Month: August 2015

They love him

by digby

I won’t link, but this is from the Stormfront site:

To be fair, some of the commenters said this was ridiculous. So he still has some work to do to convince the actual nazi constituency.

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The epidemic we know how to cure

by digby

I wrote about yesterday’s horror show and the disease of American gun violence today at Salon:

Chris Hayes featured some alarming statistics on his show last night. He pointed out that despite the fact the US is average among other industrialized countries in virtually every crime and only have 5% of the world’s population, we have had 31% of the mass shootings since 1966.  You don’t have to be an expert to see that the the fact that we lead the world in  civilian gun ownership with 88.8 guns per 100 people  (the next highest is Yemen at 54.8 per 100) has something to do with it.

And that was that.

Read on.  This is a terrible deadly problem that we know how to solve.  It’s not complicated.  Others have solved it.  But we won’t.

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Marco’s ride in the tank

by digby

This is not photoshopped.  It happened at a furniture store in New Hampshire today:

These images hurt when they reinforce a vulnerability. This one could haunt Rubio. It doesn’t make him look “youthful and vigorous”, it makes him look infantile.

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Trump’s Achilles heel: Will stories of mob ties and crooked deals sink him?

by Gaius Publius

The Trump phenomenon is taking off and shows every sign of “having wings,” to not mix a metaphor. According to this excellent analysis by Lee Drutman, “What Donald Trump gets about the electorate,” Trump has found a policy sweet spot with Republican voters (as opposed to the party’s money-bought leaders):

As the punditry attempts to make sense of the continued popularity of Donald Trump, the prevailing establishment narrative has been simple: He’s an anti-establishment buffoon; he’s channeling an angry mood; his moment will pass. But as Ezra Klein argued on Monday, this narrative may be wrong. What if Trump actually represents a sizable electorate that Beltway elites have marginalized?

The data on this is pretty clear. Put simply: While most elite-funded and elite-supported Republicans want to increase immigration and decrease Social Security, a significant number of voters (across both parties) want precisely the opposite — to increase Social Security and decrease immigration. So when Trump speaks out both against immigration and against fellow Republicans who want to cut Social Security, he’s speaking out for a lot people.

By my count of National Election Studies (NES) data, 24 percent of the US population holds this position (increase Social Security, decrease immigration). If we add in the folks who want to maintain (not cut) Social Security and decrease immigration, we are now at 40 percent of the total electorate, which I’ll call “populist.” No wonder folks are flocking to Trump — and to Bernie Sanders, who holds similar positions, though with more emphasis on the expanding Social Security part and less aggression on immigration.

The underlying data is fascinating. A taste — here’s how the electorate feels about Social Security:

And here’s how the electorate feels about immigration:

Add the middle group to the top group on Social Security and you get a whopping 93% of the electorate. Add the middle group to the bottom two groups on immigration and you get a similarly impressive 86%. Trump is simultaneous selling to both of these large groups.

In addition, unlike all of the other top candidates, Trump is his own billionaire, more or less, and the billionaires backing the rest of the candidates hold exactly opposite views — they want to decrease Social Security benefits (to keep taxes low, among other reasons) and increase immigration (to make available the cheapest non-union labor possible). Thus, while all of the other Republican candidates have to mouth words crafted for them by the wealthy who pull their strings — words that hold little appeal for voters, including Republican ones — Trump, who pulls his own strings, can freely offer policies counter to what elite Republicans want.

He’s on a roll in the polls, he’s a natural crowd favorite for a certain kind of crowd, and he’s apparently having a wonderful time. So what’s likely to bring him down politically?

David Cay Johnston on Trump and the Mob

Arrogance is unlikely to do it; that may be his strong suit. And as others have argued, his vicious (and expensive) nativism is a feature to Republicans who live at the intersection of extreme economic insecurity and frightened-male racism. Does Donald Trump have an Achilles heel? David Cay Johnston thinks so; he thinks Trump has several in fact.

From a recent National Memo article, Johnston writes:

I have covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years — including breaking the story that in 1990, when he claimed to be worth $3 billion but could not pay interest on loans coming due, his bankers put his net worth at minus $295 million. And so I have closely watched what Trump does and what government documents reveal about his conduct.

Reporters, competing Republican candidates, and voters would learn a lot about Trump if they asked for complete answers to these 21 questions.

So, Mr. Trump… 

There follow his 21 questions. The whole piece reads well — Johnston has a unique gift for making his subject clear — but I want to focus on just a few of them:

▪ Regarding Trump and the mob:

6. Trump Tower is not a steel girder high rise, but 58 stories of concrete.

Why did you use concrete instead of traditional steel girders?

7. Trump Tower was built by S&A Concrete, whose
owners were “Fat” Tony Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and
Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambinos, another well-known
crime family.

If you did not know of their ownership, what does that tell voters about your management skills?

8. You later used S&A Concrete on other Manhattan buildings bearing your name.

Why?

And:

11. You sent your top lieutenant, lawyer Harvey I.
Freeman, to negotiate with Ken Shapiro, the “investment banker” for
Nicky Scarfo, the especially vicious killer who was Atlantic City’s mob
boss, according to federal prosecutors and the New Jersey State
Commission on Investigation.

Since you emphasize your negotiating skills, why didn’t you negotiate yourself?

12. You later paid a Scarfo associate twice the value of a lot, officials determined.

Since you boast that you always negotiate the best prices, why did you pay double the value of this real estate?

13. You were the first person recommended for a
casino license by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming
Enforcement, which opposed all other applicants or was neutral. Later it
came out in official proceedings that you had persuaded the state to
limit its investigation of your background.

Why did you ask that the investigation into your background be limited?

▪ On Trump and crooked deals:

1. You call yourself an “ardent philanthropist,” but
have not donated a dollar to The Donald J. Trump Foundation since 2006.
You’re not even the biggest donor to the foundation, having given about
$3.7 million in the previous two decades while businesses associated
with Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment gave the Trump
Foundation $5 million. All the money since 2006 has come from those
doing business with you.

How does giving away other people’s money, in what could be seen as a kickback scheme, make you a philanthropist?

2. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman
successfully sued you, alleging your Trump University was an “illegal
educational institution” that charged up to $35,000 for “Trump Elite”
mentorships promising personal advice from you, but you never showed up
and your “special” list of lenders was photocopied from Scotsman Guide, a magazine found at any bookstore.

Why did you not show up?

And:

9. In demolishing the Bonwit Teller building to make
way for Trump Tower, you had no labor troubles, even though only about
15 unionists worked at the site alongside 150 Polish men, most of whom
entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site.

How did you manage to avoid labor troubles, like picketing and
strikes, and job safety inspections while using mostly non-union labor
at a union worksite — without hard hats for the Polish workers?

10. A federal judge later found you conspired to
cheat both the Polish workers, who were paid less than $5 an hour cash
with no benefits, and the union health and welfare fund. You testified
that you did not notice the Polish workers, whom the judge noted were
easy to spot because they were the only ones on the work site without
hard hats.

What should voters make of your failure or inability to notice 150 men demolishing a multi-story building without hard hats?

About that last, it’s not the hard hats; it’s the illegal Polish workers and his lack of “labor troubles” at the site. What kind of deal do you have to cut, and whom do you have to cut it with, to fly that low under the construction radar?

▪ Regarding his gaming licenses:

13. You were the first person recommended for a
casino license by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Division of Gaming
Enforcement, which opposed all other applicants or was neutral. Later it
came out in official proceedings that you had persuaded the state to
limit its investigation of your background.

Why did you ask that the investigation into your background be limited?

14. You were the target of a 1979 bribery investigation. No charges were filed, but New Jersey law mandates denial of a license to anyone omitting any salient fact from their casino application.

Why did you omit the 1979 bribery investigation?

David Cay Johnston is not alone in asking these questions.

CNN on Donald Trump and the Mob

A simple Web search on “trump mafia new jersey” produces a number of links, including this one, from CNN:

Donald Trump and the mob

Chris Frates, CNN Investigative Correspondent
Updated 12:37 PM ET, Fri July 31, 2015

Donald Trump’s glittering empire of New York skyscrapers and Atlantic City casinos have long had a darker side, allegations that the mob helped build them.

Trump’s alleged ties to New York and Philadelphia crime families go back decades and have been recounted in a book, newspapers and government records.

“The mob connections of Donald are extraordinarily extensive,” New York investigative journalist Wayne Barrett told CNN in an interview.

Barrett, the author of the 1992 unauthorized biography “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” wrote that Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.”…

In a recent Federalist article, David Marcus writes that Trump bought the property that his Atlantic City casino Trump Plaza would one day occupy — for twice market price — from Salvatore Testa, a Philly mobster and son of one-time Philly mob boss Philip “Chicken Man” Testa. (Springsteen fans might recognize the elder Testa from the opening lines of the song, Atlantic City.)

In his book, Barrett writes that Testa and a partner, who together headed a Philly mafia hit-squad called the Young Executioners, bought the property for “a scant $195,000” in 1977. In 1982, Trump paid $1.1 million for it.

“The $220 per square foot that Trump paid for the Testa property was the second most expensive purchase he made on the block, even though it was one of the first parcels he bought,” Barrett wrote.

The casino was built with the help of two construction companies controlled by Philly mobsters Nicademo “Little Nicky” Scarfo and his nephew Phillip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, according to, as Marcus notes, a New Jersey state commission’s 1986 report on organized crime.

Trump also had a decade-long relationship with Scarfo’s investment banker, according to Barrett’s book. …

There’s much more in this article, and there are more articles.

What’s the Next Move?

For those who call the shots in the Republican Party, what’s the next move? They may or may not want to allow Trump to be their nominee, but they certainly won’t let him run third-party. (I’m guessing the former won’t be permitted and the latter will get Trump “an offer he can’t refuse,” but that’s just me.)

So what do they do, these party bosses and owners, these Kochs and Friesses and Adelsons? Do they wait for Trump fever to die down (to mix a metaphor begun at the top of this page) and risk it growing stronger instead? Or do they make a move?

If it were me and I wanted him gone, I’d make the move and soon. There seems to be plenty to work with, to use for both behind-the-scene threats and for on-camera deep-fat frying. Would even the party’s economically insecure racists follow Trump all the way to mobtown, or would they abandon him at the border? What’s a bridge too far for Trump supporters? Whatever the answer, this may be the party’s strongest move, short of a “friendly” DA filing a RICO indictment.

If I’m right — if big-money Republicans, those backing all other candidates, want to make him gone; and if they’re willing to destroy Trump economically and as a brand to do it — this fall’s Republican story will be even more interesting than what we’ve seen already. Republican oppo research is relentless, and Republican tactics seem to have little short of murder as an upper bound. R-on-R violence is violent indeed.

Of course, those are two big ifs in the paragraph above. Ann Coulter, for example, wants to see Trump nominated. How many in that small group of Republicans in a position to decide actually share her view? I think we’re about to find out.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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“Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country”
by Tom Sullivan

The usually jocular Charlie Pierce appeared shaken last night on Chris Hayes’ show when he spoke about the on-air shootings yesterday in Virginia. He came packing the truth. “Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country right now,” Pierce said, glancing at the floor. “A lot of stuff that was in the kind of foul tributaries of American life has made it into the mainstream.”

Pierce wrote earlier about the shooting at Esquire:

A news crew, doing a completely ordinary happy-face morning feature at a mall get blown away on camera. If this had happened in Somalia, we’d have a lot of earnest talk about the dangers of a failed society. If it had happened in Syria, Lindsey Graham might liquefy entirely and disappear in a rush down a storm drain. But it happened here, in the exceptional home of American exceptionalism, so, once again, we will be told that Alison Parker and Adam Ward are merely more of the price we pay for the exceptional exceptionalism of a free society.

The killings of a reporter and cameraman as they covered a “happy-face” news story brought gun violence perilously close for both Hayes and Pierce. Pierce was blunt about it:

“It is worrisome to be out on the campaign trail now. It is not terrifying. It’s nothing like following a rifle platoon into the Hindu Kush or something, but there’s something unsettling and something that’s come loose in the body politic. And, frankly, I’m worried about it.”

We are a country now where more money equals more speech for the elite, and more guns equals more freedom for the rest, and murderers post their snuff films on social media. (Next time it will be streamed live.*) What’s to worry about?

Somewhere in the flood of post-September 11 articles about how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us, one writer asked, Would America keep its head? Uh, no. Except the country’s post-September 11 temporary insanity seems, like untreated depression, to have settled in and taken a “set.” The governor on the engine has broken. No, that’s not right. It has been sabotaged. Now it is racing out of control. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

Futurist Sara Robinson periodically reassesses the country’s drift towards the abyss. With daily mass shootings, with Donald Trump threatening to round up and deport millions, and with his “passionate” followers beating the homeless, calling for “white power,” and demanding that Latino citizens “Get out of my country,” it might be time to re-check the cultural doomsday clock and see how many minutes it is to midnight.

* when Howard Cosell went live to cover the assassination of “El Presidente,” it was in Woody Allen’s fictional banana republic.

QOTD: Jeb!

by digby

“This guy is now the front-runner. He should be held to account just like me. He should be asked — as he was yesterday — how are you going to pay for it? Why do you think this is not going to be — prove to me that it’s not impractical. Explain to me how you’re going to stop all the remittances without violating peoples’ civil liberty…

Go through these questions and what you’ll find is that this guy doesn’t have a plan. He’s appealing to peoples’ angst and their anger.”

These are all good questions. And he does have a plan: tell the police to round up all the “illegals” and dump them in Mexico. Like Operation Wetback.  And yes a bunch of Americans will get caught up in it but we’ll deport first and sort out any paperwork problems later.

God knows Trump supporters don’t want to hear about the civil liberties of Mexicans. And they sure don’t agree with this:

“I want to solve problems so that we can fix this and turn immigration into what it’s always been: An economic driver for our country.”

In their minds immigration is a job stealing, culture destroying threat to all they hold dear. Hasn’t he been listening?

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Torturing the agitators

by digby

That poster depicts the forced feeding of suffragists who were jailed for agitating for the right to vote.

Alice Paul led the more radical wing of those who were working for women’s suffrage in 1917. Paul had taken part in more militant suffrage activity in England, including hunger strikes that were met with imprisonment and brutal force-feeding methods. She believed that by bringing such militant tactics to America, the public’s sympathy would be turned towards those who protested for woman suffrage, and the vote for women would be won, finally, after seven decades of activism.

And so, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others separated in America from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, and formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) which in 1917 transformed itself into the National Woman’s Party (NWP).

While many of the activists in the NAWSA turned during World War I either to pacifism or to support of America’s war effort, the National Woman’s Party continued to focus on winning the vote for women.

During wartime, they planned and carried out a campaign to picket the White House in Washington, DC. The reaction was, as in Britain, strong and swift: arrest of the picketers and their imprisonment. Some were transferred to an abandoned workhouse located at Occoquan, Virginia. There, the women staged hunger strikes, and, as in Britain, were force-fed brutally and otherwise treated violently.

I’ve referred to this part of woman suffrage history in other articles, notably when describing the history of the suffragist split over strategy in the last decade of activism before the vote was finally won.

Feminist Sonia Pressman Fuentes documents this history in her article on Alice Paul. She includes this re-telling of the story of Occoquan Workhouse’s “Night of Terror,” November 15, 1917:

Under orders from W. H. Whittaker, superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, as many as forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, brutalizing thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her there for the night. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate Alice Cosu, who believed Mrs. Lewis to be dead, suffered a heart attack. According to affidavits, other women were grabbed, dragged, beaten, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked.

After the 1920 victory for women’s right to vote, Paul became involved in the campaign to introduce and pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It only took 50 years and in 1970 it was sent to the states to ratify. However, the required number of states required didn’t ratify within the time limit and the Amendment failed.

I remember back in the dark ages handing out leaflets for the ERA when I was a teen-ager and being told that it was a very bad thing because women would be forced to urinate in front of strange men. Or something.

Anyway, today is the 95th anniversary of the day women finally got the right to vote. Maybe in another 95 years we’ll have more than 20% representation in the government. Maybe even a woman president, who knows? No hurry, though. These things take time. A very long time.

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Who cares about guns?


by digby

I keep hearing from various folks that Clinton is an inauthentic, cold, emotionless, calculating robot who is hardly even a human being much less a person to whom a normal American could relate. She doesn’t seem any “colder” than Obama to me, but then that’s usually seen as “coolness” in his case and is widely considered an asset so I guess it really  is a matter of perspective.  Whatever. I don’t know about her deepest emotions (or any politician’s)  and frankly I don’t give a damn.

But it does seem to me that she is serious about taking on the gun issue, which I think is important. Her comments today were about the shooting in Virginia were quite emphatic:

On the right we’ve got Limbaugh saying that journalists should be packing heat. Not kidding.

“You can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you”

by digby

This piece at TPM is a very helpful reminder about the origins of the Christian Right:

On August 22, 1980, a massive National Affairs Briefing organized by preacher James Robison brought 15,000 evangelicals to Dallas to demonstrate their newfound political clout. Robison, who had been forced off the airwaves after he claimed that gays recruit children for sex, announced that day, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet.”

The next speaker was Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, who told the crowd, “I know you can’t endorse me. But…I want you to know that I endorse you.”

Also a reminder of the fact that the right has been speaking in these derogatory terms about their political enemies forever. Reagan may have been the “cheerful” upbeat conservative but the people who elected him were angry about everything. Aren’t they always?

There’s lots more at the link, including this:

The Christian Right changed how we talked about race. The Christian Right emerged from school desegregation—and forged a movement around taxes and religious freedom. In 1978, the Internal Revenue Service sought to revoke tax exemptions for schools formed as white-flight havens from the public schools. The backlash was overwhelming. The IRS received more than a quarter of a million letters against the proposed rules. Congressional hearings reframed the issue from an attack on segregation to an attack on religion by meddlesome bureaucrats. As Newt Gingrich, then a freshman representative, explained, “The IRS should collect taxes—not enforce social policy.”

Early in 1979, Jerry Falwell formed Moral Majority, the premier organization for the new Christian Right. Falwell ran a segregated academy that would almost certainly have run afoul of the IRS guidelines. In 1967, the same year the local public schools desegregated, Lynchburg Christian Academy opened its doors. As of the fall of 1979, it had an all-white faculty, and only five African-Americans among the 1,147 students.

In August 1979, Congress inserted riders into the appropriations bill for the Treasury Department to prevent the IRS from implementing the proposed regulations. A fight over desegregation had galvanized white evangelicals to oppose meddlesome bureaucrats, and the movement was born.

It made abortion a partisan issue. The Christian Right made opposition to abortion—which until the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 had been a Catholic issue—into an evangelical and Republican cause. The Bible’s text says nothing about abortion per se. Even W. A. Criswell, known as the “Baptist Pope,” initially praised Roe. “It was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother,” he argued, “that it became an actual person.” Until the mid-1980s, Republicans in the electorate favored fewer restrictions on abortion than did Democrats; in Congress, partisan divides between pro-choice and pro-life votes grew threefold in the two decades after Roe.

The Christian Right found in abortion an issue to bind evangelicals together with conservative Catholics under the Republican banner. Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and a deacon in the Eastern Rite Catholic Melkite church, first grasped that a new conservative majority to supplant the teetering New Deal coalition would need white evangelicals—and that opposition to abortion could unite conservative Christians. So Weyrich recruited leading white evangelical ministers to politics, and even coined the term Moral Majority.

And if you want to know who’s working this constituency the best in 2016, read my piece in Salon today.  The Dark Horse is very dark indeed.

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Round ’em all up!

by digby

I have been wondering whether any Trump followers gave a damn whether or not an immigrant is in the country legally or even if they are a citizen and I think we’ve answered that question.

@secupp @ggreenwald Ramos wants what all illegals want, no law for them

— NPete (@NPete2) August 26, 2015

Meanwhile, watch this short, telling video of reporter Jorge Ramos’ reception from a Trump supporter last night pic.twitter.com/PeXQ31PxRA

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) August 26, 2015

Univision later posted video of what happened after Ramos was escorted into the hall by security: A Trump supporter confronted him and said, “You were very rude. It’s not about you.  Get out of my country.

Ramos noted that he’s a U.S. citizen and the man responded, “Well, whatever. No, Univision, no. It’s not about you.”

“It’s not about you. It’s about the United States,” Ramos replied.

I just love that a Trump supporter is complaining about “rudeness.” How politically correct of him.

Of course it doesn’t help that a bunch of sycophantic Washington reporters are wringing their hands over Ramos’ dogged questioning of Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of Latinos “so fast your head will spin” — by letting the police take the gloves off. You see they’re worried that Ramos looks “biased” for actually trying to pin down a racist demagogue about how he plans to round up all his relatives and that reflects badly on them. I’m not exaggerating.

These elite journalists would have been checking their hair in the mirror while the black-shirted thugs beat people right in front of them.

Greenwald has written all about this embarrassing journalistic episode. It’s just so — predictable.

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