Month: December 2016

Yeah, these people voted for Trump because of his trade policies

by digby

Dear God. We’re doomed:

CNN’s Alysin Camerota sat down with several long-time Trump supporters for a focus group-style interview on Thursday’s “New Day” and pressed them for their thoughts on the president-elect’s transition and postelection performance.

Each of the participants, with whom Camerota has spoken with before on CNN, praised Trump’s performance so far.

“How do you feel about the ‘white nationalist movement,’ the alt-right, some Neo-Nazi salutes that we’ve seen? What are we to make of what feels like a groundswell of that with the Steve Bannon-Breitbart connection,” Camerota asked the group after one participant claimed that the people “that Trump has appointed or nominated have all been top of the class, number one in their field, extremely talented, great leaders on their own.”

Former Democratic state legislator and co-chair of the New Hampshire-based Women for Trump Paula Johnson jumped in to defend Trump: “That’s been around forever,” Johnson pushed back against Camerota’s questioning. “You know, if you keep reporting on it, it’s going to grow like a cancer. If you forget about it then it’s probably going to go away.” Using a favorite rhetorical device of the former reality-TV star: media bashing,” she added, “The media has to harp on everything. And it’s wrong.”

Johnson continued that many anti-Trump voters had little room to complain if they failed to vote in the election. “Voting is a privilege in this country,” Johnson said, before adding, “and you need to be legal, not like California where three million illegals voted.”

A confused Camerota asked Johson, “Where are you getting your information?”

“From the media!” Johnson insisted. “Some of them were CNN, I believe.”

“CNN said that 3 million illegal people voted in California?” an incredulous Camerota asked.

Johnson then decided to source her false report directly to President Obama.

“I think there was a good amount because the president told people that they could vote,” Johnson claimed. “They said, ‘The president said I could vote. I’m here illegally.’”

To her credit, Camerota kept up the line of questioning while seemingly holding back laughter.

“Did you hear President Obama said that illegal people could vote?” asked Camerota, to which nearly all the participants nodded their heads and replied, “Yes.”

“Tell me, where?” Camerota demanded.

At that point, another Trump voter directed Camerota to, “Google it. You could find it on Facebook.”

So she did.

Camerota, a former long-time Fox News host, was then forced to read a recent Mediate headline to the group that read, “Fox deceptively edits Obama interview to falsely claim he told illegal immigrants to vote.”

The Trump voters were apparently referring to Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney’s false claim that the president “appears to encourage illegals to vote, and he promises no repercussions if they do.”

While the above clip is clearly deceptively edited to conflate undocumented immigrants with all Latino voters in the U.S., Fox Business Network not only failed to make that distinction but falsely implied such a distinction was never even made. In fact, Fox Business Network left out the portion of Obama’s comments in which he explicitly stated that undocumented immigrants do not have the legal right to vote.

Still, Trump voters remained wedded to the fake news nearly a month after the election.

“You as you sit here today think that millions of illegal people voted in this country and you believe that there was widespread voting abuse? In the millions of people?” a clearly exasperated Camerota continued to challenge the Trump voters.

“California allows it,” Johnson said.

“They do not allow illegals — you mean voter fraud, California allows?” asked a dumbfounded Camerota.

“I believe there was voter fraud in this country,” she insisted, remaining steadfast to her false belief.

I don’t know which members of the non-college educated white Trump voters Democrats can peel off to win but it’s not going to be easy.

.

The scariest Trumpie? Mike ” Jack D. Ripper” Flynn FTW

by digby

I wrote about the crazy Flynn for Salon this morning:

From the looks of it, Donald Trump plans to staff his administration with every plutocrat and retired general he’s ever met. So far he’s named billionaire Betsy DeVos, billionaire Wilbur Ross, along with multimillionaires Elaine Chao, Steve Mnuchin and Tom Price. He has interviewed the vastly wealthy Mitt Romney and is reportedly considering Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs. It’s clear that whatever Trump may have said that sounded like economic populism during the campaign is unlikely to be translated into policy in his administration.

Bloomberg reported that Wall Street couldn’t be more thrilled, quoting hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson happily agreeing that Trump’s voters might be upset that their man is surrounding himself with billionaires and bankers:

I can take glee in that — I think Donald Trump conned them. I worried that he was going to do crazy things that would blow the system up. So the fact that he’s appointing people from within the system is a good thing.

Basically, it looks like Trump is going to deliver Wall Street’s wish list and leave the “populism” to people like Jeff Sessions and Kris Kobach, who are designated to bring the “law and order” to communities of immigrants and people of color. Surprise.

Despite the fact that Trump routinely disparaged the military leadership on the trail, saying often that he knew far more than they do about everything, Trump is actually a military fanboy. (He is not, as often erroneously described in the press, a “history buff.” He does not read.) As often as he has insulted the current brass for being “stupid” he would evoke the memory of World War II-era generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, who seem to be the only two he’s ever heard of. It’s clear that he has a deep fondness for “tough” military leaders of the kind he’s seen in the movies.

Currently, he’s said to be considering former generals David Petraeus, James “Mad Dog” Mattis and John Kelly, along with Admiral Mike Rogers for high-level jobs in the administration. As this Washington Post article by Phillip Carter and Loren DeJonge Schulman spells out in some detail, this is unusual and frankly unnerving. But none of them are as unnerving as the former general who has been tapped to serve as Trump’s national security adviser, his close associate Michael Flynn.

Flynn’s recent descent into extremism and his unfitness for this particular job have been well documented, but every day seems to bring new revelations of just how unhinged he really is. For instance, it came to my attention that in the days just before the election, Flynn was talking to the media about Hillary Clinton’s alleged association with pedophilia, which means that he’s enmeshed in the deepest reaches of the right-wing fake-news fever swamps. That reference could only be to #Pizzagate, which involved the bizarre and spurious claims that Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of the back of a pizza parlor in Washington.

It also turns out that Steve Bannon isn’t the only close Trump associate with connections to the white nationalist “alt-right.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that a week after the election Flynn was praising Breitbart’s odious racist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:

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 … See, a lot of people in here won’t know who he is. I tag him on Twitter, you know, because he’s a phenomenal individual, and I’m mentioning him tonight because he spoke alongside of me last night to another group of folks.”

It’s known that Flynn travels on the far edge of the conspiratorial extreme of neoconservative thinking, having recently written a book called “The Field of Flight” with Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. faces an existential threat from … well, pretty much everyone. (Ledeen famously speculated that even Germany and France were in cahoots with al-Qaida when they failed to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq.)

Flynn and Ledeen are heavily influenced by the late Laurent Murawiec, a French-American neocon ideologue who wrote a book they hail as a “masterpiece” called “The Mind of Jihad.” Murawiec apparently found a web of connections between radical Islamism, Bolshevism and and the Nazis that Ledeen and Flynn find convincing. Among other things, Murawiec was associated for many years with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the fringiest political figures in American life.
Curious about Flynn’s views of China and North Korea, about which he has said very little, the New York Times consulted “The Field of Flight” for clues as to his thinking. This is what they found:

In the introduction, [Flynn] wrote that radical Islamists “are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.” The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”

The general expanded on his definition of the anti-Western alliance: “The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups.” 

“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.

The technical term for that absurd and paranoid worldview is “nutty as a fruitcake.” And what’s more frightening is that the man Flynn will now be working for can fit his own knowledge of world affairs in a shotglass.

As national security adviser, Flynn will be the last man in the room with this totally unprepared president when he makes the most important foreign policy and national security decisions. In an administration already filled with terrifying prospects in almost every regard, this is the one that sends chills down my spine.

.

What do they know and when did they know it?

by digby

Make of this what you will:

That’s all the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee except Dianne Feinstein. She stuck with the Republicans.

What could it be?

I guess it’s possible that these are all just partisan suck-ups who are trying to excuse Clinton’s terrible campaign. But what if it isn’t?

And what do we do with an incompetent puppet who …?

.

A fur-lined tough time
by Tom Sullivan

President-elect Donald Trump won the news cycle again with his deal with Carrier. Or rather, with Indiana’s Carrier deal. As Rachel Maddow speculated last night, that is why Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is still Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. He wasn’t going to step down to focus on the Trump transition before giving the state a parting gift: $700,000 a year in state taxpayer-funded incentives to Carrier (United Technologies) to go with promises from Trump of a reduction in the corporate tax rate.

If incentives deals — what Republicans during Democratic administrations derisively call “picking winners and losers” — are what Trump calls sticking it to the fat cats, American business is in for a fur-lined tough time. When Trump shouted at manufacturers threatening to move offshore, “you’re going to pay a damn tax,” you thought he meant a higher one. Caveat emptor.

The Carrier deal promises to save 800 jobs at the Indianapolis plant. Another 1,300 are still headed to Mexico according to Fortune. Some dealmaker.

Henry Grabar writes at Slate:

And subsidies were probably not the biggest factor in Carrier’s decision. Once we do find out what Pence offered, the terms will likely not save Carrier the $65 million that a move would have.

Instead, the deal may have important immaterial benefits. It puts United Technologies in the good graces of the administration, which may be key to its future business. About ten percent of the company’s $56 billion in revenue comes from the federal government, especially military contracts. The implication that Trump made some kind of backroom threat in Naptown over Defense Department contracts is worrisome, but for the moment, unfounded. For now let’s just say that Carrier has an interest in keeping Trump happy.

Still, what happened in Indiana represents exactly the problem, not the solution, in America’s approach to corporate negotiation. There is literally another factory across town from Carrier waiting for the same kind of attention. It’s not good that the geography of large offices and factories is a function of public money doled out by cities, states and in Washington. It’s been a great boon to companies with the size and flexibility to uproot or locate their operations at will, or at least make a convincing threat they’ll do so. And a big loss for the rest of us.

“Use your leverage,” Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” Carrier did.

But the optics work for Trump. No one will remember the details.

Nothing to see here

by digby

Oh look, we’re already giving Trump and the kids special favors:

Six days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, the federal government finalized a key step toward a tax subsidy worth as much as $32 million for a company that is owned by Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and two of his sons.

That company owns Trump’s luxury Washington, DC, hotel, located in a taxpayer-owned historic landmark known as the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leases from the federal government. The hotel has become emblematic of Trump’s many potential conflicts of interest, because when he becomes president he will effectively be both landlord and tenant.

The latest step toward the massive tax credit, which has not been previously reported, puts that conflict in sharp relief.

On Nov. 14, the National Park Service, which oversees “Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits” with the IRS, finalized the second phase of a three-step process.
Technically, it approved an amendment to Trump’s previous plans for the rehabilitation of the building. With that done, the Trump family company that leases the hotel, the Trump Old Post Office LLC, has to go through just one more phase to get the tax credit worth 20% of the rehabilitation project.

“This is a classic or textbook example of a conflict of interest,” said Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University School of Law. “The decision-maker here, the National Park Service, works for the party that stands to benefit from a favorable decision.”

The right wingers are all saying this doesn’t mean anything because he’s a businesman. They seem to think that makes sense.