… or some banana republic (although there’s not much difference anymore) would you see this:
And the guy with the red number is the winner.
They’re still counting votes too in place where Clinton is expected to gain even more. It’s just outrageous.
Yet that pathological liar and his minions are all running around saying they won in a landslide.
It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s bad enough that it happened. But that it installed a corrupt sociopath and a band of right wing extremists is just too much to bear.
Update:
Just FYI: Nate Silver, who runs FiveThiryEight.com, calculated that “the average electoral college winner claimed 70.9 percent of the available electoral votes, which would equate to 381 electoral votes given today’s total of 538 electors.” So Trump’s 56.9 percent “is decidedly below-average,” he concluded.
A conservative group that played a key role in legal battles over access to Hillary Clinton’s emails is asking a federal judge to release videos of depositions top Clinton aides and other State Department officials gave in connection with the litigation over her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Judicial Watch filed a motion Monday with U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, asking him to unseal the testimony in light of the fact that the presidential election is over and the arguments against release seemed to be based on the videos becoming fodder in the White House race. Transcripts of the testimony were released soon after it was given, but the recordings have never been published.
“The sole reason for sealing the recordings in the first place was to avoid their misuse during the 2016 campaign season. Now that the election is over that reason no longer exists,” Judicial Watch attorney Michael Bekesha wrote. “The release of the recordings will not only allow the public to better understand Secretary Clinton’s email practices, it will also provide the public with a more complete picture of the discovery taken in this case.”
At issue are depositions given by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, former State information technology manager John Bentel, and computer technician Bryan Pagliano, who worked for State and Clinton personally. Lawyers for those four and for the State Department have indicated they oppose release of the videos, the court filing said.
Sullivan ordered the videos sealed last May, finding “good cause” to keep them under wraps, but Judicial Watch says those grounds are no longer valid.
“That good cause – the possibility that the recordings could be exploited for political gain during the contentious campaign season – is now moot. The reason for the protective order no longer exists,” Bekesha wrote.
The Judicial Watch motion points to continuing press coverage of the Clinton-related email litigation (including this POLITICO post) and notes that media organizations asked last July that Sullivan to reconsider his motion and release the videos. The judge has not acted on that request.
Basically they’re saying that as long as the media covers the story — story they’re creating — it’s in the public interest and they have to have access to all this crapola.
I feel for Judicial Watch, I really do. They were expecting a very lucrative and busy four years chasing Clinton for fun a profit. Now they’re stuck beating a dead horse and they know that even the hard core nutcases are going to lose interest in this stuff — especially when they’ve got crazed pedophile conspiracy theories to wank over. This email thing is just not very compelling when it no longer has the capacity to compel impeachment. Now, if they could find something really juicy maybe they could get their good buddy Comey to step up but he already knows what’s in these tapes so it’s not likely. It’s going to take more than this stuff to “lock her up!”
Of course, they are ostensibly a non-partisan watchdog group so they could be looking into the mountain of conflicts of interests, lies, graft and ongoing corruption of the nascent Trump administration. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one …
Trump, of course. People seem to think he isn’t one, but he is. Buzzfeed analyzed Trump’s twitter feed and it’s fascinating to see who he reads and tweets. He’s just your average freeper:
During campaign season Trump shared more Breitbart links to his more than 15 million followers than any other news organization (in August Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon joined Trump’s campaign as CEO and will enter the West Wing in January as Trump’s senior White House adviser). While Trump also shares links from mainstream sites — his second most shared site during the time period analyzed was the Washington Post — Trump’s preferred content seems to be right-leaning, hyper-partisan sites and opinion blogs including Daily Caller (21 links), Newsmax (18), the Gateway Pundit (14 links), the Conservative Treehouse (11), the Political Insider (1), Conservative Tribune (1), Infowars (1), newsninja2012.com (5), and westernjournalism.com (1). Trump’s Twitter account also shares links from a number of obscure personal blogs, like agent54nsa.blogspot.com, which hosted a joke post about a fake game show about Monica Lewinsky hosted by a character named “Stink Fartinmale.”
There’s just no doubt what we are dealing with: a far right nut. Which explains his appointment of another far right nut as his National Security adviser.
Politics and Reality Radio: Digby on the Trumpocalypse; Dean Baker: Yes, the Economy Is Rigged
with Joshua Holland
This week, Digby talks about what went wrong in 2016, what our future under the Trump regime may look like and how the media isn’t prepared to hold the first aggressively post-truth president’s feet to the fire.
Sixteen years ago, when Al Gore won the popular vote but was denied the presidency due to the anachronism known as the Electoral College, Democrats tried to figure out how they could prevent such a weird anomalous result from happening again. As early as the day after the election, the New York Times was already laying the groundwork for what would become seen as the reason for Gore’s failure (although it would be many weeks before the result of that contested election became clear).
Vice President Gore had failed to spend enough time in his home state of Tennessee, it was said, opting instead to put resources into other tossup states like Michigan and Wisconsin. But the real reason he lost was a grand geographical shift:
While Tennessee has moved to the right in national politics, Mr. Gore has moved to the left since his days as a congressman, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control that have put him at odds with many Southern voters.
Two years later, when The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber addressed the question again, conventional wisdom was sealed. Scheiber reported that on the eve of the 2000 Democratic convention the Gore team had realized they had a big problem:
“The entire target of communication was Pennsylvania, western Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. That’s the world Gore was trying to reach,” [pollster Stan] Greenberg recalls. Since these areas were chock-full of gun-toting union members, Team Gore decided that gun control would hurt the vice president in the states he needed most.
After the election, the Gore campaign’s hunch became Democratic gospel. Sure, Gore had won the Rust Belt battleground states, but the Democrats had lost their third straight bid to retake Congress — and many in the party believed gun control was to blame. In particular, they pointed to the election’s regional skew. In famously anti-gun California, the Dems knocked off three incumbents. But throughout the rest of the country, they defeated only one. “Of all the issues,” insists one senior Democratic congressman, gun control “had the greatest net [negative] effect.”
That “regional skew” is a real problem. By 2004 candidate John Kerry was running around in a hunting vest with a gun slung over his shoulder bragging about always eating what he killed. Not that it did him any good. The fact that he was against the sale of assault-style weapons was assumed to have been the kiss of death when those white rural voters rejected him.
The need to move away from “culture war” issues like gun control, abortion and marriage equality was considered gospel during that period in the Democratic wilderness. Then came the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina and a teetering economy that caught up to the Republicans, and Democrats won big in 2008.The assumption then was that Barack Obama had managed to put together a new Democratic coalition that was not dependent on those rural whites who feared the loss of their guns so much they would vote against anyone who favored common-sense gun safety regulation.
We saw Democrats find their voices on the issue after a horrific spate of mass killings, particularly the horrifying Newtown tragedy, in which classrooms full of tiny children were mowed down by a disturbed young man with a semi-automatic weapon. It became a defining cause of the party, with President Obama taking the lead in pushing the issue and elected Democrats holding an unprecedented sit-in on Capitol Hill last spring to protest GOP inaction on guns.
During the Bush years as well as the Obama years, the National Rifle Association was as active as ever. In 2000 when Bush finally prevailed, they were happy to help push the idea that his support for their cause was the defining issue of the election. The organization had bragged that it would be working out of President Bush’s office in the White House and NRA influence grew throughout his tenure as the group put money and organizing behind gun-friendly politicians at all levels of government.
But perversely or otherwise, the NRA actually experiences more growth when a Democrat is in the White House, and has become more powerful than ever during the Obama years. As the gun-tracking news organization called the Trace points out in this article, the NRA did this with a “populist” P.R. approach that perfectly dovetailed with Donald Trump’s anti-establishment campaign. One might even suggest that Trump stole a lot of his shtick from the NRA.
In 2008, the NRA’s visionary leader Wayne LaPierre declared war on establishment elites saying that they “believe the same elite conceit — you shouldn’t protect yourself. Government should. But we know there’s a little problem with that. They don’t give a damn about you!” The Trace reported:
Four years later, LaPierre expanded on the threats the elite posed to encompass free speech, religious liberty, even the ability of people to start small businesses or choose for themselves what kind of health care they want. Drug dealing illegal immigrants were being allowed to pour over the Southern border, he railed. Criminals in big cities were free to prey on innocents because judges were so lenient. “Not our issues, some might say.” He paused, and then countered: “Oh, but they are.”
In fact, the NRA has been pushing an anti-establishment message in one form or another since the mid-’90s. When Trump came along, LaPierre understood that unlike the patrician Mitt Romney, Trump’s sometime apostasy on guns would be outweighed by his ability to sell pitchfork-wielding populism and thinly-veiled calls for vigilantism. So the NRA went all in for Trump and spent millions on ads bashing Hillary Clinton in places like Columbus, Ohio; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Scranton, Pennsylvania. (I wrote about their first ad here.) According to the Center for Public Integrity, nearly one out of 20 TV ads in Pennsylvania was paid for by the NRA, and the group ran nearly 15,000 spots in the crucial swing states that Trump narrowly won, deciding the election.
LaPierre has released a new video, taking a victory lap in which he fatuously declares, “Our time is now. This is our historic moment to go on offense.” First on the agenda is demanding that the federal government enforce “concealed-carry reciprocity,” in which states would have to recognize permits to carry concealed weapons issued by other states, as if they were as benign as driver’s licenses. So much for federalism.
Most election postmortems have concluded that Democrats failed with non-college educated and rural white voters this time because of their economic message rather than guns or other culture-war issues. But perhaps that’s just the other side of the same coin. LaPierre and the NRA have a powerful understanding of what moves this constituency and they’ve been moving it in their direction for many years. The NRA has been selling anti-establishment Trumpism long before Trump came on to the scene. It’s Wayne LaPierre’s win as much as Donald Trump’s.
Legend has it that the first person Howard Dean hired for the 50-state plan was (is) a friend of mine, maybe the best field organizer I’ve known. When he returned from training in D.C., he said privately their charge was to turn county parties that had devolved into social clubs back into functioning political organizations.
Today’s Democratic Party upper echelons might resemble that remark.
There is a lot of “old-boyism” in party politics. Mostly because people who have the time and/or resources to pursue party work are older. But older doesn’t always mean more skilled; experienced doesn’t always mean the right kind. When reviewing resumes, it is wise to know the difference between an applicant who has 20 years’ worth of experience and one who has 1 year’s worth of experience 20 years in a row. Many experienced party hands are not versed in modern campaign-craft. They assign more weight to who might make a strong public servant than to whether they might make a strong candidate. (We need candidates who are both.) Nevertheless, they like to be the deciders of whose turn it is. There is a tendency to hang onto power and not to cultivate new leadership possessing skills they don’t understand. Old boys would rather turn over the reins to old chums — regardless of their skills — when they can’t chew the leather anymore.
Dennis Kucinich winning the caucus in our county in 2004 was a deep embarrassment here. Favorite-son John Edwards was supposed to win. Didn’t “those progressives” who outmaneuvered them know that? A Kucinich delegate took a county party seat the next year. But established players stonewalled and ran her off. And they got their club back. “Those progressives” were supposed to wait for their turn that wasn’t coming.
Activists who allowed themselves to be run off never got anywhere. They’re forgotten. Those who wouldn’t be run off did. Persistence pays. So does positioning. (I have an interesting story about positioning, but another time.)
The hair-on-fire panic many progressive activists exist in vis-a-vis national politics and the future of the country (and now the planet) reflects the same short-term thinking that leads establishment Democrats to defend their reelection first and the voters second. (“This is the most important election of our lifetimes,” etc.) No long-term thinking. Longer-term, the Democratic party is a pushover if progressives will just do the work and stick around long enough to see results from the pushing. Yet a lot of talented activists are unwilling to get their nice, white vinyl souls soiled by contact with the icky party to do that. They consign themselves to irrelevancy.
Bernie Sanders won the primary here handily. He had a message that connected in the same county that supported Kucinich in 2004, as well as with rural folks with an anti-establishment itch to scratch. But Hillary Clinton had a lot going for her, including national campaign experience and a national network of personal and party contacts going back decades. She had experience in spades. Party insiders naturally felt it was “her turn.” Some talented Bernie organizers here who had real potential flamed out when he lost and they are gone now. Those who stuck around are positioned to move the ball down the field and change the game. It’s their turn now if only they’ll step forward and lead. Post-election, the opportunity is there if only they will seize it.
I had a roommate in college who seemed to be everything I was not. He was adventurous, daring, liked by everybody, and lucky. Damn, good things just seemed to come to him. But it wasn’t luck. What I finally realized was his antennae were always up. He was more attuned to the world than I was, than most people. He was always open, ready to recognize and take advantage of opportunities — NOW — that I would have shied from or let slip away while I was thinking it over. Opportunities are ephemeral, and slip away as quickly as regrets pile up.
Democrats and progressives seem forever to do more Monday-morning quarterbacking about missed opportunities than thinking three to five moves ahead, never pre-positioning themselves to capitalize on opportunities when they arise. That’s what Naomi Klein described in “The Shock Doctrine.” Like my roommate, those disaster capitalists pay attention to faint signals and pre-position themselves so they are poised to move quickly and take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.
So are progressives going to do that now or just protest after the fact? Because there’s a disaster coming, and we’d best be positioned to capitalize on opportunities that will appear suddenly out of nowhere. Better that than complain how the old boys clubs failed to do it for us.
Mitt Romney’s chances for being secretary of State in a Trump administration are fading amid a deep division among President-elect Trump’s team, and that is giving rise to dark horse candidate Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a foreign policy tough guy who once arm wrestled Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to insiders.
The Trump cabinet executive committee is also eyeing long-time Republican diplomat John Bolton as deputy secretary of State, though there are some who prefer him in the top job.
I mentioned his old connections to the Taliban which made him very angry and forced the editors to publish his complaint (which was not particularly convincing.)
After reading this fascinating story by Maria Danilova of the AP over the week-end you might wonder why one of [his VP considerations] isn’t Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California. They would seem to be a perfect match. Rohrabacher is a quirky individualist who, like Trump, marches to his own drummer. He’s been in Washington since the 80’s and knows his way around congress which is something Trump has said he wants in a VP. And they share an admiration for certain big strong manly man:
A former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, the 14-term Rohrabacher takes pride in having worked to weaken “our major global enemy at that time, the Soviet Union.” A large photo in his office shows him in the hills of Afghanistan in the 1980s, where, he told The Associated Press in an interview, he launched rockets at Soviet positions as a volunteer fighter.
Rohrabacher’s view changed when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Russia emerged as a different country. Although he acknowledges that opposition leaders face repression in Russia, he also says the country allows religious freedom and is generally more open than its predecessor.
In the mid-1990s, Rohrabacher got a taste of Russian politics, he says, when he welcomed a delegation of young Russian political leaders, which included Putin, who then worked for the mayor of St. Petersburg. After a friendly football match, the group went to a nearby pub and started arguing over whether the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. The debate turned into an arm-wrestling match between Putin and Rohrabacher, which Putin won.
“I ended up with Putin, and he beat me just like that,” Rohrabacher said, snapping his fingers.
One suspects that Trump would never be so humble. But his appreciation for Putin runs along the same lines. Rohrabacher is a major defender of Putin and the Russian government in the congress and a lot of people think it’s a little bit obsessive, particularly his willingness to take the part of some Russian officials on whom the US government has imposed sanctions for the jailhouse death of a Russian whistleblower. Rohrabacher intervened, meeting with these officials privately and with officers of another Russian firm associated with the crime under investigation in the US. He then tried to get the House Foreign Affairs Committee to drop this case from a bill imposing sanctions on human rights abusers from other countries, even trying to implicate the victims of the crimes as the real perpetrators despite all evidence to the contrary.
It’s such a natural you have to wonder why he wasn’t named earlier. With Bolton as number two, they would be quite the formidable pair of ugly Americans wreaking havoc all over the world. Winning!
During a press conference on Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was asked what he thought about the sweetheart deal President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence struck with United Technology to keep about 1,000 Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indiana in exchange for millions of dollars in incentives.
“Well I’m pretty happy that we’re keeping jobs in America, aren’t you?” Ryan said to a reporter, adding that he couldn’t speak to the specifics of the deal, which won’t prevent 1,300 Carrier jobs from relocating to Mexico from Indiana. “I think it’s pretty darn good that people are keeping their jobs in Indiana instead of going to Mexico.”
Ryan’s response was a significant departure from what he’s said in the past about deals like the Carrier one. On Tax Day last year, Ryan released a statement blasting President Obama for allegedly wanting to provide “special carve-outs to his favorite industries.”
“Our tax code should not pick winners and losers,” Ryan wrote on behalf of a “simpler, flatter” tax code. “Our country can’t reach its potential with a tax code that punishes people for reaching their own.”
Ryan reiterated that sentiment in a video clip he shared to Twitter in July.
Elites in Washington should NOT be picking winners & losers—that’s a recipe for a closed economy—for cronyism.https://t.co/AcHJfVRwTE
Even supporters of the Carrier deal acknowledge the approach Trump and Pence have taken is unsustainable. Scott Paul, president of the advocacy group the Alliance for American Manufacturing, told the New York Times that “Carrier is special because it happened at the right time and the right place and it gained a high profile. But obviously, Donald Trump and Mike Pence can’t intervene every time a plant closes.”
One of the early things I would do, probably before I even got in — and I wouldn’t even use — you know, I have — I know the smartest negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones.
You get a lot of them that are overrated. They’re not good. They think they are. They get good stories, because the newspapers get buffaloed (ph). But they’re not good.
But I know the negotiators in the world, and I put them one for each country. Believe me, folks. We will do very, very well, very, very well.
But I wouldn’t even waste my time with this one. I would call up the head of Ford, who I know. If I was president, I’d say, “Congratulations. I understand that you’re building a nice $2.5 billion car factory in Mexico and that you’re going to take your cars and sell them to the United States zero tax, just flow them across the border.”
And you say to yourself, “How does that help us,” right? “How does that help us? Where is that good”? It’s not.
So I would say, “Congratulations. That’s the good news. Let me give you the bad news. Every car and every truck and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, we’re going to charge you a 35-percent tax, and that tax is going to be paid simultaneously with the transaction, and that’s it.
Now, here’s what is going to happen. If it’s not me in the position, it’s one of these politicians that we’re running against, you know, the 400 people that we’re (inaudible). And here’s what’s going to happen. They’re not so stupid. They know it’s not a good thing, and they may even be upset by it. But then they’re going to get a call from the donors or probably from the lobbyist for Ford and say, “You can’t do that to Ford, because Ford takes care of me and I take care of you, and you can’t do that to Ford.”
And guess what? No problem. They’re going to build in Mexico. They’re going to take away thousands of jobs. It’s very bad for us.
So under President Trump, here’s what would happen:
(APPLAUSE)
The head of Ford will call me back, I would say within an hour after I told them the bad news. But it could be he’d want to be cool, and he’ll wait until the next day. You know, they want to be a little cool.
And he’ll say, “Please, please, please.” He’ll beg for a little while, and I’ll say, “No interest.” Then he’ll call all sorts of political people, and I’ll say, “Sorry, fellas. No interest,” because I don’t need anybody’s money. It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money.
I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich. I (inaudible).
(APPLAUSE)
And by the way, I’m not even saying that in a — that’s the kind of mindset, that’s the kind of thinking you need for this country.
What an alpha-male, right? Too bad his actual record doesn’t match his juvenile braggadocio.
Now, this is not what happened with Ford or Carrier, we know that. Basically, Ford did what they were going to do anyway and curried favor with Trump by blowing smoke. And they got Carrier to save about 800 of the 2000 jobs they were planning to transfer to Mexico by handing them a big fat subsidy paid for by the taxpayers of Indiana, something Pence had refused to do just a couple of years ago.
Essentially, Trump’s plan is to intervene in any proposed jobs move to Mexico that comes to his attention. But instead of giving them ultimatums about tariffs (something the Carrier folks explicitly made a part of their deal) he’s going to give them everybody’s hard earned tax dollars to keep a few jobs in the US, make huge profits and give Trump a big PR victory while making the lives of all the non-photo op workers in America demonstrably worse in every way. What a deal.
But don’t say he didn’t warn us. He said from the beginning that his economic plan was to hire billionaires and personally intervene to stop job losses when he became aware of them. That’s ridiculous. People knew it. But he won anyway because he sounded like a big macho hero who would step in personally to save the day. Like Superman. That’s what they voted for. A cartoon character. And that’s what they got.
By the way, the Superman iconography was all over the campaign:
That’s what Law Professor Laurence Tribe said this morning on Joy Reid’s show:
“It’s called the emoluments clause and it basically says no officer of the United States can be on the receiving end of any kind of benefit, economic benefit, payment, gift, profit, whatever, from a foreign government or its corporations or agents,” Tribe explained before pointing to Trump’s kids having one foot in his administration and the other in Trump’s businesses. “In this case Donald Jr. or Ivanka or Eric — then there would be a close relationship that could never be disentangled by the American public.”
Turning to the Trump family’s continuing ownership of hotels and businesses throughout the world, Tribe said Trump needs to sell off everything.
“He’s a constant emolument magnet,” Tribe quipped. “He thinks of himself as a babe magnet, but he’s an emoluments magnet. And all around the world everybody wants to go to his hotels and not the competitors, and wants to give him a variance or a special land use permit and there’s simply no way short of absolutely liquidating all of his cash and assets into a blind trust and not handed over to his kids.”
“No way short of that prevents him from being a walking, talking violation of the Constitution from the moment he takes the oath,” he concluded.
And frankly, considering the legal exposure inherent in the liquidation of a business that depends upon a “brand” for its value,. I’m going to guess that even if he did this there would be tremendous incentive for him to make special “deals” with business partners to avoid such complications. I don’t think there’s any way for him not to be riddled with conflicts no matter what he does. He should not have run for president without unwinding that business before he ran. But hey, nobody said much about it and nobody told him he should so, what the hell, right?
Now it’s too late. The only thing that can stop him from doing exactly what he’s doing is impeachment. Does anyone think Jason Chaffetz is going to launch those hearings any time soon? I didn’t think so. This isn’t Richard Nixon’s Republican party. Nobody’s going to walk up the Hill and tell The Donald it’s time to go.
It’s conventional wisdom that members of both parties are equally partisan about everything and that nobody has any principles. This is an example of how that might not be true:
Americans’ support for keeping the Electoral College system for electing presidents has increased sharply. Weeks after the 2016 election, 47% of Americans say they want to keep the Electoral College, while 49% say they want to amend the Constitution to allow for a popular vote for president. In the past, a clear majority favored amending the U.S. Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system.
47% want to keep Electoral College, up from 35% in 2011
Republicans shift decisively in favor of Electoral College
Most Americans correctly answer that Hillary Clinton won popular vote
I think it’s pretty clear what’s happened here, don’t you? More Republicans have suddenly decided that the electoral college is awesome for some unknown reason. The Democrats did not. Now it’s possible that if they ever win the EC and lose the popular vote by millions they too will be ready to embrace it. We don’t know since that never happens.
What we can see is that after 2000, which was the same situation as today essentially, there was no big uptick in support for the EC. There is now. And that’s because the Republican Party is no longer even slightly interested in democratic norms. They are the “win at all costs” Party.
