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President Trump has already claimed that Barack Obama left him an economy in a "mess"; that Obama is probably behind all the protests and leaks; and that Obama had him wiretapped during the campaign. Now along comes OMB Director Mick Mulvaney to add yet another ugly accusation:

We thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers in terms of the number of people in the workforce to make the unemployment rate, that percentage rate, look smaller than it actually was.

These folks just don't stop. This isn't quite as bad as the wiretapping thing, but it's still plenty appalling. Then there was this:

The BLS did not change the way they count, I don't think, but you can have a long conversation when you've got a numerator and a denominator, how to arrive at a percentage.

Oh FFS, it's a pretty short conversation even for a sixth grader. Here's the formula:

There are no alternative ways of doing it. Here's a pretty chart for Mulvaney showing the numerator, denominator, and unemployment rate for the past decade:

Here is the original post:
Trump OMB Director Claims Obama "Manipulated" the Unemployment Figures - Mother Jones

Beyond weakening the administration, the seemingly incessant wave of Trump scandals seems to reinforce liberals narrative of the previous president. As The New Republic remarked after the resignation of Michael Flynn, Obama went eight years without a major White House scandal. Trump lasted three weeks. Or as Obama himself boasted in December, were probably the first administration in modern history that hasnt had a major scandal in the White House. To the horror of conservatives, who can cite a litany of official misdeeds during the Obama years, the apparent integrity of that era will feature prominently as historians evaluate that presidency. (Spoiler: as those historians are overwhelmingly liberal, they will rate it very highly indeed.)

In a sense, though, both sides are correct. The Obama administration did a great many bad things, but it suffered very few scandals. That paradox raises critical issues about how we report and record political events and how we define a word as apparently simple as scandal.

Very little effort is needed to compile a daunting list of horror stories surrounding the Obama administration, including the Justice Departments disastrous Fast and Furious weapons scheme, the IRSs targeting of political opponents, and a stunningly lax attitude to security evidenced by Hillary Clintons email server and the hacking of millions of files from the Office of Personnel Management. Even on the available evidence, the IRS affair had most of the major elements of something like Watergate, and a detailed investigation might well have turned up a chain of evidence leading to the White House.

But there was no detailed investigation, and that is the central point. Without investigation, the amount of embarrassing material that emerged was limited, and most mainstream media outlets had no interest in publicizing the affair. Concern was strictly limited to partisan conservative outlets, so official malfeasance did not turn into a general public scandal.

Misdeeds themselves, however, are not the sole basis for official statistics or public concern. To understand this, look for instance at the recently publicized issue of sexual assaults on college campuses. The actual behaviors involved have been prevalent for many decades, and have probably declined in recent years as a consequence of changing gender attitudes. In public perception, though, assaults are running at epidemic levels. That change is a consequence of strict new laws, reinforced by new mechanisms for investigation and enforcement. A new legal and bureaucratic environment has caused a massive upsurge of reported criminality, which uninformed people might take as an escalation of the behavior itself.

Political scandal is rather like that. To acknowledge that an administration or a party suffers a scandal says nothing whatever about the actual degree of wrongdoing that has occurred. Rather, it is a matter of perception, which is based on several distinct components, including a body of evidence but also the reactions of the media and the public. As long ago as 1930, Walter Lippman drew the essential distinction between the fact of political wrongdoing and its public manifestation. It would be impossible, he wrote, for an historian to write a history of political corruption in America. What he could write is the history of the exposure of corruption. And that exposure can be a complex and haphazard affair.

We can identify three key components. First, there must be investigation by law enforcement or intelligence agencies, which can be very difficult when the suspects are powerful or well-connected. Facing many obstacles to a free and wide-ranging investigation, the agencies involved will commonly leak information in the time-honored Washington way. The probability of such investigations and leaks depends on many variables, including the degree of harmony and common purpose within an administration. An administration riven by internal dissent or ideological feuding will be very leaky, and the amount of information available to media will accordingly be abundant.

Second, a great deal depends on the role of media in handling the allegations that do emerge. Some lurid tidbits will be avidly seized on and pursued, while others of equal plausibility will be largely ignored. That too depends on subjective factors, including the perceived popularity of the administration. If media outlets believe they are battering away at an already hated administration, they will do things they would not dare do against a popular leader.

Finally, media outlets can publish whatever evidence they wish, but this will not necessarily become the basis of a serious and damaging scandal unless it appeals to a mass audience, and probably one already restive and disenchanted with the political or economic status quo. Scandals thus reach storm force only when they focus or symbolize existing discontents.

The Watergate scandal developed as it did because it represented a perfect storm of these different elements. The political and military establishment and the intelligence agencies were deeply divided ideologically, both amongst themselves and against the Nixon White House. Leaks abounded from highly placed sources within the FBI and other agencies. Major media outlets loathed Nixon, and they published their stories at a time of unprecedented economic disaster: the OPEC oil squeeze, looming hyper-inflation, and even widespread fears of the imminent end of capitalism. The president duly fell.

But compare that disaster with other historical moments when administrations were committing misdeeds no less heinous than those of Richard Nixon, but largely escaped a like fate. Victor Laskys 1977 book It Didnt Start With Watergate makes a convincing case for viewing Lyndon Johnsons regime as the most flagrantly corrupt in U.S. history, at least since the 1870s. Not only was the LBJ White House heavily engaged in bugging and burgling opponents, but it was often using the same individuals who later earned notoriety as Nixon-era plumbers. In this instance, though, catastrophic scandals were averted. The intelligence apparatus had yet to develop the same internal schisms that it did under Nixon, the media remained unwilling to challenge the president directly, and the war-related spending boom ensured that economic conditions remained solid. Hence, Johnson completed his term, while Nixon did not.

Nor did it end with Watergate. Some enterprising political historian should write a history of one or more of Americas non-scandals, when public wrongdoing on a major scale was widely exposed but failed to lead to a Watergate-style explosion. A classic example would be the Whitewater affair that somewhat damaged Bill Clintons second term but never gained the traction needed to destroy his presidency. In that instance, as with the Iran-Contra affair of 1987, the key variable was the general public sense of prosperity and wellbeing, which had a great deal to do with oil prices standing at bargain-basement levels. Both Reagan and Clinton thus remained popular and escaped the stigma of economic crisis and collapse. In sharp contrast to 1974, a contented public had no desire to see a prolonged political circus directed at removing a president.

So we can take the story up to modern times. The Obama administration did many shameful and illegal things, but the law-enforcement bureaucracy remained united and largely under control: hence the remarkably few leaks. The media never lost their uncritical adulation for the president, and were reluctant to cause him any serious embarrassment. And despite troublingly high unemployment, most Americans had a general sense of improving conditions after 2009. The conditions to generate scandal did not exist, nor was there a mass audience receptive to such claims.

So yes, Obama really did run a scandal-free administration.

What you need for an apocalyptic scandal is a set of conditions roughly as follows: a deeply divided and restive set of bureaucrats and law-enforcement officials, a mass media at war with the administration, and a horrible economic crisis. Under Trump, the first two conditions assuredly exist already. If economic disaster is added to the mix, history suggests that something like a second Watergate meltdown is close to inevitable

Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.

Go here to read the rest:
Scandal-Free Obama - The American Conservative

Inside the White House, the temporary suspension of the limits for parts of Yemen and Somalia is seen as a test run while the government considers whether to more broadly rescind or relax the Obama-era rules for avoiding civilian casualties, officials said.

WASHINGTON The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

Already, President Donald Trump has granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces of Yemen to be an area of active hostilities where looser battlefield rules apply. That opened the door to a Special Operations raid in late January in which several civilians were killed, as well as to the largest-ever series of U.S. airstrikes targeting Yemen-based Qaida extremists, starting nearly two weeks ago, the officials said.

Trump is also expected to sign off soon on a similar Pentagon proposal to designate parts of Somalia to be another such battlefield-style zone for 180 days, removing constraints on airstrikes and raids targeting people suspected of being extremists with the al-Qaida-linked group Al Shabab, they said.

Inside the White House, the temporary suspension of the limits for parts of Yemen and Somalia is seen as a test run while the government considers whether to more broadly rescind or relax the Obama-era rules, said the officials, who described the internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

The move to open the throttle on using military force and accept a greater risk of civilian casualties in troubled parts of the Muslim world comes as the Trump administration is also trying to significantly increase military spending and slash foreign aid and State Department budgets.

The proposal to cut soft-power budgets, however, is meeting with stiff resistance from some senior Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as from top active-duty and retired generals and admirals, who fear perpetual conflicts if the root causes of instability and terrorism are not addressed.

In a sign of mounting concern over the governments policy review, more than three dozen members of the United States national-security establishment have urged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to maintain the thrust of the Obama-era principles for counterterrorism missions, saying strict standards should be maintained for using force outside traditional war zones.

The former officials, in a letter sent Sunday to Mattis, warned that even small numbers of unintentional civilian deaths or injuries whether or not legally permitted can cause significant strategic setbacks, increasing violence from extremist groups or prompting partners and allies to reduce collaboration with the United States.

Indeed, immediately after the Special Operations raid on Jan. 29, Yemeni officials suspended further commando missions, pending an assessment of what went wrong, although they later backtracked.

The letters 37 signatories included John McLaughlin, who was acting CIA director for President George W. Bush; Lisa Monaco, President Barack Obamas homeland- security and counterterrorism adviser; and Matthew Olsen, who served as a national-security official in the Bush Justice Department and as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Obama administration.

Obama imposed the civilian-protection rules in May 2013 as part of an effort to recalibrate counterterrorism operations after he had overseen a steep increase in military and CIA drone strikes in places like Yemen and tribal Pakistan.

Critics, including inside the government, worried that the strikes were causing too many civilian casualties, driving terrorist recruitment and undermining support among local partners in the regions. In response, the Obama administration developed the rules, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance.

Under those rules, Cabinet officials generally must agree in high-level deliberations that a proposed target away from a traditional war zone poses a threat to Americans. That is intended to limit strikes targeting generic groups of suspected low-level foot soldiers. And there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed.

By contrast, in a standard war zone, military commanders can approve a strike without interagency review in Washington, and some civilian casualties are acceptable under the laws of war, as long as they are deemed necessary and proportionate to a legitimate military objective.

Military operators have chafed under the 2013 rules, but the Obama administration saw them as a signature accomplishment in the era of drones and open-ended war on terrorism. In his last year in office, Obama issued an executive order requiring the government to disclose annually its official estimate of civilian and combatant deaths from counterterrorism airstrikes away from war zones.

Still, in its final year in power, the Obama administration declared the area around Sirte, Libya, to be an area of active hostilities. It then started a sustained campaign of 495 airstrikes targeting Islamic State group militias there. Obama revoked the Sirte declaration hours before Trumps inauguration.

The Obama administration also permitted the Defense Department to carry out an escalated campaign of airstrikes last year in Somalia that the U.S. Africa Command started without going through the process laid out by the 2013 rules. Instead, those airstrikes were justified under an expansive theory of collective self-defense to protect African Union and Somali forces being trained and advised by the United States.

Against that backdrop, officials said, both the Central Command, which oversees military activity in Yemen, and Africa Command, which oversees it in Somalia, had been developing proposals by mid-2016 to ask for parts of Yemen and Somalia to be declared active-hostilities zones, officials said. They submitted those to the Joint Chiefs of Staffs J5 directorate, which handles strategic plans and policy.

As a result, the Pentagon was in a position to swiftly bring the ideas forward to Trump, whose inauguration raised expectations that the White House would be more permissive. The officials said that Mattis signed one-page memos to Trump asking for each authority, backed by about five pages of supporting material, within days of Trumps becoming president in January.

Several officials said Trump signed off on making parts of Yemen an active-hostilities zone at the same dinner with Mattis five days after his inauguration where he approved the ill-fated raid on a Qaida compound in Yemen. At the time, they said, the expectation was that the Somalia proposal would be swiftly signed, too, and that the larger 2013 rules could be jettisoned swiftly.

On Jan. 28, Trump signed a presidential national-security memorandum directing the military to give him a plan within 30 days to defeat the Islamic State group. It said the plan should include recommended changes to any United States rules of engagement and other United States policy restrictions that exceed the requirements of international law regarding the use of force, a veiled reference to rescinding the 2013 limits on airstrikes.

But the momentum for rapid change broke, the officials said, after the Yemen raid, which resulted in numerous civilian deaths, including of children; the death of a member of the Navys SEAL Team 6 and the wounding of three others; and the loss of a $75 million aircraft.

As a result, Trumps national-security advisers first Michael Flynn, who has since resigned, and now Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster have slowed the review process down while letting operations in Yemen, and soon Somalia, play out as test runs, the officials said.

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Trump moves to ease Obama rules on avoiding civilian casualties in Yemen, Somalia - The Seattle Times

President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have tried to present a unified front on the GOPs health care bill, but a top Republican critic of that legislation on Sunday tried to stoke divisions between the two.

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, said flatly that he doesnt believe the president is fully committed to the legislation as currently written. The House Republican leadership, he added, is presenting a false choice between the status quo or the current alternative proposal backed by Mr. Ryan.

I think theres a separation between the two, Mr. Paul told CBS Face the Nation. Ive talked to the president I think three times on Obamacare and I hear from him that hes willing to negotiate. You know what I hear from Paul Ryan? Its a binary choice, young man. But what does a binary choice mean? His way or the highway?

Mr. Paul said he doesnt think the bill, as it stands now, will get the needed 51 votes in the Senate.

For his part, Mr Ryan admitted that not everyone is fully happy with the bill that said that Republicans have an obligation to act.

Obamacare is collapsing. If we just did nothing, washed our hands of the situation, we would see a further collapse of the health insurance market, he said on Face the Nation. So, we feel an obligation to step in front of that collapse and replace this law with one that works, that has more freedom.

Mr. Ryan also said the White House has been extremely helpful in promoting the replacement package and helping craft the details of it.

Administration officials on Sunday stongly promoted the legislation. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told NBCs Meet the Press that nobody will be worse off financially under the Republican replacement plan.

See more here:
Rand Paul stokes division between Donald Trump, Paul Ryan on health care bill - Washington Times

Washington Examiner

Sen. Rand Paul on Trump's Wiretapping Claim: 'Everybody Has ... CNSNews.com If President Barack Obama wiretapped President Donald Trump, as Trump has claimed, the House intelligence committee expects the Justice Department to ... Rand Paul: Everyone's missing the story on Trump wiretapping ...Washington Examiner all 2 news articles »

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Sen. Rand Paul on Trump's Wiretapping Claim: 'Everybody Has ... - CNSNews.com