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After Cardi B launched an anti-taxation tirade against Uncle Sam on Instagram, Remy took on the challenge of explaining what’s happening with all her money.
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Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is the latest Trump official to be caught in a swirl of ethical questions. In this case, The Washington Post uncovered a sweetheart housing deal allowing Pruitt to pay $50 a night for a luxury condo near the U.S. Capitol.
The condo is owned by Vicki Hart, a prominent health care lobbyist who happens to be married to J. Steven Hart, an energy lobbyist. It’s not difficult to see how that could create a potential conflict of interest for Pruitt, whose office has been directly lobbied by Steven Hart during the time that Pruitt has been paying well below market rates to stay at the condo. In all, Pruitt paid about $6,100 in rent between March 18 and September 1 of last year, and sometimes didn’t even pay on time. That’s absurdly low compared to what the Harts could have charged for the space, but it’s a small price for having direct access to a high-ranking official with the power to grant favors.
When he’s not staying in the $50 apartment, Pruitt frequently travels back to his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at taxpayer expense, and he’s been known to take a rather large—by EPA administrator standards, at least—security entourage with him wherever he goes. Aside from all that, questions have been raised about Pruitt using public staff for private work, spending more than $40,000 to build a phone booth in his office, and giving out big pay raises to top aides without permission from the White House.
All in all, it seems appropriate for Pruitt to face scrutiny in the press, from his bosses in the Trump administration, and from ethics investigators at the EPA and in Congress.
But the D.C. city government wants a piece of the action too. On Thursday, the city’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs hit the Harts with a citation for failing to have the proper permits to rent their condo, an offense that could carry a fine of up to $2,000—or, in more Biblical terms, 40 days and 40 nights of having Pruitt as a tenant. In the city’s eyes, Vicki Hart’s arrangement with Pruitt may violate rules governing short-term rentals like Airbnb.
This is surely nothing more than a minor sideshow in a story that already has plenty of legs, but the citation is notable for two reasons.
First, the idea that two lobbyists offering a sweetheart housing deal to a top government official would go through the necessary channels to get the proper permits is pretty funny. So is the idea that a $2,000 fine would deter this type of thing. The Harts could easily have charged double the rate Pruitt was paying—the average two-bedroom apartment in that neighborhood goes for about $3,000 per month—so it’s safe to conclude that they weren’t worried about making money with this lease.
But second, and more important, is the fact that while Pruitt’s sweet Capitol Hill condo arrangement is far from being the typical short-term rental in Washington, D.C., the penalties are exactly that. A family in Shaw or a single mother in Anacostia who is trying to make ends meet by renting extra rooms via Airbnb or another short-term rental platform could face the same punishment being handed down against Vicki Hart. And that person wouldn’t be able to laugh it off as a rounding error on a lobbying expense report.
Some D.C. officials are looking for new ways to limit the short-term rental market by limiting how many rooms can be rented in a single home and how many rentals a homeowner can make in a single year. They’ll have real consequences on anyone trying to scrape out a living that way in the nation’s capital.
No one except the bureaucrats at the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs seriously believes that the problem with Pruitt’s housing arrangement is the lack of a permit. We should apply that same logic to other situations, and ask whether it makes sense in any circumatance for the city government to require a permission slip for something an innocuous as letting someone sleep in your extra bedroom.
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Real capitalism is a tough sport where entrepreneurs risk their capital in hopes of winning customers.
The “crony” version of it involves politicians rigging the rules to assure that the “right” people are winners. We see this ugly process on high-profile national issues, such as when Donald Trump promotes tariffs to boost steel makers at the expense of companies that use steel products. But most of this nonsense proceeds quietly in legislative committees, without garnering any headlines or vocal opposition.
One awful but illustrative example popped up recently in the California state Capitol. Assembly Bill 2246, by Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, apparently is part of a national effort by rental-car companies to snuff out a burgeoning industry that just happens to be threatening its business model. The bill would redefine “personal vehicle sharing” companies as “car rental companies”—and then slam them with reams of new regulations. Similar measures have been proposed in Idaho, New Hampshire, Maryland and Maine.
Rental-car companies are facing the same challenges as other established business models in this internet and app-based age, writes Steven Greenhut. New companies are free to offer better products and services that appeal to customers. This is creative as new ideas flourish and consumers get a broader choice and lower prices thanks to competition. But it’s also destructive. Complacent old companies suddenly are forced to improve their offerings or shut their doors. The consumer is king.
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We’re probably in a trade war with China. “We are not in a trade war with China,” President Trump tweeted on Friday morning. Most signs say otherwise, or at least show that we’re well on our way there.
For instance, China just filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the billions in new tariffs that Trump is proposing. The WTO complaint gives the U.S. and China 60 days to resolve things, after which China may request that a WTO panel adjudicate.
It’s also not reassuring that Trump’s assertion that we’re not in a trade war with China was followed up by this reasoning: We already lost that war many years ago, leaving us “a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion.” (All random capitalization the president’s.) “We cannot let this continue!”
It sure sounds like Trump is hoping for another crack at trade shenanigans with China, only with the U.S. “winning” this time. But nobody wins in a trade war (as we’ve been saying). To quote a recent Sheldon Richman column, “You cannot advocate trade restrictions without also advocating state-bestowed privilege.”
Trump has been crowing that even with his aluminum tariffs, “prices are DOWN 4%” and “lots of money coming into U.S. coffers and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!” Here’s Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler on that claim:
Someone exempted most of the big aluminum countries from the tariffs, so the impact was muted. Who was that? https://t.co/Zqa3sqT0ld
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 6, 2018
But alas, even one-time free market cheerleaders like Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow are defending Trump’s tariffs, saying this isn’t “about trade wars” but “holding to the laws and customs of free trade.” Free Markets Through Regulation, or something.
That seems to be the party line from the pro-Trump crowd: We’re not restricting trade and raising taxes, we’re securing the marketplace. Which sounds an awful lot like the liberal and Democratic justifications for messing with market forces that we’ve heard so many times before, with a dash of national-greatness conservatism and fear of wily foreigners mixed in.
“This is exactly what the free traders who formerly worked in the White House feared, Trump in a macho pissing match against Chinese President Xi,” writes Jonathan Swan at Axios.
Trump has a blunt understanding of leverage and believes the worst thing he can show is weakness. He also believes, as he tweeted, that the U.S. already is so far down on the scorecard with China that he’s got nothing to lose.
In any event, our counterparts across the sea seem to be, uh, keeping calm. From Reuters:
A trade war triggered by U.S. tariffs would cause a global recession—and the mere fear of one is already hurting the economy, European Central Bank board member Benoit Coeure said on Friday.
Russia wants to ban popular encrypted messaging app. Russia is moving to block the encrypted messaging app Telegram after it refused to turn over keys to state authorities that would allow them to decrypt any and all user messages. Telegram—massively popular in some parts of the world, including Russia, many of the former Soviet Union states, and the Middle East—just hit 200 million monthly users. A lawsuit filed on Friday in Moscow now seeks to block access to Telegram throughout Russia. Iranian leaders have also been proposing a similar ban.
Venezuelans blame Maduro for deepening humanitarian crisis. A new poll of Venezuelans shows the effects of the ever-growing crisis there for ordinary people:
A majority—54 percent—blame President Nicolas Maduro and his policies. Nearly half said is leadership is “very bad” and 24 percent said that it was “bad,” while just 0.4 percent said it is “very good” and 9 percent said that it is good.
The March 2018 Atlantic Council poll found that the biggest problem people see is inflation and the high cost of living (34 percent said it is the main problem) followed by food shortages (28 percent) and an array of other issues related to money (together, “personal insecurity,” “the economic crisis,” “lack of cash,” and “economic warfare” were the main concern for 23 percent of respondents). Maduro was named as the main problem by 2.6 percent. Only 0.3 percent had international economic sanctions as a main complaint.
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Last month, news anchors at Sinclair Broadcast Group’s TV stations were required to read a script critical of “fake stories” and general bias in the major news networks. Because some of the phrasing mirrored President Donald Trump’s overcooked critique of liberal media outlets, the story triggered widespread and overwrought warnings about authoritarianism and the rise of state-run media.
It’s true that Sinclair, the largest owner of U.S. TV stations, would have been better off following the lead of the big outlets: hiring and working with people who subscribe to the same worldview and then simply letting them do their thing, writes David Harsanyi. But as long as we have a media market and inhibit government meddling in speech, the idea that we are powerless to turning away from “propaganda” is nothing but alarmism. Every Sinclair market has an alternative local news station for viewers, not to mention other sources of information consumers can read and listen to if they desire.
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The new movie Chappaquiddick is a political bombshell 50 years delayed. We’ve always had most of the facts of the case, but there was a longtime disinclination to get too exercised about them. Times have changed,however, and now the story reads a lot differently. But since the infinitely annoying Kennedy family still has its benighted admirers, director John Curran has wisely taken a straightforward approach to recounting what happened on and after that summer night in 1969 when Senator Ted Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, drove his car into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island, just off Martha’s Vineyard, and then walked away, leaving a 28-year-old woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown (or possibly to asphyxiate, gasping desperately for two hours at an ever-diminishing bubble of air inside the overturned vehicle). There’s no need for partisan exaggeration in this story; the undisputed facts are awful enough, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.
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A Columbia University student was angry with her sociology professor for saying it was appropriate to use the term negro when referring to people of color while discussing the 1960s. She wrote to the professor, explaining to him that negro was an offensive and outdated term, but he failed to adjust his vocabulary. “I didn’t pay attention in class after that,” the student, Maria Martinez, told The Columbia Daily Spectator.
Here’s some context: The professor is Todd Gitlin, a longtime leftist activist who served as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early ’60s. He teaches a course in American studies.
“It is in fact true, a matter of historical record, that African Americans in the ’50s and ’60s wanted to be called ‘Negroes,'” Gitlin told The Spectator. “Denying that practice would be a falsification of history.”
That was just the lead anecdote of the Spectator piece, which discussed student complaints about their professors’ alleged microaggressions:
Sabina Jones, CC ’20, recalled a white professor saying the N-word when reading it in a racially-charged book in an English class. She said this experience made it difficult to engage in class for the rest of the semester.
“It’s hard to continue on, not knowing if you are welcome in a space completely or [if] people have the knowledge to welcome you to a space,” she said. “It creates a roadblock in continuing down the path that you want to continue on.”
These tense interactions, commonly known as microaggressions, occur when comments or actions are—either intentionally or unintentionally—discriminatory or offensive towards people of marginalized identities.
But as I’ve written previously, the theory behind microagressions doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The concept is ill-defined, according to Emory University psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, and in surveys most members of minority groups aren’t even offended by this sort of thing, according to the Cato Institute. It would therefore be unwise to insist that professors cater to the sensitivities of students like those quoted by the Spectator.
Yet that’s exactly what some of the offended students apparently want—mandatory cultural sensitivity training for the faculty:
“Mandatory trainings are less about punishing or limiting conversation, but more making sure that everyone has the language and the basic knowledge to be able to engage in those conversations,” Martinez said.
It seems like quite a stretch to suggest that Gitlin is lacking in basic knowledge of the subject at hand.
Students, and young people more broadly, are often unfairly smeared as delicate snowflakes. But when students shout down Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis and Clark College, take offense at a photograph of Charles Murray, or level sexual harassment charges at an avante-garde film professor for showing his experimental film, it can be challenging to dispute the stereotype.
Hat tip: The College Fix
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Chicago police have shot or tried to shoot more than 700 dogs since 2008, according to a Chicago Sun-Times investigation. The paper found none of those shootings resulted in discipline against the officers, even when courts found the shooting wrongful and the city had to pay damages to the dog’s owner.
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Let’s be clear. When a cabinet head says she’s going to send “as many troops as we need to get the mission done,” she’s using governmentese to say “we have no idea what we’re talking about.”
But that’s the, er, exact number of National Guard members who will be ordered immediately to the border between the United States and Mexico to stop migrants, says Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen:
At WH this morning, @SecNielsen has no specific number of National Guard to be sent to southern border, but “we’re gonna send as many troops as we need to get the mission done.” Whether National Guard are armed or not to be worked out with Mexico and border Governors, she says. pic.twitter.com/dQK3sjMxR4
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) April 5, 2018
Matt Welch has noted that in sending troops to the southern border, Donald Trump is merely following in the footsteps of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who did the same thing at various points. In fact, so did Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Sending troops to the border turns out to be, like violence, as “American as cherry pie.”
So what’s different this time around? Illegal border crossings dropped 25 percent between 2016 and 2017 and are currently at a 40-year low:
Donald Trump ran as a nativist who said, against all evidence, that Mexico was flooding our country with criminals, rapists, drug dealers, gang members, and welfare cheats. So in a fantastically gross way, he is simply fulfilling his signature campaign promise.
But he also ran as a savvy businessman who would “drain the swamp” and make government more effective, efficient, and cost-effective. This latest move is the opposite of all that and perhaps stressing that perspective might make the 89 percent of self-described Republicans who voted for him to think twice about meekly going along with every gesture President Trump makes.
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President Donald Trump, like his two immediate predecessors, has signed an order that will send an as-yet unknown number of National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico to assist Border Patrol agents and also attend to the president’s own short-term political needs.
If you think the above sentence is unfair in any way to the more immigrant-friendly George W. Bush, dial the wayback machine to May 2006, and note that Bush made the announcement on the exact same friggin’ day that the Senate began debating an ill-fated comprehensive immigration reform package. If you think I’m being mean to Barack Obama, check out the Washington Post in 2010 noting that Obama’s muscle-flexing, like Bush’s, was openly intended to demonstrate credibility in advance of reform negotiations: “Then, as now, the troop deployment was fueled by heightened concerns about lawlessness—then it was illegal immigration, now it is drug traffickers—as well as political maneuvering in Washington to lay the groundwork for an effort to change immigration policy.”
And if you think Trump alone of the three should be spared charges of political theatricality, consider that the 19,437 agents who work for the Border Patrol arrested between them 37,393 people attempting to cross northward across the border in March. That’s two arrests per agent, on average, in a month. The month prior to Obama’s move, there were 55,237 arrests made by 17,000 or so agents, or more than three per agent. And apprehensions the month before Bush moved were 126,538, or more than 12 per agent. So the president is throwing more money and manpower at a problem that is shrinking by the minute.
You can’t go very wrong in 21st century American politics throwing ever-larger buckets of money at enforcement along the southern border. As Greg Beato noted in these pages six years ago, money and manpower along the Rio Grande had already tripled over the previous decade. But as El Paso-based Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) told me in 2015 after Trump first rode anti-illegal-immigration sentiment to the top of the polls, “You’re really working against the law of diminishing returns at this point.”
When you double the size of an agency in less than a decade, bad things can happen. “That rapid increase in staffing [under Bush] came with some problems,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last year. “Hiring standards were lowered, training at the Border Patrol Academy truncated, and background checks — a crucial step — were delayed or not performed at all…. About 170 border law enforcement agents and officers who have been arrested, indicted or convicted in corruption cases since 2002. Officials would later acknowledge the pressure to meet the hiring goals allowed less qualified candidates onto the force, and fueled in part a surge in the cases.”
Trump is not necessarily governing in response to facts on the ground (which as he noted this morning in a rare moment of immigration policy honesty includes a historic low in illegal border crossings), but rather to the political imperatives created by his apocalyptic fantasies. This is someone who campaigned on nightmare border-footage that came from, um, Morocco. And just today, referencing the migrant caravan that’s losing steam in Mexico, the president said, “Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened. Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.’ And I used the word ‘rape.’ And yesterday it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.”
With Congress continuing to refuse Trump his border money, and failing to present to him any immigration compromise (not that he has been anything but unhelpful during negotiations), the chief executive is left to that old standby: “Stonewalling by Members of Congress,” the White House said in a statement, “has prevented our dedicated Border Patrol agents from getting the resources they so desperately need. Inaction has left glaring loopholes open and crucial legal authorities unauthorized, so the President is taking action and using his existing powers to fill these gaps.”
In other words, like his predecessors, he’s reaching for his pen and phone.
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