Month: April 2016

Speaking of empty souls…

by digby

As Paul Ryan continues his latest make-over as a decent human being, people are taking a look back at this more colorful statements. This one came across my twitter feed last night:

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

— Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 6, 2014

By the way, the story was bullshit too. Four Pinnocchios.

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As California goes …

by digby

This isn’t going to be pretty:

The protests outside Donald Trump’s rally in Costa Mesa on Thursday night appear to point to an upcoming month of activism by Latinos and others as the GOP front-runner tries to seal the presidential nomination in the state.

Hundreds of demonstrators filled the street outside the Orange County amphitheater where Trump held a rally Thursday night, stomping on cars, hurling rocks at motorists and forcefully declaring their opposition to the Republican presidential candidate. At least 17 were arrested.

Inside the OC Fair and Event Center, Trump had surrounded himself with people carrying images of family members killed by immigrants in the country illegally.

When Trump vowed to make Mexico pay for a wall along its border with the United States, thousands of supporters erupted in cheers.

“We’re going to stop drugs from coming in,” Trump told them. “The drugs are poisoning our youth and a lot of other people.”

While the billionaire businessman has faced protests elsewhere, California could prove to be potent ground for demonstrators because of its large Latino population and Trump’s negative comments about immigrants in this country illegally.

Several days earlier, pro- and anti-Trump protesters clashed outside Anaheim City Hall, where the council considered a resolution condemning Trump.

Activists predict that Trump will continue to evoke angry protests in California.

“I’m protesting because I want equal rights for everybody, and I want peaceful protest,” said 19-year-old Daniel Lujan, one of hundreds of protesters in Costa Mesa on Thursday.

Southern California’s Latino community has a long history of street protests, dating back to the famous Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War in 1970.

A decade ago, roughly half a million immigrants and their supporters took to the streets of Los Angeles decrying federal bills that would criminalize providing food or medical services to immigrants in the country illegally and build a wall along the southern border of the U.S.

A USC/Times poll found that 77% of Latinos in California have a negative view of Trump. Yet among Republicans, Trump is ahead in that poll and several others.

As the article points out, California Latinos are organized and they are experienced.

Meanwhile, this piece in Buzzfeed shows the other side of the coin. It’s a fascinating look at how the Clinton campaign has been working with Latino activists since before the primary campaign officially kicked off:

One of the most important moments in this election happened at a high school library in Nevada. 

Nearly a year ago, Hillary Clinton spoke to young undocumented immigrants and their families at Rancho High School in the working-class neighborhood of North Las Vegas, where 40% of the population is Latino. The setting was risky — just the kind of event that activists have turned into protests, with videos that travel far and wide.
Her words were directed at Jeb Bush. 

She would offer a “path to full and equal citizenship” she said, while Bush, a favorite to win his party’s nomination, supported earned legal status — or as Clinton dismissed it, “second-class status.” That wasn’t unusual. Nor was her support for “comprehensive immigration reform.” 

What she said next, however, was. “If Congress continues to refuse to act,” Clinton told the activists, she “would do everything possible under the law to go even further.” She wanted the parents of DREAMers, the parents of those seated around her, to be eligible for protection from deportation. 

Clinton would prove to be very, very wrong about Bush. But she was correct about the driving issue of the election. The event would prove to be one of the most significant moments in the Democratic primary, and the policies Clinton outlined that day and as a result of that day will inform an election dominated by immigration policy, and the increasingly polarized approaches by both parties. 

While Donald Trump talks of the wall and a far more restrictionist immigration policy, Clinton began her campaign with likely one of the most liberal immigration platforms ever adopted by a mainstream Democratic candidate.

It’s an inside look at a momentous meeting between very savvy grassroots activists and a mainstream politician that changed the trajectory of the presidential campaign. Both Clinton and Sanders moved left as a result. It’s going to be a battle royale here in California and the difference between the two parties could not be starker. The stakes for millions of people could not be higher.

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Nuclear word salad


by digby

This is the man people like Senator Bob Corker thinks made a lot of sense in his “foreign policy speech” on Wednesday:

Think Progress comments:

Trump is, in all likelihood, one of the two people with a shot at becoming our next president. As Commander-In-Chief, Trump would have full control of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal and would be in charge of our diplomatic relationships with the other 8 nations that possess nuclear weapons. 

Trump has said that he believes nuclear weapons are the greatest threat facing our country. Yet the nuclear deterrence strategy he outlined last night during a 46-second soundbite on Fox News borders on incoherency. 

Diplomacy, particularly with the other countries that possess nuclear weapons, is a high stakes game. It is not an exaggeration to say that humanity’s survival depends on it. Pakistan is arguably the most fraught relationship of all — a nation with a significant nuclear arsenal that constantly faces destabilizing forces inside and outside its borders. 

Asked to comment on Pakistan, Trump essentially offers a word salad. Here’s the transcript:

Trump’s answer to Greta on Pakistan still puzzling: pic.twitter.com/kWWUdtRXdF

— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) April 28, 2016

That’s not unpredictability.  It’s ignorance. About nuclear war.

Previously, Trump argued that the United States “may well be better off” if more countries — including Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia — develop nuclear weapons. He has also hinted at using nuclear weapons to combat ISIS.

Remember that?

They have to respect us,” Trump said of Muslims in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann set to air in its entirety on Wednesday’s episode of With All Due Respect. “They do not respect us at all and frankly they don’t respect a lot of things that are happening—not only our country, but they don’t respect other things.”

“The first thing you have to do is get them to respect the West and respect us. And if they’re not going to respect us it’s never going to work. This has been going on for a long time,” he said. “I don’t think you can do anything and I don’t think you’re going to be successful unless they respect you. They have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country right now.”

Trump’s vision for how he would earn Muslim respect included such controversial proposals as returning to outlawed harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding; monitoring mosques in the U.S.; and leaving open the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against the Islamic State.
“I’m never going to rule anything out—I wouldn’t want to say. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them,” he said.

“We need unpredictability,” Trump continued. “We don’t know who these people are. The fact is, we need unpredictability and when you ask a question like that, it’s a very sad thing to have to answer it because the enemy is watching and I have a very good chance of winning and I frankly don’t want the enemy to know how I’m thinking. But with that being said, I don’t rule out anything.”

Being “unpredictable” with nukes is very, very bad.

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Weak tea
by Tom Sullivan

It will take more than fear of Donald Trump for Democrats to win this fall. They need a message. This article from Harold Meyerson after monumental losses in 2014 summed it up:

What, besides raising the minimum wage, do the Democrats propose to do about the shift in income from wages to profits, from labor to capital, from the 99 percent to the 1 percent? How do they deliver for an embattled middle class in a globalized, de-unionized, far-from-full-employment economy, where workers have lost the power they once wielded to ensure a more equitable distribution of income and wealth? What Democrat, besides Elizabeth Warren, campaigned this year to diminish the sway of the banks? Who proposed policies that would give workers the power to win more stable employment and higher incomes, not just at the level of the minimum wage but across the economic spectrum?

Bernie Sanders has focused on the banks this year, but Democrats as a party have failed so far to send a message to families working without a net that their concerns and anxieties have been both heard and felt, and that Democrats have a plan to address them. They need to forcefully answer the “cares about people like me” question.

They need to connect.

Alec MacGillis provided this anecdote from 2012:

The day of the 2012 presidential election, while reporting on the south side of Columbus, Ohio, I came across a 50-year-old man named Matt Bimberg who was waiting for the bus. He was a middle-aged white man with a Detroit Tigers cap in a mostly black neighborhood, and was returning home from a warehouse job as a forklift operator. He got the job thanks to a three-week training course paid for by the U.S. Department of Labor, and for that reason decided to vote for Barack Obama after having voted for John McCain in 2008.

“My line of thinking was that under Romney and Ryan, it would be more a trickle-down administration,” he told me at the time. “Their thinking is to give that money to corporations and the rich in tax breaks, and some will trickle down. But it didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Romney reminds me so much of Reagan’s theory of supply-side economics. It scares me.”

MacGillis’ point (allowing for off-year falloff in the vote) was that Democrats forgot that message and failed to tell people whose side they are on in 2014.

Matt Taibbi references a comment by Hillary Clinton that connects the subprime crisis to the problems of race in a way that Sanders never seemed to. Taibbi admits that the press (and he himself) overlooked practices at the heart of the financial crisis. Subprime “was fueled by a particular kind of predatory lending that targeted a very specific group of people.” Poor and minority people, to be exact. Predatory lending practices that target black families have made a comeback (they never really disappeared).

The point is not that targeting those practices should be a key campaign issue. It is that the left focuses so much on technocratic issues and spends so much time trying to impress voters with how smart we are that we miss the gut reality people live on the street. Therein lies the disconnect. Donald Trump doesn’t suffer from that problem. He doesn’t know enough to. It is why his supporters believe Trump says what they are thinking. What Democrats end up offering is technocratic, weak tea to struggling people who need something stronger if they are going to be energized enough to come out and vote for them. Voters want to hear how Democrats understand and care “about people like me.”

by digby

I have to feel a little bit sorry for the conservative movement stalwarts faced with the prospect of Trump blowing up their party.  It can’t be easy. But they sound silly when they say stuff like this:

In Congress, Mike Pence was the standard bearer for conservatism. It was his cause. He was the elected Buckley. And I am now so thoroughly disappointed in him. 

The 2016 Republican Presidential primary is a choice between a conservative and a shallow demagogue. The race now hinges on Indiana. Either Cruz will win and we can continue the fight to stop Trump or Cruz will lose and more likely than not guarantee a Trump nomination. A Trump nomination would destroy all that Mike Pence so tirelessly for so many years worked to achieve. 

But Pence, in the face of this, remains on the sidelines. He has not yet wielded his influence in Indiana, the state he governs. Every day he sits on the sidelines is another day in which he could have made a difference. He has not used his influence in the conservative movement to rally against Trump. 

In 2020, conservatives will need to remember who stood up against Trump and who sat silently by. We will need to remember those who collaborated with Trump and those who turned a blind eye to Trump. We will have to remember that the man who kept the fires of constitutional liberty lit for so long stayed so quiet.

That’s Erik Erickson. The conservative movement is going to be faced with many problems after this election. Mike Pence’s reluctance to get in the middle of this shit-show is going to be the least of it.

It will be very interesting to see if Erickson goes over to the Trump team. I’d say it’s 50-50.

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The GOP’s favorability is sinking like the Titanic

by digby

Huh:

The Republican Party’s image, already quite negative, has slipped since last fall. Currently 33% of the public has a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 62% have an unfavorable view. Unfavorable opinions of the GOP are now as high as at any point since 1992.

In October, 37% viewed the Republican Party favorably and 58% viewed it unfavorably. The decline in favorability since then has largely come among Republicans themselves: In the current survey, 68% of Republicans view their party positively, down from 79% last fall.

Republicans have less favorable view of the GOP.

By contrast, public views of the Democratic Party are unchanged since October. Currently, 45% of the public has a favorable impression of the Democratic Party, while 50% have an unfavorable opinion.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted April 12-19 among 2,008 adults, finds that Democrats have a far more favorable impression of their party than Republicans have of theirs. Nearly nine-in-ten Democrats (88%) view their party favorably, which is 20 points higher than Republicans’ ratings of the GOP (68%).

Just 28% of independents view the Republican Party favorably, while 37% say they have a favorable impression of the Democratic Party. Notably, just 43% of Republican-leaning independents view the GOP favorably, while 50% hold a negative opinion of the party.

A quarter of the public has an unfavorable view of both parties.

I can’t imagine what’s happened in the last few months to lower people’s opinion of the GOP can you?

One thing we know is that it can’t be Donald Trump. Everybody loves him. Just ask him.

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The Village lives. (And it’s as silly as ever)


by digby

I didn’t bother to write about the notoriously inane Jim VandeHei piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for a third party run by a billionaire (and clearly trolling for venture capital) because I just couldn’t find it in myself to write another piece about Villager stupidity at the moment. But I suppose it’s good to know it’s still alive and well. 

Dylan Matthews at Vox challenged VandeHei on the substance of his piece and even got him to respond in some detail. You can read the whole thing at the link, but this stuck out for me:

DM: VandeHei declares, “Terrorism is today’s World War.” Does VandeHei know how many people died in the World Wars? It’s over 17 million for World War I, over 60 million for World War II. Does he know how many people die from terrorism? It was about33,000 in 2014; only 3,503 Americans were killed between 1995 and 2014, and only 107 from 2005 to 2014. How is that in any sense comparable to the World Wars? 

JV: We are assassinating terrorists in multiple countries at any moment. Ask your friends in Paris, Brussels, and New York if they feel that a war that was started more than 10 years ago has come to an end. Ask the military and those deployed to the Middle East if they feel at war. Ask yourself if ISIS is retreating and receding and stability will return to Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

It would be naive to think this isn’t a war that get worse before it ends, if it ever does. Clearly, the war on terror does not approximate previous world wars in terms of casualties, but it’s only just begun. None of us know what’s next. Debating how we guard against it, authorize it, protect civil liberties during it, seems worthy. That is why military expertise strikes me as very important.

That phrase “Terrorism is today’s World War” was actually part of a much more cynical political proposition. This is what VandeHei wrote in his original piece:

Exploit the fear factor. The candidate should be from the military or immediately announce someone with modern-warfare expertise or experience as running mate. People are scared. Terrorism is today’s World War and Americans want a theory for dealing with it. President Obama has established an intriguing precedent of using drone technology and intelligence to assassinate terrorists before they strike. A third-party candidate could build on death-by-drones by outlying [sic] the type of modern weapons, troops and war powers needed to keep America safe. And make plain when he or she will use said power. Do it with very muscular language—there is no market for nuance in the terror debate.

This is your standard villager folks. I think people forget what they really are.

His political prescription aside, as atrocious as it is, is not as bad as his insanely hysterical insistence that terrorism is like a World War (or even that it’s likely to become as bad as World War II.)  This nonsense has pervaded our media since 9/11 — the deep an abiding desire to be a “greatest generation” and fight an existential battle. Islamic terrorism is not that. Pretending that it is is a recipe for overreaction and stupid decisions. There is no danger of the US being taken over by Islamic fundamentalists and instituting Sharia law on Americans. It’s fatuous nonsense.

Terrorism a challenge and it’s dangerous. But we are irrational on the subject as President Obama pithily put it many months ago:

I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports. This won’t be information coming from me; it will be coming from you. We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. 

From Vox:

Part of the reason we are so irrational about this is because of Villagers like Jim Vandehei.

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Trump doubles down on the sexism

by digby

He appeared on the Today show today:

Matt Lauer: Some American voters might be a little bit nervous that this call for unpredictability is actually a way of masking a lack of understanding of the issues or grasp of the details

Trump: I have a total grasp of the details, far greater than just about anybody else, that I can tell you

I don’t know about that but he does have a grasp of the details of being a total asshole:

“Seventy percent of women in this country say they have a negative view of you,” Lauer said, referring to a Gallup poll. “Do you even care?”

“Of course I care. Nobody respects women more than I do. And I wasn’t playing the woman’s card, it’s true,” Trump said.

He continued:

I mean, she is playing the woman’s card. Everything she says is about the woman’s card. And, frankly, all I’m doing is bringing out the obvious. And without the woman’s card, Hillary would not even be a viable person to even run for a city-council position.

Lauer asked Trump if he thought women in the US vote based simply on gender.

“Well, I don’t think they vote on gender, no. I think they vote for security, I think they vote for jobs, and that’s why I’m doing so well,” Trump said.

He cited exit polls showing him leading with female voters, though those only surveyed Republicans who went to the polls.

Co-host Savannah Guthrie cut in and told Trump that him saying Clinton would only get 5% of the vote if she were a man suggests that the only thing she has going for her is that she’s a woman.

“Not that she was a former senator, a former secretary of state, and a lawyer,” Guthrie said. “Do you understand why some people find that to be kind of a demeaning comment?”

Trump responded:

No, I find it to be a true comment. I think that the only thing she’s got going is the fact that she’s a woman. She has done a terrible job in so many different ways. You look at Libya, you look at some of the things that she’s done are just absolutely disasters. Now I would say the primary thing that she has going is that she’s a woman and she is playing that card like I have never seen anybody play it before.

Those comments are even worse when you hear the casual confident way he says them. But then that’s how he sounds when he calls for torture and killing the innocent children of terrorist suspects to force them to talk too. He’s nothing if not sure of himself. And judging by his success so far, he’s got good reason to be that way.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard a lot of things in recent months, much of it directed at me, that leads me to believe that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing with this demeaning, disgusting sexist description of Clinton and that it could be successful. I just don’t think most people find this to be out of bounds. And if they do now, by the time he’s finished normalizing it like he’s normalized all the rest of his insane political rhetoric, I’m going to guess everyone will see it as perfectly legitimate political criticism, unfreighted with anything more culturally poisonous. And anyone who objects will be just another politically correct sell-out.

I wish I had more faith in my fellow Americans than that but when it comes to this sort of thing, I’m a complete cynic. He knows how to push those buttons and I’m really not sure that a majority of Americans don’t want him to push them.

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What does the press think of the campaign coverage so far?

by digby

Politico polled the presidential campaign press corps on how they feel about the press coverage of the race. It’s fascinating:

Sit with that for a while. I assume that many of these reporters are not in charge of the coverage and must rely on executives, editors and producers who are hungry for ratings, clicks and circulation. Remember that the world of journalism is in crisis and under tremendous pressure to deliver an audience.

Donald Trump understands that better than anyone. But in small ways, perhaps this poll will show reporters that they are not alone in their assessment of the various ways in which the media is presenting an unfair picture of the candidates and will make some adjustment.

Ted’s Hail Mary isn’t a bad play

by digby

I wrote about Cruz’s gamble for Salon this morning:

Say what you will about Ted Cruz, he is a good student. After watching Donald Trump upstage everyone in the race all year long, he knew that after such a big string of wins the night before, yesterday was going to be a big day for the frontrunner, particularly since he had scheduled his first major foreign policy speech for that morning. So, taking a page out of the Trump manual, he scheduled his own big event that afternoon and word quickly “got out” that he would announce Carly Fiorina as his running mate. Sure enough the cable news nets all covered Trump, of course, but then switched almost immediately to the Cruz event and covered both his speech and Fiorina’s in their entirety. He bested Trump at his own game by dominating a very packed news cycle that should be been all about Trump’s triumphant march through the northeast.

There may have been some good luck involved as well. The Cruz campaign clearly had planned the Fiorina announcement as part of his Indiana Hail Mary and likely because he knows that Trump’s biggest vulnerability is with women voters. He couldn’t have known that Trump would launch a sexist broadside against Hillary Clinton during his big victory speech on Tuesday night that brought that issue into broad relief — and created a meme that went viral when the first lady of New Jersey, standing behind Trump and reflecting the feelings of millions of American women gave him an obvious side-eye when he said this.

I think the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else going on. And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s vote. And the beautiful thing is women don’t like her, okay?

He obviously thought this was an extremely clever line since he had said it earlier in the day and Clinton had responded to it in her own victory speech. And Trump, as is his wont when a woman challenges him, couldn’t resist going there again on Morning Joe:

Trump: I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message. I know a lot of people would say you can’t say that about a woman, because of course a woman doesn’t shout. The way she shouted that message was not … ewwwww … that’s the way she said it, and I guess I’ll have to get used to a lot of that over the next four or five months.

One can imagine that millions of women gritted their teeth and mouthed the words “what an ass” when they heard that one.

Lucky Cruz happened to be planning to play his own “woman card” later that day to take full advantage of Trump’s sexist impulses. After all, Trump may be deluded that the ladies really like the cut of his jib, but the fact is that they actively loathe him. The Gallup polling over the month of March, showed that 70 percent of women have an unfavorable opinion of him. Cruz needs votes and he’s strategically targeting the people who already hate his rival. What choice does he have?

Cruz’s speech was a dull and predictable as usual but he did take the opportunity to remind every woman who was listening exactly what Trump had said about Fiorina:

“Everyone remembers that in one of the earliest debates Carly confronted Donald Trump. [cheers] A man who in his characteristic understatement said of her “look at that face”. [Boos] And everyone of us remembers the grace, the class the elan with which Carly responded. She responded to Donald that she knew exactly what he was saying and that every woman in America knew exactly what Donald Trump was saying. One of the great principles of bullies, they feed off of fear. They feed off of people who will cower in the corner when they yell and scream and insult and holler and curse. And they don’t know what to do when a strong powerful woman stands up and says “I am not afraid.”

He was basically saying that Donald Trump has very small hands. It’s fair to assume he hopes that Trump will show his usual lack of control and respond on the stump with his patented crude misogyny. He offered this doozy up to Chris Cuomo on CNN already:

“When I came out, I was competing against 17 very capable people… and a woman.”

The pundits all dismissed Cruz’s so-called “Hail Carly” as a desperate move, and it is. But Cruz had to do something to change the dynamic after Trump’s string of wins in the east and this isn’t a bad way to do it. Fiorina never won much in the way of votes but all the reporters who followed her campaign reported that she was quite popular on the trail especially among GOP women. It’s unlikely to hurt and could possibly help. It’s worth a try.

Cruz and Fiorina may be antediluvian political throwbacks in most ways but for all his faults Cruz does not seem to be threatened by professional women. After all, his wife has been the primary breadwinner. And there has been some kind of “arrangement” between them from the beginning of the campaign. Recall that Cruz’s Super Pac contributed big bucks to her campaign which would normally seem quite bizarre but which was explained at the time by Amy Chozick of the New York Times:

“Fiorina finance chairs told me supporters of other candidates have thrown them $$$ to have a woman in race attacking HRC.”

Now she’s oddly in cahoots with HRC, drawing misogynist fire from Donald Trump. What a strange campaign.

Finally, there is one other excellent reason to recruit Fiorina to the cause. If Cruz could pull off a miracle in Indiana and live to fight another day, Fiorina might be helpful in her home state of California. She may have failed spectacularly in her Senate bid but she did manage to get the GOP nomination in a statewide contest and she is well-connected with the Republican establishment there. It’s possible that she could actually do some good and help keep Trump’s delegate haul below the magic number.

All of this is an extreme long shot and most people think that Trump has it in the bag even if he comes close. But this has been the weirdest primary race in history and you just never know. Cruz is still in there, working every available lever to keep his campaign alive. Yesterday he managed to upstage Donald Trump on the day of his greatest triumph and took clever advantage of Trump’s weakness with women. He isn’t dead yet.

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