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Month: March 2016

QOTD: Senator Brian Schatz

Published by digby on March 10, 2016

QOTD: Senator Brian Schatz

by digby

The Democratic Senator from Hawaii on the GOP caucus results in his state last night:

“Makes my stomach churn that Trump, who spoke favorably about the reprehensible internment of Japanese Americans, won Hawaii.”

Yeah, well, that’s what people like about Trump. He “speaks his mind” and “acts like a leader.” He’s going to make America great again:

“War is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore.”

Now say the Trump pledge everyone …

In the face of a dark future, where’s hope? @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on March 10, 2016

In the face of a dark future, where’s hope? 


by Spocko

I really enjoyed the recent GOP debate. It had the highest LPMs (Laughs Per Minute) of any Presidential debate in history. But after the laughs, it must have been depressing to see your fellow humans campaigning to get rid of environmental protections and your EPA.

Science News, photo by Todd McInturf/The Detroit News via AP

If my human emotions ruled me, I would be very depressed about the future of America right now.  Fortunately my rational, logical, activist side is in control, so I’m fine.

When I see tiny humans being poisoned, with no urgent steps taken to solve the problem, I wonder, “What is wrong with you humans?” Even the Borg protect their babies!

A healthy baby Borg. Resistance to its cuteness is futile

When you poison your own people, deny the science that shows the problem and then don’t race to fix it–the Galactic community wonders if classifying humans as sentient was the right move.

Fortunately, there are humans who are working to solve your problems and help others. Some of these people have a more optimistic view of the future than others, so when dark headlines fill my tricorder, I find them to listen to, read and watch.  One of them is Hugo awarding-winning author Charlie Jane Anders.

Last week I went to Kelper’s Books in Menlo Park, California to listen to my friend Angie Corio interview Anders.
 Charlie Jane talked about her new book “All The Birds In The Sky,”  She also talked about writing, science fiction on TV and in movies and her job as editor-in-chief at the science, science fiction and fantasy site io9.com. I was especially interested in her work a few years ago on Project Hieroglyph and the anthology that came out of it.

Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future
“This anthology unites twenty of today’s leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries—among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson—to contribute works of “techno-optimism” that challenge us to dream and do Big Stuff.”

I’ve read lots of apocalyptic science fiction so I asked her, “I’m glad you are optimistic about the future. Why is so much scifi distopic and dark? What role does science fiction play in setting a tone for the future?” She made three main points:

  1. There are fads in science fiction, this is one. Hunger Games made a lot of money so they make more.
  2. If you are trying to think realistically about our near to medium future, there are reasons to be pessimistic. If you deny that you are writing fantasy, not science fiction.
  3. We will figure this out. Being optimistic doesn’t mean burying your head in the sand, or assuming we’ll invent new  technology to easily solve the problems. She talked about creating her short story, The Day it All Ended, where things got really bad because of climate change.

    For that story she talked to scientists about solutions and what we can do to mitigate the damage, such as how to sequester carbon from the air in a way that is safe and makes sense.

The audio link of that exchange is here, You can listen to the podcast of the entire interview here on Corio’s InDeepRadio website .

Radio host Angie Corio in conversation with science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders at Kelper’s Books in Menlo Park

In my view the importance of showing a positive view of the future cannot be understated. In the Star Trek universe we saw how technology could destroy, but also create. We saw the benefits of diversity where humans of multiple races and genders worked with aliens. (In this case aliens from other planets, not countries–bonk bonk on the head with the message Gene.)

The show had stories of people working together with a common goal of discovery and exploration. It was important then, and is now, to see a future in which we don’t destroy our planet and our species.

We can survive and thrive in the future, not only by inventing and using new technology, but by finding and supporting the people who fight for–and write about–a brighter future.

Even his billionaire peers call him “Mr Trump”

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Even his billionaire peers call him “Mr Trump”

by digby

Ernie Boch’s Martha’s Vineyard estate

From Raw Story, more evidence that rich men are not necessarily very bright, here’s billionaire Trump supporter Ernie Boch:

“What I think is almost comical at this point is it seems like everybody is telling you not to vote for this gentleman,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before in any election, local, national — it’s the fortitude that Mr. Trump has to keep going and try to change this country. It’s amazing. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Trump since the 80s.”

Boch was then asked what specific policies he thought Trump would fight for that would benefit the country.

“I think he’s the right guy for the job… government waste, I think, is a big issue. I think he can save the U.S. a lot of money with government waste,” Boch replied.

“I think it’s time for a guy like this in the White House. It’s only four years. Let’s give him a shot.”

Boch later added that Trump supporters were endorsing “the man” — not his policies. “They want him in there.”

I think he’s right about that. For the most part they just like him and they hate the people he hates. It’s not complicated.

Watch the whole thing. It will wake you up.

*And, by the way, did anyone ever dream that car dealers could become billionaires? That just doesn’t seem right …

Meanwhile, planet earth

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Meanwhile, planet earth

by digby

While we were all watching Donald Trump demonstrate the massive size of his big swinging “hands” on national television, this happened:

The temperature of the lowest section of the atmosphere hit its highest level on record in February, as estimated by weather satellites.

The planet was 0.83 degrees Celsius warmer than the long-term average, according to Roy Spencer, research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who worked with John Christy to develop the original analysis of satellite-derived global temperatures.

The February reading is remarkable in that it rose almost 0.3 degrees from the warmest level in January on record, established last month. Incredibly, land areas outside the tropics in the Northern Hemisphere were a “whopping” 1.46 degrees C above average, 0.5 degrees above any previous monthly anomaly, Spencer said.

The record-setting February reading represents an inconvenient data point for those that claim the Earth isn’t warming.

You’ll note that this phenomenon is completely absent from our political discussion.

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What Trump leaves out of his vaunted populist pitch

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

What Trump leaves out of his vaunted populist pitch

by digby

Trump’s apartment


According to the latest Washington Post poll Trump’s support is best categorized this way:

Overall, Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the federal government. Two in 3 offer negative reactions, including about a fifth who describe themselves as angry; Trump has tapped into that mood. The more dissatisfied that people are with the federal government, the more they are likely to support his candidacy. 

A similarly strong majority see the political system today as dysfunctional, even slightly more so than in the fall. Trump does best among those who feel most strongly about the way the system works…. 

A similar pattern holds for two of Trump’s most controversial ideas — deporting all of the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country as a security precaution. Overall, Americans oppose both, while more Republicans favor than oppose them. Trump has big leads among those who support those policies, but those leads disappear among opponents.

He’s also against bad trade deals that have been “negotiated by a bunch of babies” who have advantaged foreign governments instead of the good old USA.

What’s missing from this critique? Even the slightest criticism of American corporations. Not one word is ever uttered that indicated American businesses bear the slightest responsibility for what’s happened to the working man. It’s all inept government bureaucrats and foreign countries.

Just saying.

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Trump’s suckers

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Trump’s suckers

by digby

I wrote about The Donald’s appeal to the working man for Salon today:

Once again, just as everyone was ready to declare him yesterday’s news, Donald Trump scored wins last night in Mississippi, Michigan and Hawaii, and if the media’s ecstatic attention to his every word in his insufferable “victory press conference” is any indication, he’s back in the saddle in a big way.
Trump spared the nation any more talk about his “big hands,” but he did brag about everything else, obviously feeling much more energized than he was in his desultory press conference last Saturday night. He strutted and preened, showed off all his brands, boasted about his golf swing and proclaimed himself the obvious winner of the general election by virtue of his vast property holdings around the country. It was one of his most confident performances — and that’s saying something.
His appeal remains quite broad across the Republican electorate, but much of the chatter afterwards was focused on his alleged affinity with Michigan’s white working class which was taken as a sign that he had a unique path to victory in the fall. There’s no doubt that Trump does very well among that group and it’s worth taking a look at why that is. After all, a megalomaniacal billionaire blowhard seems like an unlikely working class hero.
Nate Silver laid out an interesting analysis earlier this week of six cohorts of the American electorate and how they tend to vote. (It’s from within a larger piece about how Michael Bloomberg would have taken more votes from Democrats than Republicans and thus likely insured a Trump victory.)
The model, which is built on data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, divides the American electorate into six roughly equal groups:
African-Americans (12 percent of voting population): extremely Democratic-leaning.
Hispanic, Asian, “other” and mixed races (14 percent): Also strongly Democratic leaning, especially in recent elections.
White evangelicals (23 percent): Strongly Republican.
White cosmopolitans (20 percent): These are white, non-evangelical voters who favor both gay marriage and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally. They’re a highly Democratic-leaning group, mostly concentrated in urban areas and college towns.
White “picket fence” voters (15 percent): These are whites who are neither evangelicals nor cosmopolitans, but have high socioeconomic status as indicated by income, education levels, home ownership and other factors. This is a largely suburban, center-right group who went for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama about 2 to 1 in the previous election.
White working-class voters (16 percent): Whites who are neither evangelicals norcosmopolitans, and have lower socioeconomic status. Once a good group for Democrats, they now vote Republican about 2 to 1.
This shows the two coalitions pretty clearly. The Democrats are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, urban coalition with a few suburbanites and a few members of the white working class. The Republican coalition is made up entirely of evangelical, suburban and working class white people.
What’s striking about this is that while Republicans have certainly taken up the cause of the Christian Right, the other two GOP cohorts have not materially benefited from Republican policies. There may be a few upper middle class whites who like those big tax cuts, but Republicans have offered very little in the way of economic benefits to the middle class suburbanites. Obviously, they get their votes for other reasons.
But what can you say about the working class? They have not only been brutalized by the changes brought about by globalization; the Republicans have gone out of their way to make things worse. Not that Democrats have solved their problems by any means, but they do support workplace safety, environmental rules, raising the minimum wage, universal health care, child tax credits among many other benefits for working people. Republicans promise to reverse all those things and more. Yet many of these people always vote for them anyway. It’s the perennial question: What’s the matter with the working class whites?
Perhaps, like so much else in American life, we simply have to observe that the working class in America is no longer majority white. Retail workers and food service and hospitality and a lot of other working class jobs are held by people of color, many of them women, and they do vote for the party that at least tries to make a material difference in their lives. As it turns out, Democrats are still the party of the working class; it’s just not all that white anymore. And that’s why the white working class rejects them. They do not want to be a member of that particular club if it’s allowing those “other” people to be in it. Nonetheless, even though they are despised by these voters, Democrats still keep pushing for policies that will make their lives better.
In this cycle these voters are enthusiastically turning to Donald Trump, who promises to deport millions and “make America great again.” Some people think that it’s not his authoritarian racism and xenophobia that draws them but rather it’s because he promises to “renegotiate trade deals.” And maybe some of them are. But they should listen to what he’s really saying.
We’re going to make America great again — we’re going to did it the old-fashioned way. We’re going to beat China, Japan, beat Mexico at trade.
We’re going to beat all of these countries that are taking so much of our money away from us on a daily basis. It’s not going to happen anymore. We have the greatest people in the world. We have political hacks negotiating our deals for billions and billions and billions of dollars. Not going to happen anymore. We’re going to use the finest business people in the world. We are going to do something so good and so fast and so strong and the world is going to respect us again, believe me.
He’s going to use “the finest business people in the world” to make these trade deals. And all those working stiffs who have heard nonsense about “job creators” all these years apparently still think this will accrue to their benefit. Trump rarely talks about jobs. And he rarely talks about wages. But when he does, it should alarm working people. In an early debate he was honest about what he felt needed to be done:
“Our taxes are too high. Our wages are too high. We have to compete with other countries.”
He repeated it two days later on Fox News:
“Whether it’s taxes or wages, if they’re too high we’re not going to be able to compete with other countries.”
He has since walked it back,  but when you look at the totality of his “economic plan,” there is little doubt that the priority for him is not workers; it’s making business profitable for American companies. And those two unfiltered comments make it quite clear what he thinks is necessary for that to happen: more worker exploitation.
It’s environmental exploitation as well. Here’s one of Trump’s standard talking points:
China is building in the South China Sea massive military bases. Right? Why? They’re not supposed to. They have no respect for Obama or our country. They’re not supposed to be doing that. And you could get them to stop just by saying “We’re not doing business with you anymore.” Their whole economy would – you don’t have to go to war. It’s economics. The whole country would collapse in two seconds. Believe me. We have such power and we don’t know it.
But they’re building massive – now, they had little islands. They put the biggest escavators, not Caterpillars. I think they’re using Komatsu from Japan…They have these massive escavators, and I said to a friend of mine who’s Chinese from China – very rich guy, very successful guy, paid me a fortune for an apartment so I happen to like him, okay? – I said jokingly “How long did it take them to do these massive islands they’re building right out of the sea? Boom, those shovels go in, take out everything. How long did it take you to get the environmental impact statements?” He laughed. He said, “What are you kidding me? Nothing.” They say “We will build there.” About two seconds later, you have escavators digging.
Setting aside the inanity of claiming that “we” (apparently meaning the government) could commandeer all of American business to declare they would not do business in China until it shows America some “respect,” clearly part of what Trump is talking about when he says he’ll make America great again is eliminating environmental protections for the benefit of corporations.
I’m skeptical that most of these voters are really moved by Trump’s trade policies, their xenophobia is cultural not economic. This Trump voter from Texas  explains what’s really bothering them:
Where we live, those people down there are so fed up, they don’t know what do. We go into Wal-Mart and they’re speaking Spanish. And we turn around, my husband and I, and say, ‘We’re in China!’
But to the extent that any of these white working class folks truly are looking for someone who will end globalization and free trade agreements, they’d better watch their wallets if Trump is the guy doing the negotiations. He may know something about “the art of the deal” but his goal is to help business not workers. And that’s no different than anything Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or any other Republican has ever wanted to do.

Rubio’s death spiral

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Rubio’s death spiral

by digby

This is just getting embarrassing now:

Marco Rubio has found the bottom of the Republican field just two weeks after making a strong move to try to rise to the top of it. 

After finishing second in South Carolina and Nevada, the Florida senator took off the gloves and directly challenged Donald Trump, first on the debate stage and then in a zinger-filled series of campaign stops in which he hammered the front-runner as a “con artist” unfit for the White House and even mocked his “spray tan.” 

But Rubio failed to pick up a single delegate in Mississippi or Michigan on Tuesday, placing dead last with single digits in both states and disappointing the elite Republicans who rallied to his side as a way to block Trump from winning the nomination. He placed a distant third in Idaho and Hawaii. 

The poor performance also raised doubts about whether Rubio could win his crucial home state of Florida at a time when he desperately needs to start winning. The March 15 winner-take-all contest awards 99 delegates and is one of the best chances to stop Trump from gathering the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

They’e going to blame it on his inexplicable decision to throw himself over a cliff and try to out-insult Trump but the truth is that he was toast after that New Hampshire debate glitch. He hadn’t been burning up the polling up until then but he’d escaped from the establishment pile-up ad could, at least, have been in Kasich’s position. But that thing he did was so weird that it permanently tarred him. It was an epic campaign moment.

Some day Rubio may overcome it.  But at the moment he will be remembered for three things and two of them happened on national TV with many millions of people watching: that weird water thing after the State of the Union and the robot glitch in the debate. Unfortunately, the other one is that he made a joke about the size of Donald Trump’s “hands.”

These are not big things and certainly shouldn’t knock him out of politics. (His throwback policies should.) But they might. Sometimes a politician is just “off” and people can tell. I suspect Rubio is one of those guys.

Adios.

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Bonana fanna fo Fump by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 9, 2016

Bonana fanna fo Fump
by Tom Sullivan

It’s the blame game this morning as fingers point to who is to blame for the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Eric Boehlert of Hillary-friendly Media Matters examines how the media’s obsession with Donald Trump has yielded millions in free air time for the billionaire:

We seem to have entered unchartered territory where campaign coverage, at least Trump’s campaign coverage, is based on what’s popular (or what makes money for news outlets), and not based on what’s newsworthy. Casting aside decades of precedent, campaign journalism seems to have almost consciously shifted to a for-profit model.

[…]

Writing at The Observer, Ryan Holiday suggested a new paradigm is in play this campaign season:

Politicians have always sought to manipulate the public. What’s changed is that media is now not only a willing co-conspirator, they are often the driving force behind the manipulation. No longer seeing itself as responsible for reporting the truth, for getting the facts to the people, it has instead incentivized a scrum, a wild fight for attention in which anything that attracts an audience is fair game. And as long as theirs is the ring where the fight goes down, they’ll happily sell tickets to as many as will come.

True. But who produced the show? Dana Milbank at the Washington Post says the GOP should blame themselves. Sure, the media has been complicit (emphasis mine):

The bigger problem among journalists covering Trump is the moral neutrality in the reporting. News organizations apply to him the same type of horse-race reporting that they do to conventional candidates: driven by polls, defining who’s up and who’s down, who won the news cycle and who lost. Trump’s moves are often described as “brilliant.” But while it may be tactically brilliant of him to, say, propose a ban on Muslims entering the United States, it’s also deplorable. News organizations fear making such judgments would compromise their impartiality.

But that’s a small flaw compared with the chronic unwillingness of Republican leaders, and particularly Trump’s rivals, to take him on. Had they done so earlier, journalists would have followed their cues, and coverage would have been different. To blame the news media now for the GOP leaders’ own failings compounds their cowardice.

Rationalization. It’s what’s for breakfast. The fact is Trump sells soap. Seems to me the media and the parties are two facets of the same corporatization of human culture, public and private, a culture millennials see as having sold them out. Shawn Lawrence Otto addressed that issue a few days ago at Salon:

Considering Bill Clinton’s campaign’s strategic approach and what seems to have become an underlying philosophy, one can begin to understand the challenges Hillary Clinton is facing now that the landscape is changing. After a career in the political cross hairs, focus-testing messages against self-obsessed individuals with short-term horizons in order to eke out small gains from an intransigent opposition, Sanders’ talk of a political revolution must seem laughably naive.

But one can also see why this approach, and the underlying assumptions of the market-driven self-gratifying, short-term consumer culture that inform it, is posing major challenges to the old Clinton paradigm, and why Hillary needs a new approach if she is to truly seize the potential that is there in the electorate. Because it’s a different economy, stupid, something Sanders seems to recognize more intuitively than Clinton.

As parties and press alike ask who is to blame for a huckster hustling his branded steaks, wine and magazine during his victory speech, they cannot see that Trump is a creature of the same water they swim in. Bernie Sanders’ edge is he never learned to swim.

Cancer in plain sight

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Cancer in plain sight

by digby

This has got Fox News all wound up:

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria offered some commentary on his show Sunday about the rise of Donald Trump in the GOP and its similarities to the rise of Islamic extremism.

Zakaria said, “A main cause of the rise of extremism in the world of Islam has been the cowardice of Muslim moderates who, for decades, chose not to condemn bad ideas and ugly rhetoric.”

He believes they made the dire mistake of avoiding the “cancer in plain sight” and there is “a similar dynamic” at play in the conservative world.

Zakaria argued that the very same people trashing Trump these days aided and abetted his rise by, over the years, embracing “the rhetoric and tactic of the extremes.”

He said that their refusal to acknowledge there was anything wrong with the GOP feeding “the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism, and population” led to a candidate who has “unashamedly” embraced all of it.

I didn’t think you were allowed to say this sort of thing in America. Comparing the Republicans to the Taliban was once considered completely beyond the pale. And here’s Zakaria comparing them to ISIS! The right doesn’t like it one bit but they aren’t in any position to complain now are they? Trump has been endorsing torture and coming very close to saying he’d get into the beheading business if he could. He says Americans need to be savages to fight savages. It’s pretty hard to argue that this comparison is out of bounds.

It looks like Trump’s campaign has had the effect of blowing up all kinds of shibboleths.

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Your stupid of the day

Published by digby on March 9, 2016

Your stupid of the day

by digby

Actually, of the century.

This fellow is considered one of the right’s leading intellectuals. I’m not kidding.

And people wonder how the party ended up with this freak show.

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