Month: June 2016

The best graduation speech ever

by digby

Trust me. You won’t regret watching this:

I needed that so badly. It gives me hope for the future of the country.  And comedy!

The wrong place and the wrong time

by digby

Gross:

These folks are on the wrong track if they think this nonsense will work with the gay community:

Stickers and posters featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack were raising eyebrows in West Hollywood on Thursday morning in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida.

The signage was affixed to electric boxes, light poles, trash cans and other fixtures near West Hollywood City Hall, the Pacific Design Center and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several were hung near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known gay lounge.

The posters featured a coiled, striking rattlesnake, similar to the yellow Gadsden flag that reads “Don’t Tread On Me” and often is used by the Tea Party movement. The West Hollywood signs were rainbow-colored, like the gay pride flag.

But then she kept seeing them — in the public right of way and on private property — and alerted others in the Sheriff’s Department.

“I understand the sentiment behind them and 1st Amendment rights, but it’s a bad message,” Perez said. “I hope it’s just people venting that they could do this, and I’m hoping their calmness will take over. It’s our job to keep you safe.”

Perez said the past few days in West Hollywood — which has a famously large lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population — have been tense. The Orlando slayings occurred just hours before the city hosted a massive LGBT Pride parade, and a candlelight vigil for the victims drew hundreds of people on Monday evening.

“I understand that people want to fight back after Orlando,” she said. “But there are ways to do that without a gun.”

The mayor said she, too, was surprised by the signs. “We are disturbed by them,” West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister said of the posters. “We don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence.”

The signs were posted just days after Sunday’s shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. The 29-year-old gunman, Omar Mateen, had spoken in the past of his hatred for gay people before killing 49 club-goers and wounding 53 more.

Capt. Holly Perez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department West Hollywood Station said she first noticed one of the rainbow #ShootBack signs Wednesday night as she was running along Santa Monica Boulevard. She was surprised, initially thinking it was just something leftover from Sunday’s L.A. Pride parade and “a fluke.”

At Monday night’s vigil at the gay bar Micky’s, people spoke of wanting to end gun violence, and many loudly voiced their support for an assault weapons ban, Meister said.

“It’s been a very emotional and turbulent week for the city and the LGBT community,” Meister said. “There’s a lot of frustration, a lot of rage, a lot of sadness, but we firmly believe that love conquers hate.”

Meister said it was unclear who designed or posted the signs.

“Whoever is doing this, this is not the voice of the city,” Meister said.

West Hollywood Councilman John Duran, who is gay, said the signs were upsetting and not the right message for the gay community.

“Even during our heightened days of civil disobedience and protest, we have only advocated peaceful means, never arming ourselves and retaliating with violence,” Duran said.

Oscar Delgado, West Hollywood’s director of public works, said city crews would be removing signs within the public right of way, which is standard procedure.

“We are looking for them,” Delgado said Thursday morning. “Ones that are on public property are going to be removed.”

Yeah. Like Trump who insists “the gays love me” these folks seem to believe that the entire country is just like them. It isn’t. Thankfully.

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Ad war begins 

by digby

I’m seeing this ad a couple of times an hour in California. I’m not sure it makes much sense but this Trump Super Pac seems to have a ton of money so maybe they’re just blanketing the country with it for … reasons:

The 30-second, entitled “More of the Same,” intersperses clips of Hillary Clinton denying any improper activity on her private email server with clips of Bill Clinton denying any sexual activity with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The clips are edited in a way that blurs the line between the two distinct controversies. The message is clear: that Bill and Hillary Clinton are two politicians cut from the same cloth who use the same language to evade accountability. The ad comes from the super PAC Rebuilding America Now, which has raised $32 million so far from Trump supporters, founder Tom Barrack told CNN last week.

It appears to be an Alex Castellanos special :

Tom Barrack, a real estate investor and longtime friend of Trump’s, has assisted the PAC with fundraising, though he told CNN that he would have no formal role with the group. Barrack is also “close personal friends” with Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist, Paul Manafort, according to a bio provided to the Associated Press by Barrack’s publicist. Barrack recently hosted a large fundraiser for the candidate. 

According to CNN, Barrack said that the “principal operatives” running the group will be Laurance Gay, an ally of Manafort, who will serve as managing director, and Ken McKay, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign and Chris Christie’s former campaign manager. 

Ryan Call, Rebuilding America Now’s treasurer, is an attorney at Hale Westfall, LLP. He served as Colorado Republican State Chairman from 2011 to 2015. 

Christopher Marston is listed as Rebuilding America Now’s Custodian of Records in its FEC filing. A veteran Republican campaign operative and founder of the campaign finance and compliance firm Election CFO, he is listed as the treasurer on record, for about 60 campaign committees, political action committees and other groups since 2012, including almost 40 that are active in the 2016 cycle. As we noted in April, included among these was the anti-Trump PAC Make America Awesome. 

Former Romney advisor and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos will also work for the PAC.  

According to the New York Times, his role will be to “cut advertisements and work on strategy” for the PAC. His hiring is notable because he tried to organize an anti-Trump super PAC as recently as late 2015.

He’s the perfect guy for the job. Recall this from 2008:

CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted on the May 20 edition of CNN’s The Situation Room that  “[t]here was a column in The New York Times not too long ago where it talked about some of the humor in the campaign, and the punch line was a line that was — that Hillary Clinton was a ‘white bitch.’ ” 

Moments later … CNN political contributor Alex Castellanos interrupted, asserting, “And some women, by the way, are named that and it’s accurate.

And now a word from the man who brought you Sarah Palin

by digby

I don’t know why William Kristol thinks anyone will listen to him, but he keeps talking anyway:

What one hears now are expressions of dismay and sighs of resignation, accompanied sometimes by short lectures about the competing pressures and manifold complexities of political reality. And what one hears are reminders from the pols and the pros that it’s misleadingly simple-minded to think that if someone is hanging by a thread, maybe you should just step up and cut it. After all, no political consultant worth his salt would ever suggest anything so crude. No way. Before even coming close to that daunting thread, we need more meetings! We need more polling! We need to wait for more evidence! We need to wait for more mistakes by Trump! We need to wait to see what others who are also waiting will do! We need to .  .  . wait, wait, wait.

Do we really? Trump’s ghastly performance over the last couple of weeks has revived the question of an open convention, where delegates would have it in their power, should they choose to exercise it, to nominate any eligible citizen for consideration by the convention and to vote their conscience in a secret ballot. Meanwhile, the announcement of the Better for America group has given some organizational ballast to a possible independent campaign, with ballot access and signature gathering efforts about to get underway. Both an open convention and an independent candidacy are long shots. But they are far from hopeless.

But, you say, surely it’s doubtful either option ultimately would work.

Well, life is lived under the shadow of doubt.

In his final letter, shortly before his death and 50 years after the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson reminisced about his fellow signers, “that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country.” The choices the signers of the Declaration made were truly “bold and doubtful.” On the other hand, the choice to mobilize against Trump, the choice to try to save the party and the country from Trump and Clinton—such a choice isn’t even doubtful and doesn’t really require much boldness.

I don’t know why I’m sharing this.  I guess I just needed a a little chuckle today and thought you might too.

They’re not going to replace Trump at the convention.

Have they met Trump voters lately?

Headline of the day

by digby

He’s Baaaack!

by digby

On Thursday night, Mr. Trump said he was just fine with Mr. Bush’s activities. “I like that he’s helping certain Republicans,” Mr. Trump said, adding that Mr. Bush’s brother “had a great chance to beat me” and did not.

Mr. Bush’s effort to help down-ballot candidates fill their campaign coffers underscores how fissures in the Republican Party are affecting fund-raising. The senators are not receiving any fund-raising help from Mr. Trump, a typical role for the party’s standard-bearer. And few congressional candidates have sought Mr. Trump’s endorsement, given his high negative ratings in polls and unpredictable nature.

The support from Mr. Bush also reflects his rising standing. He was toxic to his own party in the final years of his presidency and left the White House deeply unpopular after two wars and a financial collapse that plunged the nation into recession.

Few candidates were clamoring for his help. Outside of helping his brother and his nephew, George P. Bush, the Texas land commissioner, and his friend Ed Gillespie in a Virginia Senate race, Mr. Bush has largely stayed away from campaigns since returning to Texas in 2009, writing only a handful of personal checks for candidates who visited his Dallas office.

But 47 percent of people nationally view him favorably now, according to a February poll from Quinnipiac University. (Mr. Trump’s favorability was at 31 percent in a June 15 national poll from Bloomberg Politics.)

Further, Mr. Bush is highly popular among Republicans, especially the party elites who are big campaign donors. The hosts listed on the invitations for the fund-raisers for Mr. McCain and Mr. Blunt include some of the country’s leading Republican contributors who have recoiled from Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

My God, how desperate can they be?

The scourge of newsiness
by Tom Sullivan

Via ETC News News Dump.

Eugene Robinson’s piece in the Washington Post looks at the challenge covering Donald Trump presents to the news media:

Trump lies the way other people breathe. We’re used to politicians who stretch the truth, who waffle or dissemble, who emphasize some facts while omitting others. But I can’t think of any other political figure who so brazenly tells lie after lie, spraying audiences with such a fusillade of untruths that it is almost impossible to keep track. Perhaps he hopes the media and the nation will become numb to his constant lying. We must not.

Trouble is, it’s not just Trump. Like Billy Pilgrim, American readers have come unstuck from the truth. Human attention span now is less than that of a goldfish. Our capacity to discern truth from lies is about as keen. The Internet and social media are awash in newsy-looking websites featuring thin, unsourced “reportage” of questionable provenance — newsiness. But it’s easily digestible. As Jeff Goldblum said of his character’s job at People Magazine in The Big Chill, “I don’t write anything longer than what the average person can read during the average dump.” That makes web surfers easy prey for Donald Trumps and disinformation traffickers. When a friend shares a “well-researched” article, prepare for a fusillade of “facts” unsupported by a single link or original source reporting. Goldfish don’t check sources.

Neither will Trump’s fans. But journalists should. After citing a string of Trumpian nonsense from the past week, Robinson continues:

It goes against all journalistic instinct to write in a news article, as The Post did Monday, that Trump’s national security address was “a speech laden with falsehoods and exaggeration.” But I don’t think we’re doing our job if we simply report assertions of fact without evaluating whether they are factual.

Trump’s lies also present a challenge for voters. The normal assumption is that politicians will bend the truth to fit their ideology — not that they will invent fake “truth” out of whole cloth. Trump is not just an unorthodox candidate. He is an inveterate liar — maybe pathological, maybe purposeful. He doesn’t distort facts, he makes them up.

If Trump’s version of the truth fits his tribe’s preferred narrative, they will swallow the bait without a second thought. The threat newsiness poses is that we fall prey to the same “create our own reality” thinking of the right-wing exuberants who coined reality-based community as a term of derision for the left during the Iraq War. Robinson thinks we should be better than passing along newsiness and he’s right.

Professor Trump wrong again

by digby

Of course:

Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week.

“They don’t report them,” Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. “For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this.”

But FBI director James Comey said, “They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

“It’s at the heart of the FBI’s effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks,” Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings.

Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Washington field office, told Reuters on Wednesday that the agency has a “robust” relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members.

Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city’s Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting “red flags.”

“I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things,” Downing told Reuters. “What we say to communities is that we don’t want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior.”

Just like a drunk wingnut at the end of the bar spouting off like he’s an expert about everything and he doesn’t have a clue, Trump is spreading bigoted nonsense about the Muslim community, including Americans, and I’m sure people believe him because he validates their primitive tribalism.

He also said that Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate. This too is total BS:

American Muslims are in fact more culturally integrated than European Muslims and say they identify more strongly with their American identity than their religious identity, according to a study from the Council on Foreign Relations: 

The percentage of U.S. Muslims in individual income and education brackets tracks closely to that of the rest of the U.S. population, surveys suggest. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, U.S. Muslims have the second-highest level of education among major religious groups in the United States. Almost 50 percent of Muslims identify with religion before their U.S. identity (nearly half of U.S. Christians polled by Gallup also identified with their religion first).

Even so, Americans are increasingly less tolerant of Muslims; a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute in September 2015 found that 56 percent of Americans think Islam is “at odds with American values and way of life,” up from 47 percent in 2011.

Personally I think Donald Trump is “at odds with American values and way of life” and yet millions of people are voting for him. They own this. It’s straight up bigotry validated by the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

And it’s disgusting.

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Testing the limits of his appeal

by digby

Trump’s doing it his way:

Behind the scenes, the RNC is struggling to get Trump’s team to staff up. Communication hires that were supposed to happen last week never materialized. Instead of matching the RNC’s ground game and firing power, Trump is focused on the same strategy he had during the primary — dominate the news cycle and don’t worry about details.

 Donald Trump defiant following Obama’s criticism after Orlando shooting 3:04
Veteran campaign operatives have expressed dismay over the Trump campaign’s unwillingness to fill key roles and infighting between senior staffers. 

“He fundamentally doesn’t believe he needs to campaign as usual,” one source said.

Maybe it will work.  He’s just that special. And if it doesn’t work out, he’s got his new media empire to fall back on:

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” (Both Kushner and Ivanka Trump did not respond to a request for comment.)

“EVEN OLD FOX NEWS DIDN’T HAVE THE RIGHT READ ON WHAT THE BASE IS. AND WE DO.”

Trump, this person close to the matter suggests, has become irked by his ability to create revenue for other media organizations without being able to take a cut himself. Such a situation “brings him to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network.” Trump has “gotten the bug,” according to this person. “So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”

Of course he does. He’s not making any money on this otherwise, is he? And it’s apparent that he needs it.

You have to love this though:

The Trump camp’s interest in cable may, on some level, be the most telling indicator of the businessman’s financial aptitude. These days, after all, the most successful media companies are figuring out their strategies in a post-cable, over-the-top landscape. In fact, one rival entertainment executive pointed out to me that launching a cable channel is “nuts” because of the limited spectrum available, the declining advertising rates, and the immense start-up costs and resources required. “It’s a fool’s errand,” this person said. “But then again, we are talking about Donald Trump.”

Just another right winger after all 🙁

by digby

How typical. Hugh Hewitt now loves what he’s hearing from the crazed Donald Trump. Gets him all excited:

A week after Hugh Hewitt called on the Republican National Committee to change its convention rules if Donald Trump could not change himself, the conservative radio host has signaled that he is back on-board supporting the party’s presumptive nominee.

“Although there’s been talk in recent weeks of implementing new rules at the Republican convention in Cleveland that would allow party leaders to replace Trump — talk that I’ve entertained — the appetite for that sort of drastic measure is gone,” Hewitt wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

What changed his mind? Trump’s speeches on Friday and Monday, addressing religious liberty at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference and responding to the Orlando, Florida, attack, respectively. Hewitt wrote that Trump “has returned to a winning message and walled off the assorted ‘never Trump’ holdouts trying to upend his nomination.”

Hewitt’s endorsement comes after Trump, in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, repeatedly insinuated that President Barack Obama supports terrorism.

Yep, selling yourself as a psychopathic strongman is the way to win. Hewitt sure likes it anyway.

If you’ve been wondering why Hewitt suddenly became the “reasonable Republican” on every TV network this season, check out his interview archives to see how often the Villagers turn up on his show to yuk it up and let their hair down.

More here.

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Chris Hayes turns his lively mind to the subject of criminal justice

by digby

Chris Hayes is writing a book on the justice system and it sounds really interesting. Be sure to read the whole interview but this excerpt caught my eye:

What made you embark on a book about criminal justice?

We covered it a lot before Ferguson and after Ferguson. The two main things it grew out of were all of that reporting and also my first-person experience of growing up in New York in the years when we had 2,500 murders as opposed to 350. What I’m trying to write about is, why did we — meaning us as citizens and particularly us as white people — build this system that we have?

So it’s not just about cops shooting innocent people.

No, it’s the entirety of the American carceral state, from the highest per capita prison rate in the world to the thousands of summonses that are issued for selling M&Ms. The argument is that we’ve made two republics that have functionally different expectations of them, different levels of rights. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it was a democratic choice, but I kind of think it was.

Speaking again of democratic choices, you were writing this book about white fear during Trump’s improbable rise. Do you work him in?

I’m still figuring it out. White fear is always seeking its object. For a very long time, crime was the dominant political issue of the day. Then it was terrorism, now it’s a combination of immigration and terrorism, and politicians will come along and exploit it, cultivate it.

Why do you call the over-policed parts of the nation a colony?

In a colony, the force of law is in some fundamental sense not representative. There’s a chapter arguing that the complaints of the citizens were extremely close to the complaints of the founders. The precipitating spark of the revolution had a lot to do with policing powers, particularly the policing powers of the tax collectors. Taxes at that point were collected by what are essentially cops, because there was no one filing their 1090s. There is essentially the British version of stop-and-frisk, the arbitrary, capricious exercise of that power on colonial smugglers.

Are you trying to reclaim Founding Father rhetoric from the tea party?

Yes. There’s obviously the deeply complicating factor of race, but if you go back and read the DOJ report on Ferguson, the picture of state power that it conjures would be in some ways recognizable to the founders and odious to them.

That’s typically insightful of him. Yes, we’ve “colonized” parts of our own country. What an interesting way of looking at the issue.

I confess I’ve been watching the series “Turn” about spying during the Revolutionary War. And they do a nice job of illustrating what must have been tremendous frustration at the “capricious exercise of power” by the Tories on the colonials. Watching it hits at a very primitive American reflex against state power. Turning that reflex to these communities of color makes you see it in a completely different way. But then state power, exercised as slavery and Jim Crow, always looked different to African Americans, Native Americans and Latino migrants didn’t it? They’ve been colonized from the beginning and in may ways remain so today.

Anyway, I can’t wait to read it.

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