The Hatch Act says you can’t use taxpayer time or money even inadvertently for political purposes, even inadvertently.
When I joined the Obama Administration, they scared the crap out of me about this.
They told me a story of someone I knew who was in trouble for a Hatch Act violation and had to exit the government.
I was shocked. This was one of the most ethical people I had met. Deeply kind, the type that would do anything to help someone & who advised us on the rules.
It sounded scandalous.
Indeed, his partner had a fundraiser at their apartment for a candidate and he attended. Meaning he went to his own apartment.
Now I’m not sure of all the details. He may have used his work email (emails!) to invite people or it may have been that the event started during work hours and so he was technically getting paid.
Any way this was discovered. He was embarrassed. He agreed to resign. And honestly he had a little of a Scarlett H behind his name.
The Ethics team meant business in the Obama Administration. It would be embarrassing to be seen even flirting with the red line.
I remember waiting outside in the rain before setting foot inside an event while my chief of staff talked to ethics lawyers about the appearance of me being there. It was a private event and we all agreed I could walk in, have no food or drinks, and send them a check as if I had.
I also decided to tweet my attendance so it would be public.
I wasn’t going above & beyond. I was trying to fit in with the norm in the Administration.
Forget about making money on hotel properties.
If a Democratic Senator asked someone in our agency to do a local event on a policy area like opioids, I would only let staff do it if we had a record of doing similar things for Republicans.
Today Administration staff are splayed out in battle ground states like Florida, Minnesota, Arizona and Michigan. The Hatch Act is one of the “many rules meant to be broken.”
The White House chief of staff Mark Meadows says Americans don’t care if they break these little laws.
That’s because you’ve worn them down. Because you’re breaking too many. Because you can exist above the law. At least for now.
It’s because if you can find one person to defend you, you make it seem like it’s a grey area. And there’s always an unqualified corrupt toady who will defend you.
Meadows is right. For many people the Hatch Act isn’t in their top 10 reasons for people who will vote against Donald Trump & family.
And to his supporters, sticking his finger in people’s eye & getting away with it is apparently part of why they like him.
Whoever is at the top will set the tone. The Obama-Biden tone made us proud to serve under them. It made us constantly think about how each action served the public who paid us.
My boss Secretary SylviaBurwell used to call the American public “our bosses.” Even though I was 48, I was new to Washington. I’m grateful that’s the example I had to follow.
From Burwell to DenisMcDonough to Obama & Biden, each of us & civil servants respected them deeply.
I’m tired of a government that thinks we are subservient to them.
For those of us who study autocracies, including elections in autocracies, there were a lot of familiar messages, symbols, and methods on display this week at the #RNCConvention.
1. Cult of the Personality. This show was all about Trump. ( 3 years after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev's gave his secret speech in 1956, titled "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences." I wonder if a future GOP leader will give a similar speech someday?)
2. Administrative resources. Autocrats and semi-autocrats frequently use government resources for personal electoral gain. We have #HatchAct to prevent such behavior in the U.S. It's obviously not working.
3. Blatant disregard for the law. That Trump's team dared anyone to charge them with violating the Hatch Act is exactly what Putin and others autocrats do all the time. Laws don't apply to the king & his court, only to the subjects.
4. Blatant disregard for facts. As U.S. ambassador to Russia, I found this Putin regime trait most frustrating. We - the U.S. government- were constrained by facts. They were not. Trump obviously was not constrained by facts last night. He usually isn't.
5. Us versus Them populism. "Elites" versus "the people" nationalism. Autocratic populists use polarizing identity politics to divide societies all the time. Many populist leaders actually have little in common with the "masses." (Putin is very rich.)
6. The opposition is the "enemy of the people." Putin & other autocratic populists cast their opponents as radicals & revolutionaries. They don't focus on their own records - often there is little to celebrate - but the horrors that will happen if they lose power. Sound familiar?
6b. There is one difference between Putin and Trump so far. Putin also claims falsely that his political opponents are supported by foreign enemies, the U.S. & the West. Trump has not gone there full-throated yet. But my guess it's coming. "Beijing Biden" is a hint.
7. Law and Order. Autocratic populists all shout about it, even when the opposite is happening on their watch.
8. The good tsar versus the bad boyars. Kings and tsars always blamed bad provincial leaders for national ills. Putin blames the governors all the time... just like Trump.
9. Individual acts of royal kindness. Putin, like the tsars he emulates, does this all the time. Trump offering a pardon or "granting" citizenship (which of course he didnt & doesn't have the power to do) are typical, faux gestures of royal kindness toward his subjects.
10. Homage and fealty. Vassals must signal their complete loyalty and absolute devotion to kings and autocrats. Those that don't are banished from the royal court or the party. (Where were the Bushes last night?)
11. The royal family. In this dimension, Trump acts more like a monarch than even Putin. (but watch Lukashenko and his gun-toting teenage son in Belarus)The many Trump family members who performed this week - even a girlfriend got a slot - went beyond even what Putin does.
12. There's still one big difference. We still don't know who will win the November election. That uncertainty is a crucial difference between electoral democracies & electoral autocracies. Its also a difference that has no guarantee of lasting, depending on the outcome this year
Inside A Secret Government Warehouse Prepped For Health Catastrophes
June 27, 2016
Thousands of lives might someday depend on this stockpile, which holds all kinds of medical supplies that the officials would need in the wake of a terrorist attack with a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.
Stacks of boxes containing critical supplies stretch almost as far as the eye
can see in this Strategic National Stockpile warehouse.(Courtesy of the CDC)
The location of these warehouses is secret. How many there are is secret. (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what's in them is secret.
"If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can't fix," says Burel. "And we just don't want that to happen."
As we walk, I hear a loud hum. It's a giant freezer packed with products that have to be kept cold. The inventory includes millions of doses of vaccines against bioterrorism agents like smallpox, antivirals in case of a deadly flu pandemic, medicines used to treat radiation sickness and burns, chemical agent antidotes, wound care supplies, IV fluids and antibiotics.
Just outside it, there are rows upon rows of ventilators that could keep sick or injured people breathing. Mabry explains that they're kept in a constant state of readiness. "If you look down to the side you'll see there's electrical outlets so they can be charged once a month," she says. Not only that—the ventilators get sent out for yearly maintenance...
"If you envision, say, a Super Walmart and stick two of those side by side and take out all the drop ceiling, that's about the same kind of space that we would occupy in one of these storage locations," Burel says.
A big American flag hangs from the ceiling, and shelves packed with stuff stand so tall that looking up makes me dizzy.
"We have the capability, if something bad happens, that we can intervene in a positive way, but then we don't ever want to have to do that. So it's kind of a strange place," says Burel. "But we would be foolish not to prepare for those events that we could predict might happen."
One of Trump's greatest ambitions in life is to destroy all of Obama's accomplishments. His narcissism cannot tolerate the knowledge that he will never come close to being a president of Obama's stature.
The cost to the innocent for his raging ego has no meaning for him, no reality. He literally has no conscience.
"In 2018, nearly 20 civilians were killed or injured every day by land mines and other unexploded ordnance remnants, such as cluster munitions, according to the International Coalition to Ban Landmines. That is almost certainly a conservative number. Children represented 40 percent of the casualties, the group reported."
Cambodia still has large numbers of mines from the spillover of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. A veteran replied to General McCaffery:
"In Vietnam alone, leftover land mines and other explosives dropped by the United States have killed 40,000 people since the end of the war, and it may take 300 years for all remaining munitions to be cleared. In other words, the last Vietnamese person to be killed by an unexploded U.S. munition probably hasn’t even been born."
But, well, dead children, children missing limbs, not important. The important thing is to piss off Obama, yes? Do they know? Just today I read Joe Walsh (Republican running against Trump for the nomination in 2020 election) describe going to a Trump rally and talking to some of the people waiting for the rally to start.
"I asked about 40 folks a very simple question: Has Donald Trump ever lied to the American people? Every single person said “No.” No, Trump has never lied. A few people told me that Trump, unlike Obama, has never golfed. Nobody in line knew that Trump was increasing the debt way faster than Obama.Nobody knew that under Trump our deficit was now greater than $1 trillion. Almost everyone thought that China was paying for Trump’s tariffs."
Yesterday, I read the report of another person who had gone to a rally and had a similar experience. No one he talked to knew that Trump's 2020 budget includes drastic cuts to Medicare and they were startled and distressed about that. I have no idea what they know about land mines. I'm willing to guess that they are not being told that they have no real military value, that actual military experts like General McCaffrey want nothing to do with them, that what they do, mainly, is kill and maim children for decades to come.
In 2004 during the Democratic Convention, I found myself at the home of a diehard FoxNews watcher. There was no possibility of watching the convention on another channel.
I really wanted to see the speakers, to follow what the Democratic party was presenting to the country in what seemed to me to be a critical election. The war, the war, the war. That was my primary reason for becoming active in the election - registering voters, going door to door, stuffing envelopes (literally), making calls, whatever I, a total novice at political engagement could find to do. The Iraq war, in my mind was a disaster. Thousands of American members of our military were dying, thousands more coming home with missing limbs, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD.
Someone I knew was a member of the National Guard and was deployed as a medic. Three times the vehicle he was riding in was blown up by an IED, all three times there were severe injuries, in one attack, a soldier in the vehicle was killed.
Meanwhile, my friend's wife struggled at home trying to keep their four children on track, to deal with their worries and nightmares about whether they would see their father again or if he too would be killed. She found taking care of everything that goes into daily life in a family of four children aged five to fourteen by herself was a lot harder than she thought it was going to be. "I'll never again complain that he's not doing enough to help," she told me. "I realize every day how much he was contributing, now that he's not here."
When he came home, it was a struggle for everyone. He spent hours every day jogging. Friends remarked that he seemed to show little emotion, that he was changed from the outgoing, friendly person they had always known. He was distant. The children, who had always impressed me as some to the nicest, most interesting, and most well-behaved children I had ever known, started struggling.
After he had been home for about six months, his wife finally managed to to convince him to go to Ft Hood to be evaluated for PTSD. He had PTSD. Treatment helped.
But it would always be there. He had been changed. His children and his wife had a hole in their lives - the time in their lives when he should have been home, at the supper table, goofing around with the kids, sleeping next to his wife at night.
And for what? Because Saddam Hussein was a bad guy? Seriously? Even George Bush said Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, seemed insulted when a reporter asked a question that implied that Bush had said so at some point. Iraq was the only country in the Middle East where Al Qaida was not active - Saddam and Bin Laden were archenemies. Bin Laden thought Saddam was a heretic who had betrayed Islam, Saddam thought Bin Laden was a religious fanatic who posed a threat to his dictatorship.
So why? Why did my friend and his family and thousands of American service people pay the price they paid? For what? I swear, I still have not heard a good answer to that.
And what about the Iraqi people. Millions of people who simply got up every morning, got their kids ready for school, went to work, came home and cooked supper . . . just like people all over the world, but trying to do it while dealing with shortages and poverty caused by sanctions, with the daily anxiety that must be a fact of life when living under a dictatorship, and then, suddenly bombs are falling all around them, on their homes, on their children.
• The Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence.
• The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. According UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the total number of internally displaced equals more than 1.3 million, and the number of refugees exceeds 1.4 million.
• Health-related impacts on children in Iraq, from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, describes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, inadequate nutrition . . .
• "Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold."
And for what? For what? Why?
How could any of us sit idly by and do nothing to stop this insane destruction? The destruction of bodies, of minds, of families, of our own military and of ordinary people in Iraq?
I wanted to hear how the Democrats were going to stop this insanity. How were they making the case to the country, to the voters, that the insanity must stop?
But where I was, I couldn't see any of that. The speakers were tiny and far away in the background. You could see someone was speaking, but there was no audio of what they were saying. In the foreground was Bill O'Reilly and a couple of others like he him he was talking to, and all they talked about was that Teresa Heinz Kerry had said, "Shove it" to a reporter before the convention began.
On July 26, the cable news networks devoted extensive air time to Teresa Heinz Kerry's exchange with an employee of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a conservative daily newspaper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife (known as the “Funding Father of the Right” ), who paid for the controversial anti-Clinton Arkansas Project.
That's all FoxNews viewers could see or hear about the Democratic Convention.
“When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going,” Obama said. “And to never -- ever -- go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace and earn the respect of the world.”
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of the administration’s most vociferous critics, called the war “misguided,” and said that “instead of making America more secure,” the administration’s politics “have made us less so.”
And so, as Trump's trial in the Senate is now underway, I listened to FoxNews in the midst of it and I heard nothing about what happened in Ukraine. Nothing about the testimony of the members of our Foreign Service, of our State Department.
Only jokes and ridicule of Nancy Pelosi's and Adam Schiff's appearance and mannerisms. Over and over again, "ridiculous witch hunt," "Trump did nothing wrong," "Democrats just hate him because liberals are haters, that's the main thing that motivates them, that's all they've got, hatred. Hatred of America and everything it stands for." And on and on. Just that.
So when I see
I think, well of course not. Everything that the rest of us - those who learn about what is happening in the world from a variety of sources, not just FoxNews - know about this whole sordid story, Republicans, including Republican Senators apparently, don't know anything about it.
We read the news articles, watched or listened to the testimony . . . they didn't.
As always, it's critically important to FoxNews that their viewers don't see for themselves and make up their on minds. They must only know what FoxNews tells them, and that is going to be very little.
“It was unbelievably boring. I don’t know how people can follow it.”
That same strategy appears to be playing out on Fox News, which went to great lengths to convince viewers that the trial wasn't worth their attention.
"Unbelievably boring" is how Fox & Friends Steve Doocy described the first day. "we watched it so you don't have to watch the entire thing," Pete Hegseth told viewers.
As warranted, we will dip in and out, but we're not going to torture you," Hannity said. He then paused to highlight Trump's lawyers, whose performances Hannity praised ad "excellent."
So as I watch the Senate trial and I hear Republicans still saying this is just a witch hunt, that Trump did nothing wrong, and I think, how on earth can they say that? Don't they know what he did?
