1. NY Times Editorial: Will America Choose Its Children Over Guns?

As surely as there are camels’ backs and straws to break them, moments arrive when citizens say they’ve had enough, when they rise up against political leaders who do not speak for them and whose moral fecklessness imperils lives. We may be witness to such a moment now with the protests by American teenagers sickened — and terrified — by the latest mass murder at the hands of someone with easy access to a weapon fit for a battlefield, not a school.

These kids have had enough. They’ve had enough of empty expressions of sympathy in the wake of the sort of atrocities they’ve grown up with, like last week’s mass shooting that took 17 lives at a high school in Parkland, Fla. Enough of the ritualistic mouthing of thoughts and prayers for the victims. Enough of living in fear that they could be next in the cross hairs of a well-armed deranged killer, even with all the active shooter drills and lockdowns they’ve gone through. Enough of craven politicians who kneel before the National Rifle Association and its cynically fundamentalist approach to the Second Amendment.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/opinion/america-children-guns-shooting-florida.html

2. Philip Rucker Trump’s ‘Russia hoax’ turns out to be real

 The hackers, he suggested, may have been Chinese. Or some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed. Again and again, he insisted, Russian interference was a hoax — a fiction created by Democrats as an excuse for losing an election they should have won.

When Donald Trump finally acknowledged publicly that Russians had hacked Democratic emails and interfered in the 2016 presidential election, the then-president elect immediately regretted it. He confided to advisers that he did not believe the intelligence. The last thing Trump wanted to do was to endorse the notion that his victory may have been caused by any force other than his own strategy, message and charisma.

“Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!” Trump tweeted last Feb. 26.

But Trump’s own Justice Department has concluded otherwise. A 37-page federal indictment released Friday afternoon spells out in exhaustive detail a three-year Russian plot to disrupt America’s democracy and boost Trump’s campaign, dealing a fatal blow to one of the president’s favorite talking points.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-russia-hoax-turns-out-to-be-real/2018/02/16/be3d174a-1346-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html

3. Thomas Friedman: Whatever Trump is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now

President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a quiescence that is simply unprecedented for any U.S. president in history. Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/opinion/trump-russia-putin.html

4. Molly Ball: Why Trump’s ‘Forgotten Man’ Still Supports Him

As long sees it, no one should feel more betrayed by the Trump presidency than the archetypical Trump supporter: the white working-class voter whom Trump dubbed the Forgotten Man. And yet, to his great frustration, many of his fellow blue collar workers don’t seem to grasp how Trump has abandoned them.

The immovable loyalty of Trump’s narrow but vocal base has broad ramifications, not just for the Democratic Party but also for the nation. Unbridgeable divides make governing nearly impossible: there can be no consensus in a politics of blind tribalism.  http://time.com/5159859/why-trumps-forgotten-man-still-supports-him/

5. Charles M. Blow: Scandal-Ridden Scoundrel

Donald Trump has turned the political world upside down, again and again, like a kid flipping a coin. Every day we wake up to either a new scandal or several lingering ones.

It is astounding. It is maddening. It is numbing.

At this moment, he is embroiled in a scandal of a six-figure payment to a porn star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels and who, at one point, gave an interview in which she claimed that the two were engaged in an extramarital sexual affair.

He is also embroiled in a scandal over why a top aide, Rob Porter, accused of physically assaulting his two ex-wives, was allowed to remainon the White House staff even after these allegations had been brought to the attention of the White House by the F.B.I.

Exacerbating this scandal is the fact that the official White House timeline about the events leading to Porter’s resignation turned out to be a lie, according to sworn testimony on Tuesday by the F.B.I. director Christopher Wray. It is also exacerbated by the fact that after Porter resigned, Trump praised him, and initially failed to say anything about domestic violence in general, reserving that condemnation for a week later, when he said, “I’m totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind.”

And of course, there is the omnipresent issue of Russia attacking our elections in 2016 and the investigation into whether anyone in the Trump orbit colluded or cooperated with the Russians, conspired to commit a crime, lied to officers or tried to obstruct justice.

That’s just the big three at the moment. We also mustn’t forget that the president has never released his tax returns, he refused to sever ties with his businesses, and he is burning through our money going to golf courses or his properties with decadent regularity. He also defended Nazis and was disrespectful to the hurricane-ravaged people of Puerto Rico.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/scandal-ridden-scoundrel.html

6. Nicholas Kristof: The Trump Stain Spreads

Sometimes politicians, liberals and conservatives alike, are unprincipled in pursuit of principles they are passionate about. But Trump aides don’t seem to believe in any cause larger than themselves or their leader.

That’s alarming because of the risks that even worse might lie ahead. When self-absorbed people are caught in a growing scandal, they overreach. In this case, that might mean the firing of Robert Mueller or Rod Rosenstein, or some military clash that changes the subject. To be clear, I don’t think officials would deliberately turn to war as a solution to political problems, but we all have a remarkable ability to persuade ourselves that what is good for us is also good for the country.Every administration suffers embarrassments. But when there is a basic lack of integrity at the top, these do not easily self-correct; rather, they build upon themselves because of an impulse to cover up and layer new deceptions on top of old deceit. That seems to be what is happening in both the Rob Porter and porn-payoff scandals.

The risk is that this stain continues to spread, metastasizing and bringing down everything around it. And to me, it looks as if the Trump administration is now metastasizing.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/opinion/porter-trump-domestic-violence.html

7. Paul Waldman: Trump's budget reveals the GOP's priorities in all their hideous glory

The president's budget is always a window into the administration's thinking and priorities. In this case, that window opens on an ugly place, where the world the Republican Party would like to see is laid out in all its hideous glory.

Let's take a look at just some of the highlights. The budget would do the following:

Spend $716 billion this year on the military

Spend $18 billion over two years to build a border wall

Cut $554 billion from Medicare over 10 years

Cut $250 billion from Medicaid over 10 years

Cut $214 billion from food stamps over 10 years

Cut the EPA's budget by 34 percent

Cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget by 14 percent, including eliminating the fund that pays for capital repairs to public housing

Eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to PBS and NPR

Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, which provides legal help to poor Americans

Eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which ensures that poor Americans don't freeze to death in the winter

Cut funding for Amtrak in half

Eliminate ARPA-E, which does cutting-edge research on energy technology

Now tell me those aren't moral choices.

If you're looking for a silver lining, you might observe that unlike prior Republican budgets, this one does not pretend that it will be balanced in 10 years. Which might sound like some admirable candor, were it not for the fact that this one is as full of magic asterisks, fairy dust, and unicorn kisses as ever. Most importantly, it assumes that GDP growth will quickly top 3 percent then stay that high through 2024, a stretch unlike anything we've seen in decades. That allows them to say they aren't ballooning the deficit as much as they actually would.  http://theweek.com/articles/754741/trumps-budget-reveals-gops-priorities-all-hideous-glory

8. Ed Kilgore: Why Rural America Controls the Debates Over Guns and Immigration

The predictability of deadlock testifies to the power of the intertwined cultural, demographic, and economic divide now separating urban and non-urban America — and how closely the nation’s partisan split follows the contours of that larger separation. It also shows how population-distribution patterns that concentrate Democratic strength in the House of Representatives into the largest urban areas, combined with the small-state bias that accords each state two senators regardless of population, elevate rural over urban priorities in these polarized debates.

Thanks to the Senate’s wildly anti-democratic nature, which is reflected in an Electoral College that lifted Donald Trump to the presidency despite his popular-vote loss, compounded by the gerrymandering and superior vote efficiency that give the GOP an advantage even in the “people’s branch” of the federal government, what Brownstein calls “rural priorities” are very powerful in a Republican-controlled federal government. To a considerable extent, in obstructing popular immigration and gun legislation, the GOP is reflecting the values and interests of its predominant demographic constituency.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/rural-america-controls-the-debates-over-guns-and-immigration.html

 

9. James Risen: Is Donald Trump a Traitor

Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)

But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenants secretly work with a foreign government that is a longtime adversary of the United States to manipulate and then win a presidential election, that is almost a textbook definition of treason.  https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/trump-russia-election-hacking-investigation/

10. David Frum: America Is Under Attack and the President Doesn't Care

As the rest of America mourns the victims of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, President Trump took to Twitter.

Not for him the rituals of grief. He is too consumed by rage and resentment. He interrupted his holidaying schedule at Mar-a-Lago only briefly, for a visit to a hospital where some of the shooting victims were treated. He posed afterward for a grinning thumbs-up photo op. Pain at another’s heartbreak—that emotion is for losers, apparently.

Having failed at one presidential duty, to speak for the nation at times of national tragedy, Trump resumed shirking an even more supreme task: defending the nation against foreign attack.

The new question is this: What has been—what will be done—to protect American democracy from such attacks in the future? The Russian attack in 2016 worked, yielding dividends beyond Vladimir Putin’s wildest hopes. The Russians hoped to cast a shadow over the Clinton presidency. Instead, they outright elected their preferred candidate. Americans once thought it was a big deal that Alger Hiss rose to serve as acting temporary secretary general of the United Nations. This time, a Russian-backed  individual was installed in the Oval Office.  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/america-is-under-attack-and-the-president-doesnt-care/553667/

11. Paul Krugman: The Content of the G.O.P.’s Character

Even those who have long since accepted the premise that Donald Trump is corrupt, self-centered and dishonest seem a bit shocked by his tirades over the Presidents’ Day weekend. Using the Parkland, Fla., massacre as an excuse to attack the F.B.I. for investigating Russian election intervention on his behalf — while lying about his own past denials that such intervention took place — took vileness to a new level, which is truly impressive given Trump’s previous record.

Yet if you step back a bit and think about it, Trump’s latest outbursts were very much in character — and I don’t just mean his personal character. When did you last see a member of the Trump administration, or for that matter any prominent Republican, admit error or accept responsibility for problems?

Don’t say that it has always been that way, that it’s just the way people are. On the contrary, taking responsibility for your actions — what my parents called being a mensch — used to be considered an essential virtue in politicians and adults in general. And in this as in so many things, there’s a huge asymmetry between the parties. Of course not all Democrats are honest and upstanding; but as far as I can tell, there’s almost nobody left in the G.O.P. willing to take responsibility for, well, anything.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/opinion/gop-character-bad-faith.html

12. Karen Tumulty: We’ve just hit a new presidential low

Donald Trump has taken the presidency to yet another new low.

“Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable,” the president tweeted. “They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign – there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

His claim was grotesque and baseless, even by Trumpian standards. His self-absorption is such that he cannot see beyond his own fixation, which is that all of this has no meaning beyond the legitimacy of his own election.

Moscow must indeed be laughing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/02/18/weve-just-hit-a-new-presidential-low/