Month: January 2016

Elizabeth Warren indicts “shockingly weak” enforcement
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Tim Pierce (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons.

If justice means a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but it means nothing more than a sideways glance at a CEO who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars, then the promise of equal justice under the law has turned into a lie. – from Rigged Justice

In the first of what she promises will be annual reports on enforcement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren this morning released Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy. Calling the Obama administration’s enforcement against corporate criminals “feeble,” Warren’s report cites 20 criminal and civil cases from 2015 in which authorities punished corporate crimes – where they were enforced at all – with a slap on the wrist. Prosecutors took only one of these cases to trial. She follows up with an op-ed in the New York Times, writing, “These enforcement failures demean our principles.” The report begins:

Much of the public and media attention on Washington focuses on enacting laws. And strong laws are important – prosecutors must have the statutory tools they need to hold corporate criminals accountable.  But putting a law on the books is only the first step.  The second, and equally important, step is enforcing that law.  A law that is not enforced – or weakly enforced – may as well not even be a law at all.

Despite its get-tough rhetoric, the report alleges that the Department of Justice fails “to impose any serious threat of punishment on corporate offenders … The pattern of weak enforcement extends beyond the Justice Department to other enforcement agencies.”

Simply put, talk is cheap.

The report slams the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as “particularly feeble”:

Not only does the agency fail to demand accountability, the SEC frequently uses its prosecutorial discretion to grant waivers to big companies so that those companies can continue to enjoy special privileges despite often-repeated misconduct that legally disqualifies them from receiving such benefits. Lax enforcement at other agencies, such as the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), stems primarily from a lack of important legal tools and persistent underfunding by Congress that often turn the legal rules into little more than suggestions that companies can freely ignore.

“Personnel is policy,” writes Warren in the Times. The next administration’s appointments to key regulatory positions matter as much as the laws it promises to put on the books. David Dayen expands on that at The Intercept:

The Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps — and their allies in the press – have been arguing increasingly harshly over who has the most perfect or most attainable policies. But the real issue, as Warren sees it, comes in installing the personnel to carry out the laws on the books that protect public safety and the economy.

[…]

In virtually all the cases she cites – from Standard and Poor’s delivering inflated credit ratings to defraud investors during the financial crisis, to Novartis giving kickbacks to pharmacists to steer customers to their products, to an explosion at a Bayer CropScience pesticide plant that killed two employees – the Department of Justice declined to prosecute individual executives or the corporations themselves, resorting to settlements with miniscule fines that barely disrupt the corporations’ business models.

The report also gives new meaning to the term “1 percent.”

In many of the cases cited, what appear on the surface as imposing fines amount to under one percent of annual profits. Rigged Justice concludes that this raises “the disturbing possibility that some giant corporations—and their executives—have decided that following the law is merely optional. For these companies, punishment for breaking the law is little more than a cost of doing business.”

Reforming the justice system in this country from Washington on down is not merely a matter of law. It is a matter of will. The question Warren asks is will the next president honor “the simple notion that nobody is above the law,” and will voters demand it?

It’s time to prosecute armed bullies threatening to kill us

By Spocko

The current stand off in Oregon is not over. As of 9:00 pm Thursday January 28th, 2016 four are still at the refuge.

Below is a video of one man at the refuge asking people to come help him. Listen as he tells them exactly how they should impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties.

“You a militia man? Come get some! It’s what you been training for, preparing for. We just happened to be the ones to step in it for ya. Now we are here. We need you. We want you, we welcome you.”

“Don’t be afraid of those roadblocks, drive up there and shoot them. They are dishonorable, not following their oath, not protecting the American people, [we’re] good patriots fighting for our rights, they’re the terrorists.”

“Any LEO, military, law enforcement or feds that stand up and fuck their oath–don’t abide by their oath–are the enemy!”

“If they stop you from getting here, kill them!” (Oregonlive video link)

Four holdouts want charge dropped for one to end occupation.  –Les Zaitz | The Oregonian/OregonLive

This specific stand off with these four might be over before I publish this, but I had been working on a piece examining the DOJ/FBI response at the Bundy Ranch last April vs. the current one and wanted to talk about a few issues around them and future ones.

Yes, we can learn from mistakes

After the Bundy Ranch stand off last April, the WH, DOJ and FBI  looked at their actions, the media response and public reactions to gauged how well they did. The White House didn’t want bloodshed and there was none. They wanted Cliven Bundy to lose his RW media love, so they made his blatant racism clear. Even Sean Hannity had to walk away from him. So on a couple of fronts they won.

However, in order to end that standoff with no bloodshed, I’m guessing the DOJ authorized the FBI to cut deals. The FBI probably talked to the snipers and others and said something like, “We are within our rights to arrest you. We have hard evidence that will win us a conviction. But we would rather not do that, so as a condition of not arresting you, you agree to not get involved with any more active situations like at the Bundy Ranch.  However, if you break the deal we will arrest you, seize your assets, your guns and source of government income. We will also tell all your followers that you cut a deal with the hated government to save your own skin.”

Based on some close reading of the histories of the people at the wildlife center it appears that one or more of the people who cut deals refused to honor their agreements.  Some, like Kenneth Medenbach, were arrested before. A condition of his release was he would not “occupy” any federal land. He violated that condition when he went to Malheur. On January 15th, he was arrested for driving a stolen refuge vehicle. If he is convicted of a felony that means no guns.

I don’t know the details of the various deals, but it appears the government kept its part of their bargain. Some Bundy supporters kept their’s, others did not. But since nobody who cut a deal talked about it, the people outside of the inner circle thought, “Hey, if those guys can point guns at government law enforcement and not get arrested, we can too!”

There is a reason governments have a policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

Domestic terrorists across the country saw the lack of arrests following the Bundy Ranch stand off in April as a consequence-free win and decided to replicate it.

The Good News

It looks like the WH, DOJ and FBI learned from the April stand off and decided to act differently this time. They knew not to go full on Waco mode, but they also didn’t cut as many deals (clearly some were offered, but rejected.) With the recent arrests the WH made clear the actions of armed occupiers have serious consequences.

Before I figured out that a lot of Bundy Ranch protesters cut deals to avoid arrest, I wondered why the government wasn’t more aggressive in tracking down and arresting people. I could think of a couple of reasons. First is denying them an excuse to be the victim. Right wing media loves to turn white domestic terrorists wearing cameo into heroes, but its harder to lionize people who talk like racists and point sniper rifles at federal law enforcement.

A friend pointed out a incredible practical reason there were fewer arrests. “If a Fed has a choice between arresting an unarmed Occupy Wall Street protester, and a guy with an arsenal, armor piercing bullets, and a history of making threats, which one is he going to pursue first?” The guns everywhere crowd LOVE to make threats, they like to remind people how well armed they are, how viciously they will respond and how serious they are. They even do it online, on Facebook and in YouTube videos.

Now is the time to do some serious prosecution of the Bundy’s and their militant supporters. They were given multiple opportunities to walk away and they didn’t. The hard evidence against them has piled up, even their previous supporters have acknowledged they have gone too far.

I’m sick and tired of armed intimidation and threats being downplayed as not serious, spun as being part of “free speech”  or used as bargaining chips for future compliance.

When there are no arrests or prosecution for armed intimidation and threats, people get the idea it’s no big deal and they keep doing in it. That needs to stop.

For years the NRA has used the “Obama’s going to come and take our guns!” as a sales tool, even when he wasn’t.  Now, some of these same people, if tried and convicted, will lose their right to own guns for cause.  When they scream, “Obama came and took my guns!” the mainstream media can point to the photos and video of the threats and their actions. If they don’t, we should.

So now Cruz is the establishment? Ok.

by digby

That is a real tattoo on ratfucking king Roger Stone’s back. His reverence for his mentor Richard Nixon knows no bounds.

So what to make of this?

Who Is The Real Ted Cruz?

By Roger Stone

01/26/2016

Vladimir Lenin said, “There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”

I can’t think of a better description of Ted Cruz’s relationship with the DC-Wall Street Establishment – Cruz being the scoundrel of course. Cruz’s claim of not being a tool of the political elite is like Bill Clinton telling the world, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Webster’s definition of a scoundrel is a dishonest or unscrupulous person, and Cruz has become quite adroit at saying one thing while his history shows him doing the other. Rather than the outsider he claims to be, Ted Cruz is the ultimate insider, former top Bush 41 policy aide and globalist, Ivy Leaguer, and establishment insider.

Not many conservatives coming out of Princeton and Harvard. “I’m just sayin,’” Ted, as said in the debate.

There is no better example of this than Calgary Ted’s actions surrounding the big Wall Street banks and their secret funding of his political ascension. Cruz has been gorging at the table of the ultimate insider of all insiders – Goldman Sachs and Citibank .

You may recall in a recent Fox Business Network debate that Cruz, in Mr. Haney from Green Acres voice, declared to one of the moderators, “The opening question [moderator Jerry Seib] asked — would you bailout the big banks again — nobody gave you an answer to that. I will give you an answer — absolutely not.”

What else would you expect a scoundrel to say who had secretly secured big sweetheart loans from Goldman and Citibank — by leveraging his retirement accounts –– to fund his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Loans which the Calgary Ted conveniently forgot to disclose to the Federal Election Commission. These are the very retirement accounts that he said he and his wife said he cashed in to fund his senate race. In other words, Ted lied.

At the same time Ted’s bulging 2016 campaign accounts and supporting Super-PACs are stuffed with big oil and gas money. He knows how to play the game.

And perhaps the ultimate hypocrisy of the native born Canadian is that his spouse, Heidi, by all accounts a lovely wife and mother, has been employed by Goldman Sachs since 2005. She is on leave as managing director and regional head of private wealth management. Heidi is a proud member of the lefty Council on Foreign Relations, advocates of one world government and the New World Order.

Heidi is not a bit player in the Cruz campaign with those credentials but rather an integral part of the campaign’s fundraising efforts. As reported by CNN last year, “She works the phones the way she worked them when she was at Goldman,” said Chad Sweet, the Cruz campaign’s chairman, who recruited Heidi to work at the giant investment bank.”

Yet we are to believe that the big Wall Street banks have no leverage over Ted Cruz? Why didn’t Heidi Cruz resign from Goldman Sachs instead of taking a leave of absence? That’s like saying Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky have had no influence on Barack Obama.

The other inside connection that hits one like a baseball bat is the Bush connection.
Ted was George W.’s brain when he ran for President. A top policy adviser. Ted maneuvered for Solicitor General in Bush World but settled for a plum at the Federal Trade Commission. Ted’s a Bushman with deep ties to the political and financial establishment.

Ted and Heidi brag about being the first “Bush marriage” – they met as Bush staffers which ultimately led to marriage. Cruz was an adviser on legal affairs while Heidi was an adviser on economic policy and eventually director for the Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. Condi helped give us the phony war in Iraq.

Also conveniently missing from Heidi’s Wikipedia bio is her service as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative to USTR head Robert Zoellick. At USTR Heidi worked on U.S.-China trade policy- the one Donald Trump talks about so much.

And Chad Sweet, Ted Cruz’s campaign chairman, is a former CIA officer. Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s former Secretary of Homeland Security, hired Sweet from Goldman Sachs to restructure and optimize the flow of information between the CIA, FBI and other members of the national security community and DHS. Chertoff and Sweet co-founded the Chertoff Group upon leaving the administration.

A known tactic of the intelligence community is the use of strategic communications as a “soft power” weapon against it adversaries — the creation of false narratives by the effective use of all media — social, digital, newspaper, print, etc. Combined with denial and deception, it can be a potent force. Glenn Beck and Mark Levin are abetting this.

Despite his ability to lie with a straight face (sadly Nixonian) on his support for amnesty and TPP, he got nailed by Senator Marco Rubio on the debate. Acting like a prick in the U.S. Senate was the core of Ted’s disciplined effort to bury his old school ties and reinvent himself as a modern-day Jesse Helms and supposed Conservative outsider. It’s a ruse.

As we get closer to the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary, Cruz and his establishment puppet masters are engaged in an aggressive strategy against Trump. The false narrative of course being that Cruz is the outsider while Trump is the insider. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In its most simplistic terms – the power elite have no leverage over Trump – nothing.
Cruz, on the other hand, is the establishments quisling, spawned by the Bushes and controlled by Wall Street, who became a strident “outsider” only four years ago.

The U.S. Constitution does not defined “native born” citizen, nor have the courts. That Ted was eligible to run for office as a citizen only 15 months ago is weird. Trump’s right the Democrats would have a field day with Calgary Ted, the Manchurian, Canadian Candidate.

Don’t get me wrong. Ted Cruz is a smart, canny, talented guy who has run a great “long race” campaign. He aspires to be Reagan but trust me he’s Nixon. Right down the incredible discipline and smarts playing the political game. Ted Cruz is not who he appears to be. As the bible says, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” In this case we must beware a Canadian bearing gifts.

Not for nothing, Stone was also involved in the Bush “Brooks Brothers riot” down in Florida.

Stone seems to be saying that Nixon’s disdain for the east coast elites belongs to Trump because Cruz went to Princeton. But Cruz the establishment. Also Nixonian. Or something.

Conservative dogma is just a pile of code words randomly hurled at your enemy.

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A little insight from Perlstein

by digby

He’s interviewed by Slate about the Trump phenomenon and it’s as good as you would expect. An excerpt:

Do you think the things that Trump has been exploiting have always been exploitable, or do you think that some conditions, either in the Republican Party or the country at large, have changed and made Trump possible?

That’s a good question. I think that people who base their political appeal on stirring up the latent anger of, let’s just say, for shorthand’s sake, what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority,” know that they’re riding a tiger. Whether it was Richard Nixon very explicitly, when he was charting his political comeback after the 1960 loss, rejecting the John Birch Society. Or whether it was Ronald Reagan in 1978 refusing to align himself with something called the Briggs Initiative in California, which was basically an initiative to ban gay people from teaching, at a time when gays were being attacked in the streets. Or whether it was George W. Bush saying that Islam is a religion of peace and going to a mosque the week after 9/11. These Republican leaders have always resisted the urge to go full demagogue. I think they understood that if they did so, it would have very scary consequences. There was always this boundary of responsibility, the kind of thing enforced by William F. Buckley when he was alive.

I think that Donald Trump is the first front-runner in the Republican Party to throw that kind of caution to the wind. As demagogic as so much of the conservative movement has been in the United States, and full of outrageous examples of demagoguery, there’s always been this kind of saving remnant, or fear of stirring up the full measure of anger that exists.

Do you think that was because of a core of decency, or do you think, as you’re saying, that it’s like, “Holy shit, if we let the cat out of the bag, the consequences could be really scary for us and for the country”?

I try not to, as our friend W. said about Putin, look into people’s souls.

Fair enough.

But, by the same token, for a lot of these people growing up, the experience of Europe, and World War II, and fascism, was a living memory. I think there was this kind of understanding that civilization can often be precarious. I think people knew that, and people saw that, and as ugly as some of these folks could be, whether it was Ronald Reagan going after welfare queens, or Richard Nixon calling anti-war protesters “bums,” or George W. Bush basically engineering a conspiracy to get us into a war in Iraq, there was a certain kind of disciplining, an internal disciplining. I think that anyone who plays the game of American politics at that level knows this can be a very ugly country, that a lot of anger courses barely beneath the surface.

Let me tell you a story about Barry Goldwater. One of the first big things to happen in America, after the Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, in which he of course, famously said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” was the outbreak of a very frightening race riot in Harlem, in New York. As I wrote in my first book, people who were rioting in Harlem were rioting, of course, in response to the shooting of a black young person by a white cop. Barry Goldwater kind of stuck his finger in the air and said, “This is really frightening stuff.” He actually, in a meeting with Lyndon Johnson, literally said, “If my supporters start exploiting these riots and start exploiting racial turmoil in the United States to get me elected, I will withdraw from the presidential campaign.”

That’s a profound contrast to someone like Donald Trump, who literally began his campaign by proposing one of the most massive ethnic cleansings in the history of mankind. I mean, can you imagine what it would mean? People talk about Bernie Sanders’ program being radical and inconceivable. Can you imagine what would happen in the act of trying to deport 12 million human beings, if people start resisting?

Even if Trump merely wins the nomination and ultimately loses in the general election, there is a concern that we will have opened up Pandora’s box. One of the nice things about our politics, compared with places in Europe, is that we don’t have these quasi-fascists making serious runs for office.

Right, and exactly how it is different is something we don’t quite understand yet. That’s where the humility is necessary. I’ve thought about Donald Trump in the context of a sociological concept called herrenvolk democracy. Herrenvolk was a word coined by a sociologist in 1967 that basically means social democracy for the favored race as a way not of expanding liberty to the entire citizenry but drawing a line between the accepted in-group and the hated out-group. There is a tradition of fascist-tending political movements being quite forthright about the favored group. That’s what’s freaking out the people in the National Review set. National Review freaked out a while back because [Trump] had been so aggressive about using eminent domain and talking about how he didn’t hold property rights so sacred. This is a fundamental conservative idea. He breaks away from conservative policy. It’s a lot like what George Wallace was doing in Alabama. Conservatives were distrustful of him because he was perfectly fine about starting social programs as long as they didn’t help black people. Or it’s a lot like what you said—the neo-fascist right in Europe, which, of course, holds no intention of unwinding the welfare state in the way an American conservative would traditionally dream of.

If Trump is defeated, do you think the Republican Party can right itself, or do you think Trump has opened up a permanent wound?

[Pauses.] Let the record show that I’m speechless. I have no easy answers for this one. What would it mean to right the ship? You have some very profound and fundamental problems. You have every senator who has ever worked with Ted Cruz turning toward Donald Trump, because they can’t stand Cruz. You have much of the infrastructure of the conservative movement explicitly saying that Donald Trump is unacceptable. That’s a pretty profound breach, especially for liberals who are so used to seeing conservatives and Republicans as united strategic geniuses. Again, I have to end on that note of humility. Where was the original contradiction? Where did this come from? Is it, you know, really just this one guy with big hair? Is this situation the result of the failure of political economy as practiced by the Democrats and the Republicans? I don’t have any good answers, and anyone who does, I think, is being glib.

He’s right. Nobody knows where this goes.

I think he’s also right to say that the conservatives of the past knew from fascism and totalitarianism. They had seen it unfold all over the world and had witnessed the greatest global conflagration in human history.

Earlier today I was on John Fugelsang’s radio show and a caller from DC went on and on about how Roosevelt was an authoritarian tyrant and a racist.(He claimed that the Democratic party was socialist/communist as well.) He was being cute, of course, in that typical snotty Tucker Carlson style. But the way he deployed this silly line was indicative of someone who thinks this stuff is just part of an abstract political sparring match. The younger generation of movement conservatives don’t feel the danger in unleashing this demagogic beast the way the older ones did.

They benefitted from hate, to be sure. But by using the dogwhistle they at least signalled that there was no room for open white nationalism in political discourse. Today dogwhistles are called “political correctness”.

Turning over the GOP rock

by digby

I’ve been writing a lot about the Trump campaign shining a light on the right’s big secret: most of their followers don’t give a damn about their “ideology.” It’s one of the most fascinating political developments in my lifetime.  It’s like the GOP rock has been turned over and the ugly truth is spilling out.

Even movement leaders are forgetting themselves and just blurting out what they really think:

Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly and Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt have both opposed immigration reform on the grounds that new citizens will overwhelmingly vote Democratic and, in Pratt’s words, “vote to take away our guns.” So it was no surprise that when Schlafly joined Pratt on his radio show this weekend, the discussion eventually turned to how immigrants don’t understand America and so will never vote Republican.

Schlafly started things out by alleging that the political problems of conservatives stem from the fact that “we’ve taken in millions of people who have no concept of the whole idea of limited government” and who “don’t even know what it means or have a desire to be American.”

Pratt agreed that we are “bringing in people who have never had any tradition of, never been schooled in what it means to have a limited government” and that “folks coming abroad are all natural Democrats, they’re looking, as you say, for big government, that’s their whole idea of what government is about, it’s there to give them more and more things.”

He added that Democrats are “eagerly bringing in these immigrants who at best don’t have an idea of what it means to be an American if they were to become one and may well be terrorists.”

“You know, I have friends who came in long ago,” Schlafly said, “and they told me with pride that after they got off the boat at Ellis Island to immigrate, their parents would stand them up and say, ‘And now we’re in America and we’re going to be Americans and we’re going to learn English and we’re going to learn a whole new set of laws and this is our country now, we’re going to be American.’ But you don’t find these immigrants saying this today.”

Now, she said, “anybody can come, no matter how much you hate us, no matter how you have no concept about limited government and the rule of law and the things that we believe in.”

Pratt added that this problem was especially acute with Muslim immigrants because “they’re taught from the Koran, they’re taught to hate people like us, they’re taught to want to kill people like us, and to the extent that they don’t, that’s taqiyya, that’s just a temporary lying to get along until they are tactically and strategically in a position to strike.”

Phyllis Schlafly is an OG movement conservative.  And it turns out that she’s just another bigot. Surprise.

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QOTD: A sad conservative intellectual



by digby

Conservative writer Matt Lewis on MSNBC earlier today:

“In “Too Dumb to Fail” I talk about how the evangelicals joining the Republican Party changed it. I think it’s important that people of faith be involved in politics. I wrote about William Wilberforce, one of my heroes who had a religious conversion and ended up leading the fight against slavery and the slave trade in britain. It’s a great example of how people of faith can make a positive difference. 

But I also think that here in America since at least the Scopes Monkey Trial, the evangelical movement has involved quite a bit of anti-intellectualism and has contributed to the dumbing down of the Republican Party.

And sadly when you look at the fact that a lot of evangelicals in Iowa seem to prefer Donald Trump this thrice married casino magnate to someone like Ted Cruz who, say what you will about ted Cruz, but I think he’s the real deal when it comes to Christian conservatives. The fact that a lot of evangelicals in Iowa are supporting Trump I think speaks to the fact that they’re prioritizing the culture war over their faith values.

He went on to say:

I think it’s really unfortunate that people would rather have Donald Trump, somebody who really doesn’t stand for much at all as far as we can tell, who has a liberal background. This is a guy who attracts a lot of unseemly characters and I think he has stoked this sort of xenophobic nationalist know-nothing trend and, in fact, if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee I worry it would redefine what it would mean to be a conservative. It would become being about this populist, white identity politics thing.

He’s very sad. And I can see why. But I’m afraid that ship sailed a long time ago, back when the GOP decided that the culture war was their ticket to success. People like Matt Lewis and the writers at the National Review all fooled themselves into believing their followers actually listened to all that crapola about “conservative ideology”.

They actually thought that when people would cheer at rallies when some politician said the words “tort reform!” that they were emotionally invested in the idea of restricting plaintiff lawsuits against big business. They didn’t know what it meant. They just cheered because they figured it meant Republicans were going to stick it to someone they hate.

At least half of the GOP base was always motivated to become conservatives because they believed it was dedicated to beating the shit out of blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, hippies and feminazis and protecting their ability to drive Hummers and pack heat. The rest was just white noise. Trump is finally articulating their philosophy upfront and without apology.

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Jeb Bush’s donors are getting restless

by digby

The donors are getting restless:

There were stays at boutique hotels featuring rooftop pools, private soirees at members-only, jacket-and-tie clubs and fundraisers at the Four Seasons, the St. Regis and the Mandarin Oriental.

In the world of Jeb Bush, the campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination has at times been a whirl of private planes and high-end affairs, according to the federal filings of Bush’s campaign and his Super PAC, Right to Rise, which can raise unlimited funds for Bush as long as it does not coordinate directly with him.

It is not unusual for U.S. presidential candidates to fly private or even sometimes stay in luxury hotels. But some disgruntled donors say they are unhappy with Bush’s large outlays, which also include big spending on staff and tens of millions of dollars in ad buys.

Eleven of 16 major donors contacted by Reuters questioned whether it was money well spent, especially given how the one-time frontrunner has stumbled badly in the polls and is now facing questions about whether he should withdraw from the race.

Ad-tracking firm SMG Delta says Bush’s campaign and Right to Rise have spent $82 million on ads, significantly more than the three leading candidates in the Republican race: Donald Trump ($5 million); Senator Ted Cruz ($11 million) and Senator Marco Rubio ($49 million). The tracking firm’s data is more up to date than what has been reported so far in the federal filings.

“There is no return on investment on the Bush ad buys, zero,” said one high-dollar donor who asked not to be named, pointing to how the ads have done little, at least so far, to lift Bush in the polls or dent his opponents.

Bush campaigns have always spent lavishly. And the press loves them for it. Recall Margaret Carlson’s fodn memories of the 2000 campaign — and why they preferred to cover W:

“There were Dove bars and designer water on demand,” she recalls, “and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.”

Gore wanted the snacks to be environmentally and nutritionally correct, but somehow granola bars ended up giving way to Fruit Roll-Ups and the sandwiches came wrapped and looked long past their sell-by date. On a lucky day, someone would remember to buy supermarket doughnuts. By contrast, a typical day of food on Air Bush…consisted of five meals with access to a sixth, if you count grazing at a cocktail bar. Breakfast one was French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon…”

It hasn’t helped him in the polls so far, but if he makes a miraculous comeback you can be sure the press will be thrilled. And I’d guess the donors won’t complain either. It’s not really about the money — they have so much this is just pocket change. They just don’t like being embarrassed.

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Poor Roger Ailes.  Turns out Fox just another corrupt establishment institution

by digby

I wrote about the Fox-Trump debate today for Salon:

Conservatives conceptions of “strength” and “cowardice” are deeply irrational. The last debate was dominated by candidates trying to prove how strong they are by bragging about who is the most scaredest of all of the scary, scary terrorists hiding under the bed. “Strength” for conservatives is not really about actual bravery or calm under fire, but about bluster.

Under the circumstances, throwing a bratty tantrum and refusing to be at the debate fits into conservative notions of “strength” far more than the alternative, which is showing up and meekly submitting to questioning.

“They can’t toy with me like they do with anybody else. Let’s see how they do with the ratings.”

In a call on Saturday with a FOX News executive, [Trump campaign manager Corey] Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a ‘rough couple of days after that last debate’ and he ‘would hate to have her go through that again.’

I don’t think there’s fear, and I don’t think it’s disrespect for the people of Iowa. This is what it looks like when some guy stands up to the rules and the game and says, “Screw yours; I’m looking out for me first. That’s all this is. And you can say whatever you want, but I am not dumb. I’m not gonna give you the gun and the bullet and stand still. You want to hit me, come get me, but I’m not gonna put myself in your line of fire.” That’s what he’s doing, if you ask me.

More at the link. Another Republican institution bites the dust?

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Voter id, not voter ID
by Tom Sullivan

Flickr photo by whizchickenonabun via Creative Commons.

All this time and money Republicans spent trying to game elections in this country seems wasted. They erected hurdles to voting in state after state, from evil-genius gerrymandering to voter IDs to slashing early voting and same-day registration to shorting voting machines in minority precincts. They could have just asked Trump. Voter id, not voter ID may determine this election.

New York magazine surveyed 100 Republican primary voters. They were all over the ideological map. The one phrase that seemed to encapsulate the voters’ mood in choosing a candidate is “testicular fortitude”:

The phrase seemed telling. If there was anything almost all of the respondents sought in a candidate, it was that testicular fortitude — or, in less colorful terms, strength. It’s why Trump has steamrolled his rivals despite his ideological inconsistencies as a Republican. And it’s why Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have failed to connect: Being labeled a nerd in this GOP primary is the kiss of death; being cast as a sissy is even worse. Machismo even seems to be Carly Fiorina’s best selling point.

This attraction to strength seems to be connected to an inchoate sense that the world is falling apart. The voters we spoke to were concerned about a lot of potential threats — terrorist, economic, and cultural — and hoped that a strong president would protect them from dangers within as well as from abroad. Voters said they no longer felt free to be themselves in their own country — policed in their speech, unable to pray publicly or even say “God bless you” when someone sneezes. “Everything’s so p.c.,” said Priscilla Mills, a 33-year-old hospital coordinator from Manchester. “And then the second you do say something, you’re a racist.” Trump, who had 21 percent of the vote in our small sample, has capitalized the most on the political-correctness grievance, which is likely to surface in the general election no matter who becomes the nominee.

It’s classic Lakoff. If Democrats are the mommy party, Republicans are the daddy party. They want a tough, big daddy capable of protecting them from this season’s “Big Bad.” Seemingly, the bad is everywhere — immigrants, economic insecurities, terrorists.

The conservative movement is both outdone and undone by Trump. They have sold candidates based on deep, sometimes subliminal fears for decades, the way Madison Avenue sells mouthwash and dandruff shampoo. Except movement conservatives are amateur “Professor Marvels” living on wingnut welfare. They sell tax cuts and a return to the gold standard out of their wagons, or whatever snake oil brings billionaire dollars into conservative think tanks. Trump is a professional with truck balls on his luxury wagon. He really does know the crowned heads of Europe (or they know him). The GOP is seriously outclassed when it comes to Trump. Of course, that is not meant in the Fred Astaire sense.

Trump’s voters prefer his lack of a filter to their own pretense that what really matters to them is family values or Christian values or all the small-government twaddle they’ve been spoon fed by movement conservatives for decades. As Digby pointed out yesterday at Salon, those simply function as tribal shibboleths or team colors. They grew up in a dominant, white America with moxie and confidence. Back when neocons could boast, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Movement conservatism has failed them. Sarah Posner wrote at Rolling Stone, even evangelicals want to even the score. They want to get back the eye of the tiger. They want Rocky III. Trump promises to give it to them.

What will they do when they find out that like a high school jock’s locker room bragging, Trump is all talk and no show?

Wingnut Welfare steals from Wounded Warriors

by digby

This shouldn’t be surprising. It’s par for the course. These wingnutty “charities” are often scams, particularly the ones that target the older folks. This one is really egregious:

In early 2014, after 10 years of rapid growth, the charity Wounded Warrior Project flew its roughly 500 employees to Colorado Springs for an “all hands” meeting at the five-star Broadmoor hotel.

They were celebrating their biggest year yet: $225 million raised and a work force that had nearly doubled in just a year. On the opening night, before three days of strategy sessions and team-building field trips, the staff gathered in the hotel courtyard. Suddenly, a spotlight focused on a 10-story bell tower where the chief executive, Steven Nardizzi, stepped off the edge and rappelled down toward the cheering crowd.

That evening is emblematic of the polished and well-financed image cultivated by the Wounded Warrior Project, the country’s largest and fastest-growing veterans charity.

Since its inception in 2003 as a basement operation handing out backpacks to wounded war veterans, the charity has evolved into a fund-raising giant, taking in more than $372 million in 2015 alone — largely through small donations from people over 65.

[…]

It has spent millions a year on travel, dinners, hotels and conferences that often seemed more lavish than appropriate, more than four dozen current and former employees said in interviews. Former workers recounted buying business-class seats and regularly jetting around the country for minor meetings, or staying in $500-per-night hotel rooms.

The organization has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years on public relations and lobbying campaigns to deflect criticism of its spending and to fight legislative efforts to restrict how much nonprofits spend on overhead.

About 40 percent of the organization’s donations in 2014 were spent on its overhead, or about $124 million, according to the charity-rating group Charity Navigator. While that percentage, which includes administrative expenses and marketing costs, is not as much as for some groups, it is far more than for many veterans charities, including the Semper Fi Fund, a wounded-veterans group that spent about 8 percent of donations on overhead. As a result, some philanthropic watchdog groups have criticized the Wounded Warrior Project for spending too heavily on itself.

It’s fitting that Donald Trump, the biggest scam in wingnut history, is holding a fundraiser for veterans tomorrow night opposite the Fox debate. Who knows, if he’s feeling generous he might even let the money go to the veterans.

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