Trump pushes for congressional term limits
By CRISTIANO LIMA
President Donald Trump voiced his support on Monday for instituting congressional term limits, renewing calls for a proposal that he made a staple of his campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” in Washington.
“I recently had a terrific meeting with a bipartisan group of freshman lawmakers who feel very strongly in favor of Congressional term limits,” the president tweeted. “I gave them my full support and endorsement for their efforts. #DrainTheSwamp”.
It was not immediately clear whether the measure indeed had the backing of several freshmen lawmakers, as the president stated, because conflicting reports emerging about the substance of the meeting.
As a presidential candidate, Trump vowed to push for a constitutional amendment that would extend term limits to all members of Congress. During a rally in October 2016, Trump called for placing a six-year limit for members of the House and 12-year limit for senators.
His missive on Monday appeared to be the first on the matter since he entered the West Wing.
PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization that has tracked the progress of the president's campaign promises, rated his vow to push for congressional term limits as “stalled” as of earlier Monday, prior to Trump’s remarks.
Since he was elected, the president has repeatedly joked about his own restrictions for serving in office. Last month, after Chinese officials abolished presidential term limits, Trump quipped that “maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.”
April 30, 2018
Sued for defying Medicaid expansion
Maine governor sued for defying Medicaid expansion ballot measure
LePage has refused to implement Medicaid expansion after voters decisively approved it last fall.
By RACHANA PRADHAN
Obamacare supporters are suing Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s administration to force him to expand Medicaid, accusing the Republican of ignoring a ballot initiative that ordered the state to join the coverage program.
LePage has refused to expand Medicaid nearly six months after 59 percent of the state’s voters approved it in a first-of-its-kind ballot measure. He has insisted he won’t adopt Medicaid expansion unless state lawmakers meet his conditions for funding the program.
“With the goal of getting health care to people as soon as possible, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer,” said Robyn Merrill of Maine Equal Justice Partners, one of the advocacy groups behind the lawsuit.
The lawsuit against LePage‘s administration was expected after the Maine Legislature’s recent session ended without a funding agreement. A LePage spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
LePage, now in his last year in office, previously vetoed Medicaid expansion bills five times, prompting the state’s Obamacare supporters to organize the ballot initiative last year. Advocates are spearheading similar campaigns to get measures on the ballot this year in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah.
Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government covered the entire cost of expanding Medicaid coverage through 2016. States last year became responsible for a fraction of program costs, and they will be on the hook for 10 percent within a few years.
Roughly 80,000 low-income Maine adults are supposed to qualify for Medicaid benefits starting July 2, according to the ballot measure. The LePage administration skipped an early April deadline to formally notify the federal government it would expand Medicaid.
The lawsuit against the Maine Department of Health and Human Services was filed in state Superior Court. Other groups bringing the lawsuit include the Maine Primary Care Association and Maine Consumers for Affordable Health Care.
The office of Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat running for governor this year, declined to comment on whether she would defend the state in the litigation. Earlier this year, Mills proposed using $35 million from a tobacco settlement to cover Medicaid expansion costs through 2019.
If Maine expands, it would become the 32nd state to join the Obamacare program. Medicaid expansion covers adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $16,800 for an individual and $34,600 for a family of four.
LePage has refused to implement Medicaid expansion after voters decisively approved it last fall.
By RACHANA PRADHAN
Obamacare supporters are suing Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s administration to force him to expand Medicaid, accusing the Republican of ignoring a ballot initiative that ordered the state to join the coverage program.
LePage has refused to expand Medicaid nearly six months after 59 percent of the state’s voters approved it in a first-of-its-kind ballot measure. He has insisted he won’t adopt Medicaid expansion unless state lawmakers meet his conditions for funding the program.
“With the goal of getting health care to people as soon as possible, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer,” said Robyn Merrill of Maine Equal Justice Partners, one of the advocacy groups behind the lawsuit.
The lawsuit against LePage‘s administration was expected after the Maine Legislature’s recent session ended without a funding agreement. A LePage spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
LePage, now in his last year in office, previously vetoed Medicaid expansion bills five times, prompting the state’s Obamacare supporters to organize the ballot initiative last year. Advocates are spearheading similar campaigns to get measures on the ballot this year in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah.
Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government covered the entire cost of expanding Medicaid coverage through 2016. States last year became responsible for a fraction of program costs, and they will be on the hook for 10 percent within a few years.
Roughly 80,000 low-income Maine adults are supposed to qualify for Medicaid benefits starting July 2, according to the ballot measure. The LePage administration skipped an early April deadline to formally notify the federal government it would expand Medicaid.
The lawsuit against the Maine Department of Health and Human Services was filed in state Superior Court. Other groups bringing the lawsuit include the Maine Primary Care Association and Maine Consumers for Affordable Health Care.
The office of Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat running for governor this year, declined to comment on whether she would defend the state in the litigation. Earlier this year, Mills proposed using $35 million from a tobacco settlement to cover Medicaid expansion costs through 2019.
If Maine expands, it would become the 32nd state to join the Obamacare program. Medicaid expansion covers adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $16,800 for an individual and $34,600 for a family of four.
Russia-related legal bills
Trump campaign pays Russia-related legal bills for Michael Cohen
By MAGGIE SEVERNS
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has paid legal bills related to the ongoing Russia investigations on behalf of Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, a campaign official said on Monday.
The official said the payments were for legal costs Cohen incurred before the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York began investigating the lawyer for a variety of issues, including a 2016 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“These payments were related strictly to the Russia investigations,” said the campaign official, who declined to be named. An ABC News report first flagged the payments to a law firm representing Cohen on Monday.
So long as the payments pertain to parts of the Russia investigation relating to the 2016 campaign, they are likely legal. Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee also have paid legal fees for Donald Trump Jr. Neither Cohen nor the president's oldest son officially worked for his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s reelection campaign disclosed paying a law firm representing Cohen in the Russia investigation, McDermott Will & Emery, a total of $228,000 for “legal consulting” services in federal election filings. The earliest of the three payments began on Oct. 26 and the most recent payment was in late January, filings show.
Cohen’s attorney, Stephen Ryan, is a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and is representing him in both the Russian investigation and the Southern District of New York probe.
By MAGGIE SEVERNS
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has paid legal bills related to the ongoing Russia investigations on behalf of Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, a campaign official said on Monday.
The official said the payments were for legal costs Cohen incurred before the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York began investigating the lawyer for a variety of issues, including a 2016 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“These payments were related strictly to the Russia investigations,” said the campaign official, who declined to be named. An ABC News report first flagged the payments to a law firm representing Cohen on Monday.
So long as the payments pertain to parts of the Russia investigation relating to the 2016 campaign, they are likely legal. Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee also have paid legal fees for Donald Trump Jr. Neither Cohen nor the president's oldest son officially worked for his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s reelection campaign disclosed paying a law firm representing Cohen in the Russia investigation, McDermott Will & Emery, a total of $228,000 for “legal consulting” services in federal election filings. The earliest of the three payments began on Oct. 26 and the most recent payment was in late January, filings show.
Cohen’s attorney, Stephen Ryan, is a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and is representing him in both the Russian investigation and the Southern District of New York probe.
Warren rushing to Tester's aid
Warren rushing to Tester's aid after Trump attack
The support comes less than two months after Warren trashed Tester for backing a bank deregulation bill.
By ZACHARY WARMBRODT
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is coming to the rescue of Sen. Jon Tester in the face of escalating attacks by President Donald Trump, just weeks after her campaign trashed the politically vulnerable Montana Democrat for supporting a landmark bank deregulation bill.
In a fundraising email Monday, the progressive leader called on her vast base of supporters to donate to Tester's reelection campaign and help him fight back.
Tester "reminds me a lot of my big brothers back in Oklahoma," the Massachusetts Democrat said, describing him as "tough as nails" with a "heart bigger than the state of Montana."
Less than two months ago, Warren's team circulated Tester's name as part of a list of senators who voted for the banking bill, suggesting that he and other moderate Democrats who backed the legislation were on the side of Wall Street rather than the American people.
Now that the president is threatening to tank Tester's reelection — a very real threat in a state that Trump won by 20 points in 2016 — the bank bill is receding in importance.
"Jon and I don’t agree on everything — but I know that Jon makes every decision with the working people of Montana and all across this country in his mind," Warren said in the fundraising plea. "He’s a good and decent man, and right now he needs our help."
Trump began targeting Tester last week after the senator released damning information that helped sink the nomination of White House physician Ronny Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Trump in tweets has called on Tester to resign, and at a rally Saturday the president said, "I know things about Tester that I could say, too, and if I said 'em, he'd never be elected again."
Warren said Monday that Trump was attacking Tester "just for doing his job."
"Jon’s a man of integrity and courage, and I know he’s not going to back down or change his votes because of a television commercial or a tweet," she said. "But he needs our help to build the sort of grassroots campaign that can go town-to-town, person-to-person, to talk about what this election is really about."
For his part, Tester defended his actions on the Jackson nomination. "It's my duty to make sure Montana veterans get what they need and have earned, and I'll never stop fighting for them as their senator," he said over the weekend.
The support comes less than two months after Warren trashed Tester for backing a bank deregulation bill.
By ZACHARY WARMBRODT
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is coming to the rescue of Sen. Jon Tester in the face of escalating attacks by President Donald Trump, just weeks after her campaign trashed the politically vulnerable Montana Democrat for supporting a landmark bank deregulation bill.
In a fundraising email Monday, the progressive leader called on her vast base of supporters to donate to Tester's reelection campaign and help him fight back.
Tester "reminds me a lot of my big brothers back in Oklahoma," the Massachusetts Democrat said, describing him as "tough as nails" with a "heart bigger than the state of Montana."
Less than two months ago, Warren's team circulated Tester's name as part of a list of senators who voted for the banking bill, suggesting that he and other moderate Democrats who backed the legislation were on the side of Wall Street rather than the American people.
Now that the president is threatening to tank Tester's reelection — a very real threat in a state that Trump won by 20 points in 2016 — the bank bill is receding in importance.
"Jon and I don’t agree on everything — but I know that Jon makes every decision with the working people of Montana and all across this country in his mind," Warren said in the fundraising plea. "He’s a good and decent man, and right now he needs our help."
Trump began targeting Tester last week after the senator released damning information that helped sink the nomination of White House physician Ronny Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Trump in tweets has called on Tester to resign, and at a rally Saturday the president said, "I know things about Tester that I could say, too, and if I said 'em, he'd never be elected again."
Warren said Monday that Trump was attacking Tester "just for doing his job."
"Jon’s a man of integrity and courage, and I know he’s not going to back down or change his votes because of a television commercial or a tweet," she said. "But he needs our help to build the sort of grassroots campaign that can go town-to-town, person-to-person, to talk about what this election is really about."
For his part, Tester defended his actions on the Jackson nomination. "It's my duty to make sure Montana veterans get what they need and have earned, and I'll never stop fighting for them as their senator," he said over the weekend.
Apologize?
Trump on Muslim ban talk: 'There's nothing to apologize for'
By LOUIS NELSON
President Donald Trump said Monday that “there’s nothing to apologize for” when asked if he would disavow his past incendiary comments on a Muslim ban in order to salvage his broader travel ban policy.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding a challenge to Trump’s travel ban last week, with the justices seemingly split on the controversial policy’s constitutionality. At one point during the hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts asked if a public disavowal by Trump of his campaign rhetoric demanding a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. would alleviate concerns about the travel ban’s constitutionality, prompting the attorney challenging the ban to say that it would.
The president, addressing reporters at a press conference Monday, disagreed.
“There's no reason to apologize. Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster. They're laughed at all over the world, they're laughed at for their stupidity. And we have to have strong immigration laws,” Trump said, standing alongside Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. “So I think if I apologize, wouldn't make ten cents worth of difference to them. There’s nothing to apologize for.”
The travel ban was among the first policy steps announced by the president and has proven to be among the most difficult to implement. Initial versions of the ban faced immediate legal challenges, were struck down by courts and then replaced by the administration, restarting the cycle as the policy made its way towards last week’s Supreme Court hearing.
While the White House has characterized the travel ban as a national security necessity, opponents of the policy have cast it as the manifestation of Trump’s campaign promise to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. The policy, a revised version of which was released last September, targets eight nations, six of which have majority-Muslim populations.
By LOUIS NELSON
President Donald Trump said Monday that “there’s nothing to apologize for” when asked if he would disavow his past incendiary comments on a Muslim ban in order to salvage his broader travel ban policy.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding a challenge to Trump’s travel ban last week, with the justices seemingly split on the controversial policy’s constitutionality. At one point during the hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts asked if a public disavowal by Trump of his campaign rhetoric demanding a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. would alleviate concerns about the travel ban’s constitutionality, prompting the attorney challenging the ban to say that it would.
The president, addressing reporters at a press conference Monday, disagreed.
“There's no reason to apologize. Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster. They're laughed at all over the world, they're laughed at for their stupidity. And we have to have strong immigration laws,” Trump said, standing alongside Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. “So I think if I apologize, wouldn't make ten cents worth of difference to them. There’s nothing to apologize for.”
The travel ban was among the first policy steps announced by the president and has proven to be among the most difficult to implement. Initial versions of the ban faced immediate legal challenges, were struck down by courts and then replaced by the administration, restarting the cycle as the policy made its way towards last week’s Supreme Court hearing.
While the White House has characterized the travel ban as a national security necessity, opponents of the policy have cast it as the manifestation of Trump’s campaign promise to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. The policy, a revised version of which was released last September, targets eight nations, six of which have majority-Muslim populations.
Launch net neutrality fight
Democrats launch net neutrality fight to energize midterm voters
By JOHN HENDEL
Senate Democrats are preparing to force a floor vote next month on restoring net neutrality rules repealed by President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission, creating a public clash they hope will help them in the midterm elections.
Democrats are planning to take the procedural step May 9 to compel the vote, a Senate Democratic aide told POLITICO. That could set up the vote as soon as the following week.
Senate Democrats have 50 votes lined up — more than enough to force a vote under the Congressional Review Act, but one shy of the 51 required for passage. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is the only Republican to have pledged support for the effort so far.
Even with Senate passage, the Democrats’ proposal would be unlikely to get through the House or earn Trump’s signature. But their plans for a floor fight would still add visibility to an issue that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has suggested will resonate with younger, internet-savvy voters.
“We’re in the homestretch in the fight to save net neutrality,” Schumer said in a statement. “Soon, the American people will know which side their member of Congress is on: fighting for big corporations and ISPs or defending small business owners, entrepreneurs, middle-class families and every-day consumers.”
The congressional resolution is the latest showdown in a decade-long fight over net neutrality, the concept that internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon should treat all internet traffic equally as it passes through their networks. The FCC has repeatedly tried to enact net neutrality rules, only to be thwarted in court or by changes of leadership at the commission.
FCC Republicans led by Chairman Ajit Pai repealed the latest, Obama-era net neutrality order in December, arguing the rules are burdensome and unnecessary to preserving an open internet. Democrats have 60 legislative days to force a vote to reverse the decision following publication of the FCC’s repeal in the Federal Register on Feb. 22.
Democrats and pro-net neutrality groups have been searching for the elusive 51st vote for weeks, putting a special focus on Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who has said he’s undecided on the issue.
“We’re only one vote away from securing a victory in the Senate,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who introduced the resolution to undo the FCC repeal, told reporters Thursday. “Momentum continues to build in every corner of the country.”
Democrats are planning another net neutrality "day of action” to rally support on May 9, the Senate aide said.
By JOHN HENDEL
Senate Democrats are preparing to force a floor vote next month on restoring net neutrality rules repealed by President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission, creating a public clash they hope will help them in the midterm elections.
Democrats are planning to take the procedural step May 9 to compel the vote, a Senate Democratic aide told POLITICO. That could set up the vote as soon as the following week.
Senate Democrats have 50 votes lined up — more than enough to force a vote under the Congressional Review Act, but one shy of the 51 required for passage. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is the only Republican to have pledged support for the effort so far.
Even with Senate passage, the Democrats’ proposal would be unlikely to get through the House or earn Trump’s signature. But their plans for a floor fight would still add visibility to an issue that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has suggested will resonate with younger, internet-savvy voters.
“We’re in the homestretch in the fight to save net neutrality,” Schumer said in a statement. “Soon, the American people will know which side their member of Congress is on: fighting for big corporations and ISPs or defending small business owners, entrepreneurs, middle-class families and every-day consumers.”
The congressional resolution is the latest showdown in a decade-long fight over net neutrality, the concept that internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon should treat all internet traffic equally as it passes through their networks. The FCC has repeatedly tried to enact net neutrality rules, only to be thwarted in court or by changes of leadership at the commission.
FCC Republicans led by Chairman Ajit Pai repealed the latest, Obama-era net neutrality order in December, arguing the rules are burdensome and unnecessary to preserving an open internet. Democrats have 60 legislative days to force a vote to reverse the decision following publication of the FCC’s repeal in the Federal Register on Feb. 22.
Democrats and pro-net neutrality groups have been searching for the elusive 51st vote for weeks, putting a special focus on Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who has said he’s undecided on the issue.
“We’re only one vote away from securing a victory in the Senate,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who introduced the resolution to undo the FCC repeal, told reporters Thursday. “Momentum continues to build in every corner of the country.”
Democrats are planning another net neutrality "day of action” to rally support on May 9, the Senate aide said.
The never ending Stormy Story.....
Stormy Daniels files defamation lawsuit against Trump
By Javier De Diego
Stormy Daniels is suing President Donald Trump over his comments dismissing a composite sketch of a man who the porn star says threatened her over her alleged affair with Trump more than a decade ago.
Earlier this month, Trump called the sketch "a total con job."
"By calling the incident a 'con job,' Mr. Trump's statement would be understood to state that Ms. Clifford was fabricating the crime and the existence of the assailant, both of which are prohibited under New York law, as well as the law of numerous other states," Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, wrote in the lawsuit.
"It was apparent that Mr. Trump meant to convey that Ms. Clifford is a liar, someone who should not be trusted, that her claims about the threatening encounter are false, and that she was falsely accusing the individual depicted in the sketch of committing a crime, where no crime had been committed. ... Mr. Trump made his statement either knowing it was false, had serious doubts about the truth of his statement, or made the statement with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity."
The suit is separate from another lawsuit in which Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, over the legality of a 2016 hush agreement in which she was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair between her and Trump. The President, who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, has denied any sexual encounter between the two. Daniels also has sued Cohen for defamation.
A California judge last week halted Daniels' lawsuit against Cohen for 90 days while a criminal investigation of the President's lawyer moves forward in New York.
Avenatti has said they plan to file an appeal of that stay.
By Javier De Diego
Stormy Daniels is suing President Donald Trump over his comments dismissing a composite sketch of a man who the porn star says threatened her over her alleged affair with Trump more than a decade ago.
Earlier this month, Trump called the sketch "a total con job."
"By calling the incident a 'con job,' Mr. Trump's statement would be understood to state that Ms. Clifford was fabricating the crime and the existence of the assailant, both of which are prohibited under New York law, as well as the law of numerous other states," Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, wrote in the lawsuit.
"It was apparent that Mr. Trump meant to convey that Ms. Clifford is a liar, someone who should not be trusted, that her claims about the threatening encounter are false, and that she was falsely accusing the individual depicted in the sketch of committing a crime, where no crime had been committed. ... Mr. Trump made his statement either knowing it was false, had serious doubts about the truth of his statement, or made the statement with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity."
The suit is separate from another lawsuit in which Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, over the legality of a 2016 hush agreement in which she was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair between her and Trump. The President, who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, has denied any sexual encounter between the two. Daniels also has sued Cohen for defamation.
A California judge last week halted Daniels' lawsuit against Cohen for 90 days while a criminal investigation of the President's lawyer moves forward in New York.
Avenatti has said they plan to file an appeal of that stay.
Blow up the Iran deal
Trump has absolutely no reason to blow up the Iran deal
By John Kirby
No need to argue over the Iran nuclear deal anymore.
In a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the most credible, measured and thoughtful member of the President's national security team said he believes the deal struck by President Obama to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons is in our best interest.
That's James Mattis, by the way, the secretary of defense.
In case you missed it, here's the exchange:
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine: "Do you believe it is in our national security interest at the present time to remain in the JCPOA? That is a yes or no question."
Mattis: "Yes, senator, I do."
JCPOA stands for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The man responsible for ensuring our military's readiness to defend the country just made clear that he believes one way to accomplish the goal is to keep the Iran deal in place.
He's joined in that assessment by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who likewise told the panel that Iran was not in breach of the deal and that it has "delayed the development of a nuclear capability by Iran."
Not to quibble, but the deal binds Iran to a permanent commitment never to pursue nuclear weapons. It's true that certain restrictions begin to ease after a period of time. But the inspection regime lasts forever. If Iran ever tried to cheat, we'd know about it and all the nuclear-related sanctions that were lifted could be snapped right back in place.
Last week, Dunford also told senators he worried about the impact to our credibility if the United States precipitously pulled out of the deal. In what could have been a nod to North Korea, he said, "It makes sense to me that our holding up agreements that we have signed, unless there is a material breach, would have an impact on others' willingness to sign agreements."
The chairman was echoing sentiments expressed last month by the commander of US Strategic Command, Gen. John Hyten, who told an audience at the Hudson Institute that when the United States of America signs an agreement, "it's our job to live up to the terms of that agreement."
It's hard to see how in the wake of all this -- from his top military leaders, no less -- President Trump could pull out of the deal, much less refuse to certify next week that Iran remains in compliance, right?
Not so fast.
We now see reporting that suggests Mr. Trump will try to split the difference with some sort of arrangement whereby he refuses to certify to Congress that Iran remains in compliance and then kick it over to lawmakers to determine whether or not to reimpose sanctions.
That's basically a "bake-your-cake-and-eat-it-too" scenario that will no doubt make the President feel good but stop well short of terminating the actual deal.
He no doubt believes he must do something. But that something should be nothing.
The International Atomic Energy Association, which is the international body responsible under the terms of the deal for certifying Iranian compliance, has thus far been able to do so with each quarterly report.
Assuming it will do so again in the near future, Mr. Trump's decision to decertify Iran on his own would fly in the face of the IAEA's considered, scientific and professional assessment - not that he has shown much care in the past for the views of other international bodies. As we've seen, it would also contradict the opinions of his own generals.
But, there's a political base to please and a predecessor's legacy to tear down and so much blustery rhetoric to live up to. So soon, perhaps even today, we will learn what the administration has in mind.
Whatever that is, one must hope Mr. Trump also bears in mind these things:
1) No problem in the Middle East gets easier with a nuclear-armed Iran. The deal is doing exactly what it was designed to do. There are plenty of ways to address Iran's other "misconduct," as Secretary Mattis calls it.
2) The hardliners in Tehran would love to see nothing more than the deal ripped up. So, finding a way to damage it hands the mullahs a nice little victory.
3) It was nuclear-related sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table. If we snap them back unilaterally and without cause, we, the United States -- not Iran -- would be in noncompliance and on the outside of international convention.
And we -- not Iran -- would be the ones sending a clear message that we are neither a credible nor trustworthy negotiating partner.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook
As Gen. Hyten put it: "Everybody's watching us wherever we are, and everything we do down to the smallest tactical level in today's world delivers a strategic message to not just the United States and our citizens, but our allies and our adversaries."
It's time to send the right strategic message. It's time to stop arguing over the Iran deal. It's time for Mr. Trump to listen to his generals.
By John Kirby
No need to argue over the Iran nuclear deal anymore.
In a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the most credible, measured and thoughtful member of the President's national security team said he believes the deal struck by President Obama to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons is in our best interest.
That's James Mattis, by the way, the secretary of defense.
In case you missed it, here's the exchange:
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine: "Do you believe it is in our national security interest at the present time to remain in the JCPOA? That is a yes or no question."
Mattis: "Yes, senator, I do."
JCPOA stands for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The man responsible for ensuring our military's readiness to defend the country just made clear that he believes one way to accomplish the goal is to keep the Iran deal in place.
He's joined in that assessment by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who likewise told the panel that Iran was not in breach of the deal and that it has "delayed the development of a nuclear capability by Iran."
Not to quibble, but the deal binds Iran to a permanent commitment never to pursue nuclear weapons. It's true that certain restrictions begin to ease after a period of time. But the inspection regime lasts forever. If Iran ever tried to cheat, we'd know about it and all the nuclear-related sanctions that were lifted could be snapped right back in place.
Last week, Dunford also told senators he worried about the impact to our credibility if the United States precipitously pulled out of the deal. In what could have been a nod to North Korea, he said, "It makes sense to me that our holding up agreements that we have signed, unless there is a material breach, would have an impact on others' willingness to sign agreements."
The chairman was echoing sentiments expressed last month by the commander of US Strategic Command, Gen. John Hyten, who told an audience at the Hudson Institute that when the United States of America signs an agreement, "it's our job to live up to the terms of that agreement."
It's hard to see how in the wake of all this -- from his top military leaders, no less -- President Trump could pull out of the deal, much less refuse to certify next week that Iran remains in compliance, right?
Not so fast.
We now see reporting that suggests Mr. Trump will try to split the difference with some sort of arrangement whereby he refuses to certify to Congress that Iran remains in compliance and then kick it over to lawmakers to determine whether or not to reimpose sanctions.
That's basically a "bake-your-cake-and-eat-it-too" scenario that will no doubt make the President feel good but stop well short of terminating the actual deal.
He no doubt believes he must do something. But that something should be nothing.
The International Atomic Energy Association, which is the international body responsible under the terms of the deal for certifying Iranian compliance, has thus far been able to do so with each quarterly report.
Assuming it will do so again in the near future, Mr. Trump's decision to decertify Iran on his own would fly in the face of the IAEA's considered, scientific and professional assessment - not that he has shown much care in the past for the views of other international bodies. As we've seen, it would also contradict the opinions of his own generals.
But, there's a political base to please and a predecessor's legacy to tear down and so much blustery rhetoric to live up to. So soon, perhaps even today, we will learn what the administration has in mind.
Whatever that is, one must hope Mr. Trump also bears in mind these things:
1) No problem in the Middle East gets easier with a nuclear-armed Iran. The deal is doing exactly what it was designed to do. There are plenty of ways to address Iran's other "misconduct," as Secretary Mattis calls it.
2) The hardliners in Tehran would love to see nothing more than the deal ripped up. So, finding a way to damage it hands the mullahs a nice little victory.
3) It was nuclear-related sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table. If we snap them back unilaterally and without cause, we, the United States -- not Iran -- would be in noncompliance and on the outside of international convention.
And we -- not Iran -- would be the ones sending a clear message that we are neither a credible nor trustworthy negotiating partner.
Join us on Twitter and Facebook
As Gen. Hyten put it: "Everybody's watching us wherever we are, and everything we do down to the smallest tactical level in today's world delivers a strategic message to not just the United States and our citizens, but our allies and our adversaries."
It's time to send the right strategic message. It's time to stop arguing over the Iran deal. It's time for Mr. Trump to listen to his generals.
Iranian nuclear program
Netanyahu says he has proof of secret Iranian nuclear program
By Eliott C. McLaughlin
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has evidence Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound.
"Tonight, I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied -- big time," Netanyahu said late Monday during an address from the Israel Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv.
Calling it one of the greatest achievements in the history of Israeli intelligence, Netayahu displayed what he said were files that demonstrate Iran planned to continue pursuing a nuclear weapons program despite the deal it brokered with the international community.
The files were kept in massive vaults inside an "innocent-looking compound" in Shorabad District, the Prime Minister said. The 100,000 files contain, among other things, blueprints, charts, photos, videos and presentations dealing with nuclear weaponry.
"Iran planned at the highest level to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel," he said.
Before Netanyahu's address, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, "The boy who can't stop crying wolf is at it again. Undeterred by cartoon fiasco at UNGA. You can only fool some of the people so many times."
Zarif was referring to a cartoon drawing of a bomb that Netanyahu referred to during a September 2012 appearance before the UN General Assembly about Iran's nuclear program.
Netanyahu said during his address that Zarif -- along with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, and President Hassan Rouhani -- had all previously lied when they said Iran had no interest in nuclear weapons.
As part of the 2015 pact -- agreed to by former US President Barack Obama, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany -- Iran agreed to reduce its uranium stockpile in return for international sanctions being lifted.
US President Donald Trump has until May 12 to decide whether to continue waiving sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the Iran deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
By Eliott C. McLaughlin
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has evidence Iranian officials were "brazenly lying" when they said Iran wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons and that the Islamic republic is keeping an "atomic archive" at a secret compound.
"Tonight, I'm here to tell you one thing: Iran lied -- big time," Netanyahu said late Monday during an address from the Israel Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv.
Calling it one of the greatest achievements in the history of Israeli intelligence, Netayahu displayed what he said were files that demonstrate Iran planned to continue pursuing a nuclear weapons program despite the deal it brokered with the international community.
The files were kept in massive vaults inside an "innocent-looking compound" in Shorabad District, the Prime Minister said. The 100,000 files contain, among other things, blueprints, charts, photos, videos and presentations dealing with nuclear weaponry.
"Iran planned at the highest level to continue work related to nuclear weapons under different guises and using the same personnel," he said.
Before Netanyahu's address, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, "The boy who can't stop crying wolf is at it again. Undeterred by cartoon fiasco at UNGA. You can only fool some of the people so many times."
Zarif was referring to a cartoon drawing of a bomb that Netanyahu referred to during a September 2012 appearance before the UN General Assembly about Iran's nuclear program.
Netanyahu said during his address that Zarif -- along with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, and President Hassan Rouhani -- had all previously lied when they said Iran had no interest in nuclear weapons.
As part of the 2015 pact -- agreed to by former US President Barack Obama, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany -- Iran agreed to reduce its uranium stockpile in return for international sanctions being lifted.
US President Donald Trump has until May 12 to decide whether to continue waiving sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the Iran deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
What Michelle Wolf said....
Wonder what Michelle Wolf said to make everyone so mad? Read it here.
“What would I do without Megyn Kelly? Probably be more proud of women.”
By Emily Stewart
Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday has stirred up an unexpected amount of controversy. The former Daily Show correspondent and host of the upcoming Netflix show The Break took a number of cutting swipes at figures such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, made fun of President Donald Trump’s wealth (or potential lack thereof), and raised eyebrows with her raunchy language — even when using words the president has already said.
“After Trump got elected, women started knitting those pussy hats. When I first saw them, I was like, ‘That’s a pussy?’ I guess mine just has a lot more yarn on it,” Wolf said a few minutes into her set. “You should have done more research before you got me to do this.”
A full transcript of Wolf’s speech is below.
All right, this is long. This has been long. Yeah. Good evening. Good evening.
Here we are the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, “Let’s get this over with.” Yep, kiddos this is who you’re getting tonight.
I’m going to skip a lot of the normal pleasantries. We’re at a Hilton, it’s not nice. This is on C-SPAN, no one watches that. Trump is president, it’s not ideal. White House Correspondents’ Association, thank you for having me, the monkfish was fine. Just a reminder to everyone, I’m here to make jokes, I have no agenda, I’m not trying to get anything accomplished. So everyone that’s here from Congress, you should feel right at home.
Now, before we get too far, a little bit about me. A lot of you might not know who I am. I am 32 years old, which is an odd age — 10 years too young to host this event, and 20 years too old for Roy Moore. I know, he almost got elected, yeah. It was fun. It was fun.
Honestly, I never really thought I’d be a comedian, but I did take an aptitude test in 7th grade, and this is 100% true. I took an aptitude test in 7th grade and it said my best profession was a clown or a mime. Well, at first it said clown, and then it heard my voice and was like, “Or maybe mime. Think about mime.”
And I know as much as some of you might want me to, it’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up — unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000. Michael, you can find me on Venmo under my porn star name, Reince Priebus. Reince just gave a thumbs up.
Okay. Now, people are saying America is more divided than ever, but I think no matter what you support politically, we can all agree this is a great time for craft stores. Because of all the protests, poster board has been flying off the shelves faster than Robert Mueller can say, “You’ve been subpoenaed.”
Thanks to Trump, pink yarn sales are through the roof. After Trump got elected, women started knitting those pussy hats. When I first saw them I was like, “That’s a pussy?” I guess mine just has a lot more yarn on it. Yeah. You should have done more research before you got me to do this.
Now, there is a lot to cover tonight, there’s a lot to go over. I can’t get to everything. I know there’s a lot of people that want me to talk about Russia and Putin and collusion, but I’m not going to do that because there’s also a lot of liberal media here and I’ve never really wanted to know what any of you look like whether you orgasm. Except for you Jake Tapper. I bet it’s something like this. Okay, that’s all the time we have.
It is kind of crazy that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn’t even in contact with Michigan. It’s a direct flight; it’s so close.
Of course, Trump isn’t here, if you haven’t noticed, he’s not here. And I know, I know, I would drag him here myself, but it turns out the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab. He said it first, yeah he did. You remember? Good.
Now, I know people really want me to go after Trump tonight, but I think we should give the president credit when he deserves it. Like, he pulled out of the Paris agreement, and I think he should get credit for that because he said he was going to pull out and then he did, and that’s a refreshing quality in a man. Most men are like, “I forgot. I’ll get you next time.” Oh, there’s going to be a next time? People say romance is dead.
People call Trump names all the time, and look, I could call Trump a racist, or a misogynist, or xenophobic, or unstable, or incompetent, or impotent, but he’s heard all of those and he doesn’t care. So tonight, I’m going to try to make fun of the president in a new way, in a way I think will really get him.
Mr. President, I don’t think you’re very rich. I think you might be rich in Idaho but in New York you’re doing fine. Trump is the only person that still watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaires? and thinks, “Me!” Although I’m not sure you’d get very far. He’d get to like the third question and be like, “I have to phone a Fox & Friend.”
I’m going to try a fun new thing, okay? I’m going to say, “Trump is so broke,” and you guys go, “How broke is he?” All right.
Trump is so broke he has to fly failed business class.
Trump is so broke he looked for foreign oil in Don Jr.’s hair.
Trump is so broke Southwest used him as one of their engines. I know, it’s so soon. It’s so soon for that joke. Why did she tell it? It’s so soon.
Trump is so broke he had to borrow money from the Russians and now he’s compromised and susceptible to blackmail and possibly responsible for the collapse of the Republic. Yay, it’s a fun game!
Trump is a racist though. He loves white nationalists, which is a weird term for a Nazi. Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling a pedophile a kid friend, or Harvey Weinstein a ladies’ man — which isn’t really fair, he also likes plants.
Trump’s also an ideas guy, he’s got loads of ideas, you’ve got to love him for that. He wants to give teachers guns, and I support that because then they can sell them for things they need, like supplies. That’s a lot of protractors.
A lot of people want Trump to be impeached. I do not, because just when you think Trump is awful, you remember Mike Pence. Mike Pence is what happens when Anderson Cooper isn’t gay. Mike Pence is the kind of guy that brushes his teeth and then drinks orange juice and thinks, “Mmm.”
Mike Pence is very anti-choice. He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you’ve got to get that baby out of there.
And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want. I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, you know, unless it’s the one you got from your secret mistress. It’s fun how values can waver, but good for you.
Mike Pence is a weirdo though, he’s a weird little guy. He won’t meet with other women without his wife present. When people first heard that, they were like, “That’s crazy.” But now in this current climate they’re like, “That’s a good witness.”
Which, of course, brings me to the #MeToo movement. It’s probably the reason I’m here. They were like, “A woman’s probably not going to jerk off in front of anyone, right?” And to that I say, don’t count your chickens. There’s a lot of parties.
Now, I worked in a lot of male-dominated fields. Before comedy, I worked at a tech company, and before that, I worked on Wall Street, and honestly, I’ve never been sexually harassed. That being said, I did work at Bear Stearns in 2008, so although I haven’t been sexually harassed, I’ve definitely been fucked. That whole company went down on me without my consent. And no men got in trouble for that one, either.
Things are changing; men are being held accountable. Al Franken was ousted, that one really hurt liberals. I believe it was the great Ted Kennedy who said, “Wow, that’s crazy, I murdered a woman.” Chappaquiddick, in theaters now.
I did have a lot of jokes about Cabinet members, but I had to scrap all of those because everyone has been fired. You guys are going through Cabinet members quicker than Starbucks throws out black people. No, don’t worry they’re having an afternoon, that’ll solve it. We just needed an afternoon.
Mitch McConnell isn’t here tonight, he had a prior engagement, he’s finally getting his neck circumcised. Mazel.
Paul Ryan also couldn’t make it. Of course, he’s already been circumcised. Unfortunately, while they were down there, they also took his balls. Yeah, bye Paul. Great acting, though, in that video.
Republicans are easy to make fun of, you know, it’s like shooting fish in a Chris Christie. But I also want to make fun of Democrats. Democrats are harder to make fun of because you guys don’t do anything. People think you might flip the House and Senate this November, but you guys always find a way to mess it up. You’re somehow going to lose by 12 points to a guy named Jeff Pedophile Nazi Doctor. Oh, he’s a doctor?
We should definitely talk about the women in the Trump administration.
There’s Kellyanne Conway. Man, she has the perfect last name for what she does. Conway. It’s like if my name was Michelle Jokes Frizzy Hair Small Tits. You guys have got to stop putting Kellyanne on your shows. All she does is lie. If you don’t give her a platform, she has nowhere to lie.
It’s like that old saying, if a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree? I’m not suggesting she gets hurt. Just stuck. Stuck under a tree. Incidentally, a tree falls in the woods is Scott Pruitt’s definition of porn. We all have our kinks.
There’s also, of course, Ivanka. She was supposed to be an advocate for women, but it turns out she’s about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons. She’s done nothing to satisfy women, so I guess, like father, like daughter. Oh, you don’t think he’s good in bed, come on.
She does clean up nice, though. Ivanka cleans up nice. She’s the Diaper Genie of the administration: on the outside, she looks sleek, but the inside, it’s still full of shit.
We are graced with Sarah’s presence tonight. I have to say I’m a little star-struck. I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mike Pence, if you haven’t seen it, you would love it.
Every time Sarah steps up to the podium I get excited, because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get — you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. “It’s shirts and skins, and this time don’t be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta!”
I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.
And I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you know? Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Cousin Huckabee, is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders? Like, what’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know. Aunt Coulter.
We’ve got our friends at CNN here. Welcome, guys, it’s great to have you. You guys love breaking news, and you did it, you broke it. The most useful information on CNN is when Anthony Bourdain tells me where to eat noodles.
Fox News is here. So, you know what that means, ladies? Cover your drinks. Seriously.
People want me to make fun of Sean Hannity tonight, but I cannot do that, this dinner’s for journalists.
We’ve got MSNBC here. MSNBC’s new slogan is, “This is who we are.” Guys, it’s not a good slogan. This is Who We Are is what your mom thinks the sad show on NBC is called. Did you watch This is Who We Are this week? Someone left on a crockpot, and everyone died.
I watch Morning Joe every morning. We now know Mika and Joe are engaged. Congratulation you guys, it’s like when a #MeToo works out.
Rachel Maddow. We cannot forget about Rachel Maddow. She’s the Peter Pan of MSNBC, but instead of never going up, she never gets to the point. Watching Rachel Maddow is like going to Target — you went in for milk but left with shampoo, candles, and the entire history of the Byzantine Empire. I didn’t need this.
And of course, Megyn Kelly. What would I do without Megyn Kelly? Probably be more proud of women. Megyn Kelly got paid $23 million by NBC, then NBC didn’t let her go to the Winter Olympics. She’s so white, cold, and expensive, she might as well be the Winter Olympics.
And by the way, Megyn, Santa’s black. The weird old guy going through your chimney was Bill O’Reilly. Might want to put a flue on it or something.
There’s a lot of print media here, there’s a ton of you guys, but I’m not going to go after print media tonight because it’s illegal to attack an endangered species. Buy newspapers.
There’s a ton of news right now, a lot is going on, and we have all these 24-hour news networks, and we could be covering everything. Instead, we’re covering three topics. Every hour is Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel full of people that remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving. Milk comes from nuts now all because of the gays.
You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.
Trump is so broke he grabs pussies because he thinks there might be loose change in them. Like an immigrant who was brought here by his parents and didn’t do anything wrong, I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. Good night.
Flint still doesn’t have clean water.
“What would I do without Megyn Kelly? Probably be more proud of women.”
By Emily Stewart
Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday has stirred up an unexpected amount of controversy. The former Daily Show correspondent and host of the upcoming Netflix show The Break took a number of cutting swipes at figures such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, made fun of President Donald Trump’s wealth (or potential lack thereof), and raised eyebrows with her raunchy language — even when using words the president has already said.
“After Trump got elected, women started knitting those pussy hats. When I first saw them, I was like, ‘That’s a pussy?’ I guess mine just has a lot more yarn on it,” Wolf said a few minutes into her set. “You should have done more research before you got me to do this.”
A full transcript of Wolf’s speech is below.
All right, this is long. This has been long. Yeah. Good evening. Good evening.
Here we are the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, “Let’s get this over with.” Yep, kiddos this is who you’re getting tonight.
I’m going to skip a lot of the normal pleasantries. We’re at a Hilton, it’s not nice. This is on C-SPAN, no one watches that. Trump is president, it’s not ideal. White House Correspondents’ Association, thank you for having me, the monkfish was fine. Just a reminder to everyone, I’m here to make jokes, I have no agenda, I’m not trying to get anything accomplished. So everyone that’s here from Congress, you should feel right at home.
Now, before we get too far, a little bit about me. A lot of you might not know who I am. I am 32 years old, which is an odd age — 10 years too young to host this event, and 20 years too old for Roy Moore. I know, he almost got elected, yeah. It was fun. It was fun.
Honestly, I never really thought I’d be a comedian, but I did take an aptitude test in 7th grade, and this is 100% true. I took an aptitude test in 7th grade and it said my best profession was a clown or a mime. Well, at first it said clown, and then it heard my voice and was like, “Or maybe mime. Think about mime.”
And I know as much as some of you might want me to, it’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up — unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000. Michael, you can find me on Venmo under my porn star name, Reince Priebus. Reince just gave a thumbs up.
Okay. Now, people are saying America is more divided than ever, but I think no matter what you support politically, we can all agree this is a great time for craft stores. Because of all the protests, poster board has been flying off the shelves faster than Robert Mueller can say, “You’ve been subpoenaed.”
Thanks to Trump, pink yarn sales are through the roof. After Trump got elected, women started knitting those pussy hats. When I first saw them I was like, “That’s a pussy?” I guess mine just has a lot more yarn on it. Yeah. You should have done more research before you got me to do this.
Now, there is a lot to cover tonight, there’s a lot to go over. I can’t get to everything. I know there’s a lot of people that want me to talk about Russia and Putin and collusion, but I’m not going to do that because there’s also a lot of liberal media here and I’ve never really wanted to know what any of you look like whether you orgasm. Except for you Jake Tapper. I bet it’s something like this. Okay, that’s all the time we have.
It is kind of crazy that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn’t even in contact with Michigan. It’s a direct flight; it’s so close.
Of course, Trump isn’t here, if you haven’t noticed, he’s not here. And I know, I know, I would drag him here myself, but it turns out the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab. He said it first, yeah he did. You remember? Good.
Now, I know people really want me to go after Trump tonight, but I think we should give the president credit when he deserves it. Like, he pulled out of the Paris agreement, and I think he should get credit for that because he said he was going to pull out and then he did, and that’s a refreshing quality in a man. Most men are like, “I forgot. I’ll get you next time.” Oh, there’s going to be a next time? People say romance is dead.
People call Trump names all the time, and look, I could call Trump a racist, or a misogynist, or xenophobic, or unstable, or incompetent, or impotent, but he’s heard all of those and he doesn’t care. So tonight, I’m going to try to make fun of the president in a new way, in a way I think will really get him.
Mr. President, I don’t think you’re very rich. I think you might be rich in Idaho but in New York you’re doing fine. Trump is the only person that still watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaires? and thinks, “Me!” Although I’m not sure you’d get very far. He’d get to like the third question and be like, “I have to phone a Fox & Friend.”
I’m going to try a fun new thing, okay? I’m going to say, “Trump is so broke,” and you guys go, “How broke is he?” All right.
Trump is so broke he has to fly failed business class.
Trump is so broke he looked for foreign oil in Don Jr.’s hair.
Trump is so broke Southwest used him as one of their engines. I know, it’s so soon. It’s so soon for that joke. Why did she tell it? It’s so soon.
Trump is so broke he had to borrow money from the Russians and now he’s compromised and susceptible to blackmail and possibly responsible for the collapse of the Republic. Yay, it’s a fun game!
Trump is a racist though. He loves white nationalists, which is a weird term for a Nazi. Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling a pedophile a kid friend, or Harvey Weinstein a ladies’ man — which isn’t really fair, he also likes plants.
Trump’s also an ideas guy, he’s got loads of ideas, you’ve got to love him for that. He wants to give teachers guns, and I support that because then they can sell them for things they need, like supplies. That’s a lot of protractors.
A lot of people want Trump to be impeached. I do not, because just when you think Trump is awful, you remember Mike Pence. Mike Pence is what happens when Anderson Cooper isn’t gay. Mike Pence is the kind of guy that brushes his teeth and then drinks orange juice and thinks, “Mmm.”
Mike Pence is very anti-choice. He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you’ve got to get that baby out of there.
And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want. I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, you know, unless it’s the one you got from your secret mistress. It’s fun how values can waver, but good for you.
Mike Pence is a weirdo though, he’s a weird little guy. He won’t meet with other women without his wife present. When people first heard that, they were like, “That’s crazy.” But now in this current climate they’re like, “That’s a good witness.”
Which, of course, brings me to the #MeToo movement. It’s probably the reason I’m here. They were like, “A woman’s probably not going to jerk off in front of anyone, right?” And to that I say, don’t count your chickens. There’s a lot of parties.
Now, I worked in a lot of male-dominated fields. Before comedy, I worked at a tech company, and before that, I worked on Wall Street, and honestly, I’ve never been sexually harassed. That being said, I did work at Bear Stearns in 2008, so although I haven’t been sexually harassed, I’ve definitely been fucked. That whole company went down on me without my consent. And no men got in trouble for that one, either.
Things are changing; men are being held accountable. Al Franken was ousted, that one really hurt liberals. I believe it was the great Ted Kennedy who said, “Wow, that’s crazy, I murdered a woman.” Chappaquiddick, in theaters now.
I did have a lot of jokes about Cabinet members, but I had to scrap all of those because everyone has been fired. You guys are going through Cabinet members quicker than Starbucks throws out black people. No, don’t worry they’re having an afternoon, that’ll solve it. We just needed an afternoon.
Mitch McConnell isn’t here tonight, he had a prior engagement, he’s finally getting his neck circumcised. Mazel.
Paul Ryan also couldn’t make it. Of course, he’s already been circumcised. Unfortunately, while they were down there, they also took his balls. Yeah, bye Paul. Great acting, though, in that video.
Republicans are easy to make fun of, you know, it’s like shooting fish in a Chris Christie. But I also want to make fun of Democrats. Democrats are harder to make fun of because you guys don’t do anything. People think you might flip the House and Senate this November, but you guys always find a way to mess it up. You’re somehow going to lose by 12 points to a guy named Jeff Pedophile Nazi Doctor. Oh, he’s a doctor?
We should definitely talk about the women in the Trump administration.
There’s Kellyanne Conway. Man, she has the perfect last name for what she does. Conway. It’s like if my name was Michelle Jokes Frizzy Hair Small Tits. You guys have got to stop putting Kellyanne on your shows. All she does is lie. If you don’t give her a platform, she has nowhere to lie.
It’s like that old saying, if a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree? I’m not suggesting she gets hurt. Just stuck. Stuck under a tree. Incidentally, a tree falls in the woods is Scott Pruitt’s definition of porn. We all have our kinks.
There’s also, of course, Ivanka. She was supposed to be an advocate for women, but it turns out she’s about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons. She’s done nothing to satisfy women, so I guess, like father, like daughter. Oh, you don’t think he’s good in bed, come on.
She does clean up nice, though. Ivanka cleans up nice. She’s the Diaper Genie of the administration: on the outside, she looks sleek, but the inside, it’s still full of shit.
We are graced with Sarah’s presence tonight. I have to say I’m a little star-struck. I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mike Pence, if you haven’t seen it, you would love it.
Every time Sarah steps up to the podium I get excited, because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get — you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. “It’s shirts and skins, and this time don’t be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta!”
I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.
And I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you know? Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Cousin Huckabee, is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders? Like, what’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know. Aunt Coulter.
We’ve got our friends at CNN here. Welcome, guys, it’s great to have you. You guys love breaking news, and you did it, you broke it. The most useful information on CNN is when Anthony Bourdain tells me where to eat noodles.
Fox News is here. So, you know what that means, ladies? Cover your drinks. Seriously.
People want me to make fun of Sean Hannity tonight, but I cannot do that, this dinner’s for journalists.
We’ve got MSNBC here. MSNBC’s new slogan is, “This is who we are.” Guys, it’s not a good slogan. This is Who We Are is what your mom thinks the sad show on NBC is called. Did you watch This is Who We Are this week? Someone left on a crockpot, and everyone died.
I watch Morning Joe every morning. We now know Mika and Joe are engaged. Congratulation you guys, it’s like when a #MeToo works out.
Rachel Maddow. We cannot forget about Rachel Maddow. She’s the Peter Pan of MSNBC, but instead of never going up, she never gets to the point. Watching Rachel Maddow is like going to Target — you went in for milk but left with shampoo, candles, and the entire history of the Byzantine Empire. I didn’t need this.
And of course, Megyn Kelly. What would I do without Megyn Kelly? Probably be more proud of women. Megyn Kelly got paid $23 million by NBC, then NBC didn’t let her go to the Winter Olympics. She’s so white, cold, and expensive, she might as well be the Winter Olympics.
And by the way, Megyn, Santa’s black. The weird old guy going through your chimney was Bill O’Reilly. Might want to put a flue on it or something.
There’s a lot of print media here, there’s a ton of you guys, but I’m not going to go after print media tonight because it’s illegal to attack an endangered species. Buy newspapers.
There’s a ton of news right now, a lot is going on, and we have all these 24-hour news networks, and we could be covering everything. Instead, we’re covering three topics. Every hour is Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel full of people that remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving. Milk comes from nuts now all because of the gays.
You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.
Trump is so broke he grabs pussies because he thinks there might be loose change in them. Like an immigrant who was brought here by his parents and didn’t do anything wrong, I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. Good night.
Flint still doesn’t have clean water.
Jokes are true...
The real reason Michelle Wolf is under attack is because her Sarah Sanders jokes are true
Sarah Huckabee Sanders can dish it, but Republicans can’t take it.
By Laura McGann
Comedian Michelle Wolf headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, shocking the crowd and spinning up indignation among Republicans and even some journalists for accusing press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of ... lying.
“Every time Sarah steps up to the podium,” Wolf started, “I get excited because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get — you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies, or divided into softball teams.”
This isn’t exactly a controversial joke. Huckabee Sanders lies all the time. It’s not spin. It’s not an ideological narrative wrapped around shared facts. She states and defends stacks of untruths — from the motivations of Donald Trump accusers to the state of health care negotiations. Many of her most measurably false claims indict the character of entire groups of people, notably brown people. Mexican men are rapists. Immigrants vote illegally en masse.
Republicans, who’ve never called out Huckabee Sanders for any of her comments, had a lot to say Saturday night. Mike Huckabee, Sarah’s father and former governor of Arkansas, captured the sentiment when he tweeted: “The WHCD was supposed to celebrate the 1st Amendment. Instead they celebrated bullying, vulgarity, and hate.”
Wolf’s routine hit a nerve because it’s true. Huckabee Sanders represents White House policy, which includes smearing people for political gain and selling legislation through blatant falsehoods, like a health care repeal bill that would have cost millions their insurance.
But Washington insiders think standing at a podium and saying all this calmly is professional, and telling a joke about it is cruel. Until we take a hard look at Huckabee Sanders’s own words, though, the joke’s on us.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells a lot of lies
Huckabee Sanders stands poised in front of the White House press corps nearly every day, laying out the White House’s priorities and taking questions. Unlike her predecessor Sean Spicer, she keeps her cool or goes on the offense. She doesn’t backpedal. She doesn’t hide in the bushes. She’s a PR pro.
And in the face of tough questions, she says whatever she needs to get by. She lies. She repeats bizarre claims. She pretends that basic facts just do not exist:
Obamacare
During the health care fight of 2017, the White House spent a considerable amount of time trying to blame Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran for the demise of Obamacare repeal. They said he was hospitalized (he wasn’t). They said he was the deciding vote (he wasn’t). Still, Huckabee Sanders accepted and repeated the claims.
As the fight on the Hill played out, she also kept insisting the White House was “focused on making sure we have a health care system in place that actually works, doesn’t bankrupt the system, and helps protect Americans across the board.” None of the Republican proposals would have increased coverage, and she was never able to provide any kind of detail to support that claim.
Voter fraud
President Trump claims millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election and that if they hadn’t, he would have won the popular vote. This is ... not true. But Huckabee Sanders is willing to repeat it: “We certainly know there were a large number of incidents reported,” she said in the briefing room. (The Washington Post puts the figure around four.)
Mexicans are rapists
After Trump took office, he defended his opening campaign speech line that Mexicans are rapists. He argued that 80 percent of women and girls who made the journey up to the United States from Central America are raped, and that that supports his claim:
Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower, when I opened, everybody said, “Oh, he was so tough.” And I used the word “rape.” And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.
Huckabee Sanders supported Trump’s claim at least twice. In one instance, she said: “There was a story, I believe it was the LA Times, I don’t have it here in front of me, that documented some of that. But this is a well-documented fact, that a lot of the people, I believe up to 80 percent in recent years, of women that are making that journey have been raped in that process. The president is saying that that’s simply unacceptable, and it should be looked at.”
That’s not actually what the LA Times article found. And Trump did not bring it up because he thinks we need to protect Central American migrants. When asked how the argument translates to immigrants coming in the United States, Trump said, “Well, somebody’s doing the raping.”
Trump accusers are the real liars
Huckabee Sanders is prepared to say — and has said — that every single one of the many women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault is a liar. It “was the official White House position that all of these women are lying,” Huckabee Sanders said, “Yeah, we have been clear on that from the beginning, and the president has spoken on it.”
She’s also pretended these women just don’t exist. As Politico reported earlier in her tenure:
“The people of this country, at a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process,” Sanders told reporters Monday, hours after three of Trump’s accusers went on television to revive their claims.
“The American people knew this and voted for the president, and we feel like we’re ready to move forward in that process,” Sanders added.
(Huckabee Sanders offered a similar statement about Roy Moore, a onetime Alabama Senate candidate accused by many women of inappropriate behavior when they were teenagers.)
Lying is Trump administration policy
Wolf took some heat more broadly for a comment she made that was called gendered. “I actually really like Sarah,” Wolf said. “I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
There are different ways to read this line. It’s a joke about ruthlessly doing the job — embracing the tactic fully, even into a fake front. Unfortunately, it does stick out for the nod to makeup. And Huckabee Sanders has been attacked for her looks.
The way to think about Huckabee Sanders is through the lens of her job. That job is to serve as the voice of the Trump administration. She’s survived because she embraces a policy of not telling the truth — one that serves not only a convenient role in a chaotic administration but also an important political purpose. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote of Trump:
He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.
Huckabee Sanders passes that test every day. She’ll stand in front of the nation and say whatever she needs to say. Trump comes first, not us. There’s nothing particularly funny about that.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders can dish it, but Republicans can’t take it.
By Laura McGann
Comedian Michelle Wolf headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, shocking the crowd and spinning up indignation among Republicans and even some journalists for accusing press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of ... lying.
“Every time Sarah steps up to the podium,” Wolf started, “I get excited because I’m not really sure what we’re going to get — you know, a press briefing, a bunch of lies, or divided into softball teams.”
This isn’t exactly a controversial joke. Huckabee Sanders lies all the time. It’s not spin. It’s not an ideological narrative wrapped around shared facts. She states and defends stacks of untruths — from the motivations of Donald Trump accusers to the state of health care negotiations. Many of her most measurably false claims indict the character of entire groups of people, notably brown people. Mexican men are rapists. Immigrants vote illegally en masse.
Republicans, who’ve never called out Huckabee Sanders for any of her comments, had a lot to say Saturday night. Mike Huckabee, Sarah’s father and former governor of Arkansas, captured the sentiment when he tweeted: “The WHCD was supposed to celebrate the 1st Amendment. Instead they celebrated bullying, vulgarity, and hate.”
Wolf’s routine hit a nerve because it’s true. Huckabee Sanders represents White House policy, which includes smearing people for political gain and selling legislation through blatant falsehoods, like a health care repeal bill that would have cost millions their insurance.
But Washington insiders think standing at a podium and saying all this calmly is professional, and telling a joke about it is cruel. Until we take a hard look at Huckabee Sanders’s own words, though, the joke’s on us.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders tells a lot of lies
Huckabee Sanders stands poised in front of the White House press corps nearly every day, laying out the White House’s priorities and taking questions. Unlike her predecessor Sean Spicer, she keeps her cool or goes on the offense. She doesn’t backpedal. She doesn’t hide in the bushes. She’s a PR pro.
And in the face of tough questions, she says whatever she needs to get by. She lies. She repeats bizarre claims. She pretends that basic facts just do not exist:
Obamacare
During the health care fight of 2017, the White House spent a considerable amount of time trying to blame Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran for the demise of Obamacare repeal. They said he was hospitalized (he wasn’t). They said he was the deciding vote (he wasn’t). Still, Huckabee Sanders accepted and repeated the claims.
As the fight on the Hill played out, she also kept insisting the White House was “focused on making sure we have a health care system in place that actually works, doesn’t bankrupt the system, and helps protect Americans across the board.” None of the Republican proposals would have increased coverage, and she was never able to provide any kind of detail to support that claim.
Voter fraud
President Trump claims millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election and that if they hadn’t, he would have won the popular vote. This is ... not true. But Huckabee Sanders is willing to repeat it: “We certainly know there were a large number of incidents reported,” she said in the briefing room. (The Washington Post puts the figure around four.)
Mexicans are rapists
After Trump took office, he defended his opening campaign speech line that Mexicans are rapists. He argued that 80 percent of women and girls who made the journey up to the United States from Central America are raped, and that that supports his claim:
Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower, when I opened, everybody said, “Oh, he was so tough.” And I used the word “rape.” And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.
Huckabee Sanders supported Trump’s claim at least twice. In one instance, she said: “There was a story, I believe it was the LA Times, I don’t have it here in front of me, that documented some of that. But this is a well-documented fact, that a lot of the people, I believe up to 80 percent in recent years, of women that are making that journey have been raped in that process. The president is saying that that’s simply unacceptable, and it should be looked at.”
That’s not actually what the LA Times article found. And Trump did not bring it up because he thinks we need to protect Central American migrants. When asked how the argument translates to immigrants coming in the United States, Trump said, “Well, somebody’s doing the raping.”
Trump accusers are the real liars
Huckabee Sanders is prepared to say — and has said — that every single one of the many women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault is a liar. It “was the official White House position that all of these women are lying,” Huckabee Sanders said, “Yeah, we have been clear on that from the beginning, and the president has spoken on it.”
She’s also pretended these women just don’t exist. As Politico reported earlier in her tenure:
“The people of this country, at a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process,” Sanders told reporters Monday, hours after three of Trump’s accusers went on television to revive their claims.
“The American people knew this and voted for the president, and we feel like we’re ready to move forward in that process,” Sanders added.
(Huckabee Sanders offered a similar statement about Roy Moore, a onetime Alabama Senate candidate accused by many women of inappropriate behavior when they were teenagers.)
Lying is Trump administration policy
Wolf took some heat more broadly for a comment she made that was called gendered. “I actually really like Sarah,” Wolf said. “I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
There are different ways to read this line. It’s a joke about ruthlessly doing the job — embracing the tactic fully, even into a fake front. Unfortunately, it does stick out for the nod to makeup. And Huckabee Sanders has been attacked for her looks.
The way to think about Huckabee Sanders is through the lens of her job. That job is to serve as the voice of the Trump administration. She’s survived because she embraces a policy of not telling the truth — one that serves not only a convenient role in a chaotic administration but also an important political purpose. As my colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote of Trump:
He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.
Huckabee Sanders passes that test every day. She’ll stand in front of the nation and say whatever she needs to say. Trump comes first, not us. There’s nothing particularly funny about that.
May 5 Launch
NASA Sets Sights on May 5 Launch of InSight Mars Mission
NASA’s next mission to Mars, Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), is scheduled to launch Saturday, May 5, on a first-ever mission to study the heart of Mars. Coverage of prelaunch and launch activities begins Thursday, May 3, on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
InSight, the first planetary mission to take off from the West Coast, is targeted to launch at 7:05 a.m. EDT (4:05 a.m. PDT) from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket.
Launching on the same rocket is a separate NASA technology experiment known as Mars Cube One (MarCO). MarCO consists of two mini-spacecraft and will be the first test of CubeSat technology in deep space. They are designed to test new communications and navigation capabilities for future missions and may aid InSight communications.
NASA’s next mission to Mars, Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), is scheduled to launch Saturday, May 5, on a first-ever mission to study the heart of Mars. Coverage of prelaunch and launch activities begins Thursday, May 3, on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
InSight, the first planetary mission to take off from the West Coast, is targeted to launch at 7:05 a.m. EDT (4:05 a.m. PDT) from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket.
Launching on the same rocket is a separate NASA technology experiment known as Mars Cube One (MarCO). MarCO consists of two mini-spacecraft and will be the first test of CubeSat technology in deep space. They are designed to test new communications and navigation capabilities for future missions and may aid InSight communications.
American Automakers Screw Up Yet Again...
In Non-Shocking News, American Automakers Screw Up Yet Again
KEVIN DRUM
Having now griped about the LA Times, here’s the story that kicked off today’s griping. It took a while, but I finally found it online:
The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state’s long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions…. Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty.
Wait. The auto industry is opposed to this because they want more certainty? How hard have they been lobbying the Trump administration to back off?
The auto industry began lobbying Trump to relax fuel economy standards soon after his election. But company officials have been clear that they want a deal with California, not a war with the state. In backroom negotiations, industry officials have urged the administration not to create a situation where California pursues one standard and the federal government pursues another.
Nice work, guys. Trump gets into office promising to raze everything President Obama ever did, so you jump on board. Then you’re dismayed when Trump is uninterested in half measures and instead wants to destroy the Obama fuel economy standards completely and, for good measure, take some revenge on California, his great white whale.
The American auto industry is bound and determined to always pursue the stupidest course of action available to them. They’ve been doing it for decades, all the while wondering why their cars aren’t more popular. This time, they could have finally done something smart. They could have loudly lobbied the Trump administration to leave the fuel economy standards alone. After all, they know perfectly well they can meet the tighter standards, and it would have been both good PR and a sign of confidence that they can compete with overseas manufacturers.
But no. As usual, they’re too dumb to go down that road. Doing something that’s both good for the planet and popular with the American public just never occurred to them.
KEVIN DRUM
Having now griped about the LA Times, here’s the story that kicked off today’s griping. It took a while, but I finally found it online:
The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state’s long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions…. Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty.
Wait. The auto industry is opposed to this because they want more certainty? How hard have they been lobbying the Trump administration to back off?
The auto industry began lobbying Trump to relax fuel economy standards soon after his election. But company officials have been clear that they want a deal with California, not a war with the state. In backroom negotiations, industry officials have urged the administration not to create a situation where California pursues one standard and the federal government pursues another.
Nice work, guys. Trump gets into office promising to raze everything President Obama ever did, so you jump on board. Then you’re dismayed when Trump is uninterested in half measures and instead wants to destroy the Obama fuel economy standards completely and, for good measure, take some revenge on California, his great white whale.
The American auto industry is bound and determined to always pursue the stupidest course of action available to them. They’ve been doing it for decades, all the while wondering why their cars aren’t more popular. This time, they could have finally done something smart. They could have loudly lobbied the Trump administration to leave the fuel economy standards alone. After all, they know perfectly well they can meet the tighter standards, and it would have been both good PR and a sign of confidence that they can compete with overseas manufacturers.
But no. As usual, they’re too dumb to go down that road. Doing something that’s both good for the planet and popular with the American public just never occurred to them.
Personal integrity????
House Republicans on Scott Pruitt: We’re With Him
“I have, high, high, high confidence in his personal integrity.”
REBECCA LEBER
One of the reasons Scott Pruitt has probably survived this long at the Environmental Protection Agency is that he still has key Republican support in Congress. It was clear Thursday that House Republicans were still willing to defend him, when Pruitt appeared before the House Energy and Commerce and the House Appropriations subcommittees.
The hearings followed a pattern. Democrats grilled Pruitt on the ethical problems surrounding his administration—or spent their remaining time with monologues about his actions. Republicans were less interested in getting answers from Pruitt on what subcommittee chair Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) called his “stewardship” of the agency, and spent more time focusing on the “policy” they agreed with. Despite Pruitt’s innumerable and well-documented ethical violations and questionable spending patterns, many Republicans in the hearing used their time to offer support for the embattled EPA head.
“It’s shameful today that this hearing has turned into a personal attack hearing and a shameful attempt to denigrate the work that’s being done at the EPA,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said.
Rep. Gregg Harper, (R-Miss.) complained of the “political bloodsport to destroy anyone who is affiliated with this administration.”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) called Pruitt a “victim” of Washington politics. “If you can’t debate the policies in Washington, you attack the personality. And that’s what’s happening to you.”
“I apologize for the abrasiveness of some of my colleagues who would rather tarnish your reputation than address the problems facing the nation,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said after a heated line of questioning from the other side of the aisle.
And as the Huffington Post pointed out, Rep. David McKinley called the criticism a “classic display of innuendo and McCarthyism.”
“I have, high, high, high confidence in his personal integrity,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Ok), who comes from Pruitt’s home state, added in the second hearing of the day.
In between the hearings, Shimkus told reporters Pruitt’s answers were “a little vague” but maintained that only the White House had the power to decide the EPA administrator’s fate.
“I have, high, high, high confidence in his personal integrity.”
REBECCA LEBER
One of the reasons Scott Pruitt has probably survived this long at the Environmental Protection Agency is that he still has key Republican support in Congress. It was clear Thursday that House Republicans were still willing to defend him, when Pruitt appeared before the House Energy and Commerce and the House Appropriations subcommittees.
The hearings followed a pattern. Democrats grilled Pruitt on the ethical problems surrounding his administration—or spent their remaining time with monologues about his actions. Republicans were less interested in getting answers from Pruitt on what subcommittee chair Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) called his “stewardship” of the agency, and spent more time focusing on the “policy” they agreed with. Despite Pruitt’s innumerable and well-documented ethical violations and questionable spending patterns, many Republicans in the hearing used their time to offer support for the embattled EPA head.
“It’s shameful today that this hearing has turned into a personal attack hearing and a shameful attempt to denigrate the work that’s being done at the EPA,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said.
Rep. Gregg Harper, (R-Miss.) complained of the “political bloodsport to destroy anyone who is affiliated with this administration.”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) called Pruitt a “victim” of Washington politics. “If you can’t debate the policies in Washington, you attack the personality. And that’s what’s happening to you.”
“I apologize for the abrasiveness of some of my colleagues who would rather tarnish your reputation than address the problems facing the nation,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said after a heated line of questioning from the other side of the aisle.
And as the Huffington Post pointed out, Rep. David McKinley called the criticism a “classic display of innuendo and McCarthyism.”
“I have, high, high, high confidence in his personal integrity,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Ok), who comes from Pruitt’s home state, added in the second hearing of the day.
In between the hearings, Shimkus told reporters Pruitt’s answers were “a little vague” but maintained that only the White House had the power to decide the EPA administrator’s fate.
The ’70s....
“Holy Shit. This is Dangerous”: Nixon, a Soviet Bomb Test, and a Top-Secret Climate Study
The ’70s were amazing.
SHARON WEINBERGER
On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the Earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture.
The nuclear bombs, it turned out, weren’t that effective for building canals, though they did create an “atomic lake” in the crater formed by the blast. But the tests had another lasting consequence, all but forgotten until now: They set in motion the first US government research on climate change—a far-reaching project that has continued into this decade.
On the surface, the reaction to the Soviet tests was somewhat muted. Western countries, including the United States, detected the explosions and lodged a protest alleging a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Moscow wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the tests for several years.
But in the national security community in Washington, the blasts sparked panic. When intelligence officials briefed Stephen Lukasik, the director of the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had an immediate reaction: “Holy shit. This is dangerous.”
The Soviet Union, it turns out, had for more than a decade been studying ways to use nuclear weapons to create massive canals to reroute water for irrigation, and the plan involved hundreds of nuclear detonations. “The Soviets wanted to change the direction of some rivers in Russia,” Lukasik, now 87 years old, told me recently in an interview. “They flow north where they didn’t do any good for them and they wanted to turn them around so they would flow south.”
The Pentagon didn’t particularly care which way rivers ran in the Soviet Union, but it cared about how this ambitious act of geoengineering, which would affect waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, could potentially alter the world’s climate. Lukasik decided that DARPA needed to start a climate research program that could come up with ways to model the effects. The name of this climate program, highly classified at the time, was Nile Blue.
At first glance, DARPA might have seemed like an odd place to study climate change. The agency was created in 1958 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, to help the United States get into space. But in those years, DARPA was also deeply involved in nuclear issues. It had created an extensive monitoring system precisely to tip off the Pentagon to secret tests like the Soviet effort in 1971.
That same year, John Perry, a young Air Force officer, got an unexpected question from an official at DARPA (at the time called just ARPA; the D for “defense” was added in 1972). “We need a program manager for this program we have. Would you like to come to Washington?” the DARPA official asked Perry.
“Washington was the not the Midwest or Vietnam, so I said, ‘Sure,’” Perry recalled answering. “I’ll discover later what the hell this thing is.”
For Perry, a meteorologist by training, it wasn’t a hard decision, even if he didn’t know exactly what the job entailed. He soon found himself at DARPA’s headquarters in northern Virginia, where he was put in charge of the mysteriously named Nile Blue. One of the first things he decided to do was get rid of the secrecy. Even if the concerns about Soviet nuclear tests needed to be kept quiet, research on climate modeling could be done in the open. Keeping the program classified, particularly during the Vietnam War, would only hurt DARPA’s ability to work with academic scientists, he argued.
The secrecy “did throw sort of a miasma over the program,” Perry recalled, noting there were rumors that DARPA was involved in weather-altering research. “In fact, I had a visit from a guy from the arms control office in the State Department who came over, armed with top-secret clearances and what-have-you, to find out what nefarious things we were doing. He was very disappointed to find out that there weren’t any.”
Once the program was declassified, the next step was finding scientists to do the necessary studies. Perry found himself in charge of $3 million in funding, a sizable sum in the early 1970s, and his mandate was about to expand.
Soon after starting the research program, he was summoned to the director’s office to meet with Lukasik and Eric Willis, who directed DARPA’s nuclear monitoring program. Willis, who had been a student of Willard Libby, the inventor of radiocarbon dating, was interested in taking a historical look at climate.
Willis “took the position that the climate research program really didn’t make any sense unless you had good information on past climates to be able to do the verification models,” Perry recalled. “He thought there should be an element of past climate research in there.”
Perry knew nothing about this topic, so he nodded and smiled before walking out of the director’s office with a new charge to spend $400,000 on paleoclimate research. “Essentially, I called up a few people and said, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I want to give you a lot of money,’” he said.
The heart of the Nile Blue program was computational modeling. DARPA may not have had experience with meteorology, but it did have plenty of experience with computers. Just two years earlier, the agency’s computer science office had established the first nodes of ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet. DARPA was also in charge of the Illiac IV, one of the world’s first supercomputers.
DARPA’s climate work helped justify the continuation of Illiac IV, whose costs were attracting scrutiny. “They needed to say that its capability was being developed for some customers who could pay for it,” Perry said. “Climate modeling is a very good customer for computer science.” (Critically, DARPA’s funding for modeling rescued the RAND Corporation’s work on climate simulation, which the National Science Foundation was on the verge of canceling.)
The modeling work had its critics. Perry recalled that Ruth Reck, an atmospheric scientist at General Motors, expressed early skepticism of DARPA-funded climate models. “Modeling is just like masturbation,” he recalled Reck telling some of the DARPA-funded scientists at a conference. “If you do it too much, you start thinking it’s the real thing.”
Reck, who confirmed the anecdote in a recent interview with me, said her point was that scientists were confusing their models with reality. “They had a right to feel glad that they were doing it, they were contributing a lot, but it didn’t mean it was the real thing. It just wasn’t,” she said. “That is very much like masturbation: If they do it enough, it becomes the focus of what they want.”
Yet DARPA’s work was critical to sparking those debates. The research program for the first time was drawing together modelers, paleoclimatologists, radiation experts, and meteorologists. The program created an interdisciplinary field, according to Warren Wiscombe, who credits the agency for transforming him from an applied mathematician into a climate scientist in the 1970s. “All of the sciences then that later contributed to climate science were very separate and they had brick walls between them,” he said. “They were what we call stovepiped now.”
As DARPA was building up its Nile Blue program, another government effort that would alter the course of climate research was taking place behind the scenes. In December 1972, George J. Kukla, of Columbia University, and R.K. Matthews, of Brown University, wrote to President Richard Nixon expressing their concerns about “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind.”
Their concern was not global warming but cooling, which they feared could lower food production and increase extreme weather. It was a preliminary result (and one that would later be used by critics of climate change in a simplistic fashion to argue that climate predictions were wrong). The letter caught the attention of Nixon, who ordered an interagency panel to look at the issue. The recommendation, according to William Sprigg, who helped set up the national climate program, was “that the government should have some kind of a program, a plan that would set goals and determine who should be doing what.”
In the end, the Soviets abandoned their grand plan to alter the course of rivers, but by the time DARPA finished its research in 1976, the foundation of climate research was firmly in place: a community of scientists dedicated to the issue, and a political atmosphere conducive to continuing the research. DARPA, whose mandate is for fixed-term research, ended its climate program, but the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up the work, eventually leading to the establishment of the national climate program.
Even scientists like Reck, who were critical of some of the early modeling work, said the research has showed clearly that climate change is real. “I stand with what I told John [Perry] years ago: ‘I really don’t think we know, I think we are far from understanding the climate,’” she told me. “That does not mean we should not curtail everything that we can to slow down the rate of change. I think we have to do that. I think it’s absolutely frivolous not to do that.”
While the debates go on about the accuracy of climate models, the scientific consensus is that climate change is real, and much of the credit for establishing that consensus goes to DARPA—whose role has been largely forgotten, except by the scientists funded by the program and who went on to take leading positions in climate research.
More than 40 years after the end of Nile Blue, former DARPA officials like Perry and Lukasik still get together for a monthly lunch, where they reminisce about their days at the pioneering agency. Lukasik recalls Perry telling him: “You know, Steve, the work started in DARPA and continued by me in the National Science Foundation became the foundation for all of the understanding of global warming.”
The ’70s were amazing.
SHARON WEINBERGER
On March 23, 1971, the Soviet Union set off three Hiroshima-scale nuclear blasts deep underground in a remote region some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, ripping a massive crater in the Earth. The goal was to demonstrate that nuclear explosions could be used to dig a canal connecting two rivers, altering their direction and bringing water to dry areas for agriculture.
The nuclear bombs, it turned out, weren’t that effective for building canals, though they did create an “atomic lake” in the crater formed by the blast. But the tests had another lasting consequence, all but forgotten until now: They set in motion the first US government research on climate change—a far-reaching project that has continued into this decade.
On the surface, the reaction to the Soviet tests was somewhat muted. Western countries, including the United States, detected the explosions and lodged a protest alleging a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Moscow wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the tests for several years.
But in the national security community in Washington, the blasts sparked panic. When intelligence officials briefed Stephen Lukasik, the director of the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he had an immediate reaction: “Holy shit. This is dangerous.”
The Soviet Union, it turns out, had for more than a decade been studying ways to use nuclear weapons to create massive canals to reroute water for irrigation, and the plan involved hundreds of nuclear detonations. “The Soviets wanted to change the direction of some rivers in Russia,” Lukasik, now 87 years old, told me recently in an interview. “They flow north where they didn’t do any good for them and they wanted to turn them around so they would flow south.”
The Pentagon didn’t particularly care which way rivers ran in the Soviet Union, but it cared about how this ambitious act of geoengineering, which would affect waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean, could potentially alter the world’s climate. Lukasik decided that DARPA needed to start a climate research program that could come up with ways to model the effects. The name of this climate program, highly classified at the time, was Nile Blue.
At first glance, DARPA might have seemed like an odd place to study climate change. The agency was created in 1958 as a response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, to help the United States get into space. But in those years, DARPA was also deeply involved in nuclear issues. It had created an extensive monitoring system precisely to tip off the Pentagon to secret tests like the Soviet effort in 1971.
That same year, John Perry, a young Air Force officer, got an unexpected question from an official at DARPA (at the time called just ARPA; the D for “defense” was added in 1972). “We need a program manager for this program we have. Would you like to come to Washington?” the DARPA official asked Perry.
“Washington was the not the Midwest or Vietnam, so I said, ‘Sure,’” Perry recalled answering. “I’ll discover later what the hell this thing is.”
For Perry, a meteorologist by training, it wasn’t a hard decision, even if he didn’t know exactly what the job entailed. He soon found himself at DARPA’s headquarters in northern Virginia, where he was put in charge of the mysteriously named Nile Blue. One of the first things he decided to do was get rid of the secrecy. Even if the concerns about Soviet nuclear tests needed to be kept quiet, research on climate modeling could be done in the open. Keeping the program classified, particularly during the Vietnam War, would only hurt DARPA’s ability to work with academic scientists, he argued.
The secrecy “did throw sort of a miasma over the program,” Perry recalled, noting there were rumors that DARPA was involved in weather-altering research. “In fact, I had a visit from a guy from the arms control office in the State Department who came over, armed with top-secret clearances and what-have-you, to find out what nefarious things we were doing. He was very disappointed to find out that there weren’t any.”
Once the program was declassified, the next step was finding scientists to do the necessary studies. Perry found himself in charge of $3 million in funding, a sizable sum in the early 1970s, and his mandate was about to expand.
Soon after starting the research program, he was summoned to the director’s office to meet with Lukasik and Eric Willis, who directed DARPA’s nuclear monitoring program. Willis, who had been a student of Willard Libby, the inventor of radiocarbon dating, was interested in taking a historical look at climate.
Willis “took the position that the climate research program really didn’t make any sense unless you had good information on past climates to be able to do the verification models,” Perry recalled. “He thought there should be an element of past climate research in there.”
Perry knew nothing about this topic, so he nodded and smiled before walking out of the director’s office with a new charge to spend $400,000 on paleoclimate research. “Essentially, I called up a few people and said, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I want to give you a lot of money,’” he said.
The heart of the Nile Blue program was computational modeling. DARPA may not have had experience with meteorology, but it did have plenty of experience with computers. Just two years earlier, the agency’s computer science office had established the first nodes of ARPANET, the network that would later become the internet. DARPA was also in charge of the Illiac IV, one of the world’s first supercomputers.
DARPA’s climate work helped justify the continuation of Illiac IV, whose costs were attracting scrutiny. “They needed to say that its capability was being developed for some customers who could pay for it,” Perry said. “Climate modeling is a very good customer for computer science.” (Critically, DARPA’s funding for modeling rescued the RAND Corporation’s work on climate simulation, which the National Science Foundation was on the verge of canceling.)
The modeling work had its critics. Perry recalled that Ruth Reck, an atmospheric scientist at General Motors, expressed early skepticism of DARPA-funded climate models. “Modeling is just like masturbation,” he recalled Reck telling some of the DARPA-funded scientists at a conference. “If you do it too much, you start thinking it’s the real thing.”
Reck, who confirmed the anecdote in a recent interview with me, said her point was that scientists were confusing their models with reality. “They had a right to feel glad that they were doing it, they were contributing a lot, but it didn’t mean it was the real thing. It just wasn’t,” she said. “That is very much like masturbation: If they do it enough, it becomes the focus of what they want.”
Yet DARPA’s work was critical to sparking those debates. The research program for the first time was drawing together modelers, paleoclimatologists, radiation experts, and meteorologists. The program created an interdisciplinary field, according to Warren Wiscombe, who credits the agency for transforming him from an applied mathematician into a climate scientist in the 1970s. “All of the sciences then that later contributed to climate science were very separate and they had brick walls between them,” he said. “They were what we call stovepiped now.”
As DARPA was building up its Nile Blue program, another government effort that would alter the course of climate research was taking place behind the scenes. In December 1972, George J. Kukla, of Columbia University, and R.K. Matthews, of Brown University, wrote to President Richard Nixon expressing their concerns about “a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experience by civilized mankind.”
Their concern was not global warming but cooling, which they feared could lower food production and increase extreme weather. It was a preliminary result (and one that would later be used by critics of climate change in a simplistic fashion to argue that climate predictions were wrong). The letter caught the attention of Nixon, who ordered an interagency panel to look at the issue. The recommendation, according to William Sprigg, who helped set up the national climate program, was “that the government should have some kind of a program, a plan that would set goals and determine who should be doing what.”
In the end, the Soviets abandoned their grand plan to alter the course of rivers, but by the time DARPA finished its research in 1976, the foundation of climate research was firmly in place: a community of scientists dedicated to the issue, and a political atmosphere conducive to continuing the research. DARPA, whose mandate is for fixed-term research, ended its climate program, but the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up the work, eventually leading to the establishment of the national climate program.
Even scientists like Reck, who were critical of some of the early modeling work, said the research has showed clearly that climate change is real. “I stand with what I told John [Perry] years ago: ‘I really don’t think we know, I think we are far from understanding the climate,’” she told me. “That does not mean we should not curtail everything that we can to slow down the rate of change. I think we have to do that. I think it’s absolutely frivolous not to do that.”
While the debates go on about the accuracy of climate models, the scientific consensus is that climate change is real, and much of the credit for establishing that consensus goes to DARPA—whose role has been largely forgotten, except by the scientists funded by the program and who went on to take leading positions in climate research.
More than 40 years after the end of Nile Blue, former DARPA officials like Perry and Lukasik still get together for a monthly lunch, where they reminisce about their days at the pioneering agency. Lukasik recalls Perry telling him: “You know, Steve, the work started in DARPA and continued by me in the National Science Foundation became the foundation for all of the understanding of global warming.”
Got to be fucking high.....
Support Is Mounting on the Right for Trump to Win the Nobel Peace Prize
The president’s fans chanted “Nobel, Nobel, Nobel!” on Saturday.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
For the second year in a row, on Saturday night President Donald Trump opted to skip the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and instead hold a rally.
The rally in Washington Township, Michigan came on the heels of Friday’s historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, where the two presidents vowed to work to end the Korean War and denuclearize the region. Trump claimed that the South Korean president gave the US “tremendous credit” for this foreign policy achievement, and as he further discussed the Korean summit, the crowd started a boisterous chant calling for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!”
The chant reflects a mounting movement on the right for Trump to get the prestigious prize. A Friday Fox News op-ed declared that Trump, “not Obama,” deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
“At the conclusion of the day-long summit between North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in Friday, one thing was clear: the meeting would never have taken place if not for President Trump,” the op-ed noted. “For this achievement, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”
On Friday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted a similar sentiment:
Twit:
"When will we see the headline: “Trump Ends the Korean War”? Unlike Obama, he actually deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. "
And she doubled down on the idea during her show later that day, calling Trump “almost a shoo-in” for the prize. One of the guests on her show, Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.) made the same point.
Messer has been trying to gather congressional support to nominate Trump for the prize since March—and on Friday, he issued a statement renewing that effort: “Following this historic announcement, President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Our peace through strength strategy is delivering never before seen results,” he said.
Messer has support for this point in Washington—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Friday that he thinks Trump should win the prize if peace and denuclearization are achieved on the Korean Peninsula. Former Trump admin appointee Carl Higbie—ousted in January over racist, sexist, and anti-gay remarks—weighed in with his support on Twitter.
The president’s fans chanted “Nobel, Nobel, Nobel!” on Saturday.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
For the second year in a row, on Saturday night President Donald Trump opted to skip the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and instead hold a rally.
The rally in Washington Township, Michigan came on the heels of Friday’s historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, where the two presidents vowed to work to end the Korean War and denuclearize the region. Trump claimed that the South Korean president gave the US “tremendous credit” for this foreign policy achievement, and as he further discussed the Korean summit, the crowd started a boisterous chant calling for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!”
The chant reflects a mounting movement on the right for Trump to get the prestigious prize. A Friday Fox News op-ed declared that Trump, “not Obama,” deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
“At the conclusion of the day-long summit between North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in Friday, one thing was clear: the meeting would never have taken place if not for President Trump,” the op-ed noted. “For this achievement, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”
On Friday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted a similar sentiment:
Twit:
"When will we see the headline: “Trump Ends the Korean War”? Unlike Obama, he actually deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. "
And she doubled down on the idea during her show later that day, calling Trump “almost a shoo-in” for the prize. One of the guests on her show, Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.) made the same point.
Messer has been trying to gather congressional support to nominate Trump for the prize since March—and on Friday, he issued a statement renewing that effort: “Following this historic announcement, President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Our peace through strength strategy is delivering never before seen results,” he said.
Messer has support for this point in Washington—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Friday that he thinks Trump should win the prize if peace and denuclearization are achieved on the Korean Peninsula. Former Trump admin appointee Carl Higbie—ousted in January over racist, sexist, and anti-gay remarks—weighed in with his support on Twitter.
WHCD..
Michelle Wolf’s Scathing Comedy Set at the WHCD Provoked Outrage, Glee, and Everything in Between
The Daily Show alumna called Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders an “Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women.”
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
The furor over comedian Michelle Wolf’s divisive comedy set at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shows no signs of abating.
On Saturday night, journalists, celebrities, lawmakers and more gathered in Washington for the annual event, a black-tie affair typically attended by the president. Both times the dinner has been held during his presidency, Donald Trump has bowed out, instead holding campaign-style rallies in battleground states he won in 2016: Last year, Trump went to Pennsylvania, and this year, he rallied in Washington Township, Michigan. At this year’s dinner, Wolf, an alumna of the Daily Show, delivered an at-times raunchy, sometimes funny, and definitely controversial roast of the president, his staff, the political press, and more, provoking an outpouring of both support and outrage from across the internet.
Wolf’s jokes about Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have prompted the most debate. Wolf compared Sanders to “Aunt Lydia,” an anti-feminist villain in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” called her “Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women,” and made a joke that mentioned the press secretary’s eye makeup, evoking criticism that Wolf attacked Sanders’ appearance:
Mika Brzezinski Twit:
"Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah an apology."
Michelle Wolf Twit:
"Why are you guys making this about Sarah’s looks? I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials."
The set caused journalists from a number of networks to call on Wolf to apologize to Sanders:
Andrea Mitchell Twit:
"Apology is owed to @PressSec and others grossly insulted ny Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Assoc dinner which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by @margarettalev - comedian was worst since Imus insulted Clinton’s"
FOX & friends Twit:
"Sarah Sanders deserves an apology from that mean, hateful, vial WHCD ‘comedian’ Michelle Wolf"
Trey Yingst Twit:
"Michelle Wolf attacking @PressSec last night was wrong. Full stop.
Being a comedian is one thing, being a bully is something completely different.
As a member of the WHCA, I join many of my colleagues in saying that Sarah deserves an apology."
Others have taken issue with the outpouring of outrage against Wolf, calling it hypocritical to criticize blows delivered by a comedian when the president himself has regularly made crude comments about women.
Bryan Safi Twit:
"Michelle Wolf is flat out disrespectful. She should have done a killer impresh of a disabled journalist or made hilar period and pussy jokes instead of saying someone has smokey eyes. Appalling."
Ryan Knight Twit:
"Donald Trump:
— “Grab em by the pussy”
— “I moved on her like a bitch”
— “Blood coming out of her wherever”
— “I would bomb the shit out of them”
— “If she wasn’t my daughter I’d date her”
— “African countries are shithole nations”
Republicans:
— “Michelle Wolf was over the top”"
Nathan H. Rubin Twit:
"Michelle Wolf made you uncomfortable.
Good.
Was it mean-spirited?
Maybe.
But look at Trump’s tweets & tell me why a comedian is held to a higher standard than the President?
Also, those Trump supporters who are upset about all of this?
Yeah. Let’s take a look ⬇️ #WHCD"
Katha Pollitt Twit:
"I can't believe people are offended by Michelle Wolf's jokes. The man who insults women, the disabled, people of color, who mainsrreamed wods like pussy and shithole, who lies every day and pays people to lie for him, is PRESIDENT. And the media made that possible."
And of course, the president weighed in on Wolf’s set from his Twitter account on Sunday morning. She “bombed,” he said, and proposed that next year, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld host the dinner.
Orangutan Twit:
"While Washington, Michigan, was a big success, Washington, D.C., just didn’t work. Everyone is talking about the fact that the White House Correspondents Dinner was a very big, boring bust...the so-called comedian really “bombed.” @greggutfeld should host next year! @PeteHegseth"
The Daily Show alumna called Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders an “Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women.”
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
The furor over comedian Michelle Wolf’s divisive comedy set at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shows no signs of abating.
On Saturday night, journalists, celebrities, lawmakers and more gathered in Washington for the annual event, a black-tie affair typically attended by the president. Both times the dinner has been held during his presidency, Donald Trump has bowed out, instead holding campaign-style rallies in battleground states he won in 2016: Last year, Trump went to Pennsylvania, and this year, he rallied in Washington Township, Michigan. At this year’s dinner, Wolf, an alumna of the Daily Show, delivered an at-times raunchy, sometimes funny, and definitely controversial roast of the president, his staff, the political press, and more, provoking an outpouring of both support and outrage from across the internet.
Wolf’s jokes about Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have prompted the most debate. Wolf compared Sanders to “Aunt Lydia,” an anti-feminist villain in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” called her “Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women,” and made a joke that mentioned the press secretary’s eye makeup, evoking criticism that Wolf attacked Sanders’ appearance:
Mika Brzezinski Twit:
"Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah an apology."
Michelle Wolf Twit:
"Why are you guys making this about Sarah’s looks? I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials."
The set caused journalists from a number of networks to call on Wolf to apologize to Sanders:
Andrea Mitchell Twit:
"Apology is owed to @PressSec and others grossly insulted ny Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Assoc dinner which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by @margarettalev - comedian was worst since Imus insulted Clinton’s"
FOX & friends Twit:
"Sarah Sanders deserves an apology from that mean, hateful, vial WHCD ‘comedian’ Michelle Wolf"
Trey Yingst Twit:
"Michelle Wolf attacking @PressSec last night was wrong. Full stop.
Being a comedian is one thing, being a bully is something completely different.
As a member of the WHCA, I join many of my colleagues in saying that Sarah deserves an apology."
Others have taken issue with the outpouring of outrage against Wolf, calling it hypocritical to criticize blows delivered by a comedian when the president himself has regularly made crude comments about women.
Bryan Safi Twit:
"Michelle Wolf is flat out disrespectful. She should have done a killer impresh of a disabled journalist or made hilar period and pussy jokes instead of saying someone has smokey eyes. Appalling."
Ryan Knight Twit:
"Donald Trump:
— “Grab em by the pussy”
— “I moved on her like a bitch”
— “Blood coming out of her wherever”
— “I would bomb the shit out of them”
— “If she wasn’t my daughter I’d date her”
— “African countries are shithole nations”
Republicans:
— “Michelle Wolf was over the top”"
Nathan H. Rubin Twit:
"Michelle Wolf made you uncomfortable.
Good.
Was it mean-spirited?
Maybe.
But look at Trump’s tweets & tell me why a comedian is held to a higher standard than the President?
Also, those Trump supporters who are upset about all of this?
Yeah. Let’s take a look ⬇️ #WHCD"
Katha Pollitt Twit:
"I can't believe people are offended by Michelle Wolf's jokes. The man who insults women, the disabled, people of color, who mainsrreamed wods like pussy and shithole, who lies every day and pays people to lie for him, is PRESIDENT. And the media made that possible."
And of course, the president weighed in on Wolf’s set from his Twitter account on Sunday morning. She “bombed,” he said, and proposed that next year, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld host the dinner.
Orangutan Twit:
"While Washington, Michigan, was a big success, Washington, D.C., just didn’t work. Everyone is talking about the fact that the White House Correspondents Dinner was a very big, boring bust...the so-called comedian really “bombed.” @greggutfeld should host next year! @PeteHegseth"
No One Knows....
No One Knows How Immigration Affects Wages and Jobs. Especially Donald Trump.
He tapped into a long-raging battle among economists to mislead America.
SUSAN FERRISS AND CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY
In April of 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service responded to a confidential request from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The memo was short, but it ignited a fiery outcry about the perceived threat of immigration from Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama.
Sessions seized on charts in the CRS memo featuring a six-decade timeline estimating average incomes—mostly flat after 1970—and another showing a rise in the foreign-born population. Exhorting GOP presidential candidates to take these “forbidden facts” seriously, Sessions called on Republicans to fight to slash immigration—legal or illegal. “It is not caring, but callous, to bring in so many workers that there are not enough jobs for them or those already living here,” Sessions, a Judiciary Committee member, co-wrote in a column published by Roll Call, a congressionally focused news outlet.
Far-right media also sprang into action. The Breitbart website, led by future Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, blasted out posts about the memo, along with TheBlaze and the Washington Examiner. Mark Levin, who hosts the nation’s fourth-most-consumed talk-radio show, read from a Daily Caller story.
“Wages and share of income for the bottom 90 percent of American wage earners declined over the last 40 years, as the foreign-born population increased dramatically,” Levin read with disgust. “Ask the phony economists who play around with the numbers, who try to persuade you that this is a good thing for the economy. These are facts. These are statistics.”
Only they weren’t facts. They were estimates. And they didn’t add up to Levin’s or others’ hyperbolic assumptions.
What Sessions and eager media failed to disclose was that CRS researchers took pains to warn against drawing any conclusions from those two lines of data. “It bears noting,” the researchers cautioned, “that a causal relationship between two variables…cannot be determined through a simple graphic representation.”
But for Sessions, that caveat didn’t seem to matter. The timelines were a simple, powerful tool to support his view that immigration had been suppressing Americans’ wages for decades.
For others, though, Sessions’ use of the memo betrayed a penchant for casting immigration in the most negative light possible—even though the preponderance of economists who research this subject don’t agree with his claims.
“When measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small,” said a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences. “To the extent that negative wage effects are found,” the report explains, “prior immigrants…are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts.” The survey also notes that a significant body of research has found that immigration causes no negative wage impact, even among lesser-skilled natives—with some research also finding wage gains.
“There’s a very big ‘if,’ if it [immigration] does in fact lower wages,” said Francine Blau, a Cornell University economist chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ 14-person panel.
The debate is not just intellectual. Today, Sessions is the attorney general of the United States, and his boss Donald Trump is president, and they’re both crusading to dramatically slash immigration based in part on the jobs and wages argument. Sessions’ spin shows how years of strategic dissemination of cherry-picked and misleading information has helped set the tone for a polarizing, bruising battle over immigration that is splitting the country. And it illuminates how the work of a small group of researchers can become the fulcrum around which policy changes are developed.
Then and Now
For Sessions, the definitive word on immigrants’ effect on the economy comes from academia’s most prominent immigration skeptic, controversial Harvard University economist George Borjas.
Borjas, 67, has been researching immigration for 30 years, and is a frequent contributor to newspaper op-ed pages. Borjas’ family fled the Cuban Revolution and was admitted to the United States in 1962. He’s repeatedly raised eyebrows by suggesting that today’s immigrants don’t have what it takes to succeed in today’s economy. “Many look back at the melting pot in 20th-century America and assume that history will repeat itself. That’s probably wishful thinking,” he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2017.
When Sessions was in the Senate, Borjas become his go-to economist. Sessions often cited figures from Borjas’ research in speeches and writings before and after becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest in 2015.
Speaking on the Senate floor in 2014, Sessions cited figures from an analysis that Borjas had posted in 2013 on the website of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that pushes for cuts to legal immigration.
“Harvard professor George Borjas, who’s perhaps the premiere student of these economic matters, as he’s worked on them for decades, estimates that high immigration flows from 1980 to 2000, based on data, reduced the wages of lower-skilled American workers by 7.4 percent,” Sessions argued. “Professor Borjas estimates that current immigration rates produce a net loss, current rates, of $402 billion [a year] for American workers who compete with foreign labor.”
In January 2015, as the Trump campaign was revving up, Sessions released a booklet that he called an “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority”—featuring Borjas’ $402 billion-a-year wage loss estimate. “We need make no apology in rejecting an extreme policy of sustained mass immigration, which the public repudiates and which the best economic evidence tells us undermines wage growth and economic mobility,” Sessions wrote.
Sessions also presided over hearings he said established that immigration had become a losing proposition for Americans’ wages. Borjas spoke at a March 2016 hearing. Despite the array of contrary research, Sessions opened a June 2016 hearing by saying: “I think very few dispute that the current large flow of labor into the country is suppressing American wages.”
In a pre-election 2016 piece for Politico, Borjas argued that while immigration has been good for the economy overall, “a ‘responsible nationalist’ policy cannot ignore the reality that immigration has made some natives poorer. A policy that keeps them in mind might tax the agricultural and service companies that benefit so much from low-skilled immigrants, and use the money to compensate low-skilled Americans for their losses.”
On his blog, post-election, Borjas expressed confidence in Sessions’ knowledge about immigration and referred to him as a “Southern gentleman.”
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to multiple Center for Public Integrity requests for comment from Sessions. Borjas declined multiple requests for comment as well. He served on the National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed fiscal-impact research on immigration.
Cornell University economist Blau said, “I have a great deal of respect for Professor Borjas as a scholar. But these are one set of estimates. They are not the consensus” reached by the NAS panel. For politicians or others “to emphasize them to the exclusion of other very well-done research,” Blau said, “I don’t think is appropriate.”
Another panelist, Jennifer Hunt, an economist at Rutgers University, said that Borjas’ estimate that natives lost $402 billion in wages a year is a “meaningless number” because it’s a rough estimate that relies on a theoretical model. Borjas’ own paper concedes his “exercise is a short-run simulation…before the economy adjusts in any way to the immigrant influx.”
Seeds of a Campaign
But among those who picked up on the larger Sessions-Borjas arguments was candidate Donald Trump. An unsavory portrait of immigrants has invigorated pro-Trump rallies, before and after his election.
Last July, in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump disparaged “chain,” or family immigration as a “low-skill system, just a terrible system where anybody comes in”—an exaggeration. Trump wants Congress to eliminate new Americans’ ability to sponsor parents, siblings and adult children—more than 20 percent of all visas—confining family sponsorship only to spouses and minor children.
“Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers,” Trump asserted in his 2016 Republican nomination acceptance speech—a speech that Borjas, in that 2016 piece for Politico, claimed was influenced by his work.
This controversial argument that immigration has suppressed wages for natives has helped Trump justify his vows to force Congress to enact what could be the most restrictive legal immigration policies since the 1920s. The posture reflects Sessions’ influence, and that of a former Sessions aide, Stephen Miller, now a senior Trump adviser.
Last August, Miller added salt to wounds Trump had opened in immigrant communities when he said at a press conference that existing legal immigration “has massively de-skilled the migrant flow in to America” and “exacerbated wealth inequality in this country is a pretty significant way.”
Opposing Views
Lost in the rhetoric is a sharply contrasting narrative laid out by other respected economists, most prominent among them David Card of the University of California at Berkeley. Card, 62, himself an immigrant from Canada, is less in the limelight than Borjas, but he continues to contribute to debate on immigration, and he’s widely respected by peers.
Card said theories that an increasing labor supply powered by immigrants automatically leads to lower wages are “completely wrong.”
Immigrants today are 17 percent of the US labor force, and the undocumented—who can be easier to exploit with lower wages—are about 5 percent, a proportion that hasn’t grown since 2009. While numbers have increased since 1970, immigrants as a percentage of the US population are slightly less than they were in 1910.
Card, who was a consultant on the National Academy of Sciences report, said in an interview: “To the best of my knowledge, very few economists subscribe to the Borjas line. George is at the extreme end.”
“He’s a complete ideologue on the topic,” Card added. He noted that Borjas assisted former California GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1994 re-election campaign, providing data portraying undocumented immigrants as a fiscal drain.
For close to three decades now, Borjas and Card and several others have been engaged in what for economists might be considered a duel.
Card, while at Princeton University in 1990, was credited with pioneering a “natural experiment” approach to studying immigration. Using Census survey data and economic modeling, he studied the wage impact of the 1980 influx of tens of thousands of Cuban refugees into Miami. The Mariel Boatlift from Cuba increased Miami’s labor pool by about 7 percent.
For Card, the influx was a unique opportunity to test assumptions that a greater supply of labor would push down wages for those most likely to compete with immigrants. But Card found “virtually no effect” on wages rates of less-skilled non-Cuban workers, and no substantial impact on the wages of Cubans already in the area when new refugees arrived.
“The data analysis suggests a remarkably rapid absorption of the Mariel immigrants into the Miami labor force,” Card wrote.
Borjas came up with his own models. In a 2003 paper published with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Borjas advanced a model to measure immigration impact by dividing workers into more distinct groups than other research, based on education level and experience. He found that immigration influxes between 1980 and 2000 reduced wages for native-born high-school dropouts by about 9 percent and about 3 percent for average wages for natives overall.
The battle continued. In a 2012 Journal of European Economic Association commentary, Card argued that Borjas’ 2003 research was flawed because Borjas assumed a “fixed” amount of capital over his 20-year study period. Without allowing for changes in investment, Card said, Borjas’ models resulted in wage drops. To understand why an economy absorbs labor, Card said in an interview, it helps to think about how technology, machinery, infrastructure and other investments—the “stock of capital”—help utilize labor without lowering wages.
Card also took exception to Borjas’ assumption that immigrant and native workers with the same level of education are perfect substitutes in the workplace. Economist Giovanni Peri at the University of California-Davis has advanced the argument that immigration prompts “task specialization” that lifts lower-skilled natives into complementary higher-ranking jobs—at restaurants or construction sites, for example—because of their English fluency, experience and other comparative advantages.
Still, the debate wasn’t over. In 2017, Borjas published a “reappraisal” that he claimed “overturned” Card’s 1990 Mariel findings. He found that wages for native-born high school dropouts in Miami fell by 10 to 30 percent after the refugee influx. Trump aide Miller pointed to Borjas’ study as evidence of wage suppression.
But others said Borjas’ dropout sample was so narrow—he removed women and Hispanics and ended up with fewer than 20 people per year—that “a researcher could hypothetically get any positive or negative ‘effect’ of the boatlift,” wrote economist Michael Clemens in Vox. Crucially, Clemens also argued, he and Rutgers economist Hunt discovered that population surveys began abruptly counting more black high-school dropouts in Miami after 1980, which had the effect of lowering average wages.
Borjas defended himself, blogging under the headline “More fake news about Mariel.” He created a chart excluding black dropouts, and still found wage decline. “Using the increase in the relative size of Miami’s black workforce after 1980 to dismiss my Mariel evidence performs the job of obfuscating the debate further, but does little to clarify,” he argued.
For laypeople, it can be challenging to unravel. And for the economists, that brings its own frustrations.
Card said he’s exasperated with media that bolster anti-immigrant positions with cherry-picked studies, as well as neutral media coverage that seeks out negative reports to balance positive studies without explaining nuances. “One competing study just cancels out another study,” he said of coverage.
The Academy’s Review
Against that backdrop, the National Academy of Sciences report may provide the broadest overview of work on this subject. The academy is widely considered the nation’s premier arbiter of complex issues, and is frequently relied upon to sort through politically-charged claims.
In September 2016, the academy released its 643-page survey entitled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.”
In addition to its specific findings on wages, the report concluded that: “Importantly, immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth.” Panelists found that “immigration supplies workers who have helped the United States to avoid the problems facing stagnant economies created by unfavorable demographics—in particular, an aging…workforce.”
The academy further noted that “if the American economy grows and requires more workers both to replace those who retire and to create new firms and industries, the primary source of labor will be first and second-generation immigrants. This basic fact will hold at all levels, from low-skilled service jobs to professionals with postgraduate degrees.”
The NAS report also concluded that immigrants are a benefit to the federal government coffers but a mixed picture for states—at least at first, primarily because of needed investments in schooling. But as adults, the NAS panel says, “immigrants’ children—the second generation—are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population,” paying more in taxes than either their parents or other native-born Americans.
Borjas didn’t dissent from the panel’s conclusions, co-panelists said.
“We all agreed high school dropouts are affected. George would say a lot. I would say a little,” said Hunt, the Rutgers economist. “The preponderance of evidence is that native wages are not affected. George agreed with that.” Hunt noted that the biggest cohort of dropouts today is near retirement age; national estimates are that only 6 percent of people between the ages of 16 and 24 were dropouts in 2015 compared to 12 percent in 1990.
Blau noted that Borjas signed the report but “has chosen to simply emphasize his own findings subsequently.”
Trump Makes His Moves
For many with immigrant roots, this academic debate is far from academic. It’s affecting real people—people like Zahid Siddiqi of Strongsville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
An engineer who retired from the Ford Motor Company, Siddiqi immigrated from India in 1969, after a 1965 US reform ended national-origins quotas dating from 1924 that favored Northern European immigrants. Siddiqi was sponsored by a professor, under a more relaxed job entry program. And after becoming a U.S. citizen, he sponsored two siblings whose families, like his, have thrived professionally.
“They’re deporting people who’ve been here 40 years. I’m horrified at what’s going to happen,” the 78-year-old grandfather said. “Not only for immigrants. But it’s the community, it’s America itself, that’s going to suffer.”
But regardless of what immigrants or economists think, Trump is pushing ahead, trying to force Congress to adopt dramatic immigration cuts. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, has emerged as the Senate’s new GOP immigration hawk and last year he introduced the RAISE Act—a name suggesting that with fewer immigrants, Americans’ wages would rise. As recently as last month, Cotton praised Borjas’ work on the subject during a hearing.
The bill’s only co-sponsor so far is Sen. David Purdue of Georgia. But Trump endorsed the proposals in August, with a tweet claiming that they would “reduce poverty, increase wages & save taxpayers billions of dollars.”
The proposal would cut the 5 percent of green cards that go, by lottery, to people from low-immigration countries. It would end all family immigration except for spouses and minor children, and create a new “merit” system to award visas. The White House wants premium points for higher education degrees in STEM fields, “extraordinary” talent and wealth to invest.
Trump claimed in a radio address last December that, under the current system, “foreign nationals can come to the United States and bring in unlimited numbers of foreign relatives.” In truth, family sponsorship can take many years. Per-country quotas keep siblings and adult children from some countries waiting a decade or even more than 20 years.
It doesn’t escape immigrants that Trump’s own history stands in contrast to new rules he wants.
Trump’s Slovenian parents-in-law were able to obtain green cards, for example, although the couple’s lawyer wouldn’t disclose how to The Washington Post. Bill Stock, an attorney with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Center for Public Integrity that of the handful of routes possible for immigration—unique talent is one—the most likely for Trump’s in-laws would be sponsorship by an adult child, the same sort of “chain migration” that Trump has disparaged.
Trump has long hired immigrant workers at construction sites and hotels. Trump businesses continue to hire seasonal foreign “guest workers” at Mar-a-Lago and at son Eric’s Virginia winery—a practice that Sessions, in the past, attacked as bad for American workers.
But the issue doesn’t break down along traditional lines. For years, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Service Employees International Union, hardly the best of friends, have shared in calling for legalization of some undocumented workers. They’ve also called for reforms to the current system that provides only 5,000 immigrant visas a year to fill shortages in lower-skilled but essential work like elder care.
In April of last year, 1,470 economists, Democrats and Republicans, signed a letter to Trump urging caution: “We write to express our broad consensus that immigration is one of America’s significant competitive advantages in the global economy. With the proper and necessary safeguards in place, immigration represents an opportunity rather than a threat to our economy and to American workers.”
In January, Trump made his first attempt to extract visa cuts from Congress. In exchange for endorsing a proposal to open a 12-year path toward green cards for 1.8 million “Dreamers”—young people brought here as undocumented children—Trump demanded that legislators approve a $25 billion trust fund for a southern border wall and deep cuts to family visas. The Senate deadlocked.
With midterm elections looming, though, immigration is likely to be a contentious issue on the campaign trail. During his 2016 campaign, Trump would often combine lambasting immigrants and trade agreements, while vowing to bring back jobs at manufacturing plants. But the reality, said economist Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC, is that immigration played no role in factory shutdowns in the Midwest.
“It’s just easy to blame immigrants,” said Nowrasteh. “You can always rely on nationalism and cultural arguments that you couldn’t make if an American took your job.”
He tapped into a long-raging battle among economists to mislead America.
SUSAN FERRISS AND CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY
In April of 2015, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service responded to a confidential request from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The memo was short, but it ignited a fiery outcry about the perceived threat of immigration from Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator from Alabama.
Sessions seized on charts in the CRS memo featuring a six-decade timeline estimating average incomes—mostly flat after 1970—and another showing a rise in the foreign-born population. Exhorting GOP presidential candidates to take these “forbidden facts” seriously, Sessions called on Republicans to fight to slash immigration—legal or illegal. “It is not caring, but callous, to bring in so many workers that there are not enough jobs for them or those already living here,” Sessions, a Judiciary Committee member, co-wrote in a column published by Roll Call, a congressionally focused news outlet.
Far-right media also sprang into action. The Breitbart website, led by future Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, blasted out posts about the memo, along with TheBlaze and the Washington Examiner. Mark Levin, who hosts the nation’s fourth-most-consumed talk-radio show, read from a Daily Caller story.
“Wages and share of income for the bottom 90 percent of American wage earners declined over the last 40 years, as the foreign-born population increased dramatically,” Levin read with disgust. “Ask the phony economists who play around with the numbers, who try to persuade you that this is a good thing for the economy. These are facts. These are statistics.”
Only they weren’t facts. They were estimates. And they didn’t add up to Levin’s or others’ hyperbolic assumptions.
What Sessions and eager media failed to disclose was that CRS researchers took pains to warn against drawing any conclusions from those two lines of data. “It bears noting,” the researchers cautioned, “that a causal relationship between two variables…cannot be determined through a simple graphic representation.”
But for Sessions, that caveat didn’t seem to matter. The timelines were a simple, powerful tool to support his view that immigration had been suppressing Americans’ wages for decades.
For others, though, Sessions’ use of the memo betrayed a penchant for casting immigration in the most negative light possible—even though the preponderance of economists who research this subject don’t agree with his claims.
“When measured over a period of more than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small,” said a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences. “To the extent that negative wage effects are found,” the report explains, “prior immigrants…are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high school dropouts.” The survey also notes that a significant body of research has found that immigration causes no negative wage impact, even among lesser-skilled natives—with some research also finding wage gains.
“There’s a very big ‘if,’ if it [immigration] does in fact lower wages,” said Francine Blau, a Cornell University economist chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ 14-person panel.
The debate is not just intellectual. Today, Sessions is the attorney general of the United States, and his boss Donald Trump is president, and they’re both crusading to dramatically slash immigration based in part on the jobs and wages argument. Sessions’ spin shows how years of strategic dissemination of cherry-picked and misleading information has helped set the tone for a polarizing, bruising battle over immigration that is splitting the country. And it illuminates how the work of a small group of researchers can become the fulcrum around which policy changes are developed.
Then and Now
For Sessions, the definitive word on immigrants’ effect on the economy comes from academia’s most prominent immigration skeptic, controversial Harvard University economist George Borjas.
Borjas, 67, has been researching immigration for 30 years, and is a frequent contributor to newspaper op-ed pages. Borjas’ family fled the Cuban Revolution and was admitted to the United States in 1962. He’s repeatedly raised eyebrows by suggesting that today’s immigrants don’t have what it takes to succeed in today’s economy. “Many look back at the melting pot in 20th-century America and assume that history will repeat itself. That’s probably wishful thinking,” he wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2017.
When Sessions was in the Senate, Borjas become his go-to economist. Sessions often cited figures from Borjas’ research in speeches and writings before and after becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest in 2015.
Speaking on the Senate floor in 2014, Sessions cited figures from an analysis that Borjas had posted in 2013 on the website of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that pushes for cuts to legal immigration.
“Harvard professor George Borjas, who’s perhaps the premiere student of these economic matters, as he’s worked on them for decades, estimates that high immigration flows from 1980 to 2000, based on data, reduced the wages of lower-skilled American workers by 7.4 percent,” Sessions argued. “Professor Borjas estimates that current immigration rates produce a net loss, current rates, of $402 billion [a year] for American workers who compete with foreign labor.”
In January 2015, as the Trump campaign was revving up, Sessions released a booklet that he called an “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority”—featuring Borjas’ $402 billion-a-year wage loss estimate. “We need make no apology in rejecting an extreme policy of sustained mass immigration, which the public repudiates and which the best economic evidence tells us undermines wage growth and economic mobility,” Sessions wrote.
Sessions also presided over hearings he said established that immigration had become a losing proposition for Americans’ wages. Borjas spoke at a March 2016 hearing. Despite the array of contrary research, Sessions opened a June 2016 hearing by saying: “I think very few dispute that the current large flow of labor into the country is suppressing American wages.”
In a pre-election 2016 piece for Politico, Borjas argued that while immigration has been good for the economy overall, “a ‘responsible nationalist’ policy cannot ignore the reality that immigration has made some natives poorer. A policy that keeps them in mind might tax the agricultural and service companies that benefit so much from low-skilled immigrants, and use the money to compensate low-skilled Americans for their losses.”
On his blog, post-election, Borjas expressed confidence in Sessions’ knowledge about immigration and referred to him as a “Southern gentleman.”
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to multiple Center for Public Integrity requests for comment from Sessions. Borjas declined multiple requests for comment as well. He served on the National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed fiscal-impact research on immigration.
Cornell University economist Blau said, “I have a great deal of respect for Professor Borjas as a scholar. But these are one set of estimates. They are not the consensus” reached by the NAS panel. For politicians or others “to emphasize them to the exclusion of other very well-done research,” Blau said, “I don’t think is appropriate.”
Another panelist, Jennifer Hunt, an economist at Rutgers University, said that Borjas’ estimate that natives lost $402 billion in wages a year is a “meaningless number” because it’s a rough estimate that relies on a theoretical model. Borjas’ own paper concedes his “exercise is a short-run simulation…before the economy adjusts in any way to the immigrant influx.”
Seeds of a Campaign
But among those who picked up on the larger Sessions-Borjas arguments was candidate Donald Trump. An unsavory portrait of immigrants has invigorated pro-Trump rallies, before and after his election.
Last July, in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump disparaged “chain,” or family immigration as a “low-skill system, just a terrible system where anybody comes in”—an exaggeration. Trump wants Congress to eliminate new Americans’ ability to sponsor parents, siblings and adult children—more than 20 percent of all visas—confining family sponsorship only to spouses and minor children.
“Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers,” Trump asserted in his 2016 Republican nomination acceptance speech—a speech that Borjas, in that 2016 piece for Politico, claimed was influenced by his work.
This controversial argument that immigration has suppressed wages for natives has helped Trump justify his vows to force Congress to enact what could be the most restrictive legal immigration policies since the 1920s. The posture reflects Sessions’ influence, and that of a former Sessions aide, Stephen Miller, now a senior Trump adviser.
Last August, Miller added salt to wounds Trump had opened in immigrant communities when he said at a press conference that existing legal immigration “has massively de-skilled the migrant flow in to America” and “exacerbated wealth inequality in this country is a pretty significant way.”
Opposing Views
Lost in the rhetoric is a sharply contrasting narrative laid out by other respected economists, most prominent among them David Card of the University of California at Berkeley. Card, 62, himself an immigrant from Canada, is less in the limelight than Borjas, but he continues to contribute to debate on immigration, and he’s widely respected by peers.
Card said theories that an increasing labor supply powered by immigrants automatically leads to lower wages are “completely wrong.”
Immigrants today are 17 percent of the US labor force, and the undocumented—who can be easier to exploit with lower wages—are about 5 percent, a proportion that hasn’t grown since 2009. While numbers have increased since 1970, immigrants as a percentage of the US population are slightly less than they were in 1910.
Card, who was a consultant on the National Academy of Sciences report, said in an interview: “To the best of my knowledge, very few economists subscribe to the Borjas line. George is at the extreme end.”
“He’s a complete ideologue on the topic,” Card added. He noted that Borjas assisted former California GOP Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1994 re-election campaign, providing data portraying undocumented immigrants as a fiscal drain.
For close to three decades now, Borjas and Card and several others have been engaged in what for economists might be considered a duel.
Card, while at Princeton University in 1990, was credited with pioneering a “natural experiment” approach to studying immigration. Using Census survey data and economic modeling, he studied the wage impact of the 1980 influx of tens of thousands of Cuban refugees into Miami. The Mariel Boatlift from Cuba increased Miami’s labor pool by about 7 percent.
For Card, the influx was a unique opportunity to test assumptions that a greater supply of labor would push down wages for those most likely to compete with immigrants. But Card found “virtually no effect” on wages rates of less-skilled non-Cuban workers, and no substantial impact on the wages of Cubans already in the area when new refugees arrived.
“The data analysis suggests a remarkably rapid absorption of the Mariel immigrants into the Miami labor force,” Card wrote.
Borjas came up with his own models. In a 2003 paper published with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Borjas advanced a model to measure immigration impact by dividing workers into more distinct groups than other research, based on education level and experience. He found that immigration influxes between 1980 and 2000 reduced wages for native-born high-school dropouts by about 9 percent and about 3 percent for average wages for natives overall.
The battle continued. In a 2012 Journal of European Economic Association commentary, Card argued that Borjas’ 2003 research was flawed because Borjas assumed a “fixed” amount of capital over his 20-year study period. Without allowing for changes in investment, Card said, Borjas’ models resulted in wage drops. To understand why an economy absorbs labor, Card said in an interview, it helps to think about how technology, machinery, infrastructure and other investments—the “stock of capital”—help utilize labor without lowering wages.
Card also took exception to Borjas’ assumption that immigrant and native workers with the same level of education are perfect substitutes in the workplace. Economist Giovanni Peri at the University of California-Davis has advanced the argument that immigration prompts “task specialization” that lifts lower-skilled natives into complementary higher-ranking jobs—at restaurants or construction sites, for example—because of their English fluency, experience and other comparative advantages.
Still, the debate wasn’t over. In 2017, Borjas published a “reappraisal” that he claimed “overturned” Card’s 1990 Mariel findings. He found that wages for native-born high school dropouts in Miami fell by 10 to 30 percent after the refugee influx. Trump aide Miller pointed to Borjas’ study as evidence of wage suppression.
But others said Borjas’ dropout sample was so narrow—he removed women and Hispanics and ended up with fewer than 20 people per year—that “a researcher could hypothetically get any positive or negative ‘effect’ of the boatlift,” wrote economist Michael Clemens in Vox. Crucially, Clemens also argued, he and Rutgers economist Hunt discovered that population surveys began abruptly counting more black high-school dropouts in Miami after 1980, which had the effect of lowering average wages.
Borjas defended himself, blogging under the headline “More fake news about Mariel.” He created a chart excluding black dropouts, and still found wage decline. “Using the increase in the relative size of Miami’s black workforce after 1980 to dismiss my Mariel evidence performs the job of obfuscating the debate further, but does little to clarify,” he argued.
For laypeople, it can be challenging to unravel. And for the economists, that brings its own frustrations.
Card said he’s exasperated with media that bolster anti-immigrant positions with cherry-picked studies, as well as neutral media coverage that seeks out negative reports to balance positive studies without explaining nuances. “One competing study just cancels out another study,” he said of coverage.
The Academy’s Review
Against that backdrop, the National Academy of Sciences report may provide the broadest overview of work on this subject. The academy is widely considered the nation’s premier arbiter of complex issues, and is frequently relied upon to sort through politically-charged claims.
In September 2016, the academy released its 643-page survey entitled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.”
In addition to its specific findings on wages, the report concluded that: “Importantly, immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth.” Panelists found that “immigration supplies workers who have helped the United States to avoid the problems facing stagnant economies created by unfavorable demographics—in particular, an aging…workforce.”
The academy further noted that “if the American economy grows and requires more workers both to replace those who retire and to create new firms and industries, the primary source of labor will be first and second-generation immigrants. This basic fact will hold at all levels, from low-skilled service jobs to professionals with postgraduate degrees.”
The NAS report also concluded that immigrants are a benefit to the federal government coffers but a mixed picture for states—at least at first, primarily because of needed investments in schooling. But as adults, the NAS panel says, “immigrants’ children—the second generation—are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population,” paying more in taxes than either their parents or other native-born Americans.
Borjas didn’t dissent from the panel’s conclusions, co-panelists said.
“We all agreed high school dropouts are affected. George would say a lot. I would say a little,” said Hunt, the Rutgers economist. “The preponderance of evidence is that native wages are not affected. George agreed with that.” Hunt noted that the biggest cohort of dropouts today is near retirement age; national estimates are that only 6 percent of people between the ages of 16 and 24 were dropouts in 2015 compared to 12 percent in 1990.
Blau noted that Borjas signed the report but “has chosen to simply emphasize his own findings subsequently.”
Trump Makes His Moves
For many with immigrant roots, this academic debate is far from academic. It’s affecting real people—people like Zahid Siddiqi of Strongsville, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
An engineer who retired from the Ford Motor Company, Siddiqi immigrated from India in 1969, after a 1965 US reform ended national-origins quotas dating from 1924 that favored Northern European immigrants. Siddiqi was sponsored by a professor, under a more relaxed job entry program. And after becoming a U.S. citizen, he sponsored two siblings whose families, like his, have thrived professionally.
“They’re deporting people who’ve been here 40 years. I’m horrified at what’s going to happen,” the 78-year-old grandfather said. “Not only for immigrants. But it’s the community, it’s America itself, that’s going to suffer.”
But regardless of what immigrants or economists think, Trump is pushing ahead, trying to force Congress to adopt dramatic immigration cuts. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, has emerged as the Senate’s new GOP immigration hawk and last year he introduced the RAISE Act—a name suggesting that with fewer immigrants, Americans’ wages would rise. As recently as last month, Cotton praised Borjas’ work on the subject during a hearing.
The bill’s only co-sponsor so far is Sen. David Purdue of Georgia. But Trump endorsed the proposals in August, with a tweet claiming that they would “reduce poverty, increase wages & save taxpayers billions of dollars.”
The proposal would cut the 5 percent of green cards that go, by lottery, to people from low-immigration countries. It would end all family immigration except for spouses and minor children, and create a new “merit” system to award visas. The White House wants premium points for higher education degrees in STEM fields, “extraordinary” talent and wealth to invest.
Trump claimed in a radio address last December that, under the current system, “foreign nationals can come to the United States and bring in unlimited numbers of foreign relatives.” In truth, family sponsorship can take many years. Per-country quotas keep siblings and adult children from some countries waiting a decade or even more than 20 years.
It doesn’t escape immigrants that Trump’s own history stands in contrast to new rules he wants.
Trump’s Slovenian parents-in-law were able to obtain green cards, for example, although the couple’s lawyer wouldn’t disclose how to The Washington Post. Bill Stock, an attorney with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Center for Public Integrity that of the handful of routes possible for immigration—unique talent is one—the most likely for Trump’s in-laws would be sponsorship by an adult child, the same sort of “chain migration” that Trump has disparaged.
Trump has long hired immigrant workers at construction sites and hotels. Trump businesses continue to hire seasonal foreign “guest workers” at Mar-a-Lago and at son Eric’s Virginia winery—a practice that Sessions, in the past, attacked as bad for American workers.
But the issue doesn’t break down along traditional lines. For years, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Service Employees International Union, hardly the best of friends, have shared in calling for legalization of some undocumented workers. They’ve also called for reforms to the current system that provides only 5,000 immigrant visas a year to fill shortages in lower-skilled but essential work like elder care.
In April of last year, 1,470 economists, Democrats and Republicans, signed a letter to Trump urging caution: “We write to express our broad consensus that immigration is one of America’s significant competitive advantages in the global economy. With the proper and necessary safeguards in place, immigration represents an opportunity rather than a threat to our economy and to American workers.”
In January, Trump made his first attempt to extract visa cuts from Congress. In exchange for endorsing a proposal to open a 12-year path toward green cards for 1.8 million “Dreamers”—young people brought here as undocumented children—Trump demanded that legislators approve a $25 billion trust fund for a southern border wall and deep cuts to family visas. The Senate deadlocked.
With midterm elections looming, though, immigration is likely to be a contentious issue on the campaign trail. During his 2016 campaign, Trump would often combine lambasting immigrants and trade agreements, while vowing to bring back jobs at manufacturing plants. But the reality, said economist Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC, is that immigration played no role in factory shutdowns in the Midwest.
“It’s just easy to blame immigrants,” said Nowrasteh. “You can always rely on nationalism and cultural arguments that you couldn’t make if an American took your job.”
Brown pulled a fast one
How Jerry Brown pulled a fast one on Trump
By Willie Brown
Gov. Jerry Brown found himself caught in no man’s land when it came to deploying the California National Guard to make President Trump happy. He still managed to come out a winner.
Brown knew he had no choice but to go along with Trump’s request to call out the Guard, even though the waves of illegal immigrants that the president cited as a reason exist mainly in his head. Trump held the ultimate weapon — he could federalize the state Guard, removing it from Brown’s control. It would be a drastic step, but it’s easy to imagine Trump doing it.
But Brown was not about to just say yes and spend his final months in office being hounded by sanctuary protesters every time he showed his face in public.
So he did what he always does: He gave each side a little bit, without actually giving either one the win.
In this case, he agreed to deploy Guard troops, but only on the condition that they not participate in any immigration law enforcement. Drugs, guns, human trafficking — that’s what the Guard will be looking for.
At first it looked like it might backfire, as Trump tweeted his thanks to “Jerry” for “doing the right thing.” Effusive praise wasn’t exactly what Brown had in mind.
Fortunately, it dawned on Trump over the next few days what the governor had actually agreed to. By last week the president was back to his usual insulting self — which Brown doubtless welcomed — even as his administration worked with the state to make the California Guard deployment happen.
This is why Brown has lasted so long in politics and done so well. He can say “yes” and “no,” all in the same sentence.
By Willie Brown
Gov. Jerry Brown found himself caught in no man’s land when it came to deploying the California National Guard to make President Trump happy. He still managed to come out a winner.
Brown knew he had no choice but to go along with Trump’s request to call out the Guard, even though the waves of illegal immigrants that the president cited as a reason exist mainly in his head. Trump held the ultimate weapon — he could federalize the state Guard, removing it from Brown’s control. It would be a drastic step, but it’s easy to imagine Trump doing it.
But Brown was not about to just say yes and spend his final months in office being hounded by sanctuary protesters every time he showed his face in public.
So he did what he always does: He gave each side a little bit, without actually giving either one the win.
In this case, he agreed to deploy Guard troops, but only on the condition that they not participate in any immigration law enforcement. Drugs, guns, human trafficking — that’s what the Guard will be looking for.
At first it looked like it might backfire, as Trump tweeted his thanks to “Jerry” for “doing the right thing.” Effusive praise wasn’t exactly what Brown had in mind.
Fortunately, it dawned on Trump over the next few days what the governor had actually agreed to. By last week the president was back to his usual insulting self — which Brown doubtless welcomed — even as his administration worked with the state to make the California Guard deployment happen.
This is why Brown has lasted so long in politics and done so well. He can say “yes” and “no,” all in the same sentence.
Pompeo sworn in.. Let the mess continue..
Pompeo sworn in as secretary of state, dashes off to Europe
Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee
Mike Pompeo took over as America's top diplomat Thursday after being confirmed by the Senate and sworn in across the street minutes later. The new secretary of state immediately dashed off to Europe in an energetic start befitting the high-stakes issues awaiting him from Iran to North Korea.
The hard-charging former CIA director was confirmed on a 57-42 vote — one of the slimmest margins for the job in recent history. Every past nominee to get a roll call vote since at least the Carter administration received 85 or more yes votes in the Senate, with the exception of Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who got 56.
He was sworn in at the Supreme Court by Justice Samuel Alito, a fellow Italian-American, who said he was "proud" to officiate for the occasion. Pompeo, in a statement relayed by the State Department, said he was "delighted" to serve as America's top diplomat.
"I am completely humbled by the responsibility and looking forward to serving the American people and getting to work right away," Pompeo said.
Then it was off to Andrews Air Force Base, where a government aircraft was waiting to ferry him to Brussels for meetings at NATO headquarters. State Department staffers, demoralized after a tumultuous first year of President Donald Trump's administration, gave a round of applause to Pompeo, who responded as he boarded the aircraft with a casual, "Hi, I'm Mike."
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, is expected to guide Trump's foreign policy farther to the right than Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO fired by Trump on Twitter last month. He inherits a State Department that has lost relevance under Trump and a diplomatic corps deeply dispirited by the tenure of Tillerson, who pushed budget and staff cuts and eschewed public appearances while leaving key diplomatic positions unfilled.
His confirmation creates a vacancy atop the CIA that will be filled, at least for now, by Gina Haspel, the intelligence agency's No. 2 official. Trump has nominated Haspel to replace Pompeo, but she faces a rocky road to confirmation. The CIA said she took over Thursday as acting director while the Senate weighs whether to make it permanent.
For Pompeo, a long list of pressing issues awaits, including a decision on the Iran nuclear deal, Trump's upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and ongoing disagreements in the White House about the future U.S. role in Syria.
Trump said he was pleased by Pompeo's confirmation, calling him a "patriot" with "immense talent, energy and intellect."
"He will always put the interests of America first," Trump said in a statement. "He has my trust. He has my support."
Yet the Senate vote followed an uneasy confirmation process for Pompeo that underscored Trump's growing difficulties in getting nominees in place for top positions. On Monday, it appeared Pompeo would fail a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but the panel ultimately cleared him after last-minute support from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Previously confirmed for the CIA job, Pompeo was supported Thursday by all the Republican senators and by six Democrats, including several up for re-election in conservative-leaning states. GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is being treated for cancer, was absent.
In the run-up to Pompeo's confirmation, his backers emphasized his resume as a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate and former congressman who enjoys a close relationship with Trump. Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang over Easter after being nominated for secretary of state and met with Kim ahead of the planned summit with Trump, expected in late May or June.
"He's the perfect person to come in at this time and lead those efforts," Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who chairs the foreign relations panel, said on the Senate floor moments before Pompeo was confirmed.
Yet his opponents warned that his hawkish foreign policy views and negative comments about gay marriage and Muslims made him ill-equipped to serve as a diplomat or to represent the U.S. on the world stage. Pompeo used his confirmation hearing to try to soften that image, edging away from past comments about regime change in North Korea.
Pompeo takes the helm ahead of Trump's expected decision about whether to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal by a May 12 deadline and reimpose sanctions on Tehran. A staunch Iran critic, Pompeo has long deplored the 2015 nuclear accord but has supported Trump's efforts to get European allies to strengthen restrictions on Iran.
"If there's no chance that we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and to achieve a better deal," Pompeo said in his confirmation hearing.
The State Department said no secretary of state had ever traveled abroad so soon after being confirmed. Originally, Deputy Secretary John Sullivan, who had been filling in as secretary since Tillerson departed, had planned to make the trip. With Pompeo's confirmation imminent, the plane was held on the tarmac until Pompeo could arrive and swap in.
In Brussels, Pompeo will attend a NATO foreign ministers summit and meet with the top diplomats from Turkey and Italy. Pompeo planned to keep up pressure on NATO's European members, particularly Germany, to live up to their past pledges to boost their defense spending.
From there, the State Department said Pompeo planned to fly to the Middle East for stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan, where the future of the Iran deal and the conflict in Syria will be significant agenda items. Pompeo will arrive in the region ahead of a series of events that could potentially plunge it into deeper disarray, including the Iran deal decision and the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee
Mike Pompeo took over as America's top diplomat Thursday after being confirmed by the Senate and sworn in across the street minutes later. The new secretary of state immediately dashed off to Europe in an energetic start befitting the high-stakes issues awaiting him from Iran to North Korea.
The hard-charging former CIA director was confirmed on a 57-42 vote — one of the slimmest margins for the job in recent history. Every past nominee to get a roll call vote since at least the Carter administration received 85 or more yes votes in the Senate, with the exception of Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who got 56.
He was sworn in at the Supreme Court by Justice Samuel Alito, a fellow Italian-American, who said he was "proud" to officiate for the occasion. Pompeo, in a statement relayed by the State Department, said he was "delighted" to serve as America's top diplomat.
"I am completely humbled by the responsibility and looking forward to serving the American people and getting to work right away," Pompeo said.
Then it was off to Andrews Air Force Base, where a government aircraft was waiting to ferry him to Brussels for meetings at NATO headquarters. State Department staffers, demoralized after a tumultuous first year of President Donald Trump's administration, gave a round of applause to Pompeo, who responded as he boarded the aircraft with a casual, "Hi, I'm Mike."
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, is expected to guide Trump's foreign policy farther to the right than Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO fired by Trump on Twitter last month. He inherits a State Department that has lost relevance under Trump and a diplomatic corps deeply dispirited by the tenure of Tillerson, who pushed budget and staff cuts and eschewed public appearances while leaving key diplomatic positions unfilled.
His confirmation creates a vacancy atop the CIA that will be filled, at least for now, by Gina Haspel, the intelligence agency's No. 2 official. Trump has nominated Haspel to replace Pompeo, but she faces a rocky road to confirmation. The CIA said she took over Thursday as acting director while the Senate weighs whether to make it permanent.
For Pompeo, a long list of pressing issues awaits, including a decision on the Iran nuclear deal, Trump's upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and ongoing disagreements in the White House about the future U.S. role in Syria.
Trump said he was pleased by Pompeo's confirmation, calling him a "patriot" with "immense talent, energy and intellect."
"He will always put the interests of America first," Trump said in a statement. "He has my trust. He has my support."
Yet the Senate vote followed an uneasy confirmation process for Pompeo that underscored Trump's growing difficulties in getting nominees in place for top positions. On Monday, it appeared Pompeo would fail a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but the panel ultimately cleared him after last-minute support from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Previously confirmed for the CIA job, Pompeo was supported Thursday by all the Republican senators and by six Democrats, including several up for re-election in conservative-leaning states. GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is being treated for cancer, was absent.
In the run-up to Pompeo's confirmation, his backers emphasized his resume as a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate and former congressman who enjoys a close relationship with Trump. Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang over Easter after being nominated for secretary of state and met with Kim ahead of the planned summit with Trump, expected in late May or June.
"He's the perfect person to come in at this time and lead those efforts," Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who chairs the foreign relations panel, said on the Senate floor moments before Pompeo was confirmed.
Yet his opponents warned that his hawkish foreign policy views and negative comments about gay marriage and Muslims made him ill-equipped to serve as a diplomat or to represent the U.S. on the world stage. Pompeo used his confirmation hearing to try to soften that image, edging away from past comments about regime change in North Korea.
Pompeo takes the helm ahead of Trump's expected decision about whether to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal by a May 12 deadline and reimpose sanctions on Tehran. A staunch Iran critic, Pompeo has long deplored the 2015 nuclear accord but has supported Trump's efforts to get European allies to strengthen restrictions on Iran.
"If there's no chance that we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and to achieve a better deal," Pompeo said in his confirmation hearing.
The State Department said no secretary of state had ever traveled abroad so soon after being confirmed. Originally, Deputy Secretary John Sullivan, who had been filling in as secretary since Tillerson departed, had planned to make the trip. With Pompeo's confirmation imminent, the plane was held on the tarmac until Pompeo could arrive and swap in.
In Brussels, Pompeo will attend a NATO foreign ministers summit and meet with the top diplomats from Turkey and Italy. Pompeo planned to keep up pressure on NATO's European members, particularly Germany, to live up to their past pledges to boost their defense spending.
From there, the State Department said Pompeo planned to fly to the Middle East for stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan, where the future of the Iran deal and the conflict in Syria will be significant agenda items. Pompeo will arrive in the region ahead of a series of events that could potentially plunge it into deeper disarray, including the Iran deal decision and the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
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