HEH: With Conservative Viewership Tanking, ESPN Gets MSNBC to Run Ads on SportsCenter.
No joke. During NBC’s late ’70 nadir, I remember them running promo spots for the ill-fated (and ill-conceived and ill-executed) Supertrain — on St. Louis’s tiny UHF station. You have to be desperate to imagine that you’ll find the audience for your new big budget show sandwiched in between mid-afternoon reruns of Sanford and Son and Rhoda.
So this is familiar TV territory, both the desperation and the nadir.
THEY THINK IT’S A SURVIVAL PACT: The Media-Democratic Party Suicide Pact.
If Dwight Eisenhower were around today, he might be warning us against the Media-Government Complex.
CLAIM: Trump’s trampling of political norms spurs strongman comparisons.
Has he threatened to use his “pen and phone” to circumvent Congress?
THE NOT-SO-GREAT WALL: China’s Economic Reforms Have Hit a Wall.
From the late 1970s until 2010 China averaged more than nine percent real growth, but growth has fallen considerably since, coming in at 6.7 percent for all of 2016. More troubling than the country’s dive in growth is its collapse in productivity. All of China’s growth now is achieved through mobilizing more money and labor, not improvements in human capital or technology. It now takes three times as much capital to generate a single unit of economic growth as it did in 2008. The result is an explosion of debt that now accounts for at least 280 percent of GDP, and could break through the 300 percent mark by year’s end.
China has three strategies to arrest this trend. The first is to shrink the size of the old economy by reducing capacity in heavy industrial sectors dominated by lethargic state-owned enterprises, including steel and aluminum. The second is to expand the new economy by supporting high value-added services and advanced technologies. And the third is to reform local government fiscal systems while tightening regulation of new financial instruments such as wealth management products. The headline figures do reflect economic restructuring; services now count for more than half of the economy, high-tech manufacturing is expanding rapidly, and the issuance of new credit is slowing. But despite these efforts, productivity is still flagging.
Two out of those three reforms directly attack the power structure of the Communist Party of China. The remaining one, expanding the high-tech “new economy,” requires the kind of openness and transparency which Communist rule makes impossible.
PARTY OF THE PEOPLE: DNC Workers Sue Party Over ‘Starvation’ Wages, No Overtime.
WAPO: Trump acknowledges ‘facts’ shared with Russian envoys during White House meeting.
President Trump appeared to acknowledge Tuesday that he revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of a Washington Post story and a move that contradicted his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.
Trump’s tweets tried to explain away the news, which emerged late Monday, that he had shared sensitive, “code-word” information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during a White House meeting last week, a disclosure that intelligence officials warned could jeopardize a crucial intelligence source on the Islamic State.
“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety,” Trump wrote Tuesday morning. “Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”
I’ll try to unpack this.
Yesterday, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said the original WaPo report was false. That’s a complicated denial, because the thing which McMaster said was false — that Trump revealed “methods and sources” to the Russians — wasn’t in the original WaPo report.
So McMaster denied something nobody was reporting, which could have been obfuscation or could have been a misunderstanding of what was reported. We just don’t know. What we do know is that McMaster is on record saying that the President did not reveal the methods and sources which could endangered an intelligence operation and our spies on the ground.
Despite what WaPo implied today, Trump’s tweet did not contradict McMaster’s complicated denial. Trump says he shared anti-ISIS intel, minus the methods and sources, with Russia — as is his right. Whether or not that was wise depends on how you view the potential for combined U.S.-Russian anti-ISIS operations. “It’s complicated” would probably be a fair assessment.
So the short version is that the President did share “highly classified information” regarding ISIS and/or terrorism in general, but not in such a way to compromise either our intelligence gathering or our intelligence officers. And that last bit comes from no less than H.R. McMaster, who wrote the book (or at least one of the first books) on how careless and stupid politicians got us into Vietnam and doomed our war there.
Today’s WaPo followup (quoted and linked above) by Ashley Parker concludes that “Trump’s tweets undercut his administration’s frantic effort Monday night to contain the damaging report.” But if I’ve unpacked this correctly, then that conclusion doesn’t follow from what was reported yesterday, what was thoroughly denied by McMaster, and by what Trump tweeted this morning. The only way to reach Parker’s conclusion is to take McMaster’s denial of one specific item (“methods and sources”) as a blanket denial. But that’s not what he said.
However, the White House P.R. effort was conducted in its customarily chaotic way, which has allowed WaPo (and many others) to make claims and conclusions which the facts — if I’ve correctly understood them — don’t support.
WINNERS & LOSERS: Morgan Stanley Is Predicting Sears Will Die Soon, Making This Rival a Huge Winner.
After Sears CEO Eddie Lampert went on yet another blog-post rant on Monday, this time aimed at one of the dying retailer’s vendors, the company’s shares plunged as much as 14%. And on Sunday, Morgan Stanley wrote casually about the possibility of a Sears bankruptcy in 2017.
“[Sears] one- and two-year credit default swaps imply the market is pricing a high profitability of default over the next 12 to 24 months,” Morgan Stanley said in a note. “If Sears files for bankruptcy this year and subsequently liquidates, JCP could be a major beneficiary.”
That’s right, Morgan Stanley is already predicting who will come out the big winner from a likely Sears Chapter 11 filing and possible liquidation, and it’s J.C. Penney. That surely comes as a slight relief to J.C. Penney, whose stock has also been declining after posting a disastrous first quarter. Last year, after a 33-year hiatus, J.C Penney started selling home appliances again, making its business prepared to benefit should Sears die.
Given Penney’s ongoing troubles, even the death of Sears might not give them much more than a temporary stay.
LIKE LABOUR TO THE SLAUGHTER? Regional voting intentions show Tory tide rising across country.
For the first time in this election, YouGov reveals the voting intention picture in each British government office region. The fieldwork, conducted from April 24 to May 5, shows:
•The Conservative vote share is up, sometimes dramatically so, since the last general election in every region of the UK.
•Labour are down on their 2015 vote haul in every region of the UK except the South West and South East where they were already performing poorly.
•The Liberal Democrat vote share is up in most regions, but only by small margins.
•UKIP’s vote share is down seven to ten points in all regions except Scotland and London, where they were already performing poorly.
The results show Teresa May “pulling a Trump” by pulling voters away from Labour in traditionally Labour-friendly regions in Wales and the north of England. So if you think of this snap election as a referendum on the Brexit referendum, it looks as though British voters are more strongly in favor now than they were during the original referendum.
HMM: Private Investigator Says Murdered DNC Staffer Was Communicating with WikiLeaks Prior to Death. “The sources also say that they were told to ‘stand down’ on investigating the crime.”
FAKE NEWS? ‘It didn’t happen’: H.R. McMaster calls WaPo’s Trump report ‘false’
But there might be more to the story and less to the denial than there seems to be at first glance.
Twitchy has the details.
AND IT WILL HAVE PASSENGERS ANGRY: Trump’s expected widening of laptop ban has European airlines worried.
Alain Bauer, president of the CNAPS, a French regulator of private-sector security agents, including those checking baggage and passengers in France’s airports, predicted “chaotic” scenes initially if the ban was instituted.
“Imagine the number of people who carry their laptops and tablets onto planes — not just adults, but also children,” he said.
Bauer added that the ban would slow passage through security checks as people try to negotiate a way of keeping their laptops.
I fail to see how a baggage compartment filled with lithium-ion batteries is any more safe than a passenger compartment filled with lithium-ion batteries.
CHARLIE MARTIN: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ebola.
A nation of men, not laws, in other words.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Eating salt could help you to LOSE weight, study reveals.
Maybe this is why you never see diet pretzels — they’re all diet.
STATE DEPARTMENT REPORT: Assad using crematorium to hide atrocities.
THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS. ONE INSIDE THE BELTWAY, THE OTHER OUT: “People are tuning the media out. Credibility is largely gone.”
UH-OH: Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says.
Uber sidestepped a full shutdown of its self-driving car efforts on Monday when a federal judge stopped short of issuing a temporary injunction against the ride-hailing company’s autonomous vehicle program.
But the court mandated that Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer leading Uber’s self-driving car program, must be restricted from working on a critical component of autonomous vehicle technology throughout the duration of the litigation, a setback that could hamper the company’s development efforts.
The decision came in a case that has underlined the increasingly bitter fight between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google’s parent company.
As Kissinger quipped about the Iran-Iraq War, “Pity they can’t both lose.”
AND MORNING JOE KNOWS THIS HOW? ‘Morning Joe’ hosts: Conway secretly hates Trump.
“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say ‘bleeech I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much,” Brzezinski said.
“‘I have to take a shower because it feels so dirty to be saying what I’m saying,’” she continued, mockingly quoting Conway. “I guess she’s just used to it now.”
Scarborough backed her up, adding that Conway began referring to Trump as her “client” after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes showing Trump speaking lewdly about kissing and groping women without their consent.
“‘I’m just doing this for the money, I’ll be off this soon,’” he said, imitating Conway. “I don’t know that she ever said, ‘I’m doing this for the money,’ but this is just my summer vacation, my summer in Europe. And basically, I’m gonna get through this.”
It’s a shame Conway can’t go on the show to defend herself, but Mika & Joe banned her two months ago.
UPDATE: Link was missing — sorry. All fixed.
BEN SASSE: ‘Shared Civic Understanding of America’ Needed Before Arguing Party, Policy Differences.
“We need to have a shared civic understanding of America before we get to partisan and policy differences. There are important fights to be had in policy. But we first need a civic sense of what America is. And here’s what comes next in things like Russian interference in America and in other countries in the age of cyber-war over the next decade. I’m obviously concerned about 2016, but I’m far more concerned about 2018 and 2020, because here is what comes next,” Sasse continued, giving the example of cyberhacking that releases mostly true information with some false info intended to take down a candidate: “Your phone records are dumped, and they’re 99 percent accurate, but 1 percent, you’re calling a brothel in Chattanooga on Tuesday nights, when your wife is at bridge club.”
“That is what is coming next in the era of cyber-war. And we’re going to need to have some institutions that we can rely on and believe are apolitical, when the public has more and more doubt.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but our public institutions have never been so politicized.
LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET BACK TO YOUR SAFE SPACE: Leading Millennials in the Military.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: These Lowe’s employees are now wearing exoskeletons to work.
ENDGAME? Evacuation deal completed as Syrian rebels leave Damascus district.
State TV quoted the Damascus provincial governor as saying that Qaboun “is empty of militants”. It said army engineering teams had entered the district, on the city’s northeastern edge, to begin clearing it of mines and unexploded ordnance.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 1,300 rebel fighters and their families had left on Monday, headed for areas further east of Damascus or to the northwestern province of Idlib.
On Sunday, more than 2,000 rebels and their family members left Qaboun, state media said.
State TV said several hundred fighters had decided to stay in the district under the agreement as government forces took control.
The Damascus government has concluded a number of similar evacuation deals in recent months with the Syrian opposition, supported in some cases by Syria ally Iran and rebel backer Qatar.
That Iran is willing to back some of these deals helps show just how much supporting the Assad regime has cost Tehran.
AND STAY DOWN: U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Revive North Carolina Voter-ID Law.
Turning away the appeal pressed by state Republican leaders, the justices left intact a ruling that said the provisions were racially discriminatory in violation of federal voting-rights law. In addition to requiring people to show a photo ID, the North Carolina law reduced the number of early voting days and eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.
The rebuff was a surprise because four conservative justices previously tried to revive the measure before the 2016 election. That effort failed because it was an emergency request that required five votes, but the court could have accepted the latest appeal with only four votes.
In a statement that accompanied the court’s order Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to uncertainty over who was authorized to file an appeal on behalf of the state. He said the court had received a “blizzard of filings” on that issue.
Roberts, however, also stressed that the justices weren’t deciding that the lower court was right to strike down the North Carolina requirements. The rejection of an appeal “imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,” he wrote, quoting from a 1923 Supreme Court opinion.
I’d like to get Glenn to weigh in on this, but the story reads like the N.C. law might be kosher, but that the appeal was a mess.
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