QOTD: Reince
by digby
Trump knows how to act like something other than a cretinous asshole it’s just that he has to act like one to get votes:
“I think Donald Trump gets it completely about being presidential and gracious and I can tell you that’s how he acts toward me in private. I think he understands that getting to that place is important. But you know Donald Trump also has to be Donald Trump, I mean that’s what got him there.”
So that’s comforting.
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Trump’s America
by digby
Prospective bidders, I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon. The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012. The gun is a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm. It has recently been returned to me by the Department of Justice.
The pistol currently has the case number written on it in silver permanent marker. Many have expressed interest in owning and displaying the firearm including The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. This is a piece of American History. It has been featured in several publications and in current University text books. Offers to purchase the Firearm have been received; however, the offers were to use the gun in a fashion I did not feel comfortable with.
The firearm is fully functional as the attempts by the Department of Justice on behalf of B. Hussein Obama to render the firearm inoperable were thwarted by my phenomenal Defense Attorney. I recognize the purchaser’s ownership and right to do with the firearm as they wish. The purchaser is guaranteed validity and authenticity of the firearm. On this day, 5/11/2016 exactly one year after the shooting attempt to end my life by BLM sympathizer Matthew Apperson I am proud to announce that a portion of the proceeds will be used to: fight BLM violence against Law Enforcement officers, ensure the demise of Angela Correy’s persecution career and Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric.
Now is your opportunity to own a piece of American History. Good Luck. Your friend, George M. Zimmerman ~Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum~
Sick.
Unhinged?
by digby
These men just can’t help themselves:
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): I figured out the best contribution I could make to the Trump effort to win the presidency — play a nonstop loop of [Hillary Clinton] 24/7 on my website. Why don’t we take the best of these tapes that we have of Hillary screaming unhinged — she really is unhinged. People talk about Donald Trump and temperament. I don’t think Hillary has the temperament to be president.
[…]
Just let Hillary talk. Well, better stated, let her yell. Cause she yells a lot, an awful lot.
Mommy obviously yelled at little Sean and called him a very bad boy. He’s traumatized.
Meanwhile, here’s Mr Sanity:
And speaking of unhinged:
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Good luck to Paul Ryan bringing unity. He’s going to need it
by digby
I wrote about the Very Big Meeting between Trump and that dreamy Paul Ryan for Salon:
Yesterday cable news held a collective crystal ball reading the entire day to let us know what was going to happen at today’s big meeting between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. Experts from across the capital gathered together to speak in hushed tones about the “what needs to happen” to bring “unity” to the Republican party, the assumption being that if Trump can be anointed by Paul Ryan as an acceptable leader the Capitol Hill rank and file will fall in line. At least, that seems to be the hope.
However, as usual, many members of the press seem unaware that far from being the conservative Prince Charming they assume Ryan to be, he’s actually quite unpopular with the base of the party. The latest PPP poll bears the bad news for Ryan:
Republican voters have soured on Paul Ryan nationally. Overall only 30% of voters approve of the job Ryan is doing as Speaker of the House, to 48% who disapprove. What’s most noteworthy though is that Ryan is under water even among Republicans, with 40% of them approving of the job he’s doing to 44% who are unhappy. In November we found that 69% of Republicans supported Ryan becoming Speaker to only 14% were against it, but that honeymoon has worn off very quickly. The idea of Ryan being a white knight who could have unified the GOP and saved it from Trump is a beltway fantasy out of line with how actual Republican voters across the country feel about him at this point.
Some of us have been pointing this out for quite some time but the political establishment just can’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that such a dreamy young fellow could possibly be so unpopular. The passage of the Omnibus spending bill last winter was seen as a slap in the face to hard core Republicans who continue to believe that if they have a majority in Congress they are empowered to unilaterally enact their agenda — or at least have a responsibility to hold their breath until they turn blue or blow up the government until they get their way. Quite simply, they have been led to believe that a congressional majority means the other side is completely neutered.
For that belief you can thank people like anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist who famously said after the GOP’s 2004 victory:
Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”
He, at least, had a president of his own party. Since 2010, Republicans assumed they had a mandate merely by winning majorities in the congress in off-year elections. Their leaders have failed to tutor them properly in the way our government works so they assume that any victory means the Democrats have an obligation to pass their agenda. (Needless to say, this rule does not apply to wins by the other side which are assumed to achieved through illegitimate means.)
Trump has made it clear that he too believes that his narrow primary victory is a mandate and he plans to change nothing:
“You win the pennant and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?” Mr. Trump said. “People like the way I’m doing.”
He argued that he stood a better chance of inspiring voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania if he was his authentic self, rather than shifting from populist outsider to political insider to please a relative handful of Republican elites who are part of the establishment he has railed against for months. He said his huge rallies, where outbursts of violence and racist taunts have vexed many Republican leaders, and his attacks against adversaries on Twitter and in television interviews would continue because he believes Americans admire his aggressive, take-charge style.
“I think I have a mandate from the people,”
How are they going to argue with that? But it does raise flags for officials like Lindsey Graham who are repulsed by Trump the demagogue and recognize the long-term damage he will inflict on the party. He’s not alone.
The word on the cable news shows yesterday was that Ryan would be content if he could just get Trump to sign on to a set of “conservative principles” that everyone can agree upon. The problem is that Trump will say something on given day and then say the opposite the next. And that assumes he doesn’t believe that everything he says, no matter what it is, comes from “conservative principles” simply by virtue of him being a self-described conservative. He has shown little familiarity with conservative movement doctrine or even the kind of rhetoric that might make some movement types believe that he’s one of them so if his simple declaration isn’t sufficient they may be out of luck.
Conservative commentator Michael Medved suggested yesterday on CNN that the healing could begin if Trump would just signal his conservative intentions by signing on to deficit reduction. Apparently he doesn’t know that Trump has already done that, he just has a different solution than most, saying that he’ll bring so much growth that the $20 trillion national debt itself will be retired in 8 years. Recently he said that he planned to “renegotiate” the national debt sparking alarms across the entire financial system. Let’s just say that Trump has expressed confidence that one way or another he will eliminate not only the budget deficit but the national debt itself and everyone else should be confident too because he’s going to make America great again.
This is just one of many very serious issues about which it’s clear he’s completely clueless. Perhaps the most frightening of these have been his ignorant meanderings about national security. Singing the praises of torture and summary execution is bad enough but when a presidential candidate says he wants to be “unpredictable” about nuclear war, refusing to rule out using it against our allies, people tend to get a little bit nervous. Even Republicans.
So even if he were to convince the conservatives that he’s really truly one of them deep in his heart Ryan would have to find a way to convince other Republicans that Trump actually understands anything but building a wall, deporting immigrants, starting a global trade war, banning Muslims, treating women like dirt, massively expanding the military, giving the police more power and torturing people. Those are, after all, the only issues on which he’s been consistent. And he’s been consistent on them for more than 30 years so it’s fair to say that this is his core agenda. Everything else is … negotiable.
Paul Ryan is stuck in a job he never really wanted and is trying to keep his party from imploding into such small bits that it cannot be put back together again. If he were the talented political guru everyone in Washington desperately wants him to be he might get that done. But the best they can really hope for from today’s summit meeting is that his blessing might appease some members of the political establishment and maybe a few congressmen in safe districts. Trump’s wrecking ball of a campaign has already caused substantial damage and it’s still swinging wildly. Today may be the day we find out if Paul Ryan is light enough on his feet to avoid being hit by it.
Update: Ryan says the discussed their conservative principles like the constitution and “life” and he was very encouraged. He heard a lot of good things. It’s going in a positive direction.
It’s gonna be great.
The vanishing middle class
by Tom Sullivan
Photo by Andrew Dunn via Wikimedia Commons.
The middle class is slowly disappearing in America. But you knew that.
Still, Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham at Wonkblog have some charts on that from Pew Research that shows the shrinkage is not just in the worst-hit communities we hear about on the news. It is everywhere:
The share of adults living in middle-income households has also dwindled in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Denver. It’s fallen in smaller Midwestern metros where the middle class has long made up an overwhelming majority of the population. It’s withering in coastal tech hubs, in military towns, in college communities, in Sun Belt cities.
The decline of the American middle class is “a pervasive local phenomenon,” according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the U.S. population. In 203 of those metros, the share of adults in middle-income households fell from 2000 to 2014.
Interestingly, in some places the middle class is shrinking not because people in the middle are falling out of it into the bottom ranks. Some are actually moving up as the middle gets hollowed out and income inequality increases.
The places with greatest net economic losses — where the shrinking middle-class has meant a sizable influx of households among the poor — are metro areas that have historically relied heavily on manufacturing, like Detroit, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Springfield, Ohio.
In only about a quarter of all of these metros does the middle class make up less than a majority of the adult population today. But the largest metros in the country fall into this group, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington. In each of these metros, the middle class is relatively small because the upper-class share of the population is larger than average.
The disappearing middle class is something our vote-seeking candidates this November might consider offering plans for addressing rather than blaming immigrants or monitoring bathrooms. Voters know their fortunes are sinking and want to elect somebody who will throw them a rope. (Hint: It’s not Donald Trump.)
The plight of the slowly vanishing middle class reminds me of the imaginary slide show comedian Jackie Vernon gave back in the day about his trip to the Everglades:
Here’s Guido the Guide leading me around a bed of quicksand. [click]
Here’s Guido the Guide from the waist up. [click]
That’s his hat right there.
A slowly sinking American must feel like Guido. She/he would best not count on the “short-fingered vulgarian” to throw a line. Trump would call you a loser and just hire a replacement.
Role model
by digby
When Donald Trump publicly attacked Megyn Kelly a day after she moderated the presidential debate last August, the Fox News host had no idea it would last as long as it did.
“I just wanted to stop,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “You’d get past an incident and then it would start again. It was really shocking.”
For months the presidential hopeful spoke out against Kelly, calling her “sick” and “the most overrated person on television.” He encouraged his Twitter followers to boycott her show and just ahead of the Iowa caucus, Trump pulled out of a debate because Fox News executives refused to remove Kelly as a moderator after he felt she not had treated him “fairly.”
“The hate can be very ugly and it can be threatening and it can be off-putting when you’re walking around the city with your kids in particular,” she says.
While remaining mostly silent on the matter, Kelly, 45, addressed the attacks on air only once.
“I certainly will not apologize for doing good journalism,” she said. “So I’ll continue doing my job without fear or favor.”
Then after a rare two weeks of quiet from Trump, the Kelly File host seized her opportunity to reach out.
“I knew all along that if there could be a period of calm on his part, that I could go and approach him and we could get to a better place,” she says.
After a “surreal” initial meeting, Kelly and Trump, 69, sat down once again, this time for her special Megyn Kelly Presents May 17 at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
I think I’ll just read the transcript online. Using his piggish misogyny to get a big ratings spike makes me sick. But that’s Fox for you.
Still, what he did to Kelly was disgusting and his fans were even worse. Just because she’s making something out of the hatred doesn’t cancel it out. He’s a menace to women everywhere.
He don’t need to stinkin’ data
by digby
Donald Trump, GOP nomination virtually in hand, is planning a general election campaign that banks heavily on his personal appeal and trademark rallies while spurning the kind of sophisticated data operation that was a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s winning White House runs.
“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday. “Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
[…]Trump said he doesn’t plan to announce his running mate until the Republican National Convention in July, a four-day event that he’s planning to remake with a showman’s touch.
“The concept of some entertainment from a great singer, a great group I think would be something maybe to break things up,” Trump said. “You’ll be hearing plenty of political speeches.”
[…]
Even as he brings in new staff for the general election, he says his emphasis will continue to be on raucous rallies that put him in front of thousands of voters and generate significant free media coverage.“My best investment is my rallies,” Trump said. “The people go home, they tell their friends they loved it. It’s been good.”
The businessman said he’ll spend “limited” money on data operations to identify and track potential voters and to model various turnout scenarios that could give him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. He’s moving away from the model Obama used successfully in his 2008 and 2012 wins, and the one that likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is trying to replicate, including hiring many of the staff that worked for Obama.
Separately, the Republican National Committee has invested heavily in data operations, eager to avoid another defeat to a more technologically savvy Democratic candidate. Trump could make use of that RNC data or leave voter targeting to the party.
It’s not surprising that he would reject using sophisticated data gathering to win. His career has been made that way. He made it quite clear in “The Art of the Deal” that he didn’t hold with those numbers crunching nerds:
“I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions.”
He liked to ask cab drivers their opinion of certain neighborhoods.
He figures that since he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple by inheriting hundreds of millions and buying Manhattan real estate (as if that takes some kind of special savvy) that he’s a genius. I guess we’ll find out just good his “gut” really is.
He also said he wouldn’t run any negative ads even though he’s already doing it and assured everyone that there’s nothing interesting in his tax returns so he isn’t going to release them.
Basically, Trump is going to run the general election the same way he ran the primary and plans to put on a circus at the convention unlike anything we’ve seen before. Maybe the press can be a little bit more prepared this time. Or maybe not.
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Ain’t that America
by digby
Meghan McCain doesn’t think it’s a good idea for the Republicans to welcome the open white supremacists into the mainstream of their party and she’s giving Paul Ryan credit for not jnoining the bandwagon. Via John Amato at C&L, you can see it got heated:
Sayeth continued, “I think Paul Ryan, you’re absolutely right Dagen, initially came out, it was this kind of awkward, “I’m not there yet,” “I’m marinating on it,” it sounded kind of small ball for such an intellectual heavyweight like Paul Ryan, which to your point Meghan, has all this credibility with the conservative movement…”
McCain defended Ryan by saying, “He’s giving people cover who aren’t there yet. He’s giving people that live and die by conservative values, who think that something things, like I just brought up, White Nationalist being a Republican delegate…”
“Trump’s campaign is addressing that…”
“Let me finish, OK?”
“OK, he’s no longer a delegate.”
“That makes me uncomfortable. That makes me uncomfortable, OK?”
“He’s no longer a delegate.”
“The fact that he ever was to begin with, there were no white nationalists on my father’s campaign.”
“Well, I don’t think he was being recruited by the Trump campaign.”
“I’m just telling you, Paul Ryan is doing this originally for cover and now they are playing nice. So if there’s an vitriol or anger, I understand why Ryan did it. It’s to help people like me.”
And himself …
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A typical Republican
by digby
It’s unknown if former rock star Ted Nugent is on Trump’s short list for the cabinet but there’s no reason to think he isn’t. They are certainly on the same classy wavelength. He shared this adorable video yesterday with his sociopathic Facebook followers:
Just a few of the comments on his Facebook page:
Idiocracy
by digby
Jonathan Chait speaks the truth here:
Why did almost everybody fail to predict Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries? Nate Silver blames the news media, disorganized Republican elites, and the surprising appeal of cultural grievance. Nate Cohn lists a number of factors, from the unusually large candidate field to the friendly calendar. Jim Rutenberg thinks journalism strayed too far from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Justin Wolfers zeroes in on Condorcet’s paradox. Here’s the factor I think everybody missed: The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.
The 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts a future in which Americans have grown progressively dumber, and eventually elect as president of the United States a professional wrestler, who caters demagogically to their nationalistic impulses and ignorance of science. Only because the film took place in an imaginary world was it possible to straightforwardly equate a political choice with a lack of intelligence. In the actual world, the bounds of taste and deference to (small-d) democratic outcomes make it gauche to do so. But the dynamic imagined in Idiocracy has obviously transpired, down to the election of a figure from pro wrestling:
behold your Republican nominee for President of the United States pic.twitter.com/WwOqpOdtJb— Jon Ward (@jonward11) May 10, 2016
There’s also the fact that his fans are just plain jerks. The first comment on that tweet is “I’d like to see him do that to Hillary.”
They mean it literally.
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