Month: May 2016

Even the real estate “expertise” is bogus

by digby

Shot:

Trump said, he agreed with the Trump University presenters, who said said to talk talk of a bubble with a “pinch of salt.” 

“At the same time I agree with three presenters of this program — Dolf De Roos, Gary Eldred, and Curtis Oakes — I picked them to teach this course because they are all masterful investors,” said Trump. “They are not just talking heads or book smart academics, they have decades of hands on experience and all three of them take the bubble talk with a pinch of salt. Of course, they know that prices can go down as well as up but they also know that real estate is one of the most resilient, profitable business arenas anywhere. What these three have to teach you can make the difference between wealth and poverty.” 

In another audiobook, How to Build a Fortune: Your Plan for Success From the World’s Most Famous Businessman, released in October 2006, Trump said he again didn’t believe there was a bubble. 

“If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know, you can make a lot of money. At the same time I don’t think that will happen,” said Trump. “If interest rates stay fairly low, if the dollars stays pretty much where it is or even goes a little higher, but basically if you have a weak dollar, there is just tremendous amounts of money pouring in, so I don’t think that is going to happen. I’m not a believer that the interest market, that the real estate market is going to take a big hit.”

Chaser:

2015, Trump claimed in a National Geographic special The 2000s, to have spotted the bubble. 

“I actually spotted the property bubble, I would tell people don’t buy a house now took expensive,” said Trump. “It’s going up too much.”

 Also:

As some economists and Wall Street traders began to sense danger ahead of the crippling housing market collapse of 2008, Donald Trump waved away the worries and offered a concrete expression of confidence in the industry.

In the spring of 2006, the tycoon hosted a glitzy event at Trump Tower to introduce Trump Mortgage LLC, a new firm that specialized in selling residential and commercial real estate loans. He devoted a floor of the Trump Organization headquarters at 40 Wall Street to the new business. And his picture appeared atop the company website with the instruction: “Talk to My Mortgage Professionals now!”

 “I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company,”  Trump told a CNBC interviewer in April 2006, adding that “the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.”

Within 18 months, as the experts’ worst fears began to pan out and home prices began to dip, Trump Mortgage closed, leaving some bills unpaid and a spotty sales record that fell short of Trump’s lofty predictions. Trump distanced himself from the firm’s demise, saying at the time that he had not been involved in the company’s management and that its executives had performed poorly.

As a presidential candidate a decade later, Trump says he would use the skills that made him successful in real estate to fix Washington. His decision to embrace the mortgage business illustrates the potential dangers of a business philosophy that has relied in part on a willingness to put aside the advice of experts and take risks.

It’s more than a willingness to take risks. It’s megalomania. This is supposed to be his field of expertise folks. The one thing he really knows.

Trump inherited a fortune and put some of it in Manhattan real estate which people have known was a good investment since they bought the land for some trinkets centuries ago. Then he turned himself into a brand name and licensed himself to other people’s products. Everything else he’s done has been a failure.

He is anything but a business genius. He’s a hustler who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. That’s certainly an All-American archetype but we don’t usually put these people in charge of things.

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Not a dime’s worth of difference …

by digby

The NRA endorsed Trump today. The crowd was deliriously excited. He went on and on about how everyone should be armed at all times and if we were we wouldn’t have any gun violence. And he said of the Clintons:

“And yet they have bodyguards who have guns. We’ll also call them and let their bodyguards immediately disarm, okay? No, they should immediately disarm, and let’s see how good they do.”

Nice.

Trump doesn’t allow guns at his rallies by the way. In fact, they didn’t allow guns at the NRA auditorium where he gave that speech. Seriously.

These are all obviously terrible people.

And they have guns.

Do you feel safer knowing that Donald Trump, the cretinous moron, is enthusiastically backed by them?

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The cost of Trump’s agenda


by digby

The New York Times did a story on the logistics of Trump’s most important agenda item: the wall and deportation of all undocumented immigrants. Yes, it’s as absurd as it sounds:

Central to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and to his national security strategy, is his intent to clamp down on illegal immigration, using a vast deportation “force” to relocate people to the other side of a wall, funded by Mexico, that would stretch nearly the length of the southern border.

Mr. Trump has suggested he will flesh out his ideas in a forthcoming speech. But experts across many fields who have analyzed his plans so far warn that they would come at astronomical costs — whoever paid — and would in many ways defy the logic of science, engineering and law.

Mr. Trump has a simple plan to reduce the population of 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States: Deport them.

How? He says he would follow the example of the military-style roundups authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. The initiative, known as Operation Wetback, expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.

Mr. Trump contends that the start of deportations would show immigrants he meant business and prompt many to leave on their own, and that it would take about two years to finish the job. There, the specifics end.

Former senior immigration and border officials are skeptical, to put it mildly. Deportations have peaked recently at about 400,000 a year, so the increase in scale to reach Mr. Trump’s goal would be exponential. And many legal procedures and constitutional constraints on the police did not exist in the Eisenhower era.

“I can’t even begin to picture how we would deport 11 million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant,” said Michael Chertoff, who led a significant increase in immigration enforcement as the secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.

Finding those immigrants would be difficult, experts said. Police officers across the country would need to ask people for proof of residency or citizenship during traffic stops and street encounters. The Border Patrol would need highway checkpoints across the Southwest and near the Canadian border. To avoid racial profiling, any American could expect to be stopped and asked for papers.

To achieve millions of deportations, the Obama administration’s focus on deporting serious criminals would have to be scrapped, said Julie Myers Wood, a director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, under Mr. Bush. “You would not care if the person had a criminal record,” she said.

Large-scale raids, rare under Mr. Obama, would resume at farms, factories, restaurants and construction sites, with agents arresting hundreds of workers and poring over company records. And prosecutors would bring criminal charges against employers hiring unauthorized immigrants.

Mr. Trump has said he would triple ICE’s deportation officers, to 15,000 from about 5,000. But even if that could be accomplished quickly — difficult given the vetting and training required — it would still be insufficient, experts said. The F.B.I. and other agencies would have to set aside some of their missions to help.

John Sandweg, who led ICE for seven months under Mr. Obama, said wholesale deportations could make it easier for immigrant gang members and drug traffickers to escape detection. “If the agents are looking for volume, they won’t spend the time to do the detective work tracking down the high-value bad guy who has fake documents, the hardened criminals in the shadows,” he said.

To prevent flight after arrest, the authorities would have to detain most immigrants awaiting deportation. Existing facilities, with about 34,000 beds, would have to be expanded to hold at least 300,000, Mr. Sandweg estimated, perhaps with tens of thousands of people in detention camps, similar to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Most deportations must be approved by judges. But backlogs in the 57 immigration courts are already severe, with waits as long as two years for a first hearing. The federal government would have to open dozens of emergency courts and hire hundreds of judges, shortcutting the painstaking selection process.

No kidding. It seems impossible to believe that he could accomplish this inane policy. It’s outrageous. But, here’s something that will send a chill down your spine.

A federal judge with a history of anti-immigrant sentiment ordered the federal government to turn over the names, addresses and “all available contact information” of over 100,000 immigrants living within the United States. He does so in a strange order that quotes extensively from movie scripts and that alleges a conspiracy of attorneys “somewhere in the halls of the Justice Department whose identities are unknown to this Court.”

It appears to be, as several immigration advocates noted shortly after the order was handed down, an effort to intimidate immigrants who benefit from certain Obama administration programs from participating in those programs, lest their personal information be turned over to people who wish them harm. As Greisa Martinez, Advocacy Director for United We Dream, said in a statement, the judge is “asking for the personal information of young people just to whip up fear” — fear, no doubt, of what could happen if anti-immigrant state officials got their hands on this information. Or if the information became public.

The judge is Andrew Hanen, who conservative attorneys opposed to President Obama’s immigration policies appear to have sought out specifically because of his belief that America does not treat immigrants with sufficient hostility. Texas v. United States was filed shortly after President Obama announced policy changes that would permit close to 5 million undocumented immigrants to temporarily work and remain in the country. As the name of the case suggests, the lead plaintiff is the State of Texas, yet the Texas Attorney General’s office did not file this case in Austin, the state’s capitol. Instead, they filed it over five hours away in the town of Brownsville.

Yeah. Trump could never get away with implementing his plans.  Don’t worry about it.

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The fall election could be an earthquake.  In a good way!


by digby

Some good news. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

It’s fair to say that most Democrats and a good many Republicans are still in a state of shock over the fact that a narcissistic, know-nothing,  billionaire demagogue is actually going to be on the ballot this November as the GOP nominee for president. Democrats are nervous that this outrageous character is going to be normalized over the next few months and there are signs that the media is on board with that project.  Many Republicans worry that he spells the end of their party altogether. And everyone aside from his fanatical following is desperately worried about what could happen if he actually manages to win the most powerful office on earth.

Take, for example, the comments by GOP strategist Mike Murphy on MSNBC earlier this week:

I think he is a stunning ignoramus on foreign policy issues and national security, which are the issues I care most about. And he’s said one stupid, reckless thing after another, and he’s shown absolutely no temperament to try to learn the things that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know just about everything. …The guy has a chimpanzee-level understanding of national security policy.

When he’s right he’s right. And it’s not just foreign policy where Trump shows a pan troglodyte level of understanding. Just last night Trump appeared at a Chris Christie fundraiser and said to the audience of big donors, “Look, a lot of you don’t know the world of economics and you shouldn’t even bother. Just do me a favor, leave it to me.” He talked up his proposal for a 35 percent tariff on imports if an American company moves its manufacturing out of the country without clearing it with him first:

“At least the United States is going to make a hell of a lot of money. And these dummies say, ‘Oh well that’s a trade war.'”

“Trade war? We’re losing $500 billion in trade with China. Who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?”

Apparently the Donald is unaware that trade wars have been known to lead to shooting wars. Or, at the very least, they tend to result in some very unpleasant economic fallout.  But then, knowing his history, these would be features, not bugs. Is it any wonder there’s a growing sense of panic among sane members of both parties?

Right now polls are showing that Republicans are consolidating around him and it looks like Trump and the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in a close fought cage match. However, Trump is probably getting a post clinch bump while the two Democrats are still involved in an intense contest with their partisans still in their corners so these numbers aren’t actually all that meaningful.

In fact, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is optimistic that Trump is actually going to be a Godsend for progressives if they play their cards right. He’s looked beyond that superficial snapshot to the underlying structure of the electorate in the wake of Trump. In a memo he titles “The GOP Crash and the Historic Moment for Progressives” Greenberg writes:

We are witnessing the crash of the Republican Party as we know it, and progressives should dramatically change their strategy to maximize conservative losses and move the stalled progressive reform agenda in the election’s aftermath. 

Rightfully shaken by off-year losses, low base turnout and Trump’s appeal to some union members, progressive strategy has been cramped by worst-case assumptions and by the goal of stopping the GOP from expanding their Electoral College map. That caution risks missing the opportunity to magnify GOP losses, expand the Democratic map and targets, shift control of states and legislatures, break the gridlock and create momentum for reform. 

Greenberg narrows the Conservative Crack-up down to what he calls a three-front civil war. The first front is between Trump and his Tea party followers against the Republican establishment. He characterizes their agenda as a “nationalist economic appeal” that attacks immigrants, trade deals and “disloyal” American corporations. Trump’s basically appealing to a large faction that is upset with diversity and “political correctness”. (I would just add that Trump’s status as the King of the birthers made him a true hero to this crowd.)

The second front in the civil war is between the religious conservatives who are angry that the establishment failed to stop social progress under the Obama administration.  Their sense of betrayal over the failure to stop marriage equality is profound. This group is the reason why Ted Cruz came in second.

Both of those fronts in the GOP civil war are well-known by now.  Plenty of pundits and analysts have looked at these splits to determine if they are fatal to the GOP’s hope for any kind of national electoral success going forward. They do portend some major problems for the party but it’s hard to see how it benefits the Democrats unless these folks just stay home or run third party candidates. It’s the third front where Greenberg sees that opportunity and it’s one to which nobody is paying much attention:

Third and just as important, moderate Republicans are deeply alienated from a GOP establishment that views them as illegitimate. This third front in the civil war has not been covered by the media, in part because no GOP candidate has been willing to seek their votes on the issues that matter to them. 

None of the pundits have speculated that the silence on their agenda has anything to do with the primary or what will happen in the election ahead. The moderates are a stunning 31 percent of the party base, and they are heavily college-educated and socially liberal. They are conservatives on immigration, regulation, taxes and national security, but as a college educated majority, they accept the science and urgency of addressing climate change. And most importantly, they are the one bloc that accepts the sexual revolution. That changes everything.

I find that number of 31% very surprising. From what we see and hear in the media, the moderate Republican is as extinct as the dodo. I know a few who live in California, people I think of as “Disco-Republicans”, who are essentially ideologically center-left but can’t stand being associated with liberals for social/tribal reasons.  They refused to vote for Jeb and Rubio because they felt they were pandering too much to the conservatives! Greenberg thinks these people are getable for the Democrats; his polling shows that 10% are willing to vote for Clinton over Trump.

The question is what it will take to get them to vote for Democrats in this election, and perhaps more importantly to demonstrate to the Republicans that its in their best interest to cooperate after the election on certain issues. They are already socially liberal so there no need to try to appease anyone on those important issues. Where Greenberg sees an opening is in national investment, bank regulation and corporate governance which dovetails nicely with the populist agenda coming from the left wing of the party as well.

But Greenberg believes that to maximize progressive gains, the party also needs to intensely focus on turning out certain voters “who now know the stakes.” That would be the “Rising American Electorate” we’ve all heard so much about:

Our new poll on behalf of WVWVAF shows a 10-point surge in the highest measure of voter interest among Democrats, key parts of the Rising American Electorate (specifically, the unmarried women and minorities), and college-educated women, a key part of the Democratic coalition. Our focus groups for the Roosevelt Institute and WVWVAF showed us that millennials and unmarried women are closely following the GOP primary battles, the GOP’s hatred of Obama and Donald Trump’s xenophobia and sexism. They now understand the stakes like no time before.

He says that African Americans and Hispanics see their communities as being under attack and despite their suspicion of Clinton, millennials understand their values are at stake as well.

Finally, there’s the working class vote. Their polling shows that working class voters respond well to demands to “level the playing field.”  Obviously much of the working class are people of color and are already among the most loyal members of the Democratic Party. But Greenberg’s polling shows that the right messaging can attract certain members of the white working class as well, particularly millenials and financially pressed unmarried women, both groups of which have already been successfully courted by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Greenberg concludes:

Trump’s chauvinism and hostility to America’s diversity has cost him electorally and led
to the early consolidation of the Rising American Electorate. But the primaries also show
we have a new opportunity to achieve an earthquake election and win strongly among
both the RAE, and the working class (where Democrats have lagged) if they strategize to
win the big economic argument.

It’s hard to see a bizarre election such as this one as an opportunity to do anything but survive it. Trump is a wild card and the Republicans are like cornered animals right now, unpredictable and dangerous. But these situations do present opportunities as well and if Greenberg is right and the Democrats pay attention and all the stars align, we could come out of this with a big progressive win, setting the stage for a fertile time of renewal and progress. Maybe Trump’s crazy campaign will end up having been a positive influence on America after all.

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TPP: More trans(fer) than partnership
by Tom Sullivan

In days of yore (pre-Internet), I telephoned the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) about a wall-sized world map I had heard about developed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When I described what I was looking for, the woman on the other end said the GPO didn’t carry the map from the CIA.

“You want DMAODS,” she said matter-of-factly.

“And that would be?” I asked.

“Defense Mapping Agency Office of Distribution Services,” she said.

Naturally.

Dave Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones (MJ) point to a report by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on the prospective economic benefits of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The projected economic impact, Drum observes, is “pretty close to zero.” Drum produced a handy chart (at top).

Drum writes:

Generally speaking, I’d say this means you should mostly ignore the economic aspects of TPP. The benefits will be minuscule and the damages will be minuscule. The error bars on a 30-year forecast are just too big to say anything more. Instead, you should focus on other aspects of the agreement. How will it affect poor countries in Asia? Is it a useful bulwark against the growing influence of China? What do you think of extending US patent and trademark rules throughout the world? All of those things are real. The economic impact is basically a crapshoot.

But is it? Jared Bernstein comments that it might seem incredible “that we’ve been intensely wrangling over this trade deal so hard for so long when these are the predicted outcomes.”

“Enquiring minds want to know” why, if the economic payback is so lean, are international business interests so keen on passage of TPP? Johnson worries that it is not the economic impacts Americans have to worry about:

[The report] estimates a decline in output for U.S. manufacturing/natural resources/energy of $10.8 billion as exports would increase by $15.2 billion and imports would increase by $39.2 billion by 2032. This translates to a loss of even more U.S. jobs in these key sectors.

Keep in mind that this ITC report assumes that there will be a “level playing field” on which other TPP countries will not manipulate currency, suppress labor or other things that hurt American jobs. It also assumes that the countries will buy from us (trade) instead of following national economic strategies to enhance key national strategic industries by selling to us but not buying from us. Of course, this is not what happens in the real world, other countries protect themselves as countries with key national economic interests; we do not.

These are only the economic projections from TPP. They do not take into account that most of TPP is not about the economic results from “trade”; it is about enhancing the power of corporations over governments. Even if TPP dramatically increased economic activity (which all goes to a few at the top now anyway) it would not be worth handing over our democracy and sovereignty to the billionaires behind the giant corporations.

But, “good news.” Public Citizen observes that historically these ITC economic projections tend to be wildly off-base:

Looking back, the USITC predicted improved trade balances as a result of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and 2007 U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. The agency projected only a small deficit increase from China’s 1999 World Trade Organization entry deal and the granting to China of Permanent Normal Trade Relations status.

Instead, the U.S. trade deficits with the trade partners increased dramatically and, as detailed in the text of the new study, manufacturing industries from autos to steel and farm sectors such as beef that were projected to “win” saw major losses. A government program to help Americans who lose jobs to trade certified 845,000 NAFTA jobs losses alone.

That is to say, trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP and TiSA tend to leave American workers USCWOAP.

“Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about economics” —Donald Trump

by digby

At a Chris Christie fundraiser tonight:

“Look, a lot of you don’t know the world of economics and you shouldn’t even bother. Just do me a favor, leave it to me.

We’re losing $500 billion to China. Who the hell cares about a trade war?”

Yes, he said those two things in the same speech.

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Don’t worry, Trump’s a total phony

by digby

Or not. I’m not sure:

Donald Trump’s convention manager sought to convince top GOP congressional officials on Capitol Hill that Trump can compete for the Latino vote, exploit Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses and become a Reagan-esque figure in the party, according to attendees and sources familiar with the meeting.

After Trump himself attempted to sooth House and Senate Republican leaders over how the presumptive nominee will conduct his campaign and work to keep Congress in GOP control, it was Paul Manafort’s turn on Thursday to try and win over some of the top GOP operatives in the party. Facing a room full of seasoned campaign veterans and longtime congressional aides at D.C. law firm Jones day on Capitol Hill, Manafort struck a confident tone.

He told attendees that Ronald Reagan used to be criticized just like Trump is now for his polarizing reputation within the Republican Party, the sources said. And the senior Trump adviser said the campaign will work hard to court Latinos, despite Trump’s poor approval ratings among Hispanics and Trump’s controversial comments about Mexican immigrants, said one attendee.
Though Manafort has joined the campaign to bring an extra layer of seasoning to an operation filled with fresh-faced Republican operatives, he insisted that his power is limited: Trump, he said in so many words, is going to be Trump.
[…]
But Manafort also reinforced a message that Trump delivered to GOP senators last week: That Trump realizes that Republicans are concerned with the tone and tenor of his campaign. When asked about Trump’s high negatives, Manafort said it was the result of the Republican primary and that Trump’s “behavior can be changed.”

Perceptions of Clinton are more ingrained, he argued.

Her “high negatives are driven by her character. It’s something we can’t wait to exploit,” Manafort said, according to the same attendee.

Well, many members of the press seem to be willing to portray Trump as a “tell it like it is” straight shooter and Clinton as a corrupt, dishonest old bag, so Manafort may be right.

But if reality has any place in our politics the American people will see through this.

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Banana Republic split

by digby

I have a feeling we’re going to see more of this:

The House erupted in chaos Thursday morning with Democrats crying foul after Republicans hastily convinced a few of their own to switch their votes and narrowly block an amendment intended to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination. It was an unruly scene on the floor, with Democrats chanting “shame!” after GOP leaders just barely muscled up the votes to reject, 212-213, an amendment by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) that would have effectively barred federal contractors from getting government work if they discriminate against the LGBT community. 

At one point, a monitor in the House gallery showed there were 217 votes supporting the legislation, eliciting cheers of joy from Democrats who thought the measure might actually pass. But over the course of about 10 minutes, those votes suddenly dropped one by one to 212 — and the amendment failed. 

A number of lawmakers from western states, who originally voted yes, changed their votes. According to a list tweeted out an hour after the vote by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) office, they included: Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), David Valadao (Calif.), Jeff Denham (Calif.), Greg Walden (Ore.), Mimi Walters (Calif.), David Yong (Iowa) and Bruce Poliquin (Maine). Their offices have not yet responded to request for comment. 

Amendment author Maloney was furious with Republicans for how they handled the floor fight over his offering. He singled out Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in particular for criticism, saying the number two House Republican personally lobbied GOP members to change their votes when it looked like Maloney’s proposal would pass. “The leader [McCarthy] went around and twisted their arms, and they voted for discrimination,” Maloney said. When Maloney complained directly to McCarthy, he said the majority leader told him “to get back on your own side.” 

 “The members who switched are going to hold a very special place in American history as the people who didn’t have the guts to stand up and support the will of the House,” Maloney said off the chamber floor after the vote. “They literally snatched discrimination out of the jaws of equality.” A GOP aide on the floor at the time said Maloney was actually the instigator, telling POLITICO that he came over to the Republican side and was angrily taunting conservatives for their votes. 

Republicans are saying privately that if the amendment had passed it would have killed the appropriations bill because Republicans would no longer vote for it. “Our veterans and troops were prioritized over a political messaging amendment that could have jeopardized the final passage of the appropriations bill,” said Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman AshLee Strong in a statement. 

The fracas highlights the risks for GOP leadership’s commitment to an “open amendment” process, where lawmakers are afforded wide latitude to offer changes to legislation, like the military construction and veterans affairs spending bill that was on the floor Thursday.  Ryan upon taking the gavel vowed he would allow more amendments on the floor, but Thursday’s drama will surely test his commitment to that process. 

It’s a good bet that other politically explosive issues will come up for votes if the Wisconsin Republican and his team continue the same practice through this summer’s spending bill process, so Ryan will have to determine if the benefits outweigh the cost.

He has no choice. This was a Freedom Caucus demand.

Its going to be a long hot summer.

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The small crusade of a dying man

by digby

Former Utah Senator Bob Bennett was a rock-ribbed Republican.  But the Tea Party saw an opening in the way the Utah Republicans chose their nominees and they successfully gamed the caucus system to oust the long term incumbent Senator, sending shock waves through the GOP.  The message was sent: we will take out loyal conservatives wherever we can find them just to show we can.

Well, Bennett lost his job and became sick with pancreatic cancer.  And this story of his last days and his own small personal crusade is the saddest thing I’ve read in a long time:

Former GOP senator Bob Bennett lay partially paralyzed in his bed on the fourth floor of the George Washington University Hospital. He was dying.

Not 48 hours had passed since a stroke had complicated his yearlong fight against pancreatic cancer. The cancer had begun to spread again, necessitating further chemotherapy. The stroke had dealt a further blow that threatened to finish him off.

Between the hectic helter-skelter of nurses, doctors and well wishes from a long-cultivated community of friends and former aides, Bennett faced a quiet moment with his son Jim and his wife Joyce.

It was not a moment for self-pity.

Instead, with a slight slurring in his words, Bennett drew them close to express a dying wish: “Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” he asked.

“I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump,” Bennett told his wife and son, both of whom relayed this story to The Daily Beast.

The rise of Donald Trump had appalled the three-term Utah senator, a Republican who fell victim to the tea-party wave of the 2010 midterms. His vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, had alienated many conservative activists in his state, who chose lawyer Mike Lee as the GOP nominee for Senate instead.

But as Bennett reflected on his life and legacy in mid-April, following the stroke, he wasn’t focused on the race that ended his political career. Instead, he brought up the issue of Muslims in America—over and over again.

He mentioned it briefly in a hospital interview with the Deseret News, a Utah news outlet. “There’s a lot of Muslims here in this area. I’m glad they’re here,” the former senator told the newspaper in April, describing them as “wonderful.”

“In the last days of his life this was an issue that was pressing in his mind… disgust for Donald Trump’s xenophobia,” Jim Bennett said. “At the end of his life he was preoccupied with getting things done that he had felt was left undone.”

Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from America had outraged the former senator, his wife Joyce said, triggering his instincts to do what he could on a personal level. They ultimately did not canvass the hospital, but Bennett had already made an effort in his last months of life.
As they traveled from Washington to Utah for Christmas break, Bennett approached a woman wearing a hijab in the airport.

“He would go to people with the hijab [on] and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here,” his wife said. “He wanted to apologize on behalf of the Republican Party.”

“He was astonished and aghast that Donald Trump had the staying power that he had… He had absolutely no respect for Donald Trump, and I think got angry and frustrated when it became clear that the party wasn’t going to steer clear of Trumpism,” his son relayed.

How awful to be on your death bed and feel as if you had a hand in something like this becoming possible.

I disagreed with Bob Bennett about almost every policy. But he was not a monster. He is literally a dying breed of Republican.

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Babies aren’t partisans

by digby

A wall at the border won’t stop this. Just saying.

Nowadays, it’s hard to shock me when it comes to Republican villainy, but they’ve got me with this one. I find this to be unbelievable:

The man who led the successful White House response to the Ebola outbreak says the Zika virus is a slow-motion public health disaster — and Congress is to blame.

Ron Klain, who served as White House Ebola czar and as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, told POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast that Congress has failed to heed the lessons of the Ebola epidemic and that the Zika funding battle has become unforgivably partisan in the face of such dire human costs, including severe brain defects in infants.

“The babies being born are neither Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “They’re babies.”

The House’s patchwork $622 million funding plan is especially “irresponsible,” said Klain. That Republican-backed bill would fund Zika research partly by taking money previously appropriated to fight Ebola. “They’re fighting over a difference of money that the Pentagon spends every eight hours,” said Klain, who now works as a venture capitalist. “In the context of Washington, this is relatively small sums.”

The White House in February requested $1.9 billion to fight the Zika virus, which is spreading quickly through the Americas. Three months later, Congress is still debating that, with competing packages in the Senate and House, and the possibility that Zika funding might stay unresolved until a July conference committee — well into the summer mosquito season.

More than 1,200 U.S. residents have already been infected with the virus, including more than 100 pregnant women. All of the domestic cases of Zika — about 500 in the states and 700 in the territories — are travel-associated, but public health experts expect that to change in the coming months. Most people have mild symptoms, if any, but researchers are probing whether the virus can cause severe neurological problems in some cases. And it can be devastating to babies.

Klain said he doesn’t understand why securing Zika funding has become a political battle. He’s especially unhappy over some Republicans’ insistence that no new money be devoted to research and prevention, that all of it has to come from another health program.

The House on Wednesday night voted along mostly party lines to approve its funding package — one-third of the White House’s original request and which repurposes funds being used to fight Ebola and other infectious diseases around the world.

“This is as crazy as saying we’re going to take a fire hydrant out of the ground in one place and move it some place else to fight a different fire,” Klain said. “To rip money away from [Ebola] to fight Zika is about as irresponsible as you can get.””

Public health officials say the leftover Ebola funds have been promised to set up health systems in West Africa and to guard against a potential resurgence of the disease. For instance, Liberia’s Ebola outbreak was declared over in May 2015 — but there have been at least three Ebola deaths in the country since then.

Between insufficient preventive efforts and the natural cycle of an outbreak, Klain predicts that local transmission of Zika virus inside the continental United States — potentially in the Gulf Coast, Southeast or other mosquito-rich regions — looms within the next few weeks.

And looking ahead, he foresees a public health catastrophe that will begin with the first wave of U.S. infants born with microcephaly and other severe brain defects.

“We are going to see … the birth of babies who will suffer a horrible impairment for the rest of their lives,” he said. “However long or short those lives are.”

This is where they’re pinching pennies. A public health crisis in the making in which babies are going to be born with unusually small heads and terrible disabilities if they manage to live at all. A public health crisis that could be averted or at least mitigated with strong and decisive action.

They are monsters.

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