Month: May 2016

He’ll fix the problems with all the dead crops
by Tom Sullivan

Interspersed with Dave Weigel’s dispatches from the Libertarian National Convention in Orlando, a clip from Idiocracy came across the Twitter feed yesterday and for some reason it wouldn’t get out of my head after that. From Think Progress:

Speaking to an audience in California on Friday, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump told the crowd “there is no drought” in their state.

Trump claimed there isn’t a real water shortage. Instead, he said, state officials are intentionally denying water to farmers in the middle of the state — choosing to reroute the water to the ocean to protect an endangered California fish called the delta smelt.
“It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump said. “There is no drought. They turn the water out into the ocean.”

TPM continues:

Trump said that if he were president, he’d have a simple solution.

“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive,” Trump said according to USA Today.

“Believe me.” (Have we ever seen a candidate with a more obvious “tell”?) Trump is going to surround himself with the very best people. TOP people. He’s got this guy, Not Sure. He’ll fix the problems with all the dead crops and the dust storms.

Trump presidency is the setup for Kanye West 2020, then president Camacho 2024 #idiocracy https://t.co/WBA0MJ2IT2— DJ Neil Armstrong (@djneilarmstrong) May 19, 2016

We entered the era of post-truth politics years ago. According to fact checkers, 91 percent of what Trump says is nonsense, but really? And Trump has Sarah Palin as his opening act:

Proving once again that she is not merely laughable but deeply disgusting, in another speech in San Diego warming up for Trump, Palin criticized President Obama for going to Hiroshima this week, calling his visit an “apology lap.”

“You mess with our freedom,” Palin bellowed, “we’ll put a boot in your ass. It’s the American way.”

The crowd lapped it up, chanting, “USA! USA! USA!”

How long before one of them pulls an automatic weapon from behind the podium and fires a burst into the air for emphasis?

“Why would he talk about my foolishly perceived fascism?”

by digby

I’ll just leave this here:

Mr. Trump dismisses the labels used by those like Mr. Weld, a longtime Republican now mounting a quixotic campaign for vice president as a Libertarian. “I don’t talk about his alcoholism,” Mr. Trump said through a spokeswoman, “so why would he talk about my foolishly perceived fascism? There is nobody less of a fascist than Donald Trump.”

Yeah. That actually happened.

Here’s the story from the New York Times, the paper of record. It’s about the rise of fascism around the world, including here. Especially here. You might even want to buy a dead tree copy so you can save that article. It might be worth something some day.

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It’s all rigged. Even the drought.

by digby

Please tell me again how brilliant this guy is. Malevolent and crafty? Sure, in some ways. But this is a moronic thing to say even to Republicans.

Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, “a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event.

“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”

I guess he’s going to use his massive divining schlong.

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A congenial feedback loop 

by digby

That graphic is from the latest Pew Poll on where people get their news.I suspect the ramifications of this are going to be quite substantial. If you get your news from your social media feeds you end up getting only one side of the story.  Everyone has their own little Fox News:

A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.

But which social media sites have the largest portion of users getting news there? How many get news on multiple social media sites? And to what degree are these news consumers seeking online news out versus happening upon it while doing other things?

As part of an ongoing examination of social media and news, Pew Research Center analyzed the scope and characteristics of social media news consumers across nine social networking sites. This study is based on a survey conducted Jan. 12-Feb. 8, 2016, with 4,654 members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter users most likely to get news on each site. News plays a varying role across the social networking sites studied. Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%) get news on Twitter, and seven-in-ten Reddit users get news on that platform. On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31%, while for the other five social networking sites it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases.

We’ve seen the Fox effect for years so we already know where that can lead. I run across people all day long who are convinced of certain erroneous facts because they spend their time in a social media bubble.

There’s a lot of twitter hate out there and I understand it completely. But it is the platform that at least leads a majority of its users to actual news sites:

Write a check big man

by digby

He’s claiming he doesn’t have money to run a normal campaign now:

Donald Trump’s campaign has alerted Senate Republicans that he won’t have much money to spend fending off attacks from Hillary Clinton over the next couple months.

The notice came when Paul Manafort, Trump’s senior advisor, met with a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff for lunch last week, sources familiar with the meeting told the Washington Examiner. The admission suggests that Trump will be far more dependent on the GOP brass for money than he has led voters to believe, but it’s consistent with his reliance on the Republican National Committee to provide a ground game in battleground states.

“They know that they’re not going to have enough money to be on TV in June and probably most of July, until they actually accept the nomination and get RNC funds, so they plan to just use earned media to compete on the airwaves,” one GOP source familiar with Manafort’s comments told the Examiner.

That’s a far cry from Trump’s public insistence that he signed a fundraising agreement with the RNC in order to help the party, not himself. “The RNC really wanted to do it, and I want to show good spirit,” he said last week. “‘Cause I was very happy to continue to go along the way I was.”

Stay abreast of the latest developments from nation’s capital and beyond with curated News Alerts from the Washington Examiner news desk and delivered to your inbox.

Still, Trump allies have suggested that the RNC is going to take advantage of the real estate mogul. “I don’t think the RNC is 100 percent committed,” a GOP donor told CNN. “If Donald Trump’s seven points down in October, they’re going to put that money toward Senate races and House races.”

Manafort seemed confident at the lunch with GOP staff, however. “He said that he thought Hillary Clinton was the ideal opponent — that he was the ultimate outsider and she was the ultimate insider,” a Senate GOP chief-of-staff in attendance said.

Some smart Republicans rightly assume he’s laying the groundwork to blame the RNC if he loses. Of course he is. The man has never taken personal responsibility for anything in his life.

Maybe the networks (other than Fox which is … well, you know) ought to give some thought as to whether they should be aiding and abetting his plan. Or at least make a commitment to strict equal time. He should not be able to get wall to wall coverage as a way to save money. The news media has some responsibility here.

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President Whining Bigot at your service

by digby

Seriously Republicans?  This is the best you could come up with?

During a campaign stop in San Diego on Friday, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump devoted a significant amount of time to attacking the federal judge overseeing the ongoing case against Trump University, suggesting the judge is a “hater” who is biased against him.

The case against the real estate mogul’s now-defunct company, which has been accused of scamming students who were misled into paying money for insight from business experts they thought were hand-picked by Trump, is scheduled to go to trial in San Diego federal court shortly after the presidential election. According to his lawyer, Trump is planning on testifying.

In what the Wall Street Journal characterized as an “extended tirade,” Trump spent 12 minutes of his 58-minute speech focused on the case and the California judge who will hear it.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel,” Trump told the crowd. “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself.”

Trump told his supporters he believes Judge Curiel should be removed from the case, citing the fact that Curiel was appointed to the bench by President Obama. Trump also said he believes Curiel is “Mexican.” The crowd — which had previously shouted “build that wall” — booed loudly.

In previous statements about the case, Trump has pointed to Curiel’s Hispanic heritage to insinuate that he won’t be able to approach the case impartially. Asked on Fox News what exactly Curiel’s ethnicity has to do with the case against him, Trump responded, “I think it has to do perhaps with the fact that I’m very, very strong on the border, very, very strong at the border, and he has been extremely hostile to me.”

Trump University — which was not actually an accredited university and did not hand out degrees — has several fraud cases proceeding against it.

I swear to God this campaign is the whiniest campaign I’ve ever heard.  Everything is so unfaaaiiir. So I have a right to act like a baby and whine and whine and throw tantrums and hold my breath until I turn blue because those meanies are being sooooo mean!!!

Boo fucking hoo.

Any endorser of Donald Trump is going to have this moron hung around their necks for the rest of the their careers. They did this with their eyes wide open.

Aristotle’s ashes
by Tom Sullivan

Reports out of Greece this week not about refugees and economic chaos say archaeologists may have found in his home town of Stageira the tomb of the philosopher Aristotle. You know, the “golden mean” guy. Wonder what Aristotle would think of our orange mean guy? Or the rest of us, for that matter.

Keeping one’s head has not been in fashion in America, oh, since September 11, 2001. Of late, those who do are – to both the right and left – clearly part of the comfortable establishment that has to go. Sorry, Ari.

Dahlia Lithwick covers the Supreme Court of the United States for Slate. A more establishment institution you will not find. (SCOTUS, I mean.) Maybe it is because she is Canadian, but Lithwick is a tad uncomfortable with the rhetoric of the presidential race. And because she leans left, she is more than a tad uncomfortable with the tone of from fellow lefties. “There’s no heavier burden than a great potential!” Linus van Pelt once said. No one can disappoint you like your friends.

Regarding those litigating Hillary v. Bernie, Lithwick writes:

I have been taken up short by the number of comments and scoldings I have faced, from close friends and casual acquaintances alike, for voicing even a hint of support for one or the other in recent months. The tone hasn’t merely been dismissive and furious; the message beneath has almost universally been that I am a moron.

The 2016 campaign has been focused on rage. Donald Trump’s cunning redirection of his supporters’ economic and racial fury into electoral support has been well-documented. But the fury on the progressive end of the spectrum has been harder to pin down. Some of us on the left seem to be suffering from many of the same symptoms we deride in Trump supporters: outrage with the political process; over-identification with our anger and under-identification with our commonalities; and a pervasive sense that anyone who doesn’t agree with us suffers from debilitating false consciousness.

I’m not a psychologist and can’t speak to the outrage. But I think a lot about how we speak to one another, and I worry that my progressive friends and I are falling victim to some habits and ideas that have made it virtually impossible for the left and right to even engage—much less debate—serious issues anymore in this country. I see them in myself in alarming new ways when I find myself digging in on Bernie vs. Hillary. I wonder if now is the time to talk about it out loud.

Lithwick does, about the “tics and habits that poison and polarize ideological discourse.” One she calls out is how some come to believe their pet issue is the only issue that matters. Anyone not solely dedicated to it is misguided at best. I’ve watched people leave organizing meetings with potential allies never to return — marginalizing themselves and their issues — because theirs was not front and center on the agenda all night. I’ve watched activists walk into congressional campaigns unwilling to lift a finger for actual campaign work (it’s all grunt work), and then walk out because they were not drubbed on the shoulder the campaign’s official expert on their pet issue and asked to write the white paper upon which the entire campaign would rise or fall.

That is precisely the trap into which Moral Mondays leader Reverend William J. Barber II refuses to fall. Preaching “fusion politics,” he and North Carolina’s NAACP have brought together a coalition of activists to focus their collective energies on rescuing the state from the T-party leadership that took control after the 2010 mid-terms. No one issue is the focus. No one leader, not even Barber, is the focus. The movement is a “people’s assembly” of those concerned about everything from voting rights to LGBT issues to education to health care. By refusing to be divided into issue silos, the Forward Together movement has found lasting power in coalition rather than in anger.

Photo via HKonJ People’s Assembly Coalition.

But like Lithwick, this year I have watched friends turn into an angry T-party of the left, with everything that implies. Lithwick writes, “If we are treating our friends and allies like we treat our enemies, we are not really a movement so much as a collective of grievances.”

In Stageira, Aristotle’s ashes must be turning over in his urn.

Friday Night Soother: Trump wallaby edition

by digby

9NEWS political analyst Kelly Maher speaks for the Republican side and has admittedly struggled with Trump’s rise to power in the party. He’s now the GOP presidential candidate. She’s gone from denial… to getting an emotional support wallaby.

Cruz control

by digby

Yes, he’s still out there. And he’s working the delegates:

Though Marco Rubio suggested on Thursday that he expects his delegates to be released for Donald Trump and even volunteered to speak on his behalf, Ted Cruz signaled on Friday that he would take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Cleveland. And the fight for delegates and the party’s platform is far from over, he said, despite Trump having clinched the required number to become the nominee.

“I am looking and listening to see what the candidates do,” the Texas senator told Tulsa, Oklahoma, radio host Pat Campbell, who listened as Cruz spoke about the importance of electing a conservative to the White House.

When Campbell remarked that it sounded as though Trump did not meet his standards, Cruz replied, “I hope that he will.”

Trump has no standards. But we’ll see if Cruz can bear the weight of being among the few “true conservatives”. He’s going to make his stand inside women’s bodies:

Before wrapping the interview, Campbell asked Cruz if he could promise to listeners to ensure Republicans in Cleveland do not “screw around with the party platform and remove the abortion plank, or alter it.”

“You have my word. One of the reasons that we are continuing to work to elect conservatives to be delegates, even though Donald has the delegates to get the nomination, we intend to do everything we can to fight for conservative principles to prevent Washington forces from watering down the platform,” Cruz said. “The platform is a manifestation of what we believe as a party, and I think it is important that it continue to reflect conservative values, free-market values, constitutional liberties, Judeo-Christian principles, the values that built this country, and that is exactly what I intend to fight for.”

Trump said in April that he would push for exceptions to the party’s platform on abortion to include rape and incest.

That’s the squishy middle of the road position now. Cruz will be there fighting to force 12 year olds to give birth to their own sisters. Because he’s a highly moral person. And I would guess Trump will be happy to let him have that one.

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The good old days

by digby

From Mother Jones: