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Month: June 2016

Reboot delayed again

Reboot delayed again

by digby

“She made up her heritage, which I think is racist. I think she’s a racist, actually because what she did was very racist,” Trump said in a phone interview.  

She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud,” Trump said. 

In the phone interview Trump re-upped his “Pocohontas” nickname for the Massachusetts senator, which some in the party have cautioned him against using in his attempt to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate. 

“I do what I do. I’ve listened to this for a long time – at the beginning of the primaries, ‘ he should do this, he should do that.” I won in a landslide,” Trump said.

The real estate mogul added that he hopes Clinton chooses Warren as her running mate, saying he would “speak very openly about her if she is.”

Tony Soprano threats again…

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Amateur GOP ratf**king 2016

Amateur GOP ratfucking 2016


by digby
I wrote about the latest pathetic attempt for Salon this morning:
It’s standard operating procedure for political campaigns to try to poach votes from their rivals by appropriating their rhetoric and repurposing it to sell their own philosophy. Ronald Reagan springs to mind as one of the best at that game, subtly appropriating liberal icons to use for his own purposes and driving a wedge between the Democratic rank and file and their party. He would blatantly steal from FDR, for instance, using phrases like “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny” for his own right wing purposes. In later years, the Republicans tried to appropriate the martyred Democratic president John F Kennedy as a fellow cold war hawk leading to the famous vice presidential debate exchange between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentson who zinged the callow Quayle with the famous line, “I knew John Kennedy, John Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you sir are no John Kennedy.”

Back in the 90s, the Republicans created a scandalmongering cottage industry mostly designed to titillate a gullible press corps but the assumption was always that they were one scandal away from the Democratic rank and file turning on President Clinton and voting him out of office after the first term or, when that didn’t work, help push him out of office before the second one was done. This led to a strategy to throw the kitchen sink at the White House to create what they called “Clinton fatigue” the idea that voters would get so sick of scandals that they didn’t care anymore if they were true and just wanted them to end. It was not very successful. The more they pushed, and the more hysterical the media became, the more the people dug in their heels. The week they voted to impeach him Gallup reported:

Despite the fact that he is only the second President in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, President Bill Clinton received a 73% job approval rating from the American public this past weekend, the highest rating of his administration, and one of the higher job approval ratings given any president since the mid-1960s.

On the day he left office he had a 66% job approval rating.

The point of this is that while it often seems like a good idea for the opposing party to try to sow discord between a candidate and his or her base (or take advantage of discord that already exists) it doesn’t always work out the way they plan it. Indeed, Democrats have become very good at seeing when they’re being manipulated by ever-so-clever Republican operatives. But with a Clinton back on the scene, it appears that like moths to a flame, Republicans just can’t help themselves.

Last May Ashley Parker and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the GOP was executing an elaborate social media strategy to make the case that Hillary Clinton was selling out the left wing of the Democratic Party. They sent out tweets and Facebook posts which were then shared by thousands of Democrats in their circles without realizing they were generated by Republicans. The program was run by the right wing PAC America Rising’s Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager who took the lesson from his own experience that the best way to weaken a general election candidate was for their own base to attack relentlessly during the primaries, as had happened to Romney in 2012. He was not alone. Karl Rove’s group American Crossroads created digital content with the same intention: to portray Clinton as corrupt and untrustworthy and aim it from her left:

Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, said the goal was simply to erode what should be her natural core of support. 

“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.

Both groups used sophisticated micro-targeting:

“You might start looking at union households. You might start looking at Bernie Sanders’s core of support,” Mr. Moffatt said, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Mr. Law said members of his staff at American Crossroads had easily been able to inhabit the liberal role, despite being fervent Republicans. “We wear these little bracelets — W.W.E.W.D.,” Mr. Law joked, referring to “What would Elizabeth Warren do?”

At that point they had no idea how the Sanders campaign would catch fire on its own or that they might have been better off using some of that clever technological know-how to tend to their own back yard. If they had kept their eyes on the prize and tried some of these tricks on Donald Trump they might have spared themselves the embarrassment they’re facing today.

But they don’t seem to have learned their lesson, at least the RNC hasn’t. As my colleague Sean Illing reported yesterday, a strategy memo has leaked in which it’s revealed that the GOP is planning to attack Clinton’s choice for Vice President, you guessed it, “from the left.” They plan to “drive wedges” between the top contenders and “traditional left-wing constituencies” and frame the choice as “an insult to the large deep base of Sanders supporters.” Unfortunately, they’re a little bit late. As Illing pointed out, Sanders supporters are already moving to Clinton in large numbers if nothing else out of terror at the prospect of the GOP nominee.

You would have thought that Clinton surviving these sorts of attacks 20 years ago and coming out more popular than ever would have shown them that this strategy just doesn’t work very well. Perhaps if they spent more time working with their own extremist base and less time trying to manipulate the Democratic base they might have a little bit more luck actually winning the presidency.

To Veep or not to Veep? by @BloggersRUs

To Veep or not to Veep?
by Tom Sullivan

The idea of Sen. Elizabeth Warren joining Hillary Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket leaves me uneasy, as much as I would enjoy the show. Warren brings real progressive chops to a presidential campaign that could use it with the electorate in an anti-establishment mood. Plus, she brings a lot of her own star power. Warren proved yesterday in Ohio she can sure wow a crowd as Clinton cannot. And brother, can she get under Donald Trump’s skin. From the Guardian:

Warren laid into the presumptive GOP nominee, characterizing him with a now familiar line as a “small, insecure money-grubber who fights for no one but himself”.

“I’m here today because I’m with her,” she said, as Clinton stood by her side. “She doesn’t whine. She doesn’t run to Twitter to call her opponents fat pigs or dummies.

“Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States because she knows what it takes to beat a thin-skinned bully who is driven by greed and hate.”

And the crowd goes wild.

But Warren can play attack dog for Clinton without leaving the Senate, where since arriving she has been a thorn in the side of all the right people. She’s proven she doesn’t need a VP slot to have a platform. Besides the risk of a Clinton–Warren ticket becoming effectively a Warren-Clinton ticket, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has reservations similar to mine:

In Warren’s case, the vice presidency could be valuable if she’s empowered to make crucial bureaucratic and regulatory decisions. It’s not hard to imagine a Vice President Warren who acts as a watchdog within the administration, pushing Clinton to find and hire aggressive regulators and reject Wall Street–sourced appointees. But this would be an unusual amount of freedom for a vice president not named Dick Cheney. Given the extent to which the modern vice president is something like a chief advocate—responsible for pressing, negotiating, and enforcing the president’s agenda—Warren could find herself bound to Clinton’s agenda and priorities, even when she disagrees, leaving her with less autonomy than she had in the Senate. In which case, progressives will have lost one of their most able and vocal champions with little in return.

There’s real symbolism in “Warren for vice president,” but it may hurt progressives in the long term to have her in a presidential administration versus in the Senate, where her advocacy has long and impressive reach. (The same, incidentally, goes for another vice presidential contender, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a strong progressive choice who would be replaced by a Republican if he left the Senate.)

Those were some strong signals yesterday in Cincinnati that Warren has the inside track. Whether Clinton has the nerve to form a two-women tag team against the Misogynist from Manhattan remains to be seen. But it won’t hurt my feelings if Elizabeth Warren stays right where she is.

The conservative containment strategy isn’t working

The conservative containment strategy isn’t working

by digby

This piece by Brian Beutler on how some conservatives who oppose Trump have shown that they still haven’t learned the lesson by their Brexit reaction is very insightful:

Most conservative and liberal American elites here are alarmed by both the success of the Leave campaign and by Trump’s victory in the Republican presidential primary. American nativists, along with a subset of leftist radicals, support the Brexit along with domestic political threats to the established order.

The outliers are conservative elites who profess to oppose Trump’s candidacy, but who nevertheless celebrate or romanticize triumphant Trumpian forces in the United Kingdom.

It’s obviously not racist, per se, to support the notion of Britain exiting the E.U. But the elite right’s winking alliance with the bigoted faction of British voters that pushed Leave past 50 percent represents a swift return to form for elite American conservatives.
[…]
To the extent that these conservatives acknowledge the racial aspect of right-wing populism at all, it’s to intimate that progressives ought to dial back their cosmopolitanism–their hospitality to refugees, their more general openness to immigration–as ransom to bigots.

For Brexit foes preoccupied with the fact that forces of reaction and xenophobia carried the day in the U.K., New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested their own unwillingness to accommodate the reactionaries and xenophobes may explain their defeat…
[…]
When data show that support among Britons for Brexiting isn’t correlated with material losses associated with immigration—and where anti-immigrant sentiments long predate the migration explosion associated with EU liberalization—this counsel of prudence reads more like extortion. It amounts to setting forth conservative policy as the only way to keep truly dark forces at bay. Or, perhaps less generously, giving quarter to indefensible prejudices out of political expedience. Nice pluralistic society you’ve built there—hate to see anything happen to it.

And frankly, on some level, I have to assume that these people aren’t quite as taken with pluralism themselves as they are currently pretending. You have to wonder is Trump weren’t such a clownish figure, so obviously in over his head if a lot of them wouldn’t have jumped eagerly on his bandwagon.

I’ve always felt that the chest beating over Trump’s horrifying extremism seemed a bit weird coming from the kind of people who would call a Supreme Court justice a “goat fucking child molester.” But even if one assumes Trump truly appalls them with his calls for a wall and deportations and banning of immigrants on the basis of religion, Beutler is right that catering to extremists hasn’t really worked out very well to keep their destructive impulses in check has it? Maybe it’s time to consider an alternative strategy.

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From the party that brought you “you lie!”

From the party that brought you “you lie!”

by digby

… during the State of the Union, comes Representative Pete Sessions calling for the smelling salts over the House sit-in. He believes the Democrats who sat in should be investigated for breaking the rules.

When the House went into recess Wednesday night and live camera feeds were cut, Democratic House members used Periscope and Facebook Live to continue giving the public look at their spontaneous protest.

“They should not have used that nor would we allow a bunch of people at a court room to take advantage of a courtroom,” Sessions said. “There are places that business is done where decorum is utilized and where we respect each other.”

Yes there are such places. But the House hasn’t been one of them since they decided to obsess over fellatio and semen stains for months on end nearly 20 years ago, turning the words “house decorum” into an oxymoron.

But hey, go for it. It’s always fun to see swashbuckling, gun slinging, anti-PC dudes clutching their pearls over decorum.

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Just don’t call it tyranny. #Trumpsexecutiveorders

Just don’t call it tyranny

by digby

Don’t look now but Trump is all for executive orders:

Trump has already promised to be as aggressive as Obama on executive orders on a wide range of issues. Early in his campaign, for instance, he vowed to use the power of the pen to give all cop killers the death penalty. More recently, in his response to the shooting death of 49 people inside an Orlando gay club this month, he pledged to use executive power to implement one of his signature proposals: A temporary ban on Muslim immigration (even though the shooter was born in New York).

“The immigration laws of the United States give the president powers to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons,” Trump said June 16, two days after the shooting. “I will use this power to protect the American people.”

Check out a few of his other proposals:

• Tighten regulations on money-transfer companies: The cornerstone of Trump’s candidacy has been a promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. While Congress approves spending for construction projects, Trump says he can force Mexico to pay for it by taking control of an estimated $26 billion that is wired to Mexico from the U.S. every year.

Trump has said he would halt these remittances “on day one” by rewriting banking rules to expand the federal regulations on companies like Western Union and PayPal. He’d then add a new rule to block undocumented immigrants from wiring money outside the borders.

• Cancel visas and increasing visa fees: Trump says he could increase his leverage on Mexico’s leaders by making it harder for their people to live and work in the U.S. The country accounted for about 14 percent of the 10.9 million visas issues by the U.S. in 2015, according to State Department data. Only Chinese visitors, who received one of every four U.S. visas last year, took more. Trump’s administration would have broad discretion in choosing who to give visas, and how much to charge, said John Sandweg, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

• Increase wages for certain foreign workers, and require companies to hire Americans first: Foreign workers hired for high-skilled jobs, like software engineering and research, must be paid a prevailing industry wage, as determined by a Labor Department database. Trump says requiring higher wages for those who receive H1-B visas will deter companies from hiring foreign workers. U.S. companies want more of these visas, not fewer, but it’s something President Trump could do with the rule-making process, Sandweg said. Similarly, Trump could change rules to try to force companies to search for new hires first from the country’s pool of unemployed workers before turning to overseas labor.

• Mandatory deportation for all undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and detentions for those caught at the border: Like Obama and Bush before him, the Trump administration would set parameters on how to focus the deportation budget. Obama has focused resources on violent criminals, but Trump could undo that to go after those with traffic offenses.

• Stop defending NATO allies: Trump used his foreign policy address on April 27 to echo concerns shared by many U.S. officials that most of the 28 nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, as required by the agreement. “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense—and, if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves,” Trump said. As commander-in-chief, Trump could take that unprecedented step, foreign policy experts said.
“He would risk blowing up the entire alliance over what could be an exchange rate or accounting issue,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

• Cancel the Paris climate accord and stop paying U.S. tax dollars into UN global warming programs: During a May 26 speech in North Dakota, Trump said he would yank U.S. support from the Paris agreement to slash carbon dioxide emissions that 195 nations endorsed last December. There isn’t much Trump could do to kill the accord itself. The deal isn’t a treaty, and it doesn’t require Senate ratification. Instead, it goes into force automatically when at least 55 parties, accounting for 55 percent of global emissions, have ratified the pact. Still, under Trump, the U.S. could sit out future United Nations negotiations designed to deepen carbon cuts over time. And because individual country commitments are voluntary, Trump could easily walk away from the U.S. pledges at the cost of alienating other world leaders.

• Scrap “job-destroying” energy regulations: Trump singled out Obama’s new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — and the “waters of the U.S.” rule that defines what waterways are under the government’s jurisdiction. He would also rescind “any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interest.”

Also:
• Approve the Keystone XL pipeline
• Reverse moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands
• Declare China a currency manipulator
• Bolster the U.S. military presence in the East and South China Seas: Increasing troop levels here will help strengthen America’s ability to negotiate with the Chinese, Trump says. Obama’s administration sent about 300 additional troops with combat aircraft and helicopters into the area earlier this year in response to a border dispute between China and the Philippines. Trump has not said how many more troops he’d like in the region.

That’s not a comprehenisve list. But I especially like the last one. For those who actually believe that Trump’s nationalism is confined to trade, they should probably think again. Many a trade war has erupted into a shooting war — and Trump talks just as much about being “respected” as he does about commerce. He’s itching for a war, don’t think he isn’t. And his preference would be a big one. Because he has very big hands.

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Big day for the Supremes: a little common sense on guns and reproductive rights

Big day for the Supremes

by digby

A couple of important cases came down, the most far-reaching being the Whole Women’s Health vs Hellerstedt decision which held that the state of Texas did indeed place an undue burden on women by making doctors and clinics go through  inane hoops transparently designed to make it impossible for them to offer abortion services to their patients. It will be a slow walk back in many states that have passed these ridiculous laws but it’s a start. The ruling puts teeth into the concept of “undue burden” for the first time in a quarter century. Ian Millhiser at Think Progress wrote:

Whole Woman’s Health leaves the right to an abortion on much stronger footing than it stood on before this decision was handed down. It’s difficult to exaggerate just how awesomely anti-abortion advocates erred in urging Texas to pass HB 2 in the first place. This law was supposed to provide those advocates with a vehicle to drain what life remains in Roe v. Wade. Instead, reproductive freedom is stronger today than it has been at any point in nearly a decade.

Say hallalujah! 

“SCOTUS’s decision is a victory for women in Texas and across America. Safe abortion should be a right—not just on paper, but in reality,” Clinton wrote. “This fight isn’t over: The next president has to protect women’s health. Women won’t be ‘punished’ for exercising their basic rights.” 

President Obama released a statement saying he was pleased with the court’s decision and that his administration remains committed to protecting women’s health. 

“As the brief filed by the Solicitor General makes clear and as the Court affirmed today, these restrictions harm women’s health and place an unconstitutional obstacle in the path of a woman’s reproductive freedom,” Obama said.

If we can keep the Republicans out of the White House long enough to ensure that there’s a liberal majority on the court going forward, we might see some progress.

And there was another case decided today that seems pretty important considering current political trends:

At-issue in Voisine v. United States is a technical question of whether two men with convictions for “reckless” domestic assault fall under a federal law prohibiting people convicted of a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” from possessing a firearm. The law prohibiting domestic abusers from possessing firearms wasn’t the question under discussion — instead, the question was how far that law reached over certain states’ differing domestic assault laws.

Justice Thomas, however, was very concerned in arguments about the broader law that domestic abusers at large can’t have guns — breaking 10 years of silence on the Court to complain at arguments in February.

“Give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right,” he asked, later suggesting that the particular domestic abusers in this case shouldn’t lose their ability to carry guns because they’ve never actually “use[d] a weapon against a family member.”

His dissent in the case upholding the law is a real doozy. It seems he really can’t stand the idea of domestic abusers losing their “right” to have deadly weapons. Even in the face of this:

Most mass shootings (defined as a shooting with four or more casualties), however, take place outside the headlines. They’re private disputes, between family members and partners, often with a clear track record of violence and assault escalating to a deadly incident.

More than half of mass shootings involve a family member or intimate partner, according five years of data compiled by The Huffington Post. Of those, 81 percent of the victims are women and children. Victims of domestic violence are 12 times more likely to be murdered when a gun is involved. According to the government attorney on Voisine vs. United States, “individuals who have previously…­­ battered their spouses, pose up to a six­fold greater risk of killing, by a gun, their family member.”

The common thread linking many of America’s deadliest crimes is domestic violence, hence the federal law. Yet even when abusers are convicted of misdemeanor crimes for domestic violence — which don’t cover non-married partners who don’t live together or extended family members — and then fall under the Federal statue, implementation is difficult: If an abuser already has a gun, police have to know it — which is made difficult by the fact that not every state has a gun registry or gun sale database. And, without universal background checks, it’s very possible for those with domestic violence restraining orders to get guns even when legally prohibited.

America has a lot of problems with guns. Lack of access for domestic abusers is not one of them.

The Supreme Court took a common sense approach to guns today. It’s a very rare person who “needs” a gun. Maybe if you’re out in the Alaskan wilds and you need to protect yourself from bears, you do, but other than that, you can do without quite easily. So, if you are convicted of a misdemeanor for threatening or inflicting violence on a family member you don’t get to have a gun to shoot them with the next time things get out of hand. That seems like common sense to me.

Maybe some day we can come at it from the other angle and make it impossible for anyone to use semi-automatic weapons and really cut down on the mass shooting fatalities. But for now, this is a step in the right direction.

By the way, many people opposed to this are all for taking away a convicted felon’s right to vote, no problem, even though one person’s vote never killed anyone. Priorities …

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Not Guh Happen #DumpTrumpGoingNowhere

Not Guh Happen

by digby

Many Republicans have buyers remorse on Trump but it doesn’t look as if enough of them are going to the convention to stage a coup and install someone else:

Republicans looking to dump Donald Trump at next month’s convention have passion, energy and a fierce sense that their party will suffer unless Trump is unseated. What they appear to lack, however, are the votes to make it happen.

POLITICO reached out to all 112 members of the committee that will write the rules of the national GOP convention. This is the panel that anti-Trump activists hope to jam a proposal through to free convention delegates to spurn Trump and select another candidate instead.

What emerged from the survey, though, is a portrait of a committee with little interest in the dump Trump crowd. In fact, most members may be eager to stop them.

“I support DJT 100%,” said Alabama rules committee member Laura Payne in an email. “I ran to support … Trump & to represent the voters of Alabama. It may or may not be an attempt, but the voters will prevail.”

“Trying to change the rules in mid-game because you don’t like the outcome is tantamount to saying you are going to take your ball and go home because you are losing,” said Christine Serrano-Glassner, a Rules Committee delegate from New Jersey. “I will be supporting our Nominee, Donald J. Trump.”

It was a common sentiment. Among the 32 committee members who responded, 25 said they would fight efforts to stop Trump’s nomination. . Another 33 members of the panel have been previously on record as endorsing Trump or rejecting efforts to rip the nomination away from him at the convention.

I doubt that doing this would go over very well among voters. They have this little thing about wanting to be the ones to choose their own nominee for president. And in any case, who would be the “consensus” choice to replace him? I don’t think there is anyone. (If people think Paul Ryan is popular among the base they’re not paying attention.)

But you certainly can’t blame some people for trying. Look at what they’ve got.

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Trump’s God laundering opportunists

Trump’s God laundering opportunists

by digby

Did you know that Trump has been born again? I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

I’ve written quite a bit about Donald Trump’s unexpectedly successful wooing of the religious right in this presidential campaign. After all, we’ve been told for more than three decades now that conservative Christians require that America’s political leaders have the highest personal moral standards and adhere to a strict commitment to traditional values so he wasn’t expected to do well with them. Recall the stirring words of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson back in 1998 during the impeachment scandal:

As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no…

We are facing a profound moral crisis — not only because one man has disgraced us — but because our people no longer recognize the nature of evil. And when a nation reaches that state of depravity — judgment is a certainty.

There was Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition and current leader of the Faith and Family:

”Character matters, and the American people are hungry for that message. We care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.”

It’s fair to say that Donald Trump misses the mark on these requirements by a thousand miles. With his three marriages, his history of public bragging about his sexual exploits and the size of his penis in the national media, and his obvious lack of even rudimentary knowledge of the Bible or any religious teachings, Christian or otherwise, he would seem to be the last person that people of strong faith would find acceptable.

But in the primaries, it became clear that he was drawing many of the voters Ted Cruz had counted on being in his corner. It’s not that Cruz didn’t get evangelical voters, it’s that he was only getting the ones who actually attended church. As it turns out this allegedly vast faction of hardcore conservative Christian true believers wasn’t nearly as big as everyone had been led to believe. Indeed, it turns out that for a lot of people “evangelical” is itself just another cultural signifier like those boots and those pork rinds, a tribal designation rather than a serious adherence to Christian teachings.

That’s not to say that this particular group of self-identified evangelicals don’t believe in anything. They undoubtedly go to church from time to time and think of themselves as Christians. It’s just that they don’t actually live their lives in accordance to the Bible as Christian Right leaders have spent years indoctrinating the public to believe. They’re conservatives the way Donald Trump is conservative — authoritarian, intolerant and often cruel.They identify with The Donald because of his willingness to “tell it like it is” as they see it and personal morality is irrelevant.

This opinion piece in the New York Times by J.D. Vance explores just how unfortunate that decoupling with the actual church and its teachings has been for many members of the white working class who are so enamored of Trump and his “anti-PC” campaign. He discusses various studies that show kids who attend church regularly “perform better in school, divorce less as adults and commit fewer crimes.” And they are, on the whole, less prejudiced, exposed as they often are to people of other races and shown empathy and generosity by church leaders’ willingness to help people in need. Evangelicals who don’t actually go to church have lost an important stabilizing, social influence.

And he may have hit upon an important reason why this has happened — “the deinstitutionalization of the faith has occurred alongside its politicization.” He says this is one reason why some of these people may be relating to Trump despite the fact that they have very little in common:

While it’s hard to fault people for voting their conscience, this fusion of religion and politics necessarily forces people to look externally. The sometimes tough love of the Christian faith of my childhood demanded a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism. While faith need not be monolithic — it can motivate both voting behavior and character development — focus matters. A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.

But then the Christian Right has long been a political operation rather than a religious movement, hasn’t it?

This brings us to Trump’s most recent “outreach” to the religious right which took place last week in New York when Trump met with a large group of Christian leaders to set their minds at ease about his candidacy. The big news that came out of that was that Trump bizarrely stated that nobody knows if Hillary Clinton has any religious beliefs at all. (They do, of course. She’s a devout Methodist.) But he also sold himself as someone who would protect “religious liberty”— the latest social conservative buzzword — with his Supreme Court picks which seemed to thrill the assembled church leaders. Some were so excited by this they lost their bearings a little bit. Cortney O’Brien of Townhall interviewed one of the participants:

Pastor Michael Anthony, who is president of the company Godfactor and founder of the National Week of Repentance, says he witnessed a much different Donald Trump at Tuesday’s evangelical meeting in Times Square…“His posture said it all,” Anthony explained. “He sat the whole time and had his hands to his side for the majority of time. I saw a gentler demeanor here…There was a palpable humility in the room that gets me kind of emotional to talk about it. It was really unique.”

It ended, he said, with the entire room on their knees praying for revival for the country.

“In a very calm, quiet way, with his arms folded, he said, ‘you religious leaders,’ he called us, ‘have every right to speak up and express yourselves, and you don’t. The First Amendment protects that right and yet you don’t.’” Anthony said the room knew he was spot-on. “I think God was speaking through him at that moment, to the church, to tell us why are you being silent about the most important thing about your lives?”

Yes, he actually said that God was speaking through Donald Trump.


At the end of the meeting, Trump released a long list of religious right leaders as his “Evangelical advisory committee” including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, a man who has been scathing in his criticism of Trump. (He torturously explained that he would agree to serve Hillary Clinton too because that’s what Jesus would do.)

Ralph Reed has been a political operative since the 80s when he and anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and convicted K-Street felon Jack Abramoff were junior Reagan revolutionaries together so he knows the game. And this was the best he could come up with:

Number one, I know his children. And you don’t raise children who are this phenomenal if you’re a person of bad moral character. Secondly, you don’t accomplish what he has accomplished in New York City and around the world by not judging people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

But he’s all in with Trump. And James Dobson, who wrote that righteous screed about people no longer recognizing the face of evil back in 1998, spoke with the aforementioned Michael Anthony on the radio and casually asserted that Trump has recently been born again:

Dobson: There are a lot of people ministering to him (Trump) personally…He did accept a relationship with Christ. I know the person who led him to Christ. And that’s fairly recent. I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long. I believe he really made a commitment, but he’s a baby Christian.”

That’s very convenient since it means Trump gets a do-over on all that awful behavior of his.

Not everyone is buying it. This evangelical scholar suggests that the real believing evangelicals are being played:

What happened on Tuesday in New York was the theo-political equivalent of money laundering. Dobson and his gang are making Trump clean so that he is worthy of evangelical votes.

So, all those white working class types who identify as evangelical but don’t go to church are being seduced by Trump’s crude nationalism and nativism, largely as result of religious leaders politicizing religion and turning it into a vehicle for their own secular power. Now, after years of lectures about morality and personal rectitude in public life, they’ve sunk so low that they’re actually trying to convince the truly devout weekly church goers that this depraved demagogue is someone they should support.

These people are making the spineless establishment Republicans look like saints by comparison.

Brexit: Do-Over!!! by @BloggersRUs

Brexit: Do-Over!!!
by Tom Sullivan

On Friday, global markets had their biggest daily loss ever. Larger than the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the Black Monday Crash of 1987. There have since been lots of stories of regret among Brexit ‘Leave’ voters, many of whom seem not to have understood what they were voting for.

Having seen what has happened to the Pound and to the value of pensions, they’re calling for a do-over:

LONDON — An online petition calling for a second referendum on Britain’s exit from the European Union surpassed 3 million signatures Sunday, highlighting the tumult sweeping the country in the wake of the shock decision.

The petition calls on the government to implement a rule stating that if the “Remain” or “Leave” camps won less than 60 percent of the vote with less than a 75 percent turnout, “there should be another referendum.”

The referendum has been deeply divisive for the United Kingdom. The “Leave” campaign had racked up 17.4 million votes — compared to 16.1 million backing the status quo — giving “Leave” 51.9 percent of the ballot.

Ironically, the pro-Leave maker of the petition created it weeks ago for another purpose entirely and wants to distance himself from it now that it has
been “hijacked by the remain campaign”:

In addition, the petition may have been manipulated from outside the country. During auditing, 77,000 signatures have been removed:

The request for another referendum on the parliament’s official petitions website should have been signed only by British citizens and UK residents.

However, the petition’s data showed signatories from countries around the world, including Iceland, the Cayman Islands and Tunisia, and in some cases there are more signatures than total population.

Despite Vatican City, a tiny city state, having a total population of just 800, over 39,000 residents of Vatican City appeared to have signed the petition.

Helen Jones, the chair of the petitions committee, said that those signatures discovered to be fake would be “removed” and said such fraud “undermines the process of parliamentary democracy”.

Even so, while the EU is saying hurry up and go already, many among the original “Leave” voters have reconsidered. What a mess:

“The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered,” a choking Cameron said in his resignation speech, which marked the most tumultuous end to a British premiership since Anthony Eden resigned in 1957 after the Suez crisis.

Still, the upswell of chatter – #regrexit is trending big on twitter – over whether Britain might be able to reconsider speaks to the disbelief gripping this continent in the wake of a vote that has unleashed financial and political mayhem.

Sterling has plunged, and Britain’s political parties are both crippled. Cameron is a lameduck leader, and the main opposition Labour party on Sunday attempted a coup against its leader, with nine top officials resigning.

The UK has “silly walked” itself off a cliff, according to the next New Yorker cover:

If only Donald Trump had been there to show them how to do it right.