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The 2018 Trump Presidency thread

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Trump’s CDC Chief Resigns After Buying Tobacco Stocks

In a fascinating moment of unintended candor, the nation’s new Health and Human Services Secretary announced that the head of the Centers of Disease Control would resign due to what he termed “complex financial interests.” And what exactly were those interests? Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, the former top health commissioner of Georgia, bought and traded tobacco stocks after taking the helm at the CDC, a post that ostensibly put her in charge of the nation’s anti-smoking efforts. Politico first reported Fitzgerald’s stock trades on Tuesday.

“You don’t buy tobacco stocks when you are the head of the CDC. It’s ridiculous; it gives a terrible appearance,” Richard Painter, a Republican who served as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer during the second Bush administration, told Politico. “It stinks to high heaven,” he added.

Since the Surgeon General of the United States first detailed the ways smoking could be harmful to one’s health in 1964, the CDC and other government agencies have as a matter of policy tried to curtail smoking, often to the displeasure of Big Tobacco.

While the tobacco stock purchases–which occurred only one month after Fitzgerald took office–were eye-poppingly problematic, they were by no means her only “complex financial interest.” Fitzgerald had also lately invested in other companies whose businesses would likely fall under her purview, Politico reports. And Congress is looking at whether she divested previously-held investments in a prompt and forthright manner.

This last point gets at a larger issue, which is that officials throughout the Trump administration have routinely skirted conflict of interest laws. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ruled that student-loan companies could run up fees for borrowers, in a move that would likely benefit one of her top advisors; he abruptly resigned as the new rule was being drafted. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross faced questions after the Paradise Papers report appeared to identify previously undisclosed offshore holdings. And China rewarded Ivanka Trump’s company with trademarks on the very day the White House advisor and her husband and colleague Jared Kushner dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Finally, how could we forget about the president himself, who charges taxpayers for the many restorative trips he takes to Mar-a-Lago and his other resort and golf properties? There’s also the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Blocks from the White House, the hotel has low occupancy yet charges high room rates in head-scratching defiance of the law of supply and demand. The hotel has, over the past year, become the go-to venue for clients ranging from foreign governments to political action committees to Republican members of Congress.

That all of these people who have, shall we say, “complex financial interests” tied to the government should choose the president’s hotel (leased federal property, mind you) for their functions is hardly a coincidence. It’s simply one more stark illustration of the fact that in the current administration, officials do not feel honor-bound to play by established ethical norms. The fact that the head of the CDC resigned over her tobacco stock is good news in that it reasserts the idea of proper conduct. But it’s also bad news in that it shows just how brazen the culture of Washington has, in only a year, become.
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The Onion is gonna go out of business at this rate.
 
How so?

I've been voting since 2004. It has never been any other way.

I have voted outside of the 2 major political parties in EVERY single election.

I am a registered democrat so that I may vote in the primaries and I voted for Bernie.

The system is fucked. Don't tell me that there are only two choices because of some self-fulfilling prophecy. That is wrong. There are 2 viable candidates because that is how it is set up, not because I say it is so.
 
The only reason there's only 2 "viable" candidates is the widespread belief that theres only 2 viable candidates. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy in action.

Granted theres other factors, like our winner-take-all election system, but shit like blaming 3rd party voters for a candidate's loss supports that the real cause here is the self-fulfilling prophecy.
 
I'm not usually one to suggest copying Australia with almost anything. But I think our system might work a lot better if it used a preferential system like Australia. I'm not suggesting switching to a parliamentary system, we'd keep the system we have, but add some kind of preferential system to the elections so more than 2 candidates stand a chance of winning.

While we're at it we could copy the other good things they have, like better harm reduction policy for drug users. Maybe some of the medical system though that might prove even more controversial than changing the elections.

I agree with tathra that it's the belief that's the underlying cause. But I don't think widespread change of that belief is a feasible solution. Having a system where you could vote first for independents then have that vote transfer to a candidate that's more popular would allow people to vote independent without losing their vote making third party candidates more electable.
 
It's called different things in different places. Whatever you call it, seems like it'd help a lot with fixing the problems of the 2 party system.
 
Trump?s South Korea ambassador pick opposed attacking the North. So Trump dumped him.
In his first State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump devoted a large amount of time to discussing the situation with North Korea. He described the country much in the same way that George W. Bush had described Iraq in 2002: as a brutal, irrational regime whose weapons pose an intolerable threat to the American homeland.

But though it was worrisome to hear Trump make a thinly veiled case for another preventive war, that wasn?t the most troubling piece of news about North Korea policy to come out last night.

Just before Trump?s speech began, the Washington Post reported that Trump?s pick for ambassador to South Korea ? Victor Cha, one of America?s most respected North Korea experts ? was being withdrawn. The reason cited by the Post was a chilling one: Cha had opposed the administration?s proposal for a limited military strike in a private meeting. Cha all but confirmed this himself a few hours after the news broke when he published an op-ed in the same paper criticizing the idea of attacking North Korea.

Cha?s withdrawal seriously worried South Korea?s government, which had formally approved the pick. It also terrified North Korea experts, who saw it as a clear sign that the war talk wasn?t merely chatter.

?This [withdrawing Cha as a nominee] suggests that the administration is seriously considering ... a strike,? says Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.

Steve Saideman, a scholar of US foreign policy at Carleton University, put it more bluntly on Twitter: ?A new Korean war is now perhaps more likely than not in 2018.?

Why the Victor Cha episode makes it seem like war is coming

Cha is a leading North Korea expert. A longtime scholar-practitioner, he served in the George W. Bush administration from 2004 to 2007 as the National Security Council?s director for Asian affairs and is currently a professor at Georgetown University.

He?s also on the hawkish end of the North Korea expert spectrum. He?s endorsed taking aggressive steps to protect against the North?s nuclear program, like setting up a naval cordon around North Korea to intercept any nuclear material it tries to sell to terrorists or other rogue regimes.

A North Korea hawk who?s both deeply experienced and widely respected seems like a perfect pick for the Trump administration, so it?s telling that Cha?s nomination was apparently derailed because he was too dovish for the Trump team.

One detail of the incident, reported by the Financial Times, really hammers this point home:
According to the two people familiar with the discussions between Mr Cha and the White House, he was asked by officials whether he was prepared to help manage the evacuation of American citizens from South Korea ? an operation known as non-combatant evacuation operations ? that would almost certainly be implemented before any military strike. The two people said Mr Cha, who is seen as on the hawkish side of the spectrum on North Korea, had expressed his reservations about any kind of military strike.


This account sure makes it seem like the Trump administration is imminently preparing for an attack on North Korea ? to the point that they?re seriously considering the logistics of how to protect the large number of American civilians in the South. Cha objected to the idea of an attack on North Korea, which seems to have disqualified him from consideration.

The fact that Cha published an op-ed afterward decrying war is also significant. He specifically criticized the logic behind a ?bloody nose? strike ? a limited attack on North Korean military and nuclear installations that aims not to escalate the situation to all-out war, but show Pyongyang that further attempts to advance its nuclear program will be met with force. Apparently, it?s the type of military action that the Trump team is leaning toward ? and Cha thinks its too dangerous.

?If we believe that Kim [Jong Un] is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind?? Cha wrote. ?And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary?s rational understanding of signals and deterrence??

The fact that Cha was dismissed after airing this kind of criticism internally is, experts say, a clear sign that the administration is taking the notion of war very seriously.

?That Victor Cha felt compelled to go on the record is a sign of how frighteningly real the risk of strikes really is,? writes Mira Rapp-Hooper, a North Korea expert at Yale.

Even if war isn?t imminent, the Cha situation is troubling

It?s also possible that this threat of force is a bluff, and that Cha?s dismissal is part of the Trump administration?s posturing.

?The president is really trying to give the impression that war is possible in order to intimidate North Korea into behaving more cautiously,? says Jenny Town, assistant director of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins. ?In such a strategy, you can?t have naysayers, especially in your own administration, if you want the threat to be credible.?

But if this is true, and many informed observers think it isn?t, then taking Cha out of consideration is still dangerous. The more signs the Trump administration sends that they?re serious about war, the more likely they are to start one unintentionally.

?The problem of such a strategy, of course, is that in the process of trying to establish a credible threat, North Korea might actually start to believe him ? and instead of being intimidated, will up the ante more,? Town adds. ?The question being, at what point do we accidentally stumble into an unnecessary and completely avoidable war??

The lack of an ambassador to Seoul makes this scenario more likely. Ambassadors play critical roles both in reassuring allies and in conveying allied views back to Washington. It?s very rare to have no ambassador in place for a country that?s an important ally at this point in a new administration ? for good reason.

?Given the tensions on the peninsula and the importance of the US-Korea alliance, it is worse than diplomatic malpractice that there remains no US ambassador in Seoul,? Reif, the Arms Control Association expert, says.

In the event of a crisis between the US and North Korea, Cha likely would have been an important voice for caution inside the administration. He also would have been able to efficiently convey vital information about the North from the South Korean government to the highest levels of the US government, as well as convey the South Korean government?s skepticism about any kind of military escalation.

Cha?s appointment, in short, would have provided a critical check on a crisis spinning out of control. There?s no chance of that now.

?To drop an ambassador nomination for a major treaty ally in the midst of a major crisis is unprecedented,? writes Abraham Denmark, who served as deputy assistant secretary for East Asia in the Obama administration. ?The fact that it?s someone as knowledgeable and qualified as Victor Cha should give everyone pause.?
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tathra said:
True, but its the same idea no matter what you call it, and having a name for it makes looking into it easy. Maine voted to implement it but their legislature blocked and delayed it.
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All I'm saying is it has several names, preferential voting, instant run off voting, transferable voting, ranked choice voting. Searching any of those terms will get you to the same place. In Australia it's called preferential voting so that's the term im used too. 99% of the time if there's a difference I use the American English spelling and terminology since that's what I grew up with, unless I think it'll confuse my audience.
 
It just doesn't stop with this guy

“Tonight,” he said, “I call on the congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.”

By design, it is easy to overlook the true significance of the second half of that phrase. But dwell on it for a moment, and imagine what this would actually look like in practice. Under Trump’s proposal, any Cabinet secretary could decide that, say, a law enforcement official investigating the president had “undermined the public trust” or “failed the American people”—and fire him on the spot. In other words, Trump is calling for an end to any semblance of independence for the IRS, the FBI, the Department of Justice, or any other federal agency.
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JessFR said:
I'm not usually one to suggest copying Australia with almost anything. But I think our system might work a lot better if it used a preferential system like Australia. I'm not suggesting switching to a parliamentary system, we'd keep the system we have, but add some kind of preferential system to the elections so more than 2 candidates stand a chance of winning.

While we're at it we could copy the other good things they have, like better harm reduction policy for drug users. Maybe some of the medical system though that might prove even more controversial than changing the elections.

I agree with tathra that it's the belief that's the underlying cause. But I don't think widespread change of that belief is a feasible solution. Having a system where you could vote first for independents then have that vote transfer to a candidate that's more popular would allow people to vote independent without losing their vote making third party candidates more electable.
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Yes but we also have the two party preferred system which pretty much is a system set up to make sure only Labor or the LNP can take office much like what Jah is talking about in the states
 
consumer said:
Yes but we also have the two party preferred system which pretty much is a system set up to make sure only Labor or the LNP can take office much like what Jah is talking about in the states
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Take what office? Third parties have won in both the senate and House of Representatives. Assuming you mean the office of prime minister, the office of head of government. In the actual Australian system, the head of government, the prime minister, is chosen by the party dominant in the House of Representatives with no direct input from the voters, and the electorates for the House of Representatives are too small for preferential transfer deals to be effective, so a third party can't ever win enough seats to be dominant in the house of representitives. In short, it's the rest of the system prevents preferential voting from getting a head of government that isn't one of the two major party's, not the preferential part. The preferential part works, but only with a large voting pools where you can have lots of third parties making deals like in the senate. Or hypothetically, the presidency.

It's not an inherent problem of preferential voting, just preferential voting in a parlamentry system. You can't really compare the US and parlamentry systems like this. Two party preferred just refers to the final two candidates left after preferences, it doesn't mean only the two major parties can win. Third party candidates have won in Australia in both Houses of Parliament because they were one of the two after 2PP.

It does however raise the problems with applying it to the American system though, which is that the president isn't directly voted for by the people either. To apply it in the US, we'd either have to do away with the electoral college and all the states rights issues that come with it, meaning a referendum where most of the states would have to vote to lose power. And that'll never happen. Or much more plausibly, we keep the electoral system, and like medical marijuana have to fight for a preferential voting system in all 50 states.

There are other issues with applying it to the electoral system too, but they're solvable, they've just never been tested because the current system doesn't potentially create conditions where they can happen. I'm largely talking about smaller candidates fielding slates of electors.
 
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JessFR said:
It does however raise the problems with applying it to the American system though, which is that the president isn't directly voted for by the people either. To apply it in the US, we'd either have to do away with the electoral college and all the states rights issues that come with it, meaning a referendum where most of the states would have to vote to lose power. And that'll never happen. Or much more plausibly, we keep the electoral system, and like medical marijuana have to fight for a preferential voting system in all 50 states.
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The national popular vote interstate compact will make the electoral college moot. Only needs a majority of electoral college votes worth of states to sign on for it to take effect.
 
tathra said:
The national popular vote interstate compact will make the electoral college moot. Only needs a majority of electoral college votes worth of states to sign on for it to take effect.
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I'd be a lot more supportive if the website would spend less time bashing the current system and trying to sell me on being supportive and tell me what it actually DOES. I mean, I was able to successfully guess what they were doing as soon as they explained they only need half of the electoral votes for it to go into effect. But I still can't find where it actually says it on the website.

Anyways. I find this quite fascinating. While I mildly support the electoral college system, I can't deny having a level of respect for this on the grounds that it's gaming the electoral college system to defeat the electoral college system. But it's the same kind of respect I afford a brilliant scam. Not saying this is a scam, just that my respect for it is "I respect the diabolical brilliance" respect.

I do find it a little disturbing though. Everything about it reflects an "ends justify the means" thinking. It's ok to use the very thing people hate about the electoral college to defeat the electoral college. It's ok to use manipulative social advertising if it's for a good outcome.

I'm not saying it's wrong, honestly I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I hadn't heard of it till now and will need time to think about it. I admire the cleverness. If your goal is to get a direct presidential election even in practice at all costs, it's a pretty brilliant way to go about doing it.

My main concern about it is in how it feels like someone went "these tactics are so manipulative and evil, but very effective. So I should use them to fight fire with fire". Like I said, I don't have much of an opinion yet. But it's still very interesting so thanks for pointing it out.

Something I've always been frustrated by about opinions of the electoral college, is almost everyone's opinions are self serving. You support it if having it benefits your preferred candidate, and hate it for the opposite reason. But I've never met anyone besides myself that clearly supports it on principle even if its existence makes it harder for your preferred candidate to win.

I still mostly support it even after trumps win, in spite of my very public hate of trump. Cause I worry about oppression by the majority. The same thing that makes independent candidates unelectable.

Even if I didn't support it though, something feels wrong to me about using the electoral college system to defeat it like this. It feels wrong. I'm not saying it is wrong, just that that's my initial emotional reaction to it. It's fair to say that doing the right thing the "wrong" way in this instance is probably the only way the right thing will actually happen.
 
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