Month: August 2016

I think he was being funny

by digby

But really, it’s just stupid:

QOTD: Trump

by digby

In today’s ISIS speech:

“To accomplish a goal you must state a mission: The support networks for Radical Islam in this country will be stripped out and removed one by one, viciously if necessary, viciously if necessary.“

He could easily mean a tactical nuclear strike. He’s for that. But I think what we’re talking about is “taking out the families” and the wives “who always know what’s going on.”

And this:

STEPHANOPOULOS:  As president, you would authorize torture?

TRUMP:  I would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding.  And believe me, it will be effective.  If we need information, George, you have our enemy cutting heads off of Christians and plenty of others, by the hundreds, by the thousands.

STEPHANOPOULOS:  Do we win by being more like them?

TRUMP:  Yes.  I’m sorry.  You have to do it that way.  And I’m not sure everybody agrees with me.  I guess a lot of people don’t.  We are living in a time that’s as evil as any time that there has ever been.  You know, when I was a young man, I studied Medieval times.  That’s what they did, they chopped off heads.  That’s what we have …

STEPHANOPOULOS: So we’re going to chop off heads …

TRUMP: We’re going to do things beyond waterboarding perhaps, if that happens to come.

He’s been saying it and saying it in so many words since he jumped into the campaign. He’s a psycho on this stuff.

And after he said that he went on to talk about American values and tolerance and pluralism and how we expect people to abide by them.

.

Extreme, extreme vetting

by digby

Trump gave his highly anticipated ISIS policy speech today and it was as creepy as you’d expect. He was “subdued” as he often is when trying to read a teleprompter speech but just as incoherent and disjointed as ever.

Here’s the piece about “extreme vetting”:

Video – Trump lays out his “extreme vetting” immigration screening plan https://t.co/vMFWXGYDfy

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) August 15, 2016

I’ll come back to all this when I find a copy of the speech as delivered. In the meantime just prepare yourself for a full blown explosion at this next rally.  These prepared speeches are always followed by a manic performance in front of a big crowd.

.

What really ails the new Republican Party?

by digby

Well, it doesn’t appear to be people who are personally affected by immigration and trade:

A new Gallup working paper on Donald Trump supporters has exposed critical parts of the prevailing narrative about Trump’s rise as myths. According to the Washington Post’s write-up, the study—based on more than 87,000 interviews Gallup has done with Trump supporters over the past year—reveals that Trump supporters have not been significantly adversely impacted by trade or immigration, the two issues that have been the focal points of the Trump campaign. From the Post:

The Gallup analysis is the most comprehensive statistical profile of Trump’s supporters so far. Jonathan Rothwell, the economist at Gallup who conducted the analysis, sorted the respondents by their Zip code and then compared those findings with a host of other data from a variety of sources. After statistically controlling factors such as education, age and gender, Rothwell was able to determine which traits distinguished those who favored Trump from those who did not, even among people who appeared to be similar in other respects. 

Rothwell conducted this kind of analysis not only among the broad group of Americans polled by Gallup. He was also able to focus specifically on white respondents, and even just on white Republicans. In general, his results were the same regardless of the group analyzed. 

Rothwell’s analysis found that those who support Trump are more affluent than those who do not and that Trump supporters may even be more affluent than generic white Republicans, who tend to earn more than most Americans. Trump supporters are also only slightly more likely to be unemployed than all nonsupporters when controlling for geography and other factors, but are no more likely to be so than whites or white Republicans.

The study also suggests that while blue-collar workers with low levels of education are significantly more likely to support Trump, those workers are not, for the most part, factory workers who have been hit by trade and the decline of American manufacturing. “The Gallup analysis shows that Americans who live in places where employment in manufacturing has declined since 1990 are not more favorable to Trump,” the Washington Post’s Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo write. “Rothwell did not find a relationship when he focused only on white respondents, either, or even specifically on white Republicans.” In fact, Rothwell writes in the study that Trump attracts less support in regions where trade has had a greater impact on manufacturing. “Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign,” he says.

But Rothwell also writes that there is genuine malaise at the heart of at least some support for Trump—blue-collar workers without college degrees obviously fare worse in the economy than other Americans. Additionally, those in areas where intergenerational mobility has fallen flat and where physical health has been poor were more likely to have favorable views of Trump. Still, Trump’s abysmal numbers with minorities, including blue-collar minorities who have been faring similarly poorly to the blue-collar whites that back Trump, indicate that support for him is not purely economically motivated.

The study paints a similar picture on immigration.

The study does indicate that many of these folks are suffering or know someone who is suffering some of the maladies that are affecting members of the white working class in these communities like high rates of suicides, poor health and obesity and drug addiction.

But this data shows that it isn’t because they are competing for jobs with immigrants or because of trade deals. That is a mistaken assumption on the part of these voters as well as the political class, which means that looking for solutions to those problems will not fix the real one.  There’s something going on and the Democratic Party must reckon with it because it’s a large group of people who are suffering and they are having children who are being raised in an environment of pain.  They may not vote Democratic for their own reasons but they need the help nonetheless. And Trump’s brand of snake oil sure won’t cure their ills.

.

John Oliver signs up to be a Trump election observer

by digby

Oh boy:

I’m laughing but it’s not really funny. There’s  a long history of polling place intimidation going back to Jim Crow and some of it is quite recent. A Tea Party groups called True the Vote was all over the place in some recent elections:

This is True the Vote: 

A new threat emerged in 2010 when an organized and well-funded Texas-based organization with defined partisan interests, the King Street Patriots, through its project True the Vote, was observed intimidating voters at multiple polling locations serving communities of color during early voting in Harris County. Members of this Tea Party-affiliated group reportedly interfered with voters — allegedly watching them vote, “hovering over” voters, blocking lines, and engaging in confrontational conversations with election workers. Under Texas law, poll watchers are not allowed even to speak to a voter. 

In a 2011 special election in Massachusetts, a Tea Party group was reported to have harassed Latino voters and others at the polls in Southbridge, Massachusetts. The Southbridge town clerk protested these actions, reporting that targeted voters left saying, “I’ll never vote again,” while a retired judge witnessed “citizens coming from their voting experience shaken or in tears.”

The Trump advisers


by digby

I wrote about Trumps “team” for Salon this morning:

Donald Trump says he isn’t running against crooked Hillary Clinton anymore, he’s running against the crooked media. This comment was in response to a couple of scorching articles by the New York Times and the AP over the week-end that featured off the record interviews with people inside the campaign making it clear that it’s in chaos with Trump himself having serious mood swings and refusing to listen to anyone. This seems obviously true judging by the “low energy” desultory performances in Florida on Friday followed by his highly agitated behavior in a rally in Connecticut on Saturday after the articles were published online. By Sunday he was refuting the notion that he’d ever agreed to follow the advice of his small cadre of political advisers, tweeting like Popeye: “I am who I am!”

It had been yet another bad week in which he pretty much stepped all over what was supposed to be his big economic speech. He’d gathered quite a group of big donors along with a few of the GOP old guard to pull together a policy designed to reassure contributors and confused normal Republicans that he had some kind of economic plan.

Though the speech was obviously conceived as a standard issue conservative economic manifesto, the Fact Checks were brutal which raises an interesting question. If that speech was a product of Trump’s team rather than his own off-the-cuff remarks at a rally, who are these people?

Prior to the speech it was announced that he was being advised by thirteen CEOs, hedge fund managers, Wall Street investors, a couple of obscure economists and the Club for Growth’s Steven Moore. There are some big names among them, like hedge fund manager John Paulson, best known for his prescient 2007 bet against the mortgage market and Hollywood financier Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s finance chair. (In fact, there are so many men named Steve among them that wags are just calling his advisory group “the Steves”.)

Trump promised to flesh out more details as time went on but nobody’s heard a word about it from him since, leaving members of of his team to spend the rest of the week trying to explain his plans on TV while Trump was on the stump creating firestorm after firestorm. Steven Moore was everywhere explaining Trump’s innovative view that tax cuts for the wealthy always create growth while CEO of CKE resteraunts, Andy Puzder, spent the week-end on CNN defending Trump’s electoral strategy for some reason and told the Huffington Post that he believes in Trump because “he certainly has all the indications of wealth.” Trump’s senior economic adviser, former Reagan official David Malpass ineffectually tried to make a case for the estate tax helping the average Joe.

Trump, meanwhile, added a little zazz to his usual red-faced stump rant by holding up charts (which only the people in the front row will be able to see.) One of them is a list of Arab countries from which the Clinton Foundation supposedly received millions of dollars after which the “Clinton State Department” then sent military equipment.Trump surrogate Jason Miller said the charts originated from “the policy department” which is odd since this one came from a far right web site and was tweeted out weeks ago by David Duke, replete with a Star of David. (It’s unclear if the star was on the chart Trump used for the rally.) It turns out that Trump has quite the diverse policy department: hedge fund managers to KKK Grand Wizards.

But for all that the one thing everyone noticed about his economic team was the fact that he couldn’t manage to find even one worthy woman in the whole country. This is not surprising since when Trump was asked recently which women he would consider putting in his cabinet the only name he could come up with was his daughter Ivanka. But never say he is unresponsive to criticism. Last Thursday he released an additional list of economic advisers that included eight woman and one man to his team. (The man was Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramuchi who I wrote about here.)

The most interesting of the bunch of mostly businesswomen (no economists among them) is the notorious former Lieutenant Governor of New York Betsy McCaughey best known for being one of the tools that tanked Hillary Clinton’s health care plan back in 1994 and years later spreading the malicious misinformation that Obamacare featured “death panels.” She’s also known as a fierce foe of immigration reform due to the danger it presents to the GOP’s electoral prospects and she cheers on government shutdowns and Bundy-style anti-government protests. There couldn’t be a more perfect female “policy adviser” for Trump. It’s a wonder she took so long to jump on his crazy train.

So Trump has filled out his economic policy team at long last with wealthy donors and female right wing cranks even as he still gets a good bit of his information from his twitter feed. Today he is slated to give another stilted teleprompter speech on foreign policy which his campaign says Trump will use to “put blame for rise of ISIS at feet of Obama and Clinton dating to 2009.”  It’s clear that the 70 plus foreign policy bigwigs who signed a letter condemning Trump are not among his advisers and nobody really knows who they might be. Speculation is that Senator Jeff Sessions is a big influence along with the flamboyantly Strangelovian General Michael Flynn. Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Giuliani are fluttering around in the background.

Oh, and there’s his campaign manager Paul Manafort who knows a lot about foreign affairs, especially in the Ukraine. (This blockbuster New York Times expose headlined “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief” hit the internet like a nuclear bomb last night.) Everyone will no doubt listen closely to Trump’s speech about NATO and Russia in light of what we’ve learned.

But there’s really only one serious adviser to Donald Trump as he will tell you himself: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

.

Walked right into it
by Tom Sullivan

Excerpts from 1982 consent decree, United States District Court
for District of New Jersey, Civil Action 81-3876.

At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen brings up a possible violation-by-Trump of the decades-old consent decree I mentioned recently. To get a sense of why this 1982 settlement exists, click on the image above and read it. Also read pages 9-13 (Operative Facts) from the original complaint by the DNC and New Jersey State Democratic Committee.

Hasen writes:

With Trump’s dangerous and irresponsible hyperventilating about voter fraud and cheating in Pennsylvania potentially costing him the election, it is probably no surprise, as reported by the Weekly Standard, that Trump is seeking “election observers” to stop “Crooked Hillary” from “rigging this election.”

However, there’s a longstanding consent decree that bars the RNC afrom engaging in such activities.  Here’s Tal Kopan and Josh Gerstein, reporting in 2013 on the RNC’s unsuccessful attempt to get the Supreme Court to lift the decree:

The Supreme Court on Monday declined the Republican National Committee’s request to lift a three-decade-old court order that limits the national GOP’s ability to challenge voters’ eligibility at the polls.

The case, Republican National Committee vs. Democratic National Committee, dealt with a consent decree issued in 1982 that prevents the RNC from engaging in some voter fraud prevention efforts without prior court consent. It specifically said the RNC could not engage in ballot security efforts (later defined in 1987 as “ballot integrity, ballot security or other efforts to prevent or remedy vote fraud,” according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit opinion), especially in areas where racial or ethnic makeup could be considered a reason for the activities.

A response to claims of voter intimidation in minority areas in the 1970s and early 1980s, the decree allowed the RNC to continue “normal poll watching” operations while barring activities that could be aimed at voter suppression, though the RNC complained to the courts that the distinction was unclear and difficult to follow. The decree effectively put the national party on the sidelines as concern about voter fraud became more and more pronounced in GOP ranks in recent years and as states passed a series of voter-identification measures.

In deciding the case, which stems from a 2008 lawsuit brought by the DNC, the district court clarified ballot security efforts as “any program aimed at combating voter fraud by preventing potential voters from registering to vote or casting a ballot,” and upheld the consent decree while adding a Dec. 1, 2017, expiration date.

In the consent decree, “The RNC agreed that the RNC, its agents, servants, and employees would be bound by the Decree, ‘whether acting directly or indirectly through other party committees.” Does Trump count as the RNC’s agent in these circumstances?  They are certainly acting in concert, and it is plausible to argue that Trump and the RNC are agents of each other for purposes of this election. Also, the activity Trump is talking about engaging violate the consent decree?  One thing the consent decree says is that they must:

(e) refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor in the decision to conduct, or the actual conduct of, such activities there and where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting; and the conduct of such activities disproportionately in or directed toward districts that have a substantial proportion of racial or ethnic populations shall be considered relevant evidence of the existence of such a factor and purpose…

If this activity violates the consent decree, the DNC can ask for it to be extended for up to another 8 years.

Trump has walked his party right into it. The DNC should indeed seek an extension. Letting the decree lapse at this point would be a mistake. The Roberts Supreme Court eliminated the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act because, you know, times have changed. But we know what happened next.

The Insult Dog conducts a focus group

by digby

I don’t honestly know if this was staged although it doesn’t seem so. Either way, it’s totally believable:

.

by digby

Poor Adam. Duped by a liar. Never again.

There’s never been a presidential candidate like Donald Trump — 

— someone so cavalier about the facts and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. As of August 9, about 65 percent (39 of 61) of our rulings of his statements turned out to be Four Pinocchios, our worst rating. By contrast, most politicians tend to earn Four Pinocchios 10 to 20 percent of the time. (Moreover, most of the remaining ratings for Trump are Three Pinocchios.)

Politifact has over 40 “pants-on-fire” total lies listed. Here’s Trump’s scorecard:

As you can see Clinton and Obama are rated similarly and are probably fairly typical. Trump is not. And yet Clinton rates as more dishonest than Trump and twice as dishonest as Obama.

The Washington Post attempted to figure this out and they didn’t get very far:

Clinton’s deceptions tend to be defensive — her reputation is under attack and she’s trying to save face. As determined by PolitiFact, a political fact-checking service, her false statements often come in response to scandals and allegations against her. For instance, with regard to her private email server, she has said she “never received nor sent any material that was marked as classified” and that the server “was allowed” at the time. Both proved false. 

Trump’s deceptions, by contrast, are more on the offensive, more self-promotional. He exaggerates his successes in the business world. He called his book “The Art of the Deal” the “best-selling business book of all time.” It’s not, according to PolitiFact.

 And he creates allegations against his political opponents and minority groups out of thin air, making himself appear better by comparison. Among his false statements, according to PolitiFact: Hillary Clinton “invented ISIS,” even though the group predates Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The United States is allowing “tens of thousands” of “vicious, violent” Muslim terrorists into the country every year. This attempt to justify his ban on Muslim immigration was also found false.

That distinction between Clinton and Trump — offensive vs. defensive — has major implications for whether people view their lies as “legitimate” and morally acceptable, according to Matthew Gingo, a psychology professor at Wheaton College. 

“Me lying to get myself out of trouble is not nearly as bad as me lying to get someone else in trouble,” Gingo said. “People view defense as more legitimate, such as physical self-defense.” 

This has long been the consensus of psychological research. A 2007 study presented scenarios where people lied with varying motivations and interviewed people about how “acceptable” each lie was. They found self-protective lies (think Clinton) to be more acceptable than self-promotional lies (think Trump on his business record), which are more acceptable than self-promotional lies that harm others (think Donald Trump on Mexicans). A similar 1997 study of women found the same result, as did a 1986 study. 

So Clinton’s omissions of fact, research tells us, should be perceived better than Trump’s flagrant scapegoating. Especially considering this disparity: PolitiFact has evaluated 203 of Trump’s statements and 226 of Clinton’s. It rated just fewer than a third of Clinton’s as “mostly false” or worse but rated 71 percent of Trump’s the same way.

They’re not perceived as better, however. The Post concludes that it’s Clinton’s desire to be honest that makes people think she isn’t. Or something. They do note that experts in this across the board say that trump is completely off the charts and they all seem to wonder why it is that Clinton has such high numbers even when compared to a pathological liar.

I think Rebecca Traister has the right answer in her latest piece which delves into this growing theme of Clinton stealing the election:

It’s true that the major hit on Hillary Clinton has long been that she is untrustworthy, which makes it a short step to suggesting that her electoral victories are fraudulent. Surely some of this stems from a reputation and history particular to her. But it seems unlikely that Clinton is, by political standards, uniquely dishonest; former New York Times editor Jill Abramson has written of how her many journalistic investigations into Clintonian malfeasance revealed that Clinton was “fundamentally honest and trustworthy.” The fact that “she can be so seamlessly rendered synonymous with all things untrue,” says Tillet, is at least in part because “religious narratives tell us that women are inherently untrustworthy … The idea of woman as a liar and as evil goes back to the Bible.”

This is some deep primal stuff and non-GOP voters should take a gut check on this Clinton meme and ask themselves some hard questions. There’s something wrong with it and it’s not that Hillary Clinton is unusually dishonest or untrustworthy. I expect right wingers to say that. They have primitive views of women. Liberals and progressives should know better. Her policies and her record are all fair game and should be criticized. But this rampant “she’s a liar” character smear is something else altogether.

.

Policy advisers

by digby