Trump’s (Press)‘credentials’ threat is an empty one — and it won’t solve his problems

ThinkProgress

Trump’s (Press)‘credentials’ threat is an empty one — and it won’t solve his problems

Simply put, Donald Trump doesn’t understand how the political press works.

Jason Linkins May 10, 2018

Washington, D.C. May 8th: Donald Trump announces his decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in the diplomatic room at the White House. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

President Donald Trump brought some fresh complaints about the press to Twitter Wednesday morning, seemingly in response to news that broke overnight about the shell company his lawyer and self-styled fixer, Michael Cohen, may have used to facilitate hush-money payoffs to adult film actress Stormy Daniels — as well as some decidedly off-book lobbying fees collected from a handful of companies.

As is his wont, Trump offered another blistering attack on the media, loosed from all capitalization conventions, for continuing to report on him. “91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake),” he wrote, adding, “Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?”

trump tweet: The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

Trump, who’s never given any indication that he distinguishes between negative commentary about him and objectively true facts that cast him in a bad light, essentially told on himself in this instance.

As ThinkProgress’ Aaron Rupar noted, Trump’s outburst was “a major tell,” in that he made it “explicitly” clear “that he considers all negative coverage of him to be fake.”

But attention soon turned to the unsettling aspect of Trump’s interjection, the part where he threatened to take away some unspecified group of reporters’ credentials.

As you might expect, the focus fell on the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), whose members do depend on credentials to work within the White House’s confines. Bloomberg’s senior White House correspondent Margaret Talev, who currently serves as the WHCA’s president, addressed the matter in a statement:

“Some may excuse the president’s inflammatory rhetoric about the media, but just because the president does not like news coverage does not make it fake. A free press must be able to report on the good, the bad, and the momentous and the mundane, without fear or favor. And a president preventing a free and independent press from covering the workings of our republic would be an unconscionable assault on the First Amendment.”

Of course, while an appeal to higher principles provides the obligatory covering of the bases, it doesn’t really resolve the matter, because Trump is immune to such appeals. Nevertheless, all this talk of revoking credentials is something of an empty threat; even if the president does revoke everyone’s credentials, it won’t stem the tide of the coverage he dislikes, and it could even exacerbate the problems he perceives himself to have.

Trump is not like previous presidents, and his relationship with the White House press corps bears the imprint of this abnormality. Trump doesn’t understand that a typical presidential administration has a sort of partnership with the press corps. This doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t somewhat adversarial, and it doesn’t mean that any other press secretary might not try to spin the reporters in the room. But the press corps functionally exists to take down copy: What are the big ideas the administration wants to drive today? What policy initiatives is the president focused on? What responses can the White House offer to the news of the day?

More than anything else, the White House is supposed to give the press corps ideas with which to contend, report out, and follow up on. Every day, there is an opportunity for the president to make an argument, and for a room full of reporters to communicate that argument to their audiences.

But Trump’s frame of reference, as far as the media goes, is rooted in the New York City tabloid wars in which he sparred as a big shot real-estate developer. To Trump, it’s all about primate dominance, and getting in your licks — not about presenting a set of core beliefs, or building a case for a policy idea.

As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told ThinkProgress’ Sam Fulwood in an interview this week, “He’s not attempting to persuade a majority of the country to his side.”

“He’s not engaging in normal persuasion tactics for which approval ratings and polling are the measure of that,” Rosen continued. “He’s trying to cement a psychological bond with his core supporters that can’t be broken.”

The only role the White House press corps can possibly play in the Trump White House, as he has conceived it, is that of a defeated antagonist, plucked as spoils for his base. That’s the entire basis for the threat to their credentials.

But an exiled press corps isn’t going to simply go home and sulk. They are reporters, and they’ll just keep on reporting — now with renewed resolve and a lot more time on their hands. And loosed into the wide world, they’ll just join up with a coterie of other reporters who are already busy applying themselves to the task of keeping the Trump administration honest.

What Trump doesn’t seem to understand is it’s these journalists, outside the briefing room, who have been primarily responsible for serving up the stories that so anger him. Over these reporters, Trump has no leverage. He can’t stop ProPublica from investigating where the funds provided for his inauguration festivities have gone. He has no credential to revoke from the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, who’s currently commanding a deep dive into Trump’s debt.

Of all the stories that have been broken in the wake of Michael Avenatti’s extraordinary reveal of Michael Cohen’s shell corporation, none were written by a reporter who needed to cross the threshold of the briefing room to get it. Pull the press corps’ laminates or don’t, but if there are hits to be had, the hits will keep on coming. The only thing a banished press corps gets you is a diminished capacity to further your own message.

The simple fact of the matter is that if Trump wanted to take a decisive step to end the terrible press he’s gotten of late, he shouldn’t be pulling any reporters’ credentials; he should just keep his own advisers and allies from going on television on a daily basis to talk about his ongoing legal entanglements.

But here, too, we find a concept to which Trump has a deep aversion. He can’t not hit back. And he seems to have a deep and abiding need to see his guys out there, on television, sparring. Never mind that it only compounds his problems. And so you have Rudy Giuliani, late of a string of disaster-laced media hits, confidently telling the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, “Everybody’s reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do.”

You can, perhaps, understand Trump’s exasperation. This is his plan, it’s playing out exactly the way he drew it up — but his life nevertheless refuses to get better. So it must be yet another system rigged against him. Whatever is happening, it has to be “fake” in some way.

Olivia Nuzzi tweet: Donald Trump suggests taking away press credentials as punishment for “negative (fake)” coverage. His campaign did this to many reporters, including me. It made it more logistically challenging to cover him, but the banned press still covered him.

At any rate, at some point in the future, Trump may actually revoke the White House press corps credentials. Yes, this is a threat to the freedom of the press, and you can expect the WHCA to fight back. But it’s really not that new: Trump has denied reporters their access in the past, and they’ve all managed to surmount the obstacle. As it turns out, life on Donald Trump’s blacklist is really not that bad, unless you’re Donald Trump.

Pruitt Resumes Courting Industry as Ethics Controversies Swirl

Bloomberg – Politics

Pruitt Resumes Courting Industry as Ethics Controversies Swirl

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy and Ari Natter May 9, 2018

EPA chief holds summit with mining, railroad, and other groups…No need to choose between environment and business, he says

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

Embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is seeking to shift the limelight away from questions about his ethics and instead focus attention on his efforts to eliminate regulations on oil drillers, farmers, home builders and automakers.

Pruitt convened a meeting Wednesday of industry representatives, ranging from the National Mining Association to the Association of American Railroads, with a pledge to collaborate.

The session marked the second meeting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly revived “Smart Sectors” program, designed to formally solicit the input of the industries the agency regulates. Although 13 specific sectors, including mining, agriculture and chemical manufacturing are part of the program, it doesn’t include environmentalists and public health experts.

Pruitt told the group they no longer had to choose between protecting the environment and industry, as he outlined plans to accelerate permitting of new factories and refineries. Other industry groups that participated in the session included the National Association of Home Builders, the American Chemistry Council, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Portland Cement Association.

Oil and Coal Executives Clamored for Meetings With Pruitt

“Permitting should not be used as obstruction,” Pruitt told the industry leaders who assembled in a wood-paneled room at the EPA headquarters Wednesday. Signs bearing slogans such as “True Environmentalism” stood in the background. “It should not be used to delay and obstruct so people don’t invest capital,” he said.

Quick-Take: Here’s a Scorecard of the Scott Pruitt Investigations

The session took place amid criticism the EPA has taken a pro-business tilt at the expense of environmental issues.

’We Like Him’

It also came amid a swirl of controversies around Pruitt, who has been dogged for weeks by disclosures about his unorthodox condo rental from a lobbyist, questionable spending decisions and frequent taxpayer-funded travel.

There was no mention of that at the meeting on Wednesday. When asked by a reporter if he still had the confidence of the White House, Pruitt said: “I think they’ve spoken very clearly.”

Earlier in the day, Marc Short, the White House’s legislative director, said the administrator would remain in his position “for the foreseeable future.”

“We like him,” Short told reporters at the Capitol. “He’s doing a good job.”

The meeting was in keeping with Pruitt’s business-focused schedule recently. He has tried to maintain a low profile with continued public appearance in front of generally friendly audiences. For instance, he said on Twitter that he also met Wednesday with the Industrial Minerals Association to highlight how the EPA is “striving to provide greater regulatory certainty for miners.”

Pruitt also has met with the National Association of Farm Broadcasting to highlight policy changes that could benefit farmers and ranchers, and last month visited Georgia to talk about forest management.

Trump and His Administration Are a Parasite on American Government

Esquire

Trump and His Administration Are a Parasite on American Government

The blight of corruption is festering beneath the surface.

By Charles P. Pierce May 9, 2018

Getty Images

A few years back, in a national forest in Oregon, researchers found the largest single living organism ever discovered on earth. It was a fungus of the genus Armillaria. It covered 1000 hectares of land and it was nearly 9,000 years old. Through a vast system of thick tendrils called rhizomorphs, Armillaria can spread over a huge area and survive by latching onto the root systems of trees, from which it slowly and parasitically dines on the nutrients of the trees until the trees finally fall over, dead. Most of the damage is done underground, and one Armillariacan kill an entire conifer forest.

I’m beginning to think that the corruption of this administration* is the political equivalent of one of these super-fungi. It is so vast, and so much of it is hidden from view, that we may never see it entirely until it’s too late, and a whole lot of important things about this country go dead and topple down.

RELATED STORY: The Word You Are Looking for Is ‘Lie’

The revelations on Tuesday that Michael Cohen, the president*’s personal lawyer, was one of the most ambitious bagmen in American political history all emerged from an improbable source: a lawsuit lodged against the president* by an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly had an affair. We discovered that Cohen reportedly got a half-million dollars from a Russian oligarch with “links” to Vladimir Putin, as though you could even be a Russian oligarch and stay alive without some kind of “links” to the newly re-elected goon-in-chief.

We also learned that a shell company set up by Cohen took in $200,000 in “consulting payments” from AT&T for, as the leaked documents put it, “insights into understanding the new administration.” They could’ve paid me half that and I would have told them all they needed to know: that these people are all a bunch of crooks and that the companies should adjust their payment schedules accordingly.

Getty Images

I mean, really. Trump. Nixon. AT&T. ITT. Where have you gone, Dita Beard? A president* turns his greedy eyes to you.

Robert Mueller’s team already has interviewed Victor Vekselberg, Cohen’s buddy from Moscow, so we can probably assume there’s more there than we already know. (More women who were paid off? Checks with “kompromat” written in Cyrillic on the memo line? Who knows at this point?) The criminal rhizomorphs of this parasitic blight on government extend god knows where. That members of the administration—hi there, Scott Pruitt—see public service as an All-U-Can-Eat buffet on our dime is no secret any more. We’ve had Pruitt’s $43,000 phone booth, Ben Carson’s dinette set, and a great love for taxpayer-funded air travel by almost everyone.

Getty Images

Nor is the fact that the president* has brought the principles he employed in private business into his public duties—to wit, keeping all the really rotten stuff underground by any means necessary, and reneging on debts you don’t have the money to pay anyway. And still, dammit, they can surprise you. As one of the scientists studying the massive Armillaria lamented to The Atlantic:

“I wish all of the substrate would be transparent for five minutes, so I could see where it is and what it’s doing. We would learn so much from a five-minute glimpse.”

Whether we’d all have the guts to look at what this spreading parasitic growth is doing to our country, however, is a whole different matter. If we saw it whole, we might have to do something about it, and then where would we be?

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.

New York Magazine

Daily Intellegencer / The National Interest

Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.

By Jonathan Chait May 8, 2018

No pee tape needed. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images

In the waning weeks of 2016, when the intelligence community and many politicians were passing around terrifying reports about Donald Trump’s links to Russia like samizdat, the frightening possibility arose that the sanctity of the United States government might be compromised in a way no living American had experienced. This was just one of the unnerving things about the rise of Trump, and it was one that many well-informed observers doubted. Russia, after all, was poor and weak. To imagine that a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s could leverage a superpower ten times wealthier beggared the imagination. And yet that paranoid, absurd belief seems to be creeping closer to reality than seemed possible even in those dark postelection days.

The New York Times has confirmed the explosive claims made by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, that Columbus Nova — a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — deposited half a million dollars into a secret account set up by attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Trump’s sexual partners. The possible reasons for this arrangement run from brazenly corrupt to far worse. Columbus Nova said the hefty sum was a “consulting fee” paid to Cohen, hardly a benign explanation.

5 of the Most Blatantly Unethical Moves by the Trump Administration

Columbus Nova reportedly retained Cohen’s services after Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive, met him while attending Trump’s inauguration with Vekselberg, who is his cousin. Like all Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg operates in cooperation with the Putin government. The payments gave Russia several sources of possible leverage over Cohen and Trump. First, the money itself could amount to some kind of bribe, in return for which a favor would be expected. Second, Russia had knowledge of the secret payoff, which it could always expose. Third, the possibility (at minimum) exists that Russia knew the account was being used to silence Trump’s mistresses, yet another source of kompromat.

For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of active investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

The Washington Post tonight reports another, and even more fanatical, step in Nunes’s crusade. Last week, Nunes demanded a piece of information that the FBI and other intelligence officials believed would “endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” They prevailed on Trump to support their request to withhold the information which, they argued, would “risk severe consequences including potential loss of human lives.”

Nunes is not only demanding the secret be revealed to him, but threatening to vote to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt. And officials who secured Trump’s support may have left out the fact that the source provided information to the Mueller investigation. As a result, “several administration officials said they fear Trump may reverse course and support Nunes’s argument.”

Think for a moment what this report tells us. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enjoys the full backing of his party’s leadership, is willing to risk what his own government describes as the betrayal and potential loss of life of an intelligence source. And officials within this government believe the president would do the same, all in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s secretive ties to a foreign power. They are acting as though Trump is compromised by Russia, or at the very least, that he cannot be trusted to defend his own country’s security against it. The sordid Russia scandal has already brought some version of a very dark nightmare scenario to life.

This post has been updated with additional information about Columbus Nova’s relationship with Michael Cohen.

Trump Destroys the Iran Deal—and a Lot More

The New Yorker – News Desk

Trump Destroys the Iran Deal—and a Lot More

By Robin Wright May 8, 2028

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal unravels Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement and puts the U.S. on a collision course with Tehran. Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP

After months of threatening, President Trump withdrew from the historic Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, unraveling the Obama Administration’s signature foreign-policy achievement and putting the United States on a collision course with allies, as well as with Tehran. “This was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” the President said. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” Trump also announced that the United States is re-imposing economic sanctions on Iran and, over time, on companies in other countries that do business with the Islamic Republic.

Trump said that he was prepared to negotiate a new deal, but it would have to cover several issues beyond Iran’s controversial nuclear program—including Tehran’s ballistic-missile program, its support for extremist groups, and other “malign” activities in the wider Middle East. In a rebuke to Trump, however, the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany expressed “regret” over Trump’s decision and vowed to remain in the pact, which also includes Russia and China. “We urge all sides to remain committed to its full implementation and to act in a spirit of responsibility,” they said. China also indicated that it would adhere to the accord.

In an initial reaction, Iran also appeared to reject new negotiations—and indicated that it might even stick to the original agreement, which curtails significant aspects of its nuclear program. President Hassan Rouhani said that his government would review the prospects of continuing to collaborate with the other five signatories of the pact, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A.

“If, at end of this short period of time, if we come to the conclusion that with the collaboration of five countries it is feasible to attain what the Iranian people wish, despite the views of the U.S. and Zionist regime and also the impolite remarks by Trump, we should see whether it is possible to just keep up with J.C.P.O.A. and also take steps in line with regional peace and tranquility,” he said. (Iran refers to Israel as “the Zionist regime.”) But Rouhani—who won office in 2013, on a platform of negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States and getting a reprieve from economic sanctions in return—also suggested that Tehran was prepared for “subsequent measures, if needed,” including “starting industrial enrichment without limitations.”

Trump’s decision means that, technically, the United States is the first nation to violate the accord. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has issued ten reports that Tehran is in full compliance with its obligations. Iran is under the toughest inspections and verification-inspections regime ever imposed in an arms-control deal. In a rare public comment on Trump’s foreign policy, former President Barack Obama noted that the right to inspections disappears if the agreement ends.

“Every aspect of Iranian behavior that is troubling is far more dangerous if their nuclear program is unconstrained,” Obama said. “Our ability to confront Iran’s destabilizing behavior—and to sustain a unity of purpose with our allies—is strengthened with the J.C.P.O.A., and weakened without it.”

Critics were scathing about the U.S. withdrawal. James Dobbins, a former U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., who negotiated with Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and now works at the rand Corporation, said that the decision “isolates the United States, frees Iran, reneges on an American commitment, adds to the risk of a trade war with America’s allies and to a hot war with Iran and diminishes the prospects of a durable and truly verifiable agreement to eliminate the North Korean nuclear and missile threat.”

Trump’s decision is likely to have far-reaching impact. The premise of diplomatic outreach was to create conditions for eventual coöperation with Iran on other flashpoints in the world’s most volatile region. Instead, danger looms for deepening tensions in hot spots such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen—countries where the United States and Iran have rival interests. “By forfeiting American leadership in the one successful multilateral deal in the volatile Middle East, Trump could possibly make a bad situation worse,” Wendy Chamberlin, a former career diplomat who is now the president of the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me.

Tensions between Israel and Iran have increased recently over Syria, where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have established footholds in three dozen military facilities during its seven-year civil war. Israel has launched more than a hundred air strikes on Syria, the majority on Iranian and Hezbollah targets. “Israel and Iran are headed toward a dangerous confrontation,” Chamberlin said.

The withdrawal from the agreement comes days before the U.S. moves its Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, another controversial decision that has inflamed anti-American passions. “Trump is pouring gasoline on a Middle East in flames already, with his Iran and Jerusalem decisions,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A., White House, and Pentagon staffer who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me.

Trump’s decision also undermines the transatlantic alliance, crafted after the Second World War, between the United States and Europe. The President defied a determined last-ditch pitch by America’s three most important European allies, made during visits by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson.

Trump’s decision to nix rather than fix the deal fits his “America First” agenda. “Withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—alongside withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Accord [on climate]—completes Trump’s reneging on U.S. commitments and undermining of U.S. credibility,” Daniel Kurtzer, a former Ambassador to Israel and Egypt now at Princeton University, told me. “The United States used to be the leader, the convener, and the engine of international diplomacy. Trump’s actions have turned us into an untrustworthy and erratic diplomatic outlier.”

The Europeans are clearly hoping that the deal—the crowning achievement of the E.U.’s diplomacy as a continental body—will survive without the United States.

Re-imposing sanctions on Iran will create the greatest division between Europe and the U.S. since the Iraq War, Mark Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Washington, told me. “Only this time it will be worse, since not a single European state sides with the U.S. on this matter.” Beyond Europe, American credibility worldwide “will go down the tubes,” he said. “Who will ever want to strike a deal with a country that, without cause, pulls out of a deal that everyone else knows has been working well? America will be seen as stupid, arrogant, and bullying. Pity the poor U.S. diplomats who have to explain this illogical decision to their host countries.”

Trump’s decision even benefits America’s adversaries, including Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. “We’re playing into Putin’s hand,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, now at Stanford University, said on CNN. “For Putin, it means that the U.S. is on the outside—and Putin is still on the inside. Why are we isolating ourselves when we need other countries to coöperate with on issues like North Korea?”

The U.S. decision will have fallout both economically and politically inside Iran, where foreboding about Trump’s long-threatened decision has already had a psychological impact. The value of Iran’s currency has plummeted by a third since December. The timing intersects with systemic change—and uncertainty—in Iran over dramatic demographic changes, aging leadership, and long-standing structural deficiencies. “The post-revolutionary baby boom is inching toward middle age, with nearly universal access to information and communications technology and after decades of thwarted hopes for economic improvements,” Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy-planning staffer now at the Brookings Institution, told me.

“I don’t see a revolution on the horizon, but I think we are witnessing the slow-motion metastasis of the revolutionary system that is echoing through the economy and the establishment,” she said. “I don’t think this is solely or even primarily provoked by the collapse of the deal but, rather, the culmination of a range of internal forces: long-simmering frustrations, the stalemate of two decades of gradualism, demographic pressures, communications technology, and the anticipated imminence of leadership succession.”

As dramatic as Trump’s curt announcement was, the repercussions of his decision—one of the most important of his sixteen months in office—may take months to play out in Iran, among allies, and even among adversaries. At a White House briefing, the new national-security adviser, John Bolton, said that the Administration will continue to talk with allies, starting on Wednesday, about ways forward. But the prospect of healing the policy divide with the world’s other five major powers—much less getting Iran to agree to a new deal—seems remote, at best.

Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

Oklahoma ranchers learn to address wild hog overpopulation

Miami Herald – Business

Oklahoma ranchers learn to address wild hog overpopulation

The Lawton Constitution, The Associated Press May 7, 2018

Meers, Okla. John Zelbst has been at war at his ranch near Meers.

Wild hogs — vicious animals with an appetite for corn and a penchant for destruction — have made their way into the Oklahoma wilderness and have run amok unchecked by any natural predator. The invasive species tears up the ground, destroys fences and other structures, kills livestock and has driven many farmers, like Zelbst, to their wits end.

“We were having ranch employees work on the problem to trap and kill them as much as we could,” he said. “It’s so bad, they wore us out. It took so much manpower to trap them that they beat us. They won.”

Zelbst isn’t alone. The wild hog is a scourge upon the land that has left many farmers, ranchers and landowners throwing up their arms in complete defeat. In an effort to help alleviate the situation, the Great Plains Technology Center, with coordination by Agri-Business Management Coordinator Clint Janda, recently hosted an outreach meeting organized by the Comanche County, Cotton County, South Caddo County and Tillman County Conservation Districts. Josh Gaskamp, a researcher at the Noble Research Center and the main speaker of the meeting, talked to the packed crowd about how there’s a good chance everything they know about addressing the wild hog problem could be wrong, the Lawton Constitution reported.

“If you’re going to catch more pigs, you have to use multiple techniques,” he said. “But many of these techniques that are being implemented may be doing more harm than good.”

Gaskamp detailed the epidemic that the men and women in the room were facing. To help make the pork market more efficient, the pork industry genetically targeted the largest breeds of pigs that reproduced quickly and grew rapidly. Dubbed the “super hog,” Gaskamp said humans created their own worst nightmare by trying to ensure everyone has a ham on the table for Christmas and Easter and bacon on the plate in the morning alongside their eggs. These pigs have no natural predators aside from humans and can adapt to survive in just about any situation.

“There’s not a habitat that you can put in a pig in where it won’t survive,” he said.

So how did this plague begin? Zelbst said hogs were introduced into this part of the state by individuals who raised them as pets or for food and simply let them go. Others, as Gaskamp said, escaped from farms. Genetically chosen to breed quickly, the populations exploded and one or two pigs turned into dozens, if not hundreds, within a short amount of time. They have an “opportunistic diet,” which means they’re willing to eat just about anything and can survive in the harshest of conditions, such as Oklahoma summers. And they leave a path of destruction in their wake.

“They’ve torn up our fences,” Zelbst said. “They’ve torn up our yards and homes. They show up where you feed cattle and tear things up everywhere.”

The simplest and easiest solution is to shoot the hogs either by hunting or as they’re spotted. That doesn’t work, Zelbst said not really.

“You can’t shoot your way out of this problem,” he said. “There’s just too many. They breed faster than you can kill them. That’s why I’m here, to hopefully find out about new research into methods to stop them.”

The closer one looks at Trump’s finances, the louder the questions become

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog

The closer one looks at Trump’s finances, the louder the questions become

By Steve Benen May 7, 2018

Presidential contender Donald Trump gestures to the media on the 17th fairway on the first day of the Women’s British Open golf championship on the Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, July 30, 2015. Photo by Scott Heppell/AP

Last summer, Donald Trump sat down with the New York Times, which asked whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller will have crossed “a red line” if the investigation into the Russia scandal extends to include examinations of the resident’s finances. “I would say yeah. I would say yes,” he replied, adding, “I think that’s a violation.”

Naturally, this generated no shortage of speculation as to why Trump is so concerned about scrutiny of his finances. For that matter, there’s no reason to separate questions about the president’s finances with the Russia scandal – because as Rachel has explained on the show more than once, there’s an amazing number of people from Russia who’ve purchased Trump properties over the years. (My personal favorite is the story of Dmitry Rybolovlev, the fertilizer king, who purchased a derelict Florida estate from the future president at an extreme markup.)

Keep all of this in mind when reading this amazing report from the Washington Post over the weekend on Trump’s unexplained shift in strategy, evolving from someone who loved taking on debt and spending others’ money to someone who was suddenly flush with cash:

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties – including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks – during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

The entire Post piece is well worth your time – it’s an impressive piece of reporting, and I’m only touching on some of its revelations – but pay particular attention to the fact that Trump had one ironclad set of principles, which guided his entire business strategy, which he suddenly abandoned without explanation.

Barbara Res, who was a top executive for Trump throughout the 1980s and continued to work for him for most of the 1990s, told the Post, “He always used other people’s money. That’s for sure. Not cash. He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he’d put up the brilliance.”

At face value, his willingness to abandon this approach seems difficult to understand. Trump’s entire business philosophy was tied to the belief that he could succeed by getting money from others – investors, banks, partners, et al – and putting it to good use. But he adopted an entirely new posture in 2006, as the real-estate bubble started to burst and not long before some of his enterprises went bankrupt, investing millions in cash on new properties, some of which continued to lose money after the purchases.

What was it exactly that led Trump to embrace an entirely new investment strategy, with liquid assets of unknown origins?

While that question lingers, the New York Times had an entirely separate report, which also ran over the weekend, on Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and go-to fixer, who “built a shadowy business empire,” which grew after he joined the Trump Organization in 2007.

The article covers a lot of ground – it, too, is well worth your time – but this jumped out at me:

Like many of Mr. Cohen’s business dealings, the transactions were unconventional. His companies would buy a building, often in cash. Soon after, they would flip the building in another all-cash deal for four or five times the previous purchase price. The buyer was generally another limited liability company.

In October 2011, for example, a limited liability company listing as its address Mr. Cohen’s apartment at Trump Park Avenue purchased a building on Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for $2.1 million. In 2014, Mr. Cohen sold the building for $10 million in cash – nearly five times what he paid three years earlier.

That same day, Mr. Cohen sold three other Manhattan buildings, also entirely for cash. In total, the four buildings sold for $32 million – nearly triple what Mr. Cohen had paid for them in the span of no more than three years.

The more we learn about Trump World’s finances, the louder the questions become.

Running list of Trump’s false or misleading claims

Fact Checker, from The Washington Post posted a new episode.

May 4, 2018

We’re keeping a running list of Trump’s false or misleading claims, including the ones he says the most. Here’s our latest tally as of May 2018.

Unraveling President Trump's top 5 claims

We're keeping a running list of Trump's false or misleading claims, including the ones he says the most. Here's our latest tally as of May 2018.

Posted by Fact Checker, from The Washington Post on Friday, May 4, 2018

Toxic coal ash ponds are at serious risk of flooding

ThinkProgress

Toxic coal ash ponds are at serious risk of flooding

A new report warns that more than a dozen toxic coal ash ponds are located in flood zones.

Natasha Geiling May 3, 2018

Thousands of tons of coal ash is deposited in an unlined landfill, know as “Little Blue,” on September 10, 2008 in Chester, West Virginia. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.

More than a dozen ponds containing coal ash — the toxic byproduct of burning coal — are located in flood zones throughout the United States, putting them at risk of flooding during storms or high water, according to a report released this week by a coalition of environmental and public interest groups.

The report comes as the Trump administration seeks to weaken standards for coal ash disposal at the request of industry, rolling back the first-ever federal regulations on disposal for coal ash.

“Putting billions of gallons of toxic coal ash next to our rivers and drinking water — that’s just an accident waiting to happen,” John Rumpler, senior director of Environment America’s clean water program and co-author of the report, said in a press statement. “We should be phasing out these toxic pits. The last thing we should be doing is weakening the few standards we already have in place to limit their pollution of our waters.”

Coal ash is the second-largest form of waste in the United States, with more than 100 million tons produced each year. To store coal ash, coal-fired power plants — which tend to be located near water sources used for cooling the power plant’s equipment — combine the ash with water and store it in pits, known as coal ash ponds.

Historically, these pits have been unlined, leading environmental groups to raise concerns about whether toxic compounds found in coal ash — like lead, arsenic, and mercury — could be leaching into nearby groundwater. Those fears have largely been backed up by industry data, which has shown elevated levels of toxic pollutants like arsenic and radium in the groundwater near more than 70 coal ash disposal sites across the country.

Coal ash is polluting groundwater across the country, according to new utility data

But the report from Environment America raises concerns beyond groundwater contamination. It warns that fourteen coal plants with onsite coal ash storage ponds are located within Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 100-year flood zones, meaning that the area is reasonably expected to flood at least once a century. These plants generate 8.4 million tons of coal ash each year, and at least six of those ponds have been designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be in poor condition.

“While hundreds of coal plant sites across the country likely put water at risk, those with coal ash ponds located in flood zones may pose an elevated threat, as being in a flood zone indicates both proximity to water and risk of flooding,” the report reads, adding that fourteen plants located in flood zones is likely a conservative estimate.

A large number of these coal plants sit along the Ohio River, which provides drinking water to more than 3 million people.

Evidence suggests that as climate change continues, a warmer atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture, resulting in more frequent extreme precipitation events. As heavy downpours increase, it’s possible that coal ash ponds that otherwise would have only been at risk of flooding every 100 years will be at more frequent risk of flooding.

If a coal ash pond were to be hit by flooding, it’s possible that the toxic waste could then flow into nearby streams or rivers, contaminating surface water near the spill.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew dumped 18 inches of rain in parts of North Carolina, causing rivers across the state to rise to dangerously high levels. Environmental groups were concerned that the flooding could breach some coal ash ponds operated by Duke Energy. The utility initially said that it did not expect the flooding to breach the ponds, but later admitted that “an unknown amount of coal ash” had in fact been discharged during the flooding at one of its coal-fired power plants.

Watchdog group uncovers a coal ash spill after hurricane flooding

The report released this week calls for a moratorium on new or expanded coal ash ponds, and calls for old coal ash ponds to be excavated and lined in order to keep the waste from seeping into groundwater.

Under the Trump administration’s proposal to rollback Obama-era rules on coal ash, however, utilities would be able to decide if and when they tested for groundwater contamination, rather than requiring all utilities to adhere to a mandated schedule as the Obama-era regulations would have required. The rollback would also give a large amount of autonomy to states in crafting their own requirements for coal ash disposal and cleanup.

“The existing EPA policies on coal ash don’t even classify it as ‘hazardous waste.’ Now, the EPA is trying to weaken coal ash policies even more,” Rumpler said. “That’s just inviting disaster for our rivers.”

This Congress Only Listens to Rich People

MoveOn shared a video.

May 1, 2018

A study showed that Congress almost always votes in support of the opinions of the wealthiest 10% of America, while routinely ignoring what the other 90% think.

If there’s an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.

Congress is Only Listening to Rich People

If there's an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday, April 29, 2018