Month: January 2016

Why pretend? 

by digby

Trump’s core supporters are heling out in Iowa:

Some registered voters in Iowa received robocalls Saturday from a white nationalist super PAC that urged them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

“I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America,” Jared Taylor said on the robocall, paid for by the American National Super PAC. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

Taylor is the founder of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance. The robocall included two more endorsements from a conservative Christian talk show host and the head of the white nationalist American Freedom Party.

Reverend Donald Tan, a Filipino-American minister and host of Christian talk show program “For God and Country,” encouraged Iowans to vote for Trump by citing scripture.

“First Corinthians states ‘God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise and God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong,’” he says on the call. “For the Iowa caucuses please support Donald Trump.”

The robocall was closed out by American Freedom Party chairman William Johnson, who identified himself only as “a farmer and white nationalist.” Johnson, who founded the PAC that paid for the robocall, notes that Trump did not authorize it.

The American Freedom Party had issued a press release Friday announcing the launch of the robocall campaign, calling Trump its “Great White Hope.”

Jared Taylor also serves as a spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which was cited in the manifesto written by Charleston shooter Dylann Roof as the group that opened his eyes to what he saw as the scourge of black-on-white crime in America. Roof went on a shooting rampage at a historically black church in June, killing nine parishioners.

Iowa resident Dave Dwyer, who sent TPM a recording of the call, said over the phone, “I’ve lived in Iowa a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Here’s the robo-call:

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“The American National Super PAC makes this call to support Donald Trump.

‘I am William Johnson, a farmer and a white nationalist. Support Donald Trump. I paid for this through the super PAC. [Telephone] (213) 718-3908. This call is not authorized by Donald Trump.'”

You have to wonder if this isn’t some kind of a ratfuck. It seems to be legit, though.

There’s a lot of chatter about a new poll allegedly showing that tons and tons of Clinton voters would defect to Trump if he wins the GOP nomination. If that’s so, it shows this country is so fucked up it may be beyond redemption anyway so it really doesn’t matter.

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If you could see the future …

by digby

I had seen this old movie “The Dead Zone” before but it was on the other night and I had it on in the background. It struck me as an interesting flick for the current period:

A high school teacher and soon-to-be wife winds up in a fateful car crash that turns his life upside down. When he awakens from a five-year coma, he discovers that through physical contact he can predict a person’s ultimate fate. This power can serve to be a gift, or a curse, as Walken soon realizes when he shakes the hand of a power-hungry politician.

Martin Sheen really chews the scenery in this one as the megalomanic politician. And to think he had never seen Donald Trump or Ted Cruz at the time …

If you’ve seen the movie, this is the ending.

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GOP Villagers come to grips with Trump

by digby

I’m still not sure how I ended up on Alex Castellanos’ email list but I’m kind of happy I have. His missives are fascinating (even though they’re written without caps which drives me crazy …)

Anyway, here’s today’s thinking from a GOP villager:

I disagree with Castellanos’ view that the establishment is coming around to Trump. (As I wrote yesterday in Salon I think they’re coming around to Cruz.) Trump is far less of a “party man” than Cruz, even with all of Cruz’s obstreperousness, and I find it hard to believe they really think he can beat Clinton. The only reason for them to back Trump would be a sort of inside job to blow up the party and start over. (And hey, maybe that’s their only option at this point.)

Brian Beutler wrote a thought provoking piece last week in which he speculated that a Cruz nomination would be the best thing for the political system right now. It’s a smart observation but I suspect that the Republicans will blame Trump for a loss no matter what, even one by Cruz. So, I’m not sure this would have the clarifying effect one might think it would. But even so, the right wingers don’t play that way. They’re patient. After Goldwater they didn’t fold. They were more motivated than before. I don’t know if it would work again, but I’m positive that they think it will. This isn’t some “strategy” for them. They are true believers and they aren’t going to be persuaded by some idea that wussy “democracy” demands they adjust their thinking.

But they might adjust their strategy. That picture at the top shows one possibility.

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Well hell

by digby

Look at this:

A majority of Americans support President Barack Obama’s executive actions on guns, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Thursday night.

Some 67 percent of Americans surveyed favor Obama’s changes, with 32 percent opposing them.

While the majority of Americans support the actions, the numbers are skewed on party lines. A plurality of Democrats (87 percent), 65 percent of independents and 51 percent of Republicans support the actions. More than one in two gun owners (57 percent) and rural residents (56 percent) also support the moves.

Even most gun owners and rural residents.

This should not even be controversial. Indeed, if the NRA had not been successful at changing the perception of the public and finally, the Supreme Court, to believe that the 2nd Amendment must be seen as an unfettered civil right it wouldn’t be.

I wrote this awhile back for Salon on this subject: 

“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights.”

“This unfortunate accident happened after the ad, but it does highlight that I want to get rid of, repeal, and replace [opponent] Bruce Braley’s Obamacare. And it also shows that I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. That is a fundamental right.”

Oh, but poor people…
by Tom Sullivan

“Greedy Humpty Dumpty” (Fleischer, 1936).

So now TransCanada is suing the United States under NAFTA for $15 billion over President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline deal:

In filing the NAFTA claim, TransCanada said it “had every reason to expect its application would be granted” as it had met the same criteria the U.S. State Department used when approving other similar cross-border pipelines.

It’s like suing for breach of promise. Except America never promised. Think Progress has this:

In the notice to submit a claim for arbitration, TransCanada notes that two previous pipelines, carrying oil from the same tar sands region across the U.S. border, were both approved. This, TransCanada claims, suggests that the denial was political in nature, which is prohibited under NAFTA.

So, government of, by, and for the people that interferes with corporate profits is prohibited? Sovereignty means you’re sovereign (to borrow from George W. Bush), except when it gets in the way of bidness. This raises the question, Who gets to sue when a war (politics by other means) ravages a local economy, but international arms merchants make out like bandits?

Lori Wallach of Public Citizen spoke about the suit with Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman:

LORI WALLACH: Well, what it boils down to is a foreign corporation deciding that the U.S. taxpayers ought to give them $15 billion because they don’t like the outcome of our government decision that this pipeline was bad for our country and bad for the environment. And where they’re going to get this money extracted from us is an extrajudicial—not U.S. court, not U.S. law—forum: the investor-state tribunal allowed under NAFTA. And the U.S. has faced about a dozen of these attacks underNAFTA, all from Canada, but we have 50 agreements that have this outrageous system. Hardly any of those countries with those agreements actually have investors here. So, up to now, we haven’t lost one of these cases; however, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, overnight, if implemented, would double our liability. Right now, 50 agreements, about 9,000 companies are cross-registered from one of those countries that we have the agreement with operating in the U.S. to attack our laws in these tribunals. Overnight, the TPP would give 9,500 more companies—big multinationals from Japan, in banking, in manufacturing, mining firms from Australia—the right to do this. So this case, hopefully, is like the canary in the coal mine letting us know what we’d be getting into.

AMY GOODMAN: In May, President Obama delivered a speech at Nike in Beaverton, Oregon, where he defended the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation, food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations. This—they’re making this stuff up. This is just not true. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama also said the TPP improves on NAFTA.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When you ask folks, specifically, “What do you oppose about this trade deal?” they just say, “NAFTA.”NAFTA was passed 20 years ago. That was a different agreement. And in fact, this agreement fixes some of what was wrong withNAFTA by making labor and environmental provisions actually enforceable. I was just getting out of law school when NAFTA got passed.

AMYGOODMAN: Lori Wallach, your response to President Obama? He was speaking at Nike headquarters.

LORI WALLACH: Well, first of all, the making stuff up comment is going to have to get shelved, because not only is this attack by TransCanada on our domestic, democratic government decision not to have a pipeline the exact kind of case he said couldn’t possibly happen—well, it just did, $15 billion being demanded by a—from a tribunal of three private sector attorneys, because this investor-state system, it’s not judges. There are no conflict-of-interest or impartiality rules. These are folks who rotate between one day suing a government for a corporation and the next day being the judge. And they all hear cases amongst themselves. They call themselves “the club.” And there’s no outside appeal, and there’s no limit on how much money they can order a government to pay. And if a government doesn’t pay, by the way, the company has the right to seize government assets—seize government assets—to extract our tax dollars. So, number one, this case is exactly the kind of case President Obama said folks were making things up when they were worried about this. Well, now it’s happened.

But this follows one month after the U.S. Congress, because the WTO threatened billions in trade sanctions, gutted another consumer law. Hate to tell folks, if they didn’t notice in the grocery store, but those customer meat—the country-of-origin labels we all use to figure out where our meat comes from, the WTO said we couldn’t have those anymore. And so, Congress, at the face of these sanctions, said, “Oh, better get rid of that law.” So, two examples, live and real, compared to what President Obama promised.

But more broadly about the TPP, here’s the thing folks need to know. The actual language that TransCanada is using in this case, because they filed a brief, is the same language that, word for word, is replicated in TPP. So there are bells and whistles that have been changed between the investor-state language in NAFTA andTPP. In many ways, actually, TPP expands investor-state. It allows more kinds of challenges. Hell, it even allows challenges of government contracts for foreign companies’ concessions on natural resources in foreign land. That was not inNAFTA. However, the actual claims being made by TransCanada, that language is word for word in the TPP. And you can see the analysis of that on our website,TradeWatch.org. You can look at the text now and use our analysis as basically a guided tour.

AMYGOODMAN: Lori, can you explain why they’re asking $15 billion?

LORI WALLACH:: So, this is a question a lot of folks asked me yesterday: “Well, wait a minute, this is supposed to”—everyone who’s read the newspaper. “This is a $3 billion pipeline. How the heck can they be asking for $15 billion from us taxpayers?” And the answer is, under the outrageous investor-state system, not only can a foreign corporation get all these special rights—go around our courts, go around our laws and demand compensation—but they don’t just get money for what they’ve spent on a project, they get to get compensated for expected future profits. Yep, they are calculating—and the brief goes through this—what they think they would have made in the future for the lifetime of the pipeline had it been allowed. And that’s what we taxpayers are supposed to give them, because we had a democratic decision of our government that their commercial project wasn’t in the national interest. That’s the $15 billion.

You’ve got to hand it to these “producers.” The very idea that they get paid for not producing. That’s a real heads, we win, tails, you lose arrangement, ain’t it? (A rigged system, if you want to get all Elizabeth Warren about it.) Isn’t that just the kind of “takers” behavior conservatives cry loudly about over feeding poor people? And lessee, $15 billion is almost a quarter of what we spent last year on helping (mostly) the working poor who don’t have enough to eat. As I asked last year,

If corporations can sue over loss of “expected future profits” they didn’t earn, can people get food over loss of “expected future work”?

But then, NAFTA, TPP, TiSA, etc. are not crafted to serve people who breathe, eat, vote, and pay taxes, only corporate people that consume.

A little Friday night picker upper

by digby

I have been following the story  at The Dodo of this tiny kitten named Smurf who was dyed purple and used as a chew toy in training dogs for dog fighting. (Apparently this is a common practice.) Anyway, the poor little thing was rescued and is now in recovery at the Nine Lives Foundation.

Here’s a little uplifting news about her:

Just days after Smurf was taken in by the Nine Lives Foundation, a rescue center for injured and abused felines in California, the group saved another kitty with serious injuries — a cat named Wanda. She had been found shivering next to a garbage can, her left eye crushed and the right suffering from an infection leaving her blinded.

In that darkness, though, she found a companion.

“She was placed in the same cage as SMURF on her very first day and has become bonded with him,” the Nine Lives Foundation wrote on Facebook.

They are now inseparable.

Over the last few days, the pair has shown signs of improvement thanks to the expert care of their rescuers and also the steady companionship they’re receiving from one another.
Their snuggling has been so constant, in fact, that Wanda has actually picked up some of the purple dye someone had poured over Smurf — a stain of cruelty transformed into a mark of friendship and solidarity.

Here they are, with little Smurf making frantic cookies!

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The right’s secret plan

by digby

Check it out:

[T]here are approximately 186,000 precincts in America, and guess how you get to be a precinct committeeman?

In most states it is an elected office and you become a precinct committeeman by filing and being elected in your Republican Primary Election.

Now, here is the dirty little secret establishment Republicans don’t want you to know: as many as half of the Republican precinct committeeman slots, on average are vacant.

Conservatives have the power and the numbers to take back their government from the current crop of officeholders who seem hell-bent on ignoring the strictures of the United States Constitution and foisting socialism upon Americans, but to do so we conservatives have to get limited government constitutional conservatives into leadership positions at the state and national levels of the Republican Party. And the way to do that is to get limited government constitutional conservatives elected to be Republican precinct committeemen.

If you know someone who is a real star volunteer for one of the conservative presidential campaigns you should encourage them to get involved in the local Republican Party committee as a precinct committeeman.

If your local Republican Party leaders are establishment Republicans, or if they are friendly, but ineffective, now is the time to make the case for new leadership.

And it’s not that hard.

In Arizona, where Dan Schultz is a precinct committeeman, to get on the ballot, the candidate for precinct committeeman had to get ten signatures from Republicans or independents in the precinct. That’s it. Ten signatures.

Schultz says it took him about forty minutes to get the signatures—the Party gave him a “walking sheet” for his precinct that told him in which houses Republicans and independents lived. In some precincts, the precinct committeemen only had to get three signatures. Every state has a different system.

Some, like Arizona and Ohio, elect the leaders in their precincts. Other states require meeting attendance and dues. None of the requirements are onerous.

Why have I never heard about this, you are probably wondering? And more important, why have you never heard about this before from your local Republican Party?

Dan Schultz says that it is because virtually all Republican incumbents, including many who profess to be conservative, are terrified that you and other conservative Americans will figure this out and replace them, too, because they have not fought hard enough to preserve your liberties.

They are terrified a more principled conservative adversary might get the backing of a majority of precinct committeemen in their district and state and throw out the incumbents. Like the new, conservative grassroots Tea Partiers and 9.12-ers did in Utah in 2010, denying incumbent senator Robert Bennett the primary nomination by keeping him off the ballot and endorsing boat-rocking senator Mike Lee at the Utah GOP state convention. In 2012 Indiana incumbent establishment Republican Richard Lugar was opposed by over half the Republican county chairs in the state, and likewise lost the primary.

What’s more, precinct committeemen—and only precinct committeemen—get to vote in the party elections that determine the leadership of the party. That means the way to get rid of ineffective Republican Party leaders, like Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus, is to start right in your neighborhood by running for precinct committeeman.

Here are some quick numbers to let you know what an achievable goal this is.

Think of the thousands of conservatives who have been turning out for rallies and events for the outsider candidates for President. If there are 186,000 precincts in America, and we elected 100,000 principled conservative Republican precinct committeemen across the country, conservatives could take control of a majority of the GOP state committees. And if we did that, we could then elect a majority (85+) of principled conservatives to the 162-member Republican National Committee, giving conservatives control of the RNC for the first time in the modern era.

With control of the Republican National Committee we conservatives could put an end to the feckless RNC leadership that set-up the disastrous CNBC Republican debate, called for amnesty for illegal aliens as part of their “autopsy” of their 2012 defeat and has done everything possible to alienate conservatives and break-up the coalition of cultural conservatives, economic conservatives, national security conservatives and limited government constitutional conservatives that delivered them the historic 2010 and 2014 wave victories.

It’s hard to say if they’ve got the juice to do this in 2016. Maybe if Cruz gets the nod — he’s a movement guy. But this is the kind of stuff the conservative movement does and it can have an effect. What he says about Utah is absolutely correct. Bob Bennett was a true blue conservative — they took him out using these means to prove they could. And the politicians in Washington certainly took notice.

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The Tea Party’s militia

by digby

I’ve heard of the 1% and 99% and the 47%, but the 3% was new to me until I read expert on US extremism JJ McNabb’s twitter stream:

The Idaho 3% have pledge to provide armed support to the OR militants.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 8, 2016

The name 3% comes from a not-quite-accurate estimate that colonists won the Revolutionary War w/ only 3% of the population actually fighting

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 8, 2016

Therefore, the militia movement thinks that if they convince 3% of Americans to side with them, they can win the Second American Revolution.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 8, 2016

Since the vast majority of 3%ers are Facebook “keyboard warriors,” a second group has emerged that call themselves the 1%ers.

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 8, 2016

Their flag (III stands for 3%) is a hat tip to the Tea Party flag (II stand for Second American Revolution) pic.twitter.com/Eu6ZDOMHf2

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) January 8, 2016

Fergawdsakes …

It wouldn’t be worth even thinking about if these people weren’t armed to the teeth. And we hadn’t had a history of this:

Yes, it’s a loony conspiracy theory

by digby

I can’t believe the president actually had to say this to Anderson Cooper on CNN but apparently he did:

And it’s not just one conspiracy theory. There are dozens of them. Here’s my personal favorite from Larry Pratt of Gunowners of America:

There’s a big one that doesn’t get much attention as a gun measure but it is, and that’s Obamacare. Obamacare among its many unconstitutional aspects, I’m sorry Supreme Court, has made privacy something that only applies between consenting adults but not certainly our relationship with the government. It says that all of our medical records are available to be pawed through by bureaucrats somewhere in Washington, looking for a reason to disenfranchise gun owners, to say ‘oh you have a medical diagnosis that means you might be a danger to yourself or others so we’re going to come and knock on the door for the BATF to take away your guns.

Here’s another one from World Net Daily:

I know it’s Halloween, but this is more terrifying than ghosts and goblins and vampires.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If Barack Obama is re-elected Nov. 6 for a second term, he will declare a full-scale war on his domestic opposition.

There may not be another free and fair election in America.

I would expect due process to go the way of the horse and buggy.

I think he will move to shut down and destroy all independent media.

In fact, I think his biggest critics will be rounded up in the name of national security.

Last week, for instance, with little fanfare, Obama issued an executive order establishing something that sounds so innocent on the surface – but it could prove to be a vehicle for the kind of political putsch I am describing.

It establishes the “White House Homeland Security Partnership Council.”…Essentially, Obama wants to deputize “community organizers” like him to determine who represents a real threat to the republic.…

If any Republican, conservative, independent journalist, pro-life activist, returning veteran, gun-rights activist, constitutionalist, Bible believer or critic of Obama thinks they will be safe in a second term under this would-be despot, they had better think again – real fast.

More at this link.

It’s such a transparently cynical manipulation to collect money from fools that I’m tempted to feel sorry for the fools. Unfortunately those fools are all armed to teeth running around accidentally killing people by the thousands and enabling other poor fools to kill themselves.

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Will the growing Ted Cruz coalition eventually include the establishment? They’re starting to think about it.

by digby

I wrote about Cruz again for Salon this morning, (I just can’t quit him …) noting once more that underestimating him is a mistake.  He is proving to be less like Goldwater and more like another unpleasant (actually repellent) politician who nonetheless won two presidential elections. And the establishment is starting to come to terms with the idea, however reluctantly, that he may be the only one who can stop Donald Trump.

An excerpt:

One questioner asked about the alleged influence of the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller, two bugbears of conspiracy theorists. “It’s a very good question,” said Cruz, pivoting to discuss the Medellin national sovereignty case, which is featured in some of his TV ads here. Another questioner asked whether the Federal Reserve was constitutional, prompting a short monologue by Cruz about why America should return to the gold standard.

And another questioner asked about the potential threat of Muslim courts issuing their own sharia-based rulings within the United States.

“Under no circumstances should sharia law be enforced anywhere in this country,” Cruz said. “We should do whatever it takes to prevent that.”