Month: August 2015

They really don’t like Jeb!

by digby

The right wing, that is:

If Republicans nominate a third Bush to face a second Clinton, they will suffer their third consecutive loss in the battle for the White House. Each of those losses will have been rooted in one undeniable fact: a milquetoast, Washington establishment-backed nominee is unelectable.
Grassroots conservatives, rank-and-file Republicans and Tea Party supporters have figured this out. Since the Washington establishment blessed Jeb Bush with the title of front-runner last December, he has steadily lost support.

I know this base. I have worked with them for over three decades. I have raised tens of millions of dollars for Republican candidates only to see one after another betray the very constituents who put him (or her) in office.

I have watched grassroots conservatives go from trust in their elected officials, to surprise at their change of positions, to frustration at their lack of backbone and now to open disgust with candidates and their high-priced political consultants pretending to support positions they oppose and who make pledges they have no intention of honoring. The grassroots conservative base of the Republican Party has no use, none whatsoever, for any more moderates. (That’s one of the reasons that I have personally endorsed Ted Cruz for president.)

The bases of both parties always feel this way. And it’s natural. In Bozell’s case it’s just part of his business plan. He makes a very nice profit stoking anti-establishment fervor.

But it’s possible that they will actually nominate someone like Cruz (or … Trump) this time. After all, they nominated Sarah Palin in 08 so it’s not as if it would be entirely unprecedented. The establishment just can’t control them anymore. And they might just think they can beat a woman (a Clinton no less) or a socialist from Vermont no matter who they nominate.

They could do it this time. The stuff of nightmares.

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QOTD: Mike Huckabee’s bff

by digby

Nuge:

“I’m a big fan of Donald Trump because I believe in bold, aggressive, unapologetic truth. Period. And I’m not a fan of Megyn Kelly, although I often turn on Fox just to look at her. Sometimes when I’m loading my magazines, I like to just look at her. And I usually sit naked on the couch dropping hot brass on my stuff.”

Stuff???

Why bring Huckabee into it?

Just cuz:

After Huckabee slammed the President for letting his daughters listen to the “toxic mental poison” of Beyoncé’s music (which he later compared to buying a 12-year-old a stripper pole), comedian Jon Stewart confronted Huckabee on air about a time when he played the bawdy song “Cat Scratch Fever” with firearm enthusiast Ted Nugent on national television.

In an interview published Wednesday by the Christian Post, Huckabee said he thought Nugent had performed a tamer version of the song.

“First of all, Ted changed the lyrics pretty dramatically when he sang it on the stage that time,” Huckabee told the Christian Post.

Video of the broadcast shows that Nugent did not dial back the sexual content of the song, which included such lines as “I make the pussy purr with the stroke of my hand.”

In fact, in a moment of improvisation on “Huckabee,” Nugent did appear to change some lyrics in the chorus, belting, at 8:00 in the video below: “I like to scratch that…” The word that follows is unclear.

“They know I’m doin’ it Mike,” Nugent shouted over his shoulder, to Huckabee, who was plugging away on a bass guitar.

Buncha lily-livered, treasonous cowards

by digby

Whatever happened to that sequester thingy?

by digby

Remember when the congress and the administration pushed through a ridiculous plan called “sequestration” because everyone thought there was no way in hell that Republicans would agree to cut military spending and it would force everyone to the bargaining table? And the assumption was that the liberals would then cave in to “entitlement” cuts because that’s just how they roll? And remember when none of that happened and sequestration actually went into effect dampening the economic recovery and screwing millions of poor people?

Those cuts are still operative and there is almost no chance that the funding will be reinstated even though it was a meat ax approach that nobody expected at the time would ever go into effect.But what if those cuts could just be reversed? What would happen?

Reversing sequestration spending caps could create as many as 1.4 million jobs over the next two years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Tuesday.

At the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, the CBO analyzed the macroeconomic effects of completely eliminating the budget cuts, which are set to return in full force in October.

Easing those ceilings would lead to increased government spending, which in turn would lead to an increase in economic output and higher employment, the CBO said.

“Fully eliminating the reductions would allow for an increase in appropriations of $90 billion in 2016 and $91 billion in 2017,” CBO Director Keith Hall wrote in a letter to Sanders. 

If Congress reverses the limits in fiscal 2016, for example, the CBO said it could result in the full-time employment of as few as 200,000 more people or as many as 800,000 more people. If the same were done for fiscal 2017, the CBO said it could similarly add as few as 100,000 jobs or as many as 600,000 jobs.

The CBO said sequestration relief would also cause the gross domestic product to grow by as much as 0.6 percent in 2016 and as much as 0.4 percent in 2017.

Sanders pithily commented: “arbitrary sequestration caps have never made any sense.”

No kidding. They were a stupid negotiating ploy that failed.

But that’s where we are. It’s clarifying if nothing else. One hopes that no Democratic president, whether Sanders or Clinton or Lincoln Chafee will ever underestimate the batshit insanity of the modern GOP again.

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Dispatch from torture nation

by digby

“America doesn’t torture” remember?

Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.

As the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: “Where are they going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?” One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.

Hours earlier, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat had made their daring escape from the unit — called the “honor block” — where they were housed. Now it appeared that Mr. Alexander, a fellow convicted murderer who lived in an adjoining cell, was being made to suffer the consequences.

For days after the June prison break, corrections officers carried out what seemed like a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates, particularly those on the honor block, an investigation by The New York Times found. In letters reviewed by The Times, as well as prison interviews, inmates described a strikingly similar catalog of abuses, including being beaten while handcuffed, choked and slammed against cell bars and walls.

They were also subjected to harsh policies ordered by the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision: Dozens of inmates, many of whom had won the right to live on the honor block after years of good behavior, were transferred out of Clinton to other prisons. Many were placed in solitary confinement, and stripped of privileges they had accrued over the years — even though no prisoners have yet been linked to Mr. Matt’s and Mr. Sweat’s actions.

Indeed, it is prison employees who have been implicated: One has pleaded guilty to aiding the escape; another faces criminal charges; nine officers have been suspended; and the leadership of the prison, in Dannemora, has been removed.

And I’m sure this is not a unique situation. Prisons operate with impunity. Nobody cares what happens to people once they are thrown inside. We make jokes about it. We think it’s fine because they’re criminals.

And we wonder why it was so easy for the government to start torturing prisoners of war. It’s just standard operating procedure.

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The Koch Brothers message: “We care”

by digby

I wrote about the latest PR campaign coming from the billionaire boys club for Salon this morning:

At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News. “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.” […]

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” […]

Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

There’s more. Like when Charles Koch compared his struggle to the civil rights movement and suffrage.

Not kidding.

by tristero

Recently, I posted a Times article regarding Coke’s funding research that would enable them to mislead the public into thinking that exercise alone would enable people to lose weight. Scientific American follows up with an interview with Charlotte Markey, a “Rutgers University–based diet and behavior expert:”

We actually know a great deal about what leads to obesity. It’s not a great mystery. People are eating too much and not exercising enough…that makes it inevitable that people will be obese. The group’s emphasis on physical activity is misleading based on what the data shows. There’s no data to support saying if you exercise for 30 minutes three times a week that this will take care of the problem. We have data refuting that. 

In reality, we need people to stop drinking sugary beverages like soda. Soda is the one consumable beverage that is repeatedly cited as having the biggest impact on obesity rates. From a public health standpoint, we want soda out of schools and we want cities to really decrease intake of soda—and Coca-Cola knows this…

Yep. From the standpoint of basic human hygiene, Coca-Cola and its ilk should be tiny little companies selling occasional treats (treats are great, every once in a while). Instead, they are colossal corporations selling obesity-delivery systems as if they were an essential food group.

That’s what you call a serious public health problem.

Has his time come?
by Tom Sullivan

“The soulless pursuit of profit has vulgarized American society,” writes Charlie Pierce. Looking at Donald the Vulgar, Pierce sees a man whose time has come:

… He has looked at the American political landscape as it has evolved since 1980 and decided that it has become just the kind of place where Donald Trump could get himself elected. Unfortunately, he was correct in that assessment. He was a vulgarian in an unusually vulgarian time and he is now a vulgarian in an age in which vulgarianism has become so normalized that we hardly notice its most deleterious consequences any more, or we call them “freedom,” which is the most vulgar thing I can think of.

Yet even as Trump pursued profit, Bernie Sanders toiled through those same years at the sort of unglamourous civil rights and social justice efforts that never pay well. As Republican candidates make vulgar obeisance before the likes of the Koch Brothers or, as Pierce dubs him, “international vice lord, Sheldon Adelson,” Bernie Sanders’ growing popularity may signify rejection of the vulgarian model.

Has his time come:

A stunning new poll has Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) beating presumptive Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

Sanders has eclipsed Clinton by a 44 to 37 percent margin, according to a new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll that was first reported by the Boston newspaper Tuesday evening.

The Guardian has background:

This marks the first time Sanders has taken a lead in any poll. By contrast, in a poll conducted by Franklin Pierce University eight years ago, in September 2007, Clinton led Barack Obama by 36% to 18%.

While the poll may be an outlier, the very fact that Sanders, an unkempt septuagenarian socialist, is leading Clinton in any poll raises eyebrows. This marks the first time that Sanders has registered a lead over Clinton in any state or national poll. In past polls in New Hampshire, Clinton had maintained a narrow but comfortable lead in that state’s first-in-the-nation primary.

Among the eyebrows being raised may be bushy, septuagenarian ones.

Misunderestimating the surge

by digby

This is an important piece by Peter Beinert about the renewed sense of hawkishness in the Republicans Party and its genesis in a really elementary misunderstanding of “the surge” which they see as a model for success and one on which Obama failed to follow through. He details the real history so that even Donald Trump should be able to understand it. And then he concludes with this:

The fact is, the U.S. failed to stop Maliki’s slide into sectarian tyranny even when it still had 100,000 troops patrolling Iraqi soil. That’s because America had already lost much of its leverage. Once the surge succeeded in reducing violence, Maliki no longer needed American troops to keep him in power. By 2010, U.S. aid to Iraq had dropped dramatically. Iraq was buying American weapons, but had the oil revenue to buy them elsewhere if America stopped selling. And the Obama administration could not pressure Maliki by threatening to withdraw U.S. troops, because Maliki wanted them gone. So did most of the Iraqi people.

The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place. In 2003, the Bush administration believed it could shatter the Iraqi state and then quickly and cheaply construct a new one that was stable, liberal, democratic, and loyal to the United States. By 2006, many conservatives had realized that was a fantasy. They had massively overestimated America’s wisdom and power, and so they began groping for a new approach to the world. But then, in 2007 and 2008, through a series of bold innovations, the United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately. Nonetheless, Republicans today say the Iraq War was won, and would have remained won, had the U.S. left 10,000 troops in the country after 2011. 

How much damage will the GOP’s revived hubris do? Inconceivable as it would have seemed a few years ago, Graham, who is now a Republican presidential hopeful, has suggested sending 10,000 American ground troops back into Iraq. (His GOP rivals generally support this idea but have not proposed exact troop numbers.) The U.S. is unlikely to send a sizable American ground force back into Iraq. But this line of thinking is troubling nonetheless, because the same wild overestimation of American power that fueled the war in Iraq now fuels the right’s opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. To hear hawks tell it, the United States can scuttle the current deal, intensify sanctions, threaten war, and—presto—Tehran will capitulate. But Iranians have been living under the threat of attacks from America or Israel for more than a decade now. And British and German diplomats have warned that if the U.S. Congress torpedoes the agreement, sanctions pressure on Iran will go not up but down, as countries that have lost billions by limiting their trade with Tehran stop doing so.

One day, Republicans will resume the painful work they began in 2006—the work of reconciling conservative attitudes with the limits of American power. Let’s hope they don’t do too much damage before that day comes.

Well, the Democrats had better not let them have the White House then because they are openly promising to start a new war at the earliest possible moment.

I’m starting to hear liberals recognise that maybe, just maybe this is the main  issue on which Republicans hope to run in 2016. (Ya think???) If we hope to understand how to counter their bloodthirsty arguments, it would be helpful to understand where they have gone wrong. This is actually an easy one.

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Frankenstein’s monster has turned on his daddy

by digby

This is wonderful:

While Trump barnstormed rival media outlets over the last few days, dissing Kelly and Fox at virtually every turn, Ailes remained surprisingly restrained in his response, even after Trump told CNN on Friday that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” during the debate. Paralyzed by the volume of pro-Trump emails from Fox’s loyal viewers, Ailes’s only statement, released a day after the debate, said that he was “extremely proud of all of the moderators.” Fox’s famously aggressive PR apparatus has not gone after Trump to defend Kelly, and although Kelly’s executive producer Tom Lowell did send out an email to colleagues thanking them for their support in recent days, that support has been private.

Trump is now back in Fox’s fold, but the lengths that Ailes went to in order to win Trump back revealed a rare moment of weakness for the Fox chief. Since Trump’s “blood” comment on Friday, some Fox executives have wanted Ailes to personally call Trump and broker a truce. But, according to a Fox source, Ailes and his lawyer Peter Johnson Jr. felt that calling Trump was a risk they couldn’t take, given Trump’s erratic behavior on the campaign trail. What if Trump leaked the conversation on Twitter like he did with Lindsey Graham’s cell-phone number? (When reached by email about this story, Johnson responded: “The reporting is false and obviously fabricated.”)

Ailes’s unwillingness to pick up the phone meant that Fox was flying blind. “They didn’t know what Trump was thinking,” one source explained. It was left to emissaries to try and discern Trump’s next move. But, after Trump told Sean Hannity in a weekend phone call that he was “never doing Fox again,” appeared on four non-Fox public-affairs shows on Sunday, and did interviews with Today and Morning Joe on Monday, Ailes raised the white flag and picked up the phone on Monday morning. “Roger wanted a friendly relationship,” the source explained.

Ailes offered Trump the chance to do a special on Kelly’s prime-time show to clear the air — an offer Trump flatly refused. “Donald was sufficiently pissed off that there was no way that was happening,” a person familiar with the call told me. According to the source, Trump’s ire was especially stoked after Howard Stern called to tell him about a 2010 interview in which Kelly joked about her breasts and her husband’s penis. Ailes offered other shows, and Trump agreed to appear on Fox and Friends and Hannity, two venues that have been loyal boosters of his candidacy.

Ailes’s next order of business was getting Trump to disarm publicly. According to a source briefed on the negotiations, Ailes called Trump “multiple” times yesterday morning “begging” him to tweet out that they had made peace. Trump refused at first, but finally consented. “Roger Ailes just called,” he tweeted at 10:35 a.m. yesterday. “He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on ‪@FoxNews. His word is always good!”[…]

This morning, Ailes got his wish: Trump returned with a chatty segment on Fox and Friends. “I’m glad we’re friends again,” co-host Steve Doocy said at the opening of the segment. “We’ve always been friends,” Trump replied, disingenuously.

But resecuring Trump access could prove to be a temporary victory for Ailes. Having backed down to the GOP front-runner and all but sacrificed one of his biggest stars to appease the conservative base — a.k.a. Fox viewers — Ailes has set a dangerous precedent. The message is clear: Fox reports, but the audience decides.

It’s his audience, he created it. Now he has to live with it.

Just a little reminder of Ailes’ contribution to the misogynistic culture that Fox News perpetuates:

Ailes: “Move That Damn Laptop, I Can’t See Her Legs!”

Sherman relayed an anecdote of Ailes regarding former Fox News reporter Kiran Chetry: “Anchor Bob Sellers remembered Ailes once calling the control booth. ‘I was doing the weekend show with Kiran Chetry. He called up and said, ‘Move that damn laptop, I can’t see her legs!'”

Ailes: “I Did Not Spend X-Number Of Dollars On A Glass Desk For Her To Wear Pant Suits”

Sherman reports that Ailes “had admiration for [former Fox host Catherine Crier’s] legs” and was livid when she appeared on-air wearing pants:

“Be more opinionated,” he told Crier in one meeting. “The guests are there as a foil for you.” He also disagreed with her dress. “He had admiration for her legs,” a senior executive said. In one meeting, Ailes barked, “Tell Catherine I did not spend x-number of dollars on a glass desk for her to wear pant suits.” [The Loudest Voice in the Room, pg 238]

Elsewhere in the book, discussing Megyn Kelly’s famous walk through the newsroom on election night in 2012, Sherman quotes a Fox employee saying, “This is Fox News, so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.”

I think the chances that Ailes hasn’t said of a woman employee who complained about something that she’s “on the rag” to be somewhere around 1 in one trillion.

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