The nanny
by digby
He actually said this about the GOP nominee for president of the United States:
He also said that he’s doing much better about beating up girls during recess and isn’t stealing the first graders lunch money nearly as often as he was.
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Trump: Ryan “wants me to be me”
by digby
Maureen Dowd likes to make up comic dialog by politicians to skewer them for what she sees as their foibles. It’s usually not very funny or insightful. And upon first skim of her column this morning, I was rolling my eyes at what seemed to me to be an attempt to channel Darryl Hammond’s SNL impression of Donald Trump.
And then I realized they were real quotes. At least I think they were.
What were Speaker Ryan’s demands?
“We talked about the success I’ve had,” Trump replied. “Paul said to me that he has never seen anything like it because I’m a nonpolitician and I beat very successful politicians. He was really fascinated by how I won. I said, it’s just like I have good ideas and I’ve bonded with the people and my people are very loyal. They will stay through thick and thin, whereas the people that support Marco and Cruz wouldn’t. If Jeb sneezed, they’d leave.”
[…]
So Ryan didn’t ask Trump to stop making remarks that alienate women? “No,” Trump said, “he wants me to be me.”
It gets worse:
When I asked if he had been chided by any Republicans for his Twitter feud with Elizabeth Warren, he replied, “You mean Pocahontas?” So much for reining it in.
I noted that John Cornyn said he gave Trump some tips on how to discuss illegal immigration more sensitively to woo Hispanic voters. “I love getting advice,” Trump deadpanned. “It’s just what I need, just what I need is more advice. The 17 people I beat are still giving me advice.”
Trump also briefly saw Poppy Bush’s guru, James Baker. “I was more interested in asking him about Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the whole Reagan era than I was in terms of getting advice currently,” Trump said.
Jesus.
The candidate who’s under fire for his own tone told me he was offended by Stephanopoulos’s tone. Trump said he’s not afraid that people will find out he’s not as rich as he says. “Tax returns don’t show that,” he said. “They would show, do I use Cayman Islands stuff? And the answer is no, I can tell you right now. Am I ensconced in some of the crazy countries where you keep money and avoid taxes? The answer is no, I don’t do that.”
Hookay…
Trump insisted to me that the Post recording was not his voice. “ Do you know how many people I have imitating my voice now? It’s like everybody.”
The man is unstable…
While many Republicans are expressing how scared they are to be handcuffed to someone so erratic, Trump is almost feral in savoring his victory. “They say it was the roughest primary in memory, in history,” he said proudly. Recalling trouncing Jeb Bush, he noted, “Low energy, that term just hit. That thing, that was a one-day kill. Words are beautiful.”
And a sociopath…
No one marvels more at his success than Trump. “Don’t analyze it,” he said. “Just do it. The other players would come up to Babe Ruth and say, ‘Babe, how do you hit the long ball?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, man. I just hit it.’ There’s a little bit of truth in that.”
No, he doesn’t know how he did it. And what that has taught him is that he’s magic. He was already a an egomaniac going in. Now he’s a full-blown megalomaniac.
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Give us back the lie
by Tom Sullivan
Huntington, Indiana from the air, looking northeast.
Eli Saslow reports for the Washington Post on the decline of manufacturing in northeast Indiana where the American Dream is proving to be just that. Chris Setser stands to lose his $17/hr production line job at United Technologies Electronic Controls (UTEC) in Huntington. Like Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis before it, the company announced plans to relocate to Mexico. Setser’s philosophy of “We can make it work” and “Life always evens out” is being tested:
All around him an ideological crisis was spreading across Middle America as it continued its long fall into dependency: median wages down across the country, average income down, total wealth down in the past decade by 28 percent. For the first time ever, the vaunted middle class was not the country’s base but a disenfranchised minority, down from 61 percent of the population in the 1970s to just 49 percent as of last year. As a result of that decline, confusion was turning into fear. Fear was giving way to resentment. Resentment was hardening into a sense of outrage that was unhinging the country’s politics and upending a presidential election.
Still, Setser believes in the “‘basic guarantees’ of the working class,” Salow writes. That his basic work ethic and work history will guarantee his home, cars, and annual trip to the lake will remain intact. He’s planning on remarrying. And he’s leaning towards Trump:
“We’re getting to the point where there aren’t really any good options left,” he said. “The system is broken. Maybe its time to blow it up and start from scratch, like Trump’s been saying.”
Krystal [his 16 year-old] rolled her eyes at him. “Come on. You’re a Democrat.”
“I was. But that was before we started turning into a weak country,” he said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anything left. We’ll all be flipping burgers.”
“Fine, but so what?” she said. “We just turn everything over to the guy who yells the loudest?”
Setser leaned into the table and banged it once for emphasis. “They’re throwing our work back in our face,” he said. “China is doing better. Even Mexico is doing better. Don’t you want someone to go kick ass?”
Globalization. Financialization. Greed, one of the deadly sins. Nothing a little ass-whupping won’t fix.
Daniel Engber at Slate has a lengthy but worthwhile examination of the state of psychological research pertaining to success. Angela Duckworth’s notion of “Grit” in particular, but other measures as well. Americans tell themselves hard work and perseverance always win out. It’s just not true. While Duckworth began her research looking at which West Point cadets had the “grit” to survive Beast Week without quitting, the quality appears to have had limited applicability:
Even the task of graduating from West Point itself doesn’t really compare to the trials of Beast. When Duckworth looked at students’ grades and “military performance scores” during their first year at school, she found that grit offered little guidance on how they’d handle the rest of the United States Military Academy curriculum. The whole candidate score—that old-fashioned, talent-based assessment—did much better. Considering that three-quarters of the students who fail to finish at West Point flunk during the post-Beast curriculum, those first seven gritty weeks appear to represent a special case, and one of marginal importance.
That is, Engber writes, “Grit matters, but only in specific situations that require strength of will.” Chris Setser might be “gritty.” He might believe Trump is. But grit alone will neither secure the “basic guarantees” to which Middle America once believed it was entitled, nor will it be enough for Trump. He seems to believe he can bully and bluster his way through any challenge, and actually knowing anything about the basic functions of government won’t matter. Trump, a former private military academy student, might have learned the value of grit, but doesn’t seemed to value other qualities that go into making an effective world leader.
One can see dead factory after dead factory stretched out for 75 miles east of here. Some textile facilities, but mostly empty furniture factories. Tens of thousands of Setsers have lost work over the last couple of decades. Hard work and perseverance were not enough to secure their futures. But many may be willing to vote for anyone who will give them back the illusion that they would. The fall elections from the presidency on down may turn on which party makes the better case. Or they might just settle for the guy who promises to kick some nonspecific ass.
The only way to stop a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler a gun…
by digby
Or something …I don’t know why this is considered to be business as usual but it is:
There may be more. The article is from May 1st.
Since April 20, there have been at least seven instances in which a 1- , 2- or 3-year-old shot themselves or somebody else in the United States:
Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that toddlers were finding guns and shooting people at a rate of about one a week.
On April 20, a 2-year-old boy in Indiana found the gun his mother left in her purse on the kitchen counter and fatally shot himself.
The next day in Kansas City, Mo., a 1-year-old girl evidently shot and killed herself with her father’s gun while he was sleeping.
On April 22, a 3-year-old in Natchitoches, La., fatally shot himself after getting hold of a gun.
On April 26, a 3-year-old boy in Dallas, Ga., fatally shot himself in the chest with a gun he found at home.
On April 27, the Milwaukee toddler fatally shot his mother in the car.
That same day, a 3-year-old boy in Grout Township, Mich., shot himself in the arm with a gun he found at home. He is expected to survive.
On April 29, a 3-year-old girl shot herself in the arm after grabbing a gun in a parked car in Augusta, Ga. She is also expected to survive.
The NRA fights against any kind of legal sanction against the parents because “they’ve suffered enough.” (I wonder how many of those people also believe that a 12 years old girl should be forced to carry her father’s child to term?)
These numbers represent only a small fraction of gun violence involving children. For instance, the pro-gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety has found at least 77 instances this year in which a child younger than 18 has accidentally shot someone. And there is a whole different universe of gun violence in which toddlers are shot, intentionally or not, by adults.
What in the hell is wrong with us?
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You say you want a revolution?
by digby
I just came across this from the night of the 2012 election:
He’s deleted a bunch of those tweets since then but they were captured here.
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Believing the worst
by digby
Things are getting a lot better on a big picture global basis but people are convinced we’re going to hell in a hand-basket:
Did you know that, in the past 30 years, the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty has decreased by more than half? If you said no—if you thought the number had gone up; that more people, not less, live in extreme poverty—you aren’t alone. According to a recent Barna Group survey, done in partnership with Compassion International and the new book Hope Rising by Dr. Scott Todd, more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has reduced so drastically. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.
Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.
Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it’s possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.
This seems like good news to me so it’s worth wondering why people don’t believe it.
I suspect Americans are generally in a bad mood, still shaken by the financial crisis and reeling from massive social change. There is good reason to have lost faith in our system in a million different ways. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that something important like extreme global poverty is improving quickly and could actually be eradicated in our lifetimes.
I feel as if people are afraid to admit that because it would make some of our political arguments sound hollow.
That’s not a good reason.
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by digby
I’ve been a little bit disturbed to see some civil libertarian types on my social media seem to take up Trump as the better choice in the upcoming election and it’ s a little bit bizarre. This is the guy who openly endorses summary execution, torture, possible retaliatory beheadings, the targeted killing of wives and children of suspects, and greatly expanded police power.
He believes Edward Snowden should be executed:
“I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?” Trump said, Politico reported.
“Well, you killed them, Donald,” said fill-in host, Eric Bolling.
“This guy is really doing damage to this country, and he’s also making us look like dopes. We can’t allow this guy to go out there and give out all our secrets and also embarrass us at every level. We should get him back and get him back now.”
“If I’m President, Putin says, ‘boom you’re gone.'”
He felt the same way about Deep Throat (!):
In 2005, Trump made similar comments after W. Mark Felt revealed himself to be “Deep Throat,” Bob Woodward’s source for the Watergate scandal, during yet another interview with Fox News.
“I think he’s disgusting. I think he’s scum,” Trump said. “I don’t care how old he is, how sick he is, I think he ought to be arrested. He was an FBI agent, essentially, and he was ratting on the president.”
His famous full page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park five ended with this lovely bumper sticker:
Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!
When it turned out that the accused were innocent of the crimes he didn’t back down. He doesn’t ever admit that he was wrong about anything. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News decrying the 40 million dollar settlement with the accused over the false imprisonment:
Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.
Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.
What about all the people who were so desperately hurt and affected? I hope it’s not too late to continue to fight and that this unfortunate event will not have a repeat episode any time soon — or ever.
As citizens and taxpayers, we deserve better than this.
The “unfortunate event” was the settlement not the false accusation.
And now he’s openly threatening to use the government to silence critics:
It’s interesting that you say that, because every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from the Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. And I will tell you. This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise. He’s using the Washington Post for power. So that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed. He’s getting absolutely away — he’s worried about me, and I think he said that to somebody … it was in some article, where he thinks I would go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much. Amazon is controlling so much of what they’re doing.
And what they’ve done is he bought this paper for practically nothing. And he’s using that as a tool for political power against me and against other people. And I’ll tell you what: We can’t let him get away with it. So he’s got about 20, 25 — I just heard they’re taking these really bad stories — I mean, they, you know, wrong, I wouldn’t even say bad. They’re wrong. And in many cases they have no proper information. And they’re putting them together, they’re slopping them together. And they’re gonna do a book.
And the book is gonna be all false stuff because the stories are so wrong. And the reporters — I mean, one after another — so what they’re doing is he’s using that as a political instrument to try and stop antitrust, which he thinks I believe he’s antitrust, in other words, what he’s got is a monopoly. And he wants to make sure I don’t get in. So, it’s one of those things. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. What he’s doing’s wrong. And the people are being — the whole system is rigged. You see a case like that. The whole system is rigged. Whether it’s Hillary or whether it’s Bezos.
I know Amazon is an enemy of the people in other ways. But this is the Republican nominee of the Republican Party for president of the United States openly threatening to use the power of his office to stifle a critic using the anti-trust laws. He’s threatened the media before.
There is a lot of corruption in our society, we know that. Big money has too much influence and monopolies are increasingly distorting the economy. There are many good reasons to be unhappy with the status quo. But any civil libertarian who thinks the billionaire fascist Donald Trump is the answer to that problem needs his head examined.
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Highly respected
by digby
It is an article of faith on the right that President Obama is a miserable failure at foreign policy. Apparently, that’s an American phenomenon:
I’m going to take a wild guess that they don’t feel as confident in Donald Trump’s judgment.
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We’d like Them just to go away
by Tom Sullivan
Traditional gender-neutral restroom.
Here we go:
The Obama administration is directing public schools across the country to let transgender students use bathrooms that match their gender identity, a move that will expand nationally the argument over North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law.
The letter going out Friday from officials of the Education and Justice departments sets out the agencies’ view of what schools need to do under current federal law to provide an environment for students free of discrimination.
The letter, first reported by the New York Times, carries no specific threat for schools that do not comply. But the threat is implicit because violations of federal civil rights law can lead to a loss of federal aid to a school district, or enforcement action by the Justice Department.
Attendees to the Texas Republican Convention did not take the news too well, NPR’s Wade Goodwyn found:
TAD GREEN: It’s a safety issue at the very core.
GOODWYN: Tad Green owns his own real estate company in Fort Worth. He’s married with three daughters. For Green, accommodating a small number of transgender children is an invitation to trouble, simple as that. He’s got no problem providing for the disabled, but for Green, this is going too far.
GREEN: This is a choice. And it’s ridiculous, in my opinion, to put the other 99.9 percent at risk, and even put that little 0.1 percent at risk, all to accommodate something that shouldn’t be an issue, in my opinion, at all.
The state that encourages carrying guns everywhere is worried about safety. That’s a choice. But transgender students are the new “black bucks” of southerners’ nightmares.
GOODWYN: For quite a few Texas Republicans, the issue is a moral one, period.
SARAH TAYLOR: What happened to God? You know, what part of the Bible do they not believe in?
Because God’s gender-specific bathroom law is clearly spelled out in 2 Chronicles 17:35. (And that’s “Two” Chronicles to you, Donald Trump.)
Americans have long felt uncomfortable around people outside what the wider community gets to define as the norm. As another Texas delegate told NPR, “I don’t think that we should hold hostage every other child, which is certainly the huge, huge, huge majority, and put them in an uncomfortable position” by formally acknowledging their presence and equality. Because the majority has a right not to feel uncomfortable around people not just like themselves. It’s why we move to gated communities. What the majority would prefer is that Others just go away. Recognizing the Other as human is somehow un-Christian and a sign of moral decay.
And in places on the right, this is somehow the fault of the left. But is it?
For Gavin Grimm, the Virginia transgender student who sued his school board for access to the men’s room, the Internet was key. As I wrote in March, we are wired to identify enemies with faces. Technology is morally neutral. Just ask the NRA. The gay liberation movement may have started with the Stonewall riot long before the advent of the World Wide Web, but the faceless technology of the Web has enabled hidden, marginalized people to come out of the shadows and claim full citizenship. Where once gay and trans teens were isolated and alone, wondering if it was just themselves who were different, on the Web they can find others like themselves and strength in numbers. And courage. Somebody with a face must be to blame because you can’t punch a system in the nose.
The majority would like Them just to go away. We would prefer to return to a more predictable America when things were Great and the majority had a right to be comfortable. Back when men’s rooms were men’s rooms and “broads” stayed home and cooked and nobody we knew was gay or conflicted about their identities or griping about family members being summarily killed by police. And ethnic minorities had their own schools and neighborhoods and stayed there. And we all faced nuclear annihilation on 30 minutes’ warning from a fleet of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Yeah, those were the days.