Month: September 2016

Repeat, repeat and repeat and it’s all people hear

by digby

The Fix:

Email, email, email. Plus other words associated with Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time at the State Department: FBI, interview and release (referring to the release of the FBI’s interview with Clinton. Then, more generically, lie and scandal — words tied to nothing in particular.

There are probably a few things at play here. The first is that Clinton’s campaign schedule was fairly light after the conventions, focused on fundraising for the final push. That contributed to most of the news being generated about and not by the campaign, meaning that updates on the never-ending email saga may actually have been all people heard.

Second, we’ve seen much more negative reactions about Clinton fairly consistently in similar polling. Because Republicans often use similar words to describe her — liar, dishonest, etc. — those words can quickly rise to the surface in surveys like this.

Third, there aren’t really many points of focus that Clinton’s critics seize upon. The email server, certainly, and her relationship with the Clinton Foundation, which makes a few appearances. But generally, Clinton isn’t prone to the sorts of wild shifts in media attention that Trump laments and enjoys at varying moments.

Oh my God. She’s been turned into a lying criminal because there are so few things to criticize her about that the media had no choice but to report the few things the Republicans were saying on a loop.

Here’s what people heard about Trump:

Each week, something new. Sometimes it’s bad — family and Muslim after the Democratic convention as he battled the Khans — and often it’s positive. His trip to Mexico and discussion of immigration made a splash, as did his suggestion that President Obama founded the Islamic State, a comment that came the same week as his comments about Hillary Clinton and “Second Amendment people.” (The word bear in the most recent week also presumably deals with the right to bear arms, and Trump’s latest comments about Clinton in that regard.)

What people hear about Trump is all over the place, with his various controversial comments quickly rising and falling. Underneath, fairly positive themes: speech and president.

You’ll notice that the media has nothing to do with any of this. So that’s good.

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Who will reform U.S. policing?
by Tom Sullivan

Responding to the video of police in Tulsa shooting and killing unarmed, black motorist, Terrence Crutcher, a former reporter I know wrote yesterday on Facebook:

I will never, ever forget the words of an African-American man I was interviewing a few months ago as he talked about being stopped for a traffic infraction with his wife in the car.

The officer approached the car he said, and he could see in his mirror that he had unlatched his holster and had his hand on his gun. My subject knew this probably was just procedure, but it affected him — terrified him.

He started weeping. “Please don’t kill me, sir, please don’t kill me,” he repeated, sobbing uncontrollably.
I knew then and I still say he was not over-reacting. He had every right to be terrified, and this is why I thank Colin Kaepernick for his courage.

That was yesterday morning. Last night, another fatal police shooting of a black man. This one in Charlotte:

The shooting took place Tuesday afternoon after officers arrived at an apartment complex in the city of Charlotte at about 4 p.m., searching for a suspect who had an outstanding warrant, a police statement said.

Police said the man fatally shot, identified as Keith Lamont Scott, was not the suspect officers were searching for, but had exited from a vehicle with a firearm and the officers believed he posed an imminent deadly threat.

Scott’s family quickly challenged the police account of the fatal shooting, saying he was not armed and that he was holding a book and waiting for his son to be dropped off from school, WSOC-TV reports.

Police say the man was armed and they recovered a weapon at the scene. CMPD is still on scene investigating @wsoctv— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) September 20, 2016

Clashes between protesters and police followed. Protesters shut down a highway. Police in riot gear used tear gas. Police and protesters were injured, etc., etc.

One candidate for president strikes a pose: get tough. Another has a plan, as Bill Scher explained at Campaign for America’s Future:

Yet we cannot easily compare the policy visions of the two major party candidates. One reason is that the phrase “flip-flop” doesn’t begin to describe Republican candidate Trump’s willingness to reverse himself when convenient, contradict himself within minutes and serve up word salad to avoid taking clear stances.

Another reason is that only one candidate is bothering to offer a comprehensive set of policy proposals.

As the Associated Press reported, “Trump’s campaign has posted just seven policy proposals on his website, totaling just over 9,000 words. There are 38 on [Democratic candidate Hillary] Clinton’s “issues” page, ranging from efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease to Wall Street and criminal justice reform, and her campaign boasts that it has now released 65 policy fact sheets, totaling 112,735 words.”

The policy fight is a mismatch. You can’t beat something with nothing. And on many fronts, Trump is literally offering nothing.

Here’s what something looks like:

Effective policing and constitutional policing go hand in hand. We can—and must—do both by:

• Bringing law enforcement and communities together to develop national guidelines on the use of force by police officers, making it clear when deadly force is warranted and when it isn’t and emphasizing proven methods for de-escalating situations.
• Acknowledging that implicit bias still exists across society—even in the best police departments—and tackle it together. Hillary will commit $1 billion in her first budget to find and fund the best training programs, support new research, and make this a national policing priority.
• Making new investments to support state-of-the-art law enforcement training programs at every level on issues like use of force, de-escalation, community policing and problem solving, alternatives to incarceration, crisis intervention, and officer safety and wellness.
• Supporting legislation to end racial profiling by federal, state, and local law enforcement officials.
• Strengthening the U.S. Department of Justice’s pattern or practice unit—the unit that monitors civil rights violations—by increasing the department’s resources, working to secure subpoena power, and improving data collection for pattern or practice investigations.
• Doubling funding for the U.S. Department of Justice “Collaborative Reform” program. Across the country, there are police departments deploying creative and effective strategies that we can learn from and build on. Hillary will provide assistance and training to agencies that apply these best practices
• Providing federal matching funds to make body cameras available to every police department in America.
• Promoting oversight and accountability in use of controlled equipment, including by limiting the transfer of military equipment to local law enforcement from the federal government, eliminating the one-year use requirement, and requiring transparency from agencies that purchase equipment using federal funds.
• Collecting and reporting national data to inform policing strategies and provide greater transparency and accountability when it comes to crime, officer-involved shootings, and deaths in custody.

Channel 9 is continuously updating this story and has LIVE updates from reporters on #Daybreak: https://t.co/eKVghitUKf #WakeUpWith9 pic.twitter.com/vncG9HaVs3— WSOCTV (@wsoctv) September 21, 2016

Donald Trump average schlub


by digby

He tries to pretend that he is prescient about the rise of terrorism and the war in Iraq. He claims he was the only one who saw bin Laden as a threat when he wrote his book in 2000 and needless to say he wasn’t. The bombings of he kobar towers and the attack on USS Cole had happened already. Anyone who’s read the 9/11 report knows this. Even I did — when the WTC was attacked the first thing I said was, “I’ll bet it’s bin Laden.” I’m sure millions of other Americans did too since we read newspapers.

He also has said he was against the war in Iraq which he wasn’t. Some of us were. Millions in fact, all over the world and we marched and protested and made a lot of noise. Trump went on Howard Stern and said he guessed it was good idea and told CNBC that he thought it would be good for the markets. His thinking about the war was like a majority of Americans’

Trump insists that he opposed the war from the outset, but the only available evidence is that he backed it. This point has been made any number of times before, but it’s important to point out that it makes sense. A lot of Americans backed the war at the outset and slowly grew skeptical of the effort — precisely the path that Trump seems to have taken. 

Using data from Washington Post-ABC News polling in 2003 and 2004, we charted polling on the subject as the war unfolded and overlapped it with The Washington Post’s timeline of what Trump said about his support and when.

He was just another American who believed his president and then got mad when his president didn’t bring home a pony.  He’s nothing special.

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If you have the biggest pole you need the biggest flag

by digby

A small flag on a 70 ft pole

A big flag on a 70 ft pole

You have probably heard by now about Trump being fined for flying an insanely huge American flag and using other people’s money to do it. Colbert did a wholesgment on it.

Your next president ladies and gentlemen:

What, exactly, does the American flag represent?Stephen Colbert asked him just that when news of Trump’s refusal to pay the fee started making the news. And despite his claims of being a staunch believer in the flag and everything it stands for, it turns out that Donald Trump doesn’t actually have any idea what it is he’s screaming about, telling Colbert point blank, “I don’t know what the 13 stripes represent.”

Schmaahtasawhip.

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Oh look, more Trump scams

by digby

This one may be a legal scam but so what?

Donald Trump has created an uproar by being the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon to refuse to release his tax returns. He claims, implausibly, that he can’t do so because he is under an IRS audit. Many speculate that there’s a different reason—Romney has even blasted him, saying his returns would show a “bombshell of unusual size.”

One thing is certain. If Trump’s full tax returns are ever released, the country would get an up-close look at how Trump’s empire sits upon a real-estate tax racket, composed of a princely pile of tax breaks, loopholes, and deferrals that make wealthy real-estate developers even wealthier by eliminating most of their taxes. For Trump, it’s a point of pride: “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible,” he said in August 2015.

Apparently these real estate developers rarely pay any taxes which may be why he doesn’t want to release them. But who knows what’s in those things? His finances are so tangled and byzantine that it could be anything.

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QOTD: that nice Republican fellow with the glasses

by digby

I’m talking about Hugh Hewitt, of course, who is now an unreconstructed Trump supporter and yet is still treated as if he’s some sort of sane moderate Republican. Here he is on MSNBC this morning talking about the bombshell Trump Foundation story that shows he spent a quarter of a million dollars of the charity’s money for his own personal legal expenses:

There might be someone out there on the margin who moves now on a foundation story. If so there are just as many who will move because of Gilbert Chagoury and the Clinton Foundation and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Foreign Agents Registration act. I’m not sure the Clintons want to be stressing foundation stories. 

This is yet another case of the Trump people turning the story back on Clinton so that whenever he takes a hit, she gets hit too. And the media has well prepared the ground for this by pounding on emails, foundation and Benghazi until people just assume there must be something nefarious and criminal even though there isn’t. (“Lock her up!!!”)

If you haven’t heart about the Chagoury story, if you google you will find page after page of febrile wingnuttery before you get to one where you find out that he is a foundation donor who asked to be put in touch with someone in the State department and they didn’t do it. The press has been eagerly publishing whatever juicy “smell test” tid-bits Judicial Watch spoon feeds them and this is one of the stories that’s “out there.”  It’s nonsense.

Trump, on the other hand is being shown to have literally used his charity to pay off politicians (there’s a signed check with his name on it) and pay for his personal legal fees with the money from people who thought they were donating to charitable causes. That’s on top of his buying pictures of himself and accepting awards for his “philanthropy” when he hasn’t spent a penny of his own money for almost a decade.

Trump has called the Clinton Foundation a slush fund but the books are completely open to the public, have been reviewed by accountants and there is no evidence of that at all. The Trump Foundation actually is a slush fund to pay for pay-offs and Trump’s personal business related expenses.

#Bothsidesdoit

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Blast from the past

by digby

Sam Bee found this fascinating Nixon townhall from 1968:

Weird how “politically correct” they sound by Trump standards. And Rick Perlstein commented in email, “amazing that this was the gold standard (well, silver standard: Wallace took the gold) for political demagoguery back then. It’s high wonkery by today’s standards!”

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Will anyone care when Trump runs his business out of the White House?

by digby

I wrote about it again for Salon. I just can’t understand why nobody seems to see this as totally disqualifying but it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction in the media:

Somebody finally noticed that Donald Trump is planning to keep his far-flung private business in the family while he’s president — an arrangement that goes far beyond an “appearance of impropriety” to an outright conflict of interest that could create serious problems for American national security. Over the weekend, a group of former government officials of both parties released an open letter urging Trump to disclose information about his overseas business dealings. Considering that this man is refusing to even disclose his tax returns, this seems like a long shot. But it’s important that the issue remains live because it could not be more important.

The signers of the letter represent all quarters of the national security and foreign policy establishment, from Michael Morell, former acting CIA director under Barack Obama, to Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush. They were responding to last week’sNewsweek investigation by Kurt Eichenwald into the Trump Organization’s foreign ties. (I wrote about the article here.) The letter states:

Donald Trump still has not revealed to the American public his international business relationships, even as it becomes increasingly clear that his overseas ties could well constitute significant conflicts of interest when it comes to charting U.S. foreign policy. This is unprecedented for a candidate for the nation’s highest office. As such, we are calling on Mr. Trump to disclose, in full, the nature of his business relationships overseas — to include specifically who his business partners are and what and where are his foreign investments.

They demand that he divest himself of all overseas business interests if he should win the presidency.

So far, Trump has simply said that he plans to “follow all the laws” and turn his multimillion-dollar private business over to his children to run. When questioned, he has not seemed to understand why anyone would question the propriety of such an arrangement, even as he has excoriated Hillary Clinton for her ties to the family’s global charity which has not personally profited her in any way. (The difference between thetransparency of the Clinton Foundation and Trump’s privately held business could not be more stark.) Trump seems to believe it’s adequate to assure the public that he simply won’t care about the business while he’s president.

Oddly, Jason Miller of the Trump campaign responded to the letter with a sideswipe against one of the signers, Wendy Sherman, an experienced diplomat and negotiator, for her role in the Iran deal:

If Wendy Sherman is the definition of who is considered a reliable government official, this letter and its signatories lose all credibility. Sherman was appointed to the State Department by Hillary Clinton during her disastrous tenure and was the lead negotiator in opening up Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — for business, ultimately funding terrorist activities and exporting violence around the world. Based on her complete failure in representing American foreign policy and deep ties to Secretary Clinton, this letter epitomizes the rigged system in Washington that has continued to fail Americans over and over again.

The letter was signed by Republicans who have worked as high-level members of the intelligence establishment as well. Perhaps they’re not expected to believe the Trump campaign was calling them unreliable government officials.

Frankly, the signers of that letter are missing the point. It’s true that we do not know the extent of Trump’s holdings. He has released nothing more than a list of 500 affiliated entities in his Federal Elections Commission report, which was the only information Eichenwald had to go on when he launched his investigation. He followed the trail of several of those entities to such far-flung places as South Korea, India, Turkey, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Azerbaijan, and detailed a byzantine network of business and government alliances. Eichenwald says there are also “deep connections in China, Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, Canada, France, Germany and other countries.”

The problem is that this is simply not fixable. Here’s how Eichenwald describes the nature of Trump’s business, which deals with foreign financiers, developers, government officials, tax havens and shady oligarchs:

The GOP nominee is essentially a licensor who leverages his celebrity into streams of cash from partners from all over the world. The business model for Trump’s company started to change around 2007, after he became the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” which boosted his national and international fame. Rather than constructing Trump’s own hotels, office towers and other buildings, much of his business involved striking deals with overseas developers who pay his company for the right to slap his name on their buildings. (The last building constructed by Trump with his name on it is the Trump-SoHo hotel and condominium project, completed in 2007.)

The foreign business, you see, is the Trump name. He cannot “divest.” It’s not something you can sell. And no one could buy it. You likewise cannot put it in a blind trust — it’s his name on buildings and developments all over the world. He cannot literally wear blinders as president of the United States. Even if he were to tell his kids to find another line of work and simply walk away from the Trump Organization, shutting the doors and leaving it all behind, there are hundreds of deals already in place and contractual ramifications years into the future, all of which would present crippling conflicts of interest for President Trump. Trump’s business interests would have had to be unwound years ago for him to be able to function properly as president. It’s literally impossible to do it now.

In case you were wondering, Trump has no legal obligation to do anything. Presidents are exempt from conflict-of-interest statutes. It was decided that it would be too complicated to write such a law for an office with such expansive powers. Instead we have depended upon norms that govern the behavior of our leaders, ensuring they are seen as acting solely on behalf of the people while they hold the office. Donald Trump has exploded every norm in politics so far. If he wins this election, there’s every likelihood that he’ll simply tell everyone that he’s not making any important decisions for the Trump Organization, and that will be that. We will have a real-life oligarch in the White House, who will likely leave a whole lot richer then when he came in, while the people will be a whole lot poorer. That’s been his business model from the beginning.

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Keeping it (un)real
by Tom Sullivan

This presidential campaign makes it hard to tell what’s real anymore.

Just last night, Seth Meyers lampooned Donald Trump and Chris Christie over Trump’s Friday faux press conference/hotel infomercial that supposedly put an end to birtherism. Christie tried to rewrite history by claimed Trump had dropped the matter in 2011. So Meyers played clips of Trump questioning whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate is real from 2011 through 2015. Meyers quipped, “And by the way, I’m not sure the guy who holds fake press conferences, has a fake university, a fake foundation, fake hair, and a fake tan should be the one in charge of deciding what’s real.”

What’s real about Hillary Clinton and what’s not has been an issue for her campaign. Struggling to connect with voters under 35, she is running on the most progressive platform in her party’s history, one heavily influenced by Bernie Sanders’ ideas. But millennials were not exactly gushing at a speech she gave Monday at Temple University:

Clinton’s speech came as some polling has found that young people opposed to Trump have gravitated towards the two main third party candidates — the Green Party’s Jill Stein and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate — rather than to the Democratic nominee. Clinton also lagged with young voters in her primary against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). On Monday, Clinton acknowledged the struggles she’s faced with millennials.

“Even if you are totally opposed to Donald Trump, you may still have some questions about me — I get that and I want to do my best to answer those questions,” Clinton said.

But post-convention, Jim Newell writes at Slate, her focus has been “moderate, suburban Republican-leaners.” So Clinton tried to address some of their concerns in an op-ed yesterday at Mic:

First, everyone who wants to go to college should be able to without drowning in debt. That’s why I worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders to design a plan that will let everyone attend college debt-free. If you already have loans, we’ll let you refinance them, defer them to start a business or forgive them if you spend 10 years in public service. You can even see how much you and your family could save under our plan by looking at the “college calculator” on our website. And we’ll make sure a four-year degree isn’t the only path to a good-paying job by supporting apprenticeships and other high-quality training programs.

Second, everyone should be able to get a job that pays the bills and can support a family. And not only that, you should be able to do work you love and find meaningful. So we’ll create more good-paying jobs, raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay. This will help a lot of Americans, especially young people struggling to find footing in a difficult economy.

Third, no new parent should have to face the impossible choice between caring for a child or family member and losing a paycheck or even a job. It’s outrageous that in 2016, the United States is the only developed country in the world without paid family leave of any kind. So we’ll make high-quality child care and preschool available to every family in every community. I’ve spent my career fighting to make a difference for children and families, and I can’t wait to do even more as president.

Of course, to do any of these things, we can’t have secret unaccountable money poisoning our politics. So I’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Citizens United and even propose a constitutional amendment to do the same. And by doing that, we’ll make sure that no special interests can get in the way of protecting and expanding civil rights, LGBT rights and all human rights.

Many of you have shared with me that it feels like you’re out there on your own — like no one has your back. It shouldn’t be that way. If I’m fortunate enough to be elected, you will always have a champion in the White House. But I can’t do it on my own. I need you to work with me, keep fighting for what you believe, hold me accountable. I can’t promise we’ll win every fight on our first try. But I can promise you this: I’ll never stop fighting for you.

The policy-speak demonstrates what Clinton said of herself at Temple, “I will never be the showman my opponent is, and you know what? That’s okay with me.” And it should be okay with voters. We’re hiring a president, not searching for soulmate on Match dot com.

Newell writes at Slate:

But running through this targeted demographic’s laundry list isn’t enough. It doesn’t get to the core of the problem, which is: character, and Clinton as the embodiment of a political insider. It’s on this fundamental question of trustworthiness where Clinton faces the steepest climb among young voters. Both she and her team were wise enough to understand that in crafting the speech.

A Quinnipiac national poll released last week asked likely voters if they believed Clinton was honest or not. Overall, 32 percent said she was, compared to 65 percent who said she was not. That ugly picture was bad across all age groups, but worst among young voters: Only 21 percent of 18-to-34–year-olds said she was honest, compared to 77 percent who did not. By contrast, 27 percent of those 18 to 34 said Donald Trump was honest. (Which is not to say they all view this as an asset in him.) Another question asked whether Clinton “bases her policies on a set of core values” or “does whatever is politically convenient.” Thirty-nine percent of likely voters overall said “based on core values,” but only 25 percent of 18-to-34–year-olds did. Clinton’s poll numbers suggest she’s outperforming her character numbers among these demographics—i.e., she’s still earning the votes of many young people who believe she’s wholly dishonest. But she needs to repair this image if she’s going to get much further, and there are only 50 days left to do so.

That’s going to be tough, especially for a generation born into a world of right-wing talk radio, Faux News, faux scandals, and relentless anti-Clinton propaganda. Much of what people know of Hillary Clinton falls into the “everyone knows” category. Everyone knows she’s a serial liar, corrupt, and untrustworthy. But how does everyone know what they think they know? Is what they know true, or do they simply feel like it’s true? Because that’s truthiness, the term Stephen Colbert invented to poke fun at people who think with their guts instead of with their heads. (I’m trying to remember a time the “neoliberal warmonger” threatened to take the country to war over someone flipping off our sailors.)

After being steeped in twenty-five years of anti-Clinton propaganda myself, I don’t claim any kind on immunity. I don’t even believe what I think I know about her. But I’m damned sure the people who who worked oh-so hard at stuffing my head with propaganda didn’t have her best interests in mind, or mine. So I focus Clinton’s long list of accomplishments and policy proposals. They are not feelings. They are on the record. What’s Hillary Clinton really like? People who actually know her speak glowingly. Me? I don’t know for sure. But I know what her opponents are like. Their deeds on the record too.

Meyers’ bit from last night is here:

Nervousness in Trumpland over foundation issues

by digby

This one does seem to get under his skin:

Those in Donald Trump’s orbit appear to be nervous about the swirling scandal around the Trump Foundation—and they should be: The stakes are incredibly high.

The allegations of a quid pro quo between Trump and Florida Attorney General, improper use of the charity for personal benefit, and employment of the charity for political purposes have serious penalties beyond mere campaign optics—the possible consequences range from hefty fines to jail time.

The last seven days has been all bad news on the Trump Foundation front: House Democrats have publicly sought a Justice Department investigation into the charity, while left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleged that Trump appeared to have bribed Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi by giving her a $25,000 contribution so that she would not join a lawsuit against Trump University.

And a New York Times investigation this past week showed that Trump had personally signed the check that constituted the illegal campaign contribution from his charity to Bondi.

Add this to a dose of personal animosity: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told CNN this week that “we have been looking into the Trump Foundation to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.” The Trump camp already despises Schneiderman due to his legal crusade on the controversial Trump University business.

“This reaches above a distraction for them due to the legal implications of it and long litigation possibility,” a former senior aide to Trump said. “Look, Donald signed those checks… he’s on there. He’s liable.”

In the interest of fairness and balance I have to point out that Hillary Clinton’s emails showed that people who donated to her family charity would call up and try to get meetings or favors and they wouldn’t get them. Just so you know. If you ‘d like the details there are approximately 8,532 articles about that and every anchor and pundit have talked about the “gross” nature of the appearance of the possibility of impropriety that never happened when she was Secretary of State years ago.

Donald Trump wasn’t a professional politician when he bribed state AGs not to pursue his fraudulent business practices so we need to cut him a little slack. He can’t be held to the same standard.

But anyway, do click over and read the whole thing. It’s quite interesting. One might even think it’s something the voters should take into account.

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