[y66]

From the Editorial Board at NYT:

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What a debacle President Trump’s shutdown proved to be — what a toddler’s pageant of foot-stomping and incompetence, of vainglory and self-defeat. Mr. Trump tormented public servants and citizens and wounded the country, and, in conceding on Friday after holding the government hostage for 35 days, could claim to have achieved nothing.

He succeeded only in exposing the emptiness of his bully’s bravado, of his “I alone can fix it” posturing. Once upon a time, Mr. Trump promised that Mexico would pay for a wall. He instead made all Americans pay for a partisan fantasy.

Maybe you want a wall. Can you possibly argue that Mr. Trump’s shutdown strategy advanced your cause? He made the right decision on Friday — to sign a bill reopening the government through Feb. 15, giving lawmakers time to reach a permanent deal. But he could have had this same outcome without a shutdown. He ultimately agreed to the sort of bill that Democrats have been pitching for weeks — one that contains not one dollar in wall funding.

In his announcement, the president struggled to obscure his failure with yet another rambling infomercial about the glory of walls. “No matter where you go, they work,” he said (raising the question of how you can get there if, in fact, there’s a wall in your way). He had nothing of substance to offer beyond the usual specious claims that only his wall can end the border flood of drugs, crime and migrant women who have been duct-taped and stuffed into vans by human traffickers. To repeat: Fewer border-crossing apprehensions were made in 2017 than at any time since 1971; drugs are overwhelmingly smuggled through established points of entry; and the only crisis at the border is a humanitarian one, of people fleeing violence and seeking asylum — again, mostly at established points of entry — under international law.

There is nothing to celebrate about this sorry shutdown, though it’s perhaps understandable that congressional Democrats were reveling in Mr. Trump’s collapse. Members of Mr. Trump’s conservative fan base demonstrated that, even if the president continues to insist on alternative facts, they are capable of acknowledging that truth.

Within minutes of the announcement, the bomb-throwing pundit Ann Coulter — among those credited with having scolded Mr. Trump into rejecting the temporary funding bill passed by the Senate last month — tweeted her judgment:

“Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”

The president tried to stand tough for Ms. Coulter and her ilk. Even as federal workers lined up at food banks, sought unemployment benefits and took backup gigs driving for Uber, he insisted he would not give an inch. He stormed out of meetings with Democratic leaders. He indulged in a public spat with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over his State of the Union address. He tweeted angrily. On Thursday, he was still vowing, “We will not cave!”

But on Friday he caved. With a growing number of overworked, stressed-out air traffic controllers calling in sick, staffing shortages at two airports on the East Coast began to snarl air travel. The spectacle of enraged travelers, canceled flights and imperiled safety turned up the heat on the White House and Congress.

Republican lawmakers were already in a foul mood. On Thursday, the Senate voted on, and failed to pass, two competing plans for reopening the government. Afterward, there were reports of sniping and finger-pointing within the Republican conference.

Along with their concerns about the human cost of the shutdown, Republicans were no doubt antsy about the negative impact the shutdown was having on their president’s public standing. Polls consistently showed that most Americans did not support the shutdown and that most blamed Mr. Trump for it. An ABC poll released this week put Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37 percent and showed him to have the lowest two-year average approval of any president in the past seven decades. Perhaps he noticed that a poll released on Wednesday found that 59 percent of Americans thought he cared little about their problems.

On top of all that, the Russia investigation hit the headlines again, when, in a predawn raid on Friday, F.B.I. agents — working without pay — arrested Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Stone has been indicted on seven counts related to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including witness tampering, obstruction and making false statements.

It was, in short, shaping up to be a very bad day for the president, who really cannot be blamed for wanting to change the story line.

Of course, the new narrative — that Mr. Trump got owned by Ms. Pelosi — isn’t likely to sit well with him, either. And who knows what he’ll do next to try to salve his ego, and salvage some political capital with the minority of Americans who still seem inclined to support him.

In his Friday remarks, Mr. Trump made threatening noises about declaring a national emergency if Congress cannot reach a compromise by the time this agreement expires. Polls suggest that such a move would be wildly unpopular, causing the president and his party even more grief. Maybe that danger will motivate congressional Republicans to hammer out a deal without him.

Here’s hoping that this mess leaves Mr. Trump with a vital lesson — even if he doesn’t care about a functional government, the rest of America does.

[Winstonm]

"Ratfrucker" Roger won't "roll" and Bobby Three-Sticks doesn't care:

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Finally, do not expect to see special counsel Robert Mueller make any attempt to flip Stone and have him cooperate. A defendant like Stone is far more trouble than he is worth to a prosecutor. Stone is too untrustworthy for a prosecutor to ever rely upon. He has told so many documented lies, and bragged so often about his dirty tricks, that he simply has too much baggage to deal with even if here to want to cooperate—which seems unlikely in any event. Mueller, I suspect, would not even be willing to engage in a preliminary debrief with Stone to just test the possibility of cooperation out of concern that Stone would immediately go on television with his pals at Fox News to decry Mueller’s Gestapo tactics.

[kenberg]

 Winstonm, on 2019-January-26, 22:31, said:

"Ratfrucker" Roger won't "roll" and Bobby Three-Sticks doesn't care:

This seems right. Possible Stone has information, which if it were independently verifiable, could be useful but basically no one should trust anything he says. I vaguely recall some youngster from the '72 Nixon campaign who became (in)famous for dirty tricks. Stone turned 20 in August of 72 and was in the Nixon campaign, so I suppose he's the guy I heard of back then. Like Mozart, he started young.

Friday night on PBS Newshour Judy Woodruff was interviewing a former prosecutor who is now a defense lawyer and she asked what he would do if he were defending Stone.He said the first thing he would do would be to tell Stone to shut up. Beyond that, he had few ideas. Hope for a pardon seemed to be the best he had to offer.

The country is in deep stuff. I hope for the best.

[y66]

From Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality:

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Open right now on my virtual desktop, as has been true about 5% of the time over the past fourteen months, is an article forecasting the economic effects of the 2017 Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut by nine academic economists: Robert J. Barro, Michael J. Boskin, John Cogan, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Lawrence B. Lindsey, Harvey S. Rosen, George P. Shultz and John. B. Taylor: How Tax Reform Will Lift the Economy: We believe the Republican bills could boost GDP 3% to 4% long term by reducing the cost of capital. It is, bluntly, unprofessional.

It states that the tax cut:

reducing the corporate tax rate to 20% and moving to immediate expensing of equipment and intangible investment... conventional... economic modeling suggests... would raise the level of GDP in the long run by just over 4%. If achieved over a decade, the associated increase in the annual rate of GDP growth would be about 0.4% per year. Because the House and Senate bills contemplate expensing only for five years, the increase in capital accumulation would be less, and the gain in the long-run level of GDP would be just over 3%, or 0.3% per year for a decade...

Their phrases "conventional economic modeling" and "if achieved over a decade" entail in their background a 600 billion jump in the level of investment this year then maintained for the next decade. That was never going to happen. That hasn't happened. The authors did not expect that to happen—if they had expected it, they would be very curious why their modeling approach had gone so wrong, and they are not so curious. As very sharp reporter Binyamin Appelbaum put it on twitter in a despairing cry:

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Binyamin Appelbaum: I am not sure there is a defensible case for the discipline of macroeconomics if they can’t at least agree on the ground rules for evaluating tax policy. How does Harvard, for example, justify granting tenure to people who purport to work in the same discipline and publicly condemn each other as charlatans? What does it mean to produce the signatures of 100 economists in favor of a given proposition when another 100 will sign their names to the opposite statement?...

Quote

Greg Mankiw in his Snake Oil Economics: The Bad Math Behind Trump’s Policies came out attacking highballed estimates of the tax cut's effects and endorsing the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion—that it would have essentially zero effect on economic growth, while redistributing a substantial amount—1.5 trillion—from the rest of us to the rich over the course of the next decade.

Unfortunately, Mankiw's attack on highball estimates did not land in December 2017, when the tax cut was moving through congress, and when it might have done some good in the debate about public policy.

It came out, rather, a year later, in December 2018, as a review of a book by Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore: Trumponomics: Inside the America-First Plan to Revive Our Economy.

[johnu]

 kenberg, on 2019-January-27, 08:37, said:

This seems right. Possible Stone has information, which if it were independently verifiable, could be useful but basically no one should trust anything he says. I vaguely recall some youngster from the '72 Nixon campaign who became (in)famous for dirty tricks. Stone turned 20 in August of 72 and was in the Nixon campaign, so I suppose he's the guy I heard of back then. Like Mozart, he started young.

Even Richard Nixon's foundation is trying to avoid being associated with Stone.

Nixon Foundation distances itself from Roger Stone after Mueller indictment

[y66]

From With Pain Still Fresh, Lawmakers Make Push to Outlaw Shutdowns by Carl Hulse at NYT:

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WASHINGTON — Was this the shutdown to end all shutdowns?

The answer could be yes. The toll exacted on government operations and federal employees by the record 35-day stalemate — not to mention the political costs to those in the White House and on Capitol Hill — was so punishing that it is giving momentum to a longstanding call to prohibit the government disruptions that have become a regular facet of Washington hardball.

“Shutting down the government should be as off limits in budget negotiations as chemical warfare is in real warfare,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said on Friday.

He was not alone in expressing those sentiments. Members of both parties said it was past time to enact legislation that would essentially mean the government would remain open at existing spending levels when an impasse such as the fight over the border wall was reached, rather than shuttering parts or all of the government. That’s an outcome that virtually everyone agrees is costly, unnecessary and even embarrassing.

“This never should have happened,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, speaking for many.

Veterans of past shutdowns have come to learn that there are few, if any, winners in the end and that closing the government has not proved effective as a negotiating strategy for those who use the government as a lever to press their case. It didn’t work for Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and House conservatives in 2013 or for Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and fellow Democrats early in 2018 when they relented on a shutdown after just three days.

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2019-January-27, 18:37, said:

From With Pain Still Fresh, Lawmakers Make Push to Outlaw Shutdowns by Carl Hulse at NYT:

The fundamental problem is that Donald Trump is president, Mitch McConnell leads the Senate, and the rest of the Republican party, most of it, lacks the will to address the serious challenge that this presents. A couple of power mad whatevers with destructive urges will find a way to destroy things until they are stopped.

Nobody but a moron, maybe not even Trump, would suggest doing another shutdown so saying "Hey, let's prevent another shutdown" and then congratulating themselves on this great move is beyond embarrassing. Where were they for the past five weeks?
For example, if they wanted to do something about an actual present danger, they could unanimously, or as close to it as possible, pass a resolution making it clear that whatever the plusses or minuses of a border wall might be the need for it is not remotely the sort of problem that warrants a presidential declaration of a national emergency. This is presumably obvious to just about everyone but for Trump it is necessary to lay it out. The shutdown is, blissfully, a thing of the past. But Trump and McConnell are still there, so the fundamental problem is still very much with us.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2019-January-27, 19:06, said:

The fundamental problem is that Donald Trump is president, Mitch McConnell leads the Senate, and the rest of the Republican party, most of it, lacks the will to address the serious challenge that this presents. A couple of power mad whatevers with destructive urges will find a way to destroy things until they are stopped.

Nobody but a moron, maybe not even Trump, would suggest doing another shutdown so saying "Hey, let's prevent another shutdown" and then congratulating themselves on this great move is beyond embarrassing. Where were they for the past five weeks?
For example, if they wanted to do something about an actual present danger, they could unanimously, or as close to it as possible, pass a resolution making it clear that whatever the plusses or minuses of a border wall might be the need for it is not remotely the sort of problem that warrants a presidential declaration of a national emergency. This is presumably obvious to just about everyone but for Trump it is necessary to lay it out. The shutdown is, blissfully, a thing of the past. But Trump and McConnell are still there, so the fundamental problem is still very much with us.

The ability to declare a national emergency over the border would come down to 4 Republican senators, I would imagine. Congress can block the move, but that requires both branches of Congress to vote against it - simple majority, I understand. The fact that they can actively stop it after it has been declared probably makes it harder to preemptively stop it.

[andrei]

 johnu, on 2019-January-16, 00:13, said:

Back on direct point about on thread:

With NATO withdrawal, Trump weighed ‘gift of the century for Putin’

No Jens Stoltenberg news lately?

NYT: no unnamed sources, no story

[Winstonm]

Crimestopper: no anonymous sources, no crime

[johnu]

 andrei, on 2019-January-28, 08:11, said:

No Jens Stoltenberg news lately?

NYT: no unnamed sources, no story

Very smart of Stoltenberg to praise a narcissist who is desperate for compliments and easily manipulated by praise from people in positions of authority like Putin and Kim Jung-un.

As far as no story about a NATO withdrawal,

Oh, those crazy Democrats and fake News making things up about Dennison...

But there's this from way back in July, 2018

Bipartisan Senate proposal unveiled to stop Trump from leaving NATO

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Two senior GOP senators joined two Democrats on Thursday to propose a bill that would allow Congress to stop President Donald Trump from pulling out of NATO, the U.S.-European alliance that Trump has repeatedly criticized.

I'm sure people like Andrei is saying this is just like the bill that was proposed under Clinton or Obama, or any of the other presidents who served since NATO was formed. And they would be idiots because that would be a fantasy.

[y66]

$11 billion. That’s how much the five-week government shutdown cost the U.S. economy, with nearly a quarter of that total permanently lost, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

[y66]

From Elizabeth Warren Does Teddy Roosevelt by Paul Krugman at NYT:

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America invented progressive taxation. And there was a time when leading American politicians were proud to proclaim their willingness to tax the wealthy, not just to raise revenue, but to limit excessive concentration of economic power.

“It is important,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, “to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes” — some of them, he declared, “swollen beyond all healthy limits.”

Today we are once again living in an era of extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, with the net worth of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined. And this concentration of wealth is growing; as Thomas Piketty famously argued in his book “Capital in the 21st Century,” we seem to be heading toward a society dominated by vast, often inherited fortunes.

So can today’s politicians rise to the challenge? Well, Elizabeth Warren has released an impressive proposal for taxing extreme wealth. And whether or not she herself becomes the Democratic nominee for president, it says good things about her party that something this smart and daring is even part of the discussion.

The Warren proposal would impose a 2 percent annual tax on an individual household’s net worth in excess of $50 million, and an additional 1 percent on wealth in excess of $1 billion. The proposal was released along with an analysis by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, two of the world’s leading experts on inequality.

Saez and Zucman found that this tax would affect only a small number of very wealthy people — around 75,000 households. But because these households are so wealthy, it would raise a lot of revenue, around $2.75 trillion over the next decade.

Make no mistake: This is a pretty radical plan.

I asked Saez how much it would raise the share of income (as opposed to wealth) that the economic elite pays in taxes. His estimate was that it would raise the average tax rate on the top 0.1 percent to 48 percent from 36 percent, and bring the average tax on the top 0.01 percent up to 57 percent. Those are high numbers, although they’re roughly comparable to average tax rates in the 1950s.

Would such a plan be feasible? Wouldn’t the rich just find ways around it? Saez and Zucman argue, based on evidence from Denmark and Sweden, both of which used to have significant wealth taxes, that it wouldn’t lead to large-scale evasion if the tax applied to all assets and was adequately enforced.

Wouldn’t it hurt incentives? Probably not much. Think about it: How much would entrepreneurs be deterred by the prospect that, if their big ideas pan out, they’d have to pay additional taxes on their second $50 million?

It’s true that the Warren plan would limit the ability of the already incredibly wealthy to make their fortunes even bigger, and pass them on to their heirs. But slowing or reversing our drift toward a society ruled by oligarchic dynasties is a feature, not a bug.

And I’ve been struck by the reactions of tax experts like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin; while they don’t necessarily endorse the Warren plan, they clearly see it as serious and worthy of consideration. It is, writes Kamin, “addressed at a real problem” and “goes big as it should.” Warren, says The Times, has been “nerding out”; well, the nerds are impressed.

But do ideas this bold stand a chance in 21st-century American politics? The usual suspects are, of course, already comparing Warren to Nicolás Maduro or even Joseph Stalin, despite her actually being more like Teddy Roosevelt or, for that matter, Dwight Eisenhower. More important, my sense is that a lot of conventional political wisdom still assumes that proposals to sharply raise taxes on the wealthy are too left-wing for American voters.

But public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich. One recent poll even found that 45 percent of self-identified Republicans support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion of a top rate of 70 percent.

By the way, polls also show overwhelming public support for increasing, not cutting, spending on Medicare and Social Security. Strange to say, however, we rarely hear politicians who demand “entitlement reform” dismissed as too right-wing to be taken seriously.

And it’s not just polls suggesting that a bold assault on economic inequality might be politically viable. Political scientists studying the behavior of billionaires find that while many of them push for lower taxes, they do so more or less in secret, presumably because they realize just how unpopular their position really is. This “stealth politics” is, by the way, one reason billionaires can seem much more liberal than they actually are — only the handful of liberals among them speak out in public.

The bottom line is that there may be far more scope for a bold progressive agenda than is dreamed of in most political punditry. And Elizabeth Warren has just taken an important step on that agenda, pushing her party to go big. Let’s hope her rivals — some of whom are also quite impressive — follow her lead.

[johnu]

Since Andrei apparently is a fanboy of Mission Impossible, I wonder if he is a fanboy of the Sicario movie? Dennison apparently gets a lot of his intelligence briefings by watching movies. Wouldn't be the first White House person to take their marching orders from the works of fiction:

Dick Cheney Still Thinks He Was a Character on "24"

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You may not remember, but there was a time when actual government officials talked about the television show 24 as though it were not absurd escapist entertainment, but a real representation of reality.

Rachel Maddow brought this up in her show.

WAS TRUMP’S PRAYER RUGS TWEET REALLY FROM ‘SICARIO 2’?

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Did Trump unknowingly pull a plot point from Sicario: Day of the Soldado to bolster his administration’s fabricated narrative about Muslim terrorists infiltrating the United States across the southern border with Mexico?

Or that smugglers and migrants are using super cars and trucks to cross the border and outrun border agents?

What Are The 'Unbelievable' And 'Stronger' And 'Better' Vehicles Currently Assaulting Our Border?

Or that women are being kidnapped, taped and bound, and brought into the US

Trump claimed women were gagged with tape. Then Border Patrol tried to find some evidence.

Apparently also plot features from movies.

Question: Is it better that Dennison gets his intelligence briefings from fictional movies and TV action series, or from Fox Propaganda?

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2019-January-28, 21:02, said:

From Elizabeth Warren Does Teddy Roosevelt by Paul Krugman at NYT:

I don't always appreciate Krugman but he is not my sworn enemy and in particular I like this piece. I like the TR quote "swollen beyond all healthy limits." I like the reference to social health rather than justice. Since there are things for the Ds to decide, I am going to say more.
Loretta Lynn has a song that begins "They say to have her hair done Liz flies all the way to France". Becky doesn't do that, nor do I, but neither of us cares if someone else does. This sort of extravagance is not the problem. The problem is that great wealth brings social and political power. And, if extreme, that's unhealthy. Assuming that a person made his/her fortune honestly, invented Google or Windows perhaps, or BBO(!), the justice of having great wealth is maybe debatable but it's hard to see it as a priori evil. Otoh I have no trouble at all believing that it is socially unhealthy for so much wealth to be so concentrated. (Relax Fred, I don't think you have reached the Sergei Brin wealth level yet.)

I think the distinction is important. "Injustice" suggests we view the wealthy as villains, as bad people. I don't. Some rich people are bad people, some aren't, same as with the rest of us. But the situation is unhealthy. Yes, that seems obvious, and I guess TR saw it the same way. Most people don't want to go through life filled with resentment, not toward the rich, not toward anyone. But dealing with an unhealthy distortion, yes.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2019-January-29, 07:41, said:

I think the distinction is important. "Injustice" suggests we view the wealthy as villains, as bad people.

Indeed. Warren Buffett is not only one of the richest men in the world, from all I've seen he's also one of the most decent. He's a big philanthropist (along with Bill and Melinda Gates he created the Giving Pledge) and has complained that the tax policy that allows him to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary is wrong. Yes, he's shared his wealth with his children, but he also raised them with proper values.

And a century ago there was Henry Ford. He made sure that he paid his factory workers enough that they could afford to buy his cars. He understood that true economic growth comes from "trickle up", not "trickle down". Healthy working and middle classes buy lots of things, which keeps the economy humming and everyone benefits.

I don't know if I've seen it discussed explicitly, but I wonder if today's attitudes by many rich people has a racist component. Probably the majority of the poorest segment of the country are black and brown; policies that reduce income inequality also reduce racial inequality. OTOH, the richest people are mostly old white men. I'm not saying that they're all racist, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the ones encouraging regressive fiscal and tax policies are.

[Winstonm]

WaPo tackles the new illegal immigration numbers from Individual-1:

Quote

The Pinocchio Test
Once again, we have an example of the president — who probably has access to more information than any other person on Earth — latching on to dubious numbers that he saw on television. Compounding this error, he apparently misunderstood one number, assuming “aliens” meant “illegal aliens,” and then tweeted it out to the nation as a new, unknown fact.

Given that immigration is supposed to be the central issue of his administration, there’s little excuse for such sloppy use of statistics. The president earns Four Pinocchios.

(my emphasis)

If there is a genuine problem that is emergent, one would not have to rely on fictionalized numbers from tv and fictional narratives from movies to make the argument.

[PassedOut]

Trump really tweets like a moron: Another winter, another Trump call for 'good old fashioned Global Warming'

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On Sunday, Trump asserted on Twitter that the United States could use "a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming" after temperatures tumbled below freezing for an extended stretch.

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@realDonaldTrump
Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!

This is hardly the first time Trump has tried to used chilly winter weather to dismiss global warming. It isn't even the first time he has tweeted something phrased just like this.

Now that the arctic has warmed to the point that the polar vortex wanders all around, we're going to see these extremes more and more. And these extremes will be coming back for a long time, now that we've failed to address the problem.

I realize that a number of folks who don't know better think the same way as Trump, but having a moron in the white house is causing a lot of damage.

[y66]

Mike Bloomberg on Twitter:

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Today I announced I'll outline a plan for a Green New Deal, accelerating US transition to 100% clean energy. The 1st pillar will be investing in people & communities that powered our economy for decades. The econ benefits of a Green New Deal must reach every corner of the country

That's the smartest thing I've heard any politician say on this topic since Angela Merkel assured German auto and coal workers that "Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first, and not of the CO2 emissions first." Not that it was enough, but a good start.

[Chas_P]

 kenberg, on 2019-January-27, 08:37, said:

This seems right. Possible Stone has information, which if it were independently verifiable, could be useful but basically no one should trust anything he says. I vaguely recall some youngster from the '72 Nixon campaign who became (in)famous for dirty tricks. Stone turned 20 in August of 72 and was in the Nixon campaign, so I suppose he's the guy I heard of back then. Like Mozart, he started young.

Friday night on PBS Newshour Judy Woodruff was interviewing a former prosecutor who is now a defense lawyer and she asked what he would do if he were defending Stone.He said the first thing he would do would be to tell Stone to shut up. Beyond that, he had few ideas. Hope for a pardon seemed to be the best he had to offer.

The country is in deep stuff. I hope for the best.

I read today that Mueller sent in more men (clad in body armor and carrying loaded semi-automatic weapons) to arrest 66 year-old Roger Stone, indicted by Mueller for lying to Congress, than were sent in to attempt a rescue of Chris Stephens and other Americans when they were under siege by Islamic militants in Benghazi during the Obama Presidency with HRC as Secretary of State. If this is true I agree with you 100%. The country is in deep stuff and I too hope for the best.