Month: October 2016

Dylan on getting it right
by Tom Sullivan

Bob Dylan at Azkena Rock Festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, June 2010. Photo by Alberto Cabello, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Two weeks of silence from Bob Dylan followed news that the Swedish Academy had awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature. In a Friday call to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Dylan said he would accept the award. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless,” he said. “I appreciate the honour so much.” Dylan’s silence had garnered criticism:

Dylan had not responded to repeated phone calls made by the academy following the prize announcement, nor had he made any public statement, prompting one academy member to call him “impolite and arrogant”.

The academy said Friday that it had not yet been decided yet if Dylan would visit Stockholm to pick up his award.

Dylan told Britain’s Daily Telegraph he would, “Absolutely. If it’s at all possible.”

The Guardian quotes Dylan on talent, practice and process (emphasis mine):

“I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place.” he said. “There might be some things that are beyond your talents.

“Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.”

The academy announced that Dylan would be awarded the prize on 13 October, saying he had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

It is easy to forget that when evaluating politicians who are not in it alone. We expect them to answer to our concerns over those of every other constituency. Progressives expect their allies to get it right the first time and are primed to throw them under the bus the first time they don’t. One sees this especially with novice legislators still learning the trade. Not grasping all the nuances and traps, they vote for a bill they should have voted against. They draft a well-intentioned bill with a fatal flaw. They write a bill that gives us only some of what we want and includes something for adversaries as a sweetener and we go all Red Queen on them. If politicians were songwriters and bills were songs, nobody would get beyond the state legislature.

It took a speechless Bob Dylan two weeks to get accepting the Nobel Prize right.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Needed now more than ever:

On Friday, world leaders meeting at the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources announced that part of the ocean around Antarctica — namely the Ross Sea — would become the largest-ever marine sanctuary. Known formally as a marine protected area (MPA), the area would be closed off to fishing and hunting, making life much, much better for the animals there.

The new MPA is about 600,000 square miles. That’s roughly the size of France and Spain combined, or a little smaller than Alaska.

This is good news for the hundreds of thousands of animals who live in the chilly Antarctic waters, including orcas, whales and birds.

One animal who’ll benefit is the emperor penguin. About 240,000 of these distinctive-looking birds currently live in the Ross Sea region, but the population has been under threat because of overfishing and ice loss, which is a result of climate change.

Then there’s the minke whale — the smallest baleen whale in the world. While minkes don’t spend all of their time in Antarctica, thousands migrate down during the summer months to feast on fish and krill. With the sanctuary’s “no fishing” rule, minkes will have more food to eat.

Hopefully the sanctuary will also put a stop to whaling. That said, Japanese fishermen have previously hunted whales in protected areas, including the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, another protected area off Antarctica that was declared off-limits by the International Whaling Commission.

Other Antarctic animals that would be protected by the new sanctuary include Adelie penguins, orcas, Weddell seals and Antarctic petrels.

The move was applauded by conservation groups, many of whom have spent years campaigning on behalf of the animals who live in the Ross Sea.

“This is a moment of optimism for the incredible wildlife of Antarctica and is a shining beacon of hope for ocean conservation everywhere,” John Tanzer, leader of oceans practice, WWF International, said in a media release. “We will take that hope and move to protect more of the ocean off Antarctica and around the world because this has never been more urgent.”

Via The Dodo

This is a money making operation

by digby

Each of these kids is reportedly worth at least 150 million bucks. And yet they get all their expenses reimbursed by the campaign. And it turns out they haven’t donated a dime:

With less than two weeks until the election, Donald Trump has amassed an impressive army of small donors, fueling his bid with individual contributions of $200 or less. But noticeably absent from the list of contributors is basically anyone with the last name Trump, many of the surrogates who represent The Donald on national television, and members of his own campaign staff.

According to a review of Federal Election Commission filings by The Daily Beast, only one of Trump’s children showed up on a list of itemized receipts for the campaign: Eric. On Sept. 7, 2016, Eric Trump appears to have contributed $376.20 listed only as “meeting expense: meals.” It appears that money was later refunded. Eric Trump did not respond to a request for comment about the transaction.

Ivanka Trump, who previously contributed to Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2007 and 2008 respectively, does not appear to have given to her father.

Donald Trump Jr., who contributed to Iowa congressman Steve King in 2014 and Hillary Clinton in 2007, is also nowhere to be found.

And a search for Tiffany Trump yielded no results.

The Trump children are not the only prominent figures in his orbit who have not invested in the mogul’s presidential bid.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director turned Trump warm-up act, has not given the candidate a dime. Neither has Governor Chris Christie, Trump’s first rival for the presidency to endorse him. Christie gave his own campaign the maximum allowable contribution of $2,700 on Sept. 29, 2015.

Many of Trump’s surrogates, who have been generous in previous campaigns, this year have kept their wallets closed to The Donald.

The Trump’s aren’t people who believe you have to spend money to make money. They just take money.

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“The most chaotic election for people of color in 50 years”

 by digby

Maybe the Department of Justice could redirect some of their email investigators to monitoring the vote. They can go back to their witch hunting right after the election:

Imagine going to the polls on election day and your polling location has been shut down or your right to vote challenged or worse, you’re taunted by people at the polling site because you’re a person of color.

These are just some of the concerns that civil rights groups around the country have as early voting begins. Groups representing Latino, Black, Asian, Arab and Muslim-American voters are preparing for what they expect will be a confusing and contentious presidential election.

“We are on the precipice of the most chaotic election for people of color in 50 years,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on Wednesday. “We are doing everything we can to prevent discrimination, intimidation and violence at the polls.”

Henderson and other civil rights groups say they are growing particularly worried as Donald Trump ratchets up claims that the election is “rigged” and calls for his supporters to monitor the polls.

On Wednesday, a group named the Oath Keepers called on “retired police officers, our military intelligence veterans, and our Special Warfare veterans” to “apply their considerable training in investigation, intelligence gathering, and field-craft to help stop voter fraud.”

In response to the Oath Keepers’ release, Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, issued a statement: “There is no place in our democracy for this form of vigilantism and extremism,” particularly since “their efforts seem directed against minority communities.” The organization is urging voters to call 866-OUR-VOTE if they encounter intimidation tactics at the polls.

Rev. Dr. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, said his offices have been “inundated with complaints” since early voting began in the state. In a conference call Thursday, Barber noted reports of hecklers photographing black voters during events and one instance where KKK-inspired graffiti was written on a street in front of a black church where a “souls to the polls” event was being held.

“It is, in fact, voter suppression that is the legal threat in this election,” Barber said.

The NAACP noted that more than 100 voters in Beaufort County, North Carolina, had their voter registration challenged after local residents raised questions to the local election bureau about whether they could legally vote in the county. Of that group, nearly 60% of the residents whose voting rights were being challenged were African-American, the NAACP said.

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Deadbeat Don


 by digby

So Trump managed to cough up 10 million to keep his campaign running for the last 10 days but I hope everyone he’s supposed to be paying got their money in cash up front. From Mother Jones:

During his decades in the real estate world, Donald Trump famously shortchanged many small businesses on the money he owed them. The list includes companies that worked on Trump’s properties or supplied him with chandeliers, pianos, marble, and other luxury touches. But Trump also tried to underpay the very same lawyers who helped him save money, and some ended up suing their former client.

As our own Hannah Levintova reported in March, the Atlantic City law firm of Levine Staller saved one of Trump’s companies tens of millions of dollars in taxes—and then sued the company, Trump Entertainment, after the business tried to pay Levine Staller $1.25 million less than the firm was owed.

In 2012, Levine Staller won a settlement that returned $35 million in overpaid taxes and cut $15 million from the company’s future liabilities, leading to a total savings of $50 million for the corporation. Trump agreed to pay $7.25 million to the law firm in legal fees, but then only paid Levine Staller $6 million before trying to claim the rest as unsecured debt in ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. In response, Levine Staller sued its former client, Trump Entertainment, and in 2014, a judge rejected Trump Entertainment’s request to be absolved of this debt and told the company to pay up.

It wasn’t an isolated case. Trump underpaid at least four law firms or lawyers who worked for him, according to various news outlets that looked into Trump’s history of cheating his contractors. One of them, Morrison Cohen LLP of New York City, had represented Trump in a lawsuit against a construction contractor that Trump claimed had overcharged him for work on a golf course. According to USA Today, Trump sued Morrison Cohen for using the case to help promote its work, and the firm countersued for almost $500,000 in unpaid bills. The case was settled in 2009.

If you won’t even pay your lawyers …

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Ref working James Comey FTW

by digby

Trump and the rest of the right wing has been dogging him relentlessly as a sell-out whore for failing to put Clinton in jail. Looks like it worked.

There was a time when it was considered unacceptable for the authorities to talk about investigations or draw up charges against  politicians in the dy leading up to elections. That seems to have changed since this happened back in 2006:

The controversy surrounding the U.S. Attorneys dismissals was often linked to elections or voter-fraud issues. Allegations were that some of the U.S. Attorneys were dismissed for failing to instigate investigations damaging to Democratic politicians, or for failing to more aggressively pursue voter-fraud cases. Such allegations were made by some of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys themselves to suggest reasons they may have been dismissed. The background to the allegations is the recent tendency for elections in parts of the United States to be very close; an election outcome can be affected by an announced investigation of a politician. It is explicit policy of the Department of Justice to avoid bringing voter-related cases during an election for this reason. In September 2008, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice concluded that some of the dismissals were motivated by the refusal of some of the U.S. Attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases during the 2006 election cycle.

By April 2007, there was some speculation that the dismissal of the US attorneys might affect cases of public corruption and voter fraud. According to the National Law Journal,

“Just the appearance of political influence in cases related to those firings, combined with the recent, unusual reversal of a federal public corruption conviction in Wisconsin [c.f., Georgia Thompson], some say, will spur aggressive defense lawyers to question the political motivation of prosecutors in certain cases; make magistrates and judges more skeptical of the evidence before them; and perhaps even chill line prosecutors in their pursuit of some indictments.”

But nobody cares about any of this stuff anymore. Anything goes. Wikileaks, FOIA, FBI all used for political purposes is just fine — as long as the ox that’s being gored is the ox you hate.

What will Trump do with his alt-right martyrdom?

by digby

I wrote about their possible future plans for Salon this morning:

After the final debate last week I wrote a rather dark and ominous piece predicting that Donald Trump’s abandonment of the democratic norm that the loser of the election accepts the results portended serious trouble. I quoted Republican strategist Steve Schmidt who said this on MSNBC in the wee hours of the morning:

I think he plans on being martyred. I think in his martyrdom he’s going to wave the bloody shirt and he’s going to go out and say through a party of grievance and resentment that “we were cheated and this was stolen,” and he’ll have a critical mass for a UKIP-style third party that splits off from the Republican Party. Who knows where the funding for Trump TV will come from, but it will be a media designed to undermine the democratic foundations of the United States and the credibility of our elections processes. Vladimir Putin couldn’t hope for anything better than that.

It sounded over the top, but not any more over the top than anything else Trump has done in this election. After all, Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, has appeared at rallies with Trump and was seen in the spin room at the debates. Trump’s campaign CEO, and by all accounts, his chief strategist in the closing days of the race, is Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, a major figurehead of the American alt-right, who is closely aligned philosophically with European white nationalist groups like UKIP. So Schmidt’s prediction may have some truth to it.

On Thursday, Joshua Green published an inside look at the GOP candidate’s campaign operation in Bloomberg Businessweek and it reveals that Trump and company have some big plans after the election, whether they win or lose. Those plans and may very well involve something along the lines that Schmidt outlined.

The big headlines that came out of the piece were about an anonymous staffer spilling the beans that the campaign hopes to suppress the vote among three key groups of the Democratic base: millennial Sanders voters, younger women and African-Americans. There was a lot of breathless commentary about this, and understandably so since the Republicans have made a fetish of vote suppression for decades. They are doing it all over the map this time too, including organizing for intimidation at the polls.

But the “suppression” they’re talking about in the Bloomberg article isn’t technically what we think of as vote suppression. They’re just targeting a very negative campaign at certain Clinton voters to try to get them to stay home or vote third-party. This isn’t really news. I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, although I couldn’t have imagined at the time they would seriously try to target African-Americans, the most loyal Democratic voting bloc.

Trump’s campaign has been relentlessly negative all along, so this isn’t really much of a shift. This is the candidate who claimed in a national presidential debate that Hillary Clinton has “tremendous hate in her heart,” and compared her to the devil. He routinely says she is “guilty as hell” of unnamed crimes and promises to send her to prison if he wins the election. It’s hard to get more negative than that. Bringing up her speeches to Wall Street or some quote from the 1990s or her husband’s past behavior is actually pretty tame. And it’s also ridiculous. Millennials, younger women and African-Americans are more committed than other demographics to Clinton at this point. They are far less likely to bolt her campaign than, say, white independents who’ve drifted to the Democrats because of Trump’s terrible campaign. But addressing that group would require Trump to change course in some way, and that’s just not something he’s willing to do.

The real story in Green’s piece was what the organization built around the Trump campaign plans to do next if Trump doesn’t win. Trump’s “entrepreneurial” history is pretty spotty as we know, and he doesn’t seem to have affiliated with people who are any sharper than he is, so this whole thing may end up being just another right-wing grift when all is said and done. In fact, I would say the odds favor that outcome. Trump sees a revenue stream, with all those groupies coming to rallies and sending money to the campaign, and figures he can keep the con going for a while. His brand is in major trouble and he’s going to have to find some other way to keep the cash flow going. Apparently his fundraising has dried up, which can’t be good news.

But on the off chance that Steve Bannon or Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are actually serious about building a real political movement out of the ashes of this bonfire, this article offers some insight into what they have in mind. It focuses on the digital campaign called “Project Alamo” they’ve built with the help of the Republican National Committee (which seems to have foolishly turned over its donor list to Trump). Trump’s operatives believe they rule the internet through Reddit and Facebook and see a formidable political empire in the making. By partnering with Bannon’s Breitbart operation, the budding global arm of the alt-right media, they think they can expand their populist uprising. Apparently, it’s already happening in Britain:

In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: “Make UKIP Great Again.”

Is this a realistic goal? It’s hard to say. But it must be keeping the GOP establishment up at night. If the Trump campaign has been about anything, it’s been about lighting a match to the Republican establishment and setting it on fire. If these alt-right arsonists manage to splinter the party for their own power and profit, they may end up winning even if they lose.

“Blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object”
by Tom Sullivan

The Republican Party’s post-mortems have already begun. Cause of death: “blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object.” So writes Julia Ioffee in Politico.

The candidacy of Donald Trump has exposed much of conservative ideology as as much a Potemkin village as Trump’s campaign. Free trade and supply-side economics were only the lipstick applied to a much uglier Republican base. The neocons have “broken off,” says
conservative political scientist and commentator Peter Berkowitz. Gen-X “reformicons” who might have been the party’s ideological future now see older party pragmatists willing to go along to get along as “collaborators.” Mike Pence has disgraced himself in their eyes:

With less than two weeks until election day, this is what Republican agony sounds like. “I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” Douglas Heye, a former RNC official and Eric Cantor staffer, rejects the word “collaborator.” “I don’t like that language. I don’t think it helps,” he told me. “I’ve been watching a French TV series about World War Two, and now I’m watching the part about the aftermath of the war where they’re trying to figure out who’s a collaborator, shaving women’s heads, etc.” The echo scares him. “I would like to see us sort out our difference in non-punitive ways,” he says.

The task ahead to salvage what is left of the party is daunting. Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, is apalled by what Trump’s candidacy has revealed:

“The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. It turned out that those forces within the Republican Party were larger than what I had imagined.” He sees “a moral necessity” to hand Trump a humiliating defeat and to scrub out the uglier things he brought to the surface of American politics. But, like Soltis Anderson, he recognizes that splitting the two may prove a Solomonic task. “Is there a way to repudiate the worst of Trump—the nativistic, racist, misogynistic elements—and appeal to people whom he brought because of economic anxiety?” he asked. “It won’t be easy because he has loyal following. If you morally repudiate him—which has to happen—those people may decide they don’t want to be part of that.”

That economic anxiety is real. Neither party has adequately addressed it. Free college and debt forgiveness might appeal to millennials, but what of the working-class? Neither party has yet to address their concerns both for themselves and for their grandkids.

While I was electioneering the other day, a Republican candidate tried to start a debate over what to do about the changing economy. Automation is reducing the number of people needed to produce goods, he observed. He hinted at the same, old GOP concerns about government supports engendering dependency, and people needing incentives to work. But Republican orthodoxy either places blind faith in entrepreneurship as a cure-all, or consigns those without the gene for it to the ravages of social Darwinism. What do you do with all those people, I asked, how do we as a society adjust to a world in which there are no jobs for a large portion of 7 billion people? Thus ended the “debate.” It is a question David Atkins has addressed here and here, and one which neither Republicans nor Democrats have yet engaged.

But getting back to the Republicans’ conundrum, Grover Norquist argues (unintentionally in a Monty Pythonish way) that the GOP is not dead yet. As much as I hate to cite Norquist, he makes a point that too many progressive non-activists fail to grasp about the importance of down-ballot races for their futures:

“Back up and look at the map of 50 states,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, the activist who has badgered hundreds of Republican politicians into signing a pledge never to vote for tax increases. “There are 31 states with Republican governors. Thirty-one where we have both houses of legislature; twenty-three where we have both houses of the legislature and the governorship. The Democrats have all of seven states where they have all three. That is a depth of Republican strength that is enduring. We really ought to have 60 senators on a bad day. The focus on the Presidential race alone give people a strange view of the miracle strength modern Republican Party.”

Miracle or not, those of us in states recently taken over by Republican and T-party legislatures know what damage this wounded party can still do. Damage neither President Hillary nor President Bernie can wipe away by executive action. Winning the hearts and minds of voters and regaining lost trust is a project both Republicans and Democrats need to undertake. The left will have to get over its fixation on the White House and focus more on the state house. For Republicans, Ioffee writes, repairing internal rifts will be harder if the “loud, orange object” starts a media company with a business model based on keeping the wounds open. He could prevent “Trump fans, the stand-pat establishment, and the conservative Jesuits” from resolving their differences.

Tough being you. But can Democrats do better?

Trump admonishes Clinton for being too mean

by digby

… to Vladimir Putin:

VIDEO: Trump says HRC too mean to Putin https://t.co/RvgwJzRfze

— Eddie Vale (@evale72) October 27, 2016

If it was anyone but Trump I might believe there was some sort of foreign policy philosophy behind it. But it is just plain ridiculous that the man who literally trash talkes everyone on the planet except his own children thinks we should be more “diplomatic” toward Putin. He is a bull in a china shop on every topic, saying everyone is a “disaster” and commanding them to bow down to American power. Except Vladimir Putin.

He may be right that being belligerent toward Russia isn’t a good idea, but if so, it’s a coincidence. He hasn’t got a clue about international diplomacy or geopolitical strategy. There’s some other reason he’s saying this because it’s so completely out of character. I’m not putting forth any conspiracy theories because I haven’t a clue why he’s so concerned about not offending this one person but it’s very weird.

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No Donald, Michael Moore is not a fan

by digby

If you listen to Trump these days, you’d think he was running with Bernie Sanders as his running mate he mentions him so often. (In fact, he never mentions his actual running mate, Mike … who?) And yesterday, he extolled Michael Moore after Moore said that the votes for Trump were going to be the biggest “fuck you” ever recorded.

I agree, @MMFlint– To all Americans, I see you & I hear you. I am your voice. Vote to #DrainTheSwamp w/ me on 11/8. https://t.co/D7nBwkogBb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2016

That’s a misunderstanding of what Moore meant, to say the least. Michael Tomasky wrote about Moore on Hardball last night making a full-throated affirmative case for Hillary Clinton:

I was driving somewhere and listening to the show in my car, and I about had to pull over to the side of the road. On and on he gushed and re-gushed: “I am serious. In 1993, this woman decided to risk everything and put it all out there so that we could all have universal health care. And she went for it. And she was attacked and humiliated…she was the first one out there trying to do that…I have felt for a long time that she was a force for good, that what she believed in and the things and people she cared about…” He did note that he’s had his disagreements with Clinton and backed Bernie Sanders in the primary, but he wouldn’t even say when Chris Matthews asked that he’d prefer that Bernie be the candidate. “No,” Moore shot back. “He lost!”

Well. What’s going on here? I don’t know exactly, but I have a guess. It’s called sanity. And a proper sense of historical responsibility.

This happens to be the case with pretty much the entire center-left coalition of voters in the country. The third party vote is either genuine Libertarian party voters and disaffected Republicans voting for Johnson or genuine Greens voting for Stein as they would have in any case. In other words, the bitterness of the primary has largely dissipated among the electorate (if not on social media) and the center left has coalesced around Clinton, whether out of genuine admiration as Moore shows or a simple recognition that allowing a fascist demagogue to win is unwise.

And Moore also mentioned something on Matthews that is beginning to bubble up a little more in the media narrative as being a salient point within the electorate:

 “First of all, on a macro level, it isn’t being said enough that we’re going to elect our first woman president. This is huge. For the country, for the world, for the future, for our daughters, our granddaughters.” 

Just a little data point buried at the very end of this New York Times article about Clinton finally managing to attract millennial voters: 

At this stage, it appears that she is reshaping the youth electorate: Specifically, more young women appear more likely to vote today than they did four years ago,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “That’s significant because she has the biggest advantage among young women.”

It’s also just significant that she’s exciting new voters. I realize they are just “young women” who apparently aren’t worthy of more than an afterthought, but they are a loyal Democratic voting bloc and bring more of them out  is very good news for the Democratic party.  I would guess that at least a few of them are excited about the prospect of a woman president and are equally appalled that the GOP has put up a misogynist fascist to oppose her.

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