Month: August 2018

^{Much lower than expected crowds show up for Pope Francis Mass}

Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland, just concluded, was very different to that of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in 1979, but it is very difficult to gauge it’s significance in the immediate aftermath. The visit was dominated by the clerical child sexual abuse scandals and cover-up, and other scandals concerning Church run mother-and-baby homes, forced adoptions, and forced labour in Magdalen laundries. Pope Francis referred to these scandals in all four of his speeches and begged forgiveness for the Church’s part in them.

What he did not do was announce any concrete measures to help bring the perpetrators and those responsible for the cover-up to justice, such as releasing files on the perpetrators held by the Vatican to state prosecutors. He referred to some Archbishops and Cardinals being sacked but claimed he was limited in what he could do by opposition from the Curia. It seems that too many people directly involved in the cover-up are still in power in the Vatican. The Pope himself has also just been accused of covering-up the abuse by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in Washington and called on to resign by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Vigano, a conservative with hard-line anti-gay views.  The Curia may be fighting back.

The crowds attending his ceremonies where also much reduced on 1979 when over a million attended Pope John Paul II’s Mass in the Phoenix park. This time half a million were expected but only an estimated 130,000 showed up, perhaps not helped by the inclement weather. Croke Park Gaelic stadium was also far from full for a Papal homily on family values despite a host of musical stars performing as well. A rival protest event organized at short notice with no logistical support by abuse survivor Colm O’Gorman drew a crowd of about five thousand.

Many practicing Catholics were hoping the Pope’s visit would result in an upsurge in religious fervour as had happened after Pope Jon Paul’s visit in 1979, followed soon after by a clause banning abortion being inserted into the Irish Constitution through a referendum carried with a two thirds majority. Exactly the same majority removed that clause just a few months ago, and so the two Papal visits nicely book-end a very significant change in  popular attitudes to Church doctrine and teaching in the meantime.

Leo Varadker gave a widely praised speech to the Pope urging the Church to adopt a policy of mandatory reporting of sex abuse allegations to civil authorities world-wide, a policy only recently adopted by the Irish Church following some opposition from the Vatican. As a non-practicing Catholic he had to tread a thin line between representing the public interest and appearing to breach the principles of separation of Church and State and freedom of religion by interfering in Church affairs. In the circumstances, it was the very least he could do.

The united front on this issue presented by both the Irish Church and State to the Vatican does however represent a powerful signal to the Vatican that any further non-reporting of allegations, or interference in the subsequent investigations will not be tolerated. The Pope appears to have been visibly moved by the forthright condemnations of church actions declared to his face by abuse survivors at a private meeting organized by the church even though it excluded some of the more vocal church critics on the issue.

Most people who met him appeared to have been impressed by his sincerity and listening skills, but many expressed disappointment at the lack of any concrete follow-up actions proposed by the Pontiff during his visit. Most will now adopt a wait-and-see approach to see if Vatican policies, personnel, and practices really do change. Few expect any fundamental changes in church teaching and practice, for instance on birth control, same sex marriage, the medical management of unsafe pregnancies, and the ordination of women; but future appointments and policy pronouncements by the Vatican will be watched closely.

Pope John Paul II initiated a conservative counter revolution in Ireland when he visited in 1979, one which took a generation to reverse. Far from a repeat performance, it is just about possible that Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland will have more of an impact on the Vatican than on Ireland.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Chincoteague shingle style house painting.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have concentrated my efforts on the right side of the house.  The roof edge has now been painted as well as the windows.  Those windows lit in the photo now appear in white.  The siding around them is a lighter gray. Finally, the foundation has been painted in a consistent fashion.

 
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

 

I guess the assholes couldn’t wait until school starts up again.

John McCain has died.

It is kind of strange that there is so little clarity about what Robert Mueller is supposed to do with the evidence he’s accumulated once he’s concluded his investigation.

I vaguely remember hearing about a doorman who worked at Trump World Tower who claimed to have knowledge that the current president of the United States fathered an illegitimate child with a housekeeper. His story was one of the catch-and-kill jobs that the National Enquirer did on behalf of Donald Trump and he was living under the threat of a million dollar penalty if he spoke about what he claimed to know. Apparently, he’s been relieved of that burden, so we should expect to hear what he has to say in some detail before long.

It appears that there was a safe that contained all the stories about Trump that had been captured and killed over the years. The contents of that safe may have been destroyed, but they may also be in the hands of prosecutors.

Five people familiar with the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements, said the safe was a great source of power for [David] Pecker, the company’s CEO.

The Trump records were stored alongside similar documents pertaining to other celebrities’ catch-and-kill deals, in which exclusive rights to people’s stories were bought with no intention of publishing to keep them out of the news. By keeping celebrities’ embarrassing secrets, the company was able to ingratiate itself with them and ask for favors in return.

But after The Wall Street Journal initially published the first details of Playboy model Karen McDougal’s catch-and-kill deal shortly before the 2016 election, those assets became a liability. Fearful that the documents might be used against American Media, Pecker and the company’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, according to one person directly familiar with the events.

It was unclear whether the documents were destroyed or simply were moved to a location known to fewer people.

The problem for Trump is that both American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker and his deputy Dylan Howard have been granted immunity deals, which means that at worst the documents have been turned over and at best (if they were destroyed) that they’ll both testify to what kind of information they contained.

US federal prosecutors have reportedly granted immunity to David Pecker, CEO of company that publishes the National Enquirer, and his top lieutenant, Australian journalist, Dylan Howard, in the investigation into Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Vanity Fair reported that Mr Pecker’s immunity deal extended to the former Channel 7 journalist, Mr Howard, chief content officer of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr Pecker met with prosecutors to describe the alleged involvement of Mr Cohen and Mr Trump in financial deals to two women ahead of the 2016 US election.

This is a nightmare for the president. It’s like all the skeletons he thought were safely locked in the closet have zombified and made their escape. It also seems like everyone and their mother is clamoring to spill the beans on Trump. Probably the most perilous of the “rats” is Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who has also accepted some kind of immunity deal. The immediate problem is that Weisselberg can verify how Trump handled all his bimbo eruptions, but those are probably minor concerns compared to what Weisselberg can tell prosecutors about Trump’s business dealings over the years.

Mr. Weisselberg’s ties to the Trump family date to the 1980s when he worked for Mr. Trump’s father, Fred. He also serves as treasurer at the Trump Foundation, which has been accused in a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General’s office of repeatedly violating laws governing charities. The foundation has denied wrongdoing.

The accountant was at Mr. Trump’s side when he faced bankruptcy in the 1990s. Mr. Trump later credited the CFO in one of his books as “one of the toughest people in business when it comes to money” who “did whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line.” Mr. Trump has also praised Mr. Weisselberg as a “loyal employee” whose advice he relied on for everything from his finances to carpet swatches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Weisselberg has already provided testimony and he may be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan could also share their evidence with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Kremlin colluded with the Trump campaign.

Mr. Trump and the Kremlin have denied wrongdoing. Mr. Mueller’s remit gives him the leeway to pursue any matters that arise from his investigation; the probe of Mr. Cohen started, in part, with a referral from Mr. Mueller’s office.

That raises the prospect that Mr. Mueller could incorporate findings from the Manhattan probe into any report he submits to the deputy attorney general about his investigation’s conclusions related to Mr. Trump, legal experts say.

There’s almost no limit to how many problems this can create for Trump. If nothing else, he just discovered that a guy that worked for his father and has been his right-hand man for decades has turned state’s evidence, and that means I presume that the Trump Organization needs a new CFO.

Another real possibility is that Donald Jr. and Eric are going to wind up in legal trouble because they have been effectively running the business and the trust since their father won the election.

Things have unraveled here rather thoroughly, and it’s not shocking that his aides are preparing for Trump to go rogue:

President Donald Trump’s lawyers and a cadre of informal White House advisers claim they’ve convinced him not to pardon Paul Manafort — but White House officials expect the president to do it anyway.

The president’s characterization of his former campaign chairman as a victim and “brave man” is being read by aides as a signal that Trump wants to use his unilateral authority to issue pardons to absolve Manafort, according to eight current and former administration officials and outside advisers.

Of course, it’s far too late for Trump to solve his problems by pardoning Paul Manafort. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is getting ramped up to look under the hood of the Trump Organization and the New York attorney general is already prepared to go after Manafort on state charges if Trump pardons him.

Trump is not one to blame himself, so it makes sense that he’s making Attorney General Jeff Sessions the repository for all his frustrations. If only that disloyal Alabama cracker hadn’t recused himself, these pesky problems could have been contained.

The loathing, which was never private, continued this week as Sessions sought to defend himself against Trump’s insults. In the span of a day, Trump accused the attorney general he appointed of failing to assume full control of the agency he leads, executing acts of severe disloyalty and allowing injustice to prevail. At one point, he even seemed to question his manhood.

“Even my enemies say that Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn’t have put him in,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News this week. “He took the job and then he said I’m going to recuse myself. I said what kind of a man is this?”

This is really a matter of Trump discovering that he has been fatally outmaneuvered. Mueller has pawned off investigations into Michael Cohen and Maria Butina making it impossible to shut down the march of justice. Firing Mueller wouldn’t stop the “rats” because they’re being interviewed in other jurisdictions. The way Trump sees it, this is Sessions’s fault for not assuming “full control” of the Department of Justice. After all, making hush money payments to mistresses and committing campaign finance felonies has nothing to do with “collusion.”

Trump’s first mistake was to tell his lawyers that he had done nothing wrong rather than telling them that his legal vulnerabilities went to the moon and back. They took him at his word and crafted a legal strategy designed to get a quick exoneration.

Of course there never was a good legal strategy for a client like Donald Trump. A man like him cannot be president. He wasn’t supposed to win, did not expect to win, did not even write a victory speech, and now everyone he knows is either going to jail or ratting him out to avoid going to jail. Spiro Agnew’s lawyer is right to say that he’d be crazy not to resign. This presidency has been one gigantic mistake, and Trump must realize that now.

I take a special political junkie-type pleasure out of seeing Spiro Nixon’s lawyer advise the president that he’d be an idiot not to resign.

Without realizing what he was doing, Donald Trump confessed to another crime during his Wednesday interview Ainsley Earhardt of Fox News. In this case, his statements about the hush money payments his lawyer Michael Cohen made to his mistresses show that he knowingly lied on his 2017 federal financial disclosure by omitting the debt he owed to Cohen. You can just add that to the pile, I guess.

What’s more serious is the administration’s refusal to do anything to secure our elections:

A bill that would have significantly bolstered the nation’s defenses against electoral interference has been held up in the Senate at the behest of the White House, which opposed the proposed legislation, according to congressional sources.

The Secure Elections Act, introduced by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in December 2017, had co-sponsorship from two of the Senate’s most prominent liberals, Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as from conservative stalwart Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and consummate centrist Susan Collins, R-Me.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was set to conduct a markup of the bill on Wednesday morning in the Senate Rules Committee, which he chairs. The bill had widespread support, including from some of the committee’s Republican members, and was expected to come to a full Senate vote in October. But then the chairman’s mark, as the critical step is known, was canceled, and no explanation was given.

I want to you to understand the basic idea behind the bill, so let’s look at some of the provisions that were expected to be included:

As it currently stands, the legislation would grant every state’s top election official security clearance to receive threat information. It would also formalize the practice of information-sharing between the federal government—in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—and states regarding threats to electoral infrastructure. A technical advisory board would establish best practices related to election cybersecurity. Perhaps most significantly, the law would mandate that every state conduct a statistically significant audit following a federal election. It would also incentivize the purchase of voting machines that leave a paper record of votes cast, as opposed to some all-electronic models that do not. This would signify a marked shift away from all-electronic voting, which was encouraged with the passage of the Help Americans Vote Act in 2002.

It’s important to realize that this is a Republican bill with Democratic co-sponsors. It’s not true that there are no Republicans who are willing to legislate to protect the integrity of our elections, and this wasn’t a toothless or symbolic bill. It had some very worthwhile components. If nothing else, simply incentivizing the states to have elections that can be audited was a necessary step. Mandating that elections be audited was a major reform.

But the White House stepped in and shut the whole thing down. I wrote yesterday that Trump seems to be purposively working to undermine confidence in our elections, and this just bolsters my case. We have to ask why he’s doing it.

Individual Republican congresspeople have seen what has happened to the political careers of people like Rep. Mark Sanford and Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake who have tried to stand up to the president. They don’t want to be next. But, collectively, the party needs to have a strategy for how to deal with a rogue president who commits felonies and (as we saw in Helsinki) is clearly compromised by an adversarial foreign power. The problem is pretty simple to understand. While congressional Republicans are bound to their president, Republican voters are not. They can walk away from the party, leaving behind only strong Trump supporters.

In most of suburban America, this has already turned into a kind of Holocaust for country club Republicans. Fewer and fewer college educated professionals (especially women) are willing to self-identify as supporters of the GOP, and it’s not possible for Republican candidates to hold these seats based on fire-breathing opponents of immigration.

The very fact that Trump dominated the Republican primaries showed how marginalized college educated people have become in the Republican Party, but the process has only continued since Trump has been in office. The typical Trump supporter had complete disdain for all Trump’s establishmentarian rivals for the nomination, and that contempt extended (and extends) to the Republican leadership in Congress. They have never liked Mitch McConnell and they especially hate Paul Ryan for abandoning Trump after the Access Hollywood tape came out. They don’t support Republicans in Washington except in the very limited sense that they rely on them to protect the president and enact his agenda. This is why the Republicans want to use the threat of impeachment as a motivational tool, because Trump’s voters might turn out to deal with that threat but they’re not reliably going to turn out to support a congressperson or senator that they don’t even like.

From the Republicans’ perspective, accountability for the president isn’t a priority because Trump supporters do not care about his crimes, and they need Trump’s supporters to come out to vote in November. Even so, they realize that they have a big problem:

Republican strategist Josh Holmes, who advises Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), attempted to downplay the political cost of the convictions.

“I don’t think it’s the atomic bomb that others have suggested,” he said. “I don’t think anybody who is a Trump supporter has been sitting around for the past six months banking their support on the president’s denial of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.”

Holmes said he feared, though, that Trump could lose much-needed votes in suburban swing districts.

They hope the prospect of impeachment will help turnout, but they have a backup plan to mobilize Trump’s base.

Republican candidates are joining the White House’s campaign to offer public support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), warn of the dangers of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang and highlight sensational crimes involving undocumented immigrants.

The aim is to draw a sharp contrast with Democrats over enforcement of border control laws. Republican strategists view immigration as a deeply emotional issue that motivates the conservative base, and they have delighted as liberals push Democrats to the left as a reaction to Trump’s presidency.

“It’s a galvanizing issue among the base,” said Josh Holmes, a top political adviser for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who previously served as his chief of staff. “The Democrats have increasingly migrated to a place on this issue far from where your everyday American is. The contrast is mind-boggling.”

The Democrats’ strategists aren’t stupid. They understand the Republicans’ two-part strategy for boosting turnout and they’re wary about doing their job for them. That’s why they’re tamping down talk of impeachment and discouraging talk about abolishing ICE. They also realize that the Republican donor base is largely satisfied with Trump’s policies and will stick with him up to a point. Of course, they’d be just as happy with Mike Pence, so Trump shouldn’t bank on their loyalty if things get truly dicey.

Of course, if the Democrats don’t show enough principle and fight, they may depress their own turnout, but it does seem sensible to take a wait-and-see approach to any discussion of impeachment. There is no harm in waiting for the evidence before making sweeping promises to the voters.

The one thing I don’t think is helpful is to continuously talk about how the Republicans in the Senate will never convict Trump even if the House impeaches him with the support of the American people. They will certainly be reluctant to do so for all the reasons I’ve already suggested, but it will really come down to the facts of the case.

If Trump is proven to have actively coordinated with the Russians despite all his denials, and if the people who were responsible for this are willing to attest to what they did, then Mike Pence is going to look like a very attractive option. To be honest, Pence is much better liked and a better ideological fit for congressional Republicans than Trump.  The reason they stick with Trump is because their own ineptitude weakened them so much that Trump was able to take over their party, and now they can’t win without his supporters.  They’re caught in a vice.

In the end, after they’ve taken their losses despite sticking with Trump, the remaining senators are not going to be eager to go into 2020 with Trump as their champion.  Since they don’t like or trust him anyway, if they can’t win with or without him, it’ll be far preferable to lose without him. There is a limit to how much shit they will eat to defend a man like Trump, and if the evidence comes in and it’s strong enough, there will be enough Republican senators who will choose removal over arguing that Trump should remain in office despite having done what he was accused of doing and then lying about it for two years.

Of course, they still won’t want to have to vote on it, so they’ll do what Barry Goldwater did in 1974 and go tell the president that he should resign.

All of this, of course, depends on the strength of the evidence. If close coordination with the Russians isn’t proved then there is almost no limit to how many crimes and outrages Trump can commit without worrying that the Senate will convict him. The GOP proves this anew almost every single day, including in their reaction to the Manafort and Cohen stories.

Oui has an excellent diary up on the lack of progress made by May’s summer diplomatic offensive trying to reset the Brexit negotiations and make her already “dead in the water” Chequers strategy the basis for future discussions. May managed to achieve an opening negotiating position 18 months too late, only to have it thrashed by her own side before she could even bring it to Europe.

In terms of a coherent negotiating strategy, May also got her timing all wrong. Having given Barnier his negotiating brief, European leaders were hardly going to undermine the Brussels negotiating process by overruling current EU negotiating positions. Getting an agreed negotiating position among 27 nations and other significant actors is actually a considerable (if unsung) achievement: Why would EU leaders want to unravel all of that and throw their side of the negotiation into utter confusion, possibly precipitating Barnier’s resignation, and playing into classic UK divide and conquer tactics?

There is a scenario where it might make sense for the EU Council to take over the conduct of the negotiations from the Commission, but only in the context of a last minute crisis where the UK needs a symbolic concession to bring an agreement over the line. “Putting one over” hated Brussels Bureaucrats might be sufficient to sugar a very bitter pill from a UK point of view providing it with a PR victory even if it makes little difference to the substance of the Brexit agreement. May must be seen to have gone “to the ends of the earth” in order to get the best deal possible.

It is worth noting, in this context, that Article 50 makes no mention of the EU Commission whatsoever. It is merely an administrative convenience that the Council has delegated the conduct of the negotiation to the EU’s chief administrative arm, although Commission support for any final Brexit deal might make it easier to achieve the required threshold of an enhanced qualified majority as defined by Article 238(3)(b) of the Lisbon Treaty.

An enhanced qualified majority is defined as “at least 72% of the members of the Council representing Member States comprising at least 65% of the population of these States.”  as opposed to the Article 238(3)(a) weighted majority requirement of “at least 55% of the members of the Council representing the participating Member States, comprising at least 65% of the population of these States.” Normally an enhanced qualified majority is only required where the “where the Council does not act on a proposal from the Commission or from the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy” but it is a requirement for an exit agreement in any case.

Others here may correct me on this, but I have not come across much informed speculation as to what actually transpired at these recent private bilateral Head of Government meetings with May. They may have been little more than courtesy meetings to give May the opportunity to look important and let off some steam. The UK would be making a grave error to mistake such courtesy for weakness.

So far the EU27’s conduct of these negotiations has been little short of exemplary. All the EU leaders seem clear that the future of the EU depends on maintaining solidarity in these negotiations and ensuring that Brexit is not allowed to undermine the cohesion and functioning of the EU27 afterwards. All are clear that Brexit will result in at least some economic dislocation for their economies, but that this is less bad than allowing it to undermine the functioning of the EU as a whole.

The sad fact, from an EU27 perspective, is that Brexit cannot be allowed to be a success for the UK, as this would undermine the raison d’être of the EU27 as a whole. An EU27 may be a less optimal arrangement than an EU28 with the UK included, but it is a lot preferable to the break-up of the EU altogether.

Jeremy Hunt has already started the blame games in preparation of a no deal Brexit, but it is not Tory hardliners who would benefit most from such an outcome despite their professed alacrity at such an outcome.  The EU as a political project would benefit most, as it does from Trump’s depredations, despite the short term economic damage such an outcome would also do to the EU27.

In this context, the UK’s attempts to build an alliance with Trump’s USA could also not be going any less well. Not only does Trump’s Presidency appear to be unraveling, but Trumps’s advice that the UK should sue the EU rather than negotiate, could not have been less helpful. What Court should the UK sue in, the European Court of Justice whose jurisdiction May is determined to leave? And on what basis? Article 50 gives no guarantees, and even provides for a no-deal Brexit.

And so it is that both sides are now stepping up their preparations for a no-deal Brexit, both to prepare for the increasing probability of such an outcome, and to concentrate the minds of partisans on both sides on the actual real world consequences of such an outcome. From having been described by Liam Fox as the easiest thing in human history, a Brexit deal is becoming almost impossible to agree.

The UK’s resilient economic performance to date, albeit less robust than any of its G7 competitors has so far insulated UK voters from the worst consequences of Brexit with the result that the has only been a relatively small movement in opinion polling on Brexit to date.

The EU27 may well come to the view that it will still take some years for UK attitudes and expectations to change to a sufficient degree to make a post-Brexit deal with the UK a realistic possibility. Given the likelihood that a no-deal split will be extremely acrimonious and lead to a post Brexit surge in British nationalism, it may be a very long time before a more constructive EU/UK relationship become politically possible.

In this context May’s summer summit diplomacy must be seen as an act of desperation rather than a shrewd political move with a realistic prospect of success. The reality is that all sides are now preparing for an almost inevitable failure. The UK may be hoping that the EU will ignore its own rules and do business as before in the event of a no-deal Brexit, but that is simply not going to happen. For one thing EU firms would not be able to compete with UK firms after a further, likely, devaluation of Sterling by up to 20%. Even where WTO tariffs do not apply, the EU will have to erect non-tariff barriers if only to protect its own industries.

Ireland could be the big loser in all of this, but that is a topic for another diary!