Month: September 2016

Remember who destroyed ACORN

by digby

This is just a little reminder of the racist Alt-right’s first big success. From Media Matters:

In September 2009, Breitbart launched his BigGovernment.com website with what remains his media empire’s biggest coup: The ACORN videos secretly filmed by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.

Breitbart played a central role in the months-long release of the tapes, hosting the videos on his websites and heavily promoting them. After the videos led Congress to vote to deny federal funding to ACORN, Breitbartbecame the toast of the conservative movement.

Meanwhile, editors at The New York Times and The Washington Post expressed regret for not giving the ACORN story sufficient attention, and they promised to take such stories more seriously in the future.

Thanks to the ACORN videos, Breitbart was riding high; without them, he would be nothing more than a third-tier, unhinged version of Tucker Carlson, providing an Internet forum for ridiculous smears, wild accusations, and trumped-up scandals.

But it soon became clear that those ACORN videos themselves were not an exception to Breitbart’s typical sludge. And so began Breitbart’s big downfall.

Breitbart repeatedly claimed that the videos depicted “illegal activity,” with O’Keefe and Giles likewiseaccusing ACORN of aiding in “criminal” actions. But investigations by California’s attorney general, Brooklyn’s district attorney, and an independent investigator hired by ACORN all determined that the videos showed no such illegal activity.

After Brooklyn prosecutors cleared ACORN, Breitbart embarrassingly backtracked on his previous accusation of ACORN criminality, tweeting that the “ACORN tapes were less about ‘criminality’ than facility with which employees all knew how to work system for any lowlife wanting govmnt $.”

The California and Brooklyn investigations also shined a spotlight on how Giles and O’Keefe had deceptively edited the tapes to “meet their agenda.” California Attorney General Jerry Brown said the videos created a “highly selective editing of reality.”

Meanwhile, a central pillar of the ACORN attacks — that O’Keefe “dressed as a pimp” during his meeting with ACORN officials — was unraveling. Breitbart eventually acknowledged that he himself had been unaware that O’Keefe had entered the offices dressed in slacks and a dress shirt, not the outlandish pimp costume O’Keefe wore in the tapes’ opening sequences.

In January, as his ACORN triumph was falling apart, O’Keefe was getting himself in even more trouble. He wasarrested by the FBI after he and his cohorts falsely represented themselves as employees of a phone company to gain access to Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office.

Numerous right-wing media figures backed away from O’Keefe following his arrest, while Breitbart — who had previously acknowledged that he paid O’Keefe “a fair salary” — denied any knowledge of his activities, thenaccused the U.S. attorney of having “frame[d]” O’Keefe “in media.” O’Keefe later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for his role in the incident.

Months later, O’Keefe’s bizarre antics would again tarnish his mentor’s credibility. In September, CNN reportedthat when investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau arrived for an interview with O’Keefe, an O’Keefe associate told her O’Keefe was planning to “seduce” and publicly humiliate her. According to the associate, O’Keefe was going to lure Boudreau aboard a boat he called his “pleasure palace,” where he would secretly record his attempts to “hit on” her.

Other right-wing media quickly condemned O’Keefe’s “disgusting,” “ugly,” “very creepy” “stunt.” Breitbart himself eventually demanded an “explanation” from O’Keefe, before giving O’Keefe space on his website todeclare victory in the fiasco and claim that the incident proved that it’s CNN, not himself, that “can’t be trusted.”

O’Keefe’s bizarre and sometimes illegal actions would not, of course, prevent Breitbart from allowing his Big websites to be used to push O’Keefe’s future videos. But that’s no surprise: Breitbart himself had already posted the most misleading smear video of them all.

In July, the NAACP released a resolution calling on Tea Party activists to repudiate the movement’s racist elements. In retaliation, Breitbart posted a 2 minute and 36 second clip that he claimed showed Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod telling a “racist tale” to an NAACP audience about her supposed past discrimination against a white farmer.

Breitbart’s report rocketed through the conservative blogosphere and Fox News and triggered the Agriculture Department’s demand that Sherrod resign.

But when Sherrod and the farmer she had supposedly discriminated against came forward to tell their stories and the NAACP released the full video of Sherrod’s comments, it became clear that the clip Breitbart posted had been ripped from context, and the smear completely dissolved.

In the days that followed, the magnitude of Breitbart’s complete lack of journalistic ethics became clear. He claimed he had received the Sherrod clip from an anonymous source and posted it without ever seeing the full video or attempting to contact Sherrod, later explaining that he “had to get it up when the media would pay attention to it.” He acknowledged that his clip had taken her out of context, but denied he had done anything worthy of an apology.

With his concocted smear on the rocks, Breitbart began hurling a variety of bizarre (and false) accusations in hopes of preserving his credibility — all while alternating between declaring himself “sympathetic” to Sherrod’s “plight” after the media supposedly “made it about her,” and continuing to suggest that Sherrod is a racist.

The scandal took on a new light after Dr. Kevin Pezzi was invited by Breitbart to repost two pieces accusing Sherrod of racism on BigGovernment.com. After we exposed Pezzi as a racist who claims to be responsible for “over 850 inventions” and schemes such as a “magic bullet” for cancer, a “robotic chef,” and sexual inventions like “penile enlargement techniques” and “ways to tighten the vagina,” Breitbart pulled Pezzi’s posts from his site and apologized.

Unimpressed with his wild claims, media of all stripes condemned Breitbart as untrustworthy and his actions as “a classic example of what is wrong with our national discourse.”

But three months later, ABC News forgot for a time what Politico’s Ben Smith called Breitbart’s “growing credibility problem.” Breitbart’s website reported — and Media Matters confirmed — that Breitbart would be providing analysis for the network during its election night coverage.

Amid widespread criticism, including from its own newsroom, ABC News announced that Breitbart would “not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage,” but rather would be “participating in an online-only discussion and debate” for ABCNews.com. After many recriminations, with Breitbart saying he had been promised broadcast time and ABC responding that he had “exaggerated the role he would play,” ABC pulled the plug, releasing a letter dropping him from its coverage of the 2010 elections.

Breitbart died suddenly and his site was taken over by Steve Bannon who pledged to carry on his mission and is now the CEO of the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

It is also worthwhile to recall how craven and cowardly the Democrats were in the face of that fraudulent con-job. They destroyed ACORN and Shirley Sherrod was immediately presumed guilty.

Maybe it’s time to give Clinton just a little bit of credit for calling this bullshit out.
The rest of the Democratic Party has been crawling on their bellies for these people for years.

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Dissing Real Americans 

by digby

Clinton out with a statement re “deplorables.” Says she shouldn’t have generalized about ‘half’ of Trump supporters. pic.twitter.com/rnQfNR5PrV

— Tamara Keith (@tamarakeithNPR) September 10, 2016

Recall this piece of mine from 2007

I first noticed the right’s successful use of sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90’s when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president’s extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely “upset” about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.

But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and titillating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.

In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day. Perhaps the best example during the Bush years would be the completely cynical and over-the-top reaction to Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial rally in 2002 in the last couple of weeks leading up to the election.

With the exception of the bizarre Jesse Ventura, those in attendance, including the Republicans, were non-plussed by the nature of the event at the time. It was not, as the chatterers insisted, a funeral, but rather more like an Irish wake for Wellstone supporters — a celebration of Wellstone’s life, which included, naturally, politics. (He died campaigning, after all.) But Vin Weber, one of the Republican party’s most sophisticated operatives, immediately saw the opportunity for a faux outrage fest that was more successful than even he could have ever dreamed.

By the time they were through, the Democrats were prostrating themselves at the feet of anyone who would listen, begging for forgiveness for something they didn’t do, just to stop the shrieking. The Republicans could barely keep the smirks off their faces as they sternly lectured the Democrats on how to properly honor the dead — the same Republicans who had relentlessly tortured poor Vince Foster’s family for years.

It’s an excellent technique and one they continue to employ with great success, most recently with the entirely fake Move-On and Pete Stark “controversies.” (The Democrats try their own versions but rarely achieve the kind of full blown hissy fit the Republicans can conjure with a mere blast fax to Drudge and their talk radio minions.)

But it’s about more than simple political distraction or savvy public relations. It’s actually a very well developed form of social control called Ritual Defamation (or Ritual Humiliation) as this well trafficked internet article defines it:

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

The article goes on to lay out several defining characteristics of ritual defamation such as “the method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.” Perhaps its most intriguing insight is this:

The power of ritual defamation lies entirely in its capacity to intimidate and terrorize. It embraces some elements of primitive superstitious belief, as in a “curse” or “hex.” It plays into the subconscious fear most people have of being abandoned or rejected by the tribe or by society and being cut off from social and psychological support systems.

In a political context this translates to a fear by liberal politicians that they will be rejected by the American people — and a subconscious dulling of passion and inspiration in the mistaken belief that they can spare themselves further humiliation if only they control their rhetoric. The social order these fearsome conservative rituals pretend to “protect,” however, are not those of the nation at large, but rather the conservative political establishment which is perhaps best exemplified by this famous article about how Washington perceived the Lewinsky scandal. The “scandal” is moved into the national conversation through the political media which has its own uses for such entertaining spectacles and expends a great deal of energy promoting these shaming exercises for commercial purposes.

The political cost to progressives for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton’s behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad — and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.

Ritual defamation and humiliation are designed to make the group feel contempt for the victim and over time it’s extremely hard to resist feeling it when the victims fail to stand up for themselves.

There is the possibility that the Republicans will overplay this particular gambit. Their exposure over the past few years for incompetence, immorality and corruption, both personal and institutional, makes them extremely imperfect messengers for sanctimony, faux or otherwise. But they are still effectively wielding the flag, (or at least the Democratic congress is allowing them to) and until liberals and progressives find a way to thwart this successful tactic, it will continue. At this point the conservatives have little else. 

I post this because I can see a lot of Democrats on television insisting that Clinton has made a grave mistake in calling out the racist haters in the Trump coalition. If they keep up the drumbeat it’s highly likely she will be forced to do more than issue that statement. The race is close and she cannot allow this truth-telling to dominate the campaign going forward.

If it fades over the next few days she will have dodged a bullet.  But the immediate response of the Democratic pundits and surrogates to Clinton telling a simple and obvious truth about many of Trump’s voters (and frankly, all of them, since they are willingly voting for an authoritarian white nationalist ) tells me that they are looking for a reason to distance themselves from anyone making the observation she made. The people Clinton was talking about are white conservatives, and no matter how racist and xenophobic they are, the political establishment still considers them to be the only Real Americans.

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The basket is full

by digby

Listen to this, and pass it on. #Trump  pic.twitter.com/mKR5YNDTir

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) September 10, 2016

This from yesterday:

In a windowless room in a swanky hotel half a block from the White House on Friday afternoon, three of the most visible leaders of the alt-right movement held a two-hour press conference to discuss their affection for Donald Trump and their hopes for a white homeland. The white supremacist alt-right movement has grown over the last eight years or so, incubated in racist forums like StormFront and meme-loving corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan. Its members generally share a disdain for political correctness, feminism, zionism, Jews in general, immigration (especially Hispanic and Muslim immigration), and anyone who criticizes them for holding these views.

And the alt-right won substantial mainstream media attention when Hillary Clinton gave a speech last month excoriating Donald Trump for some of his staffers’ ties to it. Clinton’s team zeroed in on the campaign’s new CEO, Steve Bannon, who formerly helmed a website that he himself once described as “the platform for the Alt-Right.” And prominent alt-right figures, including two of the men who helmed Friday’s press conference, told The Daily Beast last month that they were delighted Trump hired him.
Many reporters have been hesitant to give the alt-right much media attention. But since Clinton made their existence part of her anti-Trump campaign pitch, there’s significant public interest in who they are and what they believe. And they’re loving it.
The three alt-right leaders who gathered in D.C. this afternoon made two things very clear: They think white people are genetically predisposed to be more moral and intelligent than black people, and they do not want to share their envisioned utopian ethno-state with folks of the Jewish persuasion. There’s some disagreement in the alt-right on what they refer to as “the Jewish question.” But the big take-away was that Jews are suspicious.

From last February:

Donald Trump appears to have high levels of support among the nation’s intolerant population, according to a New York Times deep dive into polling data.

The Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Trump himself has never advocated for white supremacy, but some of his followers may. He has, however, called for a moratorium on Muslims entering the United States and called Mexican migrants “rapists.”

Exit polls from the Republican South Carolina primary reveal that 74% of voters in the state favored the Muslim ban—Trump won 41% of that group, according to the Times, which described Trump supporters as a “coalition of voters on people who are responsive to religious, social and racial intolerance.”

This from July:

The theme of the last two nights has been less “Make America Safe Again” or “Make America Work Again” and more “Lock Her Up.” But some of Trump’s most diehard supporters want to go further—they want her to be executed.

“Anyone that commits treason should be shot,” Al Baldasaro, an adviser to the Trump campaign for veterans issues, told The Daily Beast. “I believe Hillary Clinton committed treason. She put people in danger. When people take confidential material off a server, you’re sharing information with the enemy. That’s treason.”

Baldasaro was expanding on a violent call he made Tuesday, when he called for Clinton to be “put in the firing line” over her mishandling of classified emails. He made these remarks on the Jeff Kuhner Show, Buzzfeed reported.

From Think Progress:

Clinton said, “you know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites…He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.”

Clinton went on to describe another “basket” of Trump supporters: “people who feel the government has let them down, the economy let them down, nobody cares about them.” She stressed that “[t]hose are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

But whether Clinton is correct is a factual matter. Let’s look at the polling data. 

A survey taken this May found that about two-thirds of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim.

The same poll found 59 percent of Trump supporters believe Obama was not born in the United States.

These views are incorrect but are also racist and xenophobic. They are rooted in the idea that a black man with an atypical name could not be a U.S.-born Christian but must be a secret Muslim born in Africa.
So when Hillary Clinton says half of Trump supporters hold bigoted views, she may be understating the issue. 

Survey data shows that significant chunks of Trump supporters hold even more extreme beliefs. 

A national poll of 2000 people taken in January by YouGov found that one-third of Trump supporters believe the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, one of the most shamefully racist programs in American history, was a good idea. 

Clinton also mentioned homophobia. A PPP poll of South Carolina voters in February found that a substantial portion supported banning LGBT people from the United States.

In the same poll, 16 percent of Trump supporters admitted they believed that “whites are a superior race,” while an additional 14 percent said they were “not sure.”

The national YouGov poll from January found that 20 percent of Trump supporters disagreed with Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed southern slaves.

The polling data reveals that there is a substantial number of Trump supporters that are bigoted, intolerant, or worse.

Is percentage, as Clinton suggested, about 50 percent? That depends on how you define the various forms of bigotry within the Trump coalition. But, based on the polling, Clinton appears to be more likely to be downplaying the issue than overstating it.

I think Clinton should have put it differently:

Undecideds


by digby

Former Bush administration official Andy Card is undecided. He seems to think the choice between Clinton and Trump is like a choice between apples and oranges.

No, its a choice between an apple and a fetid, rotting, pile of dead fish. You may not like apples.  But the pile of compost will make you very, very sick.

This is not a choice.

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“Totally normal” shootings
by Tom Sullivan

Colt Anaconda 44 Magnum. Photo © by Jeff Dean via Creative Commons.

Charlie Pierce lamented Thursday that school shootings are so common now that there is a template for news coverage of them, if anyone even takes notice. For some time @KagroX (David Waldman, bless him) has been compiling under the hashtag #Gunfail the near-daily incidents of good guys with guns “Second Amendmenting” themselves or shooting others by accident.

Toddler shot by a hunter's stray bullet at 6-days-old is back in hospital https://t.co/yEGsR7pCYa via @WTAE #GunFAIL— David Waldman (@KagroX) September 10, 2016

In my EMT class long ago, the instructor observed how many Saturday nights one could see an ambulance and police cars outside one particular bar on the rough side of town where people went to drink carrying their guns to protect themselves from other drinkers carrying guns. It was a sad commentary on the pathetic nature of people defiant in exercising their right to defend themselves while drinking in a place where drinkers regularly get shot.

But it was eye-opening to read this confessional post by a former gun range worker at Mother Jones. It seems gun ranges are handy places where non-gun owners can rent guns for committing suicide:

Gun ranges often have policies that require anyone who rents a gun to be accompanied by a friend. It’s supposed to be a way to prevent suicides, but it doesn’t always work very well. Eventually the range started paying a service to come pick up the bodies and scrub everything. But before that happened, Christ, what was it? Bleach and kitty litter. I remember one time I had come in for a shift change and there was a pool of blood. We didn’t have any bleach but we did have some kitty litter. I remember using that to soak up the blood. And because we didn’t have the bleach, some of my members were kind enough to go across the street to the grocery store and buy some. In hindsight, we had no protocols, we had no protective suits. I could have exposed myself to blood-borne pathogens.

Another one was a father who was getting divorced. He was a pretty big guy. I felt the impact, and when I turned around there was pandemonium. Some of my members came rushing out the door yelling at me to call the police, and we did. The guy had sent suicidal text messages to his family. It made the paper because he was a beloved figure in the community, big into Little League. He was totally normal acting. And the next thing you know, you have 300 pounds hitting the floor.

In reporting on these incidents, tragic as they are, we accept that this is somehow normal. Novelist James Boice writes at the Daily Beast that this is because we live in a gun culture. Stories about violence focus on the shooters’ motivations, but rarely on how guns are so deeply embedded in our society that, well, people go to gun ranges to rent guns to commit suicide. It is so embedded that in fiction involving gun violence, there seemed to be no acknowledgement of gun culture itself, “the convergence of those living in fear, distrust, and faithlessness with those living in faith, trust and fearlessness.” So Boice wrote “The Shooting,” explaining:

What was interesting to me about gun culture from a fiction standpoint was its key mindset: fear, distrust, and faithlessness. Fear of other people, especially those who are different from you; distrust of authority; faithlessness toward the universe, which, gun culture believes, is indifferent to your existence, so it falls on you to protect yourself.

Gun culture provides such ripe material for literature. It’s darkly poetic: the difference between how we see ourselves—heroic—and how we actually are—tragic. People acting with one intention—self-defense, safety—but causing death, suffering. The Newtown killer’s mother, for example. Here was a tragic character right out of literature. Her child was mad, unreachable, but she saw him as simply unique, sensitive. She refused to get him help; instead, she indulged him. She liked guns, she bought the rhetoric the NRA had sold her about American values and self-defense, about an armed society being a polite society, about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns. When her son showed interest in guns as well, she was very happy. This was a wholesome thing they could finally bond over. She taught him how to shoot, seeing herself and him as good guys. She even bought him his own guns. She found meaning and connection in shooting guns with her son. It must have felt very good, to finally reach him, to be a part of something bigger with him, a culture of Americans exercising their sacrosanct constitutional rights—despite what she must have known deep down in her heart.

And hers was the body they found last, after all the kids. She was the first one he shot, before heading to the elementary school with those same guns they bonded over.

Although my EMT class was decades ago, war stories involving guns were a regular feature. During my one weekend in the Emergency Room, I had a patient who’d shot himself through the hand while cleaning a .22, a woman whose husband had not shot her, but split her head open by hitting her over the head with a shotgun, and a scary-looking dude with a dog collar around his neck who, during “primitive hunting season,” had shot a big, blue-black hole in his foot with a percussion cap revolver. His black tee shirt with the sleeves ripped out and a race hatred message spelled across his chest in big, white, block letters has stayed with me all these years. Just another weekend in the ER.

Oh, what the hell.

One war story the hospital had pieced together after the fact. A guy in a pickup truck had been drinking at one of those beer joints on the rough side of town. He’d met another gent and they decided to get in the truck and go have more drinks at another bar. On the way, they got to talking about something or other. Talking led to discussing. Discussing led to arguing. The driver decided he was just going to shoot the som’bitch in the passenger seat. So, holding the wheel with his right hand, he reached under the seat and pulled out his magnum with his left … which he aimed across his chest at his passenger and fired. The bullet tore away much of his own upper right arm and lodged in his passenger’s thigh. It was the passenger who drove him to the hospital and dropped him off, driving away with the shooter’s truck, his gun, and with a bullet still in his leg.

Freedom, baby.

Friday night soother

by digby

Just some random cuteness this week. Because you need it:

Trump Charity gives to character assassination organizations

by digby

People who know my blogging know that I’ve been writing about David Bossie and Citizens United for many, many years. He’s recently been hired by the Trump campaign as the deputy campaign manager after having run the “Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC” after Kellyann Conway left. I wrote about him two years ago for Salon.

Michael Isikoff has a very interesting new scoop:

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation gave $100,000 in 2014 to a conservative activist group that was used to help finance a federal lawsuit against New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman — the same public official who was suing the real estate mogul for fraud over the operations of Trump University.

The size and timing of the donation to the Citizens United Foundation, an arm of the sprawling conservative network run by David Bossie, who is now Trump’s deputy campaign manager, could raise fresh questions about whether Trump has used his tax-exempt charity to further political and personal causes.
[…]
A review of tax returns filed by the Trump Foundation shows that the 2014 donation to Bossie’s Citizens United Foundation was by far the largest it gave to any organization that year, substantially exceeding its contributions to more traditional charities, such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (which got $50,000), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ($25,000) and the Police Athletic League ($25,000).

It was also the first time the Citizens United Foundation had ever received funding from Trump’s charity.

While the donation to Bossie’s group has been mentioned in some media accounts, what has gone unnoticed until now is a major project of Citizens United at the time: a lawsuit it filed that year — since dismissed by a federal judge — against Schneiderman, New York’s Democratic attorney general, over his efforts to require nonprofit groups such as Citizens United to disclose the identity of their donors under seal to the New York State Charities Bureau.

Schneiderman by then had become a major political nemesis of Trump. In 2013, Schneiderman had filed his own lawsuit, still pending in New York state courts, accusing Trump of ripping off students at Trump University through fraudulent and deceptive trade practices, promising to teach them to “make a killing” in the real estate market but, according to the suit, delivering courses that had little if any value.

Trump, in response, launched a public relations and legal counterattack against Schneiderman. He accused him in a Twitter barrage of being a “lightweight hack” who brought the suit for political purposes. He filed a complaint against Schneiderman with the New York ethics agency (since dismissed) over donations the attorney general had solicited from his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, while his office was investigating Trump University. Trump, in a later interview, described Schneiderman as “a low-life, a sleazebag” who was part of a “cesspool of corruption” in New York politics.

The attack on Schneiderman’s tactics was soon reinforced in the lawsuit filed by Citizens United and the Citizens United Foundation on May 24, 2014, by the lawyer for both groups, Donald F. McGahn, a Republican campaign finance attorney and former Federal Election Commission chair who is now the chief counsel for the Trump presidential campaign. […]

Bossie charged — in a press release still displayed on the Citizens United Foundation website — that he brought the suit because the “First Amendment was under attack by the New York Attorney General.” In court documents, he asserted that major donors had pulled back from donating to his organizations because they feared their identities would become public if Citizens United submitted its list of donors to Schneiderman’s office and this had infringed on Citizens United’s constitutional right to criticize the New York attorney general. As an example, Bossie submitted a draft fundraising appeal that he said he was unable to send out, due to the fears expressed by his donors, that accused Schneiderman of being an “out of control tyrant.” (Another draft fundraising appeal submitted by Bossie in the lawsuit solicited funds for another film that would expose “the real, ruthless Hillary Clinton” and how she left “four Americans to die in Benghazi.”

David Bossie is a highly paid Republican character assassin. That’s what he does. He’s been doing it for 25 years. This money was not given to him to further any other cause because he has no other cause. His concern for the 1st Amendment is entirely in service of his primary goal which is to assassinate the characters of Democratic politicians.

It occurs to me that there’s something special about Trump University. Trump’s been sued thousands of times by many people over a variety of projects. This one seems to have really upset him and he pulled out all the stops to interfere from buying off Attorney Generals to rudely attacking one of the judges hearing the case. Why has this particular lawsuit gotten him so exercised?

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Mr Magoosolini vs Tweety

by digby

Crooks and Liars caught the action:

“Mr. Mayor. is the President of the United States legitimate or not?,” Matthews demanded. “Do you believe it? If you believe it, why doesn’t your candidate state it?”

Finally conquered, Giuliani muttered, “I believe it. He believes it. We all believe it.”

Matthews pounced. “He does? Are you speaking for him now? Are you speaking for Donald Trump tonight, on live television? Are you saying for him, I’m saying he’s about to buckle and say finally, that Barack Obama is a legitimate President of the United States?”

Giuliani sputtered and spit nonsense about how Trump “got him to finally produce the birth certificate,” before Chris Matthews had enough of that and shut it straight down, returning to the question of Trump’s birtherism.

“Can you commit to your candidate saying within the next 24 hours that President Obama’s a legitimate president? Can you commit for him that he will say that?,” he pressed.

“He has said it already. and the fact is –“

“No, he hasn’t,” Matthews interrupted. “You are wrong on the facts here, Mr. Mayor.”

After Giuliani once again tried to get back to claiming it was Hillary Clinton who started the rumor, and another back-and-forth with ridiculous claims on Giuliani’s part, Chris had finally had enough.

“Let me tell you, there’s no record at all of that. We checked this before you came on because one of our senior producers thought you might say this, There is absolutely no record ever of Hillary Clinton or anyone in her campaign ever saying that President Obama is not legitimate.”

“We are ending this now because we are spending a lot of time on it but I think it is important. you say this president is the legitimately elected President of the United States and you say your candidate agrees with you,” he hammered.

Concluding the interview, Matthews went on. “We are trying to pick the next president, not review the birth of the current president. Thank you, Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”

This is where Rudy lost it entirely, and said something he’s going to wish he hadn’t said.

“Let’s talk about the next president being someone who would be prosecuted if she wasn’t a Clinton.,” Rudy ranted.

Spoken like a true would-be strongman dictator.

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More than a protest

by digby

The Quinnipiac poll of four battleground states that came out yesterday has a bunch of interesting information. It’s going to be a real fight. But this is a little bit alarming:

You’ll notice that the 3rd party vote is pretty big there. Enough to make a difference.

I’m generally one who doesn’t get too worked up about people voting third party and often can see the utility of doing it if it sends a message to one of the two major parties.  Unfortunately, when a Democrats loses it tends not to send the message those people want to send. When Democrats lose to conservatives they assume people wanted more conservatism. When conservatives lose to liberal they assume people wanted more conservatism. Maybe that will change if it happens this time but one suspects that if the Democrats lose to an authoritarian strongman and a libertarian they might very well conclude that their more progressive platform didn’t get them very far.

Now I know that people will say it’s really because they nominated a bloodthirsty right wing warhawk and what people really wanted was a left wing pacifist, but that’s just not how people will look at it. Johnson is apparently taking more votes from Clinton (as is Stein but she’s not registering more than a usual Green) and one suspects that’s because of his positions on drug legalization and his “foreign policy.” But he’s strongly free trade and low tax and regulation and all kinds of stuff that greatly benefits the financial elites, which are the policies we can expect many members of the Democratic party to fall back on given the smallest excuse.

I’m not telling anyone how to vote.  Nobody listens to me anyway. But it’s worth thinking a little bit about how votes might be interpreted this time, regardless of who wins.  Needless to say (I hope!) if Trump wins we will have much bigger problems. But even if Clinton wins, if a majority votes for Trump and Johnson, there will be tremendous pressure to interpret that vote as a sign that the Democratic party’s  move to economic populism is not a winning platform.

I honestly have never wholly approved of any presidential candidate for whom I cast a ballot in my lifetime and Hillary Clinton is no different. These people are simply levers of power that the people hire  as a means of protecting our country and hopefully bettering our lives and the lives of the the citizens as a whole. They are tools — and I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. (The symbolic significance of Obama’s historic position as the first African American is one of those levers as would be her position as the first woman. It’s in the mix.)

So I don’t vote the way many of my friends do. I believe in “lesser evilism.” But if I were the kind of person who felt she couldn’t live with herself if she votes for someone who offends her, I think I could still vote for Clinton this time because of the closeness of the race and the nature of the opposition. And I could justify it beyond that by recognizing that by voting for her I’m voting for that platform — an affirmative gesture for the Democrat party’s move to the left. I don’t want the party to backslide on the slow, inadequate but steady progress its made over the past decade and a half to be a more progressive party and I worry a great deal about the message that’s will be received by a substantial 3rd party vote even if she wins with a plurality. You can be sure Republicans will make that case.

I realize that I’m considered a useless hack on this subject so take it for what it’s worth. But I honestly do care about progressive policies and and a sane national security and civil liberties posture. I’m just trying to think through how this is all going to come out in the wash.

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Trump’s Iraq war web of lies

by digby

Daniel Dale at the Toronto Star took Trump to task on his Iraq lies from the first 15 minutes of his speech yesterday before a bunch of schoolchildren in Cleveland:

Claim #1: I always opposed the war

Quote: “Iraq is one of the biggest differences in this race. I opposed going in. And I did oppose it. Despite the media saying ‘no, yes, no,’ I opposed going in.”

Reality: Trump expressed support for the war on Howard Stern’s radio show in September 2002, as Buzzfeed first reported in February.

Claim #2: I opposed the war after that Stern interview

Quote: “I was opposed to the war from the beginning, long after my interview with Howard Stern. Three months before the Iraq war started, I said in an interview with Neil Cavuto that perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it yet.”

Reality: Trump’s position on the war was far from clear in the Cavuto interview; he certainly did not express clear opposition. A longer version of his quote: “Well, he (George W. Bush) has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”

Claim #3: The Stern interview is irrelevant to the question of my pre-war stance because it was . . . before the war

Quote: “Those other statements were before the war even started.”

Claim #4: I didn’t really tell Stern I supported the war

Quote: “It was the first time anybody ever asked me about Iraq. He said, and I said, ‘Ah, I don’t know.’ You know, it was very, very (sic).”

Reality: This explanation is nearly indecipherable, but it is not true that Trump told Stern, “I don’t know.” When Stern asked if he supported the war, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Claim #5: I was unimportant at the time of the Stern interview

Quote: “Frankly nobody really cared too much about what I said. I — doing business. I don’t even know why I was asked the question. I guess because I was asked the question. That’s — who knows.”

Claim #6: I did not have access to good information at the time

Quote: “Here’s the bottom line. I was a private citizen. I had no access to briefings or great intelligence surveys that she did. I had no access to anything.”

Claim #7: I made anti-war comments that took precedence over the comment to Stern

Quote: “That was superseded, because, before the war, much closer to the war, I gave statements that we shouldn’t go in.”

Reality: There is no evidence that he did so.

Claim #8:I have been a long-term opponent of foreign wars

Quote: “Had I been in Congress at the time of the invasion, I would have cast a vote in opposition. For years, I’ve been a critic of this kind of reckless foreign invasions, and, look, let’s face it, interventions.”

Reality: Trump, a Republican, has supported numerous recent foreign interventions he now criticizes opponent Hillary Clinton for supporting. For example, he also supported the attack on Libya and the ouster of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Claim #9: I criticized the war soon after it started

Quote: “On March 25 of 2003, just after the war had started, just days after, just a little while after, I was quoted as saying ‘the war is a mess.’ And yet more evidence that I had opposed the war from the start.”

Reality: He made the “mess” remark in passing to the Washington Post at an Academy Awards after-party. But he still did not clearly say that he opposed the war — and just days before, he had told Cavuto that the war looked like “a tremendous success from a military standpoint,” as Buzzfeed also reported in February.

Claim #9, Part 2: I criticized the war soon after it started, cont.

Quote: “Then in August of 2004, very early in the conflict, extremely early in the conflict, right at the beginning, I made a detailed statement in an interview to Esquire magazine. So right at the beginning.”

Reality: Trump did criticize the war in the Esquire interview. But this was 17 months after the invasion, not “right at the beginning,” as Esquire says in an editor’s note now attached to the article.

And then there’s this, courtesy of a twitter user Ryan Goodman. It’s a passage from Trump’s 2000 book he’s always touting as a sign of his prescience for saying Osama bin Laden was a threat (which everybody knew at the time, by the way.)

Here’s what he said about Iraq: