Month: June 2016

What kind of a man is Donald Trump?
by Tom Sullivan

Trump isn’t a different kind of candidate. He’s a Mitch McConnell kind of candidate. Exactly the kind of candidate you’d expect from a Republican Party whose “script” for several years has been to execute a full-scale assault on the integrity of our courts. Blockading judicial appointments so Donald Trump can fill them. Smearing and intimidating nominees who do not pledge allegiance to the financial interests of the rich and the powerful.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren should stay right where she is in the Senate. She would have less of a platform as the Vice President. Yes, VP candidates are often given the attack-dog roll, but Warren needs no loftier position for doing that. Warren’s speech to the American Constitution Society’s national convention takes your breath away.

Warren’s attack on Donald Trump yesterday was part of a larger indictment of the Republican attack on the legal system and the Senate’s refusal to give Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a hearing and a vote.

Here is the entire transcript:

Four simple words are engraved above the
doors to the Supreme Court: Equal Justice Under Law. That’s supposed to be the
basic promise of our legal system: that our laws are just, and that everyone — everyone — will
be held equally accountable if they break those laws.

We haven’t always fulfilled that promise — but
it is the absolute standard to which we hold ourselves even when we fall short.

A vital part of that struggle is the fight for a truly
professional, independent, and impartial judiciary. A place governed not by
politics, not by money, not by power — but by those four
simple words: equal justice under law.

Three
years ago, I came to the American Constitution Society to deliver a warning
about how that promise is under threat.

I talked pretty bluntly about how we are losing the
fight over whether our courts will remain a neutral forum, faithfully
interpreting the law and dispensing fair and impartial justice, or whether rich
and powerful interests will completely capture our judicial branch.

I talked about how year after year, for more than thirty
years, powerful interests have worked to rewrite the law and tilt the courts to
favor billionaires and giant corporations. Cases that protected giant
businesses from accountability. Cases that made it harder for individuals to
get into court. Cases that gutted longstanding laws protecting consumers from
being cheated. And cases like Citizens United, which
unleashed an avalanche of billionaire SuperPAC dollars and secret corporate
money in a mad dash to tilt the rest of the government in favor of the wealthy.

Today, I’m here to update that warning. Because what
we’ve seen over the past three years — accelerating over the
past three months, and even the past three weeks — is alarming. Powerful
interests are now launching a full-scale assault on the integrity of the
federal judiciary and its judges.

This assault has two major elements. First, tearing down
our centuries-old process for appointing judges. Second, viciously attacking
judicial nominees, potential nominees, and even sitting federal judges, at the
first sign that they might put the rule of law above devotion to the rich and
powerful.

Earlier this week, I
released a comprehensive report on
the Republican campaign of obstruction against President Obama’s nominees. It
details how Senate Republicans have delayed or blocked votes on key nominations
throughout the entire Obama Presidency. The purpose of this obstruction is to
hold open federal positions for as long as possible. The purpose is to
hamstring the President’s ability to protect consumers and workers, to hold
large corporations accountable, and to promote equality. In other words, to undermine
the fundamental principle of Equal Justice Under Law.

The centerpiece of that strategy has been a blockade of
federal judicial appointments — and it’s much bigger than just the Supreme Court.

From the day President Obama was sworn in, Senate Republicans
have used every procedural tool at their disposal to slow down his nominees.
They spent months abusing
the filibuster in a naked
effort to preserve a right wing majority on
the D.C. Circuit. After capturing the Senate in 2015, they haveslowed
judicial confirmations to a trickle.

Judicial emergencies multiply. Cases pile up. Courts are
starved for help. And now the
Supreme Court of the United States sits paralyzed, unable to deal with its
most challenging cases. All because extremist Republicans who reject the
legitimacy of President Obama are determined to make certain our courts advance
only the agenda of the wealthy and the powerful.

It is outrageous — and it is up to us to
fight back.

Senate Republicans, do your job. Give District Court
nominees their votes.

Do your job. Give Circuit Court nominees their votes.

Do your job. Give Merrick Garland his vote!

The nominations blockade is the first part of this
assault on the judiciary. But there is a second, even uglier line of attack — intimidation.

Justice demands a judiciary made up of independent
lawyers who can provide insight and expertise from every corner of the
profession. But Senate Republicans and their big business allies don’t like
nominees whose resumes reflect insufficient devotion to the interests of the
rich and powerful — so they smear them. Defense lawyers, public interest
lawyers, plaintiff’s
attorneys — nominees with these professional experiences are
regularly slandered. Their integrity is questioned. And scores of Republicans
line up to oppose them.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has
attacked the integrity of several of President Obama’s nominees for having some association with the
American Civil Liberties Union. Apparently being connected to with an
organization whose central purpose is to defend rights guaranteed by the
Constitution is an automatic disqualification. Sessions vowed that the
nominations process would become “a
more contentious matter if we keep seeing the ACLU chromosome as part of this
process” — and he meant it.

During her confirmation hearing to be a District Court
judge this year, Senator
Sessions insulted Paula Xinis, a former federal public defender and civil
rights lawyer who worked on cases of police abuse. He asked if she could
“assure the police officers … that might be brought before your court that
they’ll get a fair day in court, and that your history would not impact your
decision-making.” I’ll let you guess how many times Senator Sessions has
questioned a fancy corporate defense lawyer, asking if they would assure
victims of fraud or people poisoned by toxic wastes or people injured by shoddy
products or employees fired illegally because they tried to form a union — if
they would get a fair day in court. Judge
Xinis was rated unanimously well-qualified by the American Bar Association.[2] Yet she was barely
confirmed, with nearly three dozen Republican Senators voting no.

This approach is corrosive to the legal profession. It
is corrosive to our courts. It is corrosive to the rule of law. It is the
responsibility of every lawyer — no matter who their
clients are — to stand up and fight back.

The attacks around the current Supreme Court vacancy
have been even uglier. At one point, Senator John Cornyn of Texas — the
#2 Republican in the Senate — announced
that any nominee — ANY
NOMINEE — put forward by the President would be beaten like “a piñata.” And his right-wing billionaire and big business allies
have made good on that threat.

When rumors circulated that Jane Kelly, a highly respected
federal judge, might — might — be under
consideration, the Judicial Crisis Network — a
shadowy right-wing group financed with dark money from the billionaire Koch
brothers — ran television
ads attacking her for her
service to the nation as a federal public defender.

The President eventually nominated Merrick Garland — a
judge so revered for his professionalism that days before he was announced,
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch called him a “fine
man” who the President could “easily name” to fill the vacancy. And what happened?

Scores of Republican Senators refused
to even meet with him. The
Judicial Crisis Network started spending millions
of dollars on television adsdemeaning him.

The NFIB — a
right-wing Washington lobbying group that
claims to speak for small businesses but is swimming
in cash from conservative billionaires — announced that it
would oppose Garland’s nomination because “[i]n
cases involving federal agencies, the Judge ruled in their favor 77 percent of
the time.” Every lawyer in
this room knows that federal law requires judges defer to most agency actions.
But apparently, it doesn’t matter anymore whether Judge Garland follows the law — what
matters is that he doesn’t
bend the law to suit giant corporations.

Judge Garland is not a politician. He is a judge with an
unimpeachable record of putting the law first. And for that sin, he faces a
nonstop, national campaign of slime. He faces historic disrespect from the
Republicans who control Senate. It is despicable. It must end. We must end it.

The goal is to tilt the game, and it’s working — 86%
of President Obama’s judicial nominees have
worked as a corporate attorney, a prosecutor, or both, while less than 4% have
worked as lawyers at public interest organizations. Professional diversity is
missing from the federal bench — and justice suffers
for it.

But even disqualifying judges based on their
professional background isn’t enough for Donald Trump.

Trump tells everyone who will listen that he’s a great
businessman, but let’s be honest — he’s
just a guy who inherited a fortune and kept it rolling along by cheating
people.

When that’s your business model, sooner or later you’re
probably going to run into legal trouble. And Donald Trump has run into a lot
of legal trouble. Ah, yes — Trump University,
which his own former employees refer to as one
big “fraudulent scheme.”

Many of the Trump University victims ended up deep in
debt — sometimestens
of thousands of dollars with no way to pay it off. Trump’s employee playbook said to look
for people with financial problems — because they make
good targets. He even encouraged his salesforce to go
after elderly people who were
trying to create
a little financial security.

I taught law for more than 30 years. Ask any lawyer in
America and they’ll tell you that sounds like fraud. And that’s exactly what
Donald Trump is being sued for — fraud, and worse, for
targeting the most vulnerable people he could find, lying to them, taking all
their money and leaving them in debt.

Some of those people are fighting back. Because in
America, we have the rule of law — and that means that
no matter how rich you are, no matter how loud you are, no matter how famous
you are, if you break the law, you can be held accountable. Even when your name
is Donald Trump.

But Trump doesn’t think those rules apply to him. So at
a political rally two weeks ago, and almost daily since then, the presumptive
Republican nominee for President of the United States has savagely
attacked Gonzalo Curiel, the
federal judge presiding over his case.

“We are in front of a very hostile
judge,” Trump
said. “Frankly, he should recuse himself. He has given us ruling after
ruling, negative, negative, negative.”

Understand what this is. Trump is criticizing Judge
Curiel for following the law, instead of
bending it to suit the financial interests of one wealthy and oh-so-fragile
defendant.

Trump also whined that he’s being been treated
“unfairly” because “the
judge … happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” And when he got called out, he doubled
down by saying “I’m
building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” He’s personally directed his army of
campaign surrogates to step
up their own public attacks on Judge Curiel. He’s even condemned
federal judges who are Muslim — on the disgusting
theory that Trump’s
own bigotry compromises the judges’
neutrality.

Like all federal judges, Judge Curiel is bound
by the federal code of judicial ethics not
to respond to these attacks. Trump is picking on someone who is ethically bound
not to defend himself — exactly what you’d
expect from a thin-skinned, racist bully.

Judge Curiel can’t respond — but we can. We can
tell his story.

Gonzalo
Curiel was born in Indiana — not
Mexico — to immigrant parents who worked hard their entire lives
and were handed nothing. He went to Indiana University for undergrad and then
for law school.

For thirteen years, he worked as a federal prosecutor in
Southern California, fighting the Mexican drug cartels as a leader of that
region’s narcotics enforcement division. He collaborated with top Mexican
officials to disrupt the culture of corruption between the Mexican government
and the most powerful and deadly cocaine smugglers in North America.

The effort was impressive. On both sides of the border,
money launderers, street gangs, and assassins were arrested and prosecuted.

But that success came at great cost. Witnesses were
killed. Mexican officials were murdered. Judge
Curiel himself was the target of an assassination plotand spent the better
part of a year living officially in hiding, under the protection of U.S.
Marshals.

Later, after his years of service as a prosecutor, Judge
Curiel was appointed to the California state courts by a Republican governor
who calls him an
“American hero.” He was nominated
to the federal bench by a
Democratic president, and confirmed
by a voice vote in the Senate.

That’s what kind of a man Judge Curiel is. What kind of
a man is Donald Trump?

Donald Trump says “Judge
Curiel should be ashamed of himself.”

No, Donald — you should be ashamed of
yourself. Ashamed for using the megaphone of a Presidential campaign to attack
a judge’s character and integrity simply because you think you have some
God-given right to steal people’s money and get away with it. You shame
yourself and you shame this great country.

Donald Trump says “[t]hey
ought to look into Judge Curiel because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total
disgrace.”

No, Donald — what you are doing is a total disgrace.
Race-baiting a judge who spent years defending America from the terror of
murderers and drug traffickers simply because long ago his family came to
America from somewhere else. You, Donald Trump, are a total disgrace.

Judge Curiel is one of countless American patriots who
has spent decades quietly serving his country, sometimes at great risk to his
own life. Donald Trump is a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who has never
risked anything for anyone and serves nobody but himself. And that is just one
of the many reasons why he will never be President of the United States.

And in spite of these shameful attacks, nobody doubts
that Judge Curiel will continue to preside over Trump’s case as a fair and neutral
judge. Because Judge Curiel is a lawyer with integrity — and
that’s
what lawyers with integrity do.

Judge Curiel has survived far worse than Donald Trump.
He has survived actual assassination attempts. He’ll have no problem surviving
Trump’s nasty temper tantrums.

When first asked if he would condemn Trump’s comments
about Judge Curiel, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader,
said, well, gee, you know, “Donald
Trump is certainly a different kind of candidate.” After days of pressure, McConnell
finally said that attacking
the judge is “stupid” and that Trump should “get on script.”

What script is that, exactly? And where do you suppose
Donald Trump got the idea that he can personally attack judges, regardless of
the law, whenever they don’t bend to the whims of billionaires and big
business?

Trump isn’t a different kind of candidate. He’s a Mitch
McConnell kind of candidate. Exactly the kind of candidate you’d expect from a
Republican Party whose “script” for several years has been to execute a
full-scale assault on the integrity of our courts. Blockading judicial
appointments so Donald Trump can fill them. Smearing and intimidating nominees
who do not pledge allegiance to the financial interests of the rich and the
powerful.

Trump is also House Speaker Paul Ryan’s kind of candidate. Paul
Ryan condemned Trump’s campaign for its attacks on Judge Curiel’s integrity.Great.
Where’s Paul Ryan’s condemnation of the blockade, the intimidation, the smears,
and the slime against the integrity of qualified judicial nominees and Judge
Garland?

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell want Donald
Trump to appoint the next generation of judges. They want those
judges to tilt the law to favor big business and billionaires like Trump. They
just want Donald to quit being so vulgar and obvious about it.

Donald Trump chose racism as his weapon, but his aim is
exactly the same as the rest of the Republicans. Pound the courts into
submission to the rich and powerful.

Senator McConnell recently said he’s “pretty calm” about
Donald Trump because “what
protects us in this country against big mistakes being made is the structure,
the Constitution, the institutions.” That
is 100% wrong. Our democracy does not sustain itself. Our Constitution does not
sustain itself. The rule of law does not sustain itself.

There have always been those with money and power who
think the rules shouldn’t apply to them. Those who would pervert our system of
government to serve their own ends. They have tried it before and they are
trying it now. All that is required for the rule of law and our independent
judiciary to collapse is for good people to stand by, and do nothing.

Now is not the time to stand by. Now is the time to
stand up. Now is the time to say no. No. Not here. Not in these United States
of America.

We are not a nation that disqualifies lawyers and judges
from public service because of race — or religion — or
gender — or because they haven’t
spent their entire careers representing the wealthy and the powerful.

We are the nation of John Adams — a
lawyer who defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, and went on
to serve as President of these United States.

We are the nation of Abraham Lincoln — a
lawyer who defended accused killers, and went on to serve as President of these
United States.

We are the nation of Thurgood Marshall — a
lawyer who fought for racial equality, and went on to serve on the Supreme
Court of these United States.

We are the nation of Ruth Bader Ginsberg — a
lawyer who fought for gender equality, and went on to serve on the Supreme
Court of these United States.

That is who we are. And we will not allow a small,
insecure, thin-skinned wannabe tyrant or his allies in the Senate to destroy
the rule of law in the United States of America.

It’s time again to fight — as we have in every
generation — for those four simple words that define the promise of
our legal system. Equal justice under law.

That’s the way you do it. And she just gets better at it.

Headline O’ the Day

by digby

Surprise:

Yeah, I’m going to guess a lot of those Republicans still believe that Ayn Rand was right about the whole parasite thing.  For all we know Ryan was the guy who turned them on to it.  And the rest think poor people are all lazy blacks and browns who refuse to work.

So yeah, this was always going to be a tough sell.

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Playground Bully for president

by digby

Here’s more of awful evidence that Trump is having a pernicious influence on the nation’s kids.  It’s very depressing:

Tracey Iglehart, a teacher at Rosa Parks elementary school in Berkeley, California, did not expect Donald Trump to show up on the playground.

This was, after all, a school named after a civil rights hero in a progressive California enclave, with a melting pot of white, African American, Latino and Muslim students.

That has not stopped some children from channeling and adopting the Republican presumptive nominee’s xenophobic rhetoric in playground spats and classroom exchanges.

“They said things like ‘you’ll get deported’, ‘you weren’t born here’ and ‘you were born in a Taco Bell’,” said Iglehart, 49. “They may not know exactly what it means, but they know it’s powerful language.”

Hearing it in Rosa Parks elementary, of all places, came as a shock. “Berkeley is not an area where there are Trump supporters. This is not the land of Trump.”

Yet the spirit of the GOP presidential candidate has surfaced here and, according to one study, in schools across the country.

An online survey of approximately 2,000 K-12 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center found toxic political rhetoric invading elementary, middle and high schools, emboldening children to make racist taunts that leave others bewildered and anxious.

“We mapped it out. There was no state or region that jumped out. It was everywhere,” said Maureen Costello, the study’s author. “Marginalized students are feeling very frightened, especially Muslims and Mexicans. Many teachers use the word terrified.” The children who did the taunting were echoing Trump’s rhetoric, she said. “Bad behavior has been normalized. They think it’s OK.”

More than two-thirds of the teachers in the survey reported that students – especially immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims – have expressed worries about what might happen to them or their families after the November election. More than half reported an increase in uncivil political discourse, and more than a third observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment.

They reported kids bringing their birth certificates to school because they’re afraid of being hauled off an deported because kids are taunting them. One kindergartner believes he’s going to be deported and trapped behind a wall.

At a basketball game in Iowa, students from Dallas Center-Grimes chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump” at Perry high school, which is nearly half Latino.

“It’s a hate word,” said Joe Enriquez Henry, Iowa chapter president of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “Those in the white community with a racist slant are now jumping on the bandwagon using the name Trump and the phrase Make America Great Again to tell people of color, especially Latinos, you are not welcome here.”

Salvatore Callesano, a graduate student in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Texas, said such rhetoric transmitted coded messages. “The phrase ‘build the wall’ indexes Donald Trump and his ideology. It’s been repeated so much it has been picked up by the kids. It’s a covert way of being anti-Hispanic. The people who use it are highly aware of what it means.”

If you watch a Trump rally you see a ritual of them chanting “build that wall!” and when Trump says “who’s going to pay for it?” they all yell back “Mexico!” Every rally. They are rapturous.

This observation strikes me as very astute:

A father of four children in the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood in west Los Angeles, was taken aback when he accompanied his 12-year-old son on a camping trip with scouts. “They were all supporting Trump, saying he was great, repeating his lines.” The father, who asked not to be named, inferred rebellion, not racism. “I think they did it to annoy the parents.”

Costello, the survey author, said Trump seemed a perfect candidate for seventh-grade boys. “They like his loudness, rudeness and brashness..

Phillip Carter, who researches sociolinguistics at Florida International University, and has a chapter on Trump and Hillary Clinton in a forthcoming book, said Trump’s iconoclasm, New York accent and inappropriate language could seem rebellious to white, monolingual boys.

I think that describes the average Trump voter quite well. They have the temperament of seventh-grade boys.

And yes, the kids are getting it from their parents. Millions of them.

According to Carter, the children who repeat the real estate mogul’s taunts tend to be from families and communities that share and mediate such sentiments. “Trumpism is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a much larger problem beneath.”

This is just creepy. And it’s going to get worse. President Obama is going to be on the trail and yet another level of disgusting rhetoric is going to bubble up.

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..a federal appeals court said Thursday people do not have a right to carry concealed weapons in public under the 2nd Amendment.

An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said law enforcement officials can require applicants for a concealed weapons permit to show they are in immediate danger or have another good reason for a permit beyond self-defense.  — AP Mercury News 

I’m sure this ruling will bring out gun carrying commenters from around the country to demand to know, “What part of SHALL NOT INFRINGE don’t these people understand!”  Followed by how happy they are they don’t live in California. (I’m happy you don’t live here too.)

Walk for Gun Safety at Golden Gate Bridge  #WearOrange Moms Demand Action  – CA  photo by Spocko

“..there was no evidence that crime went up in counties such as Fresno and Sacramento that had more permissive “good cause” standards. — Paul Clement, an attorney for the residents.

The Supreme Court has ruled that individuals have a right to possess a weapon in their home. Thursday’s ruling centers on the next frontier in the gun-control debate.
“Probably the most important battleground of the Second Amendment has been whether there is a right to carry guns outside the home, and if there is, to what extent can states and localities regulate that right,” said Jonathan E. Lowy, the director of the Legal Action Project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Deadbeat Donald

by digby

Oh my:

During the Atlantic City casino boom in the 1980s, Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr. landed a $400,000 contract to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and other cabinets at Harrah’s at Trump Plaza.

The family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward’s father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort’s builder.

Edward’s son, Paul, who was the firm’s accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. “That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company… which has been around since my grandfather,” he said.

Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.

At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.

In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.

Not that his voters will care. They have been primed to believe that the “liberal media” is lying and the system is rigged so he’ll say it’s all bullshit and most of them will believe it.

But it’s important to keep this drumbeat up anyway. His only claim to the office is that he’s an exceptional businessman. The truth is that he sucks at it and only made money because he inherited a boatload from his daddy who co-signed every loan until he was 40. His talent is being a celebrity, period. He has leveraged his celebrity into a “brand” which he licenses to every cheap con-artist who pitches him.

Donald Trump is a phony in every way and all of this has to be exposed over and over again to ensure that nobody but his deluded cult followers don’t know about it.

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All hands on deck

by digby

It’s time:

“I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

It’s a helluva endorsement.

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About that Supreme Court vacancy

by digby

This case is going to wind up there:

Americans have no Second Amendment right to carry concealed guns in public, a federal appeals court in California ruled on Thursday in a significant blow to gun-rights activists and gun owners in a large swath of the Western U.S.

The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 7-4 ruling, upheld a California law requiring residents to show “good cause” for carrying a concealed handgun.

Under the California law, personal safety alone doesn’t qualify as good cause, which is defined by county sheriffs. The plaintiffs, gun owners seeking licenses to carry their weapons concealed, said the policies in San Diego and Yolo counties where they live violated their Second Amendment rights.

“We hold that the Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public,” wrote Judge William A. Fletcher, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, for the seven-judge majority.

Lawmakers are free to enact “any prohibition or restriction a state may choose” on the carrying of concealed guns, Judge Fletcher said.

I have noted that a lot of liberals don’t care as much about guns as I do. But nonetheless, it should be legal for cities and states to make it illegal to walk around with a gun hidden under your coat. This case will go all the way to the top eventually and it would be nice if there was a majority that would uphold it. This gun violence epidemic is one of the most important problems this country faces and it cannot be solved by everyone having more guns.

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The Great Whitebread Hope is back!

by digby

The Republicans are in full panic mode. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

It seems odd that after an overwhelming litany of crude, demagogic insults over the course of the last year Republicans have suddenly recognized that Donald Trump is a racist whose reckless rhetoric is likely to destroy the Republican Party. Evidently, the “Mexicans are rapists” comments in his announcement speech a year ago didn’t ring any alarm bells. But better late than never. Party leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan both decided they needed to denounce his blatant bigotry although they made clear it wasn’t a deal breaker. Better an unfit, racist, authoritarian megalomaniac than a Democrat in the White House. You go to Hades with the devil you have not the devil you wished you have.

There have been a few prominent Republicans who have publicly withdrawn their endorsements.  Senator Mark Kirk said he could no longer support Trump because he doesn’t have the temperament to be commander in chief. This has also been obvious for the last 12 months but again, it’s to his credit that he’s belatedly decided that it’s a disqualifying characteristic. He’s decided to write-in the name of General David Petraeus which he may want to re-think considering the news this week that Petraeus was not only found guilty of “mishandling” classified information by sharing it with his mistress, he also shared Top Secret information with reporters. It’s really tough finding a decent Republican to vote for these days.

Other GOP officials  are in various stages of panic and Trump tried to calm with his stiff, unconvincing speech on Tuesday night without much success. But he was unrepentant and unimpressed. Before he gave the speech  he let the New York Times know exactly what he thinks of his fellow Republicans:

Politicians are so politically correct anymore, they can’t breathe,”Mr. Trump said in an interview Tuesday afternoon as fellow Republicans forcefully protested his ethnically charged criticism of a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against the defunct Trump University. 

“The people are tired of this political correctness when things are said that are totally fine,” he said during an interlude in a day of exceptional stress in the Trump campaign. “It is out of control. It is gridlock with their mouths.”

All of this has led to a new sense of urgency in the #NeverTrump camp, even though the pipe dream of knocking Trump off his recently acquired throne is as unlikely as ever. Joe Scarborough, formerly a huge Trump booster was nearly hysterical on Wednesday, saying:

“Donald, guess what, I’m not going to support you until you get your act together. You’re acting like bush-league loser, you’re acting like a racist, you’re acting like a bigot … Until you…prove to me you’re not a bigot and you don’t take my party down in the ditch, you don’t have my endorsement. 

It is in your hands on whether you are going to prove to the Republican Party and me personally that you’re not a bigot. Don’t use Hillary Clinton as an excuse, as your blank check to say racist things about [a judge] born in Indiana. No, Donald, you don’t get to play it that way.”

Radio and TV pundit Hugh Hewitt was one of the first right wing media personalities to expose Trump’s gross lack of knowledge about world affairs when he asked him about the Iranian Quds force on his radio show and Trump clearly had no clue what he was talking about.  Nonetheless Hewitt promised to support Trump if he became the nominee and has stuck with him as he demonstrated his unfitness for office over and over again. But the racist attack on the federal judge has put him over the edge and he is now suggesting that the GOP must do something drastic: change the rules of the convention and give the nomination to someone else. He was so overwrought he exploded with crazed mixed metaphors on Wednesday saying, “it’s like ignoring stage-four cancer. You can’t do it, you gotta go attack it. And right now the Republican Party is facing—the plane is headed towards the mountain after the last 72 hours.”

Trump supporters were not amused:

— Dan Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) June 8, 2016

But if don’t ban Hewitt from the convention and take his suggestion seriously, which some people seem to be doing, who could possibly step in?  Paul Ryan, everybody’s favorite blue eyed dream boat has said he will not do it. And as noted, he doesn’t believe Trump’s racism — or any other of his pathological personality characteristics — are deal breakers in the first place so he’s out.  Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard wrote an open letter to Mitt Romney to run as an Independent, but there’s little reason to think he’d go along with seizing the Republican nomination from Trump at the convention and even less reason to think the delegates would want him to.

But there is one possibility that has the political world aflutter: the Great Whitebread Hope himself, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. There was a time when he was lauded as the most formidable Republican in the land, a Harley driving, union  busting, tax cutting superman destined for the White House. Then he ran for president and showed himself to be a dud of epic proportions. He proved himself to be uninformed, boring and amateurish and ran through his millions in big donor money in record time. By the end of September he was gone, the first of the “Deep Bench” superstars to drop out. 

Apparently, he’s tanned, rested and ready to rumble. After months of tweeting his lunch orders and informing his followers he got a haircut, he’s back in the game:

Apparently “Fighting for Us” means those who gave to Clinton Foundation or who paid BIG speaking fees to Clintons. pic.twitter.com/d0hsMBH4Wr

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) June 8, 2016

And this comment to a Wisconsin radio station sent a frisson of anticipation through the Never Trumpers:

He’s not yet the nominee. Officially that won’t happen until the middle of July, and so for me that’s kind of the timeframe. In particular I want to make sure that he renounces what he says, at least in regards to this judge.

Or else what?

The problem with this scenario is that these elite Republicans are failing to take something very important into consideration: their voters. It’s certainly possible that they are in danger of losing some faction of the party over Trump’s repugnant behavior. But there is little reason to believe it’s a majority. This week, millions of them went to the polls and voted for him even though he had already won the nomination. Granted, he’s not the electoral juggernaut he pretends to be, but he is the legitimate winner of the Republican nomination and his voters will not take kindly to having their wishes ignored.

Moreover, the Republican rank and file doesn’t agree with the premise that Trump is out of bounds in the first place. This YouGov survey done after Trump made his bigoted comments about the judge show 81% of Democrats and 44% of independents believe they were racist. But only only 22% of Republicans agree. In other words, 78% of GOP voters are just fine with Trump and seem to agree with his statement that  “people are tired of this political correctness when things are said that are totally fine.”

Scott Walker’s ill-fated campaign fizzled so early in the primary process the he never faced the voters. His performances in the debates were rated dead last in every poll. The fact that Republicans are contemplating pulling him out of mothballs in the vain hope that he, of all people, will be able to vanquish Trump at the convention is so desperate you almost have to feel sorry for them. But then you remember that they created this monster and deserve what they’re getting. Let’s just hope they don’t somehow manage to take the rest of us down with them.

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Donald the mind-killer
by Tom Sullivan

My favorite thing about this ad is Bob Corker's look after he gets the question. He's so shook. https://t.co/3FO1VKOcK0— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) June 6, 2016

“Fear is the mind-killer” is familiar to legions of Dune fans. Jamelle Bouie’s post at Slate suggests Republicans might ought to memorize the Litany Against Fear. Watching them at once condemn and yet pledge themselves to vote for Donald Trump is, if not mind-killing, at least mind-numbing:

Republicans, from the top of the ticket to the bottom of the ballot, are caught in a bind. If they don’t say anything to counter or condemn Trump’s rhetoric, they are complicit in the Trump candidacy. If they say anything, they become fodder for Democratic efforts against their party. The only alternative is to try to walk the line of criticism without disavowal. But as we see with Paul Ryan—who was savaged by both mainstream and conservative press for looking past Trump’s racism even as he bemoans it—that’s almost impossible.

In the same way that fear of a third-party candidacy drove Republicans to craft and embrace a “pledge” that did nothing but tie their fortunes to Trump, fear—of backlash from pro-Trump Republican voters, of attacks from Democrats, of opprobrium and contempt from everyone else—is driving them to hedge and hesitate in the most craven way possible. Fear is the mind-killer, and Trump has scrambled their ability to think clearly about their dilemma.

Lay down with dogs, the saying goes. Republicans have made their bed with Trump and now face the inevitable. For comedians, Trump jokes write themselves, but the most devastating attacks coming against Trump are no joke. Abigail Tracy observes at Vanity Fair:

Using Trump’s own words against him has already emerged as a theme in Clinton’s campaign and she is doubling down on it. On Monday, a Clinton super-PAC, Priorities USA, also released an ad that criticizes Trump for mocking Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times journalist who suffers from a condition that limits the movement of his limbs, during a speech in November of last year. Roughly 20 seconds into the emotional spot, parents of a young girl, Grace, who was born with spina bifida condemn the New York billionaire for his derisive and widely criticized impression of Kovaleski. “When I saw Donald Trump mock a disabled person, I was just shocked,” Grace’s mother, Lauren Glaros, says. “The children at Grace’s school all know never to mock her, and so for an adult to mock someone with a disability is shocking.” Politico reports that the ad, which is part of a $20 million campaign and will run for six weeks in seven states, reflects the findings of a number of focus groups. According to the outlet, Trump’s taunts provoked some of the highest negative ratings responses toward the presumptive G.O.P. nominee.

Trumps attacks against a federal judge born in Indiana of Mexican heritage are taking a toll on Republicans (or is that troll?).

Weakness is the cardinal sin on the right and the ultimate conservative insult. They fear it. It is why you can count on Republicans always to double down and never back down. “I will never, ever back down,” Trump said in his speech on Tuesday. Tracy writes, “Trump—brash and outspoken egomaniac that he is—can’t resist responding to any fight.” The way the Clinton campaign can set the terms of the fall campaign is to play a tune to which Trump cannot resist dancing. Attack him as weak and he will walk right into it. Every time. Trump cannot help himself. And in trying to refute it, he will only confirm it.

Get Ready

by digby

Heh:

This is what Democrats united to beat @realDonaldTrump look like. Get ready, Donald – we’re coming. pic.twitter.com/p8dFtvr9NV

— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) June 5, 2016

He thought he’s faced his toughest opponents already.

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