Star Tribune pimps deranged MN lege bigot

I’m not going to bother putting a link here; it’s right there on the front page of this morning’s print edition.

The article notes Rep. Steve Drazkowski’s (R-Mazeppa) little splinter-group nonsense, but ignores other key facts. Apparently the ridiculous image of the pitiful ignoramus gazing portentously into the distance, like some true far-seeing statesman of old, is judged more worthy of newsprint.

I was able to find an excellent old item about the real Draz. The links therein are unfortunately to a crashed website and therefore broken, but you’ll readily get the point.

Update: An absolute must-read from Developers Are Crabgrass.

Ongoing Trump vs. the VA stuff

A congressional investigation into the Mar-a-Lago trio is continuing, but it doesn’t seem to be a big priority at this time. Which I suppose in context is understandable. For now.

The more than 300 pages of emails, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request, show the outsized influence of Ike Perlmutter, Marc Sherman and Bruce Moskowitz. None of the men have ever worked for the government, nor do they have any specific expertise on the policies they were allowed to shape at one of the largest agencies in the U.S. government. Their main qualification for the unprecedented arrangement was that they were the president’s paying customers as members of Mar-a-Lago, which he continues to own and profit from in office. 

Despite misgivings, career VA employees were obligated to waste taxpayer time and resources to respond to the trio of Mar-a-Lago members—purely because of their connections to Trump. “They are coming from POTUS friend/doctor,” reads one response to a frustrated official, saying that the career official would need to “handle sensitively and with facts.” Many of the VA employees’ frustrations had to do with the trio’s intervention into a VA information technology project; the emails provide hard evidence of what was previously only reported as anonymous sources within the department in a Politico story. - CREW

Also:

Top officials of the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to step in to try to exempt veterans and their families from a new immigration rule that would make it far easier to deny green cards to low-income immigrants, according to documents obtained by ProPublica under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, worked throughout 2018 to minimize the new policy’s impact on military families. - ProPublica

Reality about Trump's farm bailout and the trade war in general

This is from an item that's a good summary of a lot of things.

But TrumpLove turns out to be highly selective, with more than half of the government payments going to the biggest farm owners. The Department of Agriculture initially announced a $125,000 limit on the amount any one farm could get, but every Trump deal seems to have a gimmick in it to give a special break to the slickest operators. The slickum in this deal is that assorted members of a family can claim to be owners of the same farm and be eligible for bailout money, even if they do no actual farming and live in New York City! Thus, one Missouri farm family got $2.8 million worth of subsidy love from Trump, and more than 80 families topped half a million in payments.

Meanwhile, the great majority of farmers — 80% of eligible grain farmers — got zilch from Donald the Dealmaker. The smaller producers who are most endangered by his export collapse got less than $5,000. So Trump’s “Market Facilitation” is squeezing the many who are most in need while helping a few of the largest get even bigger. - AlterNet

David Dayen has a take on the bigger picture regarding the “trade war.”

This extend-and-pretend scenario, where both sides act as if in a war but undertake no fundamental changes in the relationship, doesn’t give hope to workers on either side of the Pacific Ocean. As Robert Kuttner pointed out this week, years of neglect of China’s economic aggression gave the country putative bargaining leverage over the U.S. But the answer to that was not a tit-for-tat with tariffs, which were never going to break a mercantilist country with plenty of tools to minimize the pain. Only by disentangling supply chains that should never have been bound together in the first place would America—and even China—find a better path.

In the interim, that has begun to happen, although not through onshoring but through a race to the bottom to other low-wage Asian countries. In many ways, that exodus explains the yuan devaluation...

The bigger problem lurks around the corner: The United States has lost its productive capacity and internal know-how. We don’t know how to make many things anymore. This has reached epidemic proportions in the defense sector, where previously perfunctory operations like casting a submarine are now beyond U.S. capabilities. Boeing, our main aircraft maker, apparently has lost the ability to build safe planes. When you relentlessly outsource to cut costs for decades, you don’t just lose jobs, but the intelligence and know-how and muscle memory to manufacture. And in a number of industries that’s what has occurred. - The American Prospect 

Trump Ag Sec calls Minnesota farmers whiners, to their faces

It just never stops.

At a Farmfest listening session with farmers in Minnesota, (U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny) Perdue hit back at the complaints with his joke: “What do you call two farmers in a basement? A whine cellar.”

As he pounded the table in mirth, some of the thousands of farmers at the event laughed nervously — which was followed by boos.

“It was definitely not an appropriate thing to say,” Minnesota Farmers Union President Gary Wertish told HuffPost. “It was very insensitive. It took everyone by surprise. He doesn’t understand what farmers are dealing with, and he’s the head of the Department of Agriculture. He’s supposed to be working for farmers.” - Huffington Post

This article, from Zero Hedge, summarizes what farmers and equipment manufacturers are facing right now.

Is Gov. Walz starting to get it, on sulfide mining?

From a couple of weeks ago:

(MN Gov. Tim) Walz’s press secretary Teddy Tschann said the governor “takes these concerns seriously. The [water quality] permit is currently being reviewed in court, and he believes that process should continue.” - MPR

From a couple of days ago:

Gov. Tim Walz has urged Glencore, the Swiss mining giant that recently took a majority of shares in PolyMet, to work with unions and to add its name to numerous permits at an hour-long meeting with company officials Thursday, Aug. 8...

“There are still questions to be answered, and I made it clear that there’s not a lot of confidence in Glencore, whether that’s fair or not, that is their perception,” Walz said Thursday afternoon. - Grand Forks Herald

This is certainly welcome, but it’s far short of any indication that Gov. Walz has seen the light on sulfide mining in the state, and is prepared to do what he can to end this crap. What he’s doing now is the safest political play.

As far as getting back the state legislative seats the DFL has been losing in or near the Iron Range, that’s highly unlikely for as long as our nominees continue to be pro-sulfides corporate Dems.

MN-06: How about some real anti-Semitic stereotyping?

I think the stress of failing as NRCC chairman is really getting to someone.

A letter sent by National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Chairman Tom Emmer that said wealthy Jews “bought” Congress has been called anti-Semitic by local Jewish leaders...

The letter by Rep. Emmer, who represents Minnesota’s Sixth District in the U.S. House, says “the news of impactful, real progress on turning our nation around was undercut by biased media and hundreds of millions of dollars of anti-Republican propaganda put out by liberal special interests, funded by deep-pocketed far-left billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.”

                    “These left-wing radicals essentially BOUGHT control of Congress for the
                    Democrats,” the letter continues. Soros and Bloomberg are Jews; and Steyer
                    had a Jewish father. - American Jewish World

Of course as far as Minnesota’s “mainstream” media is concerned, no politician’s statement is anti-Semitic unless it comes from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The facts that she is at least twice as intelligent, and probably more like a hundred times more reality-connected than Emmer, notwithstanding.

Trump never had a coherent tariff/farm plan

When Trump was just a failed "businessman," what he did didn't matter so much.

That giant cliff in Thursday’s stock market report comes down to one thing—one big thing. Donald Trump has admitted that his negotiations with China have gone nowhere, his promised deal in which China was going to buy more U.S. farm products never existed, and in a month he plans to increase the tariffs on China to cover another $300 billion worth of goods...

Meanwhile, former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn admits that the tariffs are doing more harm to the U.S. than to China. Speaking to The Independent, Cohn stated that he didn’t really think the tariffs are impacting the Chinese economy. But they are having a “dramatic impact” on American manufacturing. - Daily Kos

There has been news and discussion, though little of it in corporate "news" media, about Trump's pathological narcissistic and delusional disorders. But what gets far less attention anywhere is that the guy is just so god-damned pathetically just fucking unbelievably stupid.

The latest U.S.-China trade talks broke down after half a day.