Tired of All the Winning

March 10, 2017

Good morning, and happy Friday. No matter how rough your week is, there's always somebody who's had it worse. For example, you could be desperately trying to sell Chelsea Clinton to the American public as an inspiring and visionary leader.

Tired of All the Winning, Part One

Okay, so it's not a jaw-dropping number, just continued movement in the right direction:

The U.S. economy added a robust 235,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department said Friday.

The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.7%. Unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, after the financial crisis.

Last year the economy averaged about 190,000 new jobs per month. The economy is showing other signs of strength: Consumer and business confidence is high and stocks are at record levels.

Wage growth continued showing signs of progress after persisting at a sluggish pace for years until 2016. Wages grew a solid 2.8% in February compared with a year ago.

We'll take it!

Tired of All the Winning, Part Two

So much for illegal immigration being an intractable problem.

Arrests of people crossing the border illegally dropped roughly 44 percent during President Donald Trump's first month in office, according to Homeland Security data.

The Border Patrol reported that about 23,500 people were arrested trying to cross the border illegally in February, compared to about 42,500 arrests in January.

The February figures, which also include significant drops in the arrests of families and children trying to cross the border alone, are the lowest monthly tallies since at the least the start of the 2012 budget year.

Two things jump out. The Associated Press account declares, "The number of people caught crossing the border illegally in the winter typically is lower than during warmer summer months," but that doesn't explain a sudden drop from January and February, and this detail from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly's announcement indicates the drop is historically anomalous:

This change in the trend line is especially significant because CBP historically sees a 10-20 percent increase in apprehensions of illegal immigrants from January to February. Instead, this year we saw a drop from 31,578 to 18,762 persons — a 40 percent decline.

New York Times reporters in Mexico offer fascinating details about the perspective among the migrants, and indicate that the election of Trump is having a deterrent effect:

Some migrants who might once have headed to the United States for safety and work are instead looking elsewhere, including Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama and even South America.

"If the United States isn't a country that will provide the guarantees, they will go somewhere else," said Vinicio Sandoval, executive director of the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador, a labor and legal rights organization involved in migration issues.

Think of it as the Semisonic "Closing Time" policy. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

Tired of All the Winning, Part Three

Remember Raqqa, capital city of the Islamic State? The good guys — or at least the good guys, working with the better than ISIS guys — are knocking on the door.

U.S.-backed Syrian forces said on Thursday they were closing in on Islamic State-held Raqqa and expected to reach the city outskirts in a few weeks, as a U.S. Marines artillery unit deployed to help the campaign.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a militia alliance including the Kurdish YPG, is the main U.S. partner in the war against Islamic State in Syria. Since November it has been working with the U.S.-led coalition to encircle Raqqa.

SDF spokesman Talal Silo said: "We expect that within a few weeks there will be a siege of the city."

Coalition spokesman U.S. Air Force Colonel John Dorrian said the additional U.S. forces would be working with local partners in Syria - the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Arab Coalition - and would not have a front line role.

Some 500 U.S. personnel are already in Syria to help the fight against IS. A 400-strong additional deployment which arrived in recent days comprised both Marines and Army Rangers, Dorrian said, adding they were there temporarily.

In that fantastic 2015 Atlantic article, looking deep into what is unique about ISIS, Graeme Wood offered the possibility that losing control over territory could be a crippling blow to ISIS.

Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it.

Tired of All the Winning, Part Four

While James Clapper announced his intention to retire in November, he served as director of national intelligence until January 20. Between Trump's election and inauguration, there was a lot of speculation about Russian efforts to influence the presidential election.

Last week, on Meet the Press, Clapper said this:

We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, "our," that's N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.

Clapper said that evidence could conceivably have been discovered since January 20; if so, he wouldn't know about it. And yes, yes, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But you have to figure that U.S. intelligence agencies would have been looking pretty darn hard for evidence of collusion in the time period between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Ali Watkins of BuzzFeed talked to staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee on their review of the information so far.

A month into its sweeping investigation into the Kremlin's efforts to undermine the US election, the Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to answer all those questions — publicly, coherently, and fast. As the days tick by, they're less and less sure they'll be able to.

Even some Democrats on the Intelligence Committee now quietly admit, after several briefings and preliminary inquiries, they don't expect to find evidence of active, informed collusion between the Trump campaign and known Russian intelligence operatives, though investigators have only just begun reviewing raw intelligence. Among the Intelligence Committee's rank and file, there's a tangible frustration over what one official called "wildly inflated" expectations surrounding the panel's fledgling investigation.

Her BuzzFeed colleague, Miriam Elder, contends that the obsession with finding evidence of Trump's guilt is downplaying focus on Russia's actions, which are not disputed and should be a bipartisan concern.

The Russian cyberattack of 2016 was widely documented, but what's happening now is that some of Trump's critics are turning the fabric of diplomacy into conspiracy. They're trying to find evidence that it was his camp that directed those hacks, rather than investigating how they originated in Russia.

Now throw in Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who has displayed an unexpected level of skepticism about the speculation fueling this story. (He lived in Russia in the 1990s.)

…whether the investigation involved a potential Logan Act violation, or election fraud, or whatever, the CIA, FBI, and NSA had the ability to act both before and after Donald Trump was elected. But they didn't, and we know why, because James Clapper just told us – they didn't have evidence to go on.

Thus we are now witnessing the extremely unusual development of intelligence sources that normally wouldn't tell a reporter the time of day litigating a matter of supreme importance in the media. What does this mean?

Is it likely that the Russians wanted to muck around, mess with Hillary, expose embarrassing information from the DNC and John Podesta? Yes, it is. Is it likely that Russia saw Trump as friendlier or more easily manipulated U.S. leader? Yes.

Based on what we know so far, and barring some stunning new revelation, what the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to find is two separate entities (Russia and the Trump campaign) working separately towards the same goal (Hillary's defeat). Surely the Trump campaign didn't mind, and in fact gleefully touted the WikiLeaks revelations about the DNC and Podesta. But that isn't the same as collusion, which is defined as "secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose."

We don't know what the Senate Intelligence Committee's final report will say; the investigation is still ongoing. But we know the intelligence community, with all of its resources and every incentive in the world, couldn't find a smoking gun in the two-and-a-half months or so between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

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