Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?
by digby
Ross and Ricketts are both right wing billionaire plutocrats. Mnuchin is a right wing multi-millionaire plutocrat from Goldman Sachs.
Trump “saved” a thousand jobs. These guys will all make sure all workers don’t get too uppity — and the profits will flow up, not down.
SWuckers born every minute
Remedial presidenting for dummies
by digby
This is hard to believe. But I do believe it:
When he met with Trump last week, Gingrich says, “He commented, ‘This is really a bigger job than I thought.’ Which is good. He should think that.” As president, Gingrich went on, “you have war and peace, you have enormous powers … and it all comes down to the Oval Office and it all comes down to you.”
I sure am glad he has a lot of experienced hands around him guiding him through this. Like … Reince Preibus, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. Well, he does have Tom DeLay’s ethics lawyer so there’s that.
Even George W. Bush knew how big a job it was. He’d spent his life around politics. And he was a callow fool nonetheless. This is something else again.
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Surprise! The Republicans no longer care about conflict of interest
by digby
I wrote about their strangely passive approach to the dumpster fire that is Donald Trump’s business dealings for Salon today:
When last we heard from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the House of Representatives’ own Samuel Sewell (Salem’s famous witch hunter), he was declaring that just because Hillary Clinton had lost the election, her troubles were not over as far as he was concerned. He was undoubtedly disappointed that he was unable to pursue the impeachment hearings he’d been planning for several months. But Chaffetz gamely carried on and announced that he had every intention of continuing his investigation into her allegedly nefarious emails and conflicts of interest when she was secretary of state. On the day after the election, the Utah congressman told the press.
It would be totally remiss of us to dismiss [the email investigation] because she’s not going to be president. I still have a duty and obligation to get to the truth about one of the largest breaches of security at the State Department. Tens of thousands of documents still have not been turned over to Congress.
He complained about the current State Department being unwilling to cooperate and said that he believed the “Trump administration would be cooperative in getting these floodgates to open as they should.”
These investigations were to happen concurrently with the special prosecutor Trump had promised, and at the time Chaffetz had every reason to believe that Trump would follow through. Since then the president-elect has told the New York Times that Clinton had suffered enough and he didn’t want to “hurt her,” but without closing the door on further action should it become necessary.
Trump’s informal adviser Newt Gingrich has apparently told him that a president should not foreclose his Department of Justice from pursuing crimes as it sees fit, and Fox News’ Greg Jarrett has wondered why Clinton had squandered her “get out of jail free card” by allowing her lawyers to observe the Wisconsin recount process (which Trump’s lawyers are doing as well.) He wrote:
Clinton’s decision to embrace a challenge to Trump’s election is both confounding and inexplicable. Why would she chance angering the very individual who holds her fate in his hands? It’s like an inmate taunting a jailer. You’d have to be obtuse to do it.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also hinted broadly that Trump’s “magnanimous” attitude is contingent on Clinton not saying anything that might anger him.
But this is the president-elect’s position right now and I would say he has been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when for whatever reason her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70-plus electoral votes that he beat her by.
It looks as though this threat will hang over Clinton’s head for a long time to come.
This all seems rather strange, doesn’t it? There are much bigger fish to fry these days. Indeed, there is a Great White Whale out there by the name of Donald Trump, a man with so many conflicts of interest and potential national security transgressions it would be a full-time job for any congressional oversight committee just to find out what and where they all are.
The Huffington Post’s Michael McAuliff asked House majority leader Kevin McCarthy about the growing clamor for congressional oversight of incoming Trump administration. McCarthy seemed to have heard very little about Trump’s issues and had no grasp of the details. But he seems to have had an epiphany about using investigations for political purposes. He told McAuliff:
I think for too long, some of these rules have been used that way, and I think it’s been a bad thing, and it’s harmed the ability for people all to work together.
You’ll recall that McCarthy lost his bid for the speakership when he went on TV and said:
When you look at poll numbers of Hillary Clinton, they have dropped. Unfavorables pretty high, because people say they don’t trust her. They don’t trust her because of what they found out about the server and everything else. Would you ever have found that out had you not gathered the information from the Benghazi Select Committee?
But what about Chaffetz, the man whose supposed commitment to the principle of congressional oversight led him to declare that he would chase Hillary Clinton to the ends of the earth? Surely a man of such integrity would never let partisanship interfere with his sacred duty to hold the powerful to account?
Well, it seems he isn’t up on the details of the current controversy either. When Chaffetz was asked about it by HuffPo’s Matt Fuller, he conflated the issue of the Secret Service paying to rent space in Trump Tower with the news that foreign dignitaries are already trying to curry favor with Trump by spending big money at his new D.C. hotel. He said he thought there was ample precedent for all this, which came as a surprise to the ranking Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, who said, “He’s operating 111 companies in 18 countries. Come on!”
And that’s what we know about. His domestic conflicts, along with those of his children and his son-in-law are massive as well. Jason Chaffetz, relentless email stalker and enforcer of proper national security practices is remarkably relaxed about Donald Trump’s overwhelmingly complicated ethical problems. Why, if you didn’t know better you might think that all of his pretentious grandstanding over the years was nothing more than political posturing.
There has never been a President more in need of oversight than the one who will be inaugurated in January. This train-wreck of an administration could only be helped by adults in his own party taking their responsibilities seriously and trying to keep it from running off the rails. From the looks of it, they have all decided to play dumb and behave as if what Trump and his entourage are doing is no big deal. It’s a very big deal indeed. Congressional Republicans are doing their new president, and our country, no favors by concluding that they no longer have a job to do.
They’ve decided to kill us slowly
by digby
ICYWW about how they plan to repeal Obamacare, this article in the Washington Post spells it out for you:
— The emerging Republican stratagem is to create some “transition period,” as McCarthy calls it, setting a firm date on which the law would expire. That would then create a metaphorical cliff that the country would go over unless Congress acts. With the prospect of 20 million Americans losing health insurance coverage, the R’s bet that the D’s will cave and accept something they don’t like rather than nothing at all. As McCarthy put it, “Once it’s repealed, why wouldn’t they be willing to vote for a replacement? Right? You have no other options.”
— This might be a brilliant stroke. Or, if history is a guide, it could fail spectacularly. Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate Minority Leader, says his caucus won’t budge and pledges resistance. Democrats feel like Republicans never worked with them during the past eight years, and there is heavy pressure from the left flank of Schumer’s caucus to replicate Mitch McConnell’s strategy of obstruction now that they’re going into the wilderness. It’s a dangerous cycle that could set up an epic game of chicken.
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— Something to ponder: Which eight Democratic senators would actually vote for a replacement to Obamacare? McCarthy thinks incumbents up for reelection in 2018 in red states like Indiana, North Dakota, West Virginia and Missouri will play ball and push their colleagues to do the same. He also thinks Schumer will be temperamentally more willing to cut a deal than Harry Reid would have been, despite whatever he is saying in public.— Another wrinkle: There is not Republican consensus on what a full replacement package should look like. There was much discussion when it looked like the Supreme Court would undercut the foundation of Obamacare with the decision in King vs. Burwell about what fixes conservatives could get behind. But the justices sided with the government, so the issue never came to a head. “It’s not easy,” McCarthy acknowledged. “I’ve sat around the room trying to come up with the replacement plan.”
— To be sure, Tom Price has introduced his own legislation to replace the ACA four times, and in 2015, the House Budget Committee chairman was the chief sponsor of the only ACA-repeal bill to ever reach the White House. The president vetoed it, of course. And it is important to note that the Price alternative is quite partisan and leave no real room for negotiation with Democrats. If Republicans use it as an opening bid, the best case scenario is that the other side reads it as an unserious joke. The worst case scenario is that they take it as an insulting slap and then refuse to even come to the table.
[…]— McCarthy believes there is close to universal support among Republican lawmakers for protecting people with pre-existing conditions and to let children stay on their parents’ plans until they are 26 (which does not actually cost insurers all that much). Trump endorsed both elements during the post-election “60 Minutes” sit-down.
— Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, who has jurisdiction over federal health care programs, now says it will take up to three years to repeal the Affordable Care Act – a timeline that would guarantee the law is once again a marquee issue in the 2018 and 2020 elections. “We know that to correct it is going to take time,” the Utah senator told Kelsey Snell yesterday afternoon. “I don’t see any reason for anybody to be too upset about it.”
— Wise Republicans are trying to get out front of what they see as inevitable voter backlash if they run roughshod with reconciliation, without trying to win Democratic buy-in (or at least making a show of trying to). “There will be a multiyear transition into the replacement,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in a separate conversation with Kelsey. “This is a failed piece of legislation and it is coming apart at the seams, but it is going to take us a while to make that transition from the repeal to actually replacing it.”
— Wisconsin is a telling example because it is the home state of both the Speaker of the House and the incoming White House chief of staff. About a quarter of a million people there are enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges, and another 143,000 childless adults are enrolled in Medicaid because of the 2010 law. “We believe that the transition should be a reasonable time, whether it’s a year, a year-and-a-half or two years,” Scott Walker, the new chairman of the Republican Governors Association, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
What this article elides, of course, is that the Republicans have no alternative and if they simply repeal everything but the ban on pre-existing conditions and 26 year olds and add in some tax incentives, the whole market will fall apart and people will die.
Democrats should resist every step of the way. But they won’t. It’s not in their nature to fight back after a loss. They truly believe that the country is more conservative than it is because of the people with whom they associate.
I am not sanguine.
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Better than the alternatives
by digby
Trump is dragging out the suspense on the secretary of state pick like a reality show. And I guess that’s what his presidency really is. With nukes. And cops. Last night he had dinner with Mitt Romney and Reince at a very upscale eatery where they ate Pepe the Frog for appetizers. (I’m actually not kidding. They had frogs legs.)
Anyway, as we anxiously await the finale, here’s a reminder of Romney’s foreign trip in 2012. It didn’t go well. But one wouldn’t expect it to. After all, his main foreign policy experience was hosting the Olympics in Utah and doing Mormon missionary work in Paris during the Vietnam War.
Sausage-making 101
by Tom Sullivan
It’s a big country. Everybody wants a piece of it. Big pieces of legislation are like that. Everybody wants something. A lot of money rides on who gets what and who pays for it. Sam Stein, Ryan Grim, and Matt Fuller at Huffington Post offer an exhaustive (exhausting?) stroll through the machinations behind the 21st Century Cures Act. As with the Affordable Care Act, lawmakers have to buy off Big Pharma if they want to pass the parts that may actually help people. They write:
… It’s as if the fire department had to pay off the arsonist to get permission to put out a fire.
Lawmakers have been left with a Hobson’s choice: The bill would make billions of dollars available for medical research. It would fund lofty goals, such as precision medicine, a White House initiative to map the human brain and Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot.” It would save lives. But it would also undermine regulations that patient advocacy groups say are essential for making sure medical and drug research is conducted ethically and safely — meaning it could cost lives, too.
Sausage-making at its finest. Funding VP Joe Biden’s cancer moonshot is perhaps the biggest carrot, Stein et al. explain, but not the only one. There is the EUREKA Initiative [Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration]. (Please shoot me now.) EUREKA “directs the NIH to establish a competition for innovative work to combat serious biomedical diseases.” And there are other promising-sounding projects. Of course, there is a “but” coming:
But assembling a broad, bipartisan coalition often requires including ethically suspect giveaways. And this bill has those, too. The REGROW [Reliable and Effective Growth for Regenerative Health Options that Improve Wellness] Act, introduced by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), is one of many stray pieces of legislation sewn into the 21st Century Cures Act to help it gain support.
The bill would speed up the delivery of adult stem cell therapies to patients. But it would do that by allowing those therapies to go to market before they’re definitively proved to be safe and effective.
No worries. However, Zoë Carpenter writing about the Cures Act at The Nation recalls a fast-tracked contraceptive device released in 2002 called Essure. Another of those troublesome buts:
But it turned out that the device was neither as safe nor as effective as expected: as many as one in 10 women who used Essure got pregnant, thousands reported injuries or other serious complications, and a few died.
So what if stem cell patients grow an ear on their foreheads before the recalls? Just so long as the stock goes up.
Including “lobbyist and donor-backed measures” like REGROW is how business gets done on Capitol Hill, HuffPost continues:
The bill’s supporters are making concessions to Republicans, too. Late Tuesday night, Republicans pulled a bipartisan provision ― authored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) ― promoting evidence-based prevention services to help keep more children out of foster care after Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) demanded it be stripped out.
The bill had passed the House unanimously in June when it came up for a standalone vote, and it’s backed by more than 500 child welfare groups. But Republican leaders backed down Tuesday after Burr, along with Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Dan Coats (Ind.), pressed McConnell and Ryan to remove it from the larger Cures Act.
Your guess is as good as mine why they object to keeping children out of foster care. But follow the money.
Precious Bodily Fluids Watch Day 20
by digby
This nut Michael Flynn is even nuttier than I thought:
Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, praised controversial alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos one week after the election as “phenomenal” and one of the bravest people he’s met.
Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s tech editor, has developed a following by antagonizing progressives through his controversial statements and stunts. He set up a scholarship fund solely for white men, compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan, and said that the United States has “a Muslim problem.” He was permanently banned from Twitter earlier this year for inciting racist and sexist attacks on “Ghostbusters” actor Leslie Jones.Speaking to a gathering of young conservatives at Trump’s Washington hotel, Flynn said, “I was with Dinesh D’Souza last night, and the other, for the young audience here, for the young ones here, I mentioned it to a couple of you, I was also with Milo Yiannopoulos,” Flynn said at the Young America’s Foundation conference. “See, a lot of people in here won’t know who he is. I tag him on Twitter, you know, because he’s phenomenal individual, and I’m mentioning him tonight because he spoke alongside of me last night to another group of folks.”
“He’s definitely, he’s one of the most different, one of the most brave people that I’ve ever met. We have different views on different things, but he is deeply, deeply conservative in his views about this country,” the retired Army lieutenant general added. “So he is going around this country at the undergraduates, at our colleges and our universities and he fighting for you, for all of the people in here.”
Milo Yiannopoulos is a blight on humanity. This means that Bannon is not the only white nationalist “alt-right” adviser in Trump’s inner circle. Flynn is one too.
And check out this interview with Yiannopoulos by Amanda Marcotte at Salon. Creepy.
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It’s not like he’s ever violated a contract before …
by digby
Josh at TPM:
From Government Executive magazine on the ye olde Trump Post Office deluxe hotel …
The Post Office Lease differs from many of Mr. Trump’s other business arrangements. That’s because, in writing the contract, the federal and D.C. governments determined, in advance, that elected officials could play no role in this lease arrangement. The contract language is clear: “No … elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom…”
The language could not be any more specific or clear. Donald Trump will breach the contract on Jan. 20, when, while continuing to benefit from the lease, he will become an “elected official of the Government of the United States.”
How much ya wanna bet Trump will take the time — between tweets and Victory Tours — to sign a quick quit-claim over to his offspring and we’ll all pretend that means something?
I would think he’d “renegotiate” it but I don’t think he has time to make one of those really great deals before he is in violation. So, just turn it over to Ivanka and the boys and we’re all good.
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Dispatch from Trumpland
by digby
There’s a lot going on, obviously. More than we can absorb. So I’m just going to pass on various observations from day to day to give you a glimpse into the current zeitgeist.
Donald Trump is a big fan of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist. His good pal Roger Stone goes on the show at least once a week. Trump routinely passes on bogus information he gleans from Jones.
Here’s the latest from Alex Jones, via Media Matters:
Infowars.com, the website operated by conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones, lashed out at Erica Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung, for calling on President-elect Donald Trump not to appear on Jones’ show because Jones has pushed conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook tragedy.
In a November 28 Infowars.com video, Infowars.com reporter Owen Shroyer said he wanted to “stand up” for Jones before attacking Lafferty’s advocacy for stronger gun laws as illogical and claiming that Lafferty needs “to address” the theories of Wolfgang Halbig, a leading Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist who has been warned by police against harrasing victims of the attack.
Lafferty has been outspoken in calling for President-elect Trump not to appear on Jones’ radio program. Before he was elected, Trump praised Jones as having an “amazing” reputation, and Jones said that after Trump’s victory, he called Jones to promise to appear on his show in the near future.
In a November 16 open letter to Trump, Lafferty wrote, “radio host Alex Jones has fanned the flames of a hateful conspiracy theory claiming that the shooting that took my mother never happened. It’s unthinkable. It’s unacceptable. I’m asking you to denounce it immediately and cut ties with Alex Jones and anyone who subscribes to these dangerous ideas.”
Indeed, it is well documented that in the wake of the 2012 shooting, which left 20 children and six educators dead, Jones repeatedly suggested that the shooting was a “hoax” that never happened. Jones has reacted to Lafferty’s letter by lying about his past statements while simultaneously doubling down on his conspiratorial claims about the attack.
Shroyer addressed Lafferty directly in his video, which was posted to Alex Jones’ YouTube channel. He said, “I just have this message to you. Why wouldn’t you want a good guy on the scene with a gun when a bad guy comes? I’m just missing this logic. Don’t you understand that if your mother had a pistol or a firearm she could have prevented her death? A good person with a gun could have stopped a bad person with a gun and saved lives. Why does this logic escape you?”
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That’s because he a “populist” dontcha know. And he also has some other ideas:
Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”
Here’s another guy who has similar beliefs, at least about genetic superiority:
These guys really believe this stuff. It’s not a pose. And their followers believe it too.
By the way, the great populist hero of the late 19th century, William Jennings Bryan, was a big eugenics fan too.
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