Month: September 2016

by digby

Louie Gohmert:

Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas opened his remarks at the Values Voter Summit today by facetiously apologizing for having said that Hillary Clinton’s “brain is in a blender” because it is unchristian to mock those with “special needs.” 

“You don’t make fun of people who are impaired, have special needs,” Gohmert said, “and whether you like her or not, Hillary Clinton has made clear she is mentally impaired and this is not somebody you should be making fun of.” 

“We need to be praying for Hillary Clinton,” he continued. “There’s special needs there, there’s mental impairment … That was not a proper thing to say because, again, I’m making fun of the mentally impaired and that’s not right.”

Like most people with the emotional maturity of 6th graders (such as Donald Trump when he called Ted Cruz a pussy) he will defend himself by saying that he didn’t actually say she’s brain damaged and in fact was admonishing people who do. And PeeWee Herman would be proud.

Think about the fact that it was Louie Gohmert saying this. This guy:

Earlier today, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, put a new spin on his “gay island” story, arguing on the House floor that the push for LGBT rights is wrong because we would never choose to send gay couples or gay animals into space to start a new colony like in the Matt Damon movie “The Martian.” 

He said that if lawmakers had to decide “whether humanity would go forward or not” in case of an imminent asteroid collision by putting people in a 

“space ship that can go, as Matt Damon did in the movie, plant a colony somewhere, we can have humans survive this terrible disaster about to befall, if you could decide what 40 people you put on the spacecraft that would save humanity, how many of those would be same-sex couples?  

You’re wanting to save humankind for posterity, basically a modern-day Noah, you have that ability to be a modern day Noah, you can preserve life. How many same-sex couples would you take from the animal kingdom and from humans to put on a spacecraft to perpetuate humanity and the wildlife kingdom?” 

But due to the attacks on “natural order” and religious freedom, Gohmert said, “we don’t have much longer to go.”
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Many conservative intellectuals like those of the National Review and the Weekly Standard as well nationally known columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer said no, and the #NeverTrump movement was born. They tried to figure out a way to thwart him but ultimately came up short. The electoral structure designed to help the frontrunner blew back on the party establishment and it turned out that the conservative grassroots cared nothing about their carefully nurtured ideology and instead were enthralled with the racist dogwhistling and militant nationalism that had been the foundational motivators of the movement.  The dissenters will, in the end, have their pride,  and some, like Cruz and Kasich will have a chance to try to rebuild from the rubble.

But there was another group of conservatives  Donald Trump was able to cajole into believing they would have a say in his campaign and beyond. These were political professionals who had convinced themselves that Trump could be “managed” and would actually be a better choice than Ted Cruz, a fanatic who refused to be a team player.

The National Review reported this from the GOP retreat:

The developing feeling among House Republicans? Donald Trump is preferable to Ted Cruz. “If you look at Trump’s actual policies, they’re pretty thin. There’s not a lot of meat there,” says one Republican member in Ryan’s inner circle, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the two front-runners as leadership has carefully avoided doing all week. 

If Trump were to get the nomination, he would “be looking to answer the question: ‘Where’s the beef?’ And we will have that for him,” says the member. 

The member says he believes that, when it comes down to it, “almost all of the candidates would subscribe to” the conservative agenda he and the rest of leadership are hoping to advance.

Elder statesman Bob Dole came out early with his view that Trump was preferable because nobody could stand Ted Cruz and  Trump could “probably work with Congress, because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.”

It was, in short, assumed by many in the professional side of the political establishment that Trump was a man you could do business with.  And so they persuaded the Trump campaign to open a policy shop to hammer out papers and campaign documents that would reassure conservatives that Trump wasn’t going too far off the reservation. As conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote yesterday, this was an important development in the campaign:

The act of doing so reassured conservatives. Some conservatives actually decided it was safe to head toward Trump, even though Cruz was still in the race. They did so largely because Trump appeared to be taking policy seriously and was hiring conservatives.

Well, that hasn’t worked out so well. The Washington Post reported yesterday that the policy shop is pretty well defunct:

Since April, advisers never named in campaign press releases have been working in an Alexandria-based office, writing policy memos, organizing briefings, managing surrogates and placing op-eds. They put in long hours before and during the Republican National Convention to help the campaign look like a professional operation. But in August, shortly after the convention, most of the policy shop’s most active staffers quit. Although they signed non-disclosure agreements, several of them told me on background that the Trump policy effort has been a mess from start to finish.

According to the article, people have been working feverishly to put together a serious policy agenda and gather various advisers on specific topics. They announced national security and economic advisory teams to great fanfare in the press but the people on them have barely had any contact with the campaign and Trump is certainly not listening to them, if he even knows who they are. Everything comes out of Trump Tower.

The campaign reportedly doesn’t care about what this staff has produced because ever since Trump clinched the nomination they felt there wasn’t any need for it. In other words, it was always just a pander to conservatives to win the primary. For the general Trump makes up his own “policies” (if you want to call them that.) Seeing that they were doing nothing useful most of the group decided to walk.

But that’s not the only reason most of the staff has quit. It turns out that Trump made them sign non-disclosure agreements but didn’t bother to pay them. Apparently, there were promises of pay made by the two Senate staffers who run the operation, Rick Dearborn from Senator Jeff Sessions’ office and John Mashburn from Senator Thom Tillis’ office, that never panned out. Dearborn reportedly tried very hard to get New York to approve a budget to pay staff but just couldn’t get it done.

These folks are not alone. Last week Huffington Post reported that Trump hasn’t paid his top staffers either. And some of them are resigning as well.

But frankly, these people only have themselves to blame. Anyone who reads the newspapers should know by now that Trump routinely doesn’t pay people who work for him. He’s been sued literally thousands of times for non-payment. And nobody should gripe that he’s reimbursing his own children tens of thousands of dollars in campaign expenses either.  In every business venture, large and small, Trump gets his “expenses” off the top.

Anyone who works for Donald Trump and doesn’t get her money up-front is a fool.

Block the vote!
by Tom Sullivan

The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, Dallas Woodhouse, last month urged Republican Board of Elections appointees across the state’s 100 counties to “make party line changes to early voting” to limit early voting sites and hours. In its July ruling that threw out much of the the state’s massive voter suppression law, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals restored a week of early voting the law cut from the fall schedule. Local election plans had to be reworked, and nearly a third of county boards did just what Woodhouse asked. (With a Republican in the governor’s mansion, 3-member county boards across the state are weighted 2-1 Republican to Democrat.) Another NCGOP official urged Republican county board members to provide only a single voting site for the extra week and the minimum hours allowed by law.

The state Board of Elections, however, rules on the plans where county boards split. In a marathon session yesterday, the state board reigned in some of the locals:

RALEIGH – Noting the watchful eye of a federal court, the State Board of Elections voted to restore Sunday early voting hours in several counties that had offered the option – popular among African-American voters – in 2012.

The board also voted to add early voting hours in counties where schedules had been cut. But in party line votes, the board’s Republican majority rejected efforts to add Sunday voting in counties that hadn’t previously offered it.

Some of the decisions put members of the board’s Republican majority at odds with their party’s leaders, who had lobbied extensively for fewer early voting opportunities and the elimination of Sunday voting. The board was charged with settling disputed early voting schedules in 33 counties where the local board vote wasn’t unanimous.

Wake County (Raleigh) contains ten percent of the registered voters in the state. During the same seven-day time period in 2012, Democrats told the state board, more than 72,000 Wake County voters cast early ballots. The local board had approved a single voting site for the extra week of voting, the minimum allowed. The state board expanded that to nine, plus an extra Sunday of voting. Mecklenburg County (Charlotte, also ten percent of the state’s registered voters) had approved six sites for the additional week. The state board expanded that to ten.

The state board made its decisions while looking over its shoulders at the federal court:

“I think today what you witnessed was, to a pretty good extent, a bipartisan board doing its best to interpret and make a good faith effort to comply with the law and especially the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals,” Democratic state board member Joshua Malcolm said after the meeting had concluded.

We are expecting 80 percent turnout where I live. It is going to be a wild ride.

QOTD: Jonathan Chait

by digby

This is what’s been driving me mad for months and months:

“The harrowing reality is that the only thing standing between handing control of the Executive branch to a wildly ignorant, racist demagogue with a fondness for the authoritarian world is the second-most-unpopular presidential nominee in the history of modern polling. (The most-unpopular candidate is Donald Trump, though the gap between the two is narrowing.) That Clinton is viewed as the near-equivalent of Trump, a grotesque buffoon who has committed what would normally be considered a campaign-defining gaffe at a rate of approximately once a day for 15 months, required the convergence of several factors.”

Read the rest. Sigh.

In case you think this isn’t a problem, check this out:

New Battleground Polls: Clinton’s Lead Shrinks Or Disappears In 4 Swing States

Feeding the fever swamps 

by digby

Via Media Matters:

Thurston Douchebag III has a big future in GOP politics. And look who’s linking all this garbage:

Drudge still rules their world.

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Does anyone know what White House delegation Trump is talking about?

by digby

There have been hours of discussion today about Trump lying about being against the Iraq war. There’s nothing on the record about him being critical of it until long after it started. Fact checkers have declared him pants on fire many times over this.

But he said something in passing last night that deserves a deeper look:

Lauer: But you are prepared? 

Trump: Totally prepared, remember this. I have found this subject and these subjects of interest all of my life, Matt, this hasn’t been only the last 14 months. I’ve found these subjects of tremendous interest. That’s why they were asking me about Iraq 14 years ago. They were asking me these questions. They don’t ask business people these questions. 

Who was asking him about Iraq 14 years ago?  What was he talking about. If Lauer were a little more on the ball he might have followed up.

But in writing my Salon piece for this morning, I came across the following quotes from one of his rallies and apparently it isn’t the only time he’s said this:

Trump: So, Iran is taking over Iraq, second largest oil reserves in the world, Iran is taking over Iraq, so when it happened with Iraq, I said we shouldn’t go in.

And a delegation came to see me from the White House, because I get, for whatever reason, without PR or without anything, but for whatever reason, I get a disproportionate amount of publicity. (Turns to audience behind him) Do you agree? (applause, screams of “Yeah!”) Look at them, they’re still standing! Will you sit down? You people are great. Sit down. You must like me to be standing…Look how handsome. He’s better looking than his father.

So what happens is, you look at Iraq, and I said don’t do it. So a delegation comes to see me from the White House that they’d like to have me … and I said you’re making a mistake, you’re going to destabilize the whole middle east.

Cuz you had Iran and Iraq who always fight. Years, I read about wars. Iran goes ten feet this way then ten feet that way. They were the same. They were like twins! Same strength! Saddam Hussein would use gas, then they’d use gas and we’d read about it and I said yeah, but if you do that you’ll destabilize because you’re going to knock the hell out of one and the other one will take over. 

I mean you don’t have to be a total genius to figure this out even though I am a genius, ok?  So they go in they knock it out, I was very vocal about it, I said you’re making a mistake. And, by the way, I’m more militaristic than anybody in this room. Just so you understand. I’m going to make the military so strong, so powerful … (Cheers, clapping)

Trump says the White House sent a delegation to see him and ask him whether they should invade Iraq and he told them no because well … you saw it.

It seems to me that someone should be able to verify if this delegation really existed. We know Trump is delusional — he says he personally saw Muslims jumping up and down cheering on 9/11 among hundreds of other completely made up events. This is likely another one. He said this just today:

Frankly, nobody really cared too much about what I said. I— doing business. I don’t even know why I was asked the questions. I guess because I was asked the questions. That’s, who knows? 

Who asked him for an opinion about Iraq at the time??? Can’t some journalist at least ask him for some specifics on this question?

Here’s the youtube of the rally where he said a White House delegation came to him.  The remarks are about 38 minutes in.

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Headline o’ the day

by digby

You won’t believe it. So after two press conferences on the plane in which she was asked about her emails and a “commander in chief” forum last night in which 35% of her time was spent answering repeated questions about her emails from the moderator and the audience, this morning she held another press conference on the airport tarmac. And here’s the headline from The Hill:

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Fasten your seatbelts

by digby

This says something

In 2015, more Republicans told the Public Religion Research Institute that “there is a lot of discrimination” against white men than said “there is a lot of discrimination” against women. This spring, 42 percent of Americans said they believed the United States has become “too soft and feminine.” Imagine how these already unnerved Americans will react once there’s a female president. Forty-two percent isn’t enough to win the presidency. But it’s enough to create a lot of political and cultural turmoil.

I’m going to post this long excerpt of Peter Beinert new piece on Clinton but I want you to click over to the original to read the whole thing if you find this sort of thing interesting. I’m glad to see a man write this piece because when women write this sort of thing they have to put up with some truly scarring stuff on social media. (I have had a very bad week over this one I wrote for Salon on Tuesday for instance. It got 26 thousand Facebook shares and a whole lot of unpleasant misogynistic blow back.) I know may of you do not want to hear about this and I get it. But we’re not just talking about one person. It’s illustrative of the way the world sees half the population.

Except for her gender, Hillary Clinton is a highly conventional presidential candidate. She’s been in public life for decades. Her rhetoric is carefully calibrated. She tailors her views to reflect the mainstream within her party.

The reaction to her candidacy, however, has been unconventional. The percentage of Americans who hold a “strongly unfavorable” view of her substantially exceeds the percentage for any other Democratic nominee since 1980, when pollsters began asking the question. Antipathy to her among white men is even more unprecedented. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white men hold a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton. That’s a whopping 20 points higher than the percentage who viewed Barack Obama very unfavorably in 2012, 32 points higher than the percentage who viewed Obama very unfavorably in 2008, and 28 points higher than the percentage who viewed John Kerry very unfavorably in 2004.

At the Republican National Convention, this fervent hostility was hard to miss. Inside the hall, delegates repeatedly broke into chants of “Lock her up.” Outside the hall, vendors sold campaign paraphernalia. As I walked around, I recorded the merchandise on display. Here’s a sampling:

Black pin reading don’t be a pussy. vote for trump in 2016. Black-and-red pin reading trump 2016: finally someone with balls. White T-shirt reading trump that bitch. White T‑shirt reading hillary sucks but not like monica. Red pin reading life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one. White pin depicting a boy urinating on the word Hillary. Black T-shirt depicting Trump as a biker and Clinton falling off the motorcycle’s back alongside the words if you can read this, the bitch fell off. Black T-shirt depicting Trump as a boxer having just knocked Clinton to the floor of the ring, where she lies faceup in a clingy tank top. White pin advertising kfc hillary special. 2 fat thighs. 2 small breasts … left wing.

Standard commentary about Clinton’s candidacy—which focuses on her email server, the Benghazi attack, her oratorical deficiencies, her struggles with “authenticity”—doesn’t explain the intensity of this opposition. But the academic literature about how men respond to women who assume traditionally male roles does. And it is highly disturbing.

Over the past few years, political scientists have suggested that, counterintuitively, Barack Obama’s election may have led to greater acceptance by whites of racist rhetoric. Something similar is now happening with gender. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is sparking the kind of sexist backlash that decades of research would predict. If she becomes president, that backlash could convulse American politics for years to come.

A troubling omen comes from Australia and Brazil, where female leaders have suffered a brutal backlash.
To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social failures like “losing a job.” When asked how someone might lose her womanhood, by contrast, they mostly came up with physical examples like “a sex-change operation” or “having a hysterectomy.”

Among the emasculations men most fear is subordination to women. (Some women who prize traditional gender roles find male subordination threatening too.) This fear isn’t wholly irrational. A 2011 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that men who have female supervisors earn less, and enjoy less prestige, than men whose bosses are male.

Given the anxieties that powerful women provoke, it’s not surprising that both men and women judge them more harshly than they judge powerful men. A 2010 study by Victoria L. Brescoll and Tyler G. Okimoto found that people’s views of a fictional male state senator did not change when they were told he was ambitious. When told that a fictional female state senator was ambitious, however, men and women alike “experienced feelings of moral outrage,” such as contempt, anger, and disgust.

But while both men and women are often critical of powerful women, men are more likely to react aggressively. A study published last year by researchers at Northwestern, Washington State, and Bocconi University, in Italy, reported that men negotiating with a female hiring manager demanded more money than those negotiating with a male one. Another recent study, this one by University of South Florida researchers, showed that after men had their gender identity threatened, they placed riskier bets. Feeling subordinate to women may also lead men to act recklessly in their private lives. According to the University of Connecticut’s Christin Munsch, men who are economically dependent on their wives are more likely than others to be unfaithful.

It gets worse. In a study of several hundred people, Jennifer Berdahl of the University of British Columbia found that women who “deviated from traditional gender roles—by occupying a ‘man’s’ job or having a ‘masculine’ personality” were disproportionately targeted for sexual harassment.

But sexual harassment isn’t more likely only when women violate traditional gender roles. It’s also more likely when men consider those roles sacrosanct. In another study, Italian researchers arranged for male students to collaborate online with a fictitious man and one of two fictitious women. One of the women said she wanted to become a bank manager “even though it takes so much time away from family” and that she had joined “a union that defends women’s rights.” The second woman said she wanted to be a teacher, which she considered “the ideal job for a woman because it allows you to have sufficient time for family and children.” Having told the subjects that they were participating in a test of visual memory, the researchers gave them an assortment of images to exchange, some of which were pornographic. In each group, the fictitious male interlocutor proceeded to send pornographic images to the fictitous female; the researchers studied which of the male students would do the same, and to which of the women. They reported that the feminist interlocutor received the most pornography, and that male students who endorsed traditional gender roles were most likely to send it.

Please read on. This isn’t all in our heads. This happens every day. And if Clinton manages to win, not a sure thing at all, it won’t magically disappear any more than racism disappeared with Barack Obama.

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“Angry white men have started to reproduce asexually”

by digby

Colbert talks about the “presidential look.”

“I think Trump is pointing out that you can’t spell the word presidential without the word penis.”

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Donald Trump, genius


by digby

I wrote a little bit about Trump’s performance last night for Salon:

This week, in anticipation of last night’s “Commander in Chief” town hall forum on NBC the two presidential candidates engaged in a war of words over their respective qualifications. On Tuesday, Clinton said that Trump was “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president.” Trump responded on Wednesday morning with a speech in Philadelphia by declaring Clinton “trigger happy and very unstable, whether we like it or not.”

The Clinton campaign responded with yet another ad featuring Trump’s own words this time disparaging veterans and their families. The anti-Trump Priorities USA SuperPAC went even further with a new spot that shows Trump saying “I love war.”   Trump’s campaign manager KellyAnne Conway responded by saying the bizarre comment was taken out of context but the full quote, which he gave last November at a wild Ft Dodge Iowa rally (the same one where he called Ben Carson a child molester) is even worse than what it sounds like in the ad:

“I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.”

Trump has never been in the service, although he has said  “I always felt I was in the military” because of his education at a military-themed boarding school and believes that he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

That comment “I’m good at war” says everything about Trump as he demonstrated last night at the town hall forum that he is indeed unfit to be president of the United States. There were many aspects of his performance that had people gasping at the mere idea of this man in a position of real power, not the least of which was his comment that President Obama compares unfavorably to Russian president Vladimir Putin who “has an 85 percent approval rating” and is “very much a leader” because he has “strong control over his country.”

But it was around the question of ISIS and the middle east where he really showed his true colors. He was upset that Hillary Clinton had earlier claimed he lied when he said he had been against the Iraq war and defended himself by pointing to an Esquire Magazine article from 2004 — which doesn’t really help since the war began in the spring of 2003. The fact checkers have declared his pants are on fire numerous times on this but he just keeps saying it.

Last night he also made a passing reference to someone “asking him about Iraq” 14 years ago, and you may be surprised to learn that at that same crazy Iowa rally he told the crowd that a delegation from the White House came to him to ask his opinion and he advised them not to go in because it would destabilize the region. To the best of my knowledge this claim has never been validated. It’s possible, of course, this was the Bush administration. But lets just say that it’s as likely as Trump witnessing thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheering after 9/11.

He said he told them:

You’ll knock the hell out of one and the other one is going to come and take over the other. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out even though I am a genius…

And then he added:

And by the way, I’m more militaristic than anybody in this room. I’m going to make our military so strong, so powerful.

Everyone seems to think that Trump has “pivoted” from his position that he could not reveal his plan to defeat ISIS to his announcement today that he would give the generals 30 days from the inauguration to come up with one. But that’s wrong. Trump’s secret plan is not so secret. At that same rally last fall, Trump spoke about it plainly:

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me. … I would bomb the shit out of ‘em. … I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the — I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys how good they are? The great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker brand new. It’ll be beautiful. And I’d bring it, and I’d take the oil.”

At the forum he reiterated this belief that America should “take the oil” because he thinks this will make ISIS surrender and has taken to saying “to the victor goes the spoils” apparently unaware that this is a considered a war crime. He has said in the past that it would require a permanent force to protect the oil but that it wouldn’t take much.

Trump said that under Obama and Clinton’s leadership “the generals have been reduced to rubble” and “reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country.” He sounded as if he planned to fire some of them which isn’t actually something the president can do. As he is wont to do he brought up his favorite, General General Patton, saying that he’s “spinning in his grave” over the state of affairs in the military. The good news is that he didn’t bring up General Black Jack Pershing and endorse mass executions with bullets dipped in pigs blood as he often does on the trail. He maintained that he still believes in his own plan for Iraq and says he won’t necessarily follow the generals’ advice.

So, the GOP nominee for Commander in Chief tells people that he’s “good at war,” “has had a lot of wars of his own” and “loves war in a certain way” despite never having been in the military. He also believes he’s a “genius” who is “more militaristic” than anyone in the room. His plan to defeat ISIS is to blow up the Iraqi oil wells and have Exxon come in and rebuild them. And he believes that half the military leadership are fools and cites Vladimir Putin’s “approval rating” as evidence of superior leadership.

But there’s nothing delusional about any of that so there’s no need to concern yourselves that the polls are tightening.  If he happens to pull this off, what could go wrong?