23 January 20
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
Tomasky writes: "Why, it seems so inconsistent on its face! But for Starr, it's 1,000 percent consistent. It's who he is."
His Clinton probe was one of the sleaziest episodes in recent American political history, at least until Trump came along.
had to chuckle over the weekend as pundits tried to square the circle of Ken Starr, who led the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton in 1998, defending Donald Trump on impeachment charges in 2020. Why, it seems so inconsistent on its face!
But for Starr, it’s 1,000 percent consistent. It’s who he is.
He’s a political hack. A total partisan hatchet man. One of the most poisonous political figures of our time. No—worse. One of the most poisonous public figures. Not just in politics, but in any realm. I’d sooner have O.J. over for dinner.
He’s another one of those men who started his adult life as a Democrat—even a Vietnam protester!—but got yucked out by something along the way and became a Reagan man. Like Rudy Giuliani, another historically poisonous figure (I wouldn’t have said this of him, by the way, until the last couple of years).
But let’s just go back to the pivotal moment, when Starr became known by the nation at large. This was 1994, when he was appointed to replace Robert Fiske as independent counsel investigating Clinton. This was one of the sleaziest episodes in recent American political history, at least until Trump came along.
In January of 1994, Clinton reluctantly agreed to let Attorney General Janet Reno name a special prosecutor to look into the Whitewater affair, a land deal in Arkansas that he had invested in while governor there. He did nothing wrong, as subsequent investigations made clear, but the right-wing noise machine, then just gestating into a thing that mattered, was declaring Clinton guilty of swindling his co-investor (the opposite was the truth) and duping regulators. Aides told him, “If you did nothing wrong, a special prosecutor will give you a clean bill of health, and your opponents will have to shut up about this.” Which was true, in theory.
Reno appointed Fiske. He had a strong reputation. He was a Republican. But he was not a movement conservative, and this was his real crime. He sniffed around for about six months, didn’t find much, and issued the first part of his report, about the suicide of Clinton aide Vince Foster. Some right-wingers were literally going around saying the Clintons had Foster iced because he knew too much. Fiske found he committed suicide. No conspiracy.
The wingnuts were up in arms and feared that in Part 2, about Whitewater, Fiske was going to exonerate the Clintons. Fiske has subsequently said that he did uncover evidence of serious crimes, but not by the Clintons. (I know I’m going into some detail here, but trust me, I have to, so you can see how filthy this deal was.)
At this exact time, the independent counsel law was expiring. Congress passed a law renewing it, which awaited Clinton’s signature. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t very well end it. Oh, that’s the kind of thing Trump would do in a heartbeat, but pre-Trump, presidents worried about such appearances.
So Clinton signed the law, which had one fateful impact. It shifted the oversight of the independent counsel from the Justice Department (the attorney general) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Specifically, to a three-judge panel that consisted of two movement conservatives.
They fired Fiske. They claimed he had a conflict because his firm had once represented International Paper, which years before had done business with Clinton’s Whitewater partner. They replaced him with Starr. Starr’s firm represented International Paper at the time of Starr’s appointment! But somehow, that wasn’t a conflict. And that’s how we came to be saddled with Ken Starr as a household name.
From there, you know what happened. The judges knew that Starr had something Fiske didn’t: zero scruples. Starr would go to any length to pin anything he could on the Clintons. The whole thing was a set-up by hard-right judges, working with hard-right activists to install a hard-right prosecutor who threatened witnesses and leaked grand-jury information and held one witness in a plexiglass cell as if she were some kind of war criminal.
Then he got lucky because another set of hard-right activists learned that Clinton had had intimate relations with Monica Lewinsky (what a great tweet she wrote the other day!), and they told Starr’s prosecutors—who were supposed to be looking, remember, into a real-estate deal—all about it and finagled things so Clinton lied under oath about it, leading to his impeachment and the release of Starr’s sex-obsessed “report” (written, you may recall, with help from a young Brett Kavanaugh.)
That’s who Starr is, in addition to the good Christian man who spent years waving away a wave of sexual assaults at the university of which he was president. Funny thing about Starr and sex. He seems to think it’s evil when a Democratic president has it with someone other than his wife, but OK and worth trying to cover up or excuse when a football player does it to an unconsenting woman.
And now, of course, he’s defending Trump. Starr’s perverted the law for rancid partisan purposes and ruined a major university, but I guess he feels hasn’t done enough damage to America yet, so now he’s going to help exonerate a president who tried to get a foreign government to help him rig the next election.
Principle, you say? There is no principle. Actually, there is one, the same one that drives Bill Barr: That Godless liberals are evil, and when you’re waging jihad against them, nothing is out of bounds.
Of course, this doesn’t explain his behavior at Baylor. Or his legal defense of Jeffrey Epstein. Or his plea to a judge to sentence to community service rather than jail time a Virginia man who admitted to having molested five girls under the age of 14 years before.
So maybe there is another principle at work. Maybe he’s just attracted to sleazy, disgusting men. Takes one to know one.
Rep. Adam Schiff. (photo: Getty)
Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Rubin writes: "Given how firmly some Republican senators are ensconced in the right-wing news bubble, and how determined they are to avoid hearing facts that undercut their partisan views, it is possible many of them are hearing the facts on which impeachment is based for the first time."
Intentionally ignorant Republicans previously may have learned these things from Schiff’s presentation (seriously, if they didn’t hear it from talk radio or state TV, it doesn’t exist):
- Trump mentioned the Bidens and Burisma but not “corruption” during the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
- Trump followed up with a call to Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, on whether the investigations he demanded would happen.
- A text by a Trump appointee to Zelensky’s top aide sent 30 minutes before the July 25 call stressed that Trump was looking for an announcement of an investigation into the Bidens.
- When Trump, standing on the White House driveway, told the media that he wanted both Ukraine and China to investigate Joe Biden, he was not pursuing corruption in Ukraine, but rather looking for foreign countries to smear the former vice president.
- The draft statement announcing that Ukraine would undertake corruption investigations was rewritten by Sondland and Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to specifically include Burisma and the 2016 election (i.e., Crowdstrike).
- Giuliani openly bragged about interfering in an investigation in Ukraine.
- Ukrainian officials threw Trump’s corrupt scheme back in our faces when asked not to investigate their political opponents.
- Ukraine was confronted with a cut-off of vital aid in the middle of a hot war.
- The aid was only released when Trump was caught (and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed it publicly).
Schiff stacked one fact upon another until an impenetrable wall of evidence confronted Republicans. What will their excuse for acquittal be? The facts turn out to be a lot stronger, by gosh, than the House Republican apologists said!
Schiff was confronting not only the public but also the Republicans with an indisputable factual account for which Trump’s lawyers have no answer. So how are they to acquit? Well, there is always the legally insane argument that abuse of power is not impeachable. But Schiff knocked that down as well:
- Attorney General William P. Barr apparently thinks that this bizarre interpretation of the Constitution is wrong, as does Jonathan Turley, who testified for Republicans during the House impeachment process.
- Alexander Hamilton and other framers of the Constitution made plain they were seeking to prevent breaches of public trust and political crimes.
- If abuse of power isn’t impeachable, then the president is king.
Yale Psychiatrist Brandy Lee. (photo: Democracy Now!)
Yale Psychiatrist: Congress Must Demand That President Trump Undergo a Mental Health Evaluation
Igor Derysh, Salon
Derysh writes: "A Yale psychiatrist leads a group of medical professionals who have called on Congress to demand that President Donald Trump undergo a mental health evaluation after he ordered a drone strike that killed top Iranian military official Qassem Soleimani."
Yale psychiatrist leads a group of medical professionals who have called on Congress to demand that President Donald Trump undergo a mental health evaluation after he ordered a drone strike that killed top Iranian military official Qassem Soleimani.
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Igor Derysh, Salon
Derysh writes: "A Yale psychiatrist leads a group of medical professionals who have called on Congress to demand that President Donald Trump undergo a mental health evaluation after he ordered a drone strike that killed top Iranian military official Qassem Soleimani."
"Critics compare us to Nazi and Soviet psychiatrists, but they abandoned professional standards to serve the state"
Yale psychiatrist leads a group of medical professionals who have called on Congress to demand that President Donald Trump undergo a mental health evaluation after he ordered a drone strike that killed top Iranian military official Qassem Soleimani.
Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine who has consulted widely with state and international governments on a public health approach to violence prevention in communities and in prisons, told Salon that Congress should convene a panel of mental health experts to determine Trump's fitness for office. Lee serves as the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, which issued a statement formally calling on Congress to convene a panel of mental health experts to assess Trump's fitness.
"We have been seriously warning about this for some time. The U.S. Congress must act immediately and forcefully without further delay," the group said in a statement, describing Trump as "psychologically and mentally both dangerous and incapacitated."
Senior military leaders must pass annual psychiatric evaluations, but Trump is exempt from such evaluations, even though he is "the person in most need and who is a maximum danger," according to the statement.
The psychiatrists warned that Americans "cannot wait any longer to deal with the dangerous situation caused by a mentally compromised person acting in erratic, reckless, impulsive and destructive ways."
Is there any reason to suspect that President Donald Trump will change his campaign platform from the 2016 race? Political analyst and MSNBC's host of "AM Joy," Joy Reid, suspects that Trump will stick to "playing the hits" when it comes to his 2020 presidential campaign. On "Salon Talks," Reid explained to SalonTV's Dean Obeidallah that "nothing is off the table" and nobody is willing to stand in Trump's way, so why fix what isn't broken?
"The Republican Party, they're either terrified of his base, or they love what he's doing. They're not going to stand in the way. So there's nothing really stopping him," Reid said. She explained how Attorney General William Barr has showed no remorse in defending Trump.
"What you can look for is for Donald Trump to repeat what works," she noted also pointing out Trump's "show biz" background as evidence for sticking to his anti-immigration platform. "He just threatened to have millions of immigrants rounded up for the delight of his fan base, just sheerly to delight them and to keep them on board."
Reid's new book, "The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story," details Trump's 2016 presidential campaign to now, describing all the chaos in between. And as someone who studied how Trump ran his 2016 campaign, Reid warned, "if you're undocumented, just be very, very vigilant because Donald Trump is going to use immigration again because it worked."
Watch the video above to hear Joy Reid further explain how Donald Trump's 2020 campaign will be more divisive than ever. And watch the full episode to hear her break down how Trump channels a "sense of victimization" in his base.
SalonTV host Dean Obeidallah is also the host of the daily national SiriusXM radio program, "The Dean Obeidallah Show" on the network's progressive political channel. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Since Congress has the constitutional authority to fund military action, the statement urges Congress to "act immediately to take any war-making powers out of his hands," adding that it is "imperative that the Congress be equipped with accurate information" from medical professionals qualified in "assessment and management of psychological dangers."
"We urge Congress to consult with us for a profile, if not evaluation, and to take seriously the mental health aspects that are at play in this mentally impaired president," the statement concluded.
Lee spoke with Salon about the need for Trump to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, the danger posed by his actions in the Middle East and the criticisms her comments have received from other mental health professionals. Lee said her views represent those of the World Mental Health Coalition and no other institution.
The World Mental Health Coalition recently urged Congress to demand Trump undergo an evaluation. What do you hope this statement will accomplish? What would this look like? Is there a congressional process for demanding the president be evaluated by a psychiatrist?
The statement was in response to Qassem Soleimani's assassination, which was precisely the kind of emotion-driven incident we warned against in our petition a month ago. Now that his own defense secretary contradicted that there was an imminent threat to four embassies — the reason the president gave — I believe most people can now see how his internal processes supersede security considerations. We barely averted an all-out war — not for our doing — and we shouldn't wait until a similar crisis erupts again.
If the Congress continues to treat this matter as pure politics, it will misunderstand the nature of the problem and be compromised in handling it. Congressional committees consult with experts all the time, and the nation's top mental health experts are eager to be of service. We have also established an independent expert panel for the evaluation of presidential fitness based on medical criteria only. It does not have to be us, but the panel needs to be independent, given the usual compromise of White House-employed physicians.
The statement came in response to Trump's speech following Iran's retaliatory attack last week. What do you make of the president's apparent difficulty in pronouncing words and his repeated sniffling during his statement?
These are obviously abnormal signs. He has shown severe emotional, cognitive and neurological signs, including intoxication, for some time. Getting him an urgent evaluation, as well as treatment, would only be the humane thing to do — both for him and for the country.
You note in the statement that senior military leaders must undergo annual psychological evaluations, thus the military officials advising Trump are presumably of sound mind. Why do you think these officials publicly support the president's actions if he poses as large a danger as you say?
We know that Pentagon officials were stunned that he chose the most extreme option. The statements are extraordinary, if we consider that military officials are trained not to question their commander-in-chief. I believe it is clear we have no control over him. People mistake Donald Trump for being less likely to go to war because of his timidity and his promise to "end endless wars." But a cowardly person with a fragile sense of self is exactly the kind of person who resorts to violence — or can be manipulated into doing so if there are nefarious interests.
You suggest that the president should undergo an evaluation the same way military officials get annual evaluations. Would you want to see all presidents undergo an annual psychological evaluation?
Yes. Almost every job dealing with life-and-death matters in this country has a psychological fitness-for-duty test built in. Yet, the most consequential job, now capable of extinguishing multiple species on the planet based on one person's decision, is not required to possess even basic rationality.
Salon recently spoke with Amy Barnhorst, a psychiatrist at UC Davis. She said she doesn't believe an evaluation or even an involuntary mental health hold would be effective in impacting Trump's behavior or position. How do you respond to your peers who argue that your proposals damage the profession and do little if anything to rein in Trump?
The interview exemplifies our problem of scale. We can explain away the need for intervention —even when we have the medical and legal authority — through absurd technicalities. It comes out of fear. This is what the American Psychiatric Association did in the beginning of this presidency when it dug up the obscure "Goldwater rule" and turned it into a gag order, losing sight that the original rule was meant to protect society — not the public figure. Now we have the extraordinary situation of facing the greatest public mental health emergency in our lifetimes, and the mental health authorities are missing in action. I say the profession has already damaged itself, and some of us are trying to salvage it.
Encroaching tyrannies want professionals to be mere technicians that they can control and use. Medical professionals, without a moral compass, can become instruments of the worst atrocities. This is precisely the situation for which the Declaration of Geneva was created: "Do not lose sight of your humanitarian obligation for technicalities" is basically its message from the experience of Nazism. Our critics compare us to Nazi and Soviet psychiatrists, but they abandoned professional standards to serve the state. We are advocating that we keep with professional standards, even if it displeases the state.
Our primary question should be: Does the president meet criteria for an emergency evaluation? Whether it is a 72-hour hold (as in Florida) or a 48-hour hold (as in DC) does not matter, as most evaluations do not take that long. He would be let go if he does not meet criteria. What is important to recognize is that mental impairment exists, a president is not immune to it and avoiding an evaluation does not make it go away.
To assess legal or constitutional feasibility is not our job. Would we not treat a heart attack simply because it is happening in the president? Our job is to meet the medical need. Members of Congress who have direct interactions with the president can request an evaluation. They could also request an involuntary fitness-for-duty evaluation. In my view, citizens, who are direct stakeholders, are also appropriate auspices.
Mental health professionals could then order the hold if the situation warrants it based on uniform standards. Given that our last petition drew more than 800 signatories, we could expect a near-consensus. Whether security staff will comply is another concern that will be a decision of their own conscience. The military should take the protocol measures it does when a fellow serviceperson poses a danger. The Congress would do well to draw up additional articles of impeachment on the latest bypassing of constitutional requirements in launching an act of war, which would serve as limit setting that can help prevent future dangers. We each need to do our part, and we should not stop until the danger is removed.
Unless we are conscientious, independent moral agents of our own, we can easily be coopted into the machinery of domination. We should not let what happened to Nazi doctors, who abandoned medical principles to serve power, happen here.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
South Carolina Lawmaker Switches Support From Biden to Sanders, Saying Sanders Is Best Candidate to Take on Trump
Meg Kinnard, Associated Press
Kinnard writes: "A South Carolina elected official who endorsed Joe Biden last month is switching her allegiance to Bernie Sanders in the state's first-in-the-South presidential primary, saying she had viewed the former vice president - whose support in the state is considered deep - as 'a compromise choice.'"
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Meg Kinnard, Associated Press
Kinnard writes: "A South Carolina elected official who endorsed Joe Biden last month is switching her allegiance to Bernie Sanders in the state's first-in-the-South presidential primary, saying she had viewed the former vice president - whose support in the state is considered deep - as 'a compromise choice.'"
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Demonstrators tools signs calling for protection of Social Security. (photo: Getty)
Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Aamer Madhani, Associated Press
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump appeared to suggest in a television interview Wednesday that he's willing to consider entitlement cuts in the future, a move that would mark a tectonic shift from his stance during his 2016 run for the White House."
Trump suggested he was open to a cut in social safety net benefits, such as Medicare and Social Security, in comments during a CNBC interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
While Trump has repeatedly talked up strong economic growth, the federal budget deficit has swollen as his administration has pressed for tax cuts and increased government spending.
Asked if entitlement cuts would ever be on his agenda, Trump responded, “At some point they will be.”
As a candidate for the White House, Trump stood apart from much of the GOP primary field as he vowed to oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, while also ensuring every American had health coverage.
In the CNBC interview, Trump called tackling entitlement spending “the easiest of all things” and suggested higher economic growth would make it easier to reduce spending on the programs.
“Well, we’re going – we’re going to look,” Trump said. “We also have assets that we’ve never had. I mean we’ve never had growth like this.”
Asked for clarification following the interview, White House spokesman Judd Deere noted there had been “no benefit cuts” under Trump, and said the president has kept “his commitment to the most vulnerable Americans, especially those who depend on Medicare and Social Security.”
The budget deficit is expected to reach $1 trillion this year, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.
Early in his presidential campaign, Trump said he was a different sort of Republican, one who would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
The Medicaid promise was ultimately abandoned. The unsuccessful Republican drive to repeal “Obamacare” would have also limited future federal spending on that federal-state health insurance program for low-income people.
More recently, Trump’s 2020 budget called for deep cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals.
Although the White House countered that the proposal would not scale back benefits for seniors, Democratic congressional leaders and a major hospital group denounced the plan.
As a candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump had seemed to draw a line against cuts to major benefit programs.
“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid,” he said at a 2015 event in New Hampshire. “And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to … cut.”
The head of an advocacy group created to defend the Affordable Care Act said Trump tipped his hand with his comments in Davos.
“The president has made it clear that he wants to make draconian cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid – something that the American people vehemently oppose – and today he said he’s going to try again,” said Leslie Dach, chairman of Protect Our Care.
The Trump administration plans to make it more difficult for pregnant women to get a US visa. (photo: Tetra/Getty)
US to Impose Visas Restrictions for Pregnant Women
Matthew Lee and Colleen Long, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The Trump administration has been restricting all forms of immigration, but the president has been particularly plagued by the issue of birthright citizenship - anyone born in the U.S. is considered a citizen, under the Constitution."
Matthew Lee and Colleen Long, Associated Press
Excerpt: "The Trump administration has been restricting all forms of immigration, but the president has been particularly plagued by the issue of birthright citizenship - anyone born in the U.S. is considered a citizen, under the Constitution."
Regulating tourist visas for pregnant women is one way to get at the issue, but it raises questions about how officers would determine whether a woman is pregnant to begin with, and whether a woman could get turned away by border officers who suspect she may be just by looking at her.
Consular officers right now aren't told to ask during visa interviews whether a woman is pregnant or intends to become so. But they would have to determine whether a visa applicant would be coming to the U.S. primarily to give birth.
Birth tourism is a lucrative business in both the U.S. and abroad. American companies take out advertisements and charge up to $80,000 to facilitate the practice, offering hotel rooms and medical care. Many of the women travel from Russia and China to give birth in the U.S. The U.S. has been cracking down on the practice since before Trump took office.
Although there are scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. And women are often honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even show signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.
There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.
The draft rule is “intended to address the national security and law enforcement risks associated with birth tourism, including criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” a State Department spokesperson said.
Florida Everglades. (photo: Getty)
Florida to Purchase 20,000 Acres of Everglades Wetlands to Prevent Oil Drilling
Ella Torres, ABC News
Torres writes: "The Florida Department of Environmental Protection will purchase 20,000 acres of wetlands in the Everglades in an effort to save the area from oil drilling, the governor announced."
Ella Torres, ABC News
Torres writes: "The Florida Department of Environmental Protection will purchase 20,000 acres of wetlands in the Everglades in an effort to save the area from oil drilling, the governor announced."
It was the largest wetland acquisition in a decade, according to the governor.
he Florida Department of Environmental Protection will purchase 20,000 acres of wetlands in the Everglades in an effort to save the area from oil drilling, the governor announced.
It was the largest wetland acquisition in a decade, according to a press release from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' office.
The wetlands affected, which are located in the Water Conservation Area 3 in Dade and Broward Counties, had previously been owned by Kanter Real Estate LLC. Kanter and the state's Department of Environmental Protection recently reached an agreement and the acquisition of the land was announced Wednesday.
"This significant purchase will permanently save these lands from oil drilling. I’m proud of our progress, but also recognize this is just the beginning," DeSantis said in a statement. "I will continue to fight every day for the Everglades and Florida’s environment."
The wetland acquisition will protect the wildlife habitat of more 60 endangered and threatened species and support expedited restoration work on the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir, according to the governor's office.
Water Conservation Area 3 is part of Everglades Protection Area, described as "one of the most important wetland systems in the Everglades ecosystem."
In February 2019, a Florida appeals court ruled that the real estate company would be able to drill an exploratory well in the Everglades, according to court documents.
The company's president, John Kanter, wanted to drill on a 20-mile-wide, 150-mile-long stretch of shale between Miami and Fort Myers dubbed the Sunniland Trend, according to the Miami Herald.
With the new acquisition by the state, about 600,000 acres of land are now protected in Water Conservation Area 3 and will be restored, the governor said.
Kimberly Mitchell, the executive director at The Everglades Trust, called the acquisition "fantastic news."
"This Governor keeps plowing through the morass that has confounded every Governor before him. We have never doubted the sincerity of his commitment," Mitchell said in a statement.
DeSantis' office did not immediately respond to ABC News' question as to how much the land purchase will cost.
He has also requested sustained funding at $625 million annually for the Everglades, springs and clean water to help with restoration, according to the press release.
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