Month: January 2017

Snowball effect of Ryan’s dreams

by digby

Yes, they want to kill people with their “health care” plan. They also want to impoverish them. This will help on both counts:

A new report by EPI Research Director Josh Bivens finds that repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will cost the economy 1.2 million jobs in 2019, with jobs lost in every state. The report looks at the effects of cuts to both spending and taxes that would occur under a full repeal.

The $109 billion in spending cuts would have a disproportionally negative effect on states with the highest share of low and middle-income families and those states that took up the ACA Medicaid expansion, while the $70 billion tax cuts would disproportionately benefit those states with the largest share of households in the top 1 percent. Because low- and moderate-income households tend to spend a much higher share of marginal increases in disposable income, the overall effect of ACA repeal would be less spending and slower demand growth across all states.

“If the ACA is repealed, working peoples’ purchasing power will be significantly reduced, which means they will spend less on goods and services in the local economy,” said Bivens. “Job growth will be constrained due to this decrease in spending. Any spending boost from lower taxes as a result of ACA repeal would be swamped by spending cutbacks low- and middle-income families would have to undertake after losing access to Medicaid or subsidies in insurance exchanges.”

18 states would see employment losses greater than 0.5 percent of their current state under-65 population: New Mexico, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, West Virginia, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Vermont, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, and Delaware. While all states would lose jobs, states whose economies would be harmed the least are those that never took up the Medicaid expansion, as well as those with a larger share of households in the top 1 percent.

The report points out that the most important reason to worry about this is the 20 million people who stand to lose health insurance because of this daft insistence by the Republicans that the ACA is some kind of communist plot and must be replaced with a market based plan which the ACA actually is.  But this will also be a disruption on a grand scale since the health sector represents 1/6th of the economy. A lot of jobs are also at stake.

I’m sure they’ll find a way to blame Obama and the Democrats for it so that will work out fine for him politically. And anyway, there’s going to be a yuuuge influx of money into the military industrial complex and for wall building  at the border so maybe it will all even out.

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QOTD: Sean “Baggy Suits” Spicer

by digby

Senator Pat Geary in Godfather Part II

They’ll make ’em an offer they can’t refuse:

“The voters are gonna remember what senators stood in the way of when President Trump tried to install his agency and department heads the next time their name is on the ballot.”

If you know what I mean …

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Ok, now we’re seeing the way they’re planning the deportations

by digby

I don’t know if “taxpayer help” applies to public schools or perhaps even the use of any public services that are funded by the taxpayers, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

This is very, very ugly:

The Trump administration is considering a plan to weed out would-be immigrants who are likely to require public assistance, as well as to deport — when possible — immigrants already living in the United States who depend on taxpayer help, according to a draft executive order obtained by The Washington Post.

A second draft order under consideration calls for a substantial shake up in the system through which the United States administers immigrant and nonimmigrant visas overall, with the aim of tightly controlling who enters the country, and who can enter the workforce, and to reduce the social services burden on U.S. taxpayers.

The drafts are circulating among administration officials, and it is unclear whether President Trump has decided to move forward with them or when he might sign them if he does decide to put them in place. The White House would not confirm or deny the authenticity of the orders, and White House officials did not respond to requests for comment about the drafts on Monday and Tuesday.

If enacted, the executive orders would appear to significantly restrict all types of immigration and foreign travel to the United States, expanding bars on entry to the country that Trump ordered last week with his temporary ban on refugees and people from seven majority Muslim countries.

While Trump’s immigration ban last week focused on national security and preventing terrorism, the new draft orders would be focused on Trump’s campaign promises to protect American workers and to create jobs, immediately restricting the flow of immigrants and temporary laborers into the U.S. workforce. The administration has blamed immigrants who end up receiving U.S. social services for eating up federal resources, and it has said immigrant workers contribute to unemployment among Americans who were born in the United States.

“Our country’s immigration laws are designed to protect American taxpayers and promote immigrant self sufficiency. Yet households headed by aliens are much more likely than those headed by citizens to use Federal means-tested public benefits,” reads one draft order obtained by The Post, titled “Executive Order on Protecting Taxpayer Resources by Ensuring Our Immigration Laws Promote Accountability and Responsibility.” The draft order provides no evidence to support the claim that immigrant households are more likely to use welfare benefits, and there is no consensus among experts about immigration’s impact on such benefits or American jobs.

This one’s a Bannon special designed to send electrifying thrills up the legs of their poor, sad forgotten white voters. And it will. This will be among the most popular actions the president will have taken among his own folowers.

Let’s see if he has the nerve to set off the inevitable nuclear reaction among those who are not such big fans. I’m betting yet.

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Trouble brewing in the inner circle?


by digby

I wrote about the latest Palace intrigue for Salon this morning:

Last night President Trump fired Sally Yates,the acting Attorney General because, citing both the law and the constitution she ordered the Department of Justice not to defend his ban on Muslims from certain countries entering the US. Republicans all applauded the firing, calling her insubordinate because it was her job to carry out his orders, no questions asked. Democrats hailed her as a hero for asserting the independence that’s supposed to be conferred upon the office. To back them up they produced footage of Senator Jeff Sessions himself telling her in her confirmation hearing that she was obligated to say no if she believed the president’s order were unlawful.

Well that’s awkward pic.twitter.com/VID88sYOeV

— Staffer News (@staffernews) January 31, 2017

At this point it would behoove the Senate to think very, very hard about whether it makes sense to confirm Sessions as the new attorney general. It’s hard to imagine that would ever say no if Donald Trump wanted him to execute and unlawful order. On the other hand, it’s also hard to imagine that Trump would ever ask him to execute an unlawful order he didn’t enthusiastically agree should be executed so perhaps it’s a moot point. Nonetheless this crisis should induce Democrats to stiffen their spines and vote against Sessions. According to this Washington Post article,this is just a preview of what’s to come:

The early days of the Trump presidency have rushed a nationalist agenda long on the fringes of American life into action — and Sessions, the quiet Alabam­ian who long cultivated those ideas as a Senate backbencher, has become a singular power in this new Washington.

Sessions’s ideology is driven by a visceral aversion to what he calls “soulless globalism,” a term used on the extreme right to convey a perceived threat to the United States from free trade, international alliances and the immigration of nonwhites.
[…]
Sessions’s nomination is scheduled to be voted on Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but his influence in the administration stretches far beyond the Justice Department. From immigration and health care to national security and trade, Sessions is the intellectual godfather of the president’s policies. His reach extends throughout the White House, with his aides and allies accelerating the president’s most dramatic moves, including the ban on refugees and citizens from seven mostly Muslim nations that has triggered fear around the globe.

Even Republicans should be leery of confirming this man as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement official. But they are afraid. As former GOP congressman Richard Jolly told Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC last night, “the reason Republicans won’t speak out is because we have a president who will destroy you with a single tweet.”

Still, it’s not entirely impossible. If the Democrats all stuck together it would only require three Republicans to say no. I have no idea who those profiles in courage in might be. And anyway, Sessions has ideological tentacles throughout the new new administration. According to the Post:

The author of many of Trump’s executive orders is senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a Sessions confidant who was mentored by him and who spent the weekend overseeing the government’s implementation of the refu­gee ban. The tactician turning Trump’s agenda into law is deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, Sessions’s longtime chief of staff in the Senate. The mastermind behind Trump’s incendiary brand of populism is chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who, as chairman of the Breitbart website, promoted Sessions for years.

So even if he ends up back in the Senate, his antediluvian ideology will be over-represented in the Trump administration. There’s no escaping it.

Of course a big part of the problem with the Trump administration isn’t ideological, although that’s certainly an issue. It’s also the incompetence and that’s turning out to be overwhelming. It’s no longer a simple matter of an amateur hour convention or a poorly planned inauguration. It’s not even about a clownish display of celebrities traipsing through the lobby of Trump Tower and calling it a transition. They have a real job now and they are executing it very, very poorly. (One might even say that they are running the country the way Donald Trump ran the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City — which went bankrupt.)

And then there is the palace intrigue, the details of which are leaking like the Titanic to every reporter in Washington. Over the past few days we’ve been hearing a lot about Sessions and his proteges and about Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparent Razputin who has been elevated to an exalted position as adviser on foreign policy. And this raised the question of what happened to the crazed alt-right General, Michael Flynn, who was supposed to be Trump’s Patton, MacArthur  and Blackjack Pershing all rolled into one. Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times got the scoop on that: it looks as though he has seriously lost favor.

While Flynn was a favorite of Trump’s when he was heaping contempt upon Hillary Clinton, evidently he hasn’t worn well with the boss since they vanquished her. They say he talks too much and his son has been a thorn in their side. There are also whispers about him being too close to certain fringe characters which is true but also self-serving since Bannon and Trump himself are closely tied to the same elements. According to the NY Times’ juicy dish, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and Mike Pompeo all convened a meeting this week and didn’t invite poor Flynn because he was the subject of discussion. The claws are definitely out.

This may be the most encouraging bit of news we’ve had since Trump was inaugurated. Sessions and his crew are scary ideologues. Bannon is a frighteningly adept propagandist with a dangerous worldview. Mike Pence and Paul Ryan are far right conservative movement zealots with a blank check. Trump himself is unfit and over his head.  And the whole administration is clearly incompetent on every level. But Michael Flynn seems to be certifiably unhinged even by the standards of this unbalanced crew so if they are looking for ways to ease him out, thank goodness for small favors. One less kook in a White House full of them is a baby step in the right direction. We’ll take it.

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Push comes to shove
by Tom Sullivan

“Military” vehicle flying “Trump” flag caught on video Sunday in Louisville, Kentucky. Photo by invisibleky.

When it comes to faith, it often seems people who talk about it the most understand it the least. The same is true of our vaunted American principles. We love our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We venerate the Founders and American principles: separation of powers, the rule of law, not of men, equal protection, etc. But for many, when push comes to shove, faith in them is a mile wide and an inch deep. Has push come to shove?

From Huffington Post:

President Donald Trump on Monday quietly replaced the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, following a chaotic weekend during which DHS customs officials struggled to interpret and comply with Trump’s controversial executive order barring travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

In a statement released late Monday evening, the newly confirmed DHS secretary, John Kelly, announced that Thomas Homan had been named the new acting director of ICE. The statement did not mention Daniel Ragsdale, who was being replaced.

Ragsdale stays on as deputy director. As associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, Homan received the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service.

Trump also fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates Monday night. The Obama appointee was “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the White House said in a statement. Don’t miss the wording:

The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States. This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.

You well remember the sound legal advice that came out of the last Republican Office of Legal Counsel. The George W. Bush White House waited until its second term to start firing Department of Justice officials for following the law rather than the president’s wishes. Donald Trump, Man of Action, isn’t waiting.

The International Business Times reports:

Meanwhile, Dana Boente, the new acting attorney general, overruled the advice of Yates that the president’s travel ban was not lawful and should not be defended.

“Based upon the Office of Legal Counsel’s analysis, which found the Executive Order both lawful on its face and properly drafted, I hereby rescind former Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates January 30, 2017, guidance and direct the men and women of the Department of Justice to do our sworn duty and to defend the lawful orders of our President,” Boente wrote in a statement.

What is in question is whether the Trump administration will even adhere to the barest of norms and legal principle. As reports come out that Trump’s Customs and Border Protection officers are ignoring multiple court orders halting Trump’s travel ban, Dahlia Lithwick writes:

The situation has forced observers to reckon with a question that has little or no precedent in American history: What happens when the federal government or its agents refuse to honor a court order handed down by a federal judge? By definition, it has to be different from what happens when, say, a state lawmaker flouts the word of a federal judge, since in the past, such cases have involved the president himself sending in the U.S. Marshals to enforce the law. But who will be on what side if things escalate, and the executive branch itself explicitly and continuously refuses to follow the rulings of the judiciary? At what point does the conflict turn into a full-blown constitutional crisis?

But most likely, “there will be several rounds of brinksmanship before this rises to the level of a constitutional crisis,” University of Chicago Law School professor William Baude told Lithwick. Expect a ramping up of pressure in attempt to gain compliance and avoid sending anyone to jail for contempt of court.

What happens if Trump and his people simply decline to back down, even after a judge gives them an opportunity to comply? According to Waldman, that’s when a judge could call the U.S. Marshals in to enforce the order. In the case of Dulles, that could mean pitting U.S. Marshals against armed agents at airports. “This,” Waldman wrote, “is what sets us up for a darker, dangerous turn.”

Lithwick’s post reassures that Trump does not yet control all of the executive branch, and many career officials and Obama administration holdovers remain. Like Sally Yates. Obviously, Lithwick posted a mite too early.

Rule of law, not of men? Ask CBP officers and the guys in the trucks what they believe in. Then pay attention not to what they say, but to what they do.

The torture lovers

by digby

Has anyone polled the support for concentration camps and genocide recently? I’m wondering how many of my friends and neighbors are all in on those too. I mean, if you’re for torture what other limits can you logically have?

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Thoughtful governance

by digby

Who needs it, amirite? Lets just take a meat ax to everything and see what happens:

“This will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen,” Trump declared moments before signing it in the Oval Office. “There will be regulation, there will be control, but it will be a normalized control where you can open your business and expand your business very easily. And that’s what our country has been all about.”

The executive order signing, which fulfills a campaign pledge, comes after the president held a listening session with small-business leaders.

“If you have a regulation you want, No. 1, we’re not gonna approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms,” Trump said. “But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two.”

The president added that “it goes far beyond that.” “We’re cutting regulations massively for small business — and for large business,” he said. “But they’re different. But for small business, and that’s what this is about today.”

The executive order calls for agencies to pinpoint “at least two” current regulations to be repealed for each new proposed regulation. And it says the net incremental cost for fiscal 2017 should “be no greater than zero,” meaning the cost of new regulations should be offset by existing rules that will be rescinded.

To hell with it. Let’s just get rid of all of them. Let’s really have some carnage and maybe we’ll be able to compete with the rest of the world for once.

I don’t know if his voters are aware of it, but regulations save white lives too.

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Trump’s jobs plan: work until you drop dead

by digby

EPI examines Trump’s jobs claims:

On the White House website, the Trump administration announced a new goal of adding 25 million new jobs over the next ten years, an extraordinarily audacious, or simply innumerate, target. If their plan were successful, it would require raising employment rates well above what we can realistically hope for given the aging of the population and historical evidence on these rates. Now I happen to love optimistic agendas, but to the extent that this goal is not fantasy based on “alternative facts,” it can mean only one of two things: either the United States needs an enormous influx of immigrants, or a much higher share of the elderly population needs to be put to work.

Read on for the details.

This one might actually be real.They are certainly not going to invite more immigrants. So it’s up to the duffers. If Ayn Rand fan Paul Ryan is in charge, his social security destruction plan will ensure that old people work until they drop dead. He will also do away with age discrimination laws so if you were counting on staying with your employer until you are 80 and keeping your health insurance (Medicare will be a largely worthless voucher too) think again. Lemonade stand maybe?

Seriously, this is more idiotic hype from Trump who is probably going to turn this country into the dystopian hellscape full of the suffering and carnage he already thinks it is. There won’t be 25 million new jobs.  It’s totally absurd.

His voters like be stroked and lied to and he’s going to tell them whatever they want to hear. But he’s going to make their lives immeasurably worse. I’m sure they’ll blame welfare queens and gays and illegals and feminazis for ruining everything but it won’t change a thing.

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Diplomatic resistance

by digby

From Lawfare:

Consider this a major bureaucratic uprising on the part of career foreign service officers against the President on his executive order on refugees.

Numerous Foreign Service officers and other diplomats have drafted a dissent memo expressing opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States. ABC reported this morning on the draft, which is likely to be submitted today.

Here’s a copy of the actual draft. We are hearing that literally hundreds of foreign service officers are planning to be party to the dissent memo; it’s still unclear exactly how many. We have redacted all names and personally identifiable information from this document.

This is the nub:

“We do not need to place a blanket ban that keeps 220 million people — men, women, and children — from entering the United States to protect our homeland. We do not need to alienate entire societies to stay safe. And we do not need to sacrifice our reputation as a nation which is open and welcoming to protect our families. It is well within our reach to create a visa process which is more secure, which reflects our American values, and which would make the Department proud.”

Sean Spicer said earlier today that government employees “can get with the program or they can go.”

So that’s where we are.

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Confusion reigns

by digby

Marzieh Moosavizadeh and her grandson follow a routine when she visits almost every year from Iran.

The 75-year-old, who travels in a wheelchair and speaks little English, struggles to find direct flights to Phoenix, where he and his family live. So they meet in Los Angeles and he escorts her on the last leg of her trip.

This time was different.

Moosavizadeh landed at Los Angeles International Airport a day after President Trump signed an executive order banning citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including Iran, from entering the United States.

Moosavizadeh’s plans to catch her last flight were upended when she said she was held at LAX for nine hours with dozens of other passengers who, like her, had no idea whether they would be released or sent back to their native country.

“Sitting there for eight hours, for somebody who has arthritis, is very, very hard,” Moosavizadeh said while recounting her detention in an interview with The Times in Persian while her son translated by phone. “Please, tell Mr. Trump when they make these kind of decisions, think it all the way through.”

For Moosavizadeh, who her grandson said has held a green card since 1997, the anxiety set in when she landed shortly after 4 p.m. on Saturday.

Customs officers scanned her passport, held it up next to her head and told her to wait. Then, they ushered her to a room where she said a couple dozen passengers — Iranians, Africans and Asians — were being held.

She sat there for two hours before officers led her, along with a handful of others passengers from her flight, to another room filled with travelers from Iran. She spent the next several hours there.

At about 6 p.m., Moosavizadeh’s wheelchair attendant offered her a cellphone to call her grandson.  

She told him to go eat and rest — she heard she’d be held for a few more hours. He told her to stay calm, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Every hour or so, Moosavizadeh said, officers would come by to escort passengers to the bathroom or drop off 8-ounce water bottles. The English-speakers implored them for answers.

It’s out of our hands, the officers said. Their fate was up to their superiors.

Passengers were afraid to talk to one another, Moosavizadeh said. No one knew whether they’d be released or sent back to Iran.

“Most of them, they thought they were going to get deported,” she said, through her son.

At one point, she was taken elsewhere for questioning. Customs officers asked her when she last visited the U.S., who she lives with in Iran and where she gets her income.

When she returned, she snacked on almonds she’d packed in her purse.

“Thank God I put them in my purse, otherwise I didn’t have anything on me,” she said.

Meanwhile, in Phoenix, her sons frantically refreshed news articles and peppered her grandson, Siavosh Naji-Talakar, with questions he couldn’t answer. Huddled among throngs of boisterous protesters demanding the detainees be released, Naji-Talakar could do little but wait. 

Over and over, they chanted, “Let them in!” They said they wouldn’t leave otherwise. 

Some offered Naji-Talakar food and a couch for the night, others money for a hotel room.

Nearby, the detainees heard the cries, faintly. They had no idea, though, if those who had gathered were there to support or decry them. A customs officer, Moosavizadeh said, told the group that it wasn’t safe for them to let them go.

Eventually, officers began calling passengers one by one. Detainees were taken away, alone or in pairs, while those left behind wondered if they were being released or deported.  

“We all thought they were going to give us hard time first and then send us back,” Moosavizadeh said.

She added that she wants Trump to know that Muslims condemn Islamic State.

“They might be Muslim, but they’re not a part of us,” she said. “We are all brothers and sisters and we don’t believe in their values — at all.”

Moosavizadeh’s name was among the last ones called, at about 1 a.m. 

Finally, she said, she was “released from prison.”

When she spotted her grandson in the crowd, she felt like she was flying. 

He saw her too, and bolted.

“I pushed people out of the way, I was like, ‘Get out of my way,’” Naji-Talakar said. “I ran up to her and gave a big old hug.”

That’s when the cheering and chanting started again.

Over and over, “We got grandma!” 

This is just awful. And for no good reason, none. Our threat level from refugees and foreign visitors from these countries is minuscule compared to the threat from some sick person with an AR-15 coming in an mowing down little children in a grade school or people watching a midnight movie or workers in an office or any of the tens of thousands of shootings, purposeful and accidental, that happen every single year in this country.

Donald Trump wants to make that situation worse by letting loose a flood of weapons on the streets of America even as he detains 75 year old ladies from Iran. It is insane.

You tell me who’s keeping us safe.

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