Month: December 2015

I gotcher appeasement for ya, ryechea

by digby

If there’s one thing we have learned from the past few GOP debates and the stump speeches since then it’s that the Republican candidates, all of them, are muy macho. To listen to them go on, they will all defeat both Hillary Clinton and ISIS terrorists with their bare hands while vanquishing all vestiges of the weak political establishment in Washington whether it be Democratic or Republican. They will brook no interference from any lily-livered media or half baked academic intellectuals, they are all men and women of action, leaders of legions whose instincts and reflexes are well-honed by years of experience.

One might find this curious considering that most of them have never put anything on the line but their reputations but nobody said that kissing the rings of billionaires didn’t take a tremendous amount of courage. These people bravely march into belly of the moneyed beast without a thought for their own integrity. It’s not easy.

It goes without saying that the political colossus who sets the bar for manly virtues is Donald Trump the fearless warrior against political correctness, female reporters and ISIS. Now it is true that he never made it to the military but as his groupie Ann Coulter breathlessly declared in Chris Matthews’ documentary Citizen Trump, being sent to military boarding school for punching a music teacher proves that he’s an “alpha male”.(You know who else was sent away to school for assaulting a teacher, don’t you?) Trump has said that his expensive military prep school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” (Even though he was perfect draftable age for the Vietnam war he had many deferments and bone spurs in one of his feet  — he can’t recall which one –that prevented him from joining up and taking his obviously yuuuuge leadership qualities to the battlefield in Southeast Asia.)

It is against that high bar that all the other allegedly virile 2016 contenders must be measured. These mighty conservative heroes shake their fists at ISIS, declare WWIII, threaten to punch Putin in the nose and call Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders weak old women. But they just can’t get it up to take on Donald Trump. In that regard, he’s done something very useful, he’s shown the Republican voters just what a bunch of craven invertebrates these GOP candidates really are.

Take Chris Christie, the self-appointed New Jersey tough guy, known for brow-beating teachers and telling his constituents to sit down and shut up. One would not expect Christie to take on Trump for his mistreatment of women or vulgar commentary on the trail since he has his own history in that area but when Trump made his infamous assertion that thousands of Muslims had danced for joy on New Jersey rooftops, Christie boldly raced into the breach to defend his home state by saying, “I think if it had happened, I would remember it, but, you know, there could be things I forget, too.”

He has since admitted that it didn’t happen. When nobody was paying any attention. He explained that he was very emotional on 9/11, all at sixes and sevens and it just took him a while to pull himself together to remember that there weren’t thousands of Muslims dancing on rooftops that day. Very brave.

But nobody has shown less spine than poor Jeb Bush who has been the object of Trump’s puerile insults for weeks and has been unable to respond with anything more assertive than “Donald Trump is a jerk” and “you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency.” But he keeps flailing about ineffectually anyway. He says Trump isn’t serious and says he would have a “chaos presidency.” Trump responds by saying Jeb is “an embarrassment to the Bush family” and “a weak and ineffective person” who is “going to be off the stage soon…a basket case.” And yet after all that, like a puppy who’s been repeatedly kicked by his master and comes back begging for approval, Jeb couldn’t help but defend Trump against Clinton’s accusation that his anti-Muslim ranting was an excellent recruiting tool for ISIS:

“Hillary Clinton suggesting that Donald Trump is being used in an ISIS recruiting video, man, talk about chutzpah. There’s no evidence of that. There’s no evidence of that at all.”

(Trump responded by saying, “Good boy! Now sit!”)

When Trump basked in the praise of Russian president Vladimir Putin Marco Rubio harshly shot back,”he shouldn’t be honored” and “he shouldn’t excited.” He then read off the bill of indictment against Putin but had nothing more to say about Trump. When Trump announced his plan to ban Muslims from entry to the US, Rubio went in for the kill:

Obviously I don’t agree with everything he says. There’s a lot that we have a difference of opinion on. But we can’t ignore that he’s touched on some issues that people are concerned about.

Trump must have really smarted from that lethal jab.

John Kasich came out swinging with an ad evoking fascist imagery. When questioned about it the fiery Republican Governor backed off the message and said that the ad was in the words of a POW who felt very strongly about divisive people.

Lindsay Graham has been vociferous in his criticism, even saying Trump should “go to hell.” He quit the race this week and gave this parting shot to Trump:

“You’re doing really well. I’m impressed with your campaign.”

Ted Cruz is the only one who doesn’t bother to pretend to be anything but Trump’s toady. His standard response to his every repulsive, irresponsible utterance is some version of the following:

“I don’t need to be another political pundit. I’m going to let Donald Trump speak for himself and I’ll speak for myself.”

For half a century the right wing has shrieked “Neville Chamberlain!” whenever anyone suggests that perhaps diplomacy or negotiation should be tried before the mighty US military unleashes hell. Their worldview is organized around the idea that to try to mollify bullies is irresponsible and cowardly.  In 2003 the Bush administration insisted that anything short of a full invasion of Iraq added up to capitulation and in recent days we’ve seen headlines like this in right wing media The Iran Deal Appeases the Greatest Evil of Our Time.

Any attempt to mitigate a threat or finesse a difficult diplomatic challenge is met with such language. Unless, apparently, the threat is Donald Trump. These warrior leaders who all strut across the debate stage calling Democrats cowardly and weak and promising to kill all the terrorists cannot even deal effectively with a pampered, celebrity blowhard.  And that pampered, celebrity blowhard is laughing all the way to the nomination.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Oh look, it’s Chris Christie desperately trying to be controversial

by digby

He thinks Clinton should suspend her campaign and go to Paris:

Christie then alluded to reported remarks from President Barack Obama, who said that he does not watch enough cable news to quickly understand the extent of Americans’ anxiety about terrorism.
“Bad news,” Christie commented. “And secondly, you had Hillary Clinton the other night saying that we’re exactly where we want to be on ISIS. Here’s my suggestion to her: suspend your campaign, get on a plane to Paris, and go and look in the eyes of the families of those dead victims and tell them we’re exactly where we want to be on ISIS.”

I often forget Chris Christie is in the race, which is nice. But whenever he pops up to try to get some attention I’m reminded of what an unctuously sanctimonious bully boy he is.

One thing’s for sure, if anyone’s going overseas let’s hope it isn’t Christie. He’s more embarrassing that George W. Bush.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Bernie Sanders scores big win — breaks major fundraising record

by Gaius Publius

In the most recent underwatched Democratic debate, there was a lot of ISIS-this and terror-that thrown around — and not one climate word, as near as I could tell. It was therefore presumed, by those who know their job is to tell us what to know, that Clinton “won” (example here).

And yet, and yet, when when people who are paid to tell you what to know are removed from the equation, stuff like this happens (go ahead; take the poll yourself to see the most current result).

From the Sanders campaign:

Bernie Sanders Scores Big Win; Breaks Major Fundraising Record

MANCHESTER, N.H. – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders won a major victory in Saturday night’s third Democratic presidential debate, according to social media measures and in polls by Time, The Wall Street Journal and other major media websites.

During the debate, Sanders also reached a major milestone in grassroots financial support. His campaign has now received more contributions than any other candidate at this point in any White House bid — more than 2.3 million contributions.

President Barack Obama was the record holder. Through Dec. 31, 2011, his re-election campaign reported 2,209,636 donations. The Sanders campaign crossed that mark during the debate as grassroots supporters flooded the BernieSanders.com website. The average contribution for the night to the Sanders campaign was below $25.

On social media, where Sanders’ grassroots revolution began, there were more Google searches for Sanders than for any other candidate. His campaign had the most retweeted tweet of the night, according to Twitter. He gained more followers on Twitter than any other candidate and Facebook said people talked about Sanders more than any other candidate online.

After the debate, Sanders was named the winner by viewers who voted in large-sample polls from Time, PBS, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Telegraph.co.uk and The Washington Times.

On Time’s website, for example, 84 percent of the 27,246 who had taken the poll in the first 90 minutes after the debate said Sanders won.

Sanders is winning support from Democrats hand over fist. Will that be enough to win him the actual nomination? I guess we’ll see. If you’d like to lend your support to Sanders and to those courageous candidates who have dared to stand with him, you can do so here (adjust the split any way you like at the link).

Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina

These are the states that count for Sanders, the states that will keep him viable or secure the nomination for Clinton — in order, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. According to the latest polls, Clinton has a narrow lead in Iowa (+5), Sanders has a large lead in New Hampshire (+14), Clinton has a very large lead in South Carolina (+36), and a decent lead, according to one out-of-date poll, in Nevada (+16).

I wouldn’t count this a done deal, however. A Sanders win in Iowa would go a long way to stretch his viability. Nevada is not out of reach — Sanders has DREAM activist Cesar Vargas working for him there — and even the South Carolina lead that Clinton has depends on almost-automatic institutional support for mainstream Democrats by a community for whom, especially, “black lives matter.” Clinton, remember, has a track record on racial justice issues, and even today supports the (clearly racially biased) death penalty. The pro-institutional-Democrat dynamic could easily shift, especially if more like the video at the top turns up.

All of which is to say — if you’re a Sanders supporter and not a surrender kind of person, the time to lift your hand to the task is now. For example, got time to spend in Iowa?

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

GP

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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Restoring the white franchise

by Tom Sullivan

Give me that old time religion. Or at least, that old time franchise. Bring back the good old days when white, Christian men could run this great democracy the way God intended when he handed down the U.S. Constitution on tablets to George Washington in 1776.
Writing in the Washington Post, William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution examines the latest rearguard effort to stave off white political obsolescence. The Supreme Court earlier this month heard arguments in Evenwel v. Abbott. At issue: whether government exists to represent all the people or just eligible voters. As Dahlia Lithwick explained:

If the court sides with Evenwel and accepts the view that only voters or even registered voters are to be counted when drawing district lines, children, legal residents, and people who have committed felonies or the mentally ill—all of whom are certainly affected when legislators legislate—are not to be counted for apportionment purposes. In the words of the Obama administration, which sides with Texas in this case against the two plaintiffs, whole swaths of the population become “invisible or irrelevant to our system of representative democracy.”

And your point is? That’s how this nation was founded. The plaintiffs just want America to get back to its founding principles.
Their worry is apportionment by total population rather than by voting population dilutes (and saps and impurifies?) the votes of rural voters compared with those in urban centers where larger populations of underaged (and possibly undocumented) people reside. The principle at issue, they argue, is not equal representation, but equal protection for eligible voters. (If they are the right kind of voters.) These are the people who chase voter fraud for the same reason: fear of losing control to the Other. Is it about race? Yes. But even more, it’s about power.
Frey writes:

This month in Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court heard arguments for altering the long-standing principle of “one person, one vote” by substituting voting-age citizens for total population when drawing legislative districts within states. While much has been said about the implications of eliminating noncitizens from the population on which district lines are based, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in this case could have an even larger impact: shortchanging the interests of minority children and their families. That’s because nearly half of the nation’s under-18 population is made up of racial minorities, while 70 percent of voting-age citizens are white. The United States is undergoing a boom in demographic diversity, but it’s the younger population that’s being transformed first.
Removing the racially diverse youth population from the apportionment calculation would intensify a divisive cultural generation gap that pervades politics and public attitudes in this country. Pew Research polling has shown that the mostly white older population is far less accepting of immigrant minorities and government support for social programs than is the increasingly minority younger population. The rise of immigrant-bashing presidential candidate Donald Trump as a hero among older white Republican primary voters represents an extreme version of the pushback against a demographically changing country.

One imagines that if Frank Luntz gathered a focus group of Trump supporters and told them this decision might disenfranchise young people, especially minority young people, their all-American reaction might be, “Yeah, so?” If people want representation, they ought to have (white) skin in the game.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone! — d

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It takes a blogger

by digby

I want to take a moment this morning to deliver a shout-out to my two regular contributors Tom Sullivan and Gaius Publius. Tom writes every morning and Gaius a few times a week and both are wonderful writers who offer up something unique and interesting with every post.

Tom is a longtime progressive Democratic activist and writer of his own blog Scrutiny Hooligans where he’s been writing insightful political observations about national and North Carolina politics for years. I met him and his lovely wife Sarah many years ago at a Netroots Nation convention and we instantly hit it off.  I can’t even remember the occasion that prompted my asking him if he’s like to publish some of his great stuff here but whatever it was, it was good day for Hullabaloo readers. Every morning I get my coffee, turn on the old computer and the first thing I read is Tom’s latest. I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

Gaius Publius has been a fixture in the blogosphere for the past several years writing all over the place on blogs such as Americanblog where he was a regular writer, to Naked Capitalism and Howie Klein’s Down With Tyranny where he publishes regularly today. He is a fearless progressive activist working from the outside of the system  and pulling no punches in doing it.  He has a particular expertise in climate change and posts some of the most intelligent writing on that subject anywhere.  It will scare the hell out of you — but it should. Whenever I get complacent I read one of Gaius’s pieces on climate and am reminded that there is much more at stake than the next election.

Tom and Gaius are not just intelligent, passionate activist writers — they are both incredibly decent human beings.  I’m extremely grateful for their contributions to this blog but even more grateful for their friendship.

I hope we can keep this old blog going over the next year.  If you would like to keep reading what we produce here, I hope you’ll consider dropping a little something into the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

QOTD: Rubio

by digby

Asked if he has a plan for climate change, Rubio responds:

“I don’t have a plan to influence the weather.”

These people are getting more proudly cretinous by the day. That’s just embarrassing. What a smug little jerk he is. And sadly, I’m sure he got a lot of applause from the people who don’t care if their kids and grandkids can breathe. I guess it’s just not their problem.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Another creepy Trump “joke”

by digby

So Trump talked about killing reporters last night and everybody laughed, even reporters on cable TV today:

“I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people. It’s true.”

I get that he hates the press. But it’s not abstract in the way most people think of it. He points to reporters in the room and he says sarcastically that he “wouldn’t kill them” the way Vladimir Putin kills Russian journalists.

I know it’s hardly the only or even the most repulsive comment Trump has made. But honestly, it’s very creepy for a presidential candidate who freely talks about summary execution, assassinations and torture on the campaign trail to “joke around” about killing members of the press. If I were in the press pool, in that crowd of cheering neanderthals, I wouldn’ feel very “free” I can tell you that.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

The impossible GOP pivot

by digby

According to Ruy Texeira, who studies demographic changes and the electorate, the Republican do have a path to victory.  Greg Sargent interviewed him today and it boils down to this:

The strategy of focusing on white voters presupposes that Republicans have a lot more room to move among that part of the population. If their path is just to forget about the minority vote and concentrate on increasing the white vote, they might have to reach the support Reagan got in 1984 — 63 or 64 percent of the white vote. Or white turnout would have to increase enough beyond its normal pattern so the share of the minority vote does not increase by two points. That would need a one-sided mobilization of whites. That’s implausible.

If Republicans run a whites-oriented, hard core conservative campaign, swing-ish, moderate, college-educated whites in the GOP coalition may desert to the other side. And it could also drive up the minority vote for Democrats.

The better path for Republicans would be to speak to the white voters who are already disenchanted — there’s been a relatively slow recovery, and there’s time-for-a-change sentiment and populism out there — without necessarily running a hard core campaign. Republicans could have a more economically oriented populism — without being so forthrightly anti-government, anti-social change, and anti-immigrant — and stand a better chance of appealing to white college educated voters and attenuating the Democratic advantage among minorities. If Republicans could get Democratic support among minorities down to 75 percent — and work both sides of the equation — there are more ways to win.

I suppose it’s possible that the eventual Republican nominee will be able to pivot from the race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigotry of this primary campaign. And maybe they can stimulate their white base to come out with a nice mainstream appeal to minorities. But they might want to check in with Mitt Romney before they formulate their strategy. He’s probably got some thoughts.

I hope we can keep this old blog going over the next year.  If you would like to keep reading what we produce here, I hope you’ll consider dropping a little something into the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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“Make America White Again”

by digby

One of the recurrent themes of this presidential election so far is a determined belief that Donald Trump is tapping into working class economic anxiety. And given what we know about the Republican party and the subset of American that are attracted to the Trump campaign that’s understandable. As Ronald Brownstein has been reporting in the National Journal for the last several months, Trump’s greatest support comes the ranks of non-college educated working class whites:

Trump is ce­ment­ing a strong blue-col­lar base, while the white-col­lar voters re­l­at­ively more res­ist­ant to him have yet to uni­fy around any single al­tern­at­ive. That dis­par­ity is crit­ic­al be­cause in both the 2008 and 2012 GOP nom­in­a­tion fights, voters with and without a four-year col­lege de­gree each cast al­most ex­actly half of the total primary votes, ac­cord­ing to cu­mu­lat­ive ana­lyses of exit poll res­ults by ABC poll­ster Gary Langer. With the two wings evenly matched in size, Trump’s great­er suc­cess at con­sol­id­at­ing his “brack­et” ex­plains much of his ad­vant­age in the polls.

He isn’t the only one playing in that “bracket” — Ted Cruz also draws from it — but this does suggest that if you want to understand Trump and Cruz’s appeal you need to look at that group of voters and it’s natural that observers would look at their working class status as being the key to it. After all, people who are losing ground economically are going to be angry, depressed and generally upset and Trump speaks to those feelings very directly. (The name of his latest book is “Crippled America.”) President Obama talked about this at some length yesterday, saying that Trump was “exploiting” these peoples’ fear.

And they do have a right to be afraid. As anyone who’s been following the political discussion about income inequality over the past few years knows, they are losing ground. The latest research shows that the incomes of the top 20% grew on average 42.6% since 1979, the middle only grew 9.5% and the bottom 20% actually fell by 2.7%. Many of these non-college educated white working class Trump fans are either in what we would call the lower middle class or among the lower 20%. If they are anxious you cannot blame them.

On the other hand, there is an assumption that somehow Trump’s message is speaking to this particular complaint and that is questionable. Trump, after all, is the guy who said in a debate in answer to a question about whether he supported a raise in the minimum wage that he not only didn’t support the raise but said he thinks wages are already too high! He went on “Morning Joe” the next morning and made his case even more strenuously:

We have to become competitive with the world. Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high. What’s going to happen is now people are going to start firing people.” 

“People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot [raise the minimum wage] if we are going to compete with the rest of the world, we just can’t do it.”

He quite clearly believes that Americans are going to have to take further pay cuts in order to compete with workers in foreign countries. The man who rails against Mexican immigrants coming into this country thinks nothing of telling American workers they are going to have to lower their own standard of living to “make America great again.” If you can’t make it into the “upper stratum” as he did (by being born into it) you’re just out of luck.

It makes little sense that such a message would resonate with these white working class people who are flocking to his rallies. No, whatever is drawing them Trump it certainly isn’t the fact that these people are disaffected economically and Trump is offering them the road to riches.

What if it isn’t that these angry working class whites are attracted to Trump because he’s giving voice to their economic problems at all, whether by offering some vague notion of “making America great again” or telling them their problems are caused by undocumented workers? What if their “anxiety” is really just about simple racism — the fact that people they believe are inferior to them are becoming equal in society?

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie delved into this possibility in this piece. He observes that it’s only very recently that overt racism hasn’t played a hugely important part in our electoral system, reminding us that the 1988 Bush campaign was heavily influenced by the subconscious and not so subconscious race baiting in the Willie Horton ad. (It’s also important to recall that the 2000 Bush operation cut off the McCain insurgency in Lee Atwater’s South Carolina firewall with a scurrilous whisper campaign about McCain’s “black daughter” — who happened to be adopted from India.)

Bouie writes:

What’s key is that there’s always been a portion of voters who are activated by racist appeals. And in an erstwhile herrenvolk democracy, this shouldn’t be a surprise. They show up in surveys, polling, and research data as Americans who rank high on racial resentment or hold strong anti-black views. They respond favorably to racial demagoguery—whether from candidates or media or both—and exist throughout American politics, in the far-right margins as well as a voting group in the Republican Party.

In fact, their racism makes them more partisan; in a 2010 paper, political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears found that for Republicans in the era of Obama, the higher their racial resentment, the stronger their attachment to the GOP.

To think racial animus is activated by economic distress is something that progressives desperately want to believe. Because if that’s true, they have solutions. Racism, not so much.

Recall Governor Howard Dean’s memorable line back in 2003:

“White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not [Republicans], because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.”

That these white folks might sincerely be more upset about African Americans becoming equal or undocumented immigrants destroying “American culture” or Muslims worshipping a religion they find threatening and weird than their own economic well-being is an unsettling thought. But it’s very hard to ignore the fact that in good times and bad it still exists. As Bouie wrote:

These voters may feel anxious about their economic status. But they also hold racial and cultural resentments. They’re worried about their futures and they dislike immigrants, Muslims, and blacks.

And Trump is pushing the racial and cultural resentment button a lot harder than he’s pushing the economic button. In fact, he’s pushing the resentment button so hard that it’s activated some very serious racists who truly had been pushed to the fringes of the right wing fever swamps. According to a rather disturbing story this week in the Washington Post there has been a surge of excitement among white supremacists. It quotes a number of different leaders of the movement who are thrilled at the prospect of one of their “own” getting mainstream credibility. Trump is often said by his followers to be “saying what they’re thinking.” These racists feel exactly the same way.

This is not to say that all Trump supporters are white supremacists. But it’s also not fair to say that the Trump voters who are hostile toward immigrants, Muslims and African Americans are simply reacting to economic inequality. As Bouie pointed out, this isn’t necessarily a case of classic Marxist false consciousness, or at least that doesn’t explain or excuse their love for Trump. Their racial resentment exists all on its own.

When Donald Trump says he will make America great again, what they hear is that Donald Trump will make America white again.

I hope we can keep this old blog going over the next year.  If you would like to keep reading what we produce here, I hope you’ll consider dropping a little something into the kitty.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

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No Clinton did not say ISIS was making videos of Donald Trump


by digby

Even though Fact Checkers have all declared Hillary Clinton a liar, liar pants on fire for her alleged “lie” about ISIS’s Donald Trump videos, I have to wonder if they actually listened to exactly what she said:

“He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”

Politifact declared her a liar:

But while such quotes support the notion that ISIS could be making recruiting videos, or will do so, they do not support Clinton’s contention — offered in the present tense — that they are currently doing so.

She didn’t say they were making these videos. She said they were “going to people” and “showing videos of Donald Trump.” They don’t have to make them. They already exist in this world, right there on Youtube where anyone can see them.

Here’s one:

This is from all the way back in 2011:

And here are his followers:

So there’s no need to make “ISIS videos” to spread the word about Donald Trump and Clinton never claimed they did. There’s plenty of footage out there they can use to “show people” if they want to.

And the experts all confirm that ISIS is definitely using Donald Trump’s Islamophobia to recruit new members. It is highly unlikely that they aren’t watching the videos that exist of Trump being the bigoted ass he is (as well as his bigoted American followers) to gin up jihad.

The press is trying very hard to be “even-handed” in their fact checks and it’s hard because the Republicans are lying so prolifically this year. And they love the narrative of Clinton the lying witch in any case. But this Politifact check is wrong. She didn’t say what they claimed she said.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!