Sunday Funnies
by digby
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2016
Honor and dignity
by digby
Those of us who went through Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution with Newt Gingrich will remember that he pounded the dishonesty and immorality of Bill Clinton as the basis for impeachment which resulted in him nearly losing the House majority in 1998 and losing his speakership. And then it was revealed he was having an affair . His replacement, Bob Livingston also had to resign because he’d had one too. The head impeachment manager Henry Hyde had also been revealed to have had a long term affair but he got to keep his job.
So when they appointed Denny Hastert, the avuncular congressman from Illinois, as the new speaker everyone breathed a sigh of relief that they’d finally found a leader with impeccable morals. Considering the mantra at the time was that the GOP had more “honor and dignity” than the Democrats, it was always a little bit hard to take, but there you have it.
Who would have guessed that the Speaker they chose for his unimpeachable morals turned out to be a sexual predator? We’ve known about all this for some time, of course. But this story in the New York Times details the case the authorities uncovered, which includes at least four teen-age boys on the wrestling team he coached. An excerpt:
After a series of recorded phone calls, with Mr. Hastert’s cooperation, the investigators concluded that there was no extortion, but that Mr. Hastert was actually carrying out an agreed-to settlement for real abuse.
Even when Mr. Hastert told Individual A, as investigators listened in, that he needed more time to come up with more money, Individual A “did not make any threats” and even “expressed understanding,” the prosecutors said. At another point, Individual A seemed agreeable, even empathetic, suggesting that they settle on smaller amounts and keep the payments as a “private, personal matter.” Individual A even pushed Mr. Hastert to tell his wife about the payment agreement, and suggested that an outside lawyer or confidante might be called in.
Of the abuse of Individual A, prosecutors said there was “no ambiguity.”
Prosecutors said the motel incident had happened during a trip to a wrestling camp, in which several other boys shared a room but where Individual A and Mr. Hastert spent the night together. Individual A told prosecutors he did not know why Mr. Hastert had singled him out.
The court filing says Mr. Hastert had the boy strip naked and lay on a bed under the guise of treating a groin pull, but it “became clear to Individual A that defendant was not touching him in a therapeutic manner to address a wrestling injury but was touching him in an inappropriate sexual way.” The boy then ran across the room, confused and embarrassed, before Mr. Hastert asked him to get onto Mr. Hastert’s back and to give the coach a massage. “Defendant lay on the bed in only his underwear, and Individual A gave him a back massage,” the prosecutors said. “They then went to sleep in the same bed.”
When Mr. Hastert was charged last year, the accusations rattled the town of Yorkville, Ill., about an hour west of here. Mr. Hastert, a Republican who served as House speaker from 1999 to 2007, was regarded as a hero by many in Yorkville, where he had taught high school. But prosecutors said Mr. Hastert’s life had been “marred by stunning hypocrisy.”
They alluded to a fifth boy from Mr. Hastert’s days in Yorkville who recalled Coach Hastert brushing against his genitals during a massage at one point. But he said he was unsure whether the contact was intentional though he found it “very weird.”
Of the boys, prosecutors said: “He made them feel alone, ashamed, guilty and devoid of dignity. While defendant achieved great success, reaping all the benefits that went with it, these boys struggled, and all are still struggling now with what defendant did to them.”
They love to hit liberals over the head for their lack of decency and morality. More often than not it seems they are doing it to hide their own sins. That happens a lot in life.
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If he can’t handle Cruz how can he handle ISIS?
by digby
After being asked whether threatening delegates is fair game in the hunt for the 1237 required to secure the Republican nomination, Manafort responded, “It’s not my style, and it’s not Donald Trump’s style … But it is Ted Cruz’s style.” He then called the Cruz campaign’s methods “Gestapo tactics, scorched-earth tactics.”
“We’re going to be filing several protests because reality is, you know, they are not playing by the rules,” Manafort said.
But Manafort, who has advised Republican presidential campaigns going back to Pres. Gerald Ford, would not outline the rules he is playing by either. When pressed on whether paying for a delegate’s golf membership or trip to the convention was in the realm possibility he answered, “Well, there’s the law, and then there’s ethics, and then there’s getting votes. I’m not going to get into what tactics are used.”
The last I heard, when the enemy breaks the rules the only way to deal is to break the rules yourself. Isn’t that how Trump expects to “win” against ISIS? What’s the big deal? Why doesn’t he just waterboard a few faithless delegates? That’ll teach ’em.
So TV isn’t enough
by digby
My oh my, I would have thought Trump could just fly in to the state conventions and make a great deal, a yuuuuge deal, and walk away a winner.According to Politico, not so much.
Trump, who handed the reins of much of his campaign this week to strategist Paul Manafort in an effort to shore up his operation before the nomination slips away, was swept out of delegate slots up for grabs at Colorado’s state convention. Adding to his woes, he picked up just one delegate of six on the ballot in South Carolina. The most painful result, though, may have been Trump’s failure to capture two of three slots in his strongest South Carolina congressional district.
In fact, Trump lost five of the six delegate seats on the ballot in South Carolina’s 3rd and 7th congressional districts. Ted Cruz nabbed a delegate in the 7th district, while another, Alan Clemmons, remained uncommitted despite Trump’s dominant finish there in the state’s Feb. 20 primary. (The Manhattan billionaire won 43 percent of the district’s vote, to Cruz’s 20 percent and Kasich’s 6 percent.) Cruz also won two of three delegates in the 3rd district, while a third — Susan Aiken, a supporter of Marco Rubio — will go to the convention as an uncommitted delegate.
At the same time, Trump so far has been swept in Colorado, which unlike most states chooses its delegates indirectly, through a series of caucuses. Cruz, who has had a team working the state for months, received a thunderous ovation in Colorado Springs at Saturday afternoon’s chaotic GOP assembly as he announced his preliminary delegate haul while Trump’s bare-bones operation struggled to get organized.
After firing the organizer initially put in charge of Colorado last week, Trump’s team hired Patrick Davis, a GOP operative from Colorado Springs, to put together a slate in an effort to win some of the delegate slots to be elected by just fewer than 4,000 party activists at Saturday’s assembly. Heading in, Cruz had already swept the seven assemblies held in the state’s congressional districts, each of which elect three delegates, giving him 21 of Colorado’s 34 elected delegates – a majority – before ballots hit the floor at the state convention.
“We have beaten Donald Trump,” Cruz told supporters packed into the World Arena.
Trump’s last-minute organizing effort did not go well. The leaflet his campaign handed out listed a slate of 26 delegates. But in many cases the numbers indicating their ballot position — more than 600 delegates are running for 13 slots — were off, meaning that Trump’s team was mistakenly directing votes toward other candidates’ delegates.
When the balloting results were announced Saturday evening, Cruz picked up the 13 statewide at-large delegates chosen during Saturday’s convention, with the final three appointed automatically by the Colorado Republican Party, giving him all 34 of Colorado’s elected delegates (Trump did win six of the 34 alternate spots).
“Cruz had the crowd eating out of his hand when he spoke,” said Kelly Maher, a GOP operative based in Denver.
It’s an extension of a losing streak for Trump that threatens the mogul’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at what is increasingly likely to be a contested convention in July. Trump is close to falling short of enough support in the state-level primaries and caucuses to clinch the nomination outright, meaning his fate would be determined by delegates in Cleveland.
Yet Trump’s thinly staffed operations, even in the states he carried easily in February and March primaries, have left little organization behind to support delegate candidates. In addition to the congressional-district routs in South Carolina and Colorado, he’s been dealt setbacks in Indiana, North Dakota, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Georgia. Massachusetts is also shaping up as a delegate battleground, despite Trump’s dominance of the popular vote there.Trump has primarily lost delegate races to Cruz, whose superior organization, months of preparatory work and resonance among the GOP’s activist base has helped him consolidate support in the insider-oriented battle for delegates. Trump has begun mobilizing for a delegate push in recent days, empowering Manafort, a veteran of past convention battles, to lead his effort, but the 67-year-old lobbyist and political consultant is still playing catch-up.
Trump failed to understand that political parties are organizations made up of people who have long-standing ties and loyalties to one another and their institution. He could have run as an independent and not done any of this stuff. He had the money and probably could have gotten himself on the ballot in all 50 states. But he wanted the legitimacy and the infrastructure of the GOP without working to ensure the loyalties of the people who participate in party politics day in and day out.
He apparently didn’t even bother to find out how the party works. He thought it was all about being on TV. You want to be an outsider? Great. But don’t expect to have any loyalty from the people you’re slagging all day long.
Cruz was the smart one. He positioned himself as the outsider who represented the conservative movement. Those people have been infiltrating the party apparatus for years and they don’t have a problem supporting him in these state delegations. They don’t like the “Washington Cartel” but Cruz is a party man without being a RINO. He’s got the best of both worlds.
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Politics and Reality Radio
by Joshua Holland
Politics and Reality Radio: Fire Bill Clinton?; Bernie and Hillary Aren’t That Different
Hillary Clinton is trying hard to distance herself from some of her husband’s more controversial policies, but every time she gets some space he drags her back to the 1990s, often generating bad headlines in the process. What’s going on? Is Bill Clinton unconsciously sabotaging his wife’s campaign? This week, we kick off with Slate’s Michelle Goldberg calling for Hillary to fire Bill.
The we’re joined by Newsweek political correspondent Emily Cadei. Cadei took a deep dive into the congressional records of both Democratic candidates, and found that not only were their voting records very similar — and not only did they work together on 26 bills during the two years they overlapped in the Senate — but they also demonstrated similar styles of coalition-building to advance their agendas. She says the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination are a lot closer than the conventional wisdom suggests.
Finally, we’ll talk to Dr. Arijit Nandi, a scholar at McGill University in Montreal, about how paid family leave is not only vital for achieving work/life balance, but also for infants’ health outcomes.
As always, you can subscribe to the show at iTunes or Podbean.
Playlist:
Merle Haggard: “That’s the News”
Amy Winehouse: “To Know Him Is to Love Him”
The Isley Brothers: “It’s Your Thing”
Kiddus I: “Graduation in Zion”
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Boston Globe gives Trump a Bronx cheer
by Tom Sullivan
We take @realDonaldTrump at his word https://t.co/tLcadvrdQa pic.twitter.com/Z4BnNQE5Ts— Boston Globe Opinion (@GlobeOpinion) April 9, 2016
This morning the Boston Globe offers a glimpse into President Donald Trump’s America with a mocked-up front page illustrating the kind of stories we could expect if Trump were elected president. Stocks plunge, trade wars loom, and “riots continue” over mass deportations.
Other mock entries include a story about unrest in the ranks of the U.S. military as soldiers refuse orders to kill family members of Islamic State militants, and the headline: “New libel law targets ‘absolute scum’ in press.”
“It is an exercise in taking a man at his word,” explains the editorial accompanying the graphic on the front page of the newspaper’s “Ideas” section:
That’s not a pretty picture. But then nothing about the billionaire real estate developer’s quest for the nation’s highest office has been pretty. He winks and nods at political violence at his rallies. He says he wants to “open up” libel laws to punish critics in the news media and calls them “scum.” He promised to shut out an entire class of immigrants and visitors to the United States on the sole basis of their religion.
The toxic mix of violent intimidation, hostility to criticism, and explicit scapegoating of minorities shows a political movement is taking hold in America. If Trump were a politician running such a campaign in a foreign country right now, the US State Department would probably be condemning him.
The editors chastise the GOP for missing opportunities to stop feeding the “hateful currents” behind Trump’s movement. The party, the Globe argues, needs to ask itself how its own actions and inactions paved the way for Trump’s ascendancy and muster the courage finally to stop him using “every legitimate roadblock,” warning, “It is better to lose with principle than to accept a dangerous deal from a demagogue.”
Once upon a time, Republicans worked up an autopsy of their 2012 presidential defeat. And promptly round-filed it. Their 100-page report designed to Make the GOP Great Again urged:
We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities. But it is not just tone that counts. Policy always matters.
States such as Michigan, Kansas, and North Carolina proved just what sorts of policies matter outside the RNC’s fanciful self-reflection worked up by the likes of Henry Barbour, Sally Bradshaw, Ari Fleischer, Zori Fonalledas, and Glenn McCall:
Bradshaw was a senior adviser for Jeb Bush’s now-defunct campaign. Henry Barbour, nephew of longtime Mississippi power broker Haley Barbour, had a family tie to Bush’s campaign: His brother Austin was also a senior advisor to the campaign. Ari Fleischer, of course, was George W. Bush’s first White House press secretary. And Fonalledas was on Jeb Bush’s Hispanic Leadership Committee.
They represent a party that a broad swath of the angry GOP base has rejected for Trump. Contra conservative ideology since at least Reagan, “the base doesn’t really believe in, or much care about, small government.” Trump’s success proves “the party’s intellectual leaders, who organized the base around the National Review/Weekly Standard consensus — small government, free trade, pro-Israel, deregulation, low taxes, social conservatism and an aggressive foreign policy — have been generals of a phantom army.”
Except maybe for the aggressive foreign policy part, “Donald Trump might as well have read [the autopsy] and done the exact opposite of what it said.” His followers don’t care about all that Beltway insider stuff. They’re tired of feeling like the kid picked last in gym class. They want to stick it to the party elite and ISIS and the Chinese and the Mexicans. They don’t really want to make America great again. They just want someone to make them feel better about themselves. They want a strongman. They want a boy named Trump.
John Avlon might have to update his list of America’s 9 Worst Demagogues to include Donald Trump. Trump is a perfect 10. Just ask him.
Saturday Night at the Movies
The empress has no pitch: Marguerite ***
By Dennis Hartley
It’s been said that many who fancy themselves singers can’t “hear” their own true voice (ever been to a Karaoke bar?). Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder; but in the ears, not so much. Off key is off key, and unfortunately for wealthy arts patron Marguerite Dumont (Catherine Frot) this is Paris in the 20s, and Auto-Tune is many decades hence.
Her heart is in the right place, though. In fact music is her driving passion, and in the opening of writer-director Xavier Giannoli’s eponymous drama, we witness a gathering of aristocrats (and a few party-crashers) that has converged on Marguerite’s sprawling estate for a charity fundraiser. Marguerite has invited a number of accomplished musicians to perform. The biggest buzz surrounds the headliner-Marguerite herself, who has prepared one of her favorite Soprano pieces to regale her guests with. However, she’s holding off until her husband Georges (Andre Marcon) arrives; it seems he has car issues.
It turns out that Georges has frequent trouble with the car; weirdly enough this occurs every time Marguerite gives a recital at their home (although the significance of this “coincidence” has never occurred to the unflappably enthusiastic Marguerite). As the guests are getting impatient, the show must go on…and so Marguerite takes center stage.
When Marguerite begins to sing, erm, how can I put this politely…well, let’s just say she is no Edith Piaf. OK, full disclosure: Her caterwauling could decalcify your spinal column at 100 paces. She’s godawful. But…she’s so enthusiastically godawful that she is at once oddly endearing. We assume this, because nobody has ever told her how utterly horrifying her singing is; neither her guests (who in fact give her a standing O) nor her longtime butler (Denis Mpunga), nor husband (aside from those “problems” with the car).
Two of the “party-crashers” I referred to earlier are an ambitious young journalist and his pal, an avant-garde provocateur, who are intrigued by the inexplicably sycophantic cocoon of “admirers” that enables Marguerite to remain cheerfully oblivious to her atonal warbling. Do they do this out of kindness? Or are they being ironic? Perhaps there’s something the young men are “missing”? The pair decides to conduct a sort of social experiment. If they can coax Marguerite out of her hermetic bubble, into a real public performance, she might prove to be a true phenomenon. Stranger things have happened.
What ensues is a sometimes uneasy cross between The Producers and The Dinner Game. The saving grace is Frot’s brave and moving performance; she’s sweet, funny and heartbreaking all at once. Michel Fau is another standout as a fading opera singer who is reluctantly recruited into playing Henry Higgins to Marguerite’s Eliza Doolittle (his characterization also recalls the exasperated singing coach who is hired to tutor Orson Welles’ tone-deaf wife in Citizen Kane). While there are many amusing moments, this is not a lighthearted romp; the odious, uniquely human capacity to cruelly exploit others for personal gain is on full display. Then again, you know what they say: “That’s show biz!”
More reviews at Den of Cinema
—Dennis Hartley
The crack-up gets serious
by digby
Now they’re trying to kick Phyllis Schlafly out of the Eagle Forum for supporting Trump. Phyllis Schlafly is The Eagle Forum. Seriously, this is amazing:
QOTD: A Lifelong Republican
by digby
Thompson, a lifelong Republican, said he admires Trump’s independence from big campaign donors and takes that as a sign that the front-runner will be able to think for himself if he were to become president.
Evidently, these people believe that Trump doesn’t agree with all those billionaire campaign donors. This strikes me as odd, since he has been one for years. Why do they all assume that he has their interests at heart instead of the interests of his fellow billionaires?
The notion that Trump being free of campaign contributions means he’s a free thinker strikes me as a very simplistic way of thinking about politics. There’s more to it than that. But then this is the guy who thinks that the way to manage national security is to alienate everyone on the planet so why would these people think any differently?
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Aunt Pittypat’s been tippling again
by digby
I think somebody had a few too many cocktails on the plane
Missing: Ralph Lauren jacket. Last seen in seat 2F of the 3 p.m. shuttle from D.C. to LaGuardia. If found, please call Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
A distraught Graham used a Friday interview with CBS News to get the word out about his missing jacket.
“All of that stuff in the Mideast is important, who will be president, that’s important. But I’ve got the wrong jacket,” he said. “We’re not going to fix the world unless I get my jacket back.”
Graham said he accidentally swapped jackets with a nearby passenger.
“I have your jacket, you have mine,” Graham said to the camera. “Call me. I’m in the book. And I apologize for my jacket being so dirty. If we get this right, everything else falls in place.”