Skip to content

Month: March 2016

Reaping the whirlwind by @BloggersRUs

Reaping the whirlwind
by Tom Sullivan


Photo by Evan-Amos (Own work)
[CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The party in a lather over Hillary Clinton’s email server is poised to nominate a candidate who last week boasted he would issue criminal orders to the military, orders that violate their oaths as soldiers and his own as president. “If I say, ‘Do it,’ they’re going to do it,” he assured us. William Saletan writes, “This wasn’t a gaffe. It was a casual promise of dictatorship.”

Donald Trump quickly retracted his statement and acknowledged he would be bound by laws and treaties as president. Next January, if Trump raises his right hand and swears to defend the Constitution, how can his left hand go on the Bible with his fingers crossed behind his back? As he says, everything is negotiable.

It should be clear by now (if it was not already) that the vaunted principles and values espoused by many Americans are equally negotiable. Movement conservatives and their think tanks are finding to their chagrin that Trump’s supporters give not a fig for small government and lower taxes so much as they value machismo and promises to exact retribution on disfavored Others. Trump’s campaign has proven again that in America our convictions are a mile wide and an inch deep. We are better at boasting about them than sticking to them.

Saletan continues:

These Republican are willing to call Trump a con man and a liberal. They’re willing to use his CNN interview about the Klan as an argument against his electability. But they’re not willing to call out his bigoted statements about ethnic and religious minorities, because on those matters, too many voters are on his side. In the past month, exit polls in seven Republican primaries have asked whether Muslims who are not U.S. citizens should be barred from entering the United States. On average, more than 70 percent of voters have said yes.

Trump’s threat to the republic isn’t just sectarian. It’s also constitutional and military. Last week, to punish “hit pieces” by the New York Times and Washington Post, he threatened to “open up our libel laws.” “With me, they’re not protected,” Trump told a cheering crowd. Cruz, who pledges in every speech to defend the Second Amendment, had nothing to say about Trump’s assault on the First. Meanwhile, Rubio, who’s running as the candidate of national security, has made Trump’s volatility a punch line in his stump speech: “You have a lunatic in North Korea with access to nuclear weapons. We have a lunatic in America trying to get access to nuclear weapons, too.” Audiences laugh, and Rubio smiles. But if he were serious about protecting the country, Rubio wouldn’t treat Trump’s candidacy as a joke. He would speak up when the Republican front-runner, on the debate stage, threatens to issue illegal military orders.

But no. That would require something stouter than cosmetic principles. Or a political philosophy with more moral depth than winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Among Trump’s supporters and his fellow GOP candidates, both are in short supply.

Dan Balz writes this morning:

The sight of establishment Republicans recoiling at Trump strikes some analysts, particularly on the left, as ironic. These GOP critics see Trump’s appeal as the logical result of decades of efforts by the GOP to discredit government and more recently of the party leadership’s passive acceptance of virulent and in some cases racially tinged opposition to President Obama. Having sown the wind, the argument goes, the party now reaps the whirlwind.

And an authoritarian blowhard shall lead them.

All the glitter we can use: We Are Twisted F- – – -ing Sister! *** (and a Top 10 list)

Saturday Night at the Movies



All the glitter we can use: We Are Twisted F- – – -ing Sister! ***

(and a Top 10 list)


By Dennis Hartley



First off, there ain’t no such thing as an Easter Bunny, OK? And as much as we’d all like to believe in this new millennium of instant, “one-mouse-click-away” validation, there is no such thing as “overnight success” – especially in the music business. You may have heard of writer Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of practice” rule, which is equated as the minimum investment of time and effort required to master a field? Well…it’s true.


Consider pseudo-glam shock rockers Twisted Sister (I know…it’s been a while since you have). They may have appeared to come from nowhere with their breakout hit (and MTV staple) “We’re Not Gonna Take It” in 1984, but by that time the band had already labored in the trenches (i.e., the Jersey/Connecticut/L.I./Westchester County circuit) for 12 years.


Those first 10,000 hours of dive bar stage time are chronicled in an entertaining (if slightly overlong at 135 minutes) documentary from Andrew Horn called We Are Twisted Fucking Sister! (just out on We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!). Horn begins in 1972, which is when longest-running member, NYC-based guitarist Jay-Jay French, joins a glitter band from New Jersey who called themselves Silver Star. They become Twisted Sister the following year (French’s idea), and then go through a number of personnel changes before the key addition of lead singer Dee Snider in 1976, infusing stylistic changes that kick-start the gradual evolution into the version of T.S. we all know and love (or hate). Horn may be teasing for a sequel; he ducks out just as they are poised for their big break.


While I’ve never been a huge follower, I came away from the film with admiration for their stick-to-itiveness and stalwart dedication of their rabid fans. It’s especially impressive considering that they built a coterie of self-proclaimed “SMF”s (acronym for Sick Mother Fuckers) the old-fashioned way-one gig at a time…sans radio play or record company support (they didn’t snag a major label deal until 1983). And as footage from their club days reveals, they were one tight live act, from their Bowie medleys to their meta stage shtick (recalling The Tubes). In the age of American Idol and YouTube, it’s a reminder that paying your dues (putting in those 10,000 hours) still counts for something.



Don’t scrape the glitter off just yet! Here are my picks for the Top 10 glam rock movies:


Ballad of Mott the Hoople – Mott the Hoople never consciously set out to be a glam band, yet they remain synonymous with the era due to their brief association with David Bowie, who produced their 1972 album All the Young Dudes (and penned the eponymous hit single). But leading up to that period, the band had flirted with a number of genres, from country rock to proto-metal. And they already had a great in-house songwriter on board in pianist/lead vocalist Ian Hunter, whose influences were more Dylan than Bowie. Chris Hall and Mike Kerry’s documentary is a fairly comprehensive retrospective on the band, with great anecdotes from band members and tons of rare footage. Fans will love it.


Born To Boogie – Ringo Starr directed and produced this “lost” 1973 rock’n’roll cult film (meticulously restored and reissued direct-to-DVD in 2005), which captures late great T. Rex front man/glam icon Marc Bolan at the peak of his strutting, charismatic, androgynously beautiful rock god glory. Don’t expect an insightful portrait of the artist; it’s more of a “lightning in a bottle” capture of the era, highlighted by footage culled from two 1972 concerts. The original theatrical version released in the U.K. only ran just over an hour, but the DVD is lengthened by inclusion of both full performance sets. Film directing is not one of Ringo’s strongest suits; be prepared for some cringingly amateurish vignettes in between the song sets. Still, it’s a fascinating historical document.


Hedwig and the Angry Inch – It’s your typical love story. A German teen named Hansel (John Cameron Mitchell) falls head over heels for an American G.I., undergoes a (less than perfect) sex change operation so they can marry, and ends up seduced and abandoned in a trailer park. Now completely unanchored (geographically as well as sexually) the desperate Hansel opts for the only logical way out of this mess…by creating an alter-ego named Hedwig, putting a band together, and setting out to conquer the world. How many times have we heard that tired old tale? But seriously, this is an amazing tour de force on the part of Mitchell, who not only acts and sings his way through this wildly entertaining musical like nobody’s business, but directed and co-wrote (with composer Steven Trask; the same duo co-created the original stage version).


Jobriath A.D. – There have been a good number of “rags-to-riches-to-rags” show biz tales that played out to their inevitably sad denouement within the walls of New York City’s Chelsea Hotel…this may be the saddest one yet (and that’s saying a lot). That’s where one Bruce Wayne Campbell (aka Jobriath) checked out permanently in 1983, dead from AIDS at 36. As you learn in Kieran Turner’s documentary, it all began promisingly enough. Proclaimed a child prodigy due to his proficiency on piano, he made his show biz entrée in the late 60s, when he landed a plum role in the original west coast production of Hair, which he soon left to begin finding his own way as a singer-songwriter. In 1972, he was “discovered” by Carly Simon’s original manager, Jerry Brandt (either the savior or the villain of the piece, depending on who you believe). Before Bruce knew it, his newly forged persona of “Jobriath” had a two-record deal with Elektra, and was hyped as the “American David Bowie” and “True Fairy of Rock and Roll” before the public heard a note (no pressure). See it to discover how it all played out.


Mayor of the Sunset Strip – George Hickenlooper’s fascinating portrait of Sunset Strip fixture Rodney Bingenheimer (whose English Disco club served as the west coast HQ for the U.S. glam scene from 1972-1975) doubles as a whirlwind time trip through rock music’s evolution, filtered through a coked-out L.A. haze. The diminutive, skittish and soft-spoken Bingenheimer comes off like Andy Warhol’s west coast doppelganger. The ongoing photo montages of Rodney posing with an A-Z roster of (seemingly) every major seminal figure in rock’n’roll history recalls Woody Allen’s fictional Alfred Zelig, a nondescript milquetoast who could morph himself to match whomever he was with at the time. The film is peppered with appearances and comments from the likes of music producer Kim Fowley (whose whacked-out rock’n’roll career warrants his own documentary), Pamela des Barres (legendary super-groupie and former member of Frank Zappa protégés The GTO’s) and her husband, actor-musician Michael des Barres (who steals the show with priceless backstage tales). Brilliantly made, and essential viewing!


Phantom of The Paradise – To describe writer-director Brian DePalma’s 1974 horror schlock-rock musical take-off on The Phantom of the Opera as “over the top” would be understatement. Paul Williams (who composed the memorable soundtrack) chews all the available scenery as ruthless music mogul “Swan”, a man with a curious predilection for insisting his artists sign their (somewhat long-term) contracts in blood. One who becomes so beholden is Winslow (William Finely) a talented composer hideously disfigured in a freak accident (and that’s only the least of his problems). Jessica Harper plays the object of poor Winslow’s unrequited desire, who is slowly falling under Swan’s evil spell. Musical highlights include the haunting ballad “Old Souls” (performed by Harper, who has a lovely voice) and “Life at Last”, a glam rock number performed by “The Undead”, led by a scene-stealing, riotously campy Gerrit Graham as the band’s lead singer “Beef”.


Rocky Horror Picture Show – 40-odd years have not diminished the cult status of Jim Sharman’s film adaptation of Richard O’Brien’s original stage musical about a hapless young couple (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) who stumble into the lair of one Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) one dark and stormy night. O’Brien co-stars as the mad doctor’s hunchbacked assistant, Riff-Raff. Much singing, dancing, cross-dressing, axe-murdering, cannibalism and hot sex ensues-with broad theatrical nods to everything from Metropolis, King Kong and Frankenstein to cheesy 1950s sci-fi, Bob Fosse musicals, 70s glam-rock and everything in between. Runs out of steam a bit in the third act, but with such spirited performances (and musical numbers) you likely won’t notice.


Slade in Flame– Akin to Mott the Hoople, it may be arguable amongst music geeks as to whether Slade was truly “glam” (they were a bit on the “blokey” side- as the Brits would say), but they are nonetheless considered so in some circles, and this 1974 film was released during the heyday of space boots and glitter, so there you go. The directorial debut for Richard Loncraine (Brimstone and Treacle, The Missionary, Richard III) the film is a gritty, semi-biographical “behind the music” drama about a working-class band called Flame (suspiciously resembling the four members of Slade, wink-wink) who get chewed up and spit out of the star-making machine (this just in: managers and A & R people are back-stabbing weasels). Far from a masterpiece, but better than you’d expect, considering its non-professional cast (with the exception of Tom Conti, in his first film!).


Velvet Goldmine – You could call this the Citizen Kane of glam rock movies. While Todd Hayne’s 1998 love letter to the 70s glitter scene has its flaws (let’s just say that it plays hard and fast with its verisimilitudes) he gets credit for being one of the few latter-day filmmakers who has revisited the era with any palpable sense of earnestness. Obviously inspired by (as opposed to “based on”, which is an important distinction to make here) the professional and (and purely speculative) personal relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Set in the mid-1980s, the story concerns a British journalist (Christian Bale) assigned to uncover “whatever happened to” a 70s glam-rock star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in flashback) who may not be “dead” after all (long story). Ewan McGregor’s Iggy-ish character might hold the key. Also with Toni Collette. Reminiscent of The Hours and Times (a speculation on John Lennon and Brian Epstein’s relationship).


Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture – It’s fun to speculate if director D.A. Pennebaker had been given a clandestine “heads up” that he was about to capture what you might call Ziggy Stardust’s “retirement party” for posterity as he was setting up to film a 1973 David Bowie concert at London’s Hammersmith venue. It was news to Bowie’s backup band, The Spiders From Mars who (as the story goes) didn’t have a clue that their boss was about to undergo one in a series of alter-ego ch-ch-ch-changes until he made his mid-set announcement to the audience that this was to be their “last show…ever.” It’s all captured right there on camera, along with a dynamic and exciting performance by Bowie, Ronno & co., who are on fire. Technically, it’s a bit lo-fi, but a must-see for fans.


And to play us out, the quintessential glam rock video, by my personal faves, The Sweet:


More reviews at Den of Cinema


Dennis Hartley

Update from digby:  As Dennis knows,  The Sweet is my favorite too. I’ll add this one:

Who’s in the GOP driver’s seat? Hint: it’s not the establishment

Who’s in the GOP driver’s seat

by digby

It appears that Ted Cruz is having a very good day at the polls. After this he will be able to say he’s got momentum and that he’s the true alternative to Donald Trump. Whether that will take him through the big primary states to come with their winner take all delegates, we’ll have to see. But his argument is real  and it’s got to be killing the GOP establishment to see it happen.

I’ve thought for some time that Cruz is underrated. This piece from a couple of months ago made that case:

When Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2013, after winning a squeaker of a Senate race the previous November, he didn’t waste any time in bringing himself to national attention. It wasn’t his style to use his freshman term to keep his head down and learn the ropes.  Just seven weeks after being sworn in, Cruz made a name for himself by accusing fellow Republican Chuck Hagel of taking money from communist North Korea during his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense. This accusation startled virtually everyone and earned Cruz a rebuke from committee chairman John McCain. Senator Barbara Boxer drew an apt analogy when she said she was reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.” She was alluding, of course to the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy.
As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker at the time, this was not hyperbole. She had personally heard Cruz claim that the Harvard School of Law had harbored a dozen communists on the faculty when he was a student there:
Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Within seven weeks of becoming Senator, Cruz was a national figure who was being compared to one of the most reviled figures in American politics. He was often compared to McCarthy from that point forward, even including the likes of conservative David Brooks, who found him to be quite a distasteful character:
It’s like the most un-conservative act to come in two weeks into the job and decide the Senate exists for you to take it over. So I think he’s made a lot of enemies. It doesn’t help that he has a face that looks a little like Joe McCarthy, actually. So, you know, I find him a little off-putting.
The more establishment figures like McCain and Brooks loathed him, the more the right wing of the party loved him. He became a backroom advisor to the “Freedom Caucus” in the House and he led the charge to shut down the government in 2013. Many on the right attribute their victory in 2014 to his strategic leadership.
When he threw his hat in the ring for president, the conventional wisdom was that he was a fringe player along the lines of Michele Bachmann in 2012 and was assumed to be so unpopular within the party that he couldn’t possibly raise any money. And even if he could  overcome those obstacles he had such a repellant personality that nobody in their right mind would vote for him for president. He was, after all, the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, a man whose name is synonymous with political paranoia.
That doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact, Cruz has shown himself to be a disciplined campaigner and a strategic thinker, managing the rough and tumble of this weird GOP primary campaign better than any of his rivals. He’s fended off attacks with aplomb and doesn’t seem to have been hurt by them. And as Dave Weigel reported yesterday in the Washington Post, he has not trimmed his ideological sails in the least:
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.”
It doesn’t get any more hardcore than that.
But Cruz has done something else that hasn’t been noticed by most of the press corps. He’s lost that Joe McCarthy countenance, and many of his harsh edges have softened. He’s given one on one interviews in which he told personal stories that humanized him. He’s lightheartedly sparred with Trump and others on social media batting back criticisms with clever bon mots instead of engaging in combat. The Christmas ad that caused such a ruckus when a Washington Post cartoonist portrayed his daughters as monkeys only served to introduce the two darling moppets to many more people than would otherwise have seen them. And rather than get down and dirty with Trump, as the man is obviously baiting him to do, he has maintained a rather stately mein, insisting that he is in the race to speak about serious issues. The contrast with Donald Trump’s crude brashness has had the effect of making the awkward Cruz seem almost moderate in affect if not ideology.
Meanwhile, polls continue to show a race with Trump at the top, then Cruz coming on strong in second and a cluster of so-called establishment candidates — one of whom everyone still expects to emerge as the “candidate to beat.” And perhaps that will happen as they predicted all along. After all, nobody has voted yet. But that is a unique way to analyze a race in January of an election year. If anyone but Cruz and Trump were in the number one and two position it would be assumed that they were the legitimate leaders and the race would be framed as a race between the two of them with some outside chance of a dark horse making a late move. But because they are both, in different ways, extremists, it’s assumed they both represent a minority faction and the “mainstream” Republicans will emerge as the majority. But there’s every reason to believe that in 2016 these two may actually represent most GOP voters while the Washington establishment types are the fringe.
If that’s the case, the establishment is going to have a big decision to make. Do they back the hated Cruz to stop the loathsome Trump? Or do they back the detestable Trump to stop the odious Cruz? What a choice.
Early indications are that some DC insiders are still living in hope that one of the establishment types will break through but, still also harbor so much animosity toward Cruz that they’ll take the risk of Trump rather than accept him as their leader. Jeb Bush, for instance, refused to say that he would vote for Trump if he were to get the nomination.
More interestingly, it looks as though some of the mainstream conservative pundits are starting to make peace with the idea that Cruz may end up as the establishment candidate by default. Rich Lowry made this case in Politico by calling into question the conventional wisdom that Cruz is another Goldwater extremist who will necessarily go down in a massive general election defeat. And instead of finding parallels to his aggressive ambition in the repellant Joseph McCarthy, he compares him instead to another awkward, unlikeable politician who nonetheless got millions of people to vote for him for president in one very close loss, one very close win and one huge landslide: Richard Nixon.
Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He is more ideological than Nixon. And he has none of Nixon’s insecurity, in fact the opposite. Nixon went to tiny Whittier College and resented the Northeastern elite; Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard and could be a member of the Northeastern elite in good standing if he wanted to be.
But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else.
He has a point. Say what you will about Nixon — and there’s plenty to say — he was a very smart politician. In particular, he overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice.
I’ve written about Cruz’s savvy strategy to appeal to the movement conservativesthe Carson evangelicals and the Paul libertarians here at Salon. And everyone knows he’s killing Trump with kindness in the hopes of attracting his angry xenophobes and nationalists over to his campaign if Trump falters or they end up being the last two men standing. He’s got important billionaires in his pocket. And now it appears that some of the Republican establishment is taking notice of his sharp political acumen and work ethic and are offering him the respect of recognizing that he’s very good at what he does. That’s the GOP coalition, right there.
None of that means that Senator Ted Cruz is not a far right extremist. He certainly is. But he is not just a canny politician, he’s also a lucky one. After all, without a maniac like Donald Trump being in the race it’s very unlikely he’d be in the position he is today no matter how hard he worked or how well he organized.

And a smart and lucky extremist is a very dangerous one.

I underestimated how much the establishment hated him at the time. I thought they’d end up going with the conservative movement extremist over the authoritarian white nationalist simply because the conservative movement extremist was someone they were familiar with while Trump is something completely unique. That has not happened. The establishment hates Cruz just as much as they hate Trump and are now throwing Hail Mary passes like the Romney gambit to take it to the convention, contest the results and install a more appealing right winger like Paul Ryan.

Cruz is showing that he is the real alternative to Trump among Republican voters, however. And once more this proves the basic principle that the Republican party is a party of authoritarian white nationalists and hardcore right wing extremists. Period.

And we’re about to find out which of those two factions is in the driver’s seat. It isn’t the “establishment” that’s for sure.

Update: Cruz told his supporters today “the scream you hear from Washington DC is utter terror.”

In your heart you know he’s right …

.

Wherever did he get these crazy ideas?

Wherever did he get these crazy ideas?

by digby

As I noted yesterday, Trump walked back his oft-repeated endorsement of torture and other war crimes. He’s been saying this for many, many months so it’s curious that he released this very formal statement after he reiterated it so strongly in the debate last Thursday:

Obviously, he was “spoken to” by someone and not just by the hypocrite Michael Hayden or the rest of those GOP foreign policy establishment who spoke out before the debate.  It would be fascinating to know who “convinced” him to release that statement which was obviously not written by him and which has the tone of a coerced confession.  Very strange.

Today his spokesperson explained on CNN that he never really meant what he said at least 500 times in public:

Katrina Pierson, a Trump spokeswoman, said the candidate had been misunderstood. 

“He realized they took him literally, that’s why he put out the statement,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.” “What he’s saying is that he wants to go after them with the full force of everything we have.”

He has been very, very explicit in his language, there was no misunderstanding, he said he believes in torture, summary execution and the killing and torture of terrorist suspect’s families to extract information. There is no doubt about what he was talking about for all these months.

Where have these people been? Many of us have been running around with our hair on fire documenting the horror of a presidential candidate openly calling for war crimes and large crowds of Americans cheering ecstatically whenever he says it.

How did these people miss this?

When asked about waterboarding [in the debate Trump] eagerly endorsed it, and more:

MUIR: … Mr. Trump, you said not only does it work, but that you’d bring it back.

TRUMP: Well, I’ll tell you what. In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians, we have people chopping the heads off many other people. We have things that we have never seen before — as a group, we have never seen before, what’s happening right now.

The medieval times — I mean, we studied medieval times — not since medieval times have people seen what’s going on. I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

This was greeted with ecstatic applause from the audience.

When asked about it further the next morning he was more explicit:

STEPHANOPOULOS: The issue of waterboarding front and center last night as (INAUDIBLE). You said, I would bring back waterboarding and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

What did you have in mind?

TRUMP: Well, George, you’re not talking about what I said before that. I said we’re living in a world where, in the Middle East, they’re cutting people’s heads off. They’re chopping a Christian’s head off. And many of them, we talk about Foley, James Foley, and you know, what a wonderful young man. Boom, they’re chopping heads.

So then I went into this. I said, yes, I would bring back waterboarding. And I would make it a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes.

What did you have in mind?

TRUMP: I had in mind going worse than waterboarding. It’s enough. We have right now a country that’s under siege. It’s under siege from a people, from — we’re like living in medieval times. If I have it to do and if it’s up to me, I would absolutely bring back waterboarding. And if it’s going to be tougher than waterboarding, I would bring that back, too.

STEPHANOPOULOS: As president, you would authorize torture?

TRUMP: I would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding. And believe me, it will be effective. If we need information, George, you have our enemy cutting heads off of Christians and plenty of others, by the hundreds, by the thousands.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do we win by being more like them?

TRUMP: Yes. I’m sorry. You have to do it that way. And I’m not sure everybody agrees with me. I guess a lot of people don’t. We are living in a time that’s as evil as any time that there has ever been. You know, when I was a young man, I studied Medieval times. That’s what they did, they chopped off heads. That’s what we have…

STEPHANOPOULOS: So we’re going to chop off heads?

TRUMP: We’re going to do things beyond waterboarding perhaps, if that happens to come.

Trump did not rule out chopping off heads.

Nobody cared. It was fine. Having Republican crowds cheering and clapping for torture was just fine. Nobody objected.

Now suddenly, it’s a problem? Well, better late than never but it’s pretty rich to hear stuff like this coming from the right wing:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, released a letter to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, on Friday asking for his thoughts on the legality of Trump’s stance.

“What impact would this policy have on our war effort?” he asked.

That’s nice. It would have been even nicer if he’s done this when Trump first started saying it six months ago.

And then there’s this:

Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen told CNN Thursday that “the notion that we would attack and kill the families of terrorists is something that contravenes everything the United States stands for in this world.”

Cohen warned that if the military carried out these orders, they could face a Nuremberg-like trial, saying, “we have to be concerned about that you have an order given by the commander in chief which violates every sense of law and order, international law and order, that would make any of those who carried out that dictum such to be a violation of the international criminal code.”

Actually we do that all the time, we just pretend it’s an accident. And sometimes we don’t even bother pretending:

“I would suggest that he should have a far more responsible father …”

Maybe Lindsay Graham should have asked what effect that had on our war effort too.

But this takes the cake:

And former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, speaking of Trump, told HBO this week that “if he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”

“You are required not to follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict,” Hayden said.

CNN analyst and retired Army Major Gen. James “Spider” Marks agreed, telling CNN Friday, “You are required to follow orders but you are also required to think, to use your judgment. And if an order is illegal you can’t go down that path. You cannot follow that order.”

Well, “unlawful” is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t? As both of these men know very well all you have to do is get an “opinion” from a lawyer who’s willing to say that war crimes aren’t war
crimes and you’re good to go.

Trump just didn’t understand the procedure. Now he does. He’ll be sure to say publicly “the United States doesn’t torture” just as Bush and Obama have done. I’d guess he’ll be winking broadly as he draws his hand across his throat while he does it because that’s the kind of guy he is.

This is the piece de resistance, however:

Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper Friday night, Hayden applauded Trump’s reversal but was still left with nagging questions.

“I was quite heartened to see it,” Hayden said before asking, “What was the worldview that prompted those statements in the first place?”

Yes, I wonder he got that?

I am horrified by Trump’s primitive bloodlust and have written about it for months. He takes it farther than anyone in modern politics up until now. But let’s not pretend that he came up with this out of the blue. This has been the official and unofficial policy of the United States for a very long time. President Obama banned the official use of torture but has been involved in the killing of terrorist suspects families under less than honorable circumstances. (They have not said they were targeting family members to pressure terrorist suspects as Trump has, but it’s obvious that the people in the region believe that’s exactly what they’ve done. And yet it hasn’t stopped terrorism. Go figure.)

There were no official repercussions for torture. In fact, the Republican Party repudiated the Senate report that documented the sickening extent of it and the full release of the report may never come. The White House stonewalled even the summary and still refuses to even acknowledge the full report.

So why would anyone be surprised when some malevolent, demagogic, megalomaniac comes along and thinks that openly endorsing war crimes like torture and killing of family members was just a matter of being “politically incorrect”? He has every reason to think that this is what the government, the military and most of the political establishment actually believes should be done and he’s just the one who will be honest enough to defend it in public.

Update: Apparently Trump said today in a totally sarcastic tone that he “would not break any laws” wink, wink and that he would change the laws to make it possible to torture. Because he really wants to torture. He sounded as if he was completely exasperated by the fact that he has to say this.

I’d still like to know who it is that convinced him that he has to say this. That is a powerful person.

.

The white guy candidate

The white guy candidate

by digby

He needs lots and lots of them:

If Trump wins the GOP nomination, he will be testing the limits of a strategy that has long haunted the Republican Party. Since the civil rights era, the Republicans have relied heavily upon white male voters in order to overcome a disadvantage among minorities and some subsets of women. Mathematically, that was an easier strategy a half-century ago, when white men dominated the electorate. But as the GOP failed to broaden its coalition and the demographics of America have shifted dramatically, an ever-greater percentage of white men has been required to secure a GOP victory.

And if, as it appears, Trump’s opponent in the general election is Hillary Clinton, his lane becomes even narrower. If things continue the way they’ve been going, just how much of the non-Hispanic white-guy vote would he need to win?

The math suggests Trump would need a whopping 70% of white men to vote for him. That’s more than Republicans have ever won before – more than the GOP won in the landslide victories of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and far more than they won even during the racially polarized elections of Barack Obama.

Of course, the argument often made by Trump’s followers is that he will win in November because he will bring so many disengaged Americans to the polls. But they’re talking about disengaged white voters, mostly mostly men— and unfortunately for him, the turnout rate for white men is already relatively high.

There are a few women who love them who’ll get with the program I’m sure:

Mic found the woman who originally shouted the comment about Cruz.  “I watched the debate, and [Ted Cruz] just comes across as a pussy,” she told Mic on the floor of the Verizon center. “He doesn’t have the balls to stand up to Putin. He doesn’t have the balls to stand up to other leaders of others countries.”

When asked whether she trusts Trump, she answered, “He’s got the balls the size of watermelons, whereas the other ones got the balls of little grapes.” She then specified the size of other candidates’ testicles. “The other one, Rubio, [has balls] like a raisin.” When asked about the other candidates, she answered, “They’re nobodies.”

What they like about them

What they like about them

by digby

You Gov put a series of word clouds together on the presidential candidates. Members of both parties describe their own candidates and the remaining candidates of the other party. I think the way the Republicans describe their own is the most interesting

There’s a lot in there that explains their appeal and their problems. The most interesting one is Trump, of course, because the most common words to describe him are really just different ways of looking at the same characteristics: “bully egomaniac” and “strong leader”.

The fact that Cruz is failing to catch fire despite the clear impression of him among Republicans as the “true conservative” is also very telling. They will blame it on his personality, of course. But in truth is exposes the central truth of this election — most GOP voters don’t care about conservative orthodoxy and probably never have. They care about the dogwhistles.

The most interesting thing about Rubio is the fact that members of both parties have the same impression of him which is that he’s “young”. That seems to be a handicap in this election which is sort of surprising.

Anyway, it’s a fun illustration of the way the various factions view their candidates and their rivals. It can tell you a lot.

.

Trump the canary

Trump the canary

by digby

This is an interesting article by Benjy Sarlin about Trump and CPAC.  Trump decided not appear this year and probably for good reason. (And there are actual elections this week-end so it makes sense for a lot of reasons.)

Anyway:

The billionaire is not popular personally with the crowd here. The audience is disproportionately young and libertarian – Trump was booed last year after proposing to fight ISIS with ground forces – and many attendees this year said they plan to vote third party if he is nominated.

“Trump doesn’t believe in anything,” Joshua Delano, a 34-year old libertarian from Texas, told MSNBC. “Here we truly believe, naively sometimes.”

In retrospect, though, the convention hosted by the American Conservative Union (ACU) has been a canary in the coal mine for weaknesses in conservatism that are now tearing the movement apart amid Trump’s impending candidacy.

Consider one of its most infamous moments. In 2007, Mitt Romney fired up the crowd for upcoming speaker Ann Coulter, who then used her speech to call Democratic Senator John Edwards a “f—got.”

That scene is instructive now. Romney knew the risks of appearing with Coulter, who famously responded to the 9/11 terror attack with a call to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” By praising Coulter onstage, Romney lent her credibility and received authenticity in exchange.

Nine years later, Romney delivered an impassioned speech on Thursday rallying Republicans to stop Trump, who is enthusiastically backed by Coulter. But Romney’s message was undermined by his decision in 2012 to accept an endorsement from Trump in person in Las Vegas despite Trump’s race-baiting campaign to prove Obama was secretly born in Kenya. Trump boasted after this week’s speech that the former nominee would have “dropped to his knees” to beg for his backing.

As it turns out, a number of conservatives have criticized CPAC for legitimizing Trump with the mainstream right by giving him prime speaking slots year after year. Trump has donated over $100,000 to the ACU, according to a Politico report this week that quoted a Rubio aide and an anti-Trump super PAC both grumbling how CPAC helped enable Trump.

But the issue is more than just Trump the man. Many of the same tensions that have played out between establishment Republicans, conservative activists, and the extreme fringe over his current platform and rhetoric have also played out in CPAC over the years.

He goes on to chronicle some of the many stories of racist, xenophobic, bigoted, extremist behaviors that have been reported from this gathering and notes:

For a long time it was a running joke among Republicans – and not without some truth – that CPAC was a festival for liberal journalists out to embarrass the GOP, who would breathlessly write up the most incendiary lines from speakers and track down the wackiest figures for interviews. Stephen Glass, the infamous New Republic fabulist, filed a phony story in 1997 about conservative students partying at CPAC. Leftist documentarian Max Blumenthal recorded a short film at the event in 2007 that went viral. It’s still an annual tradition for news cameras to swarm William Temple, the tea partier who dresses in 18th century period costume.

The implication was that there were really two CPACs, only one of which was worth taking seriously. There was the CPAC on the main stage, at which presidential contenders including Ronald Reagan extolled conservatism. Then there was the fringe CPAC, which included cranks who sponsored a booth or sat in for a little-attended panel but were hardly representative of something bigger. The idea someone like Paul Ryan had any connection with, say, the professional pickup artist teaching conservatives how to find right-leaning lovers was ludicrous.

But with Trump roiling the party, the barrier has disappeared. Far from separating two worlds, it’s possible CPAC and hundreds of events sent another message to Republican voters: You should trust these fringe speakers, they’re on the same stage as a presidential candidate.

Today, the fringe speaker is the presidential candidate.

Of course, the difference between the fringe and the main stage speakers to a whole bunch of the GOP coalition wasn’t that the main stage speakers didn’t say these things. They always did, they just used the dogwhistle.

There is no more dogwhistle. So it’s all out in the open and the main stage people are uncomfortable having to defend their bigotry in the open.

But make no mistake, all these mainstream Republicans who were and are screaming about amnesty and “welfare” and anchor babies and “food stamps” and Obamacare are bigots. They just don’t come right out like Trump does and say “it’s ok to hate Muslims and blacks and Mexicans (well “the bad ones” if you know what I mean.) And it’s a-ok for you want America to go back to a time when these people knew their places.”

On some practical level the main stage people recognize that old world is gone and that they simply cannot afford to alienate everyone but conservative white people. So they’ve been trying to keep that view on the down low. Trump has brought it right into the open. But it’s always been there.

If you want to read something truly frightening, check out these quotes by Trump voters. God help us.

Strip mining the human landscape by @BloggersRUs

Strip mining the human landscape
by Tom Sullivan


The Chino open-pit copper mine near Silver City, New Mexico
Photo by Marshman [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Dylan Ratigan’s August 2011 on-camera meltdown is as close as reality has ever come to Howard Beale’s Network rant remembered in Digby’s sidebar.

What made it a powerful moment was he was right:

Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren’t doing it, republicans aren’t doing it, an entire integrated system, banking, trade and taxation, created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work on our entire country right now.

Elias Isquith at Salon this morning interviews Les Leopold, Labor Institute executive director and president, about his new book “Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice.” Ratigan called what is happening “being extracted.” Leopold calls it “financial strip mining,” and a far cry from what free marketeers and neoliberals taught would happen from lower taxes and fewer regulations:

What they didn’t teach us and what they never discussed is that it’s one thing to deregulate trucking or airlines or telecommunications, but it’s quite another thing to deregulate the financial sector. When they started deregulating the financial sector, it put in motion something that we refer to as “financial strip mining.” It’s an incredible, insidious process. It started with a lot of corporate raids – we know call them hedge funds, takeovers, private equity companies – financiers who use a little bit of their own money, borrow a huge amount of money, and start buying up companies. In the deregulated atmosphere they bought up thousands of them over time. The debt that was accumulated to do that was basically put on the company. It’s a little bit like if you went out and bought a car with a loan, instead of you paying back the loan the car pays back the loan. That’s what they were doing.

Then we started paying CEOs with stock options and the whole thing went to hell.

There was a rule change in 1982, under Reagan. A guy who was the former Head of E.F. Hutton became head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he changed the rule about companies buying back their own shares. Before 1982, it was virtually illegal to do that because it was considered stock manipulation. When a company buys back its own shares, it reduces the number of share owners, and therefore every share is worth a little bit more. If you do this, all things being equal, you’re going to boost the share and manipulate the price. The free market’s not doing it, you’re doing it. This guy thought, “Well that’s very efficient. Anyway, competition will even all of that out.”

CEOs and their corporate raider Wall Street partners are thinking, “Oh, this is fantastic. Let’s use the company’s money to raise the price of the share, and then we can cash in on our stock incentives. The outside investors can cash in and leave, ‘pump and dump.’ This is great.”

Build a better mousetrap? Why bother with that or R&D when you can goose the stock value by buying back company stock. Whine about the high corporate tax rate. Insist that a tax repatriation holiday that brings back corporate monies stashed in the Caymans will got to R&D and investment, then use the windfall to simply buy back more stock (as happened under Bush II). Capitalism started eating itself and America with it.

What I call the Midas Cult, Leopold calls the “Better Business Climate” that took hold in the late 1970s and overturned the postwar model:

The philosophy at that point was basically “retain and reinvest.” CEOs viewed stakeholders as labor, community and their shareholders. It wasn’t that shareholders were somehow in there for the share price over everything else. Once this Better Business Climate model hit, you look at these same two lines and they just split apart. Worker wages actually go down in terms of real buying power. The gap between the two lines today is so large that if worker wages stayed on that productivity line that they taught us was an iron law, which of course they then repealed as soon as I graduated, if the two lines kept going up together the average weekly wage would be double what it is today. That’s how big a gap took place. Something really big changed.

It is not simply the financialization of the economy that has taken place, but a poisoning of minds and the emergence of homo corporatus, with a spreadsheet for a mind and gold where a heart used to be. Even the victims of the “Better Business Climate” have adopted its values, as if the bottom line is the measure of all things. And they don’t even know it. But they can feel it, and that it is wrong.

There is a concept they teach in real estate, a value, actually: highest and best use. (The Republican front-runner, himself a real estate developer, would be well versed in the concept.) Since it is a business concept, it reflects business values, not human ones. The “highest and best use” of a piece of land is that which results in its highest present value. How is that measured? In terms of money, of course. What other measure is there? What then is the highest and best use of public prisons or public schools? What is the highest and best use of Yosemite or Yellowstone? Or the time in your day? Hmm, spend it with your children or spend it making money?

We have truly lost our way That is why the anti-establishment sentiment in an electorate poised to burn it down and break out the guillotines. Here again is Ratigan’s rant.

Meet the Democratic Trumpie-bros

Meet the Democratic Trumpie-bros

by digby

There was a time when this guy was considered a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton, but he hasn’t ruled out casting his ballot for Donald Trump.

Webb, who briefly flirted with an independent bid before deciding against it, said on Friday morning that the Democratic front-runner wasn’t inspirational.

“I would not vote for Hillary Clinton,” Webb said on MSBNC’s “Morning Joe.”

When asked whether he’d vote for Trump, Webb said he wasn’t closed to the idea.

He thinks Trump will shake things up he’s just not sure how. But he’s intrigued.

Webb’s former senior strategist, David “Mudcat” Sanders, told POLITICO he wouldn’t be voting for Clinton, either.

“As a Jim Webb Democrat, and I’ve called myself that before, I’ve never been prouder of the boy,” Saunders said.

You remember Mudcat:

Bubba doesn’t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we’re going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat.”

There you go.

.

Somebody took Trump into a room and gave him the word

Somebody took Trump into a room and gave him the word

by digby

I wonder if they waterboarded him?

According to the Wall Street Journal:

He has been saying that he’d waterboard “and much, much worse” since the beginning of his campaign. He’s promised to torture and “take out” the families of terrorist suspects in order to make them talk. This is not new although everyone’s acting as if it’s first they’ve heard of it.

What seems to have alarmed people is the idea that he would expect the military to follow his order to do such a thing. Well, why wouldn’t he? It’s not as if anyone’s paid a price for all the torture that came before. Of course he figured the military would do it.

But he made a mistake. It’s the CIA that does this sort of wet work, not the military. They like to keep their hands clean these days. So now I’d guess he’s promised someone (I wonder who) that he’ll mouth some platitudes about keeping within the law while winking and nodding like everyone else. Donald Trump. Just another politician.

Remember that the White House has not read the whole torture report.  If they do it will be subject to public scrutiny. So they just haven’t opened the file. 

.