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Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday disavowed a tweet from the National Weather Service's Birmingham, Alabama, office that had contradicted President Donald Trump's false assertion that Hurricane Dorian was likely to hit the state.

In a statement attributed to an unnamed NOAA spokesperson, the agency said Trump had been given information from August 28 until Monday that Dorian could impact Alabama.

"From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama," the statement read. "This is clearly demonstrated in Hurricane Advisories #15 through #41, which can be viewed on the center's website.

"The Birmingham National Weather Service's Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time."

Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, lambasted NOAA's characterization of events and defended the agency's employees.

"Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight #NOAA," he tweeted Friday.

Later Sunday, Trump repeated his statement.
"And, I will say, the states -- and it may get a little piece of a great place: It's called Alabama. And Alabama could even be in for at least some very strong winds and something more than that, it could be," Trump told reporters at a briefing on the storm. "This just came up, unfortunately. It's the size of -- the storm that we're talking about. So, for Alabama, just please be careful also."

Those mistaken remarks received criticism that apparently irked the President, as he began tweeting criticism of reporters for pointing out that, at the time he was speaking on Sunday, Alabama was not expected to be hit by the storm. On Wednesday, Trump's attempts to prove he was correct veered into the absurd when he showed off an apparently altered map of a forecast from NOAA that showed a black line drawn in marker over Alabama to imply the storm's track would have taken it deep into the Gulf state.

That was followed by multiple tweets from the President attempting to back up his statement, many of which featured outdated forecasts from days before he had made his remarks on Sunday. CNN was first to report on Thursday that Trump also made his case to a Fox News White House reporter that he was right about Dorian's path.

Every week, if not every day, there is breaking news saying that Trump broke the law and that he is insane.

The thing to remember about the boy who cried wolf is that eventually a wolf did come along. Just because every little thing Trump has done gets blown out of proportion, doesn't mean he hasn't broken a law or that his mental stability is on shaky ground.

It seems in this case Trump violated a minor law. Do I think he should be impeached for breaking a minor law? No. Could a petty congress impeach him for breaking a minor law? Yes they could.

Is Trump's mental stability questionable? In my unprofessional opinion: yes. He seems to be increasingly erratic in the past few months.

What are you talking about? Trump has also committed obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ce/594634/

https://www.justsecurity.org/64975/afte ... planation/

The problem is that Pelosi, who is focused more on following polls than justice, has refused to do anything, not that Democrats have been "crying wolf". Also, Pelosi finds it more convenient to fundraise with Trump in office, since she can use him as a boogeyman, so she doesn't want to get rid of her cash cow.

The thing to remember about the boy who cried wolf is that eventually a wolf did come along. Just because every little thing Trump has done gets blown out of proportion, doesn't mean he hasn't broken a law or that his mental stability is on shaky ground.

It seems in this case Trump violated a minor law. Do I think he should be impeached for breaking a minor law? No. Could a petty congress impeach him for breaking a minor law? Yes they could.

Is Trump's mental stability questionable? In my unprofessional opinion: yes. He seems to be increasingly erratic in the past few months.

Every time I see Nancy Pelosi patiently spell out the higher political wisdom of refraining from impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, I think of Alan Greenspan. That’s obviously not because the speaker of the House and the famously tight-lipped former Fed chair have any affinities of political outlook or personal temperament. Rather, it’s because as a former financial journalist, I’m reminded of how Greenspan’s observers in the financial industry tended to project all manner of genius onto him simply because he refused to articulate, in any concrete way that involved anything so crass as a narrative, what he was thinking or doing. For market watchers and finance industry savants, Greenspan was a human koan upon which they were expected to puzzle out their own economic enlightenment. If you didn’t get it, you were the idiot.

And now I get the sense that Pelosi’s refusal to articulate her strategy with regard to Trump is being met with the same familiar projection of assumed good faith and competence. Most important, her imputed leadership savvy, like Greenspan’s long pre-crash tour atop the Fed, is routinely taken for granted as the most accurate and astute analysis of The Current Situation that will either one day produce, or is already leading to, a well-thought-out, nimble, and unassailable tactical response.

When people do inexplicable things, it’s always tempting to project qualities onto them that would offer a more innocuous explanation of their behavior than bad judgment, fecklessness, or stupidity. And this particular bias has infected contemporary political analysis with a virulence that rivals Ebola. Even when the subject’s motives are as transparent as Donald Trump’s, there will always be a class of pundit who insists that Trump is playing 3-D chess, when, as one anonymous staffer put it, “more often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”

This reflexive tendency to dress up a posture of inattention as inscrutable cunning applies even more so to people who are smart and capable, or at least have a record of behaving as if they are. What I now think of as The Alan Greenspan Fallacy is pervasive among elites who believe intelligence is synonymous with inevitable progress, realism, and pragmatism. So when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, an effective and often groundbreaking career politician, refuses to articulate a rationale for failing to hold Trump accountable, she gets the benefit of the doubt, and quite a bit more. When she says something that provokes Trump, or forces him to be defensive, this is read as active management of Trump and not Trump behaving in the reactionary fashion he always does. (This particular brand of savvy being the ability to get “into Trump’s head” as Maureen Dowd put it in her now-notorious interview with Pelosi earlier this month—as though there’s some concrete political victory associated with this cranial burrowing, or, more to the point, as if there’s anything in the big broad world that doesn’t get into Trump’s head.)

Whenever Pelosi claims to have a plan for managing him long term, she’s met with affirmational centrist validation that says she knows what she’s doing—and that any inability to parse her logic must definitionally be a shortcoming on the part of the observer. In short, if Trump is playing 3-D chess, Pelosi must be operating in some more sophisticated double-digit dimension that’s so beyond the ken of regular voters that none of us can possibly comprehend it. Surely there has to be a strategy behind all of this sitting around, claiming to be outraged, and doing nothing.

Pelosi herself has done much to enforce this perception, both with her refusal to communicate her rationale—silence is often mistaken for genius—and by periodically alluding to hypothetical wheels in motion that may or may not exist at all. When forced to comment, she’s fearless, but only in her willingness to insult the intelligence of other Democrats. We’re told that the plan, whatever it is, is working because Trump is “self-impeaching”—a nonsensical claim belied by the daily onslaught of cascading horrors that the administration continues to unleash upon Americans with no consequences whatsoever. (If he is self-impeaching, however that happens, it’s happening so slowly and incrementally that it’s not visible to the naked eye, and it’s doubtful that he’ll have completed the process before the end of a second term.)

This has not, of course, stopped her from fundraising off of it. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee donor inboxes are littered with appeals signed by the speaker to, all caps, stop Trump, as if the critical brake mechanisms are being controlled by donors and not by the officials whose elections they support. It’s like watching a person drown while the lifeguard sits in her tower, performatively noting with alarm that someone is sinking into the sea and surely someone—someone!—must save the swimmer.

None of this is to say that Pelosi is not personally horrified by what’s happening. Perhaps she is. But whatever she’s experiencing is obviously not compelling or severe enough to make her violate her notions of institutional decorum or consider the long-term consequences of looking the other way when the most corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent president in modern history continually escalates his corruptions, bigotries, and incompetence.

Those long-term consequences should be Pelosi’s primary consideration, but here she exhibits an unfortunate flaw of the entire party: the inability to think past the next election cycle.

Democrats, unlike their Republican counterparts, don’t invest longitudinally. They don’t think about voter contact as a long-term relationship that transcends particular electoral cycles. (Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of three-times-a-day bait-and-switch donor emails can attest to this.) They handicap what’s supposedly winnable—the baseline for which is polling at the beginning of the cycle, collected anecdotes, and a lot of bias about what candidates and campaigns should look like—and often at the expense of building any affirmative capacity to alter the actual terms of political engagement. Such thinking doesn’t exercise the imagination of the Democratic Party elite for the simple reason that it rarely pays off in absolute wins over the course of a single cycle.

Pelosi is no exception to these myopic trends—indeed, she tends to aggressively reinforce them, as one of her party’s premier fundraisers. Nearly every framing device that Pelosi has presented to justify her inaction pivots on the ostensible political cost of initiating impeachment proceedings during the 2020 election cycle. There’s no reckoning with the foreseeable costs or gains of an impeachment process beyond the election. When she does talk about the longer-term damage Trump is doing to American democracy, she speaks in vagaries: “We believe that no one is above the law,” she says, but until the House demonstrates that by enforcing law, it’s a meaningless abstraction.

It’s hard to believe that this is a function of naïveté—a sincere belief that the norms and laws Trump is constantly and gleefully violating will hold up under his repeated assaults. It’s more likely that after decades in politics, Pelosi is only capable of calculating losses and gains electorally. Systemic erosions go unnoticed in the daily chaos of reacting to Trump, and amid this broader state of inertia, they also do not figure in any macro way as part of Pelosi’s theory of change. That is to say, she has not engaged in the necessary public reflection with her caucus leaders or the public at large in order to explain just what should be done to reverse the horrible legacy of our present political moment, and to prevent anything like it from happening again once Trump is out of office.

Another side effect of this myopia: the petty internecine attacks Pelosi and her cohort have unleashed on Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. When everything is a battle and nothing is a war, stupid low-stakes skirmishes break out at an astonishing rate, because there are no coherent long-term goals beyond immediately husbanding the balance of congressional power and getting past the next cycle without a loss. House leadership of course pays lip service to the idea of party unity, but in practice Democratic leaders view unity as a top-down dictum and not a consensus. It’s hard not to see this mandate from on high as of a piece with the fantasy of “self-impeachment”: Both notions involve a maximum amount of institutional condescension with a minimum complement of hard work. True consensus-building within the Democratic caucus would require engaging the freshmen congresswomen who’ve exhibited a level of energy and determination that has galvanized support from typically younger voters who are disillusioned by traditional party politics—the sort of voters who are crucial in forging a majoritarian Democratic coalition over a longer-term time horizon.

Instead, Democratic leadership’s approach to message discipline and party unity has more to do with bad managerial theory than coalition-building: People who can’t be contained safely in the lower compartments of a manageable hierarchy are viewed as a threat, even if, in theory, they are pursuing the same objectives that the threatened management caste is. As a result, they get stigmatized. They are viewed as liabilities instead of opportunities—and their conduct thus gets obsessively scrutinized and disciplined by managers ever mindful of the next potential threat to their own authority.

Antrax,

Did she say that's why she's not bringing impeachment, that it's because it will make 2020 go poorly? I don't think she ever said anything like that. I think that you are assuming that she's smart and savvy, and just thinking up something that sounds reasonable on the surface and attributing it to her.

Perhaps I am, and perhaps it's my own confirmation bias that I think impeachment would be a political mistake by the democrats entering 2020.

I do think Pelosi is a savvy politician. She schooled Trump during the shutdown, when I thought she actually had the weaker position. She has survived in Washington a long time with a lot of people trying to bring her down. Attribute that to her fundraising alone if you must, but I think there's more to it.

I think impeachment against Trump would be seen as a politically motivated overreach. The Mueller report and hearing remain a Rorschach test with people who dislike Trump seeing obstruction and people who like him seeing exoneration. The campaign finance investigation you mentioned earlier is not in the mainstream at all, and most people don't even know about it. Even running with the obstruction, there's only evidence that Trump obstructed justice, not that he actually obstructed justice to cover up anything. While it's certainly a crime, it's on the same level as Bill Clinton's perjury.

I think impeachment would fire up and excite most democrats, but go over poorly with independents and swing voters. It's not just Pelosi, most of the democrats in congress not calling for impeachment are from moderate districts: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/th ... right-now/.

There's a next to 0 chance that Trump is actually removed from office by the Senate, so if your goal is to remove Trump from office, the best way to go about that is to do what's politically best for his 2020 opponent.

You left much of my argument on the table.

I would have reported everything correctly, but I would have also drawn balls on Florida.