, I am reflecting on my two great x 4 grandfathers who fought in the Revolution; my several great-great grandfathers in the Civil War (among them, one was a prisoner at Andersonville; another marched through Georgia with Crazy Bill Sherman); my grandfather, who was a machine-gunner in the trenches in France when my father was born in 1918; my dad, in uniform in World War II; my dad’s brother, Uncle Harry, who spent all of World War II as a Japanese POW; my brother, who earned a Bronze Star and Army Air Medal in Vietnam and is now permanently deployed to Arlington Cemetery; and his son who is about to retire from the Army and who was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I’m thinking that none of them served so that Donald Trump could manipulate U.S. foreign policy so that Ivanka can get a bunch of trademarks.

China this month awarded Ivanka Trump seven new trademarks across a broad collection of businesses, including books, housewares and cushions.

At around the same time, President Trump vowed to find a way to prevent a major Chinese telecommunications company from going bust, even though the company has a history of violating American limits on doing business with countries like Iran and North Korea.

The story goes on to say that the timing of the two events might be a coincidence. Bullshit, I say.

Just for starters, does anybody have a clue what The Creature is bleating about here?

Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt? They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation…They went back home in tatters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2018

Seriously, I have no clue what “young and beautiful” lives he’s talking about. Who went home in tatters?

And then there’s this one, from yesterday:

Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

Put pressure on the Democrats? to end the horrible law? This is your bleeping policy, you bleeping moron. 

Mother and son at Mexican-American border.

In case anyone is confused, this is what’s happening: There has long been a policy that when unaccompanied minors enter the U.S., they are put into the custody of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, and from there they are either sent to relatives legally living in the U.S., if such can be found, or put into some kind of foster care. Once placed, Homeland Security takes no more responsibility for the children. It supplies no subsistence benefits for them and does not keep track of them. I would think they should at least keep track of them, but apparently they don’t. Again, my understanding is that’s been the process for awhile, and it could have used more scrutiny before Trump became president.

What’s new and unique to the Trump Administration is that the Trump Administration (via Terminal Prick Jeff Sessions) has directed border patrol to prosecute parents caught making unauthorized border crossings with their children. When that happens, and the parents are taken into custody, the children become unaccompanied minors. Got that? They weren’t really unaccompanied until Trump’s border patrol took their parents away. This directive wasn’t issued officially until recently, but the New York Times reported in April that 700 children, over 100 of them younger than four years old, had been taken from their parents at the border since October 2017.

And then, it was learned in a congressional hearing that Homeland Security has lost nearly 1500 children.

From October to December 2017, ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] attempted to reach 7,635 UAC [unaccompanied alien children] and their sponsors. Of this number, ORR reached and received agreement to participate in the safety and well-being call from approximately 86 percent of sponsors. From these calls, ORR learned that 6,075 UAC remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight UAC had run away, five had been removed from the United States, and 52 had relocated to live with a non-sponsor. ORR was unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 UAC.

So we don’t know if those children are being trafficked or living on the streets or even still alive, and many of them actually came to the U.S. with at least one parent, who now has no idea where her or his children are. So, to keep out nasty street gangs — and I’m fine with keeping out nasty  street gangs — we’re tearing up families that are not part of street gangs, many of whom are fleeing the violence of street gangs. And Trump is responsible for this, not the Democrats. The Democrats have absolutely no power to reverse Trump’s decision.

Trump may be attempting to use lost and traumatized children to blackmail Democrats into providing funds to build his stupid wall, but the ripping apart of those families is still on him. Hostage-takers who kill the hostages can’t blame their victims.

Oh, but Trump tries. He also said,

“We have the worst immigration laws of any country, anywhere in the world,” Trump said at the roundtable held at the Morrelly Homeland Security Center. “They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors.”

Trump added: “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”

http://fox2now.com/2017/03/03/dhs-considering-proposal-to-separate-children-from-adults-at-border/

We’ll have to disagree about who is innocent and who is not.

But Trump was at his most brilliant yesterday when he tweeted that a White House aide who had given an official briefing to many members of the press did not exist.

The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official,” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

But most of the bleeping White House press corps was there and heard this White House official say what he said.  See articles from the Washington Post, New York magazine, and CNN, just for starters.

Apparently Trump hasn’t yet given up on his Nobel Prize and is clinging to a fiction that the June 12 meeting that he canceled is going to happen anyway. There is a word for people like Trump. It is “moron.” Actually there are several other words; I believe you can think of a few.

There was another school shooting today, this time in Indiana. Fortunately, no one was killed, although two were wounded. An unarmed science teacher saved the day.

Seventh-grader Ethan Stonebraker said the science teacher likely prevented even more injuries by confronting the shooter, who he said pulled out a gun and opened fire while the class was taking a test.

“Our science teacher immediately ran at him, swatted a gun out of his hand and tackled him to the ground,” Stonebraker said. “If it weren’t for him, more of us would have been injured for sure.”

We don’t know where the shooter got his gun. But we’ve had a number of recent circumstances in which shooters used their parents’ guns, or who were not supposed to have guns according to a court but were indulged by a parent.

I’d like to direct your attention to a post at a blog called Stonekettle that I have found recently. The blogger describes a conversation between himself and someone opposed to gun control laws. The blogger argues that there should be enforceable laws making the owner of a gun legally responsible if that gun is used in a crime, including a mass shooting. The other person objects:

If someone takes my car without permission and runs someone over with it, am I liable? The same answer applies to if someone took one of my guns without permission to murder someone else.

YES.

Yes. You can be held liable depending on circumstance.

Tony might want to check the laws of his state.

You see, in many states failure to properly secure your vehicle does make you liable under the law – not to mention, being grounds for claim denial by your insurance company.

For example: In nearly every state it is illegal to leave a running car unattended, even on private property, even if the the door is locked, and in some states even if you use a remote starting system with anti-theft lockout capability.

If you leave your car unsecured, with the keys in the ignition, you can be held liable for its theft and subsequent use in a crime.

Likewise, if you loan your vehicle to somebody unauthorized to operate it, or who is impaired, or who is not covered under your insurance, then you are liable for whatever happens with that vehicle. You are most certainly liable if your kids take your car and kill somebody because you left the keys where they could get them. You’re responsible for both the kids and the car.

However, if you take reasonable steps to secure your vehicle and to keep it out of the hands of unauthorized users, then the law generally does not hold you accountable if someone steals your car.

This is no different whatsoever from what I suggested.

Very simply, if you own a gun, you are responsible for it. If you leave it where your child can get it, and your child takes it and shoots up his science class with it, you should bear some legal responsibility. Likewise if a loaded gun is left where a toddler can get it, and the toddler kills himself or a sibling, that is not an “accident.” The owner of the gun is responsible for that shooting, and he or she should be legally responsible also. If you can document that you keep your guns in a safe or secure, locked cabinet, and a master thief gets into your house, picks the locks and steals the gun, and you report this to police, then you are not liable. Otherwise, you are. And if there are soft headed judges who routinely hand out suspended sentences for irresponsible gun ownership, maybe we can talk about mandatory sentences.

I do think that if gun owners get the message that they can get hit with serious fines and jail time for what is done with their guns, I suspect we’d see a lot fewer school shootings, at least.

Further, gun violence — including the costs of law enforcement and medical bills — are estimated to be costing U.S. taxpayers $100 billion a year. Gun owners should be required to pay for liability insurance to help pay for that. I’d tack additional sales taxes onto gun sales as well.

Are there any sensible arguments why this isn’t a good idea?

This morning, The Creature officially canceled the meeting with North Korea:

President Donald Trump will not meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month for what would have been a historic diplomatic summit, he announced in a letter to Kim released by the White House Thursday morning.

“I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” Trump wrote. “Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.”

And that Nobel Prize had been so close. Well, maybe some other time.

There have been a number of headlines in the past few days about how Trump is getting played by Kim Jong Un. I don’t doubt some people on the teevee have said this also, meaning this might have gotten back to Trump.

Go back to John Bolton’s comment about the Libya Model that almost scuttled the talks a few days ago. We all know that the Libya Model didn’t turn out well for Muammar el-Qaddafi. The last thing Kim Jong Un wants is to disarm himself of nuclear weapons (assuming he ever really considered that) and then have western powers roll over him anyway and put videos of his lifeless carcass being mutilated on YouTube.

So Pyongyang was not thrilled with the Libya Model talk, and Trump walked it back a few days later. The White House was at least dimly aware that talk of Libya was not conduicive to intra-national harmony.

But then, Aunt Lydia Pence went on Fox News to warn North Korea that Trump wouldn’t be played.

It would be a great mistake for Kim Jong-Un to think he could play @POTUS Trump. pic.twitter.com/Q6Xo3fz5LI

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 22, 2018

Aunt Lydia continued,

Pence said that the Clinton and Bush administrations “got played” in the past by offering concessions to Pyongyang if the country promised to dismantle its nuclear-weapons program, only to see those North Korean promises broken.

Trump isn’t concerned about a public-relations disaster if the June 12 meeting falls apart or doesn’t go well, even with a commemorative coin already struck. Trump, rather, is “thinking about peace,” the vice president said.

Pence added that Trump has made clear that the back-and-forth with North Korea will ”end like the Libyan model, if Kim doesn’t make a deal.”

By late yesterday North Korea was reacting with extreme indignation.

North Korea fired some highly charged statements toward US Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, all but torching what had been an otherwise conciliatory mood that the White House hoped to carry into a historic planned summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s vice minister of foreign affairs, called out Pence in a scathing statement and threatened to scuttle the Trump-Kim meeting set to take place in Singapore on June 12.

“Vice President Pence has made unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya, military option for North Korea never came off the table, the US needs complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization, and so on,” Choe said in a statement, according to North Korea’s leading propaganda outlet.

“As a person involved in the US affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the US vice president,” Choe said.

Choe don’t know Pence very well, do he? But I doubt very much that Pence said anything he hadn’t been instructed to say. I bet Trump was aware that people thought he was being played. He’d rather blow up the summit than let it be said he was being played. And if anyone was going to call of the date, it would be Trump. Nobody jilts Trump.

So for now we’re being spared the ghastly prospect of the cartoon character in the White House actually negotiating nuclear disarmament with anybody.

Even now, CNN is reporting that North Korea had appeared to blow up its nuclear test site, although there had been earlier reports that the nuclear test site had already collapsed, and not intentionally.  This was supposed to be showing North Korea’s good intentions before the summit.  But I’m sure we’ll hear more details about what happened as the day goes on.

Update: Here’s another take. After noting that Trump had “accepted” North Korea’s non-invitation to a summit on impulse, Josh Marshall wrote,

It was clear to anyone who was really listening and who knows North Korea’s history that there was little reason to think the North Koreans were seriously considering giving up their nuclear deterrent. Indeed, why would they? They’ve made immense sacrifices to achieve it and see it – quite reasonably – as a guarantee that they will never face violent regime change from the United States or South Korea.

The planned meeting was based on a clear misunderstanding between the two parties, albeit a willful one to some degree and one each seem to think it could square in person or use to overawe the other party. We can rehearse all the reasons this fell apart. But fundamentally this was a massive goof by the President that ended up blowing up in his face. There’s simply no other way to put it. It’s not clear that we’re in a worse place now than we were before the meeting was announced. But we soon may be. It is notable that this report suggests the White House released this letter before informing the North Koreans of the decision. That was a bad, dangerous mistake. It seems, based on their initial response, that Trump had not consulted extensively and perhaps not at all with the South Koreans either. The South Korean government’s first response, as reported by Yonhap News Agency was that the President of South Korea would convene his top officials and was “trying to figure out what President Trump’s intention is and the exact meaning of it.”

JM notes that Trump’s letter is full of emotional neediness. Trump is one big bag of emotional neediness, frankly.

Update: Fred Kaplan:

By canceling his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, President Donald Trump has proved his lack of skill as a negotiator, handed the world’s most brutal dictator a win, and further isolated the United States as a world power.

In a letter to Kim, released at the same time as Western reporters were witnessing the destruction of North Korea’s nuclear test site, Trump wrote that proceeding with a summit would be “inappropriate,” given the “tremendous anger and open hostility” in Kim’s recent statements. He thus revealed how little he knows about the history of diplomacy with Pyongyang—a true expert could have told him that fiery rhetoric is par for the course—and about Kim’s long-standing position on the issues that were to be discussed.

Yep, mostly Trump has been making a fool of himself over North Korea, but unfortunately that reflects badly on all of us.

Trump’s big mistake was accepting Kim’s invitation to a summit without first discussing its potential risks and opportunities with people who know something about these things. His second, bigger mistake was hyping expectations, tweeting that a peace treaty was on the horizon and that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize simply for agreeing to meet. These absurd remarks only heightened his own stake in the summit’s success—and Kim’s leverage in the negotiations.

It’s also the case that Bolton and Pompeo were against the summit and probably were behind persuading Trump to torpedo it. And if Trump thinks Kim will come crawling back to the table, he can kiss that off. Kim has already won in the court of international public opinion, and no doubt realizes it.

First, be sure to read Will Bunch’s How the Trump family sold U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder. He sums up a lot of stuff I’ve just been sputtering about.

In spite of the fact that the Kim-Trump summit may not happen — I’d bet against it — the White House had some fancy commemorative coins made to celebrate the great achievement of something something  denuclear something Nobel Prize. And some people don’t like them.

Part of the problem is the design. An official American coin with a likeness of Kim Jong Un on it that refers to him as “Supreme Leader” feels off, to say the least, given that his government is currently holding at least 120,000 of its own people in vicious camps designed specifically to hold and punish political prisoners. The coin also depicts Trump and Kim looking at each other eye to eye, as if they’re on equal footing — exactly the kind of status boost that the pariah regime in Pyongyang wants to achieve in this summit.

Not to mention the fact that it’s a tad premature to celebrate whatever it is that Trump thinks he is accomplishing that hasn’t happened yet. He had some sort of public appearance today in which he admitted the summit is not a sure thing. So the rendezvous in Singapore could fizzle, but we’ll always have the coin. See also How Trump Got Punked by Kim Jong Un.

And what about that Elliott Broidy? Paul Waldman explains,

A new article from the Associated Press lays out a remarkable campaign that Broidy and his partner George Nader waged in 2017 in order to obtain huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in exchange for which they would use Broidy’s connections to the new president to help the Saudis and the UAE in their conflict with Qatar, a U.S. ally that houses a critical American military base.

And as the Daily Beast reports, after years of trying with almost no success to obtain federal military contracts, in 2017, Broidy’s company, Circinus LLC, received millions of dollars in defense work. The Trump presidency has been very good to Broidy, and he may have also been very good to President Trump himself.

You might remember that Broidy is the guy for whom Michael Cohen paid  $1.6 million to a Playboy model, who then aborted his baby.

From the start, many parts of this story didn’t quite add up. Broidy is a very rich man, but not necessarily someone who has occasion to hang out with Playboy models, unlike some people you might be familiar with. And he was not a public figure, which makes the $1.6 million payoff seem wildly excessive. To put it bluntly, $1.6 million is “Keep this out of the papers because it’ll be a huge story” money, not “Don’t tell my wife” money. And why would Broidy, who has access to the most high-priced and discreet legal talent in the country, retain someone like Cohen to take care of this delicate matter for him?

See also Paul Campos, Hey, Look: More Evidence That Broidy May Have Been Covering for Trump in That Playmate Affair.

Today the EPA barred the Associated Press, CNN and an environmental group from covering a national summit on water contamination. Why? We all know Trump doesn’t like CNN, and the Associated Press broke the scoop about Broidy yesterday. That’s just a guess, though.

Evgeny A. Freidman, a major business partner of Michael Cohen, just agreed to cooperate with Bob Mueller as part of a plea deal.

See also Trump’s Lawyer’s Lawyer Is (Was) a Foreign Agent for Qatar. Sometimes I think the entire Trump Administration are just surrogates for Persian Gulf nations working through their issues. And Russians.

Earlier, the question of the day was, Did Rod Rosenstein cave? By now you’ve heard about how Rosenstein agreed to investigate the Russia investigation and possibly turn documents related to it over to the White House.  Or is he playing Trump like a five-cent violin? Charles Pierce:

For the moment, I’m going to give Rosenstein credit for being a gifted bureaucratic infighter and survivor who has played the president* like a five-cent violin. (There are precedents supporting this view to be found just this morning.) There are a dozen ways for Rosenstein to slow-play the review of any classified documents. I think the president* got played on behalf of all of us.

I hope so. Jennifer Rubin (Jeez, what got into her?) has an even-handed explanation of what might be going on with Rosenstein and Wray. And then she writes,

I would suggest a third take on the meeting: Wray and Rosenstein, with Mueller’s full backing, might be setting up Trump. We know Mueller is already pursuing an obstruction-of-justice inquiry that might relate to acts such as Trump firing former FBI director James B. Comey, falsely accusing him of illegally leaking confidential material, pressuring Comey to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, helping draft a phony cover story to explain the June 9 Trump Tower meeting and conducting an extended campaign to smear, discredit and disrupt the work of the FBI and the special counsel. In that vein, wouldn’t a meeting directly ordering Wray and Rosenstein to conduct what amounts to a wild goose chase and to put confidential material into the hands of congressional allies be part of the pattern of possible obstruction they are investigating?

The latest is that a meeting has been set up with Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy, but with no one from the White House, and Director of National IntelligenceDan Coats, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed O’Callaghan, about these documents and the expanded investigation. I don’t yet know what to make of this.

Okay, what have I left out?

Over the weekend the Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, blamed just about everything on the planet for the Santa Fe High School shooting except, you know, guns.

The Republican lieutenant governor also said, “We can’t sit back and say, ‘It’s the gun.’ It’s us as a nation, George … On this Sunday morning, when we all go to church and pray or go to synagogue or the mosque or wherever we go, let’s look inward at ourselves as a nation.”

Stephanopoulos asked, “But when we look inward, sir, aren’t we going to find that guns are more available here in greater numbers, in greater lethality, than any other developed country in the world?”

“They are, George,” Patrick said, “and here’s the reality: They are a part of who we are as a nation. It is our Second Amendment.”

I’m all for looking inward at ourselves as a nation. And when we do, we ought to be honest with ourselves that “we” have a problem with guns. And by “we” I mean our fellow citizens who harbor a toxic mix of aggrieved entitlement, masculinity issues and firearm fetishism.

Josh Marshall wrote a couple of days ago (please read all of this):

School shootings are a contagious phenomenon in American society which virtually always involves boys in late adolescence who have histories of rage and alienation and play that out in mass atrocity attacks at their school, which for them is their social world.

We can all see that they are highly choreographed, often using the same set of strategies to maximize fatalities, sometimes with new innovations which are then folded into the ritual of attack. What we call extremist ideologies are really just the languages these guys glom onto to articulate and understand those impulses. This doesn’t mean extremist groups and extremist ideologies don’t matter. For some, they clearly provide a language and a rationale and even a sense of righteousness to their actions. For some that helps bridge the path between extreme rage and actual violence.

But if that’s absent, it’s no mystery. Because it’s a mistake to see them as the real driver. Again, this happens all the time. The motive is pretty clear: angry and alienated young man, a late adolescent consumed with rage and alienation who lives in the United States and thus has become a devotee of the cult, the ideology of the redemptive school shooting atrocity. The ideology is really the cult of the mass shooting, in which the gun, with all its cultural and political omnipotence, plays a central role. Every school shooter learned from the history of school shootings, mimicked the strategies, was in a sense acting out a ritual which has become deeply rooted in our culture. We know the motive. We know the ideology: rage and alienation transmuted through mass gun violence. [Emphasis added]

And if the boy manages to grow up without killing anybody, he turns into the specimen in the photo above, in which he expresses his identity, his sense of manhood, through guns. We are threatened by a cult of the gun, which has become culturally and politically omnipotent. And supporting this is one big, toxic, twisted, neurotic sickness that has replaced any sense of honor, decency or responsibility in many American men.

Back in 2013 I wrote a post titled “Gun Culties vs. Everybody Else” about a man who had sheltered some children during the Sandy Hook shooting who was being harassed by “truthers.” The die-hard culties are buggier than road kill in August. They get catered to becausee they are single-issue voters backed by a powerful lobbying organization that many legislators fear. See also “Guns as Sacred Objects.”

I agree with Charles Blow, that we must all become single-issue voters where it comes to gun control.

People seeking common sense gun control must become single-issue voters on gun control. Support for more restrictions may not be the only reason to vote for a candidate, but it must be sufficient to vote against one.

We have to stop waiting for politicians to display courage and instead start to instill fear in them.

We must not let these weenies with guns continue to terrorize us and slaughter our children.

I’d like to make one more point. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Santa Fe shooter, is believed to have gone on his rampage because he wouldn’t take “no” from a girl.

Sadie Rodriguez, a mother of one of the victims, Shana Fisher, said that the shooter approached her daughter in class. Rodriguez told the Los Angeles Times that Fisher “had four months of problems from this boy” and “he kept making advances on her, and she repeatedly told him no.”

She said the the boy became more and more aggressive, according to The Times, which wrote that he “continued to get more aggressive, and she finally stood up to him and embarrassed him in class” a week before the shooting.

I haven’t found any details about how Pagourtzis had been “embarassed.” It sounds as if the late Ms. Fisher tried to let him down easy and finally was driven to calling him out. Did she report him to school authorities? If she had, would they have done anything (I am skeptical)?

For a subset of our citizens, guns have become the totem through which their cartoonish notions of “manhood” are actualized. And as long as that’s the case, we’re all in danger. Our message to them has to be, No, this is not who we are.

While most of us are wallowing in the latest twists and turns of the investigations of Trump, the Right is holding its breath waiting for an Inspector General’s report on — you guessed it — Hillary Clinton.

The completion of a long-awaited watchdog report on the FBI and DOJ’s Hillary Clinton investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign has put Washington on edge, as the clock counts down to its potentially explosive release.

“We’re all anxiously awaiting this report,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News’ “Hannity.”

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced the draft report was done in a letter to members of Congress on Wednesday. He did not say when the results of the review will be officially released to the FBI, DOJ and congressional committees.

We’ve had so many “final” reports on whatever it was the Clintons are being investigated for at the time, and they never amount to anything. It would almost be a relief if the IG report found the Clintons guilty of something; at least, it would shut up her die-hard supporters, who are a continuing drag on the Democratic Party, IMO.

However, it’s my understanding that the anticipated Inspector General’s report is about why the FBI screwed Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 but treated Donald Trump with kid gloves.

This month, the Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the findings of its lengthy review of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Clinton case. The results are certain to renew debate over decisions by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to publicly chastise Mrs. Clinton in a news conference, and then announce the reopening of the investigation days before Election Day. Mrs. Clinton has said those actions buried her presidential hopes.

Those decisions stand in contrast to the F.B.I.’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

We all remember the infamous New York Times story of October 31, 2016 declaring that the FBI did not see a connection between Russia and Trump. I suspected at the time that was a lie. But my post of October 31, 2016 was about the damn emails. With this graphic:

Conservative writer and novelist Roger Simon, who is not the Roger Simon who is a journalist, writes at PJ Media (another blast from the past) that “The Inspector General’s Report Will Expose the MSM as Treasonous.” His “premise,” if you can call it that, is that by focusing so much on Trump and leaks from Trump’s administration, while ignoring the evil machinations of the Clintons, the mainstream media is guilty of treason.

He even compares today’s treasonous media to the “good” media that exposed Watergate, because the Watergate reporters (according to Simon) didn’t need leaks. Seriously, he said that. He even ran an image from the film All the President’s Men, which he apparently didn’t watch. (Un, Deep Throat, folks? For that matter, Pentagon Papers?) In fact, it was Nixon’s obsession with leaks from his own administration that led to his ruin, this article says.

The IG report may be very, very bad for James Comey, a man about whom I am ragingly ambivalent. But other than that, I doubt the Right is going to be very happy with it.

Stuff to Read:

Jennifer Rubin, Trump’s team underestimates the extent of his exposure

NY Times, F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims

Washington Post, The GOP’s campaign against the FBI makes the nation less safe

Also, Trump Blinks; he’s caved to Kim Jong Un rather than risk his Nobel Prize.

Update: The Trumprettes weren’t just colluding with Russia. The New York Times is reporting that an  emissary from crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE also met with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower in August 2016 and offered to help Trump win the election.

Women in Colorado protest a speech by Mike Pence, June 2017.

Trump is expected to announce today that any medical facility that so much as refers a woman to an abortion clinic will lose federal family planning funds.

The rule, which is to be announced Friday, is a top priority of social conservatives and is the latest move by President Trump to impose curbs on abortion rights, in this case by withholding money from any facility or program that promotes abortion or refers patients to a caregiver that will provide one.

The policy would be a return to one instituted in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan that required abortion services to have a “physical separation” and “separate personnel” from other family planning activities. That policy is often described as a domestic gag rule because it barred caregivers at facilities that received family planning funds from providing any information to patients about an abortion or where to receive one.

Of course, it would be a known sexual predator; a man facing multiple, and credible, accusations of sexual assault; a man who has been rampantly promiscuous for years without apparently caring if the women he impregnated terminated the pregnancies or not, would be the one who comes up with something like this. It’s a pattern.

Mr. Trump is set next week to give the keynote speech at the “Campaign for Life” gala held by the Susan B. Anthony List. Ms. Dannenfelser has called Mr. Trump “the most pro-life president in our nation’s history.”

More proof that the entire anti-abortion movement is one big amoral cesspool. They don’t care about babies. They don’t care about women. They just care about control. But this is even worse:

Women in an exodus from Central America since 2014 have succeeded in winning asylum or other protections in the United States as victims of a pandemic of domestic abuse in that region. Because of recent cases that established fear of domestic violence as a legitimate basis for asylum, those claims often found more solid legal grounding in U.S. immigration court than claims of people who said they were escaping from killer gangs.

Now the Trump administration, determined to stop the stream of people to the border from Central America, is moving to curtail or close the legal avenues to protection for abused women like L.C. While the #MeToo movement has swept the country, bringing new legitimacy to women’s stories and consequences for men who abused, on immigration President Donald Trump is going the other way.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, from his position as the top official in charge of the immigration courts, is leading a broad review to question whether domestic or sexual violence should ever be recognized as persecution that would justify protection in the United States.

Yes, they’re all so pro-life they’re sending these women and girls back to near certain death rather than grant them asylum, because you know women and girls who are literally running for their lives must also be drug dealers and rapists.

Here is L.C.’s tale:

A woman from Honduras, who shall be identified only by her initials, L.C., was granted asylum in an immigration court in Chicago early this year. She came to the United States with her teenage daughter, fording the Rio Grande in Texas, after the girl had the extremely bad fortune of being a passer-by witness to a noonday massacre on a street near their home. Gunmen from the Mara 18 gang murdered eight people, mostly bus dispatchers, because the bus company was balking at paying a tax to the gang.

Soon the killers came to L.C.’s house, threatening to abduct her daughter for the sex trade and demanding that L.C. pay the gang for her child to be spared.

But that story of fear was not what convinced the immigration judge that L.C. had met the legal standard for asylum. Rather, it was her account of 16 years of beatings and sexual assault by her husband. In one of the last episodes before she fled, he had pressed a pistol to her temple to show how easy it would be to kill her.

Here’s more about our family-friendly, pro-life government: It was reported nearly a month ago that hundreds of immigrant children had been taken from their parents at the border.

On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and needed protection from the political violence there.

She had hoped she and her son would find refuge together. Instead, the agents ordered her to place her son in the back seat of a government vehicle, she said later in a sworn declaration to a federal court. They both cried as the boy was driven away.

For months, members of Congress have been demanding answers about how many families are being separated as they are processed at stations along the southwest border, in part because the Trump administration has in the past said it was considering taking children from their parents as a way to deter migrants from coming here.

…new data reviewed by The New York Times shows that more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4.

This week the Trump Administration declared it was going ahead with this plan, which is what they’ve been doing for months, anyway. The Department of Health and Human Services is inspecting military installations in Texas and Arkansas to be sure they are suitable for children. This no doubt has thrilled the Defense Department, which normally doesn’t sign on to be baby sitters.

Jeffie Sessions is in on this as well. This is from last month:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Justice Department will begin prosecuting every person who illegally crosses into the United States along the Southwest border,a hard-line policy shift focusing in particular on migrants traveling with children.

Apparently, it’s families or single women traveling with children that do all the damage. Single men are less threatening, at least to Jeffie Sessions.

In separate speeches — one in Scottsdale, Ariz., the other in San Diego — Sessions said the Department of Homeland Security will begin referring such cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. Federal prosecutors will “take on as many of those cases as humanly possible until we get to 100 percent,” he said.

“If you cross the border unlawfully . . . then we will prosecute you,” Sessions said. “If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we’ll prosecute you. . . . If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”

This no doubt results in long-standing trauma to these children, to which the Trump Administration is oblivious. These are sick, twisted people. And so is Mike Pence. Pence keeps his head down and out of the headlines, but if anyone in the Trump Administration is playing the role of Aunt Lydia, it’s Pence. So I don’t want to leave him out.

Someday someone will make films about the atrocities committed by the Trump Administration while citizens looked on.  We’ve got to get these people out of office asap.

So much going on with Trump it’s hard to keep track. While I’m digesting what’s going on with the various Michael Cohen and Trump Junior scandals blowing up in Trump’s face, let’s look at North Korea.

FYI, the BBC just reported that North Korea has stopped talking to South Korea.

North Korea says it will not resume talks with the South until issues between the two countries are resolved.

Its chief negotiator dismissed the South Korean authorities as incompetent and senseless. Pyongyang is angry at continuing US-South Korea joint military exercises. …

…He also criticised the South Korean authorities for allowing “human scum” (a reference to a North Korean defector) to speak at the Seoul National Assembly.

The joint exercises have been going on for a long time, and few believe that’s the real reason North Korea is pissed off. The real reason is that John Bolton flapped his mouth on Face the Nation and said that the U.S. would follow the “Libya model” in treating North Korea.

Paul Waldman wrote yesterday,

Here’s where we see how Trump is being played from the other side, most specifically by his new national security adviser, John Bolton. Bolton, who has long advocated that we start bombing North Korea at the earliest possible opportunity, made a point of saying publicly that we should look as a model to the arrangement made with Libya in 2003, in which it gave up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief and a reintegration into the international community.

Which, if you knew nothing about anything, might sound perfectly fine. But to the North Koreans, there’s almost nothing more provocative you could say than bringing up Libya. North Korean officials regularly cite the experience of Libya as precisely the reason they won’t give up their nuclear weapons. Moammar Gaddafi did so, and what happened to him? He was deposed and killed. The same fate befell Saddam Hussein.

Now, Bolton is many things, but stupid and ignorant are not among them. He knew perfectly well how the North Koreans would react if he brought up Libya.

We can quibble about whether Bolton is or isn’t stupid and ignorant, but the point is that Bolton appeared to be deliberately shooting down any possibility that an accomodation will be made with North Korea. And Trump, of course, is too stupid to see he’s being played by his own man.

And then there’s this:

Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it was likely to be the bragging that Kim had been forced to the table by Trump’s successful use of “maximum pressure” with sanctions and threats that had stung the Pyongyang regime most.

Kim has portrayed his diplomatic opening as a natural consequence of completing the decades-long project to build a nuclear arsenal.

“The North Koreans were prepared to ignore a lot of what the administration said before the summit, but it was the victory lap before the race that has really set them off,” Narang said.

If you have any idea what Kim Jong Un really wants, this makes sense.

What does Kim want? Economic assistance and an end to sanctions, obviously. He also wants a summit alongside the leader of the global hegemon, which would grant him enormous prestige. That’s something the United States has withheld from North Korea in the past, but Trump has already granted it. And above all, Kim wants to ensure his own survival and that of his regime.

Which is why most everyone except Trump seems to realize that there is no way Kim is going to give up his nuclear weapons, which he sees — quite rationally — as a guarantee against foreign invasion or a move to depose him.

The last thing Kim wants is any loss of face with his own people, or other Asian nations.

The Panmunjom Declaration recently signed by the two Korean leaders was partly designed to create “the optics of success for Trump.” I’m sure they were also intended to create the optics of success for Kim.

But Trump started celebrating a tad prematurely:

Since the moment he agreed on a whim to a summit between himself and Kim Jong Un, President Trump has been almost giddy about the breakthrough he’s about to achieve, even musing about his upcoming Nobel Peace Prize.

But like everything about being president, it’s turning out to be more complicated than Trump understands.

The release of North American prisoners also was a gift to Trump.  A good quasi-Confucian would have receprocated with humble and conciliatory language, at least, but that’s not a game Trump knows how to play. Trump’s bragging and Bolton’s “Libya” comments were not what Pyongyang expected. I suspect the only thing that might save the Singapore summit is if Trump did some ritual groveling now. I’m not holding my breath.

Somebody explain this paragraph to me —

Before the ink was dry on our new tax bill, outraged blue states were screaming about the cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes. Their governments were also frantically seeking ways around it, and small wonder. For decades, high-tax states with a lot of wealthy residents enjoyed a hefty subsidy from the rest of America. Legislators were understandably panicked over what voters might do when handed the rest of the bill.

This is from Megan McArdle in Wapo, who is one of those wonders who keeps getting plum writing jobs in spite of having the brain of a turnip.

At no point in this column does McArdle explain how people in high-tax states are getting a subsidy from the rest of America. It’s long been known that it works the other way around; with some exceptions, higher-tax “blue” states are subsidizing the lower-tax “red” states.

Here’s where it’s coming from:

Last fall, when the Trump Administration was pushing for its Tax Bill of Doom, Mnuchin and the rest of the Swamp Creatures pushed the idea that people in high-tax states were getting a break on their income taxes because they could deduct high state and local taxes from their federal returns. However, even with that “advantage,” the data show us that the high-tax “blue” states are still subsidizing the low-tax “red” states, not the other way around. And that’s because people who make tons of money tend to be concentrated in “blue” cities, because they are better places to live, and that’s where their jobs are.

The lie about how “red” states were subsidizing “blue” states was one of the selling points of the tax bill. McArdle is too dim to realize it was a scam.

Glenn Kessler explained,

Indeed six states–California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania–claim more than half of the value of all state and local tax deductions nationwide, according to IRS data. (Texas has no state income tax.)

As it happens, the high-tax states also tend to be the wealthiest states — and also blue states in presidential elections. Under this particular provision, one could perhaps make the case that they are being subsidized by low-tax states. But when you step back and look at the total revenue and spending picture, blue states could make the case that they are subsidizing other states, as various reports show they receive far less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes.

A report released on Oct. 3 by the New York State Comptroller said that New York generated 9.4 percent of the federal government’s income-tax receipts, even though it represented 6.1 percent of the U.S. population. It received 5.9 percent of federal spending allocated to the states. According to the report, New York contributed $12,914 per capita in tax revenue to the federal budget — but received $10,844 in per capita federal spending. The problem has only gotten worse in the three years since the report was last produced, state officials said.

“In New York state, the idea that we are being subsidized by other states holds no water,” Deputy New York Comptroller Robert Ward said in an interview.

And, of course, since the very wealthy made out like bandits in the tax bill, one can’t weap for them too much. But those blue states have a lot of low- and middle-income taxpayers also, who are there because that’s where their jobs are, but they struggle with higher costs of living and really need that tax deduction to get by. And there’s a bigger issue here about income inequality, as well as the fact that those blue states and cities are the biggest drivers of the American economy — just imagine if the whole USA were Mississippi — and yet people who live there have less of a say than rural red state voters about who gets to be president.

Just don’t get me started.