Month: December 2016

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The Power of Trump’s celebrity


by digby

First of all, thanks to everyone who’s donated to the holiday fundraiser this year. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. It’s been a dark year, but you’ve made it a little bit brighter.

Last year at this time we were all watching the debates and everyone was laughing about the idea that Donald Trump and Ben Carson were the front-runners for the GOP nomination. Oh how hilarious it was!  All the sage pundits and political analysts assured us the Trump had no chance, he was like the Herman Cain of 2016 or, at worst, the Newt Gingrich. Surely Jeb! or Rubio or Chris Christie would be the nominee.

What a difference a year makes. We are now dealing with Donald Trump the president-elect.

I never understood why people dismissed him. It was clear from the very beginning that he was something very different than we’d ever seen before and that he brought with him a kind of celebrity and fame that was very powerful.

On the day after Trump announced, I wrote this:

The GOP race for the presidency has been upgraded from a clown car to a three-ring circus with the official entry of Donald Trump into the race. After daughter Ivanka delivered a stirring introduction worthy of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, the audience waited expectantly for the great man to appear. And it waited. And waited. Finally after several long moments, the great man finally emerged above the crowd on the mezzanine level of the glittering Trump Tower building waving as if he were Juan Peron (or the Queen of England). As Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” continued to play over and over again, he then descended to the stage on an excruciatingly slow-motion escalator and began his speech by insulting his fellow Republican candidates for failing to know how to put on a competent political event.

It was a perfect beginning to what is going to be an astonishing political spectacle.

Right out of the gate he began to free-associate like a drunken Tea Partyer on 2 Shots For A Buck night, insulting Mexican immigrants by calling them rapists and drug dealers, asking when we’ve ever beaten China or Japan (!) at anything, declaring himself to be potentially the greatest jobs president God has ever created and more. Oh, and he also told us that he’s worth $8,737,540,000 — more or less. It was the best presidential campaign announcement ever, even better than Lindsey Graham’s.

The media seemed a little bit shell-shocked in the early going — perhaps they’ve never actually heard what the average right-winger believes. They seemed to find it noteworthy that he was incoherent and contradictory, with promises of totally free trade even as he said he would make Mexico pay a tariff to construct the Great Wall he envisions building on the border.

And they didn’t seem to know what to think about his endless gobbledygook about “making” the world do what he wants it to do. They are clearly unaware that members of the far right don’t follow the philosophy of Edmund Burke. They follow the philosophy of Glenn Beck, Joe McCarthy and P.T. Barnum. Not even Roger Ailes can control the way their minds work.

Donald Trump may not make sense to the average journalist — but to the average Tea Partyer, he’s telling it like it is, with a sort of free-floating grievance about everyone who doesn’t agree with them mixed with simplistic patriotic boosterism and faith in the fact that low taxes makes everybody rich. It’s not about policy or even politics. It’s about following your instincts. (“In your heart you know he’s right.”)

But it wasn’t long before Twitter lit up with insider jokes and insults among the Village press. Salon chronicled some of them here. The only one to take Trump seriously was Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin, whose first impression was quite a bit less derisive than anyone else’s, giving him a solid B- on his tiresome political report card:

Substance: Made a concerted and admirable effort to laundry-list his presidential plans before the speech was finished, calling for the replacement of Obamacare, cautioning foreign adversaries about messing with the U.S., expressing opposition to the current trade bill, promising to build a southern border wall and sticking Mexico with the bill, terminating Obama’s executive order on immigration, supporting the Second Amendment, ending Common Core, rebuilding infrastructure, resisting cuts in entitlement programs. Still, left open too many questions about the hows and wherefores, given that he has never run for nor held office. 

Best moment: Protracted run-up to formal declaration of candidacy was spirited and engaging. 

Worst moment: Lost his rhythm a bit whenever cheerful supporters in the crowd tossed out helpful prompts or encouraging chants. 

Overall: A madcap production–garrulous, grandiose, and intense—that displayed his abundant strengths and acute weaknesses. For the first time in decades, Trump is a true underdog, but his ability to shape the contours of the nomination fight should not be ignored. On the debate stage, through TV advertising (positive and negative), in earned media, and by drawing crowds, Trump has the potential to be a big 2016 player. He staged an announcement event like no other, and now he will deliver a candidacy the likes of which the country has never seen.

What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump.

First, let’s dispense with the fact that his ideas are more bizarre than anyone else in the field. They are not. Say what you will about the Donald, but nobody can bring the wingnut cha-cha-cha like Tea Party fave Dr. Ben Carson:

“I mean, [our society is] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.”

This week’s latest poll actually shows him in first place.

Lindsey Graham often appears on television and breathlessly proclaims that we must stop ISIS “before we all get killed here at home!” Presumed top-tier Scott Walker makes so many gaffes you can’t count them anymore, including some doozies like musing publicly with Glenn Beck about shutting down legal immigration.

Compared to that, building a wall on the border is standard boilerplate on the right and it certainly isn’t hard to find candidates who are willing to demagogue China or Japan and claim that liberals have destroyed the American way of life. Trump’s style is colorful, to be sure. His ideas are disjointed and irrational. But they are hardly unique. In fact, he represents a very common strain in American political life: the right-wing blowhard.

Trump actually has something that none of these other candidates have and they’re pretty important. First, of course, is the money. Trump says he’s worth 9 billion. Let’s assume he’s exaggerating by 50 percent. That’s still a whole lot of money, more than enough to finance a presidential campaign for as long as he wants to do it. The Beltway wags seem to believe that he’s only announcing so that he can get himself into the debates but it seems more likely that he’s finally so wealthy that the cost of a campaign is so negligible he figures he’s got nothing to lose. After all, if he were to spend even a hundred million on the primary it wouldn’t make a serious dent in his bottom line. What else has he got to do?

But there is something else he has that may be even more valuable than money: stardom. I don’t think it’s possible to place a political value on the fact that Trump has had a prime-time network TV show for over 10 years with “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“The Apprentice” averaged 6 to 7 million viewers a show with finales sometimes getting between 10 and 20 million viewers. Last year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” averaged 7.6 million a show. Fox News’ highest rated shows rarely get more than a couple of million viewers and they are all elderly hardcore Republicans. The Donald has a wider reach and might even appeal to the most sought-after people in the land: non-voters.

It’s impossible to know if that’s a serious possibility. But it’s fair to say that many more people in the country know the name of Donald Trump than know anyone else in the race (with the possible exception of Jeb Bush). It’s hard to quantify that kind of name recognition but it’s certainly not worthless in our celebrity-obsessed culture. And remember, Trump would not be the first show business celebrity who everyone assumed was too way out there to ever make a successful run for president. The other guy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

Sure, Trump is a clown. But he’s a very rich and a very famous clown. And he’s really not much more clownish than many of the current contenders or some serious contenders in the past. It’s interesting that the one time Mark Halperin deviates from the conventional wisdom he may actually have seen something more interesting than the rest of his cohort: the fact that Donald Trump has the potential to be a serious 2016 player. And that says everything you need to know about the Republican presidential field and the state of our politics today.

I underestimated how bad he could be. But I think I understood from the beginning that he could win, which is something that mainstream journalism, for the most part, failed to see. Case in point:

I was wrong about many things this past year, of course. I’m not an oracle. But I wrote about Trump seriously from the beginning, knowing that he represented a strain in American politics that could be powerful if given voice. I have never been so unhappy to be right about anything in my life.

I’m not part of the Village and I don’t pretend to be a journalist. I’m just a political observer, blogger and essayist who tries to sort out what’s going on in the world around me. I’m lucky to be able to spend my time doing this, but I couldn’t do it without the support of my readers.

If you find this sort of thing valuable in this age of fake news and alternate reality, I hope you’ll consider donating or subscribing to keep the lights on for another year.

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

Hey, what about that domestic emoluments clause? (Yes, there is one…)

by digby

I wrote about Trump’s domestic corruption exposure for Salon today:

I would guess that most Americans had never heard of the “foreign emoluments clause” of Article I of the United States Constitution until the last month. We’ve certainly heard a lot about it since. It is a constitutional prohibition against presidents receiving compensation, gifts or other forms of profit or gain from foreign governments. Donald Trump’s potentially colossal conflicts of interest have compelled legal scholars from all sides of the political divide to dust off this old clause in the Constitution in what is probably a vain hope that it will force the incoming president to divest himself of his businesses.

The obvious concern is that Trump will be unduly influenced by foreign interests currying favor by supporting his business (or vice versa). But it turns out that there is a domestic emoluments clause as well, which has not been discussed. And Trump faces potential conflicts on that front as he does on the other.

It remains a mystery as to why, with some notable exceptions, the campaign press largely ignored the the issue of what Trump planned to do about his privately held business if he were elected. His unprecedented refusal to release any tax returns was an obvious sign that he was hiding something. And the required forms that he filed with the Federal Election Commission don’t shed much light on his web of business interests — other than to show that the appearance of conflict is overwhelming. But members of the press largely let that drop, aside for a few questions that Trump waved away with a fatuous declaration that he planned to turn the business over to his kids in a “blind trust” — which meant it would not be a blind trust. He promised that he wouldn’t “care about” the business.

Since the election Trump has said that his ethics adviser, the new White House counsel (and notorious former Republican federal elections commissioner), told him that “the president cannot have conflicts of interest” although he told The New York Times he wanted to “do something” to alleviate questions. He scheduled a press conference for Dec.15 to announce his plans and then canceled it. The last we’ve heard is that he’s not going to divest anything and plans to have his sons run the business.

Legal scholars are scandalized. It is true that the conflict of interest laws that apply to others in government don’t apply to the president. But the Constitution’s two emoluments clauses apply directly to him and him alone. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote this in The Guardian about the foreign emoluments issue:

Trump’s continued interest in the Trump Organization and his steady stream of monetary and other benefits from foreign powers put him on a collision course with the emoluments clause. Disentangling every improper influence resulting from special treatment of Trump’s business holdings by foreign states would be impossible. The American people would be condemned to uncertainty, leaving our political discourse rife with accusations of corruption. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that Trump has regularly declined to make his business dealings or tax returns transparent. Thus a specter of skewed incentives will haunt a Donald Trump presidency.

Tribe says that if Trump refuses to “cure his continuing violation of the emoluments clause” the Congress has the power and the duty to impeach him.

Brianne J. Gorod, chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, addressed the lesser known but equally applicable domestic emoluments clause of Article II of the constitution in an article for The Huffington Post. She explained that this clause was designed to prevent the president from receiving, beyond his salary, “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them” meaning that the Congress or the individual states could not offer the president side deals or other financial inducements.

How this compromises Trump is obvious. His company owns properties and businesses all over the United States as well as around the world. Gorod laid out a few of Trump’s possible conflicts that appear to violate Article II:

[I]t’s apparent that there may be no shortage of ways in which the new President may be violating the Domestic Emoluments Clause, even as the President-elect’s failure to disclose all of his financial holdings and interests makes it impossible to know the true extent of the problem. 

Perhaps most significantly, with hotels and property developments all over the United States, it’s possible that Trump has been — and will continue to be — the beneficiary of tax breaks from any number of states. As [The New York] Times has reported, since 1980, Trump “has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings in New York.” And that’s just in New York. It’s not difficult to imagine that Trump could use the power of the presidency to “encourage” states and cities to offer similar tax breaks to his properties, or that states and cities could of their own will do so to try to curry favor with the Administration. Likewise, Trump plans to maintain a financial stake in the reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice.” It’s quite possible that the show might be the recipient of tax incentives and breaks, and that Trump would be one of the people reaping the benefits.

It’s also not difficult to imagine Trump’s children winking and nodding at various parties to offer favors in exchange for favorable regulations or other benefits. Just this week it was revealed that Trump’s older sons were involved in selling access to the president for million-dollar donations to unnamed “conservation charities.” (That they would do this after their father and the Republican Party spent months ripping Hillary Clinton for taking the calls of donors to the Clinton Foundation redefines the word hypocrisy.)

There is already the appearance that the Trump family is engaged in enriching itself further through Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s children are talking business with foreign leaders and businesspeople during the transition and openly selling access to themselves and the president-elect. Since the actual scope of Trump’s businesses remains shrouded in secrecy, we have no way of knowing the true range of his potential conflicts and avenues of corruption.

Tribe wrote in his piece for The Guardian that “while much has changed since the constitution was written, certain premises of politics and human nature have held steady, among them is that private financial interests can subtly sway even the most virtuous leaders.” Trump is anything but a virtuous leader. The emoluments clauses could have been written specifically with him in mind.

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

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Making Trump proud
by Tom Sullivan

Back in the day, you didn’t ask South Carolinians where they were going for their summer vacations. You asked when they were going to Myrtle Beach — “The Grand Strand” or (derisively) the Redneck Riviera. Unless they had money, in which case they had a beach house or a condo on Hilton Head. They didn’t get out much. So when I lived in South Carolinia in the 70s and 80s and traveled outside the immediately adjoining states, I never saw SC license tags.

When people asked where I was from and I told them, they’d follow up with, “So how long have you been living in North Carolina?” or “What part of North Carolina is that?” Except for Strom Thurmond and Charleston, South Carolina hadn’t much penetrated the national consciousness. But North Carolina? In the latter part of the 20th century, it was a jewel in the South. People knew it, and for the right reasons.

Good times.

And now? And now Ryan Cooper warns at The Week, “The Republican Party in North Carolina is giving the rest of the country an object lesson in the difference between tyranny and democracy.” Brace yourselves, the rest of the country could be goin’ to Carolina in their GOP-controlled legislatures:

It’s not hard to predict how Republicans will attempt to cement their control of political power during the Trump years. Indeed, the tyranny is already some distance towards completion. Part of the plan will be what they have already been doing since they won the 2010 midterms and especially since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. They’ll continue gerrymandering district boundaries to make it as hard as possible for Democrats to win (indeed, the way those selfsame state legislative districts are drawn in North Carolina is already an unconstitutional abrogation of civil rights, according to a federal court). They’ll enact further targeted vote suppression measures to disenfranchise as many minorities and white liberals as possible, this time at the federal level if they can manage it. And for Democrats who manage to jump through all the hoops, they’ll make it as onerous as possible for them to vote by restricting polling locations and hours in Democratic-leaning locations.

Finally, as we’re seeing in North Carolina, any inconveniently lost elections can be overturned so long as the GOP controls enough other chunks of government. Legislatures can core out a governor’s power, or Supreme Court decisions can overturn legislation with reverse-engineered legal argle-bargle. Who knows where it will stop. And from there it’s really quite a short distance to stuffing ballot boxes or rigging the election counts. It has all happened before.

A friend asked last night for a list of 3-5 of the most egregious things Republicans have done in North Carolina since taking control. Most of them readers here already know, particularly with regard to voting issues. But the GOP never does anything that’s not at least a twofer. Privatization — of roads and water systems, for example, or public schools via charter expansion — is not just about converting “We the People” assets into private profits for cronies. It’s about disrupting the income streams of Democratic-leaning city governments. The goal is to weaken them politically, stripping them of revenue by creating a slow-rolling economic crisis that will force cities to either raise taxes or slash services or both, allowing Republicans in a few years to argue, See, see how badly Democrats have handled your economy? Elect us and we’ll show you how it’s really done.

The spin they deployed last week justifies their strippng the incoming Democratic governor of powers as cold revenge for slights their party experienced so long ago that some members could not possibly remember, before some had birth certificates and others were barely out of diapers. Donald Trump would be proud. But then, when is he not?

The NCGOP has scheduled yet another super-duper, extra-extra-special session today, ostensibly to “discuss” repealing the anti-LGBT HB2. But watch out for in your ear.

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

The congress should investigate James Comey

by digby

This is ridiculous:

The warrant connected to the FBI search that Hillary Clinton says cost her the election shouldn’t have been granted, three legal experts who reviewed the document released on Tuesday told The Huffington Post.

FBI Director James Comey shook up the presidential race 11 days before the election by telling Congress the agency had discovered new evidence in its previously closed investigation into the email habits of Clinton, who was significantly ahead in the polls at the time.

When Comey made the announcement, the bureau did not have a warrant to search a laptop that agents believed might contain evidence of criminal activity. The FBI set out to rectify that two days later, on Oct. 30, when agents applied for a warrant to search the laptop, which was already in the FBI’s possession. The FBI had seized the computer as part of an investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

The unsealed warrant “reveals Comey’s intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at time,” Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said on Twitter Tuesday.

Clinton’s lead in the polls shrank in the wake of Comey’s announcement. Then, just days ahead of election, the FBI announced its search was complete, and it had found no evidence of criminal activity. Clinton officials believe that second announcement damaged her as much as, or more than, the first, by enraging Trump supporters who believed the fix was in.

The legal experts’ argument against the validity of the subpoena boils down to this: The FBI had already publicly announced that it could not prove Clinton intended to disclose classified information. Without that intent, and without evidence of gross negligence, there was no case. The warrant offers no suggestion that proving those elements of the crime would be made easier by searching new emails.

The essence of the warrant application is merely that the FBI has discovered new emails sent between Clinton and Abedin.

That’s not enough. The idea that the mere existence of emails involving Clinton may be evidence of a crime is startling, said Ken Katkin, a professor at Salmon P. Chase College of Law.

“The warrant application seems to reflect a belief that any email sent by Hillary Clinton from a private email server is probably evidence of a crime,” Katkin said. “If so, then it must be seen as a partisan political act, rather than a legitimate law enforcement action.”
[…]
In the days before the election, Comey informed lawmakers in a letter that the FBI investigators believed they had discovered emails that were “pertinent” to their Clinton investigation, months after Comey had announced that the agency had closed its probe without finding evidence of criminal activity by Clinton. The announcement sent shockwaves through the nation. Some Republicans seized on Comey’s letter, mischaracterizing it as a “reopening” of the case.

Regardless, damage was done by the release of the letter. The Clinton campaign has attributed her loss, in part, to Comey’s letter, arguing that it “helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support.” Analysis of voter behavior in the final weeks of the campaign does suggest that voters made late moves toward Trump, and the timing of Comey’s letter to Congress helps bolster that argument.

I know that it’s considered whining to be concerned about this but seriously, we should be concerned about this. The FBI is the most powerful domestic intelligence and police agency in the country. In the world, actually. It’s really a big deal if they interfere in democratic elections. In fact, it’s the mark of authoritarian states.

The problem with the warrant really is beside the point. They didn’t seek the warrant until after Comey had dropped his bombshell. If they hadn’t gotten the warrant it’s unlikely it would have made any different. Comey had already tainted the election in the final stretch and it wouldn’t have helped. Still, it’s outrageous all on its own that this warrant application was “garbage” and that James Comey almost certainly had to have approved it.

If Comey simply “made a mistake” then he should be removed from office because that level of bad judgement means he is incapable of doing the job. If he did this in order to head off Giuliani’s pro-Trump FBI agents leaking to the media, then he’s lost control of his agency and he also needs to be removed. (And again, it would show monumental bad judgement since a notice coming from the FBI director would be far more damaging than any anonymous leaks to the press from rogue FBI agents. ) And then there’s the fact that Comey may have taken the action he did for straight up political purposes. He was deputy counsel for the Republican Senate Whitewater Committee which leaked like a sieve and was outrageously partisan. He should be fired for that.

Whatever James Comey’s motives, his actions and that of his agents who seemed to be working on behalf of Donald Trump should be investigated, just as the alleged Russian hacking must be investigated. (Indeed, his unwillingness to put his weight behind a bipartisan statement about the Russian hacking merits an investigation of its own.) This was a world-changing event.

I’m putting this out there just as a marker. I know the Republicans will not investigate this and nothing will happen to Comey. Indeed, he will be considered a hero among many of his his peers for ignoring long-standing directives in the Justice Department, first by assassinating Clinton’s character even as he cleared her in July and then interfering in the election just 11 days out. But the rest of us should remember what he did, just for the record.

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

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Trump tower has only the BEST barricades

by digby

That is no joke:

Lately, Tiffany & Co. has been frustrated with the decline in foot traffic near its Fifth Avenue store in New York. The store is just one door down from Trump Tower and ever since Trump was elected, sales have been way down. The incredibly large security presence from both the Secret Service and the NYPD has apparently caused fewer people to shop at the iconic, high-end retailer.

So what’s the solution, according to Tiffany’s? Put branded covers over the security barriers nearby. WWD reports that Tiffany’s has been working directly with the NYPD to get more attention for their store. And that includes putting Tiffany’s-branded coverings over the barricades meant to restrict where people can walk near Trump Tower. The details of the arrangement haven’t been disclosed, but Tiffany & Co. acknowledges that it’s working with NYPD and the Secret Service.

“Tiffany is in frequent communication with the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service regarding safety and security along the perimeter of our Fifth Avenue flagship,” Tiffany’s said in a statement to WWD. “We remain open for business with regular hours and welcome customers to enter the store via our 57th Street entrance if any barricades along Fifth Avenue are in place.”

I’m sure the tourists love it. It’s kind of like visiting Saddam’s palace or Ukraine’s ousted president Viktor Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya palace. Well, except our authoritarian demagogue is just getting ready to start his reign.

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

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Who’s going to kick the right wing’s ass?
by Spocko

I had a discussion the other day with a woman who talked about her feelings about Hillary and the election. In the end she said some of the same things that I’ve heard before. “Wasn’t there something that would have preventing Trump from ever running?” and now, “Isn’t there something that won’t let him get into office?”

She also talked about how the media didn’t do their job BUT… Hillary has baggage, she’s isolated etc. etc.

I stopped her and said, “Look, I know Joe Conason, the guy who wrote the book “The Hunting of the President.” and there is a reason that you think these things about her. It started with $2 million dollars spent by Richard Mellon Scaife and others on the Arkansas project in the 80s and has gone on for decades.

When you dread how they will come after Hillary, it’s because they instilled that dread in you. Hillary acts the way she does because of the constant attacks in the past and the anticipated ones in the future. Those Scaife/Mellon people won. They were successful in their strategy. I know that because of what you have just said.”

Photo by Evan P. Cordes, Creative Commons licence

And then we talked about why doesn’t the left do that.

I talked about the difference between people wanting to use their time and money to do good for the world vs the people who just want to mess shit up, attack people and institutions.

People on the right think that George Soros is attacking them, but he really doesn’t. They are projecting.

Super rich people on the left have the idea that they should spend their millions on good things like clean water and stopping malaria, not actively working to take down the bullshit right-wing think tanks, media and pundits supporting the crazy demigods on the right.

They are more comfortable building up positive things than kicking the crap out of the people destroying our country. At the end of the day they feel better about themselves saying, “I helped bring clean water to 20 million people.” or “I helped good journalists do important work.” That’s great. We need more of that. But..

Are there some super rich lefties who just want to kick the right’s ass? There might be, but they aren’t doing anywhere near what the right does and they aren’t coordinated like the Koch’s and their donor network.

If there was a network of well funded ass kickers on the left they could work on multiple levels: attacking right wing funding, ideas, projects and institutions. They could attack on multiple fronts via multiple venues: in the media, in the courts and in the minds of the public.

I understand why it might be hard for big funders on the left to take on a right wing institutions or organizations. Pushing back on right wing craziness is like trying to mop up an active oil spill. If nobody is trying to slow the spill, the crude keeps coming. You can build walls to contain the oil and channels to divert it so it doesn’t pollute the groundwater, but it would all be easier if someone could stop it at the source.

But going after the source isn’t done much on the left. It might be because it requires an almost prosecutorial zeal to keep going.

I’ve looked at how the right wing funders maintain their war footing against people, ideas and institutions for decades. Many seem to have a personal animosity toward certain people or organizations. Who knows why they have this feeling? It’s just there. They have the means, motive and opportunity to do something about it, so they do. They might have an obvious logical reason or an obscure personal reason. A slight at a party. Someone laughing at them. Righteous anger. Misplaced anger. Mental illness. The reasons don’t have to make sense to others, just as long as they make sense to the funders.

If you are a rich funder you don’t need to get consensus and approval. Sure you might have advisers saying, “Don’t waste your time, money and energy on attacking. Spend it on solving the underlying problems!” To which the funder can say. “I’m giving money to solve what I see as the underlying problem! But I also want the satisfaction of crushing this person and group that makes me angry.”

A close friend or therapist might tell a rich funder, ‘You know, spending millions destroying the Clinton’s isn’t going to make your father love you.” But they aren’t going to hear that from someone who agrees with their agenda. They will find people with the skills to make their agenda happen.

“You hate the Clintons? Me too! I’m happy to help spend your money attacking them. I’ll just need 15 million to fund Breitbart, For an additional two million you can fund an O’Keefe “sting” I can guarantee it’ll embarrass someone or some group publicly.”

The thing is that there are plenty on the left who are angry and want to do something and would rather not take it out on family members who fell for a long-term con. They would be happy to see someone kicking right wing ass. There will also be a lot of people who will be concerned about methods or tactics. I don’t want to call them concern trolls, because I understand the desire to not become like the people they are going after.

But if we on the left are going to kick some ass and engage in attacks we can’t just use the model of the right. We have to be smarter.

I believe our funders and fighters can be smarter. Create strategic plans of actions that hit the right in behavior-altering ways. Deliver some short-term tactical, personal and media friendly wins. If they are successful, they will get more support.

It might also be hard to find the people who will fund activities that go after the right’s institutions in a way that hurts them. A lot of them are nice. But some are fighters.

I’ve found that when someone successfully puts the hurt on a right wing person or organization, even in some small manner, the right brings out the lawyers guns and money.  They go after whomever had the audacity to challenge them with the full force of every tool at their disposal in their multi-million dollar arsenal.   One of their tools is to attack the associations of whomever they feel is hurting them. They are hoping to tie some bad behavior to a known do-gooder sponsor, or politicians so they will be forced to disavow them. Especially it they did anything that doesn’t follow the standard that the good guys are supposed to use.

On the right, this is not a problem. “Yeah, we know that James O’Keefe lies, cheats and breaks the law. We got his back. We paid his fines, his legal fees and gave him a 2 million dollar budget to do more crap. So what? It’s our money. What are you going to do, sic a journalist on us? Oooh I’m so scared.”

Of course if the left does some serious damage to a right wing group the MSM hears the poor multi-million dollar institution that is a “vicitm” of this horrible unjustified attack. The MSM knows to go instantly go into “both sides do it” mode. They will balance on success on left against 40 years of attacks from the right. They also don’t want to be seen as biased. They don’t want anyone to think that they welcome someone doing what they should have done instead of sucking up to the institutions that feed them crap 24/7.

Another problems with going after organizations directly is that the right wing media base will crow “See, see? I told ya they were coming after us! It just took them 40 years. I told ya Soros was behind this! Alex Jones was right!” To which I say, so what?

If I was to talk to these super rich people I would tell them about my method of kicking the right wing media’s ass in the revenue stream. It had a long term strategic goal as well as visible, media friendly wins. It involved getting the group destroy themselves from the inside.To make them angry at each other over what they cared about, revenue. It involved get them to overreact and using their weight against them.  It took advantage of their overconfidence and their thinking they could do or say anything and not feel any consequences.
I would teach them we don’t have to sit back and take it. We can kick ass.

Anger can be very energizing, combining it with funders who want to kick ass with some specific goals can be a powerful force.

I sometimes think about that scene in Batman, who are the heroes we need now?

cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

Trump’s goon squad

by digby

Trump’s private security force evicts a reporter from a news conference

I wrote about Trump’s private security force for Salon this morning. They just wear regular suits with white shirts:

On Monday, Politico reported the startling fact that in addition to his Secret Service protection, Donald Trump employs his own private security and intelligence service and plans to continue to do so as president. This is unprecedented. Presidents already have the most sophisticated protective shield of any human on earth and none has ever employed his own before. If the Politico article is correct, Trump’s private security has not been trained for this kind of work, and may actually make Trump less safe than if they were not there at all. All this raises the question of why he insists on having them around.

It turns out that the main function of Trump’s private security forces has been to deal with protesters at his rallies, which he has bizarrely continued to hold since the election and promises to continue to do so. This past weekend in Mobile, Alabama, he explained why:

They’re saying, “As president, he shouldn’t be doing rallies.” But I think we should, right? We’ve done everything else the opposite. This is the way you get an honest word out.

As Robert Reich observed in Newsweek, this is one of the ways Trump disseminates propaganda (such as insisting that he won in a landslide). One can easily imagine him telling his crowds that the CIA is plotting against him or that authoritarian policies are necessary to fight whatever enemies he decides are keeping America from being great again.

Trump is only appearing before friendly crowds, many of whom have been to Trump rallies before and consider themselves part of his “movement.” Rather than using the opportunity to wind down the hostilities as one might expect a new president with a very shaky mandate to do, he’s winding them up.

This is where his private security force comes in. Their specialty seems to be bringing the hammer down on dissent. Where the Secret Service concentrates on keeping the president safe, these “special bodyguards” concentrate on protesters. Here’s some footage from Trump’s “Thank You Rally” in Michigan on Dec. 9, after he gave the signal to “get ’em out”:

The head of Trump’s private security force is a former cop named Keith Schiller. Like most of Trump’s close associates, he’s a full-blown conspiracy theorist. According to Politico, Schiller he has tweeted that “20 percent of Clinton’s campaign cash came from people who were responsible for the September 2001 terrorist attacks, that a grand jury had been convened to investigate her use of a private email server for State Department business and that Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote illegally.” Those were all tweeted just this fall.

Schiller has been with Trump for years and is so close to him that Trump asks for his advice and will be bringing him on board at the White House as some kind of special counselor or security specialist. The rest of the team are former cops and FBI agents who are presumably being paid by Trump personally — although with the way things are going he will probably find a way for someone else to foot the bill.

So what’s the big deal? So far the Secret Service hasn’t said anything, although former agents seem to believe this is a dangerous situation that could interfere with Trump’s security. But what makes people nervous about this arrangement is the idea of a political leader having his own security guards and a growing group of fanatical followers who are being worked up and fed propaganda by the president — who happens to be a demagogue.

There are historical parallels that make people very uncomfortable. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte pointed out yesterday, we now have Trump supporters hurling the Nazi word Lügenpresse (German for “lying press”) at the media at rallies, with Newt Gingrich giving seminars on how to smooth out the rough edges of the fascist rhetoric so Americans can feel comfortable only believing what they’re told by their own leadership. This private security service, and its function as a suppressor of dissent, is reminiscent of that same period. Obviously, it’s nothing like what the SS later became, but its origins are similar enough to make one feel nervous.

Trump has the support of many police officers around the country. He won the endorsement of the border patrol and ICE unions and the National Fraternal Order of Police, which issued a “wish list” of dozens of proposals shortly after the election. The highlights include lifting the ban on racial profiling put in place by the Bush administration, ending DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and using the information obtained to deport everyone who signed up under it, allowing local and state police to participate in the deportation of immigrants and stopping implementation of a national database on police use of force among other things. They are very supportive of Trump’s “law and order” agenda. It’s impossible to know how many count themselves as members of the Trump Movement, but some certainly do. That’s their right, of course. But considering Trump’s worldview, it’s concerning.

As for the president-elect, he has been all over the map on many issues but one thing he’s been very consistent in saying one thing:

We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.

I’m afraid pretty much anything is thinkable right now.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby


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Oh, what a lucky man he was (and is, God help us)

by digby

This long analysis by Nate Cohn in the New York Times called “Why Trump had an edge in the electoral college” is a must-read. I know we’re all sick of hearing about it, but you can read this and then put away the subject if you want to.

He goes into great depth about the electoral college win and what it means and what it doesn’t mean. It’s probably not what you think. It wasn’t what I thought anyway.

I’m not interested in arguing about this. I’m done with that and frankly I don’t much care at this point. Trump is going to be our new president and there’s nothing we can do about it. Whether it’s a fluke of history, foreign and FBI interference, bad luck or Clinton’s mistakes isn’t relevant except to the extent that they present a threat going forward. Donald Trump is sui generis and is already changing the world and the electoral landscape. There is very little chance that the next time the voters go to the polls that 2016 will be a template for winning.

Still, two Republican losses of the popular vote resulting in a win in the electoral college in 16 years shows the basic undemocratic nature of our system. Not that I think we’re going to change it any time soon. As with virtually everything else, until the problem affects the right, there will be no fix. They have veto power over democracy and progress and they know how to use it. The only time they are thwarted is in the aftermath of one of their overwhelming screw-ups or when the left and center-left stop squabbling among themselves long enough to form a super majority. It does happen from time to time so all is not lost. But we’re a very long way from that right now.

For the moment we are facing an ascendant right all over the globe. Let’s hope sane people of all stripes can put 2016 behind us and figure out a way to deal with what’s coming.

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

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You don’t know Jack
by Tom Sullivan

Many artistic luminaries passed away in 2016. Those who died during the heat of campaign season escaped my attention, however. Thankfully, Roy Edroso at the Village Voice led me (quite indirectly) to one who went to his reward in late October.

Edroso has been on safari in Rightbloggerland where veterans of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders are “fighting a rear guard action against various threats to the Republic, including Facebook’s fake news alerts, the new Star Wars movie, and basic math.” There was little reaction to Trump’s “unpresidented” tweet, Edroso found. However, when someone tagged Trump booster Mike Cernovich for misspelling “Gettysburg” on Twitter, Cernovich relpied, “Strategic Typos increase engagement as it makes you stop to look. Thus more views. As your reply proves.” Pee Wee would have stopped at, “I meant to do that.”

Edroso adds:

This may also have been the spur of a Twitter convo between the New York Post’s Seth Mandel and Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel about how that Obama guy isn’t so smart actually: “It’s Obama’s utter lack of intellectual curiosity that grates…” “Despite his intellectual pretense, I’ve never taken Obama as a big reader.” “he’s not (though he occasionally pretends to read, with hilarious results).” “Got to hand it to Dubya… he read A LOT,” etc. By 2014 they’ll be telling us it was Obama who couldn’t spell.

Rightbloggerland: space where everyday laws of nature no longer apply. Quantum conservatism we might call it. It is a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.

But it was this passage from Edroso led me to the death notice of the luminary in question (or is it gloominary?):

At Fox News, John R. Lott voiced another common complaint: “These fact checkers have their own biases — usually the same liberal biases that we see in the rest of the mainstream media.” For example, Lott wrote, fact-checker Politifact said Trump’s claims of “large scale voter fraud” were bullshit, but aha, “voter fraud in 2008 gave Al Franken the Senatorship in Minnesota.” That is, if you believe the evidence Lott was offering, namely another Fox News editorial written by… John R. Lott containing rock-solid proof points like “undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.”

Okay, my neurons fire funny, but this echoes the intellectual rigor of the age’s premier cartoonist-theologian, Los Angeles native Jack Chick. You know, the author of those darkly bizarre, sometimes violent, comic book gospel tracts found on the toilet tank in gas station restrooms. It seems the angels have carried Jack home for a visual replay of his life:

The New York Times marked Jack Chick’s passing on October 26:

“To some, Chick tracts are American folk art or even a form of religious pornography, titillating and somewhat dangerous,” Brill’s Content wrote in 1999. “Chick is the ultimate underground artist.”

[…]

Mr. Chick saw a long list of practices and beliefs as enemies of true Christianity. In addition to Islam, they included abortion, drugs, evolution, homosexuality, rock music, the Roman Catholic Church, Judaism, Mormonism and Freemasonry — but also Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, Halloween and updated translations of the Bible. He and the Christian Booksellers Association parted ways in 1981, partly because of his work’s anti-Catholic messages.

Jack Chick was 92.

I have a small bundle of Chick tracts collected over the years. One that passed through my hands into oblivion, sadly, was a comic book-sized, anti-Catholic expose in the style of Classics Illustrated (those of a certain age might remember). Priest have secret sex with nuns and sacrifice the babies to Satan — that sort of thing. Jack also had a thing for documenting his charges by footnoting his illustrated screeds with references to past screeds:

We can expect a lot of similarly scholarly work under the Trump administration, as Edroso illustrates:

… Accuracy in Media just dropped a scathing indictment of Ken Burns. Yes, they’re talking about the Civil War and baseball guy, who they say “hammers at left-wing mantras in his documentaries.” For example, in “his blatantly biased documentary Central Park Five,” Burns focused on the fact that the Five were exonerated by DNA evidence — or, as Accuracy in Media had it, “exonerated” in quotes, since “they would have to stand trial and be declared not guilty in order to be exonerated. Instead their sentences were simply vacated.” It looks as if the reign of The Leader will have a suitable intellectual complement.

Since he was dead before Election Day, one hopes Jack Chick voted his last ballot early or by mail. That would, of course, make the conservative icon one of Dear Leader’s loathsome dead voters.

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

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The antidote to fake news and mainstream perfidy is right here

by digby

Well folks, it’s that time again, when I come to you and ask for a little holiday cheer to keep the old blog going for another year.  I wish I could make a pitch for your support in 2017 based upon a sense of shared relief and hopefulness for the future. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. We are in the midst of a political maelstrom within which it’s very hard to see how the future is going to play out.

This past year has been a political horror show on every level. And I’ve documented the atrocities with six or seven posts a day, seven days a week on this blog, with at least one major thousand word analysis Monday through Friday that is also posted on Salon.com. I have covered the right wing and particularly Donald Trump almost exclusively, with a few forays into horrible terrorist attacks, mass shootings, media malpractice and a few natural disasters. I did 22 one hour “Clown Car” podcasts about the GOP primaries with Jay Ayckroyd, which started out as a fun chronicle of the 17 candidates tumbling out of the tiny circus car which ended up being a dark, scary story featuring one very frightening clown.  I watched dozens of Trump rallies start to finish and read virtually everything about him that’s been written.  I even forced myself to read all the books his ghostwriters wrote for him. (So far, I think I’ve escaped PTSD, but I’m not entirely sure.)

I know more about this man than I ever wanted to know and his ascension to power is the most terrifying political event of my lifetime. This is the most powerful nation on earth and a cretinous, authoritarian demagogue who has surrounded himself with paranoid lunatics is going to be running it.

So, what do we do now? Everyone will have to do something, that’s for sure. It’s all hands on deck whether organizing, donating time, marching in the streets, mass resistence or all of the above. For me, it’s all of those things, but first and foremost as a writer and blogger, it’s a commitment to be as clear and uncompromising in documenting what’s happening as I possibly can be.

The cacophony around us, the chaos, the fake news, the perfidious media, the timorous Democrats all serve the interests of Donald Trump and a Republican Party that was having a nervous breakdown even before he appeared on the scene. The normalization of Donald Trump is happening before our eyes, slowly and inevitably, and it is not normal.

I started this blog at another moment of deep crisis. We had just come through a disputed election and a major terrorist attack and the country was hurtling headlong into the Iraq war,  the media was in a state of ecstatic bloodlust and the Democrats were paralyzed. We were a small community of like-minded citizens just trying to make sense of the senseless and take heart in our shared sense of discombobulation and despair. Somehow it helped to know that others saw things the way we did.

The online world today is totally changed and we have social media to provide us with that shared sense of community.  But I think there is still value in blogs like this one, which is one of the few to have survived all the way through from Bush and Cheney to Obama to today.

My colleague Tom Sullivan writes every morning on a range of topics with particular focus on Democratic organizing and state level politics in his home state of North Carolina — the new epicenter of anti-democratic GOP perfidy. Gaius Publius writes about our most important global challenge, climate change. Spocko tracks the right wing media and from time to time tristero and Batoccio each contribute original observations and deep thoughts about current events. My old friend Dennis Hartley reviews current films and offers his take on the political scene from a cultural perspective.

We are all progressive, liberal, left, whatever you want to call us, who are out here trying, to coin a phrase from The Donald himself, to “figure out what the hell is going on.” It has never been more important to have places to go and people you trust trying to do that. We are one of those places.

After the election all the mainstream newspapers reported a huge uptick in subscriptions. Many of the less mainstream publications did too. It’s understandable. After watching what happened with the surge in fake news and the tendency of the feedback loops to create false narratives that have the capacity to change the world it’s important to support real journalism and I do it myself.

But I would respectfully submit that there’s also value in supporting sites like this, were we spend a lot of time (in my case, all of my time) sorting through the information out there, including that from mainstream sources, and trying to synthesize the daily churn for people who don’t have the time to do all that.  We can’t get to it all, and we miss a lot, but I think that a stop here can usually give you a little perspective and often one you won’t get in the mainstream papers or on cable TV.

I hope you will consider a donation or a subscription to this little outpost this year. And many, many thanks to those who have contributed in years past and continue to do so. It’s a great privilege and honor to be able to devote my time to this little project and I could not do it without you.

So, here are the buttons to donate. If you prefer to use snail mail, the address is at on the column to your left.

And once again — Happy Hollandaise, everybody. Fasten your seatbelts. This is going to be the bumpiest flight we’ve had yet.

cheers — digby