Month: July 2016

Home of the brave

by digby

You’ve probably seen this, but if not ….

Happy 4th everybody.

‘Nuff said
by Tom Sullivan

In a fit of conscience, Republicans in our state House Friday rebuffed a powerful state senator from their caucus. On his way to retirement he wanted to take a parting shot (my op-ed) at the pockets of lefties who keep beating his team at the polls. Cities here have been targets of punitive legislation from the capitol since the GOP took full control after 2012. Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them. This time, however, something snapped.

Maybe it was the fact that their colleague appeared to have lied to them about the bill. Perhaps the federal ruling Friday morning overturning the Wake County Commission districts (imposed by legislative fiat) did it. Whatever. The attempt to do the same thing again Friday night was all many Republican legislators could take. They had had enough of the state again and again paying and losing in court defending their leaders’ attempts to exact retribution on political opponents. Twenty-four GOP House members defied their leaders and joined outnumbered Democrats to defeat the bill. If you fight back (even outnumbered), sometimes you get to win. Even in ‘Murica.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is advising citizens not to wear traditional dress when traveling abroad after police tackled, handcuffed and injured an Emirati businessman outside Cleveland. A hotel clerk thought he was connected with ISIS. Dressed in white robes, headscarf and headband, he had been trying to book a hotel room. The Christian Science Monitor reports Ahmed Almenhali was looking for a hotel “because his apartment was being used by the Republican National Committee for the upcoming Republican Convention.” This is your country, ‘Murica.

The photo above is at a business down the street. Maybe Stan Lee has a country cousin.

The Failure Conspiracy

by digby

I can’t help but enjoy reading hysterical essays from the Wall Street Journal these days even though Trump’s popularity with tens of millions of Americans makes me feel sick to my stomach when I stop to think about it:

Before they gather in Cleveland for their convention, it’s not too soon for Republicans to begin thinking about what exactly a Donald Trump defeat might be like… 

[W]hat happens if Mr. Trump decides he can’t win and no longer is willing to throw good money after bad. Unless they were born on a turnip truck yesterday, campaign vendors will be the first to figure it out. Look for them quickly to cut off services rather than get stiffed in the inevitable Trump campaign bankruptcy filing.

Mr. Trump’s harsher Republican critics are kidding themselves to think Mr. Trump is crazy or unstable and will suffer a breakdown. More likely, he will simply and coldbloodedly toss the ball to the GOP, saying, in effect, “If you want to pay for some events or TV, I’m available. Otherwise I’m done.” The GOP would then have to shoulder the dual burden of propping up a minimally respectable Trump campaign while also distancing its down-ballot candidates from Mr. Trump so they might survive.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. Mr. Trump has learned the value of audacity. He might well decide to cover his retreat and preserve his amour propre with a flurry of lawsuits and conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election.

He’s already begun putting narrative flesh on these bones. He speaks of “crooked Hillary” and increasingly of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton’s philanthropy, and what he calls the Clintons’ “politics of personal profit and theft.” In his trade speeches, he portrays the Clintons as members of a nefarious global elite that has enriched itself while foisting impoverishing trade deals on the U.S. middle class.

He perhaps will throw in a few suggestions that foreign governments hold hidden leverage over Hillary because of her hacked, illegal email server. He’ll mention Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.

Republicans can also expect to be a target of his accusations. He doesn’t need to be plausible, just tell a story that justifies his own stance that he didn’t lose, the other side cheated, “Washington elites” conspired against him, etc.

If the Trump endgame is destined to go this way, Republicans should hope it does so early, ideally before the convention is even over. To date, Mr. Trump continues to tease top GOPers and conservatives with the idea that he may yet come their way, turn his formidable talents to advancing conservative causes. This merciless exploiting of Republican romantics has begun to seem like something out of “The Blue Angel” or Lucy with the football.

Republicans need a strategy, and lots of money to fund it, to preserve their House and Senate majorities. Do they know it? The thing they should fear most: An autumn dynamic in which Mr. Trump believes the best outcome for him personally is one that does as much damage as possible to the long-run GOP cause.

I’m fairly sure that ship has already sailed…

Trump is a conspiracy theorist and he will almost certainly claim that the election was rigged against him. He already says that and he hasn’t even lost yet. But let’s face fact, this theme of rigged elections is a big one in all political circles and not all of it is just the more understandable abstract complaint about big money dominating the system. Current conspiracy theories are all about literal ballot box stuffing and nefarious criminality. Meanwhile, the very real problem of vote suppression, an actual fact, is being driven by another nonsensical conspiracy theory, “voter fraud.”

We seem to be in one of those periods where everyone believes there’s a conspiracy behind every door. It’s tiresome but it happens in times when people lose faith in institutions. If there’s one person who will use that sentiment to excuse what we hope is going to be his massive failure it’s Trump. And he’ll find a way to turn a profit at other people’s expense. He always does.

“THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED!”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2016

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by digby

It’s time for a little catch-up on the political news the American news media have decided is less important than Bill Clinton getting a haircut on an airplane tarmac — oh sorry, saying hi to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac. It’s so hard to keep the tarmac scandals apart. (If you’re looking for a news story that’s actually informative on this latest, this one by Amy Chozick in the NY Times strikes me as fair and informative.)

For some real political intrigue instead of sophomoric pearl clutching over bullshit, you really need to read the British press. Take this piece about the Tory leadership in the wake of Brexit:

Now that the news cycle is measured in seconds, there’s a risk that 23 June might come to feel like history, that we might move on too soon. But there can be no moving on until we have reckoned with what exactly was done to the people of these islands – and by whom.

This week’s antics of Gove and Johnson are a useful reminder. For the way one has treated the other is the way both have treated the country. Some may be tempted to turn Johnson into an object of sympathy – poor Boris, knifed by his pal – but he deserves none. In seven days he has been exposed as an egomaniac whose vanity and ambition was so great he was prepared to lead his country on a path he knew led to disaster, so long as it fed his own appetite for status.

He didn’t believe a word of his own rhetoric, we know that now. His face last Friday morning, ashen with the terror of victory, proved it. That hot mess of a column he served up on Monday confirmed it again: he was trying to back out of the very decision he’d persuaded the country to make. And let’s not be coy:persuade it, he did. Imagine the Leave campaign without him. Gove, Nigel Farage and Gisela Stuart: they couldn’t have done it without the star power of Boris.

He knew it was best for Britain to remain in the EU. But it served his ambition to argue otherwise. We just weren’t meant to fall for it. Once we had, he panicked, vanishing during a weekend of national crisis before hiding from parliament. He lit the spark then ran away – petrified at the blaze he started.

He has left us to look on his works and despair. The outlook for the economy is so bleak, the governor of the Bank of England talks of “economic post-traumatic stress disorder.” The Economist Intelligence Unit projects a 6% contraction by 2020, an 8% decline in investment, rising unemployment, falling tax revenues and public debt to reach 100% of our national output. No wonder George Osborne casually announced that the central aim of his fiscal policy since 2010 – eradicating the deficit – has now been indefinitely postponed, thereby breaking what had been the defining commitment of the Tories’ manifesto at the last election, back in the Paleolithic era known as 2015.

Perhaps headlines about Britain losing its AAA credit ratings don’t cut through. Maybe it’s easier to think in terms of the contracts cancelled, the planned investments scrapped, the existing jobs that will be lost and the future jobs that will never happen. Or the British scientific and medical research that relied on EU funding and European cooperation and that will now be set back “decades”, according to those at the sharp end.
And what was it all for? For Johnson, it was gross ambition. Gove’s motive was superficially more admirable. He, along with Daniel Hannan and others, was driven by intellectual fervour, a burning belief in abstract nouns such as “sovereignty” and “freedom”. Those ideas are noble in themselves, of course they are. But not when they are peeled away from the rough texture of the real world. For when doctrine is kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by reality, it turns into zealotry.

Ain’t that the truth…

Just look at what this act of vandalism has wrought. There has been a 500% increase in the number of hate crimes reported, as migrants are taunted on the street, told to pack their bags and get out – as if 23 June were a permission slip to every racist and bigot in the land. And for what? So Boris could get a job and so Gove, Hannan and the rest could make Britain more closely resemble the pristine constitutional models of the nation-state found in 17th-century tracts of political philosophy, rather than one that might fit into the interdependent, complex 21st-century world and our blood-drenched European corner of it. 

They did it with lies, whether the false promise that we could both halt immigration and enjoy full access to the single market or that deceitful £350m figure, still defended by Gove, which tricked millions into believing a leave vote would bring a cash windfall to the NHS. They did it with no plan, as clueless about post-Brexit Britain as Bush and Blair were about post-invasion Iraq. They did it with no care for the chaos they would unleash.

It’s so House of Cards. The original.  Only real!

As for the other big Tory in the running for the Party leadership, get a load of this:

Theresa May has warned that the future of European Union citizens living inside the UK is uncertain and their status will be part of any Brexit negotiations. 

The Home Secretary, who has emerged as the clear front-runner in the Conservative Party leadership contest following the withdrawal of the former London mayor Boris Johnson, also told ITV’s Peston on Sunday there could be an upsurge in immigration before Britain officially leaves the EU.  

And though Ms May said she wanted to “guarantee the position” for EU citizens currently living in the UK and British citizens living in EU countries, she admitted their future was up for negotiation. 

“What’s important is there will be a negotiation here as to how we deal with that issue of people who are already here and who have established life here and Brits who have established a life in other countries within the European Union.

Nice. No doubt she and Trump would have a beautiful friendship.

The apple drops right under the tree

by digby

Here’s son Eric sounding like a recording of his father Donald:

Eric Trump in an interview Sunday attacked a Washington Post article that found his father, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, donated only $10,000 to charities over seven years, millions less than he has publicly claimed.

Eric Trump dismissed the article as a “hack job” while calling the media the “worst part of society.”

“It was such a disgusting article, and that’s The Washington Post, and that’s their M.O., unfortunately. Every article is just a pure kill job,” Trump said in an interview with John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on AM 970 in New York.

The Post reported that Donald Trump hasn’t personally given to his own foundation since 2008. And of the 188 charities the Post contacted that had some connection to the billionaire, 11 received a personal donation, while 44 declined to comment. Another 48 didn’t respond to the Post’s inquiries. An additional 85 had no record of receiving a personal donation from Trump.

But Eric Trump claimed the opposite.

“Charity is such a big part of our company and of our lives. My father has contributed so much to what I’ve done. He contributes so much to every charity,” he said.

“The worst part of society is that you can’t have an objective and unbiased media. … You know, it’s a hack job, and it’s done for various reasons. It’s very, very sad.”

Unfortunately, even if it’s true although I’m quite sure it isn’t, nobody will ever believe that Donald Trump anonymously gives massive amounts to charity without taking public credit for it. He doesn’t eat breakfast without taking public credit for it.

I don’t blame Eric Trump for defending his father. That’s just family loyalty. But adopting his tiresome whining isn’t necessary.

And he is an exotic animal killer which makes him irredeemable in my eyes:

Two disgusting bloodthirsty murderers

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Let them eat nothing

by digby

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. — Anatole France

I will never understand how any moral person can say it’s ok for a wealthy country like ours to put conditions of people’s ability to obtain food to eat.

In the eight months that Michigan has been running a pilot program to drug test applicants and recipients of its welfare program, not a single person has tested positive, according to preliminary results.

The program began in October in three different counties, instituting a 50-question screening questionnaire that can prompt officials to order a drug test. As of May, 303 people who applied for benefits or were already receiving them participated, but they turned up zero positive drug test results.

An applicant can refuse a test, forfeiting benefits if he or she does, and some argue that low positive testing rates can be due to those who abuse drugs simply declining to get tested. But no one in Michigan’s pilot program refused to take a test.

The legislature appropriated $300,000 to run the pilot program, although a spokesperson for the department that oversees the welfare program told the Guardian that it has only spent $300 so far. The department will have 60 days after the program ends in September to report on the results.

Michigan’s results aren’t abnormal for these kinds of programs. Ten states have implemented them, typically requiring applicants and beneficiaries to undergo a screening questionnaire and submit to a drug test if the answers raise suspicions. But few tests have come back positive. In 2015, Arizona uncovered zero positive tests. All told, the 10 states spent a collective $850,909.25 to dig up just 321 positive tests. The ratio of positive results to the population on welfare is below the share of Americans who use illegal drugs in the general population, but states have still spent nearly $2 million on the efforts.

Many of the programs aim to cut drug users off of benefits, which proponents claim should result in savings. In Michigan’s pilot program, if someone had tested positive for illegal drugs he or she would have been referred to treatment while continuing to receive benefits. But a second positive test would get a person dropped from the roles until he or she can test negative.

But experts warn that if states don’t increase resources for drug treatment programs, people with actual substance abuse issues won’t necessarily be able to access help. And getting cut off from assistance will do little to help them with any harmful habits.

But it will make them hungry a fate that will never befall any of the middle class and wealthy people who use drugs.

The article goes on to note that these punitive laws have been enacted all over the country and have cost a lot of money and never had a positive result. This is just a shaming exercise, nothing more.

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Next steps for anti-choice

by digby

This article in the New York Times discusses the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Texas abortion decision. It delves into the reasoning behind the anti-choice strategy that led to the movement focusing on how abortion allegedly “hurt women” and how this decision affected it.

Where do abortion opponents go from here?

Pro-lifers have to decide if a legal strategy focused on women is one they want to stick with — and if the political party to which they have tied their fortunes still deserves their support. In the past decade, the movement’s success has mostly concealed activists’ sometimes clashing views about strategy. Now, with a major legal setback, the movement risks fracturing again.

Finding a perfect historical comparison is hard, but the best understood pro-life setback came in 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. That case invalidated the vast majority of criminal abortion laws in the nation and left the states little room to regulate abortion early in pregnancy.

After Roe, pro-lifers concentrated more than ever on arguing for the rights of the unborn, but movement members disagreed about strategy. Some gave up on litigation, and focused on amending the Constitution, believing that the court had deliberately disregarded the rights of the unborn.

Dr. William Colliton, a veteran movement member, spoke for many who believed that the Supreme Court had already “evaded the scientific answer to the question, ‘When does life begin?’ ” so pressing on that point was futile. Others responded that the problem was ignorance. If the American public was educated about “what is really done to that living being, the child in the womb, they will reject abortion on demand,” argued Americans United for Life.

The Texas decision forces the movement into a comparable debate. Some members have already suggested that it is time to refocus on fetal rights.

Others suggest that strategies focused on women still have untapped potential. The conservative magazine National Review argued that pro-lifers had won in the Supreme Court when they introduced narrower versions of legislation and collected better proof to support it. Now as before, movement members will have to decide whether to prove that abortion really hurts women or turn more exclusively to arguments about fetal rights.

Here’s the thing. They never gave up on “fetal rights” strategy. The “personhood” amendments around the country, the 20 weeks ban, all of that is about “fetal rights.” But the fact that they separate these things in a two pronged strategy exposes the central misdirection of their approach. These are not separate entities. The fetus is part of the woman and the woman is part of the fetus.

Polling has changed very little over the years despite this fierce culture war. There are people who are very clear about their beliefs on both sides of the divide and others who have decided they can just live with some ambivalence on the issue. That translates into the battle continuing with the anti-choice side chipping away at reproductive rights incrementally and the pro-choice side winning the rare victory to push them back a step or two. The anti-abortion zealots have been on a roll lately so this case was important. But they aren’t going to stop.

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Trump’s got a feel for the alt-right

by digby

Remember that anti-Semitic tweet from Donald Trump yesterday? Well, guess what?

Mic discovered Sunday that Donald Trump’s Twitter account wasn’t the first place the meme appeared. The image was previously featured on /pol/ — an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Trump’s rhetoric — as early as June 22, over a week before Trump’s team tweeted it.

Though the thread where the meme was featured no longer exists, you can find it by searching the URL in Archive.is, a “time capsule of the internet” that saves unalterable text and graphic of webpages. Doing so allows you to see the thread on /pol/ as it originally existed.

Of note is the file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for “HH,” or “Heil Hitler,” which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight.

The watermark on the lower-left corner of the image leads to a Twitter account that regularly tweets violent, racist memes commenting on the state of geopolitical politics.

This is hardly the first time anyone’s noticed this. Last march Fortune did this story on Trump’s social media ties to genocidal white supremacists. And since Trump notoriously does his own tweeting, it’s notable that he seems to be unusually attracted to the racist tweets that come across his timeline which he likes to retweet to his millions of followers:

In late January, Donald Trump did something that would have sunk almost any other presidential campaign: He retweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who goes by the not-so-subtle handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Trump neither explained nor apologized for the retweet and then, three weeks later, he did it again. This subsequent retweet was quickly deleted, but just two days later Trump retweeted a different user named @EustaceFash, whose Twitter header image at the time also included the term “white genocide.”

None of this went unnoticed among ardent racists, many of whom believe there is a coordinated effort to eventually eliminate the “white race.”

Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”

It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.

“The retweets are based solely on the content, not the personal views of those individuals as they are not vetted, known or of interest to the candidate or the campaign,” says Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who declined to explain how Trump searches through his Twitter feed. Hicks also declined (repeatedly) to answer Fortune‘s question as to whether or not Trump believes that white genocide is a legitimate concern.

There’s a lot more at the link. They went in and analyzed his twitter feed and it’s just creepy.

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Today we have neither
by Tom Sullivan

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.
June 27, 1936

Posts leading up to the Independence Day weekend remind me how, as Roosevelt once observed, economic royalists have again carved new dynasties.

At Our Future, Dave Johnson points to how corporate barons have grown strong enough and bold enough to challenge great nations. And not with conventional weapons, but with legal ones:

A Canadian corporation is suing the us because we wouldn’t let them build a pipeline across our country (seizing people’s property along the way) so they could sell oil to China.

They can do this because we signed a trade agreement that places corporate rights above our democracy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would increase by an order of magnitude the companies that can sue us for hurting their profits by protecting the environment, consumers, public health and small businesses.

TransCanada Corporation is suing the U.S. government (us) for $15 billion in damages under North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) rules. The company wanted to build the Keystone pipeline all the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico so they could ship oil to China. They also wanted to use “eminent domain” to seize land from ranchers, farmers and other property owners along the way to enable this.

Why can they do this? In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and on January 1, 1994, the United States officially became a party to the agreement. Chapter 11 of the agreement “protects investors” by allowing them to sue governments that pass regulations or laws that hurt their profits. They can bypass the legal systems of these governments and take the issue to “corporate courts” in which corporate attorneys decide if the corporation or the government will prevail.

That is not new, but deserves repeating. Approving the TPP, Johnson argues, will simply take more power and authority from people and hand it over without a shot to transnational corporations. The American Revolution began with “the shot heard round the world.” The American experiment could end with the scratch of a pen.

At the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson has a thoughtful piece on how Democrats address the politics of downward mobility. It has taken time for the long-term effects of the 2008 crash to sink in. One pollster tells candidates to avoid using the term “middle class.” Too many Americans have fallen out of it:

Last year, a Pew Research Center survey confirmed those Americans’ assessment. The share of income going to middle-class Americans declined from 62 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2014, while the share going to upper-income households rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.

In response, Meyerson asks, “Will the Democrats, as they did between 1928 and 1936, and again in 1964 and 1965, redefine their fundamental mission?” Will they, as Franklin Roosevelt did? Just as the Great Depression shaped the perspective of the generation that experienced it, so too has the Great Recession reframed the thinking of Americans 29 and younger. Over 70 percent of those voters supported Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, while over 70 percent of those over 65 went for Hillary Clinton. The capitalism that allowed post-war Boomers a comfortable life in the suburbs has failed Millennials still living with their parents and saddled them with mountains of school loan debt.

Clinton surely understands that, in light of the growing populism of the electorate, her ties to finance have become an electoral liability. While she cannot credibly morph into a Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, she’d do well to embrace more of their positions—calling for the breakup of the mega-banks, for a tax on financial transactions, for greater public provision for the cost of college. More fundamentally, she’d do well to acknowledge more explicitly the great and growing imbalance of power and income between workers and owners, between ordinary Americans and the economic elite, and to situate her proposals under that rubric.

To do this, Meyerson recommends she “acknowledge the breakdown of a once-thriving economic order, identify the culprits, and propose a solution. Identifying the culprits is the part that does not come naturally to her, but there are moments when simple leadership requires it.” This is Narratives 101. She cannot be the hero without first identifying the enemy (as Sanders has). It was not that hard to do on July 4, 1776:

Noting that it was in Philadelphia that Americans had first defined their nation’s creed, Roosevelt equated their break with the British crown with the New Deal’s break with the “economic royalists” of 20th-century America. “Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the [founding] fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. … The political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.”

The task before the nation, Roosevelt continued, was thus to equalize both economic and political power. “If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.”

Today we have neither. One hundred years after the first Gilded Age, the balance has once again tipped in favor of the royalists who have been among us all along angling for a return to their “rightful” place at the top of the social order. Angling, if not directly, through corporate structures that insulate their great wealth from the so-called Takers — those who might object, say, to having a corporation seize their farmland for its own purposes, or to subjugating government of, by, and for the people to the whims of a new class of resurgent barons and would-be kings.

Roosevelt cautioned in 1936:

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

The Appalachian chain they say were once taller than the Rockies before erosion carved them away. So too will the freedoms we take for granted inexorably erode if not vigorously defended from those intent on patiently carving them away so slowly that no one noticed. Perhaps an economic Magna Carta would be in order to reassert the rights of citizens against the claims of the investor class?

Worth every penny

by digby

CNN is reportedly paying this guy half a million dollars for this drivel:

CAMEROTA: There is a long tradition in this country of, when politicians go abroad, not trash talking the U.S. or the U.S. president or even their fellow candidates, and Donald Trump broke with that on Friday. He did say negative things about the president and Hillary Clinton and the country. Why do you think that he broke with that tradition?

LEWANDOWSKI: It’s about authenticity. And what you have with Hillary Clinton is she’s put an ad out which is completely false. Donald Trump was not playing golf, as she alluded to in that golf — in that ad.

CAMEROTA: He was there for a golf resort.

QUINN: And he did talk about sprinklers.

LEWANDOWSKI: He put 200 million pounds of his own money into a resort to help. And his son oversaw that project. He went out to support him. One night overseas to show support for his family. I find it very hard to believe he’s being criticized for going out and supporting his family for rebuilding a course.

CAMEROTA: Right. No, I’m asking why he would criticize the president while he’s there.

What, exactly, does this add to the coverage?

Think about all the real journalists or experts — or even former campaign operatives who haven’t signed a non-disclosure agreement — they could have hired instead.

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