Month: June 2016

The Heebeejobbies

by digby

Or Heebiejeebies?

She seems nice.

That reminded me of this one, from last September:

Trump did look at “getting rid of” Muslims and he decided to ban them from immigrating and deport all Syrian refugees. So there’s a decent chance he’ll “look into” firing all the “heebejobbies” and retired retired veterans to man the borders and the airports. No word on whether it will be ok to hire heebeejeebie or heebiejobbie veterans.  There are a bunch of them.

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Trump QOTD: Too good for the average voter

by digby

He ‘s just better than your average voter — and they know it.

Don’t forget when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did these big rallies, 3,4, 5k people would come. And they said, wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go into people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.  

I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living rooms they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, “I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird!” 

The King doesn’t visit his subjects in their living rooms. They would lose respect for him.

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A full blown macho bully ticket?

by digby

Looks like it might come to pass:

Four months after endorsing Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie remains one of the few major figures in the Republican establishment to align himself entirely with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. In public, he has defended Mr. Trump’s freewheeling and sometimes offensive pronouncements, vouching for him even after Mr. Trump attacked a federal judge for his Mexican heritage. (Mr. Christie said he knew from personal experience that Mr. Trump is not a racist.)

Mr. Christie is among those being vetted as Mr. Trump’s possible running mate, according to people briefed on the process, and Mr. Trump has said in interviews that Mr. Christie would have a prominent place in a Trump White House.

Already, Mr. Christie has begun the task of designing a government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Tapped to lead Mr. Trump’s transition efforts, Mr. Christie has taken a role that some of his allies liken to that of a White House chief of staff, soliciting views on what a potential Trump administration should look like.

Mr. Christie has taken the transition process firmly in hand, according to people familiar with his activities, which have been kept from public view so far. He has enlisted his former top aide in Trenton, Richard H. Bagger, to help manage the transition team.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Christie has prodded his fellow governors and Republican political donors to line up behind a candidate many view with distaste. He has made only modest headway in the last few months: Mr. Trump has struggled badly with fund-raising and Mr. Christie has pleaded with donors, in personal phone calls and fund-raising events, to give him a second look.

A couple of years ago I wrote that I thought the GOP would naturally nominate Christie to go up against Hillary Clinton. He’s a sexist bully who revels in going after women. I didn’t see Trump coming and he out-bullied Christie to o on to win. But it makes perfect sense to me that they would team up.

If Clinton picks Warren and Trump picks Christie it would be an epic battle of the sexes. Bring it on.

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Trump’s credo: “whatever you do, don’t apologize”

by digby

This article by the right wingnut radio host Howie Carr says it all. After doing a racist war whoop in his Trump introduction he joined the candidate on his plane and reported back:

The candidate loosened his tie and offered me some advice.

“Whatever you do, don’t apologize,” he said. “You never hear me apologize, do you? That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek way back. Remember? He was doing okay ’til he said he was sorry.”

Not to worry, I wasn’t going to say I was sorry for mentioning the name of the fake Indian and then doing a few seconds of a war whoop. About an hour earlier, I had been at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, warming up a crowd of maybe 5,000 Trump supporters for Gov. Paul LePage before he introduced The Donald at a weekday rally.

I was speaking extemporaneously when I free-associated Fauxchohantas’ name, and suddenly a war whoop seemed appropriate for the occasion. Moments after I left the stage, one of Trump’s aides handed me his cellphone, with a fresh headline from Politico:

“Boston radio host at Trump event mocks Warren with war whoops.”

The Trump guy smiled. “That didn’t take long.”

Interesting that he referenced sports betting expert and TV commentor Jimmy the Greek who lost his job almost 30 years ago for saying African Americans were “bred” to be better athletes. He apologized but he refused to resign. So they fired him.

Apparently, the campaign “re-boot” doesn’t include soft-pedaling the racism. Good to know.

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Obama’s epic rant on Trump’s “populism”

by digby

“That’s not the measure of populism. That’s nativism, or xenophobia, or worse. Or it’s just cynicism….Let’s just be clear: Somebody who labels ‘us versus them’ or engaged in rhetoric about how we’re going to look after ourselves and take it to the other guy — that’s not the definition of populism. Sorry.”

Actually it’s pretty standard with right wing populism. But the rant is good nonetheless.

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Onward Christian Torturers

by digby

I wrote about Trump, torture and the evangelicals for Salon this morning:

“Only the Lord knows the condition of a person’s heart. I can only tell you what I’ve heard. First, Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit. I also hear that Paula White has known Trump for years and that she personally led him to Christ. Do I know that for sure? No. Do I know the details of that alleged conversion? I can’t say that I do… if anything, this man is a baby Christian who doesn’t have a clue about how believers think, talk and act. 

@saletan @jlupf Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe.

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 28, 2016

They said, “what do you think about waterboarding,” I said ‘I like it a lot and I don’t think it’s tough enough.” 

We’re living in Medieval times. We have to stop it. We have to be so strong, we have to fight so viciously and so violently, because we’re dealing with violent people, vicious people.

We have laws and the laws say you can’t do this , you can’t do that, well, a lot, alright? Their laws say you can do anything you want and the more vicious you are the better.

So we can’t do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages. They can do whatever they want to do.  

They eat dinner like us. Can you imagine them sitting around the table or wherever they’re eating their dinner, talking about the Americans don’t do waterboarding and yet we chop off heads. They probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership.  

You know, you have to fight fire with fire.

Remarkably, the gap between torture supporters and opponents widens between voters who are Christian and those who are not religious. Just 39% of white evangelicals believe the CIA’s treatment of detainees amounted to torture, with 53% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 45% of white Catholics agreeing with that statement. Among the non-religious, though, 72% said the treatment amounted to torture. (The poll did not break down non-Christian religions in the results.)

“I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.” 

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!”

Enforcing norms of reciprocity
by Tom Sullivan

Reducing human decision-making to a binary this or that choice turns humans into Flatlanders with no other dimensions to their thinking. So the rush to explain last week’s Brexit vote as simple xenophobia or stupidity is rankling. (Don’t get me started on the complaint that people voted against their best interests.) A flush of articles examines the human psychology that led to it.

Time magazine quotes Drew Westen (“The Political Brain”):

“There’s a very legitimate reason to be concerned about immigration,” says psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University. “Unfortunately ISIS has given would-be fence-sitters the permission to vote out of some combination of conscious or unconscious prejudice or bias.” That hardly means that pro-Brexit Britons acted out of racism; it does mean that people who do traffic in racism had more power to influence voters than they would have had in more peaceable times.

Writing for Scientific American, Julia Shaw cautions that the Leave camp mirrored Donald Trump’s appeals to fear undercut the brain’s ability for rational decision-making:

When pundits argue that people don’t need experts, they are actively trying to push you from using central processing to a peripheral approach. They are asking you to turn off your logic and turn on your emotion, because they know that it is difficult to use logic once fear takes over.

This is also why politicians like Trump and the Brexiters like to say they represent “ordinary people.” Of course, “ordinary people” don’t exist. Even if they did, they’d be unlikely to be a billionaire or an old-Etonian who delivers speeches in Latin. Presenters of such arguments are trying to make you feel negative emotions against an imaginary opponent (usually the ‘elites,’ who also don’t actually exist), trying to get you to disregard evidence and logic.

“Very few people are stupid in any meaningful sense, and the British aren’t either,” writes Thomas Hills at Psychology Today. Simmering anger at growing inequality gets his vote for why Leave prevailed:

People who are unhappy and angry often don’t attend to the long-term consequences of their actions. Crimes of passion, by definition, lack the premeditated thinking-it-through that tends to keep people out of trouble. Still, crimes and emotionally driven actions are often the outcome of a history of emotional dissatisfaction. People don’t just get angry one day and stab their partner. They get angry, and then they get angry again, and then they stomp their feet for a while, and then one day they get really angry and they happen to be cutting onions.

Working-class people in places with high inequality have been angry for a long time, perhaps since the dawn of work. The referendum on Brexit in the UK just handed the working class a knife and placed a blow-up-doll of the EU nearby.

But humans seem to have evolved a sophisticated sense of fairness that a growing body of research supports. Perhaps the most satisfying response to Brexit comes from Eric Beinhocker at the Atlantic:

People are what behavioral economists call strong reciprocators and altruistic punishers. Humans are wired for reciprocal cooperation: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, etc.

Beinhocker recounts experiments using the Ultimatum Game,

… in which one person is given some money (say $100) and asked to offer a share of it to another person (say $20). If the second person accepts the offer, both keep the money, but if he or she rejects it, both get nothing. The rational solution is to accept any offer except $0, as even $1 is better than nothing. But experiments on thousands of subjects around the world show that offers below around 30 percent are typically rejected, thus harming both individuals.

He explains, “People will sacrifice their own self-interest and harm themselves, even severely, to enforce norms of reciprocity.” So the Leave voters have done in the U.K. So might Trump voters in the U.S. this fall, Beinhocker warns. (Or the Bernie-or-Bust crowd he leaves unmentioned.) The lack of accountability for Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis coupled with unsustainable levels of economic inequality have created a vast, untapped market for enforcing norms of reciprocity.

From the time we are in the Terrible Twos (I want to do it myself!), people exhibit a need not just for cooperation, but some autonomy and control over their fates. Working people feel the economy and capitalism itself is failing them, that they are getting a raw deal and lack control their fates. Offer them less than 30 percent and they’ll offer you a middle finger.

There is a reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren excite crowds. They have given voice to the complaints of the masses and convinced their respective audiences that they have been heard, that they have an advocate. People who know Hillary Clinton tell us privately she is a good listener. This is her chance to prove it publicly.

Beinhocker concludes:

The reason the Remain camp lost was that they didn’t understand the game they were playing. They thought they were playing a rational game, appealing to people’s pocketbooks and sense of security. They fought their campaign with facts and figures and by highlighting the risks of Brexit. But the voters were playing the Ultimatum Game. Leave understood this and fought with promises to “take back control.” Like the Remain campaign, Hillary Clinton is also playing the rational game, appealing to voters’ economic and security self-interest. Donald Trump is the weapon of the altruistic punishers.

I’m not as sanguine about their altruism as Beinhocker. Clinton and the Democrats risk selling into the wrong market if they’re selling rational self interest this fall. That’s not what working people are buying. They want an economic system that treats them fairly.

QOTD: That nice Dr Carson

by digby

What a guy:

[My mother] has Alzheimer’s. She’s not really cognizant of that, which is a good thing because my mother is really a fighter. She probably would have taken a gun and gone out and shot some of the dishonest reporters… One of the reasons that our founders said that our system and our freedom depends on a well-informed and educated populace is because they recognize that if people were not well-informed and well-educated, they can be easily manipulated by a dishonest media and that’s exactly what happens in our society today.

Did anyone ever find out where all that money went?

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by digby

There’s too much to read these days on the ramifications of the Brexit vote and it’s hard to keep up, but this struck me as a useful encapsulation of why Britain’s leadership looking little better than the Trump campaign:

Mr. Johnson is clearly looking to unite the divided Conservative Party behind his own, flamboyant self and to burnish his free-market economic credentials. 

But playing down immigration, Mr. Goodwin said, could create more political trouble. “I worry for senior euroskeptic leaders, because there is a misunderstanding of the vote, and that will feed voter dissatisfaction,” he said, driving many of the voters who chose a British exit to turn away from both mainstream parties and move to the populist right. 

The referendum was unusual, because it pitted a government on one side, “Remain,” against a loose coalition on the other, made up of Conservatives, some Labour legislators and U.K. Independence Party supporters. The Leave side never had to hammer out an agreement on how to proceed if it won, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. 

“There was no coherence, because it wasn’t a political party fighting for government, but an odd coalition fighting against something, but with no consistent view of what it was fighting for,” he said. 

Even on the economy, the Leave side was made of free-market economists who believe in no tariffs at all, those who believe in trade deals and protectionists who want to shield the declining working class against globalization, Professor Travers said. 

“And now the government will have to be reformed as if it were representing the Leave side and yet represent both, a one-party government that must reflect the schism in itself,” he said.

 Sometimes the old “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing creates more problems than it’s worth.  If Conservatives had simply taken responsibility for the consequences of their harsh austerity programs and tried to ameliorate some of the discomfort with the rapid cultural and social change of our modern world instead of seeing opportunities to use all that to advance their own agendas they might have avoided all this. Instead, they just seemed to run with it without any plan or vision for how it was going to work out. Let’s just hope their ineptitude doesn’t result in Britain voting in a Far Right party. That will not end well.

It’s quite a fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into.

And speaking of Boris Johnson, this article by Tina Brown called “Beware Boris Johnson: The Power of a Cunning Clown”  is devastating.

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Trump is soliciting donations from foreign leaders?!?

by digby

Since members of the British Parliament have complained about receiving several fundraising emails from Donald Trump, politicians in several other foreign countries have revealed that they’ve also been flooded with email requests for donations from Trump.

Members of parliament in Australia, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland have all received the emails, according to news reports and tweets from the politicians.

Tim Watts, an Australian member of parliament, told TPM’s John Marshall on Twitter that he has received several fundraising emails from the Trump campaign, and that he believes all Australian members of parliament have gotten the emails as well.

The Trump campaign has also asked members of parliament in Iceland for campaign contributions, according to Icelandic media. At least three Icelandic members of parliament have received a Trump fundraising email, according to the Iceland Monitor. A couple members of parliament told the Morgublaðið newspaper that they had received emails, according to a report in Iceland Magazine.

“This whole matter is very perplexing. The letter left me speechless,” Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the head of Iceland’s Left Green Party, reportedly said.

And a member of parliament in Denmark, Ida Auken, revealed on Twitter that she had also received a fundraising email from Trump.

Anders Adlercreutz, a member of parliament in Finland, also said on Twitter that Finnish elected officials have received the fundraising pleas from Trump.