True grit
by digby
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2016
QOTD: Kasich the moderate
by digby
On This Week:
“Well George I hope they do repeal Roe v. Wade and then, you know, it’ll be up to the states to decide how they want to proceed, it’ll be up to them to figure out what they want to do, and that’s precisely what we would do.”
What a slimy piece of work.
He’s for a “Human Life Amendment” which proclaims a zygote to have full human rights. So I wonder if he thinks that it would be cool for California to legalize child murder? Because that’s what a “human life amendment” would do. And on the other hand, if say, Ohio, thinks women should be prosecuted for murder well, you know, that’s their prerogative too.
This states’ rights dodge is annoying generally but it’s cheap and stupid coming from “pro-life” zealots like Kasich. This is supposed to be a matter of life and death. It’s the killing of a full human being with all the rights of any of the rest of us. But it’s cool with him is some states decide that this mass killing is ok? Really?
Reporters should push him on this.
.
Another election day shitshow coming right up
by digby
Wisconsin has enacted some of the most byzantine voting restrictions in the country. Ari Berman has the story. This quote from the legal challenge sums up some of the issues:
Since 2011, the State of Wisconsin has twice reduced in-person absentee (“early”) voting, introduced restrictions on voter registration, changed its residency requirements, enacted a law that encourages invasive poll monitoring, eliminated straight-ticket voting on the official ballot, eliminated for most (but not all) citizens the option to obtain an absentee ballot by fax or email, and imposed a voter identification (“voter ID”) requirement.
Scott Walker says it’s easy to get voter ID in WI. Just follow this simple chart https://t.co/E02yKk6mkN via @ACLU pic.twitter.com/vWtOAhYQC8— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) April 3, 2016
Politics and Reality Radio
by Joshua Holland
This week, we’re joined by Sharona Coutts, an investigative reporter for Rewire, who brings us one of the most rage-inducing stories in recent memory — an almost unbelievable saga about the kind of intrigue and sleaze that young women have to endure to get abortions in Mississippi. Prepare for your blood to boil.
Then we’ll talk politics with Heather Parton, whom folks around here might know better as Digby. We talk Trump, Republican coup plots and take a little time to look at the Dem side as well.
Finally, we’ll be joined by scientist and science writer Greg Laden to discuss a worrisome new study about our changing climate — we shouldn’t be totally distracted by Donald Trump!
As always, you can subscribe to the show at iTunes or Podbean.
PLAYLIST:
Bitter: Sweet: “Trouble”
Mindless Drug Hoover: “The Reefer Song”
Postmodern Jukebox: “All About That Bass”
Elvis Presley: “In the Ghetto”
Trump admits error. World stops turning.
by digby
Trump gave an interview to Maureen Dowd. And he said something earth-shattering:
YOU could hear how hard it was for Donald Trump to say the words.
“Yeah, it was a mistake,” he said, sounding a bit chastened. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have sent it.”
I was telling him he lost my sister’s vote when he retweeted a seriously unflattering photo of the pretty Heidi Cruz next to a glam shot of his wife, Melania.
He repeated his contention that he didn’t view the Heidi shot “necessarily as negative.” But I stopped him, saying it was clearly meant to be nasty.
Trump also got into his schoolyard excuse of “he did it first” and “that wasn’t nice,” insisting that Ted Cruz wrote the words on the digital ad put up by an anti-Trump group aimed at Utah Mormons; it showed Melania in a 2000 British GQ shot posing provocatively and suggested that it was not First Ladylike. Cruz denies any involvement.
Truth be told, Trump said he “didn’t love the photo” of Melania. “I think she’s taken better pictures,” he said, also protesting: “It wasn’t a nude photo, either. It wasn’t nude!”
This actually made me laugh:
I pressed, how he could possibly win with 73 percent of women in this country turned off by him?
He chose another poll, murmuring, “It was 68 percent, actually.”
Trump doesn’t have a plan to turn it around with women, except to use Ivanka as a character witness and to chant that “nobody respects women more than I do.”
“I’m just going to be myself,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”
I asked how he would get past the damage done by his insults about women’s looks.
“I attack men far more than I attack women,” he said. “And I attack them tougher.”
There’s a very good chance Trump wins the nomination and if he does it will be an epic battle of the bros vs the beyotches.
.
Sunday Funnies
by digby
What’s wrong with this picture?
by digby
David Brooks on Meet the Press:
There are two motivations for voters. There is philosophy and Sanders sort of has that. But there is also party loyalty. I was watching an interview with her earlier and I was thinking if Ed Muskie or Hubert Humphrey came back and they saw her they’d say “that’s what a Democratic candidate looks like.” And so she’s part of the embodied history of the party. There’s a machine like quality and so it’s hard to get excited by her but there’s comfort level for Democratic voters. That’s carrying her but it doesn’t inspire anybody.
“That’s what a Democratic candidate looks like.”
Well, there is one little difference. Not that anyone cares because it’s so insignificant and meaningless. But still. You’d think it would at least get a tiny bit of acknowledgement. Nobody said a word.
But why should they? It’s not like it makes any difference, right?
.
“Frontiers of wrongness”
by Tom Sullivan
Puzzling over how the next few months are going to shake out, it is easy to sympathize with Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. He writes about a conference call this week in which strategist Tad Devine explained how the Bernie Sanders campaign means to whittle away at Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead:
One reason the thought-leaders of media groupthink listened so eagerly to Devine’s Gandalfian pronouncements is that we’ve been wrong about damn near everything in 2016 — wrong about Sanders, wrong about Trump, wrong about the enduring power of the “Republican establishment” and wrong about the stability of the two-party system. Who is to say we’re not wrong this time too? Who can imagine what new frontiers of wrongness lie ahead?
“Frontiers of wrongness” brought to mind the flat-earthers’ maps. Perhaps the most tantalizing aspect of their wrongness is the notion that beyond Antarctica lie uncharted lands still left to explore. Perhaps Donald Trump will build a resort/casino there? Perhaps North Carolina can send its unwanted gay and transgender people there?
Frank Bruni comments on both the wrongness and the shortsightedness of Republican’s anti-gay agenda, a provincial and retrograde attempt to stand athwart history as it bends towards equality and justice. Plus, sponsors are getting nervous about particpating in the RNC convention, what with the “brew of misogyny, racism and xenophobia stirred up by Trump.” Bruni writes:
THE party’s anti-gay efforts not only undermine its pro-business stance but also contradict conservatives’ exaltation of local decision making. The North Carolina law was drafted and passed expressly to undo and override an ordinance in the state’s most populous city, Charlotte, that extended L.G.B.T. protections against discrimination to transgender people who want to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. The law went so far as to forbid any municipality from instituting its own anti-discrimination protections, lest they contradict the state’s.
Apparently conservatives love the concept of local control when the locality being given control tilts right, but they have a different view when it leans left. Rural sensibilities must be defended while cosmopolitan ones are dismissed.
And don’t miss the Trojan Horse provisions in that NC law that significantly indemnify discrimination by employers.
Charlie Pierce is in Madison, Wisconsin to cover the primary on Tuesday and has a few choice words on the wrongness of Gov. Scott Walker’s voter ID legislation. Bernie Sanders had more biting ones:
“It has never occurred to me and I think to most candidates that the way you try to win an election is to make it harder for people who might vote against you to participate in the election,” Sanders said. “That is political cowardice.”
The room erupted in cheers — including one man who yelled “Go get ‘em, Bernie!” — as he accused Walker and other Republican governors who support laws requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote of trying to deny people of color, poor people and the elderly their right to vote.
“If you don’t have the guts to participate in a free, open and fair election, get another job. Get outta politics,” Sanders said.
But getting back to O’Hehir’s frontiers of wrongness, where will Sanders supporters go this fall should he not win the Democratic nomination? Furthermore, where will Trump’s go if he wins the nomination and loses badly in the fall? Michael Bourne wonders:
For a generation, gun advocates have defended the right to bear arms as a check against tyranny, and for just as long liberals have dismissed this as a melodramatic talking point. But what if we take them at their word, and accept that it is possible we are witnessing the opening phase of a still-inchoate violent uprising by a broad class of Americans, who, ignored politically, bypassed economically, and dismissed socially, are beginning to take matters into their own hands?
What if, in other words, Donald Trump isn’t an aberration created by the miscalculations of a party elite, but the political expression of a much deeper, and more dangerous, frustration among a very large, well-armed segment of our population? What if Trump isn’t a proto-Mussolini, but rather a regrettably short finger in the dike holding back a flood of white violence and anger this country hasn’t seen since the long economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s helped put an end to the Jim Crow era?
What is most worrisome about the uncertainty ahead is the sense that on both the left and the right many people have convinced themselves that the republic is beyond repair. Decades of right-wing “voter fraud” propaganda have done their work, to where even the left believes, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren reminds us, “the game is rigged.” She may be speaking primarily (and accurately) about the economy, but the rigged meme is widespread, with even lefty activists quick to see conspiracies first and ask sober questions later.
There is a kind of Nero impulse afoot. Susan Sarandon’s comments captured the mood well. And if there are those on the left prepared to see the republic restored in cleansing fire, Bourne’s concerns about the right may be well-founded. The question is whether all the talk of revolution isn’t more Trumpian-style bluster. The thing about bringing down purifying fire is that innocent villagers tend to get sprayed with napalm.
“We knew exactly what he was…”
by digby
Nice explanation of the Trump phenomenon from Ezra Klein here, tracking closely with what I’ve been writing for months: Trump’s not iconoclastic or lacking in ideology. He’s not an isolationist. He’s an authoritarian nationalist. He’s been very clear about it.
.
