Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change
by digby
Just saying:
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"what digby sez..."
Month: July 2016
Trump signals his support for hacking
by digby
Donald Trump invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on Wednesday, asking them to find “the 30,000 emails that are missing” from the personal server she used during her time as secretary of state.
“It would be interesting to see, I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” the Republican nominee said at a news conference in Florida. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
He’s right about that, of course.
There is some context for this comment:
In the interview, Mr. Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he pronounced “great.” He also suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds, but also saw her as a personal foe.
At one point, Mr. Peston said: “Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?”
Mr. Assange replied that what Mr. Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Mrs. Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.
First, citing his “personal perspective,” Mr. Assange accused Mrs. Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks disseminated a quarter of a million diplomatic cables during her tenure as secretary of state.
“We do see her as a bit of a problem for freedom of the press more generally,” Mr. Assange said.
(The cables, along with archives of military documents, were leaked by Pvt. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to news outlets, including The New York Times. Despite a criminal investigation into Mr. Assange, he has not been charged; the status of that investigation is murky.)
In addition, Mr. Assange criticized Mrs. Clinton for pushing to intervene in Libya in 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was cracking down on Arab Spring protesters; he said that the result of the NATO air war was Libya’s collapse into anarchy, enabling the Islamic State to flourish.
“She has a long history of being a liberal war hawk, and we presume she is going to proceed” with that approach if elected president, he said.
Who knows what he has? But Donald Trump probably read that article and feels quite enthusiastic about it.
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Bill and his speeches
by digby
I wrote about Bill for Salon this morning:
It seems as long as I can remember that Bill Clinton has been giving highly anticipated speeches and the press has whined petulantly about how long and boring they are. In fact, the vast majority of his speeches have been extremely well received by the American people but the media follows a script that came from his very first national exposure back in 1988 when he was Governor of Arkansas and a rising young political star. His DNC speech nominating fellow Governor Michael Dukakis really was exceedingly dull finally ending with catcall and jeers from the hall. It was bad enough that many people assumed his career was finished.
But Bill Clinton is high wire act and often looks like he’s going to take a fatal tumble only to catch himself at the last minute and pull himself back up to the great relief of the people watching. In this case he decided to go on the Tonight Show directly afterwards and as has happened so many times since, reports of his death were premature and he came out of the whole thing as a popular national figure. Here’s how the press reported it at the time:
Clinton, panned for a Democratic convention speech that seemed like the last word in boredom when he nominated Michael Dukakis for president, has apparently made a comeback with his appearance Thursday with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” Cable News Network on Friday cited the governor for the “fastest turnaround ever” on its weekly “Winners and Losers.”
“People who watch television love this kind of comeback story. He was so boyish and charming. I’m sure he won a lot of hearts,” said Tom Shales, syndicated television critic for The Washington Post.
Ever since then virtually every speech Clinton has given is characterized in the media as being long and dull, often a laundry list of boring policies that the pundits are sure will finally turn the public against him. And inevitably, people actually like the speech, his favorabilities go up and the media acts surprised. Until the next time.
Clinton is different from Barack Obama. He doesn’t have that “thrill up the leg” quality as Chris Matthews once described it. But he is a masterful speaker in his own right. He’s a spinner of stories and an adept explainer of complicated issues in simple terms. And there’s always a sense of enjoyment in the task.
He’s also very fast on his feet. Being the high wire act that he is, there can often be some problem with technical problem that requires him to wing it. The most famous example was one of his most important speeches back at the beginning of his first term when he appeared before a joint session of congress to present his comprehensive health care plan. For some reason the wrong speech was fed into the teleprompter and Clinton had to wing the wonky speech for nearly 10 minutes until they managed to get the right one in the machine. Nobody would have known if the press hadn’t reported it. He didn’t miss a beat.
In 1997, they had another technical problem with the SOTU that caused the speech to be unformatted. This time they fixed it seconds before the speech was about to start. Bizarrely, that was happening at the same moment the OJ Simpson civil trial verdict was returned and the networks actually believed they needed to cover it so they broadcast the State of the Union on a split screen. And the following year Clinton delivered it just as the Monica Lewinsky story was breaking which had the media watching his every move for signs of stress. He didn’t show any.
He has given good speeches at all the Democratic Conventions since that debacle on 1988. But his most famous, until last night perhaps, was the 2012 barn burner where he made the case for President Obama’s reelection. Again the press whined that it was too long but even they had to admit that it was extremely effective. Historian David Maraniss described it for the Washington Post:
Twelve years out of office but still and always ready to be needed, he took to prime time as master explainer and policy clarifier, party morale booster extraordinaire, voice of experience, historian longing for the old days of political bipartisanship, earnest economics instructor, hoarse whisperer to the middle class, and empathetic testifier for President Obama, who came to the Democratic National Convention arena on Wednesday night to watch as the former president placed his name in nomination.
The Obama campaign gave him credit for launching the president out of his convention with a big bounce that never went away.
Last night the usual jaded attitude from the press was in full effect. On twitter they groused about the length of the speech as usual but the likely reaction among the general public will be what it always is. This time, rather than being the “explainer-in-chief” he spun stories to reintroduce Hillary Clinton to America through the eyes of the man to whom she’s been married for more than 40 years. He presented her as scary smart and committed to social justice from the time she was a young lawyer working for the Children’s Defense Fund, registering voters in Texas and investigating housing discrimination in Mississippi. He said, “Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by a private citizen.”
He took the country into their personal life showing her as a girlfriend, a newlywed and a young mother. This was not new to people who’ve read Clinton’s memoirs or followed her career (although the story of a pregnant future presidential nominee’s water breaking was a new one.) But for many people last night was the first time many of them may have seen Hillary Clinton as something other than a caricature. He said:
“If you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade, a real change-maker represents a real threat. Your only option is to create a cartoon alternative then run against the cartoons. Cartoons are two-dimensional and are easy to absorb. Real life is complex and hard to absorb.”
Indeed it is and Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, came through for her last night with one of the best speeches he’s given. It was a fitting benediction.
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To humanize Hillary Clinton
by Tom Sullivan
The goal of last night’s Democratic convention program was, as a Time magazine headline explained, to humanize Hillary Clinton. Beyond the roll-call vote to formally nominate the the first woman to head a U.S. presidential ticket, the DNC rolled out a long line of Americans to highlight a woman they know personally, but few see in public. “She is the most famous, least-known person in the country,” Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters.
In making his case for his wife, President Bill Clinton’s spoke last night repeating many of the stories he used on the stump during the primary season. Plus some. Plus a lot about Bill Clinton. No surprise there.
Dahlia Lithwick observes:
Bill Clinton is still a hell of a storyteller. He dove into the elaborate biography of a woman who spent most of her professional life trying to troubleshoot crazy crap at Yale–New Haven Hospital, at the Children’s Defense Fund in D.C., for children denied equal access to education in Alabama, for voters in Texas and juveniles incarcerated in South Carolina, and for kids trying to access schools in Massachusetts. And then more and more and more. No credit. In a strange way it was a woman’s story, told the way a woman would tell it: long on detail, short on ego. Sure Bill Clinton name-checked half the states in the convention hall. But that was largely because Hillary Clinton upped and traveled to those states long before young women hopped from state to state to effect social and legal change.
After he had ticked off a seemingly endless list of her unsung accomplishments, he concluded:
Now, how does this square? How does this square with the things that you heard at the Republican Convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up. And you just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans.
The real one had done more positive change-making by the time she was 30 than many public officials do in a lifetime in office. The real one, if you saw her friend Betsy Ebeling vote for Illinois today, has friends from childhood through Arkansas, where she has not lived in more than 20 years, who have gone all across America at their own expense to fight for the person they know. The real one, has earned the loyalty, the respect, and the fervent support of people who have worked with her in every stage of her life. Including leaders around the world who know her to be able, straightforward, and completely trustworthy. The real one calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble, or when there’s a death in the family. The real one repeatedly drew praise from Republicans when she was a senator and Secretary of State. So what’s up with this? Well, if you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two car parade, a real change-maker represents a real threat.
So, your only option is to create a cartoon alternative. Everybody gets the cartoon. Cartoons are two dimensional, they’re easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard, and a lot of people even think it’s boring. Good for you. Because earlier today, you nominated the real one.
This squares with what people who know her (or have worked around her) tell me. Having never met Hillary Clinton, I cannot say. After exposure to 25 years of propaganda directed at the woman, after 25 years of faux scandals and fruitless, taxpayer-funded investigation, I’m not sure I can trust what I think I know about her. Being aware of the propaganda does not immunize one from its cumulative effects. Still, the purveyors of the cartoon narrative have the strong scent of a cattle farm about them.
Over the course of the primary season, I found myself increasingly irritated at the unfairness of the personal vitriol directed at Hillary Clinton from both the right and the left for sins real and imagined. It’s not about policy, really. It’s about her. Where does the cartoon woman end and the real one begin?
The right wing has been gunning for Hillary Clinton at least since the “baking cookies” comment in 1992. Rush Limbaugh and (later) Fox News have made a piñata of her, day after day, for decades. What galls the patriarchs most is she is more like a punching clown. No matter how hard they hit her, no matter how many times they knock her down, she bounces back for more. The caricature they’ve made of Clinton as a lying, scheming, emasculating witch was on full display at the RNC convention last week. Republican after Republican has lined up hoping to be the one to finally claim her scalp, and one after one, accusation after accusation, investigation after investigation, they have failed. Somehow, this never proves they are lying assholes. It only proves just how deeply corrupt and untrustworthy Cartoon Clinton is.
Sadly, 25 years of all smoke and no fire has done its work. The right has convinced many in the country that the cartoon Hillary they have created is the real one. The cartoon one is the only Hillary Clinton many under 30 have ever known.
Over the course of the primary season, my social media feed has been laced with anti-Clinton propaganda, right-wing oppo-research, and disinformation circulated by a minority of passionate Bernie activists. Many articles are linked from conservative websites set up to lure the left into doing the right’s propagandizing for them. (A WhoIs search is your friend.) No accusation is too far-fetched. No source is too tainted. No allegation is too unsupported to pass along to further … what? Progressivism? It doesn’t matter. The woman is poison. Evil, pure and simple. In social media, this is defended as “research.” In reality, what it supports is the proposition that politics does not exist on a spectrum, but in curved space, and that if you go far enough left, you meet David Horowitz.
I’ve never been a big fan of Hillary Clinton. Still, the base cruelty of it all has me getting defensive for her (as if she needs my help).
It is not surprising at this point that Hillary Clinton presents in public as closed off. After 25 years of constant attacks, of always having to be ready to duck the next punch, she never seems to go out in public without wearing psychic body armor. If it feels as if she is is peering at you over the top of a shield, she is. And it comes off in public as if she has something to hide. It is not a good look for a candidate. It reinforces her enemies’ untrustworthy narrative.
The private Hillary Clinton, those who know her say, is a different person, as warm and caring and as good a listener as we heard repeatedly last night. And funny. Maybe she’ll find a way to show the public that Hillary between now and November.
Same As It Ever Was
by tristero
Horribly, it is quite plausible that a major-party presidential candidate would willingly collude, and possibly sponsor, a foreign government to create mischief in order to influence the election in his favor. Nixon did it:
It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.
He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.
At a July meeting in Nixon’s New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.
In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.
Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.
So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.
He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador’s phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault’s calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to “just hang on through election”.
Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.
Nixon went on to become president and eventually signed a Vietnam peace deal in 1973
In a series of remarkable White House recordings we can hear Johnson’s reaction to the news.
In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: “We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move.”
He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.
When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.
The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.
Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.
Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador’s phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.
So they decided to say nothing.
The president did let Humphrey know and gave him enough information to sink his opponent. But by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency. So Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway.
Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles. They couldn’t even get the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table.
He won by less than 1% of the popular vote.
Adding: the notion that Trump is in any way anomalous is belied by this story. There has been something very sick and dangerous afoot in Republican party post-Eisenhower, and especially post-Ford. Trump is only the latest manifestation.
We’ve come a long way
by digby
Arizona’s 102-year-old delegate, older than women’s right to vote, cast votes for @HillaryClinton #DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/ied8Pimego— Mashable News (@MashableNews) July 26, 2016
Trump stiffs the Freedom Kids
by digby
Remember this amazing campaign song?
Cowardice
Are you serious?
Apologies for freedom—
I can’t handle this!
When freedom rings—
Answer the call!
On your feet!
Stand up tall!
Freedom’s on our shoulders.
USA!
Enemies of freedom
Face the music
Come on, boys—take ‘em down!
President Donald Trump knows how
To make America great
Deal from strength or get crushed every time…
Over here…
USA!
Over there…
USA!
Freedom and liberty everywhere…
Oh, say can you see
It’s not so easy
But we have to stand up tall and answer freedom’s call
USA! USA! USA!
We’re the land of the free and the brave… USA…
USA!
The stars and stripes are flying
Let’s celebrate our freedom
Inspire, proudly, freedom to the world
Ameri-tude…
USA!
American pride…
USA!
It’s attitude, it’s who we are
Stand up tall…
We’re the red, white, and blue
Fiercely free, that’s who!
Our colors don’t run, no sirree…
Over here…
USA!
Over there…
USA!
Freedom and liberty everywhere…
Oh, say can you see
It’s not so easy
But we have to stand up tall and answer freedom’s call!
It started in Pensacola. When Popick first reached out to the Trump campaign about performing, he spoke with various people including former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. His understanding from the campaign was that the Kids would make two appearances in Florida, where Popick lives. The first event didn’t come to fruition, and Popick says he asked for $2,500 in payment for the second performance, in Pensacola. The campaign made a counter-offer: How about a table where the group could presell albums? Popick took the deal.
When they arrived at the venue, though, there was no table, Popick says. The result was “complete chaos,” he said. “They clearly had made no provisions for that.”
Popick, believing that he was owed some alternate compensation, tried to contact the campaign afterward, without luck. In addition to costs spent on promotional materials for the nonexistent table, Popick says, he also lost several promotional opportunities due to confusion over his relationship with the campaign.
When Trump made the sudden decision to skip the January Fox News debate and instead hold an event for veterans, a representative of the campaign called Popick to see if the Freedom Kids might perform. The call came the day before the event, Popick says, which was being held in Des Moines at 6:30 p.m. With the promise that the exposure from the event would be “huge,” Popick readily agreed, and the kids and their parents packed up for a direct flight to Chicago and a long drive to Iowa.
It wasn’t to be. When the plane landed, Popick had a message from the campaign staffer indicating that there was a change of plan. The campaign invited the performers to attend the rally, which they did, in their outfits. The campaign asked Popick not to talk to the media, he says, but then gave them seats within arm’s length of the press. “They just were constantly coming over, wanting pictures,” Popick said of the news media. “They wanted to take pictures, they wanted to ask questions — and I had to be a real jerk.” The cost of the flights, rental car and hotel were all absorbed by Popick.
[Donald Trump used money donated for charity to buy himself a Tim Tebow-signed football helmet]
After that, he kept reaching out “again and again and again and again,” without luck. He was passed around between staffers; calls went unreturned even after calls were promised. Emails Popick sent to the campaign (which he shared with The Post) detail the interaction between himself and the campaign and his ultimate request. “We are now asking and DEMANDING for what has been promised to us and is now long-overdue (and has been rightly earned by us); that is, a performance at the convention,” an email dated July 9 reads. “Or, be made whole.”
An email to the campaign requesting their understanding of the agreement was not returned by our deadline.
“These are guys that insist they’re straight shooters,” Popick said, “‘You may not like what we’re going to say, but we mean what we say and we say what we mean’ — and they just would not say anything of any substance!”
“I’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money,” he continued, “and it’s just been complete silence.”
It’s hard to believe that they would do this … well, actually it’s totally believable. Join the long line of Americans who’ve been stiffed by Donald Trump. I’ve said it before, if you’re doing any work for the Trrump campaign get your money up front.
But I have to love this:
“These are guys that insist they’re straight shooters,” Popick said, “‘You may not like what we’re going to say, but we mean what we say and we say what we mean’ — and they just would not say anything of any substance!”
The hell you say …
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DNC DAY 1: Michelle Sets the World Right
By Dennis Hartley
July 25 dawned a bit ominously for America. From the east coast…
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To the west coast…
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| Wildfires rage near Big Sur, California 7/25 (The New Milford Spectrum) |
Clearly, the gods were angry. WTF was happening? Are we actually living in that United States of impending doom and dystopian Hellscape, as envisioned by the speakers at the RNC last week?
I began to despair. All seemed lost. But then, I heard this lady speak:
Then somehow, all seemed right with the world. She gave me hope.
And that’s a good thing.
crossposted from DenofCinema
About that bump
by digby
The measure of the post-RNC bounce so far is a median swing of4 percentage points1 percentage point. For stragglers, see HuffPollster.One point is not an impressive change. Recall that in states won by Mitt Romney (R) in 2012, Trump has been lagging by about 9 percentage points. A CBS crosstab (can’t find at the moment – perhaps a reader can help) reports that Trump’s progress was made entirely with Republicans – whose support went up by 2 points. This suggests that with many reluctant Republican voters, Trump did not close the sale. Also, note that some of the change may be changes in how likely people were to respond to the survey. And of course, it remains to be seen whether any increase in support is lasting.
Current numbers do indicate that the race has closed up a bit. As of today, the election could possibly go to Trump. However, the election is not today.
Convention bounces aren’t what they used to be. Shown below are patterns that come from Gallup data, 1984-2012 in the net change in direct support for a candidate.
As you can see, the median change in candidate support in modern times is only 2 or 3 percentage points.
This reflects what I wrote about over the weekend, decreases in net impact, i.e.change in “likelihood of supporting candidate”, which allows favorability to be measured without forcing voters to change their minds.
In the CNN/ORC poll (see Q13), 42% of respondents said they were “more likely to support Trump,” and 44% said “less likely.” That’s a net difference of negative 2 percent, which is worse than any value in the graph above. By that measure, the Republican convention was a failure.
In both graphs, a notable shift occurred around the time that national elections became more polarized, in 2000. We are in an era of government shutdowns, endless Congressional investigative hearings, criminalization of political opposition, and ever-more-contentious judicial nominations. Voter entrenchment appears to be just one more symptom.
In the coming week you may be surprised to see relatively little change in the Princeton Election Consortium electoral-vote tracker and November win probability. There are two reasons: (1) We use state polls, which take time to reflect national shifts. (2) The Bayesian-win probability listed in the banner uses polls over the entire 2016 campaign to set a prior expectation for where things are likely to head. The second assumption also has the more traditional name of “regression to the mean.” Effectively, these two mechanisms prevent the calculations from spinning out of countrol whenever there is a momentary bump in polling. Therefore, today’s November win probability is 80%.
Of course, if the race shifts in a lasting manner, it will show up eventually. Just to state the obvious, now is not the optimal time to gauge where the race is headed in steady state. Recall that in 2008, the Republican convention and the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket led the race to briefly appear tied.
If you want to see the prediction without the Bayesian prior, the assumption that polls can drift equally in either direction, toward Clinton or toward Trump, is therandom drift probability. Today, that probability is 65%.
This is why it’s helpful to have women at the top
by digby
I don’t know if they would have responded this quickly if Samantha Bee hadn’t tweeted a reaction, but the fact is they did. That nobody knew how offensively sexist it was to begin with is still a sad reality of America life:
It was one woman looking out for another. But Samantha Bee had second thoughts.
The brash, brainy comedian — who broke ground this year by becoming the only female late-night host in a crowded field dominated by men — took to Twitter on Monday night to tell her own network, TBS, to “delete your account” after the network posted a video comparing Hillary Clinton’s laugh to that of wild hyenas.
The network responded on Tuesday morning by issuing an apology. “This post was obviously a poor attempt at humor and has been taken down,” a statement read. “Moving forward we’ll leave political satire to professionals like Samantha Bee.”
Bee’s tweet, which was quickly deleted, was posted just as the first night of the Democratic National Convention concluded with a rousing speech from Bernie Sanders calling on disruptive supporters to rally around the presumptive presidential nominee, the first female major-party nominee in U.S. history.
The network posted the controversial video to Twitter on Sunday. “Move over Donkey! There’s a new mascot in town. … #ImWithHyena,” the caption read.
The video, titled, “Hillary Clinton’s Call of the Wild,” runs 24 seconds and features clips of a laughing Clinton alternating with shots of a pack of wild hyenas making cackling sounds.
I’m sure it was hilarious.
I’ve never understood this particular hit. To me her laugh sounds like a mirthful belly laugh which I think is one of her better personal qualities. But all you have to do is look at the internet to see mountains of evidence that people find her laugh to be a horrifying blight on humanity so what do I know? Hillary Clinton’s voice seems to drive people crazy.
In any case, women leaders’ voices are policed in ways that men’s are not with an expectation that they be more masculine, but also feminine. It’s a tough line to walk.
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