Month: January 2016

Cruz control

by digby

If you read  nothing else today, read this Bloomberg article about Ted Cruz’s top benefactor, the certifiably looney tunes wingnut billionaire, Robert Mercer. He makes the Kochs look like Ike by comparison.

I don’t know why so many of these right wing billionaires are susceptible to conspiracy theories and fringe ideology but there are quite a few of them. Some come more from the conservative Christian side of things but this one is a full blown weirdo, with wingnut ties with everyone from Murray Rothbard to Andrew Breitbart. This is just a short excerpt:

Robinson saw Mercer again last August, at a DoubleTree airport hotel outside of Los Angeles. A group called Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, of which Robinson is a longtime member, was holding its 33rd annual meeting. Founded to promote civil defense during the Cold War, it’s transformed over the years into a forum on many of the same fringe-science topics that Robinson covers in his newsletter. It’s been run for decades by Robinson’s friend Orient, the Arizona physician. Attacks on mainstream climate science are a staple, but the range of material is broad. One recent presentation spun a theory about links between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the deaths of his brother and son.

The weekend kicked off with a tour of the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. At the DoubleTree, one speaker warned that the aim of Obamacare was to collapse the U.S. health-care system and recommended that the audience start stockpiling medications and finding doctors who would work for cash. Another speaker discussed the controversial theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health. A retired heart surgeon from Seattle spent almost an hour arguing that HIV does not cause AIDS; rather, he said, the link was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”

In an interview, Orient says she knows little about Mercer other than that he’s attended several of the conferences and has been a “generous” donor to them. In addition to arranging the events, Orient heads a separate group that opposes government involvement in health care, and she writes frequently in the far-right media. In December she posted an article about the San Bernardino killings, suggesting that the government failed to stop the attacks because it’s “on the other side.”

At the DoubleTree, a surprising number of strands from Mercer’s interests intersected. Breitbart.com, the populist website he funds, dispatched a reporter to cover the meeting. The Heartland Institute, a climate-skeptic think tank to which he’s given more than $4 million, sent its science director to present his plan to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Another speaker warned of the dangers of Agenda 21, the UN program that’s a frequent target of a Mercer-funded activist. George Gilder, a techno-evangelist and bitcoin advocate who recently wrote a monograph for the Mercer-funded gold-standard project, was on hand. And of course there was Robinson, who shared a lunch table with Robert and Rebekah Mercer. As usual, he says, Robert Mercer didn’t have much to say.

There’s more. Much more.

He has given Ted Cruz 11 million dollars, the largest single donation to anyone in this campaign. And Trump is right about one thing. Cruz has been bought, it’s just that he hasn’t been bought by Goldman Sachs as Trump suggests. He’s been bought by this guy and we know it because of this. If there’s one thing Mercer is obsessed with above all others it’s the fringy “Gold Standard” theory:

It’s hard to know exactly how much attention Cruz pays to Mercer’s views, but he’s breathed new life into one of Mercer’s pet issues. During two nationally televised debates last fall, Cruz called for a return to the gold standard. “We had it for 170 years of our nation’s history and enjoyed booming economic growth,” he declared in November.

It’s hard to know if Cruz really believes that but it doesn’t matter, does it?

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A black guy goes to a Trump rally

by digby

This piece in NY Magazine is a must read.  An African American man who helped officiate the Black Brown forum in Iowa attended several different gathering of both Democrats and Republicans and wrote about.  Specifically he describes the difference between being at every other event and a Trump rally. Let’s just say they are very different. There were almost no African Americans in the big and he was being stared down by numerous attendees.

He meets up with one other black person and young woman who is visibly upset at being insulted by one of the attendees.

An hour after watching Trump hit the stage to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger,” here she was. I didn’t know her specific background, but she kept pointing to her brown skin whenever she mentioned what was said to her. I asked if it was a fellow student who questioned why she was there and she replied that it was an “old person.” She mentioned that many of the students were present because teachers were giving extra credit for attendance. But it was clear that wasn’t the sole reason for her presence. “We moved to Iowa from Seattle when I was 11,” she said. Her family farmed, she worked on the farm, she worked with tractors — she was as Iowan as anyone in that room. And because of that, she felt she had an investment in what someone running for president had to say about her state, and perhaps her family’s livelihood.

Truthfully, I wanted to go find the old bully that said this to her. Why couldn’t someone have said that to me instead? As she was telling the story, she was fidgety. As we often do in times like this, she confronted mild trauma with humor, laughing off aspects of the encounter. Her response to the question was, “If by that do you mean do I look like the wrong color to support Donald Trump, then yes,” followed by a sarcastically half-bowed “why, thank you.”

After listing all the ways she was from Iowa — including aspects of farming that I’d never even heard of — she paused and then said, “but apparently I’m not authentic.”

Her story was the unfortunate — and predictable — coda to an evening spent listening to Trump easily instill (and reinforce) fear and distrust in thousands of people, not only about the direction of the country, but also about people who are “different.” He proudly gave a scriptless, teleprompter-free speech — on the grounds of I’m not like these other politicians — that consisted of sermonlike rambles punctuated by discriminatory preaches to the choir, many of which entailed getting the demographics of this country back to where they once were. Repeatedly, he’d hold press clippings in the air with the fervor of a minister controlling his congregation. Trump’s views for the future of America didn’t require detailed explanations, fact-checking, or empirical research to send the room into a frenzy. He simply presented options that allowed his followers to most comfortably suspend disbelief. Two days later, at the Republican debate in South Carolina, the GOP looked more like the party of Trump than ever.

Driving back to Des Moines, with President Obama’s State of the Union on the radio, I thought about the last 48 hours spent traversing Iowa, which felt like a microcosm of America. I’d been in the same room as some of Iowa’s most liberal and conservative citizens and listened to five presidential hopefuls — three Democrats and two Republicans — feed the people of Iowa the full spectrum of politics, from truth and hope to empty promises and fear. I’d listened to Sanders speak unfavorably of Clinton, Clinton make fun of Trump, Jeb speak ill on the entire Democratic party. But what I saw, and heard, and felt during two hours with Trump was a different beast: as real, as frightening, and as authentically American as it gets.

Yes it is.

I couldn’t help but think of that Trump supporter’s comment about the Muslim woman who stood up in the crowd: It would be like a KKK member showing up at an NAACP meeting.

They are unselfconsciously white supremacist.

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The Sarah and Donald show in prime time

by digby

I wrote about The Donald and The Palin for Salon today:

[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives.

There’s more …

Starving Uncle Sam
by Tom Sullivan

Death by a thousand cuts is a kind of political strategy movement conservatives have deployed against adversaries for decades. Too bad they also deploy it against the country whose flag they display on their lapels.

Thomas Edsall this morning examines the effects of Republican Party members toeing to rigid conservative orthodoxy. Besides opposition to any restraints on firearms, and denial of climate change and abortion rights, any measure that raises revenue to maintain the country they swore an oath to serve is anathema.

The beast they are determined to slowly starve in pursuit of ideological purity has a nickname: Uncle Sam. Edsall writes:

A majority of economists surveyed in 2012 by the University of
Chicago found that, despite Republican demands for austerity, the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus legislation significantly reduced unemployment. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill on Feb. 13, 2009, as did 38 of 41 Republican senators on the same day.

Republican opposition to raising taxes, in turn, resulted in a decade-long delay before the enactment last year of long-term Highway Trust Fund legislation. During the delay, the nation’s infrastructure continued to decay, with one out of nine bridges considered structurally deficient; the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that airport overcrowding and delays cost the nation $22 billion annually; and 42 percent of major urban highways were congested.

Similarly, Republican cuts to the I.R.S. budget have resulted in a loss of tax revenue. In an April 2015 speech, John Koskinen, the commissioner of the I.R.S., noted that over the previous five years, as the number of taxpayers has grown, the I.R.S. budget was pared by $1.2 billion (to $10.9 billion from $12.1 billion), its lowest level since 1998, adjusted for inflation. In addition to a sharp reduction in the quality of services to taxpayers — the I.R.S. in 2015 answered only 37 percent of taxpayer phone inquiries — Koskinen said that “the drop in audit and collection case closures this year will translate into a loss for the government of at least $2 billion in revenue that otherwise would have been collected.”

Those lost funds might have supported providing safe drinking water in Flint or replacing weakened bridges in Minneapolis, or might have been used to support research by the Centers for Disease Control to fight Zika virus-caused microcephaly.

Edsall found that since the early George W. Bush administration, favorability ratings for Republicans in Congress have fallen from the high 40s to mid-50s to 14 percent last year. When you are dedicated to training voters to hate the government and you are the government, you reap what you sow.

The fact is that as political orthodoxy matures, it calcifies, imposing more costs than benefits. Politicians who submit to such doctrinal pressures threaten their own authenticity.

But that’s their problem. Authenticity for Republicans is Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. It’s Ted Cruz and Virginia Foxx and Jeff Sessions and Joni Ernst and Steve King and Trey Gowdy and Louie Gohmert and ….

Bob Gates, liberal squish

by digby

At least I’m pretty sure that’s what the right wing thinks about this:

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday blasted the Republican field for their rhetoric on destroying the Islamic State.

“First of all they, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Gates told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Front-runner Donald Trump has said as president he would “bomb the s—” out of the Islamic State, while rival Ted Cruz has suggested carpet bombing them into oblivion.

“Carpet bombing would be completely useless. It’s totally contrary to the American way of war,” said Gates, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush and also served under President Barack Obama. “Total disregard for civilians. So, I mean, part of the concern that I have with the campaign, particularly when it comes to national security, is that the solutions being offered are so simplistic and so at odds with the reality of the rest of the world, with the way the world really works.”

Alluding to political outsiders Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Gates challenged their ability to be an effective president. “I will tell you this: I do think that politics is a profession,” he said. “And I think that if you don’t have any experience in how government works, if you have never been in government, your ability to make the government work is going to be significantly reduced.”

“It’s different than business,” he continued. “It’s different than surgery. It’s different than anything else. It’s a skill set that you bring based on experience and based on dealing with other people.”

What kind of insider weeny crapola is this? All we need is somebody who wants victories! And who knows how to force people to do exactly what he wants them to do. A politically incorrect winner.

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The really important Trump endorsement

by digby

No not the Queen of the Arctic. I’m talking about those White Nationalists who are robo-calling all over Iowa on his behalf.

I had missed his response when quizzed about it by Erin Burnett on CNN last week:

BURNETT: Mr. Trump, when you hear that, does that shock you? Do you denounce that?

TRUMP: Nothing in this country shocks me. I would disavow it, but nothing in this country shocks me. People are angry. They’re angry at what’s going on. They’re angry at the border. They’re angry at the crime. They’re angry at people coming in and shooting Kate in the back in California and San Francisco. They’re angry when Jamiel Shaw shot in the face by an illegal immigrant. They’re angry when the woman, the veteran, 65 years old is raped, sodomized, and killed by an illegal immigrant. And, they’re very angry about it, and — by the way, thousands of other cases like that. They’re very angry about it. So, I would disavow that, but I will tell you people are extremely angry.

BURNETT: People are extremely angry, but to be clear, when he says, “We need smart, well-educated white people to assimilate to our culture, vote Trump,” you’re saying you disavow that. You do denounce that?

TRUMP: Well, you just heard me. I said it. How many times do you want me to say it?

BURNETT: A third would be good.

TRUMP: I said I disavow.

One of the white nationalist robo-callers was asked what he thought of it on a radio show:

Donald Trump’s response when he was asked to address it was just a wonderful response. He disavowed us, but he explained why there is so much anger in America that I couldn’t have asked for a better approach from him.

It is interesting that when asked to disavow White Supremacists he just automatically rattled off his boilerplate violent racist rant about undocumented immigrants. From the perspective of a White Supremacist that’s got to be an awesome validation of their noxious racist philosophy. Who else in national politics would ever do such a thing?

Notorious White Supremacist Jared Taylor agreed:

EDWARDS: Your reaction to the Donald Trump acknowledgement, I think better than anyone really could have expected, correct?

TAYLOR: Yes, he was, you know, for days everybody was calling him up, calling up his campaign saying, “What do you think of these horrible people? Denounce them, denounce them.” And he didn’t. You know, he just maintained a dignified silence as he’s capable of doing. And then finally when CNN’s Erin Burnett really forced him to say, “Well, I would disavow it.” 

But she asked him, “are you shocked by this? Will you denounce this?” “I’m not shocked by anything in America.” I thought that was a great line. He’s so quick on his feet. And then he goes to say, “I would disavow it” but then he goes on to explain why people are so angry. 

In effect, he’s saying, “Yeah, yeah, if you want me to denounce it I will, but I understand exactly what these guys are saying, they’re furious, and they’re right to be furious.” So if he disavowed us, he did it, I thought, in the nicest possible way.

When he’s right, he’s right. Trump was almost courtly in his “disavowal” of the despicable racists and very nicely made their argument for them for a mainstream CNN audience. What could be better than that?

I just have to love the fact that Paul Ryan and the establishment are seriously talking about backing this repellant piece of work. If they do, they will explicitly and openly be joining hands with White Supremacists like Jared Taylor.

But hey, Trump is telling everyone who’ll listen that “the blacks” and Latinos love him so maybe they’ve just decided to close their eyes and believe. Or maybe they’re just feeling some relief that if they back Trump they don’t have to pretend to be anything but bigoted white supremacists themselves anymore. Someone should ask them about it.

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The downside of being bigoted, negative jerks

by digby

Yes, there is a downside! Thank goodness …

The WSJ:

Bryan Yarde, a 25-year-old independent voter from Florida who says he leans conservative, is closely following the Republican presidential primary—and doesn’t like what he sees from the two leading candidates, businessman Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“The nativist tendencies of Cruz and Trump are pretty atrocious,” said Mr. Yarde, adding that he would consider supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton if either man wins the GOP nomination.

The Republican primary is generating more interest than the Democratic contest, but that attention isn’t entirely good news for the party, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found. The Republican nominating fight is souring critical constituencies, including independents, Latinos, suburban women and registered voters open to supporting either party in the fall.

[…]

The Republican contest is driving negative impressions among key voting blocs in a general election. For example, 45% of Latinos view the GOP more negatively as a result of a primary in which the leading contender, Mr. Trump, has advocated the mass deportation of millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally. Just 13% of Hispanics view the party more favorably.

More college-educated whites are also turning their nose up at Republicans. Half of those voters said the nominating fight has given them a less favorable impression of the GOP. Independents, suburban women and voters who are genuinely undecided about which party to support in November are all much more inclined to view the Republican Party more negatively as a result of the primary.

“I don’t know what’s happening on the Republican side—each one seems more crazy than the next,” said Joan King, 53, a swing voter from Green Bay, Wis., who says she tends to back more centrist Republicans. “I have a hard time buying that people really support Donald Trump. I think they’re just drawn to his celebrity.”

By contrast, the Democratic contest isn’t having the same impact. Some 29% of Latinos said the Democratic primary has given them a more favorable view of the party, compared with the 17% who view Democrats less favorably. Some 54% of registered voters said the Democratic primary has had no impact on how they view the party.

The poll, conducted January 9-13, included interviews with 800 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.

As you can see by that graph, moderates, independents and Latinos are really turned off. Democrats are also viewed less positively than they were but the difference between the negative attitudes toward the Dems and the Republicans is stark.

This actually makes me feel a little bit better about America. I’ve always thought that the vast majority of Americans of all political persuasions were pretty decent people just trying to raise families, do good work, live lives of meaning. This ugly, angry electorate we see at the Trump rallies (and to a lesser extent at all the others) is very disturbing. And depressing. All these people have been worked up into a frenzy of negativity and hate beyond anything I’ve seen in this country since I was a kid.

I’m glad to know that it isn’t only the left side of the dial that hasn’t succumbed to this madness, most of which has been created and stoked by cynical billionaires, avaricious grifters and media charlatans for their own purposes.

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QOTD: Levin and Limbaugh

by digby

Going after Trump again today and I think this is the essence of the complaint:

What’s different right now is that the attack on Cruz in many ways is an attack on us, That’s the problem.  He’s “nasty, nasty, nasty …” Donald says. Why, because Mitch McConnell thinks he’s nasty? Because Bob Dole thinks he’s nasty? Because the dug-in ruling elite Republicans thinks he’s nasty?

Rush:

The establishment says, “yeah, yeah yeah we can make deals with Trump. We can coexist with Trump.”What they mean by that is they think they can moderate Trump or make deals with him that are not ideological in nature but they know, they are certain that Cruz is not gonna compromise what he believes in order to strike deals or have peaceful relations with them. That scares them.

Meanwhile Bristol Palin wrote a Facebook post saying that the Cruz campaign saying they would be disappointed if Palin endorses Trump because he isn’t a real conservative is proof that everyone saying Cruz is nasty is true.

Reality TV star politicians gotta stick together.

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Why did Trump ignore his nemesis on the stump yesterday?

by digby

Now that we are in the stretch in the primary campaign the fight between Trump and Cruz is really heating up. At Salon this morning I caught everyone up on Trump’s week-end of Cruz-slagging and then noted his abrupt turn-around.

Michael Moore: How racism poisoned Flint’s water

by Gaius Publius

I’m a former resident of Michigan, in particular, Saginaw and Flint, and in my mind there’s never been a question that the Republican and Rick Snyder attack on both Detroit and Flint are racist to the core. There’s also no doubt in my mind that the decision to stop Flint from paying Detroit for water was also a way to further punish Detroit, by denying funds to the Detroit water district.

Still, intent is hard to prove, so let’s just say that the decision to cut Flint’s payments to the Detroit water district had the effect of using one largely minority and emergency-manager-controlled city to hurt another largely minority and emergency-manager-controlled city, intentional or otherwise.

And yes, Rick Snyder should be tried for homicide, negligent or otherwise.

“This is a racial killing”

The racial aspect of this story is widely under-commented. Even the excellent Bernie Sanders, in his recent call for Snyder to resign, did not touch on race. He well could have.

[UPDATE: In the debate just held, Clinton and then Sanders acknowledged the racist basis for this crisis. Good on them both, and very glad to have heard that.]

Now comes Michael Moore to let that cat publicly out of the bag. Here’s USuncut with the story:

Michael Moore — Flint’s most famous native — is calling out the
inherent racism of the policies that led to his hometown’s water crisis.

Michael Moore: “This is a racial killing.”

The result of a decision to switch water sources made under Snyder in June 2013, hazardously high levels of lead, copper, e. coli, trihalomethanes (which are toxic when inhaled, such as in a hot shower) and chlorine in the city’s water supply have created an epidemic of serious, long-term health problems in Flint. The alarming effects of Flint’s contaminated water were immediately apparent and known to public officials in 2014 when the switch was made, but were downplayed by political leaders for over a year.

Michael Moore, who posted a petition for Snyder’s arrest on his website Wednesday, tweeted last month that Snyder “knowingly poisoned a black city”, calling it a “version of genocide.”

This is a racial killing. Flint MI is 60% black. When u knowingly poison a black city, u r committing a version of genocide #ArrestGovSnyder

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) December 20, 2015

Moore held a rally in the city yesterday, where he accused political leaders of intentionally poisoning residents.

“This is not a mistake,” he said. “Ten people were killed here because of a political decision to save money… to risk the lives of people here in a city that is majority African-American, where 41 percent live below the official poverty line. That is what is going on here.”

Moore spoke on the racial disenfranchisement created by state policy in Flint. “It’s a crisis created by the Republican governor and visited on a city that is majority black and majority poor,” he said.

This gets the ball rolling. Time for others to step up.

The racist use of Michigan’s emergency manager law

The article makes a convincing case that Snyder’s use of the emergency manager law is prima facie racist. Again:

The shocking racial disparity behind this policy lies in the racial breakdown of Michigan residents whose lives are controlled by appointed emergency managers. In 2013, The Atlantic’s Chris Lewis reported that “while the cities under emergency management together contain just nine percent of Michigan’s population, they contain, notably, about half of the state’s African-American residents.”

Last week, Louise Seamster and Jessica Welburn reported for The Root that over the past decade only two percent of Michigan’s white residents have lived under emergency management, compared to over half of black residents.

The cities targeted by Snyder for emergency management reflect the state’s attitude toward the human and democratic rights of African-Americans. Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter for the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan, discussed the racial composition of cities currently controlled by emergency managers with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! Friday, saying that “with the exception of one, they are all majority African-American. And they’re also all very poor cities. So this is a racial issue, and it’s a class issue.”

I hope that the major tellers of this tale tell it all. It’s not just the deaths and permanent brain damage; it’s the racial targeting that got us there. Not much different from racial targeting by police — except in scale. If a foreign terrorist did this to an entire American city, they’d call the water pictured above a “weapon of mass destruction,” as indeed it is.

Bernie Sanders, Killer Mike and Martin Luther King, Jr.

A bonus — listen to the end of this interview, Killer Mike talking with Stephen Colbert, about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the once-in-a-generation Bernie Sanders campaign.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. If you’d like to help out, go here; you can adjust the split any way you like at the link. If you’d like to “phone-bank for Bernie,” go here. You can volunteer in other ways by going here. And thanks!

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

GP