Month: December 2016

The right wing noise machine takes it to a new level

by digby

I wrote about their latest ploy for Salon this morning:

Conservatives are trying to give us all a headache — and not just by taking away our health insurance and worshipping Donald Trump. They are launching an attack on the concept of reality itself. This is not entirely new, of course. The right has made good use of propaganda and the old “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” routine for many years.

Recall that back in the early 2000s, many of us were alarmed to see Iraq war propaganda making its way into the mainstream, eagerly passed on by major newspapers and cable news shows. The people pushing the attack had a long history of advocating for the invasion before 9/11 and had even made clear they were hoping for a pretext. Nonetheless, in those days of compulsory patriotic flag-waving the media showed no inclination to be even slightly skeptical, and the result was catastrophic.

Even as news was filtering out that the case against Saddam Hussein for supposedly aiding Osama bin Laden was thin to the point of nonexistence, top leaders such as Dick Cheney were blithely asserting that they had proof. The media largely took them at their word. When it became obvious that Saddam’s WMD cache did not exist, many on the right simply insisted that it did. This 2015 poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that tons of people still believe it:

Overall, 42 percent of Americans believe that U.S. forces found active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. Republicans are more likely to hold this belief than Democrats: Fifty-one percent of Republicans think it’s “probably” or “definitely” true that an active program was found after the 2003 invasion, with 14 percent saying that it was definitely true. Still, large portions of other groups think that the WMD program, a major part of the justification for the invasion, was actually found, including 32 percent of Democrats.

It was a confusing time. But war propaganda is hardly unprecedented and America has deployed it as often as any country. From the Hearst yellow journalism that ginned up support for the Spanish-American War to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, the United States government used such tactics to gain public support for wars overseas.

The first Gulf War featured one of the most blatant examples ever when the first Bush administration hired the P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton to help them sell the war. According to John R. MacArthur’s book “Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War,” their focus groups showed that there was a particularly vivid storyline that worked: the mistreatment of infants.

So at a hearing prior to the vote, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., and Rep. John Porter, R-Ill., called a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The distraught young woman testified about a terrifying event at a Kuwait City hospital. She said, “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming into the hospital with guns and going into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

From that point on the “babies yanked from the incubator” story was emblematic of the viciousness of Saddam’s troops. I personally knew people who were moved into supporting the war because of it. And it was a lie. The young woman who testified was not some anonymous Kuwaiti candy-striper but rather a member of the royal family whose father was the ambassador to the U.S. When human rights organizations investigated later, they could not find that she had any connection to the hospital, or any evidence that any incident of that kind had happened at all.

Back in the 1960s, when the modern conservative movement was birthed in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, one of the Republican explanations for that defeat was that the media had a liberal slant. This grew into a bedrock belief over the next decade as the Watergate scandal unfolded. By the time Reagan came to power in 1980, it was being deployed as an organizing principle.

Conservatives learned to challenge the media’s alleged liberal bias as a tactic to make reporters leery of any news that reflected negatively on conservatives. It was very effective. By the time right-wing talk radio came along and later Fox News, with its pretensions of being “fair and balanced,” conservatives had convinced millions of people that their version of reality was the truth and that mainstream media and major newspapers were all catering to the liberals.

It succeeded in making conservatives uniquely subject to misinformation and right wing propaganda. Now they are deploying a new tactic. Jeremy Peters of the New York Times reported on Monday that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have cleverly rebranded the mainstream media once again. It’s no longer the “liberal media.” It’s now “fake news” — the online phenomenon that emerged in this election cycle to foment clicks, profits and chaos for a variety of reasons.

In defining “fake news” so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, [conservative commentators] are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all purveyors of information, one product of the country’s increasing political polarization. And conservatives, seeing an opening to undermine the mainstream media, a longtime foe, are more than happy to dig the hole deeper. 

“Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship by pundits. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”

It is going to be a very difficult task. The right-wing media complex is all-in on this. According to the Times, everyone from Laura Ingraham to Erick Erickson to Donald Trump himself is labeling anything they disagree with, including the fact-check sites like Snopes or Factcheck.org, as “fake news.” Millions of people have been conditioned to believe their claims for years, which means polarization is only likely to get worse. If Americans can’t even agree which facts are real, it’s hard to see how we’re going to be able to govern ourselves.

The Holiday fundraiser continues. Thanks to all who have contributed so far. I’m very grateful.

cheers — digby

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Trouble’s my New Year’s resolution
by Tom Sullivan

A Facebook friend “never one to suffer fools gladly” joked last night that if trends don’t change soon “there’s gonna be trouble.”

Trouble’s my New Year’s resolution.

People who have never engaged in politics are still calling seven weeks after the election to ask what they can do. Are there buses going to the women’s march in Washington? (Yes.) Is there going to be a local march for those who can’t get to Washington? (Yes.) Is anyone going to Raleigh to protest what’s going on there? (And then some.) Kim Yaman, a Kossack friend I’ve dubbed the Repeat Defender, got arrested again for civil disobedience during the HB2 repeal debacle. She made the front pages.

North Carolina has become a testing ground both for “whitelash” extremists and for the progressive counteroffensive, Politico reports:

Progressives and moderates watching across the country have been horrified about the evolution of a resolutely purple state into a hardcore bastion of untouchable conservative power—and what that might portend for a country where Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court and 32 state legislatures—25 of which will have Republicans at the helm of all three branches of government. “The reality is this exactly how empires fall … When people put their own political interest over the interest of institutions is when countries fail,” said Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a former advisor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “I think the message from North Carolina is that the rules have changed.”

Rules? There are no rules here. This is serious and progressives need to get serious.

… Andrew Reynolds, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote in the Raleigh News & Observer that, in terms of freedom of electoral laws, fairness of party competition and other metrics, North Carolina now ranks “alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.” “I love North Carolina … [but] the state has really been leading the way in restraining democratic principles,” Reynolds said in an interview.

But others say North Carolina offers another lesson for national politics—that a party given that much seemingly unassailable power will eventually overreach. Helping lead the backlash in the state has been a loud and well-organized protest movement whose weekly protests at the state legislative building have gotten national coverage. Rev. William Barber III, the state NAACP leader whose passionate address at this summer’s Democratic National Convention called on viewers to be the “moral defibrillators of our time,” has called for a national economic boycott of North Carolina to demand the repeal of HB2, redrawing of fair electoral districts and the rescinding of many of laws seizing power from Cooper passed by the legislature in December.

Barber has already posted the signup page for the 11th Annual Moral March on Raleigh scheduled for Saturday February 11. The 2014 rally held in the wake of passage of the now court-gutted vote suppression bill attracted tens of thousands, but little press. That was then. This is now.

Roger Hickey of Campaign for America’s Future wrote after the 2014 rally about how the Forward Together movement successfully got activists out of their silos and pulling together (links have been updated):

Long years of organizing and networking had built trust among groups representing various parts of the North Carolina community. And attacks on “my group” coming at the same time as attacks on “your group” forged stronger bonds. An inclusive People’s Agenda was forged, supported by an impressive list of coalition partners – from faith groups to labor unions to LGBT rights organizations to women’s groups and environmentalists. Look at these two links, which can both be found at http://www.hkonj.com/about. They are models for almost every state coalition in the nation.

That rally was in part about fighting North Carolina’s voter suppression bill. The NC-NAACP and its co-litigants won that fight last July.

Isaiah Poole heard from an activist on the ground at the 2014 rally:

Edrie Irvine, a grassroots activist from Washington, D.C. who has been active in a number of demonstrations, said that this march was different. “So many previous gatherings have felt unfocused or hijacked at times,” she wrote in an email after the march. “Also, that while there may have been many different groups marching along the same street, it didn’t mean that after the event, we’d be still working together toward the same goals. Today, I not only heard a sense of unity in the messages but felt a sense of unity in the people. I didn’t walk away with that flushed sense of power I have felt at other times but more a sense of determination that the people I met along the way are committed toward positive ends, achievable ends – the path won’t be smooth and victory won’t come tomorrow but together they will lift each other up to reach, in Rev. Barber’s words, higher ground.” [Read Edrie Irvine’s full first-person account of her experience at the Moral March on Raleigh.]

Make no mistake. This is a fight. Time to fight back.

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

There’s always the D-List

by digby

You have undoubtedly heard by now that our president elect is having a hard time finding anyone willing to perform at his inauguration. And he’s not happy about it, not one bit. After all, his convention was one of the worst ever staged and this looks likely to exceed it for sheer amateurism and tackiness.

Roy Edroso of the Village Voice discovered that he’s not the only one who is like totally pissed off. Conservatives all over the country are so mad that these liberal idiots won’t do as they’re told:

It may seem as small thing to you and other normal people. The performances by Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, and other big names at Obama’s inaugurations were nice, but certainly not the main attraction.

Yet rightbloggers, whenever they talk about the celeb shortfall, become extremely agitated. Though they are about to assume complete control of the federal government, it seems that as long as someone in this great land of ours isn’t kissing their ass, they can’t be happy.

Since shortly after The Leader’s victory, a team of show biz experts has been working to sign up appropriately boldface-name performers for his inauguration. But Garth Brooks fell through, as did Celine Dion, as did (despite an erroneous report from The Leader’s team) Elton John. This pattern prevailed until the press was talking less about who might perform at the event and more about who had already declined to do so, and soon Alec Baldwin was trolling The Leader with an offer to perform an AC/DC song.

The Leader was peeved and, as is his wont, issued an I Know You Are But What Am I statement via Twitter (“The so-called ‘A’ list celebrities are all wanting tixs to the inauguration…”) while inauguration producer Mark Burnett shook up his team and scoured the agencies.

And, for reasons that might be better described by their psychoanalysts, conservative writers who had spent the previous six weeks gloating over The Leader’s victory began to act as if they had instead lost everything, and lashed out in inchoate rage.

“The list of A-list talent refusing to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration is a glaring reminder of how for celebrities, their preening and posturing over their high-toned moral positions supersedes their burning desire to be noticed by the public,” seethed Hank Berrien at The Daily Wire.

“It’s being claimed that Elton John, Garth Brooks and Andrea Bocelli have all refused to perform, but I’ve yet to see confirmation that anyone actually asked them,” huffed Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.

At RedState, Jay Caruso sputtered:

Most of these jackwagons were prancing around with their “I’m With Her” apparel and busily planning what they were going to sing when Hillary’s ascendancy to the Oval Office was complete…The Hollywood elite lined up in droves to defeat Trump, with Hillary cackling along. The concert in Cleveland with Jay-Z, Beyonce and an appearance by Lebron James worked wonders for her, didn’t it? Trump supporters show up by the tens of thousands at his rallies even after being elected. Does anybody believe people are not going to show up because Katy Perry or Madonna won’t be performing? They don’t care.

There, he showed them.

And the insolences didn’t stop there. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested that several famous musicians hold a big concert in Miami that same day, and rumors circulated that such an event was being planned.

Highly speculative, that, and something you’d think could be easily ignored by gracious winners.

“Some of the most famous libtard singers on the planet such as, Beyonce, Madonna, Elton John, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga are all planning the most pathetic attempt at sabotaging President Trump’s inauguration,” snarled Richard Smith at Conservative101. “Crybaby celebs plan to make Inauguration Day all about themselves with protest concert to rival Trump,” headlined BizPacReview. “You know what, this is just like the Democrats to plan something like this,” moped Danny Gold at Liberty Writers News.

There’s much more at the link. They are all aquiver.  I don’t know why. I’m sure the Duck Dynasty guys will be happy to do and inspirational duck call. And Nuget’s always up for a rousing rendition of the pussy-grabbers theme song, “Cat Scratch Fever.”

There’s no word on whether Toby Keith and Alabama are still going to play at Don and Eric’s post inauguration charity fundraising event called “camouflage and cufflinks” now that it’s been revealed as a pay to play scheme for access to the new pres and Eric has closed down his charity.But they were the only names mentioned as confirming for anything in Washington that week.Maybe they can be pushed into singing “The Angry American” so Donald and Ivanka will have something to dance to at the President’s Ball.

And then there’s Kanye. You know his followers will just love him.

It’s a problem. But Trump had better get used to this. There are hundreds of millions of people in this country who find him so deplorable that they want nothing to do with him. He should understand that. He’s a loser everyone knows won by a fluke.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

Cheers — digby

A helpful psychological guide from the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova to understanding our predicament:

Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper’s “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization”
In 1979, a team from Stanford University—Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper—published a paper that made sense of a common, and seemingly irrational, phenomenon: that the beliefs we hold already affect how we process and assimilate new information. In other words, we don’t learn rationally, taking in information and then making a studied judgment. Instead, the very way we learn is influenced from the onset by what we know and who we are. In the original study, Lord and his colleagues asked people to read a series of studies that seemed to either support or reject the idea that capital punishment deters crime. The participants, it turned out, rated studies confirming their original beliefs as more methodologically rigorous—and those that went against them as shoddy. 

This process, which is a form of what’s called confirmation bias, can help explain why Trump supporters remain supportive no matter what evidence one puts to them—and why Trump’s opponents are unlikely to be convinced of his worth even if he ends up doing something actually positive. The two groups simply process information differently. “The confirmation bias is not specific to Donald Trump. It’s something we are all susceptible to,” the Columbia University psychologist Daniel Ames, one of several scholars to nominate this paper, said. “But Trump appears to be an especially public and risky illustration of it in many domains.” (Ames and his colleague Alice Lee recently showed a similar effect with beliefs about torture.)
A closely related paper by Ross, Lepper, and Robert Vallone, from 1985, found that the polarization effect was particularly powerful among strong partisans. When looking at perceptions of the 1982 Beirut massacre, they found that more extreme partisans saw the facts as more biased, and recalled the media coverage of the massacre differently. They saw more negative references to their side, and they predicted that nonpartisans would be swayed more negatively against them as a result—thus increasing their perception of being assaulted and solidifying their opinions. The more knowledge of the issue they had, the greater their perception of bias. American politics has grown only more partisan since the eighties, and this finding can help explain some of the backlash among Trump supporters to press outlets that reported critically on him. 

Dan Kahan’s “Cultural Cognition”
Over the last decade, Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale University, has been studying a phenomenon he calls “cultural cognition,” or how values shape perception of risk and policy beliefs. One of his insights is that people often engage in something called “identity-protective cognition.” They process information in a way that protects their idea of themselves. Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren’t true. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, one of several to nominate Kahan for this list, said that his theory is best called “political and intellectual tribalism.” Like seeks like, and like affirms like—and people gravitate to the intellectually similar others, even when all of their actions should rightly set off alarm bells.
Trump, Pinker said, won over pretty much the entire Republican Party, and all those who felt alienated from the left, by declaring himself to be opposed to the “establishment” and political correctness. And this all happened, Pinker wrote to me, “despite his obvious temperamental unsuitability for the responsibilities of the Presidency, his opposition to free trade and open borders (which should have, but did not, poison him with the libertarian right), his libertine and irreligious lifestyle (which should have, but did not, poison him with evangelicals), his sympathies with Putin’s Russia (which should have, but did not, poison him with patriots), and his hostility to American military and political alliances with democracies (which should have, but did not, poison him with neoconservatives).” 

Karen Stenner’s “The Authoritarian Dynamic”
Research published a decade ago by Karen Stenner provides insight into a psychological trait known as authoritarianism: the desire for strong order and control. Most people aren’t authoritarian as such, Stenner finds. Instead, most of us are usually capable of fairly high tolerance. It’s only when we feel we are under threat—especially what Stenner calls “normative threat,” or a threat to the perceived integrity of the moral order—that we suddenly shut down our openness and begin to ask for greater force and authoritarian power. People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it’s in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives. In 2005, Stenner offered a prediction that seems clairvoyant now. In response to the increasing tolerance in Western societies, she wrote, an authoritarian backlash was all but inevitable:

[T]he increasing license allowed by those evolving cultures generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance. . . . The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance. 

John Tooby and Leda Cosmide’s “Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality”
In 2010, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, scholars at the University of California, Santa Barbara, best known for their work in evolutionary psychology, published a paper on the use of outrage to help mobilize coalitions. Their main claim is that humans, like other animals, are predisposed to coalition-building: in order to best protect ourselves, we coöperate with those we see as within our coalition, and we fight those we see as outside it. One of the ways coalitions can be galvanized to action, the authors showed, is by uniting them against a perceived outrage—and this dynamic played out repeatedly in the Trump campaign, both with Trump supporters and the opposition. Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before—and prepare to attack like never before. 

Michele Gelfand’s “Cultural Tightness”
In a series of recent papers in Science and PNAS, Michele Gelfand, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, demonstrated a concept that seems particularly relevant not only to Trump but to the seeming polarization of politics more globally: in surveys conducted throughout the United States, in one case, and in thirty-three countries, in another, combined with historical analyses and personality assessments, she found that when people perceive higher threat levels and are under stress, they flock to leaders who promise tighter rules, greater strength, a more authoritarian approach. Gelfand calls this “cultural tightness”: a desire for strong social norms and a low tolerance for any sort of deviant behavior. As threat perception increases, even looser cultures—those with high tolerance and lower norms—begin to tighten up.
Throughout the election, Trump himself stoked the feeling of threat and fear, so that he became a seemingly more and more fitting leader. In Europe, rhetoric about terrorism, immigration threats, and the like is doing much the same thing. The greater the perceived threat, the tighter the culture becomes. Indeed, Gelfand has found that the strongest supporters of Trump were also those who thought the U.S. was under the greatest threat. 

Tali Sharot’s “Optimism Bias”
So why didn’t anyone see this coming and try to reverse any of the trends? In ongoing research, the psychologist Tali Sharot is investigating something known as “optimism bias”: we think the future is going to be better than the past. We tend to dismiss things we don’t particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations. Instead, we assume that the future will be far more promising than current signs might make it seem. We are, in a sense, hardwired for hope. And so that’s what we do. Until the very end, some supporters of Hillary Clinton held out hope that the Electoral College would somehow, for the first time in history, reverse the results of the election, just as some people had held out hope that Trump wouldn’t get the G.O.P. nomination and, once he did, that he wouldn’t accept it. Now many Trump opponents hold out hope that once he assumes office he will act differently than he has on the campaign trail. People keep hoping for the best, even in the face of great odds. And it’s a hope that helps us survive, even when those great odds defy us.

Bob Altemeyer’s “The Authoritarians” (which he released for free on pdf) is really helpful in understanding this as well. His central insight is that the danger stems not only from authoritarian leaders — the followers are authoritarians too. (You know them when you see them, amirite?)

You can look for all kinds of explanations for the rise of Trump and far right movements around the world. These studies all work to explain the psychology that got us here. But authoritarianism is the one common thread. You ignore that at your (and our) peril.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

.

Wayne’s World

by digby

I continue to be a little bit surprised at the lack of attention being paid to the efforts of the NRA in the past election what part gun proliferation activism may have played. I guess that’s an old story although I will be surprised if gun regulation is given the prominence Hillary Clinton gave it in any campaign going forward.

Guns are a cultural totem, particularly in rural white America and those voters all heard Trump and the NRA loud and clear. And they will continue to speak out.

Take, for instance this story from Media Matters about the NRA TV channel host who thinks criticizing Trump is a violation of the constitution:

Ostensibly a news organization, the National Rifle Association’s NRATV is actually a pro-Trump propaganda effort that routinely labels protected-speech reporting on the president-elect as a plot to destroy the United States, “anti-patriotic,” and an “assault against freedom and the Constitution.”

In fact, the opposite is true. Freedom of the press is enshrined in the First Amendment, which reads in part, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

The protections afforded to the press by the First Amendment are, of course, not absolute. The publication of defamatory material can have legal repercussions. But the type of press activity NRATV describes as oppositional to the U.S. Constitution is actually accurate and sourced reporting on important matters of public interest.

NRATV, a rebranding of NRA News, launched in October with the stated mission of providing “the most comprehensive video coverage of Second Amendment issues, events and culture anywhere in the world.” It brought on conservative radio’s Grant Stinchfield to serve as a host, interjecting live hourly updates into a 24-hour video feed featuring archived material and other live programming…

Following Donald Trump’s victory, NRATV has adopted an even more authoritarian tone. During a November 29 broadcast about the “dishonest and downright dirty” mainstream media, Stinchfield argued that it is “anti-patriotic” to report on Trump and his transition team if those reports raise critical questions. Claiming that “the media needs to get on board,” Stinchfield said, “They talk about being anti-patriotic; when you call into question every single thing that this president-elect does and his transition team does, it’s the media that is trying to destroy our republic. They are trying to tear it down piece by piece by sending you false information.”

There’s much more at the link.

One can discount these people as small potatoes so who cares what they think. But this is the most powerful single issue lobbying group in the US. And they are armed. That they are openly accusing the media of trying to destroy the republic if they don’t “get on board” is concerning.

In too many ways it’s Wayne LaPierre’s world and we’re just living in it.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

.

The gloves will still come off

by digby

Here’s a sobering, day after Christmas statistic:

The number of police-related fatalities in the United States appears to be far higher than the federal government has previously estimated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has been tracking the data since 2000. But a new hybrid program that combines media reports and crowdsourcing techniques with reporting by police agencies has resulted in new estimates of civilian deaths that are closer to reality. The data, released last week, include deaths related to police interactions with subjects on the street as well as deaths that take place while a suspect is in police custody.

Police reported 444 fatal shootings of civilians in 2014. New data suggests a far higher death toll.

The bureau’s researchers identified 1,348 arrest-related deaths from June 2015 through March 2016 using media reports and crowdsourced information—an average of about 135 deaths per month. For June through August 2015, they also surveyed police agencies and identified an additional 46 arrest-related deaths—or 12 percent more—than the number the bureau had tallied independently for that time period. Extrapolating the data, and correcting for the police-reporting disparity, the bureau estimated there were about 1,900 arrest-related deaths in the 12 months ending May 2016.

Unfortunately, the first time a contentious police shooting results in protests I’m afraid our new president and his Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions will send the message that the gloves are coming off. Authoritarians look for opportunities to give their authoritarian followers a little red meat.

I have little doubt this will be one area where the Trump administration has a whole lot to say. Whatever else you may say about his intelligence, Trump instinctively understands what his people want and he’s willing to give it to them.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

.

Daddy Dearest

by digby

This article about Ivanka being first lady is …. wrong:

Like so many other aspects of the looming Trump presidency, this feels like an historically unprecedented and telling scenario. Ivanka’s proto-first-ladydom seems particular to a man whose actual wife, Melania, has seemed ill at ease with and unprepared for the speeches, policy hobbyhorses, and general diplomatic responsibilities of the modern role. And by adopting his daughter as a professional consort, Trump, who has shown a knack for ushering out his wives in favor of younger models, has in a weird way now done it again.

In this one dimension, however, Trump is actually harking back to a long tradition. Many first daughters and daughters-in-law have in fact served as formal hostesses, advisors, and confidantes in the White House. According to the National First Ladies’ Library, a project that produced a series of articles on “other women” of the White House a few years ago, about two dozen women relatives other than wives have served as first lady in some capacity. Eliza Monroe Hay served as unofficial spokeswoman for her father, James Monroe, for example. Angelica Van Buren lived at the White House and received guests on behalf of her widower father-in-law, Martin. The daughters of Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson assumed the role when their mothers died in the White House. The term “first lady” itself was popularized during the presidency of James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor—if you know what I mean—who enlisted his niece to handle the duties of first lady.

It is unprecedented for a president with a wife who clearly could perform the duties of First lady being usurped by his daughter. That has never happened before and it is weird I don’t care what anyone says.

There’s nothing wrong with a daughter being close to her father, of course. But installing her as First Lady is creepy, particularly since it just raises more questions about her relationship to the family business and her own brand. The whole thing makes no sense. Trump has a perfectly good wife. There’s no reason his daughter should assume the role.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

.

Trump’s mom and pop global empire

by digby

This NY Times article about the Trump Organization is fascinating. Indeed, it’s so fascinating one might have thought they’d have done it before the election but, oh well. There’s a lot of detail about how it’s run which provides some insight into how Trump operates.

Perhaps the most interesting is the fact that he’s running a very small company.Trump headquarters houses what appears to be about 150 people. The idea that he knows how to run a big operation is a fallacy. (Of course, nobody can know how to run an operation as big as the federal government but this was supposed to be his selling point since he has no government experience at all.)

This gets to the heart of the conflict of interest matter:

With extensive entanglements around the world, many packaged in a network of licensing agreements and limited liability companies, the Trump Organization poses a raft of potential conflicts of interest for a president-elect who has long exerted such control over his company that, as he told The New York Times in a recent interview, he is the one who signs the checks. “I like to sign checks so I know what is going on,” he explained.

Mr. Trump — owner of all but the smallest sliver of the privately held company — has said that, while the law does not require it, he is formulating plans to remove himself and his older daughter, Ivanka, from the company’s operations. (Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, is likely to have a role in the White House.) His sons Donald Jr. and Eric, along with other executives, will be in charge, the president-elect wrote on Twitter in mid-December, adding that “no new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.” People involved in the planning have said that Mr. Trump intends to keep a stake in the business.

But in recent weeks, amid rising pressure, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been intensely debating further measures. Among other things, the president-elect has agreed to shut down his personal foundation, has ended some international development deals and has reviewed a plan for an outside monitor to oversee the Trump Organization.

Yet an examination of the company underscores the complex challenges of taking Mr. Trump out of Trump the organization.

His company is a distinctly family business fortified with longtime loyalists that operates less on standardized procedures and more on a culture of Trump. Mr. Trump may leave the details of contracts to his deputies, but his name — and influence — is stamped on every deal the company does.

In an interview last spring with The Times, Mr. Trump explained that he approved new ventures based on his personal “feel.” And while in recent years his three oldest children have taken on more of a leadership role, Mr. Trump has the final say, sometimes weighing in on the most minute design details of planned hotels, golf courses or other properties the company owns or manages.

His other top executives — many of them natives of Queens, where Mr. Trump grew up, or Brooklyn, where his father, Fred, expanded a housing empire many years ago — have secured power not necessarily through fancy pedigrees or impressive credentials, but through decades of devotion to their boss.

Allen Weisselberg, the organization’s chief financial officer, started off as an accountant for Mr. Trump’s father. Matthew Calamari, the organization’s chief operating officer, was recruited in 1981 after Mr. Trump saw him eject some hecklers while working security at the United States Open tennis tournament.

For some executives, there appears to be little division between their service to the company and their service to the Trumps.

“We’re not a publicly traded company. At the end of the day, I work for the Trump family,” Alan Garten, the general counsel, explained in an interview with the legal industry publication Corporate Counsel shortly before the election. “That’s how I view my job. Whether it’s protecting their business interests or protecting their personal interests. I am here to assist them and represent them in any way they need.”

When asked to elaborate in an interview last week with The Times, Mr. Garten said that in any job, “you want to be as helpful as you can,” but that “obviously the interests of the Trumps and the interests of the company are two distinct things.”

The divisions between business and politics were often fuzzy during the presidential race: Mr. Garten became a “liaison” to Mr. Trump’s campaign; Michael Cohen, an executive vice president, tirelessly promoted his boss’s bid for the White House on television while battling negative media coverage; and Jason Greenblatt, the company’s chief legal officer, began serving as his adviser on Israel. On Friday, it was announced that Mr. Greenblatt would be joining Mr. Trump’s administration as a special representative for international negotiations.

After the election, other lines continued to blur as the president-elect and his children met with foreign businessmen with connections to their global ventures and with foreign officials with potential influence over their business dealings.

Some government-ethics lawyers have warned that unless Mr. Trump fully divests himself from the company and places someone independent of his family in charge, he risks entering the White House in violation of a constitutional clause that forbids him from taking payments or gifts from a foreign government entity.

As Mr. Trump assumes the presidency, it is difficult to foresee him walling himself off from the company entirely, said Michael D’Antonio, the author of a critical biography, “The Truth About Trump.”

“I don’t think that he could keep himself from inquiring about the performance of these businesses any more than he can keep himself from tweeting,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “It is just too vital to his identity. Profit is the way he has always measured himself. I don’t see how he can stop.”

He can’t and he won’t. It’s ridiculous to believe he will. Success in politics has an entirely different measure and it’s not going to be satisfying to him. Becoming the richest man in the world is a much more tangible goal.

And I’m sorry to say that I don ‘t think anyone’s going to do a thing about it. The Republicans are abandoning the norms that have traditionally kept presidents (and others) from being blatantly corrupt in high office. It was assumed that the voters would punish anyone who tried to take advantage of his position for personal financial gain. But Trump says “what’s good for Trump is good for the USA” and many of his followers are fine with it because he’s a businessman and they respect the fact that he wants to make a profit. They too assume the nation will profit as well — from his “good deals” and the “respect” he will demand.

The AP published this, this morning:

Donald Trump spent the past two years attacking rival Hillary Clinton as crooked, corrupt, and weak.

But some of those attacks seem to have already slipped into the history books.

From installing Wall Street executives in his Cabinet to avoiding news conferences, the president-elect is adopting some of the same behavior for which he criticized Clinton during their fiery presidential campaign.

Here’s a look at what Trump said then — and what he’s doing now:
___

GOLDMAN SACHS

Then: “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs,” Trump said at a South Carolina rally in February, when he was locked in a fierce primary battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.”

Now: A number of former employees of the Wall Street bank will pay a key role in crafting Trump’s economic policy. He’s tapped Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn to lead the White House National Economic Council. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary nominee, spent 17 years working at Goldman Sachs and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, started his career as an investment banker at the firm.

Trump is following in a long political tradition, though one he derided on the campaign trail: If Cohn accepts the nomination, he’ll be the third Goldman executive to run the NEC.
___

BIG DONORS

Then: “Crooked Hillary. Look, can you imagine another four years of the Clintons? Seriously. It’s time to move on. And she’s totally controlled by Wall Street and all these people that gave her millions,” Trump said at a May rally in Lynden, Washington.

Now: Trump has stocked his Cabinet with six top donors — far more than any recent White House. “I want people that made a fortune. Because now they’re negotiating with you, OK?” Trump said, in a December 9 speech in Des Moines.

The biggest giver? Linda McMahon, incoming small business administrator, gave $7.5 million to a super PAC backing Trump, more than a third of the money collected by the political action committee.
___

NEWS CONFERENCES

Then: “She doesn’t do news conferences, because she can’t,” Trump said at an August rally in Ashburn, Virginia. “She’s so dishonest she doesn’t want people peppering her with questions.”

Now: Trump opened his last news conference on July 27, saying: “You know, I put myself through your news conferences often, not that it’s fun.”

He hasn’t held one since.

Trump skipped the news conference a president-elect typically gives after winning the White House. Instead, he released a YouTube video of under three minutes. He also recently abruptly canceled plans to hold his first post-election news conference, opting instead to describe his plans for managing his businesses in tweets. “I will hold a press conference in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest. Busy times!” he tweeted in mid-December.
___

FAMILY TIES:

Then: “It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for I guess the making of large amounts of money,” Trump said at an August rally in Austin.

Now: While Trump has promised to separate himself from his businesses, there is plenty of overlap between his enterprises and his immediate family. His companies will be run by his sons, Donald Jr and Eric. And his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have joined Trump at a number of meetings with world leaders of countries where the family has financial interests.

In a financial disclosure he was required to file during the campaign, Trump listed stakes in about 500 companies in at least 25 countries.

It’s important to try to put all this on the record if only to keep our heads straight. It’s going to be very easy to become disoriented and lose sight of what we know to be true:  we have a full blown authoritarian kleptocrat coming into the White House.

This is Bush-Cheney on steroids and without the basic competence. They are so bad they could easily do something extremely dangerous. Or they could self-destruct. It’s possible that they will simply successfully destroy every liberal achievement of the past half century — Paul Ryan’s fondest dream. We just don’t know how it’s going to go.

We’ll be here as long as the lights stay on, documenting the atrocities and trying to make sense of it all. If you’d care to contribute making that happen, the holiday fundraiser goes through the ends of the year. You can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

.

American Pie in the face
by Tom Sullivan

Image by @Carl_Price Chris Barker #sgtpepper2016 .

British graphic artist Chris Barker’s montage began on election night in the U.S. Pondering the losses this year of David Bowie and so many other celebrities, Barker eventually created an homage to the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The image posted on November 9 went viral:

“Then Leonard Cohen died and he was so almost Beatles-y that adding him was a no-brainer and it went even more viral,” Barker noted in his blog. “Then Robert Vaughan, another great sixties icon also passed away and it went viral again. Then suddenly I was that dead celebrity photoshopper guy.”

Last night George Michael appeared in the image. Barker swears he’s not causing it.

This is too much now. #ripgeorgemicheal #LastChristmas #sgtpepper2016 #sgtpepper2016 Massive thanks to @Carl_Price pic.twitter.com/70TEnC6qIu— christhebarker (@christhebarker) December 26, 2016

The image may mimic “Sgt. Pepper’s” but the feeling this morning is more the melancholy “American Pie.” A bit of irony about what else died in 2016 appears in the center foreground:

Barker’s image includes Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder and more. Also represented is “America” via a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat.

Amanda Marcotte writes that the phrase “preparing for Trump” began trending on Twitter Friday morning. What began as a response to a Peter Dreier article about fighting for working people under a Trump administration morphed into a bitch session by conservatives excited by the coming of Trump:

But what’s fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump’s fans on Twitter don’t seem to think that he’ll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really. In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he’s an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

David Bell extends that thought in a piece at The Nation. A large proportion of Trump voters live inside “the party’s steel-walled ideological bubble” now, and are impervious to information coming from sources outside a Republican messaging apparatus that includes the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity (emphasis mine):

The machine has been operating in this way for many years, as Alterman and others have detailed. But since the election, the delegitimization of real news has taken a new, dangerous twist. It has now become clear that faithful followers of Limbaugh, or Fox News, will not only immediately discount any mainstream-media story that reflects badly on politicians or policies they like, no matter how well sourced and substantiate; they will consider the story itself yet another reason to support those politicians and policies, and will quite possibly believe the opposite, simply as a matter of principle. Polling data suggests that even during the election, the revelations about Trump’s failure to pay federal income taxes, and then the Access Hollywood tape, failed to significantly affect his support within the Republican base. The stories were unquestionably true, but that was less important than the fact that they were reported in the mainstream media (broken, in fact, by The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively). By definition the stories demonstrated the power and extent of the dark liberal conspiracy against America, making Trump’s victory even more important for the Republican base.

In that sense, Barker might well have included a copy of one of those newspapers beside Trump’s MAGA hat to symbolize the death in 2016 of real news. Except real news is taking its time about it, really. Like the father in The Last Remake of Beau Geste, real news is perpetually “still alive and dying.”

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

A note for future historians from Matthew Yglesias. I’m posting it here too for future reference.

December 25, 2016 

To Whom It May Concern: 

Sitting at my desk in the winter of 2016-2017, I have no way of knowing what the future holds for the United States under the administration of Donald Trump. I hope it will all turn out for the best. But I fear that it will not. The election of a man temperamentally unfit to the presidency and lacking in the basic qualifications to perform the job, backed up by congressional allies who seem determined to ignore his flagrant corruption, is an alarming situation. The odds that he will systematically corrupt American institutions and install an authoritarian kleptocracy or blunder into some kind of catastrophic war seem simply too high to entirely discount. 

And if something big and awful does happen, I know from my own reading of history that the scholars of the future will be sorely tempted to look for causes that are big in proportion to the consequences. 

Historians will write of a growing trend toward partisan polarization and a brewing sense of political crisis dating back to Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. They’ll note the projected end of America’s white majority, the geopolitical revolution induced by Russia’s reinvention of itself as an international beacon of cultural conservatism, and the corrosive effect of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The “failures of neoliberalism” will come in for scrutiny. 

All true and all important. But my message to the future is this. No matter how stupid it sounds, and no matter how much political and journalistic elites on all sides of America’s toxic politics began trying to ignore it as soon as the votes were counted, the dominant issue of the 2016 campaign was email server management. 

What the email story was 

Back in the early days of the 21st century, it was common for people to communicate via an open protocol known as email that was developed originally in the 21st century before internet access became widespread. Most email users had a “personal” email account but were also issued a “work” email account associated with their specific job. A typical personal email account would be obtained for free from an ad-supported service such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft. But because Bill Clinton found himself in the unusual employment circumstances of being an ex-president in 2001, he hired someone to set up a private server for himself and his wife and her personal email was hosted on that server. 

At the time Clinton became secretary of state, she was a heavy user of a once-popular early smartphone line called Blackberry. 

The state of federal government information technology infrastructure, at the time, was such that a work-issued email address could only be associated with a work-issued Blackberry and the work-issued Blackberry could not be connected to a personal email address. Many federal workers at the time handled this by carrying around two smartphones, which was an annoying but workable solution. Clinton, as the boss, chose to spare herself the inconvenience involved by simply ignoring State Department guidelines and using her own phone and her personal email address. 

This came to light some years later and sparked a politically motivated investigation into whether the use of personal email account violated not only State Department IT guidelines but federal law regarding the handling of classified information. To convict someone under the relevant statutes, prosecutors have to show malign intent which was pretty clearly not present, even though it did turn out that some of Clinton’s email traffic did contain classified information. For this reason, FBI Director James Comey told the American people that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton. 

The email story dominated the campaign 

If that sounds far too boring and unimportant to have conceivably dominated the 2016 presidential campaign, then it is difficult to disagree with you. And yet the facts are what they are. Indeed, by September of 2015 — over a year before the voting — Washington Post political writer Chris Cillizza had already written at least 50 items about the email controversy. 

Email fever reached its peak on two separate major occasions. One was when Comey closed the investigation. Instead of simply saying “we looked into it and there was no crime,” Comey sought to immunize himself from Clinton critics by breaking with standard procedure to offer extended negative commentary on Clinton’s behavior. He said she was “extremely careless.” 

Comey then brought the email story back to the center of the campaign in late October by writing a letter to Congress indicating that the email case had been reopened due to new discoveries on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. It turned out that the new discoveries were an awfully flimsy basis for a subpoena, and the subpoena turned up nothing. 

This all still sounds unimportant, but it was not at the time:
The New York Times dedicated 100 percent of its above-the-fold space to coverage of Comey’s letter to Congress. 

Throughout the campaign season, network newscasts dedicated more time to Clinton’s email server stories than to stories about all policy issues combined. 

Donald Trump’s campaign rallies featured regular “lock her up” chants, centering the email server as the opposition’s main criticism of Clinton.
Across five television networks and six major newspapers, 11 percent of campaign coverage was stories about Clinton’s email server. 

Critically, one useful function of email-based criticism of Hillary Clinton was to pull together the Trumpian and establishment wings of the Republican Party. That’s why it served as the central theme of the 2016 Republican Convention, allowing the likes of Scott Walker and Rick Perry to deliver on-message speeches rather than clashing with Trump’s message.  

Historians looking through the archives of stories published in November and December of 2016 will find billions of words published on the nature of Trump’s appeal to voters who liked him. These takes, whether accurate or not, are important pieces of sociological exegesis that shed light on the nature of our political debates. 

But in terms of what actually drove the election result, people who liked Trump were not the key decisions-makers. Not only did he lose the national popular vote, but even in crucial swing states he was mostly viewed negatively. 

In Pennsylvania, for example:
56 percent of voters said Trump was unqualified to be president.
62 percent of voters said Trump lacked the right temperament to be president.
60 percent of voters said Trump was dishonest.
56 percent had an unfavorable view of Donald Trump. 

At the same time, Barack Obama had a 51 percent job approval rating in the state. A majority of voters were okay with the incumbent administration and a majority of voters took a dim view of Trump. But these marginal voters were also very skeptical of Clinton, and the email story that 65 percent of Pennsylvania voters said bothered them was a key reason why. 

Indeed, research from Gallup indicates that emails dominated what voters heard about Clinton all throughout the campaign. 

Research by Dan Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania indicates that Trump dominated among voters who decided in the final two weeks of the campaign — a period in which Comey’s letters about Clinton’s emails dominated media coverage.

Big events sometimes have small causes 

These events are at high risk of slipping out of view of the historical record for a variety of reasons. Republicans, for starters, had a vested interest in putting forward the idea that the election results constituted a sweeping public affirmation of their policy agenda. Competing factions of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, sought to use Clinton’s defeat as a rationale for advancing their own preferred substantive agendas. 

More broadly, the further the email issue receded into the past the less credible it seemed that a major historical turning point could really have hinged on something so trivial. 

And certainly one can imagine a variety of scenarios in which Clinton might have won the election despite her email woes. More successful economic policymaking from the Obama administration could have done the trick. So could a better campaign message or better targeting of resources. It was, after all, a very close election. 

The crucial point, however, is that in broad ideological terms, the 2016 election happened at a time when the incumbent president was popular and the insurgent demagogue promising dramatic change was not popular. The unpopular insurgent managed to win, despite accumulating fewer voters than the popular incumbent’s designated successor, largely because she had become personally unpopular thanks to a massive onslaught of criticism largely focused on her email server. 

Even at the time, some of us found it hardly credible that a decision as weighty as who should be president was being decided on the basis of something as trivial as which email address the secretary of state used. Future generations must find it even harder to believe. But the facts are what they are — email server management, rather than any deeper or more profound root cause, was the dominant issue in Donald Trump’s successful rise to power.

This was, of course, obvious to those of us following the election closely. If everyone had read this piece by Jonathan Allen about the way the press covers Clinton, they would have known what was coming. It’s actually a testament to her rectitude that a vague scandal called “emails!” was all they came up with. They had certainly tried over the course of 25 years to come up with something real and they ended up having to make up this ridiculous fake scandal to justify their Javert-like obsession. Unfortunately, it worked as perfectly as any Clinton-scandal ever worked. It was a complicated story that added up to nothing but fit the “didn’t pass the smell test” narrative for the media so they pimped it and pimped it and pimped it like it was Watergate.

I’m not surprised it happened. It was inevitable that Hillary Clinton would be the one they finally nailed. After all,  she was always the uppity one who was asking for it, not good old Bill. They didn’t get the indictment they were promised but the FBI did manage to be the instrument of her destruction so it’s almost as good. Plus they can keep kicking her whenever she has the gall to show her face in public so it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Now we have Trump, the horror story some of us were screaming about until we were hoarse for the last 18 months, knowing that he could and might very well win unless the media, the Republican establishment and some very silly voters sobered up. They didn’t.  And now we all have to deal with the hangover.

I’m officially done writing about this unless something new emerges. It’s navel gazing at this point and since I believe that Trump is going to change politics and possibly the world so dramatically that lessons to be drawn from Hillary Clinton’s personal foibles or strategic decisions are useless going forward. It’s a new world.

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

.