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Month: September 2016

Warren FTW. She wants to apply the Clinton Rules to Wall Street executives.

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

Warren for the win

by digby

Elizabeth Warren wants to apply the Clinton Rules to Wall Street executives:

Elizabeth Warren hasn’t left the financial crisis behind—she wants the FBI to hand over the records of its investigations into criminal behavior at Wall Street banks before the crash.

And she says she has grounds to do so after federal law enforcement officials gave extraordinary public access to their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server.

Eight years ago today, the financial markets seized up after the bankruptcy of the investment firm Lehman Bros. You’ve probably noticed that there have been no criminal prosecutions of bank executives in the wake of that crisis.

That is true despite the fact that the federal commission authorized to investigate the crisis referred nine individuals to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as executives at Fannie Mae, Citigroup, AIG and Merrill Lynch. None were charged.

Fourteen corporations were also referred for criminal prosecution. The end product was civil settlements, with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Citibank paying billions to settle claims that they lied about the quality of mortgages in bonds they packaged.

Normally, the discussion would end here. But this year, in an unusual, unrelated decision, FBI Director James Comey released interview notes and a summary of his agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail server, despite his agency’s decision not to charge her with any crime.

The revelations became a public spectacle but did not reveal any new information suggesting illegal behavior. Yet bank executives whose companies lied to customers have not had their “I do not recall” depositions put before the public.

It won’t happen of course. In fact, it shouldn’t because it’s wrong for the FBI to release those interviews and work papers in cases where the justice department doesn’t indict. We don’t do that because it’s a way to smear someone with a bunch of information from a police investigation that never gets challenged or litigated in a court of law the way it’s supposed to be. Even that lying Hillary Clinton was entitled to that but we know how that works.

Warren cleverly turns the tables on the FBI which both shows how they broke the rules for Clinton but played by the rules for Wall Street fat cats. it’s a nice little jiu-jitsu. Coming from Warren, a hero of the progressive left, it’s an especially clever turn.

Trump’s online deplorables

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

Trump’s online deplorables

by digby

If you want to understand the underground culture that lies beneath the Trump phenomenon read this piece by Jesse Singal about the alt-right. It is just … scary.

This is just a short excerpt of a longer explanatory piece:

You can’t understand this stuff without trying to grasp the Chanterculture. That’s the term coined by Joe Bernstein, the BuzzFeed reporter who explained late last year that 4chan, 8chan, and other anonymous and pseudonymous online communities traditionally peopled mostly (but by no means entirely) by frustrated young white men appear to be in the midst of a reactionary upheaval geared at fighting back against the culture of inclusion and diversity that has — in their view — infected mainstream life.

Specifically, they’ve reacted in a rather batshit manner: by acting as ostentatiously racist and hateful as possible. This has included everything from a ginned-up online campaign to “protest” John Boyega’s role in the new Star Wars trilogy, since he’s black, to a comic called “the Adventures of Christ Chan” in which the titular protagonist fights to keep her hometown of “New Bethlehem free of blacks, gays, atheists, and the fearsome Jew King. Her weapon is a katana; her insignia, the swastika.” The Chanterculture predates the rise of Trump by years (Gamergate was obviously a big moment for it), but suffice it to say that the emergence of Trump, a larger-than-life walking middle finger to political correctness, hit this subculture like a mainlined bottle of Mountain Dew — Trump is their hero, and like so much else in their online world they have rendered him in cartoonish, superhero hues.

Part of what makes the Chanterculture confusing and difficult for outsiders to penetrate is that, as Bernstein puts it, “It unites two equally irrepressible camps behind an ironclad belief in the duty to say hideous things: the threatened white men of the internet and the ‘I have no soul’ lulzsters.” That is, some proportion of Chanterculture warriors actually believe the things they say — some dedicated real-life internet Nazis like Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. weev, came up in chan culture — while others are just in it for the outrage. (Many channers find the idea of having an actual ideology — or expressing it online, at least — rather distasteful, with the only exception being instances in which cloaking one’s online persona in an offensive ideology can elicit lulz.)

The outrage-mongers are motivated in part by the broader, deeply nihilistic ethos of chan culture. Channers, as a group, and long before the Chanterculture emerged in its present form, have always been in it for the lulz, for the satisfaction that comes from fucking with people in general, and more specifically from riling people up into states of outrage by being, well, outrageous. Naturally, anonymous online weirdos hoping to spark outrage and one-up each other’s attempts to do so frequently dabble in, if not embrace, racist and anti-Semitic imagery and language, regardless of what’s going on in the broader culture wars. It’s not an accident that 4chan’s harassment campaigns have, according to the researcher Whitney Phillips, disproportionately targeted women and people of color.

But the point is that there’s more — or less — going on here than “just” racism and misogyny. Underlying chan culture is a fundamental hostility to earnestness and offense that plays out in how its members interact with each other and with outsiders. To wit: If you, a channer, post a meme in which Homer and Lisa Simpson are concentration camp guards about to execute Jewish prisoners, and I respond by pointing out that that’s fucked up, I’m the chump for getting upset. Nothing really matters to the average channer, at least not online. Feeling like stuff matters, in fact, is one of the original sins of “normies,” the people who use the internet but don’t really understand what it’s for (chaos and lulz) the way channers do. Normies, unlike channers — or the identity channers like to embrace — have normal lives and jobs and girlfriends and so on. They’re the boring mainstream. Normies don’t get it, and that’s why they’re so easily upset all the time. Triggering normies is a fundamental good in the chanverse.

And when channer and normie culture collide, normie culture indeed tends to spasm with offense. From the point of view of a normie, why would you post Holocaust imagery unless you actually hate Jews or want them to die? To which the channer responds internally, For the lulz. That is, for the sake of watching normies get outraged, and for recognition from their online buddies. And while channers loves to performatively bemoan the fact that their memes — many of which are legitimately clever and have nothing to do with racism or white supremacy — so often get co-opted by the mainstream internet, it isn’t hard to discern that really, channers love the attention, love the outsize influence they have on normie culture, whether the memes they are disseminating are celebrated or reviled. If they didn’t seek and relish this recognition, they wouldn’t spend so much time trying to seed outrage.

There’s much more to this and you should read it.

I occasionally run into people with this attitude in real life among my friend’s kids. It’s not pleasant. But online it’s everywhere and it’s an ethos that’s filtering into all corners of social media. It’s not surprising that a psycho like Trump would appeal to these people. He was a troll long before there was an alt right.

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There is Only One Candidate by tristero

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

There is Only One Candidate 

by tristero

According to the media I look at, it looks like all but one person has dropped out. Sure, there are a bunch of losers floating around, including someone who seems to be kind of sick, but only one candidate gets truly prominent news coverage, meaning headlines and pictures.

This happens more days than not. And in many more places than I have time to take screenshots of. And we wonder why the polls are are so alarming? No one else seems to be running.

And remember: It doesn’t matter what gets said. All publicity is good publicity.

 

“Something fishy about the whole thing”

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

“Something fishy about the whole thing”

 by digby

So Trump said today that Hillary Clinton started the birther rumor and that he was the one who ended it.  It’s all her fault and the issue has been settled. It’s all over.

For once the press doesn’t seem to be buying it and are pushing back hard on his lies even the part about Clinton which is unusual. But then he also made the fatal error of promising to take questions and then not doing it and his campaign pushed around a pool reporter and wanted the press to broadcast a live advertisement for his new hotel in DC without asking him any questions. They refused and they’re angry about what happened.  So they may stay on this issue today. (Remember, it’s all about them.)

Trump is a racist piece of work and we’ve known that for a very long time.  He was tweeting this stuff as recently as 2014. Slate captured them all. Here’s the most recent:

Here’s a compilation of the despicable lies he told on TV:

Apparently, they wanted to “get this out of the way” before the debates so it wouldn’t be brought up. I’m going to guess it’s going to be brought up.

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This is not what people meant by a “CEO President” #hellberunninghisbusinessoutofthewhitehouse

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

This is not what people meant by a “CEO President”


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s disqualifying business dealings for Salon today:

A tremendous amount of the coverage during this presidential campaign has centered around the issue of “transparency.” The problem is that this coverage has been tremendously lopsided resulting in a huge misunderstanding on the part of the public and this misunderstanding may put Donald Trump in the White House. The latest Quinnipiac poll asked who voter think is the more transparent, Clinton or Trump, and 54 percent believe Trump is the more transparent to only 37 percent for Clinton. The problem is it’s just not true.  Trump is the least transparent candidate in memory and the press knows knows it.  Why don’t the people?

This theme began with the partisan Benghazi investigations in congress from which  came the discovery of a trove of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the fact that she had used a personal email while she was Secretary of State. The press spent months pursuing that story without showing any evidence of unethical behavior but Clinton’s prickly relationship with the press over the years has led to a presumption of guilt for any possible appearance of impropriety. (This piece by Jonathan Allen explains how that works.)

And then there are the health records. Clinton released a letter from her doctor over a year ago in the same form as Romney and Obama laying out the basic outline of her health issues and attesting to the fact that she is fit for the presidency. Her cough and bout of pneumonia (and a calculated right wing whisper campaign) brought more accusations that she was refusing to be transparent. She released over 30 years of tax returns, more than any candidate in history. The Foundation has also released all of its financials to the public, Bill Clinton will give up his role and it will curtail all its charitable activities around the world if she wins. Now there are demands that it be shuttered completely so there can be no question of any conflict of interest anywhere.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has only released what the FEC requires to run for president. He’s the first nominee in half a century to refuse released no tax returns at all. (His son let the cat out of the bag this week, however, admitting that he didn’t plan to release them because people would ask too many questions. )  Trump’s own foundation seems to be some kind of elaborate con in which Trump used other people’s money to pass himself off as a philanthropist, taking a few little goodies for himself in the process. There’s also good reason to suspect he used it to launder a pay-off to Florida’s Attorney General for not investigating his other scam, Trump University (for which he’s being sued for fraud all over the country.) He’s refusing to release those records too.  He produced an absurd letter from his very strange doctor last fall and then this week went on the controversial Dr Oz’s daytime show and released a more professional letter from the same doctor attesting to his stamina and high levels of testosterone. 

But nothing compares to the epic conflicts with his privately held company The Trump Organization which, considering the endless yammering throughout the campaign about transparency, has received far less attention than it should have. Some business pages gave a cursory look at the potential complications and reported on how previous candidates handled the matter and running down the legal restrictions that apply. Wealthy candidates have generally divested themselves of any any businesses and converted their investments into index funds or cash or put them into a blind trust which is administered by a disinterested party.

Despite all the hours spent before cameras and taking questions there have been remarkably few about this issue. He was asked if he would put his assets in a blind trust at the Fox Business primary debate:

TRUMP: I would put it in a blind trust. Well, I don’t know if it’s a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it. If that’s a blind trust, I don’t know. But I would probably have my children run it with my executives and I wouldn’t ever be involved because I wouldn’t care about anything but our country, anything.

That is asking the people of the United States to have blind trust in him it’s not a blind trust.

This week Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek dropped a bombshell report that should have shaken the campaign to its core but has not seemed to penetrate the noise. He took a look at some of the companies Trump listed on his FEC report and connected enough dots to trace them to various deals around the world. What he found was a labyrinth of business agreements with politically connected oligarchs, tycoons and criminals some of which have been coming together even as he’s running for president. These conflicts are so complex and potentially dangerous that unless he completely shuts down the Trump organization he simply can’t be president.

There is no way to put it into a blind trust or unwind it, even if it were placed in the hand of total strangers because it’s an extremely lucrative branding business, in which Trump licenses his name to various global development projects. Without the Trump name, there is no company. But with a President Trump it’s a more valuable company than ever.  Nobody who has watched Trump can possibly believe that he doesn’t care about his name and his company and that it would have no influence on his decisions.

He’s planning to run the country as an oligarchy, much like the strongmen leaders he’s so fond of. He has provided virtually no details and the media have failed to properly follow up.  Once he’s in the White House there’s nothing they can do. There are no laws against a president doing this because it never occurred to anyone that one would be so bold as to do such a thing.

The New York Times’ Nicolas Kristoff wrote yesterday, “when the public sees Trump as more honest than Clinton something has gone wrong.”  It’s a media failure of potentially disastrous proportions.

Good Villains and Bad ones by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 16, 2016

Good Villains and Bad ones
by Tom Sullivan

The way truthiness has replaced truth in our culture has led us to this situation in which a denizen of Bizarro World has a shot at becoming president of the United States. Reality has become inverted, a negative image of the world that is hard on the eyes to read. It is not simply the nature of this political season, but the product of a concerted effort to break down what Al Gore called “inconvenient truths” into constituent bits and to reassemble them into more sellable ideological products. Or as Joni Mitchell sang,
to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Thus, people believe voter fraud is rampant, though rampant is nowhere to be found. On lists of potential threats to health and safety, people rank the quantifiably least likely as the most concerning. Hillary Clinton is believed an “inveterate liar,” while analysts’ data say the opposite.

“When the public sees Trump as more honest than Clinton,” writes Nicholas Kristof, “something has gone wrong.” He cites Politifact’s files on both Clinton and Trump and ponders how we have come to such straits. The media falling for simplistic narratives is one trap. :

President Gerald Ford had been a star football player, yet somehow we in the media developed a narrative of him as a klutz — so that every time he stumbled, a clip was on the evening news. Likewise, we in the media wrongly portrayed President Jimmy Carter as a bumbling lightweight, even as he tackled the toughest challenges, from recognizing China to returning the Panama Canal.

Then in 2000, we painted Al Gore as inauthentic and having a penchant for self-aggrandizing exaggerations, and the most memorable element of the presidential debates that year became not George W. Bush’s misstatements but Gore’s dramatic sighs.

Paul Krugman warned recently that Hillary Clinton this election is getting “Gored.” Screenwriter Craig Mazin responded in a tweetstorm it is because “the media sells you a narrative dressed as truth.”
Narratively, Clinton makes a Good Villain. Good Villains are smart. They have plans, friends in high places. They are competent. Trump is none of those things. He makes for a Bad Villain. He’s harder to write about.

Hollywood admits it is in the narrative business, Mazin writes. The press pretends it is not. Kristof insists that journalists have a duty to call out Bad Villains like Trump, even if people find it easier to roll with a good story than with the truth.

There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.

We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.

But you shouldn’t hold your breath. BTW, Bad Villains seem to run in the family:

Daily Show Exposes Pro-Gun Activist To C**ks Not Glocks Protest @spockosbrain

Published by Spocko on September 16, 2016

Daily Show Exposes Pro-Gun Activist To C**ks Not Glocks Protest 

 by Spocko

The Daily Show did a segment about the University of Texas students protesting the new law allowing students to carry concealed handguns on campus.

Correspondent Roy Wood Jr. talks to Jessica Jin, the creator of the protest. The goal was to strap dildos to their backpacks as a protest, but it turns out that it is illegal to openly brandish a dildo in Texas.

The students went ahead with the protest and the clip shows a number of creative uses of the dildos in the protest, including a nice juggling bit.

Animated juggling version

Jin says they are “fighting absurdity with absurdity.” Then she talks about how the gun nuts handled the absurdity of the protest–by issuing death threats to her. Wood describes the seriousness of the threats and shows some of the footage from the film that a pro-gun person released of someone murdering a dildo protester.

I wrote about that violent film here Gun Nuts Can’t Handle Cocks Not Glocks Protest and put together a clip with the graphic scenes the Daily Show included.

The clip opens with Woods talking to open carry gun nut C. J. Grisham. Grisham talks about the immaturity of college students, who used dildos to protest the state law that allows guns on campus, then describes the maturity of college students, who can now carry guns on campus. The piece ends with Woods giving Grisham a dildo while he talks about how uncomfortable it makes him. (Animated brandishing version)

I’m really glad that this story aired because it’s a way to keep the issue in the public eye without a mass shooting. In an article in the Dallas Morning News, one of the other protestors, Ann Lopez talks about the point of the protest. “The end game is to get this law repealed,” Lopez said. 

Ultimately, Lopez hopes people take Jin’s movement seriously. Jin hopes the silliness of her protests lends credence to the ongoing legislative and legal fight against campus carry. But that’s an uphill battle at the state Republican-dominated Legislature, which is likely to push to allow guns in more places next year.

That made me wonder. “What would it take to repeal campus carry in Texas?” I’ve reached out to a few people in the community to see if they have any ideas or how the efforts to repeal the laws are going.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the protest. It makes me want to dig into my closet and find my juggling balls.

For the record

Published by digby on September 16, 2016

For the record

by digby

For those of you who have lives here is a list of all the lies Trump told today:

He also released his clown doctor’s medical report and said that he plans to let his kids run his global business  interests when he’s in the white house and he won’t pay any attention to it so there’s no possible conflict of interest.  (And no , it’s none of our business what his private company does.)

Oh and Hillary isn’t transparent.

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