Month: September 2018

Both sides in the Brexit negotiations have been hyping the risk of a no deal Brexit and becoming more explicit in discussing the economic damage it will do. This is to be expected  in the run up to the end of the negotiations, if only to soften up opponents of a deal.

“There is no alternative”, Mrs. May can be expected to say if and when negotiators finally come to a deal: The economic consequences of no deal are too awful to contemplate, a point made clear by the publication of the first of 84 studies on the economic impact of a no deal Brexit.

All of this may very well be true, particularly in the short term. But are there longer term benefits to a no deal Brexit than can overcome any short term disadvantages? This is certainly the theory which arch-Brexiteers cling to when opposing the compromises any deal would entail.

They too can be suspected of tactical maneuvering, both to stiffen the resolve of British negotiators to hold out for a better deal, and to absolve themselves of any responsibility when any final, messy, compromise deal is done.

But let us take their objections at face value, for the moment, and examine their claim that a sovereign UK, free of any entanglement with the EU, could be much more successful, economically and politically, on the world stage.
The common wisdom points to a UK in gradual decline, economically and politically, when the UK was last entirely sovereign: before it joined the EU in 1973. Since then it has lost the remains of its empire, its industrial base, and much of its influence on the world stage. Former colonies like India, Pakistan, Australia, and South Africa have become much more independent and influential.

Within the EU, on the other hand, the UK has been able to push for the rapid expansion of the EU eastwards, the creation of the Single Market and Customs Union, and the adoption of English as the working language of key EU institutions. Politically the push for Scottish independence has been contained, and the Northern Ireland  troubles have been brought to an end.

What’s not to like, from a UK perspective? Apparently, rather a lot, if the Brexiteers are to be believed. Freed from meddling Brussels bureaucrats, the UK will apparently be able to negotiate much more advantageous trade deals, keep out undesirable aliens, and “take back control” over its own foreign and security policies.

“How has that been going?” The EU may well be inclined to ask, a few years from now.

First of all, it is difficult to see how the UK, a market of 65 Million people, can negotiate more advantageous trade deals than the EU with 450 Million people.  It would take spectacular incompetence on the part of EU trade negotiators for that to be the case – and they have a lot of experience of negotiating trade deals, whereas the UK has none.

Secondly, immigration from within the EU has generally been of highly qualified professionals or hard working eastern Europeans prepared to do manual agricultural jobs Britons have shown little enthusiasm for doing. Their numbers have already been in decline since Brexit was announced, partly because they feel unwelcome, partly because of the decline in Sterling, and partly because their prospects elsewhere are improving with a gradual rise in EU employment levels.

Many UK farmers, employers and the NHS have been sounding the alarm that they cannot sustain output and services without these workers, who have cost the UK little to bring up, educate and train, and who generally contribute more in output and taxes than they cost in terms of the consumption of state health, education and social welfare services.

Thirdly, the UK’s foreign policies adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria have not been spectacular successes of late, and Trump shows little inclination to treat the UK as anything other than a colony in future US adventurism. What has the average UK citizen to gain from all of this?

All international forecasters predict significant short/medium term economic losses for the UK, and it is difficult to see how those losses can be made good. The above chart dates from 2016, but a a recent Financial Times analysis suggests that the UK economy has already suffered a Brexit hit of between 1 and 2% of GDP.

However because the UK entered the Brexit negotiations with strong momentum, these reductions have resulted in a slowdown of UK growth relative to its G7 competitors, but not an outright recession. Record employment levels mean that the political impact has, to date, been relatively small.

All of which has meant that the UK has been able to adopt a relatively insouciant approach to the Brexit negotiations to date, up to and including a certain alacrity about the impact of a no deal Brexit if that is the outcome of the negotiations.

This is in spite of economic predictions that estimate the impact of Brexit on long term EU growth of c. 1.5% and anything from 4 to 10% on the UK. Economic predictions don’t change voter preferences, felt realities do.

Given these are long term scenarios, spread over many years, the impact will hardly be felt in most EU countries, except for specific sectors. Ireland is the only EU country which suffers a comparable level of damage to the UK, and given Irish growth has been averaging over 5% in recent years, some cooling off may not be an entirely bad thing, even from an Irish perspective.

And while there is some very justified skepticism over Irish GDP figures, especially 2015/6, employment figures suggest a similar trend:

And the unemployment rate amplifies this:

So the real problem for Ireland is less the overall macro effect of a hard Brexit on the Irish economy,  but on the specific impacts on our agri-food exports, subject to the highest WTO tariffs, and based in rural communities with few alternative employments. Ireland already suffers from an Urban Rural divide and gross income inequalities between Dublin and city based financial services, Big Pharma, and IT industries and more rural agri-food and service industries.

So the political impact of a hard Brexit on Ireland would be major, and that is before one factors in the impact on the Northern Ireland border and on peace and stability in N. Ireland itself. Ireland will require a special dispensation from the EU to mitigate the worst impact of Brexit  and this may include a limited level of continuing free trade across the border for goods not destined for the rest of the EU.

But presuming these intra-EU issues can be managed, what has the EU really got to lose from a hard no deal Brexit? Why would the EU want to encourage UK exports to the EU aided by perhaps a 30% cumulative Sterling devaluation rendering EU competitors un-viable? Why not maximize the opportunity to replace UK exports of goods and services with indigenous EU products and services? Can the EU really afford to continue being dependent on a non-member for the production of vital goods and services?

But most importantly of all, why would the EU want to assist the UK in “making a success of Brexit” when that would undermine the very raison d’être of the EU itself? Whereas the UK Brexiteer case for a no deal Brexit is all bluff and bluster, could it be that the EU case is very real indeed?

British expectations for a deal now appear to be wildly unrealistic, involving, as they do, the undermining of the “four freedoms” underpinning the Single Market. Is the only way of achieving a more realistic deal for the EU to wait a few years until the real effects of a no deal Brexit have worked their way into the UK body politic and expectations have been reduced to a point the EU can concede without damaging it’s own internal coherence and stability?

Of course it would seem grossly revangiste for the EU to pursue such a strategy as a first choice, any hint of which EU negotiators have been careful to eschew. But when UK Brexiteers extol the virtues of a no-deal Brexit, they should perhaps be more careful as to what they wish for. A no deal Brexit may very well be what they will get, and their hopes that German car industry executives will come to their aid may be very mistaken indeed.

And with Trump threatening to withdraw from the WTO, the “WTO option” so beloved by hard Brexiteers may not be the “worst case” scenario a no deal Brexit could usher in. If the UK defaults on its €40 Billion exit payment, there may be no incentive for the EU to grant the UK any kind of “most favoured nation” market access at all. No deal doesn’t just mean no deal. It could mean very rapidly deteriorating relationships, mutual recriminations, and ultimately, a trade war.

Brexit may  be a full frontal attack on everything the EU stands for, but there is no reason why the EU should fulfill UK stereotypes of an ineffectual bureaucracy and fail to fight back. Brexit may very well become the impetus the EU needs to forge a new unity of purpose and collective self interest. That self-interest may not include giving an ex-member and chief critic an easy ride.

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was married for thirty-eight years. Her divorce was finalized in 2013. Who knows what goes on between two people or why such a long relationship might ultimately fall apart? They certainly endured through some tough times. On June 23, 2000, a jury found her husband guilty on twenty-three of the tax evasion charges brought against him. Like Paul Manafort, he beat the rap on ten counts. Albert Pirro was sentenced to twenty-nine months in prison.

Jeanine thought the case was trumped up. She called the investigation “invasive and hostile” and the prosecutors “desperate.”  In other words, she had some pretty good training for her current job as official Fox News on-air defender of the White House against the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

Last night, she went after Jeff Sessions in a big way. Speaking directly to the attorney general, she mocked him for refusing to resign his position despite the fact that the president has made his desires clear:

“What don’t you get? Have you have no self-esteem, no self-regard, self respect?” she said. “Where is your dignity? Why would you stay in a job where you’re not wanted? A job you took under false pretenses, knowing you wouldn’t be able to do the whole job?”

This is actually a pretty good set of questions. Why does Jeff Sessions persist in his job knowing that the president loathes him, considers him incompetent and disloyal, and most definitely wants him to quit? Pirro took him to task for his lack of self-respect, and then she added some more insults at the president’s behest just to drive the point home:

Pirro said Sessions “groveled and begged” Trump for the job and was given it out of pity. She derided his service in the Senate, saying he did “basically nothing” and “did not deserve to be Attorney General.”

The “gave the job out of pity” jab is straight stenography from the president’s mouth and the kind of retroactive pettiness and rewriting of history that he’s well-known for committing, but insulting Sessions’s performance as a senator is new line of attack. Trump, through Pirro, is saying “You suck and you have always sucked.”

From here, things got even uglier:

Pirro then said that the Russian collusion investigation is “over” and that the “unhinged conspiracy theory is dead.”

Pirro then warned Sessions that Trump would come for him.

“Can’t you see the damage to this country by this fraudulent investigation that you breathed life into by allowing them to run amok,” Pirro said. “This country is being torn apart.”

Pirro then appeared to threaten Sessions.

“If you and your pals think you’re getting to the president, think again. This president can take the shots, he’s done it his whole life,” she said. “Never underestimate him or his powers.”

In this last bit, the president (again, through Pirro) is casting Sessions as a conspirator against his presidency. Sessions and his pals think that they will “get” the president but they are underestimating his vast powers.

Maybe this how Trump now views things. If Sessions won’t quit, it must be because he’s secretly part of the deep state cabal that is trying to use a “dead” and “unhinged” conspiracy theory and “fraudulent” investigation to remove Trump from power.

There’s one odd aspect to this that is easy to overlook. President Trump could fire Jeff Sessions today if he wanted to. There are two reasons why he doesn’t.

One is that he’s been warned that he would not be able to appoint a successor. But, following an intense White House lobbying effort, the Senate Republicans have begun to soften on that threat, with Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley recently reversing himself and saying that he actually could find time to confirm a replacement before the end of the year and a handful of other senators stepping up to say that the president deserves an attorney general he can trust. It’s still not clear that he’d have the votes though, so this is still a consideration.

The other reason Trump won’t fire Sessions is that it could be construed as an effort to obstruct the investigation. But this isn’t an actual reason not to fire him because merely by explaining that he’s angry that Sessions hasn’t obstructed the investigation, Trump has indicted himself already on this count. Firing Sessions would be a superfluous act. Everyone knows he wants him gone so he can have a new attorney general confirmed who will shut the investigation down.

When Pirro argues that Sessions accepted the job of attorney general under “false pretenses,” knowing that he “wouldn’t be able to do the whole job,” she’s echoing what the president has said publicly and privately countless times. When she say that Sessions “breathed life” into the investigation and allowed it “to run amok,” she’s criticizing him using the president’s own words. And those words mean “you were hired to shut down any investigation of how we won the presidency and you allowed it to continue.”

That’s the worst example of a conspiracy to obstruct justice that can be conceived. If you can hire the prosecutor and direct his activities, you will never be indicted for any crime no matter how heinous. Trump is arguing that he has the right to obstruct justice and that Sessions was supposed to be his instrument for that purpose. That kind of behavior is impeachable. Forcing Sessions out with threats and insults isn’t materially different from just firing him.

It also is more than enough evidence that Trump would expect any replacement for Sessions to make obstruction of justice their first order of business. I think Senator Susan Collins put this most succinctly:

…Susan Collins told reporters that she would discourage Trump from ousting Sessions, given the president’s repeated criticism over his decision to step aside from the investigation of Russian election meddling (ultimately leading to the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III).

“It certainly would send the wrong message,” the Maine Republican said. “Because the basis of the president’s criticism of the attorney general is that he recused himself, appropriately so, from the Russia investigation.”

“I don’t see the president being able to get someone else confirmed as attorney general were he to fire Jeff Sessions,” she said.

If anything, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska was even more emphatic on this point in a speech he gave on the Senate floor:

“Bizarrely, there are people in this body now talking like the attorney general will be fired, should be fired, I’m not sure how to interpret the comments of the last couple of hours,” Sasse said. “I would just like to say, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, and as a member of this body, I find it really difficult to envision any circumstance where I would vote to confirm a successor to Jeff Sessions if he is fired because he is executing his job, rather than choosing to act in a partisan hack.”

“The attorney general should not be fired for acting honorably and for being faithful to the rule of law,” Sasse said.

The uncomfortable truth is that Senators Collins and Sasse may be all that stands between a functional system of government and a complete breakdown of our system in favor of an unaccountable and dictatorial strongman. If Jeanine Pirro gave the same performance on Egyptian or Turkish or Filipino or Russian television, we’d recognize it as fascism because the threats would be taken at face value as serious. All Trump needs to make his threats real at this point is the compliance of the Senate.

Corruption at the highest levels in Washington DC … why I’m NOT surprised … FBI and IC 🙂

○ American media are lapdogs of political elites | De Volkskrant – July 27, 2016 | [Dutch]

FBI Agents tried to flip Russian oligarch Deripaska to get to Trump | The New York Times |

In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations of extortion, bribery and even murder.

They also thought he might make a good source.

Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant.

More below the fold …

The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men …

Two of the players in the effort were Bruce G. Ohr, the Justice Department official who has recently become a target of attacks by Mr. Trump, and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier of purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The systematic effort to win the cooperation of the oligarchs, which has not previously been revealed, does not appear to have scored any successes. And in Mr. Deripaska’s case, he told the American investigators that he disagreed with their theories about Russian organized crime and Kremlin collusion in the campaign, a person familiar with the exchanges said.

The person added that Mr. Deripaska even notified the Kremlin about the American efforts to cultivate him.

…
The outreach to Mr. Deripaska, who is so close to the Russian president that he has been called “Putin’s oligarch,” was not as much of a long shot as it might have appeared. He had worked with the United States government in the past, including on a thwarted effort to rescue an F.B.I. agent [Robert A. Levinson] captured in Iran, on which he reportedly spent as much as $25 million of his own money.

…
The timeline sketched out by Mr. Ohr shows contacts stretching back to when Mr. Ohr first met Mr. Steele in 2007. It also shows what officials said was the first date on which the two discussed cultivating Mr. Deripaska: a meeting in Washington on Nov. 21, 2014, roughly seven months before Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president.

Mr. Steele served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Russian oligarchs they were seeking to cultivate. He had first met Mr. Ohr years earlier while still serving at MI6, Britain’s foreign spy agency, where he oversaw Russia operations.

…
Mr. Steele helped set up a meeting between the Russian and American officials during the 2015 trip. Mr. Ohr attended the meeting, during which the Americans pressed Mr. Deripaska on the connections between Russian organized crime and Mr. Putin’s government, as well as other issues, according to a person familiar with the events. The person said that Mr. Deripaska told the Americans that their theories were off base and did not reflect how things worked in Russia.

Mr. Deripaska would not agree to a second meeting. But one took place the following year, in September 2016, when F.B.I. agents showed up unannounced at his door in New York.

…
Mr. Deripaska, though, told the F.B.I. agents that while he had no love for Mr. Manafort, with whom he was in a bitter business dispute, he found their theories about his role on the campaign “preposterous.” He also disputed that there were any connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to the person familiar with the exchange.  

Mueller may have a conflict — and it leads directly to Deripaska | The Hill – May 14, 2018 |

In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska [NYT] to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.

…
Some aspects of Deripaska’s help were chronicled in a 2016 book by reporter Barry Meier, but sources provide extensive new information about his role.

They said FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington. Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither involve nor harm his homeland.

“We knew he was paying for his team helping us, and that probably ran into the millions,” a U.S. official involved in the operation confirmed.

Before long, he [Levinson] was retained by the CIA to assist a new unit focusing on illicit international finance, a group that found his comprehensive reports educational and invaluable. By 2006, the Illicit Finance Group had been tasked to gather intel that could be used against the leaders of Iran, and when that responsibility was passed on to Levinson, he made the risky journey to meet an American-born terrorist, an assignment from which he never returned. [Source: The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran]

○ American missing in Iran since 2007 was working for the CIA | The Guardian – Dec. 2013 |

One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.

Deripaska’s lawyer said the Russian ultimately spent $25 million assembling a private search and rescue team that worked with Iranian contacts under the FBI’s watchful eye. Photos and videos indicating Levinson was alive were uncovered.

Then in fall 2010, the operation secured an offer to free Levinson. The deal was scuttled, however, when the State Department become uncomfortable with Iran’s terms, according to Deripaska’s lawyer and the Levinson family.

FBI officials confirmed State hampered their efforts.

Chabad, Vekselberg, Putin and the Schneerson Library

[Update-1]  Rusal Aluminum Merger [Deripaska] and Swiss Glencore

American/Israeli oligarch Marc Rich …

○ Business profile: Marc Rich, Glencore’s fugitive founder

in a merger with Russia’s Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg …

○ August 2006, Russian media reported that SUAL and Rusal were merging, will include the Swiss company Glencore

“Would [the U.S. government] have any concerns about CGI inviting Viktor Vekselberg, President of Renova Group, to attend CGI Annual Meeting in NYC in September?” Desai asks Clinton confidantes Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Michael Fuchs under the subject line “Russia/Viktor Vekselberg?”
[Source: National Review – 2012]

○ DRC Mining Rights and Israel’s Billionaire
○ Marc Rich: controversial commodities trader and former fugitive dies | The Guardian – 2013 |

○ Laundering a Russian Oligarch through Israeli Citizenship

Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy | Politico – Dec. 2017 |

By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a Reuters report.

“There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing,” Brennan said. “And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.”

In practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others.

○ Hezbollah, Drugs, and the Obama Administration: A Closer Look at a Damning Politico Piece | Lawfare – Jan. 30, 2018 |

[Archive key words: Christopher Steele – Steele dossier]

○ British Intelligence Delivers Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’
○ Did MI6/CIA Collude with Chris Steele to Entrap Trump?
○ British Censor, Pablo Miller MI6 and Oui’s Diary

Crap. I’ve got to put my game face on and get back to work.

While the information is mixed, there seems to be a downward trend in President Trump’s approval numbers over the last couple of weeks. I think we’re often left wondering what it will take for a more significant portion of the country to turn its back on the fraudster in the White House, but something seems to be afoot. Still, it’s not really all that important where the polls are now. We want to know where they’ll be when it really matters. And that prognostication has to take into account a lot of coming attractions:

We’re waiting for the rumored Roger Stone indictment to come down, and so is he. We’re waiting for the charges that might be filed against Don Jr. We’re waiting for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to deliver his collusion and obstruction report to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. We’re waiting for Rudolph Giuliani’s counter-report to the Mueller report, which is almost finished even though Rudy hasn’t seen Mueller’s work. We’re waiting for Paul Manafort’s second trial, which starts on September 24, and aren’t sure whether to be happy or blue about his plea deal falling apart.

We’re waiting to see what new fur balls the Michael Cohen prosecutions will cough up and we’re waiting to see if a November red tide will spark the impeachment machinery to life and activate the dozen-and-a-half investigations of Trump World that Axios says the Democrats have dreamed up, wish-list style, on a spreadsheet. We’re waiting for Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House. (One measure of our towering anticipations: It has been decades since anybody looked forward to a Woodward book.)

We’re waiting for President Donald Trump to find new boundaries to melt with his indignation and fury. (“I view it as an illegal investigation,” the president insisted to Bloomberg this week.) We’re waiting for him to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. We’re waiting for him to fire Rosenstein. (At his Thursday rally in Indiana, he threatened to take charge of the Department of Justice and the FBI.)

Most of all, we’re waiting for him to fire Mueller.

I don’t often agree with Megan McArdle, but I think she is doing a good job of trying to look forward:

It’s all too easy to imagine a similar scenario for Democrats intent on impeaching Trump as they come up short looking for Republicans to help them make it across the finish line. But it’s not entirely impossible to picture a few Republicans going along. If Democrats do manage to start impeachment hearings, it would be because — unlike Republicans in 1998 — they’d be coming off a huge midterm win. Public support for impeaching Trump, even taking into account his more favorable polls, would be higher than it ever was for impeaching Clinton.

Trump is in a very unusual situation for an American president. Members of his die-hard base are loyal, but at his peak they were barely a plurality of the party. The rest of his support is purely expedient, interested in getting judges appointed and keeping Democrats out of power. Republicans in Congress are loyal, for now, but only because they’re afraid of his voters.

But by the time Trump faced a Senate trial, that would mean the political calculus had shifted radically. He would have cost them the Congress; there would be no hope of more judges; the 2020 election would seem already lost. And he’d have no reservoir of goodwill in the party, for at every turn he has made a point of attacking and humiliating any Republican he deemed insufficiently obsequious. Just how long will the Coalition of the Unwilling stand by a president who was never really their man?

Assuming the Democrats have a big night in November, the results will cut two ways. On the one hand, if the GOP gets shellacked, that will be a giant rebuke to the president that undercuts him in almost every way imaginable. Trump is doing badly enough managing the Russia investigation as it is, but with a hostile Congress he will have more problems than we can count.

On the other hand, most of the most likely Republican votes to impeach the president will be gone next year either because they have retired or been defeated. What remains of the GOP will be less moderate and, at least in the House, definitionally able to withstand the backlash against his style of governance.

The biggest difference between the effort to remove Trump and the failed effort to remove Bill Clinton is certain to be to the magnitude of the crimes involved. For the most part, Clinton’s guilt was fairly uncontroversial. The main question wasn’t over whether this or that act constituted perjury or obstruction of justice, but over whether any of them amounted to a high crime or misdemeanor. It wasn’t that challenging to argue that Clinton’s failings were basically personal in nature and to convincingly make the case that his opponents had investigated his sex life because they’d failed to find evidence in their Whitewater investigation. It wasn’t painless to give a president a pass for lying under oath, but it wasn’t a hard decision either, especially considering the fact that the people stuck with Clinton.

Any Republican senator thinking of acquitting Trump is going to have a much more difficult decision because giving him a pass on all the things that are likely to be subjects of articles of impeachment will eviscerate all standards about what a president can and cannot do while campaigning or serving in office. If they can dispute the facts, that’s what they’ll do. But if the people accept the facts as presented, the choice will come down to a mix of political and principled considerations, coupled with the fact that very few Republican senators have any genuine loyalty or confidence in the president to begin with.

I’m very cynical about the idea that Republican senators will put principle above party or even put the rule of law above party. But I don’t think these considerations will be entirely absent, and they’ll certainly be available as excuses for doing what the senators genuinely feel ought to be done. The critical decision point, however, will certainly be the perception of self-interest for both the Republican senators individually and for the health of the party overall. Those two considerations have been in a bad and seemingly irreconcilable tension ever since Trump won the nomination, but I think the scales will tip when it becomes clear that individual self-interest won’t be served by acquitting Trump.

I honestly don’t think that Republican senators will have much to fear in primaries in 2020 or 2022 from having voted to remove Trump from office. They may not see it that way right now, but I suspect they’ll be clear on it by the time they have to vote on impeachment. Only about sixteen of them need to vote to convict, and that will not be an unattainable number if the facts come in the way I expect them to come in.

All of this, however, is predicated on the Democrats having a good election night in November. If they don’t, then we can’t expect Congress to do anything but make themselves irrelevant in our system of government.

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.

I’ve concentrated most of my efforts on the room extending forward from the body of the house.  I’ve now completed the facade including the windows and area directly above.  On the right side of the house I have revised the siding with a lit area below and shadow above.  Finally, the small covered area extending from the right side has been completed.

 
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.