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Month: April 2016

Bubble babies

Published by digby on April 26, 2016

Bubble babies


by digby

Get a load of this from a Trump supporter who confronted Ted Cruz in Indiana. She’s a perfect example of someone who is living in the Trump social media bubble:

Outside an Indiana ice cream shop today, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stepped off his campaign bus and was almost immediately confronted by an angry Donald Trump supporter.
Kathy Hiel questioned Cruz about the delegate process, accusing him of rigging the system. The contentious exchange ended with Hiel saying Cruz isn’t a natural-born citizen and Cruz saying that if Trump had been confronted by a voter challenging him, the Trump campaign would have threatened the voter with violence. 

Good lord.

I have little sympathy for Cruz in general. But he’s right about this. The delegate rules in the states are not made by lobbyists, they’re made by local officials and engaged grassroots activists, the vast majority of whom cannot be considered part of the “Washington Cartel” or DC establishment. These Trumpies have obviously not been involved in politic before and are unaware that it isn’t actually like a reality TV show.

Everyone has a right to be involved, of course. They should. But social media is making it seem as though everyone has a right to win — and if they don’t it can only be because the system is rigged against them. After all, “everyone” is on their side!

There’s always been a bit of this in politics.  It was taken as a given by a whole lot of people that JFK stole the 1960 election in Illinois. I remember that people said President Bill Clinton wasn’t legitimate because he won with a plurality. And in 2000 George W. Bush actually did manipulate the system in broad daylight. The results of close elections are always debatable I suppose. But in the social media age it’s gone well beyond anything like that to the point where everything is a conspiracy. I don’t know where this leads — probably nowhere. But it doesn’t strike me as one of the positive developments to emerge from the internet.

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Qapla! We’ve disrupted the RW radio advertising model @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on April 26, 2016

Qapla! We’ve disrupted the RW radio advertising model

By Spocko

 My friends at Media Matters For America put up this video pointing out that Rush Limbaugh is no longer the goose that laid the golden egg. In fact, he hasn’t been for years. It’s news now since he is in contract negotiations.  It’s too bad some media outlet won’t dig deeper into what happened to Rush and the AM broadcast radio business.  Right wing radio is no longer a safe place for most consumer advertising. How this happened and what it means might be a good story–if they cared to write it.

They could examine the impact of the revenue decline, but also the reasons behind it.

I don’t expect anyone in the media to “follow the money.” since the money raised for political candidates goes into media buys. But if one did, they might find that lowered revenue expectations and dark money are now keeping Rush afloat.

The political press will talk about how powerful Rush still is and how he and his brethren (cistern?) helped bring us the extreme right wing GOP presidential candidates. They can ignore the lost advertisers, since that is not their metric for power.

The business press might write about the advertisers that left him. They will then dutifully report any details the new contract reveals. But they will only do macro-level reporting, since the corporations that distribute Rush’s show are privately held.

If Rush was employed by a public corporation, with reporting guidelines and analysts covering the company things might be bit different.

But then again, as I pointed out to Rupert Murdoch during Newscorp’s 2010 quarterly conference call, big public companies can hide losses too. (Rupert and Me: I question the Newscorp CEO about subsidizing Glenn Beck)

 In American, unless you have a different metric for success, your product or service is supposed to eventually generate revenue quarter after quarter. And if a product that did generate revenue stops or slows down, steps are taken to get the asset to return to profitability. If your product continues to lose more money than it generates, something has to change.

However, if your metric for success is not money, your product can lose 100’s of millions of dollars each year and every year just like the New York Post and the Washington Times.

Expecting a specific product (or radio host) to make money is only a problem if they are expected to. Private entities can change the rules anytime they want to.

Take for example right-wing think tanks. Their job is to push the ideas and viewpoints of the funders. Nobody expects them to make money, if they do it’s a lucky accident. Let’s say one of their authors writes a book that the public actually buys. Score! If the book only sees the inside of swag bags at CPAC, the authors still get paid.

What was an asset is now a liability. 

Back in 2004 when I decided to “take on” right wing radio, I knew that nobody cared what I thought. I was told, “If you don’t like it, turn it off!” But I knew that the people running the station did care what one group of people thought, the ones paying them money. The advertisers.

And the people with the money cared about their brands.  I simply showed them what they were paying for on the shows. Is this what your brand is about? If not, don’t taint your brand. They could choose to stay or go. No threats, no boycotts.

The radio hosts could also choose to keep saying the same things, just not with that advertiser’s money. No censorship, no government regulations, just market forces.

The hosts could have made different choices, but they didn’t.

I imagine at some point Rush was asked to reduce his sexism and his bigotry. After missing forecasts for a few quarters distributors might have begging him to tone it down.

 “What!? Tone it down? Me, apologize!?  US Senators call me to apologize. Nobody tells me what to say on MY show!”

Maybe they tried to find some leverage to break his contract, because that is what they do with “labor” that is costing them money.  But maybe his lawyers were smarter, “You signed a contract, you have to keep paying Rush or we’ll sue for breach.”

So then the distributors had to take the very significant financial hit from the advertisers leaving. Over and over again. Lowering expectations again and again. There probably are some very pissed off people because of this. Will they take it out on Rush in the contract? Sure, somewhat, but no matter what is announced we won’t really know the details.


Bullies think like bullies. They’ll make verbal, legal or physical threats

I found out that when you impact a revenue stream people notice, and hit back, hard. Bullies don’t just rollover and back down. Because if they can’t fix the source of the problem, the host(s), they try to get rid of the people who pointed out the problem. In my case it was verbal and legal threats.

Instead of the distributors dealing with Rush’s brand tainting comments, they went after the people who alerted advertisers to what he was saying.  My friends in the #stoprush group, who did all the real hard work contacting advertisers, got targeted by one of Rush’s PR bullies.

In this story about what happened, that the media won’t do, they might look at what the distributors and stations have done following these massive material hits to their revenue. They could look at how they found new revenue from places like the Heritage Foundation, conservative schools and other one-step- removed-from-dark-money people.

They could write about how stations bulked up on political advertising at full price from old rate sheets while making money for creating the ads as well.  They could document the barrel scrapping and the search for more and bigger boner pill companies. If there isn’t a gold seller ad to run they fill up with PSAs, non-profit ads and annoying Kars for Kids spots.

They might even look into how their failure to address the real problem spilled over into successful stations which they then destroyed. These are the unintended consequences of a wildly successful program to defund RW radio.

Qapla! (Success in Klingon) 



Sometimes people point out that Rush is still on the radio, he still has tons of money and millions of listeners. Or that money still gets to him and his distributors, just via dark channels.

As I wrote back in 2007 when I got a letter from Bank of America about pulling their ads from KSFO, convincing mainstream advertisers to leave showed the money people that RW radio views are no longer safe to publicly get behind, is a very big deal.

To everyone who worked (and continue to work) to make this all happen I say. “Qapla!” and live long and prosper.

Trump’s election would bring on “the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since the civil war.”

Published by digby on April 26, 2016

Trump’s election would bring on “the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since the civil war.”

by digby

Huffington Post Highline has put together a comprehensive look at Trump’s history and pronouncements about military matters. He’s been foolish on these issues for decades, but now he’s getting very close to becoming the Republican nominee for president and it’s getting serious. Don’t read it if you scare easily:

[W]hen Trump has weighed in on national security questions, his remarks often reveal either ignorance or disdain for military expertise and the codes of conduct that govern the armed forces. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me,” he boasted in one speech, adding, “I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war.” His foreign policy prescriptions include proposals to “bomb the shit out of ISIS,” to “take out” the families of ISIS members and to torture terrorism suspects. (“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would,” he told one crowd. “And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”) When it was pointed out that soldiers couldn’t legally carry out those last two actions, Trump was unconcerned. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.” (He walked back that last statement the next day.) The Geneva Conventions, he recently observed, have made American soldiers “afraid to fight.”

Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policy, combined with his years of broadsides, have set off a very real fear within military circles about what might happen were he to become president. In the last two months, I spoke with dozens of people in the national security realm—current and retired officers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA officials. The words they used to describe their mood: Terrified. Shocked. Appalled. Never before, they say, has a candidate gotten so close to the White House with such little respect for the military.

One former Marine infantry officer described Trump as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk.”

“He completely misunderstands the military profession that he would head if he were the president,” said Robert Killebrew, a retired colonel who served in the Army for more than 30 years. Others were less polite. In a pair of ads produced by the American Future Fund, a retired Special Forces commander named Michael Waltz calls Trump a draft-dodger who “hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” and a Vietnam veteran, Tom Hanton, says that Trump’s quip about POWs was “the most infuriating comment I think I’ve heard from a politician in my entire life.” One former Marine infantry officer described Trump to me as a “fake-bake-ing chicken hawk” whose “knowledge of the Middle East could be trumped (sorry) by your average Georgetown sophomore.”

Trump’s chosen foreign policy advisers—which include a 2009 college graduate who touted his experience in the Model U.N. on his online résumé and another who used Kanye West lyrics to make arguments on his foreign policy blog—have only stoked these anxieties. “Weirdo nobodies,” was how one military historian characterized them to me. “They’re probably the least qualified group of foreign policy and national security advisers I’ve ever seen or even heard of,” said Richard Kohn, an expert in civil-military relations and retired professor at the University of North Carolina. A source with firsthand knowledge told me that Trump’s campaign pursued retired General David Petraeus, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, but all three men declined. In a TV appearance not long afterward, Trump said he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the members of his military team if they didn’t agree with him. (Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)

For even the savviest of presidents, the relationship between a commander in chief and his military is famously fraught, an intricate dance of egos and agendas, worldviews and bureaucracies. A President Trump, however, could usher in a clash of historic proportions. “If you take the man at his word,” said Michael Breen, the president of the Truman National Security Project and a decorated former Army officer, “we have a presidential candidate who seems to have committed himself to triggering what would probably be the greatest crisis in civil-military relations since the American Civil War.”

There’s more. It gets worse.

I know I sometimes sound like Lindsey Graham on this question but I think it’s warranted. A country with as much money, firepower and influence as this one looks like a very dangerous nation to the rest of the world in the hands of a demagogic proto-fasicst like Trump. Whether this crisis with the military would actually materialize or not there is no doubt that there would be many unfortunate consequences. The madman theory was never meant to be deployed by an actual madman.
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Ted Cruz’s muse

Published by digby on April 26, 2016

Ted Cruz’s muse

by digby

I wrote about Texas, Tom DeLay and Ted Cruz for Salon this morning:

2016 is a political season of epic peculiarity and weirdness so perhaps it’s not too surprising that the news of a former speaker of the House being convicted of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money to a former student he molested when he was a wrestling coach years before is part of the mix. It’s a testament to how far we’ve defined deviancy down that this has only caused a minor ripple in the press. He’s an elderly man now and he has been out of office for a decade but some of the craziness we are experiencing today can be traced back to his heyday so it’s worth taking a look at the Dennis Hastert years to see how we got to where we are now.

Dennis Hastert has one man to thank for his career as Speaker: former Texas congressman Tom DeLay, the Republican hatchet man who rammed the impeachment of Bill Clinton through the House and out-lasted Newt Gingrich in the GOP leadership. (He also has to thank him for writing a letter to the judge in his case, attesting to the character of his old compatriot and claiming that Hastert had never disappointed him “in any way”, apparently not even when he found out he was a sexual predator.)

DeLay was the power behind Hastert’s throne, the whip known as “the Hammer” who preached and perfected the brand of take-no-prisoners politics currently practiced by the Tea Party and House Freedom Caucus. He was the man who made Ted Cruz possible. As the majority whip and majority leader during the Clinton and Bush years, he was an extremely powerful leader who had been looking for crimes and procedural offenses that would help him make the case for impeachment of liberal judges he felt were too liberal long before he jumped on the Clinton impeachment train. He had no patience for normal democratic processes and believed in achieving his goals by any mean necessary.

He pushed impeachment hard, making insinuations to the press that he knew more than he could say publicly and pressing his fellow House members to go along. The born again Christian (who had been known by his friends as “hot tub Tom” in his youth) was quoted saying, “I think Bill Clinton is the representative of the demoralization of America during my generation.” It was a crusade, but not just a moral one. He set out to prove that conservatives could rule by brute force and the plan was to destroy Bill Clinton and ensure that “those who jumped off the cliff with him will suffer politically. Starting with Al Gore.”

We all know how that turned out.

One of the big casualties of that whole mess was Newt Gingrich who was forced out after the House lost seats in the 98 mid-terms during the impeachment saga. (It seems the public wasn’t happy about the House deciding to depose a duly elected president against the will of the people. Imagine that.) But Gingrich had been the subject of a failed coup the year before, led by none other than Tom Delay. James Carney at TIME wrote it up as it happened:

The plan was to have Armey, DeLay, Boehner and Paxon present Gingrich with a fait accompli: step aside or be voted out by parliamentary maneuver. What happened next is murky. By some accounts, when DeLay reported back to his fellow leaders later that Thursday night, he brought news that the rebels wanted Gingrich to be succeeded by Paxon, not Armey, who was next in line. Early Friday, Armey told his colleagues that he spent the night “praying with my wife” and decided he could not support the coup. “When Armey realized he wasn’t going to be Speaker, he backed out,” insists a knowledgeable source. 

Not so, says Armey. When details of the aborted putsch broke in the July 16 edition of the scrappy weekly newspaper the Hill, he issued a statement that “any and all allegations that I was involved in some ridiculous plot to oust the Speaker [are] completely false, and, in fact, ludicrous.” But later when Armey stood up in a meeting of House Republicans and declared that the Hill story was inaccurate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a rebel leader, lunged for a microphone to challenge the assertion–knocking over a chair before another member could restrain him. Later, Armey changed his story. To his utter surprise, sources close to him now claimed, he realized that several of his fellow leaders–in other words, Paxon and DeLay–had been conspiring against Newt. Asked at a press conference whether DeLay should resign, Armey remained silent. DeLay wouldn’t comment on any of it. And Boehner said he’d been assessing the rebel threat, nothing more… “The Speaker doesn’t want to waste time figuring out the intricacies of what happened,” a Gingrich aide said. “He wants to move forward.” 

The Speaker did have time, however, to plot his revenge–and he settled on DeLay as his next target. Privately, Gingrich told associates that he wanted to remove the whip and replace him with DeLay’s chief deputy, Illinois moderate Denny Hastert. 

As you can see,  the current GOP lunacy didn’t just spring out of nowhere.

Gingrich didn’t succeed in replacing DeLay with Hastert but when he was finally forced out the next year (and very briefly replaced by the embarrassing philanderer, Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston) DeLay stuck in the shiv by putting Hastert into the Speaker’s chair. DeLay ended up spending the next half decade running the House as his private fiefdom and turning the GOP caucus into the obstinate, obstructionist destructive force it is today.

And Texas was ground zero. For 130 years, Democrats had dominated the state.  When the GOP finally won a majority in 2002,  DeLay immediately instigated a new redistricting plan to favor Republicans, despite the fact that all the states had just redistricted in 2001. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and DeLay prevailed. The result was that Texas went from being run by a big money, oil rich, bipartisan political establishment to Tea Party crazy over the next 10 years and it produced DeLay’s perfect extremist leader, Ted Cruz.

When he went to Washington, Cruz attempted to bust all norms and processes, almost as if that were an end in itself. He disdained the leadership of his own party as much as he does the President. He is a moral crusader without any ethics. And today he’s fighting for the presidency using any means necessary, just like the man who made the Texas GOP what it is today. The Hammer’s legacy is secure.

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Back to the voting booth by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 26, 2016

Back to the voting booth
by Tom Sullivan

Well, that didn’t go as hoped. This morning’s headline in the Charlotte Observer online reads, “Federal judge who backed limits on early ballots upholds voter ID requirement.” Slate summarizes:

A federal judge on Monday upheld a 2013 North Carolina voter ID law that increased the requirements a voter must meet to cast a ballot, a move that critics say is an effort to discourage black and Hispanic voters from political participation. The suit was brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, as well as a group of North Carolina voters, and claimed the new measure, one of the strictest in the country, violated the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder, however, disagreed and in his 485-page opinion wrote “North Carolina has provided legitimate state interests for its voter ID requirement and electoral system.”

Critics condemned the ruling, which they will likely appeal to the 4th Circuit:

“This is just one step in a legal battle that is going to continue in the courts,” said Penda Hair, an attorney representing the NAACP. The law “targets the provisions that once made North Carolina among the states with the highest turnout in the nation. This progress was especially clear among African-American and Latino voters, who came to rely on measures like early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct provisional ballots to ensure their voices were heard.”

The New York Times explains what was on the table:

The opinion, by Judge Thomas D. Schroeder of Federal District Court in Winston-Salem, upheld the repeal of a provision that allowed people to register and vote on the same day. It also upheld a seven-day reduction in the early-voting period; the end of preregistration, which allowed some people to sign up before their 18th birthdays; and the repeal of a provision that allowed for the counting of ballots cast outside voters’ home precinct.

It also left intact North Carolina’s voter identification requirement, which legislators softened last year to permit residents to cast ballots, even if they lack the required documentation, if they submit affidavits.

Just weeks ahead of a hearing last July, Republicans in the legislature swapped out some of the barricades to voting for hoops.

Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog has additional analysis of the opinion, including these observations on the original impetus behind the bill:

5. On the need for the voter id law to prevent voter fraud, the court says first that it is hard to find impersonation fraud without an id requirement, but more importantly the Supreme Court in the Crawford case said there need not be evidence of impersonation fraud to justify the law. So while the plaintiffs have to present tons of evidence of burden, the state can get by with no evidence of a need. (This seems perverse to me.)

So plaintiffs provided insufficient proof of a burden and the state provided no justification for the law. Let’s call it even.

6. The court also finds that the state did not act with discriminatory intent, citing (without an appreciation for irony) at p. 387 the testimony of Hans von Spakovsky to the legislature on the need for this restrictive law. Whether or not his testimony was true, the court says, the legislature could have believed it true, thereby negating possibility of discriminatory intent.

Spakovsky, the Professor Harold Hill of voter fraud, testified that the “potential for abuse exists.” And windmills might be giants. Sufficient enough reason to pass a law restricting them.

It’s back to the voting booth, people, if voters expect to stop them from stopping voters.

Fiorina’s deal

Published by digby on April 26, 2016

Fiorina’s deal

by digby

Oh please:

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is vetting Carly Fiorina as a potential running mate, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned.

According to a spokeswoman for Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and one-time presidential candidate is being vetted by Cruz’s campaign.

“Normal stuff,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, who served as deputy campaign manager during Fiorina’s bid, when asked about the process. She added that Fiorina has met with members of the Cruz campaign and has given them financial disclosures and other documentation. Flores added that “no offers” have been made.

I think the DNC had an appropriate response to this one:

“Carly Fiorina laid off 30,000 workers, outsourced American jobs, destroyed HP’s stock value and took a $42 million golden parachute upon being fired. If a record like that passes Ted Cruz’s vetting operation, it tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party’s misplaced priorities.”

Remember, the Cruz megabucks donors helped finance her campaign. They were op-en that the idea was to have a woman on board to viciously disparage Hillary Clinton without being accused of sexism. It appears the money was well spent.

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Your new presidential Trump

Published by digby on April 25, 2016

Your new presidential Trump

by digby

Here he is today talking about his rival John Kasich:

“He has the news conference all the time when he’s eating. I have never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion,” Trump said. “I’m always telling my young son, Barron, always with my kids, all of them, I’d say ‘children, small little bites.’” This guy takes a pancake and he’s shoving it in his mouth, it’s disgusting.”

“Do you want that for your president?” Trump asked the crowd. “I don’t think so”

Right. We want an orange psychopath who has no control over what he says. Got it.

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