Month: January 2017

Mad Dog on a chain

by digby

It turns out that Trump’s transition is even worse than we knew and that nobody has a clue. And they won’t let anyone who does do anything. It’s going to be a fun four years:

With only two weeks left before Inauguration Day and days before Mattis’s Senate confirmation hearing, most major Pentagon civilian positions remain unfilled. Behind the scenes, Mattis has been rejecting large numbers of candidates offered by the transition team for several top posts, two sources close to the transition said. The dispute over personnel appointments is contributing to a tenser relationship between Mattis and the transition officials, which could set the stage for turf wars between the Pentagon and the White House in the coming Trump administration.

The Trump transition team was already considering candidates for a host of Defense Department top jobs when Trump announced Dec. 1 that he intended to nominate “Mad Dog” Mattis to lead the military. The Mattis pick was seen by Republicans around Washington as an indication that Trump would rely on senior and experienced officials to shape and implement his national security and foreign policies. Many “Never Trump” Republicans also thought this might be their way into service despite having opposed Trump in the GOP primary.

Initially, both Mattis and the Trump team intended to engage in a collaborative process whereby Mattis would be given significant influence and participation in selecting top Pentagon appointees.

But the arrangement started going south only two weeks later when Mattis had to learn from the news media that Trump had selected Vincent Viola, a billionaire Army veteran, to be secretary of the Army, one source close to the transition said.

“Mattis was furious,” said the source. “It made him suspicious of the transition team, and things devolved from there.”

Service secretaries represent potential alternate power centers inside the Defense Department, and Mattis as defense secretary has an interest in having secretaries who are loyal to him and don’t have independent relationships with the White House.

Mattis is also pushing for the Trump transition team to allow “Never Trump” Republicans to serve in the Pentagon, but so far the Trump team is refusing.

One position that is a source of tension is undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a powerful post that oversees all Defense Department intelligence agencies, which include the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, President-elect Trump’s national security adviser-designate, was DIA director until he was sacked by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. following a dispute with then-Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael G. Vickers.

Mattis has rejected all of the names the Trump team has offered to be the top intelligence official in the department, another transition source said. Mattis is also unlikely to accept Trump’s top Pentagon transition landing team official, Mira Ricardel, as a top official. She was rumored to be in line to be undersecretary of defense for policy, a hugely influential job.

“Let’s put it this way, he’s being very picky about the options presented to him,” said the source, who was not authorized to talk about internal deliberations.

Transition sources also said that David McCormick, a hedge fund manager and former Army officer, is still Trump’s likely pick to be deputy defense secretary, the No. 2 job under Mattis.

The personnel dispute could be the first sign of tension between Mattis and Flynn. As a four-star general and head of Central Command, Mattis outranked Flynn when Flynn was DIA director, a three-star position. If confirmed, Mattis would be a Cabinet member and a member of the president’s National Security Council, but Flynn has a close relationship with Trump and the duty of coordinating between all the national security agencies.

No surprise there. Flynn wants to run everything and he’s a lunatic.

He’s bringing in his own cronies:

Meanwhile, Flynn is busily filling up the National Security Council staff with military and intelligence officers he knows personally. For example, as the Nelson Report first reported, Flynn intends to make Matthew Pottinger the senior director for Asia on the NSC staff.

Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter in China, joined the Marines in 2005. While deployed in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer, he worked closely with Flynn and co-authored a memo on how to fix intelligence operations in Afghanistan that was later released by a Washington think tank in 2010.

Flynn has also been meeting foreign officials, especially from Europe, with Sebastian Gorka, a professor and vice president of the Institute of World Politics, who was born in Britain to parents who fled Hungary. What position Gorka will have in Flynn’s NSC staff is unclear. Both Pottinger and Gorka are well-respected but their new prominence has raised concerns that Flynn is placing too much emphasis on military officials and military experts, in effect militarizing the NSC staff.

Of course he is. trump loves all these military guys. It’s like playing with GI Joes for him.

Several Washington foreign policy experts who are in touch with the Trump transition team said that overall, there’s no uniformity in the way each department is being handled and no real understanding of how much autonomy each Cabinet member will have in running his or her agency.

Many expect the agencies to have more power than usual because the Trump team is planning to slash the NSC staff from more than 400 people to about 150 personnel. Then again, national security officials outside the White House may find it difficult to exert influence with a president who often alters major policies by tweet.

Yeah, that’s going to be an issue. Apparently, his staff is fine with that. And so far the GOP leadership doesn’t seem to care much. And if they don’t care, there’s not much anyone else can do about it.

What a mess.

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Why they preferred Trump

by digby

Via Vox:

Following Donald Trump’s election, the media tried to identify several indicators for why he won. Was it the opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic? Poor health outcomes? The economy?

A new paper by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta puts the blame back on the same factors people pointed to before the election: racism and sexism. And the research has a very telling chart to prove it, showing that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology:

As the paper acknowledges, clearly economic dissatisfaction was one factor — and in an election in which Trump essentially won by just 80,000 votes in three states, maybe that, along with issues like the opioid epidemic and poor health outcomes, was enough to put Trump over the top. But the analysis also shows that a bulk of support for Trump — perhaps what made him a contender to begin with — came from beliefs rooted in racism and sexism.

Specifically, the researchers conclude that racism and sexism explain most of Trump’s enormous electoral advantage with non-college-educated white Americans, the group that arguably gave Trump the election. “We find that while economic dissatisfaction was part of the story, racism and sexism were much more important and can explain about two-thirds of the education gap among whites in the 2016 presidential vote,” the researchers write.

Now, the researchers didn’t measure just any kind of racism and sexism. For racism, they evaluated the extent that someone acknowledges and empathizes with racism — acting as a proxy measure for actual racist beliefs. (Research shows that these kinds of measures correlate with actual racism, which is tricky to measure in a more direct way since people will do what they can to avoid looking racist.) For sexism, they evaluated someone’s hostile sexism — which, through several questions, gauges hostile attitudes toward women. (For more on how hostile sexism is typically measured and compares with other types of sexism, read Libby Nelson’s explanation for Vox.)

To gauge these measures, the researchers looked specifically at national survey data from the online polling firm YouGov, taken during the last week of October.

YouGov’s data for likely voters had Hillary Clinton up by 3 points, which isn’t far from her final 2.1-point victory in the popular vote — suggesting that it’s fairly accurate.

Within this data, the researchers looked at respondents’ answers to various questions about the economy, racism, and sexism. The questions typically measured how much a respondent agreed with statements like, “I am angry that racism exists,” and, “Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for ‘equality.’” The researchers then matched responses to the scores shown in the chart above.

This isn’t the first study to produce these results. It’s been consistently demonstrated that racism and sexism played a big role in Trump’s Election Day victory. But knowing and proving the link between Trump and bigotry is crucial for anyone interested in defeating a candidate like him — or even Trump himself — in the future.

More at the link.

I know people want to deny this for some reason. In fact, many people throughout the political spectrum seem almost desperate to deny it and I think that’s very telling. We’re probably going to go through one of those periods where liberals try to win by ignoring it or trying to triangulate or trim around the edges. It won’t work. It never works. This is primal stuff and you can’t finesse it.

There will be a woman president not too long from now. And she will likely be a Republican who runs on traditional values. That’s how you have it both ways in America. And that’s what America wants.

There will be an other African American president as well, but I’m not sure how long it will take. And he might even be a Democrat — there are just so few in the GOP that it makes it unlikely. But if a Colin Powell type were to emerge, they’d do it. These Americans like individual people of color and women just fine. It’s “the blacks” “the illegals” and “the feminazis” they can’t stand.

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A series of mutually “auspicious moments”

by digby

They’re just ignoring the ethics office:

The office tasked with overseeing ethics and conflicts in the federal government struggled to gain access to leaders of the Trump transition team, and warned Trump aides about making decisions on nominees or blind trusts without ethics guidance, according to new emails obtained by MSNBC.

Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub emailed Trump aides in November to lament that despite his office’s repeated outreach, “we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election.”

Trump aides may also be risking “embarrassment for the President-elect,” Shaub warned, by “announcing cabinet picks” without letting the ethics office review their financial information in advance.

The perils for White House staff were even more severe, Shaub argued, because they might begin their jobs without crucial ethics guidance, raising a risk of inadvertently breaking federal rules.

“They run the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction at 18 USC 208,” Shaub wrote, citing a federal conflicts law in an email to Trump Transition aide Sean Doocey.

“If we don’t get involved early to prevent problems,” he added, “we won’t be able to help them after the fact.”

Shaub also warned that if Trump tried to create his own “blind trust” without the ethics office, the effort could be dead on arrival.

Related: Trump Pushes Back Announcement on Business Conflicts of Interest

The government might decide potential trustees were not independent, he cautioned, if Trump aides talked to them “before consulting” with the ethics office.

In contrast to most proposals floated by the Trump transition team, Shraub added that the ethics office only considers a trust blind if its underlying assets have “been sold off.”

In his public remarks, Trump has mostly focused on who would manage the Trump Organization. He has not suggested he would divest, or sell off its assets.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Request from MSNBC and The James Madison Project, and represented by the law office of Mark S. Zaid.

But they don;’t care. Read this article in today’s New York Times about Jared Kushner’s selling of the presidency for personal gain. It’s amazing:

On the night of Nov. 16, a group of executives gathered in a private dining room of the restaurant La Chine at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The table was laden with Chinese delicacies and $2,100 bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild. At one end sat Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of the Waldorf’s owner, Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese financial behemoth with estimated assets of $285 billion and an ownership structure shrouded in mystery. Close by sat Jared Kushner, a major New York real estate investor whose father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

It was a mutually auspicious moment.

Mr. Wu and Mr. Kushner — who is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and is one of his closest advisers — were nearing agreement on a joint venture in Manhattan: the redevelopment of 666 Fifth Avenue, the fading crown jewel of the Kushner family real-estate empire. Anbang, which has close ties to the Chinese state, has seen its aggressive efforts to buy up hotels in the United States slowed amid concerns raised by Obama administration officials who review foreign investments for national security risk.

Now, according to two people with knowledge of the get-together, Mr. Wu toasted Mr. Trump and declared his desire to meet the president-elect, whose ascension, he was sure, would be good for global business.

Since the election, intense scrutiny has been trained on Mr. Trump’s company and the potential conflicts of interest he will face. But with Mr. Kushner laying the groundwork for his own White House role, the meeting at the Waldorf shines a light on his family’s multibillion-dollar business, Kushner Companies, and on the ethical thicket he would have to navigate while advising his father-in-law on policy that could affect his bottom line.

Unlike the Trump Organization, which has shifted its focus from acquisition to branding of the Trump name, the Kushner family business, led by Mr. Kushner, is a major real estate investor across the New York area and beyond. The company has participated in roughly $7 billion in acquisitions in the last decade, many of them backed by opaque foreign money, as well as financial institutions Mr. Kushner’s father-in-law will soon have a hand in regulating.

The Anbang talks, which have not previously been reported, began roughly six months ago — “Well before the president-elect’s victory,” Mr. Kushner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, noted. That was, however, just as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican nomination. While the talks are far along, representatives for Mr. Kushner said some points remained unresolved. Ms. Heller declined to outline the financial terms under discussion.

Mr. Kushner, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has hired a leading Washington law firm, WilmerHale, to advise him on how to comply with federal ethics laws should he join the White House staff as an adviser to the president. The firm has concluded that one potential sticking point, a federal anti-nepotism law, is not applicable, though not all ethics experts agree. While the law prohibits federal officials from hiring relatives for agencies they lead, Mr. Kushner’s lawyers argue, among other things, that the White House is not an agency and is therefore exempt.

As for conflicts of interest, Mr. Kushner would be required to make limited financial disclosures, which could give the public a clearer picture of his holdings. And, unlike Mr. Trump, who as president will be exempt from conflict-of-interest laws, he would have to recuse himself from decisions with a “direct and predictable effect” on his financial interests.

They’ll find a way around that too.

This is just a free-for-all. I won’t be surprised to learn they’re short-selling before Trump tanks the stock of companies with a tweet. He’s doing that with regularity. But nobody cares.  They aren’t bothering to vet any of the cabinet or their political appointees. Why bother? None of it matters.

The “President Brand” is the most lucrative brand in the world and Trump and his family and cronies are going to milk it for all its worth.

By the way, Vladimir Putin is rumored to be the richest man in the world. I’m guessing Trump sees beating him that way as his goal.

I wrote about Trump’s “ethics” lawyer here. He defended Tom DeLay.

And there’s this on Jared Kushner.

The conflicts are overwhelming. And since they don’t care and members of their party don’t care — indeed, they seem to want to get in on the action — this is just inexorably unfolding before our eyes.

Update:

January 6, 2017

The Honorable Charles E. Schumer
Minority Leader
United States Senate
322 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Elizabeth Warren
United States Senator
317 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senators Schumer and Warren:

I write in response to your letter dated January 5, 2017, requesting information about the
work of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to implement the Ethics in Government
Act in connection with the individuals whom the President-elect has announced he intends to
nominate. 1 This response addresses the issues your letter raises.

As OGE’s Director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not
completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me. This schedule has created undue
pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews.
More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved
ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings. I am not aware of any occasion in the four
decades since OGE was established when the Senate held a confirmation hearing before the
nominee had completed the ethics review process.

The Ethics in Government Act establishes a requirement that covered nominees to
Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed positions must obtain OGE’s certification of their
financial disclosure reports.2 That this certification must be obtained prior to the hearing is
evidenced by the additional requirement that nominees must “make current” their financial
disclosure reports as to earned income by the date of the hearing. 3 Further evidence is found in
the requirement that, “The [OGE] Director shall forward a copy of the report of each nominee to the congressional committee considering the nomination.”4 This timing is significant because the
need for OGE’s certification prior to the hearing creates the leverage necessary to compel
nominees to disclose their assets fully and resolve all conflicts of interest.

The nominee financial disclosure process is complex. It involves assisting nominees to
make complete and accurate disclosure of complex financial holdings and arrangements,
identifying conflicts of interest uncovered through reviews of nominees’ disclosures, and
developing comprehensive written ethics agreements that resolve all identified conflicts of
interest. This work is labor-intensive. As a result, the process is necessarily measured in weeks,
not days. OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials must have adequate opportunities to ensure that
the Senate receives a complete accounting of each nominee’s relevant financial interests and an
explanation of the steps the nominee will take to resolve conflicts of interest. To provide a
window into the complexity of this work, I have enclosed non-exhaustive checklists that we have
developed for financial disclosure reviews, OGE’s Nominee Ethics Guide, the Appendix to the
Nominee Ethics Guide, and a copy of OGE’s Ethics Agreement Guide.5

This normally intensive process has been further complicated by both the Senate hearing
schedule and the announcement of nominees prior to consulting OGE for an evaluation of any
ethics issues. In the past, the ethics work was fully completed prior to the announcement of
nominees in the overwhelming majority of cases.6 Under this traditional process, the names of
nominees were not made public until OGE “precleared” them and, therefore, there was no
opportunity for undue influence on the independent ethics review process.

During this Presidential transition, not all of the nominees presently scheduled for
hearings have completed the ethics review process. In fact, OGE has not received even initial
draft financial disclosure reports for some of the nominees scheduled for hearings. Despite the
challenges current circumstances present, OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials have been
working diligently in an effort to deliver expedited reviews that meet the Senate’s schedule. As a
measure of our success, I note that we have precleared 58% of the financial disclosure reports
that we have received from the President-elect’s Transition Team. By the same date eight years
ago, we had precleared 21 % of the financial disclosure reports that we had received from the
transition team.

We remain committed to completing the ethics work on each nominee as quickly as
possible without compromising the integrity of our ethics work or the nominee’s future activities
on behalf the American public. I am optimistic that we will be able to continue expediting our
ethics reviews of the President-elect’s nominees to meet reasonable timeframes without
sacrificing quality. It would, however, be cause for alarm if the Senate were to go forward with hearings on nominees whose reports OGE has not certified. For as long as I remain Director,
OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore
conflicts of interest.

Sincerely,

Walter M. Shaub, Jr.
Director

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Damn it Dems. Make news on what repealing ObamaCare means!

By Spocko

I know the D.C. Democrats are busy running around trying to find their next job and tickets to concerts but Christ on a crutch why isn’t anyone baiting Trump about his “repeal and replace” ObamaCare promise?

At least get some people out there who can tell us what a straight up repeal would mean and what’s going to happen next. Give us some scenarios like my hero Wendell Potter did here

Explain that what Americans faced before Obamacare will come rushing back, the insurance industry abuses, the crummy coverage, the out of control prices.  That’s what repeal is. “But, but the law!” Well tell us exactly what can’t be done and what CAN be done.

The problem is that the media lets Trump and his spokespeople off the hook time and time again for not having a plan and how they are making promises they can’t keep.

Why are the democrats giving him more time? He has had over a year to come up with a replacement plan. Stop cutting him slack damn it! Every day they delay lets him prepare and lets the industry help him to the soft landing they want.

 “But but he’s not even in office yet!” So what? Is he going to do in two weeks what he couldn’t do in 18 months? No. He’s going to ask for an extension and get it. Do we wait for the extension? Hell no! People need to stop moping around.

It’s not really that hard to get under Trump’s skin. And, for all I know there are a bunch of unemployed Clinton healthcare strategists planning a big push back to be unleashed Tuesday morning.  If so, great, I want a cookie if I predicted it. But I don’t see anything yet.

This week I’ve been listening to Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter talking about how Trump won’t be able to really repeal ObamaCare, how he’ll declare a win and kick the can down the road till 2019, 3 years away.  Any problems in the continuing system will be blamed on Obamacare.  He’ll blame Democrats for all the bad stuff still there and if he is forced to keep any good stuff, that’s because he negotiated a great deal with the industry.

Taking credit for other people’s success and avoiding blame: a perfect Trump “win.” And he’ll get away with it too because there are no “meddling kids” pushing him to overreact and tear off his mask.

On the other hand, the healthcare industry does have a strategy and a narrative. In this insightful piece last month from Joey Rettino he explains what they are doing.

Repeal Obamacare? GOP Should Be Careful What They Wish For

The PR shops will help Republicans convince the public they’ve repealed and replaced the law when all they will have done is tweak it to the satisfaction of a few lobbyists — in particular, lobbyists for the health-insurance industry. So much for draining the swamp.

We are already seeing this in the form of comments from KellyAnne Conway.

The reason Republican leaders have called in the PR pros is because of what they undoubtedly have been hearing from my former colleagues in the health insurance business: If they rush to repeal ObamaCare and think they can replace it with a plan based on those ideas, they’ll have a PR nightmare on their hands in no time flat. And it won’t help to postpone the replacement for a couple of years. The uncertainty created would lead insurers to abandon the ObamaCare exchanges well before two years had passed.

As that reality sinks in, party leaders will draft legislation that will be based on the insurance industry’s wish list and try to sell it as making good on their repeal-and-replace campaign promise. Among the items on that wish list: allowing insurers to once again charge people in their 40s, 50s and 60s far more than younger people for the exact same coverage, letting them once again take the status of an applicant’s health into consideration when pricing their policies and making it legal again for them to sell inadequate or even worthless coverage to gullible Americans.

This scenario makes sense to me, because the lobbyists and the Republicans are expected to act as they always act. But nobody seems to get that Trump can’t be counted on to play the same game. 

Everyone is assuming that he’ll listen to reason. They also don’t want to be the one who pushes him into doing something rash. So now people are helping him soften the blow–for various reasons ranging from noble: saving lives, the overall good of the people, to the more craven: their career or the bottom line.

Nobody wants to be the one who forces Trump to actually do what he promises because they know real people will die if that happens. I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say that “somebody” will stop him.

BTW, Trump was never a governor in a death penalty state. He has had no military service leadership where a mistake means people die.
Has Trump ever been personally responsible for people dying? What about people he liked dying?  Has he ever ordered people to their deaths? Ordering someone to kill “the enemy” or “bad dudes” is different than being responsible when the good guys die because of your actions. 

 Americans aren’t very good at “Imagine this terrible thing happening. Now do something about it so it doesn’t happen.” Remember, “Osama determined to strike…?” We are better at, “Holy CRAP! That terrible thing happened, why didn’t we do something? Never mind, we need to fix this, right now!”

Right now insurance industry lobbyists are trying to keep the “good stuff” (aka profits) from ACA while their PR people are trying to make Trump look like he’s doing what he promised. There are other groups that are helping to keep things running the same, they range from doctors worried about patients to Pharma worried about patents.

For this to work smoothly it requires Democrats to play along. And they will, because they hope the “good stuff for the people” won’t be taken away. The don’t want to use the leverage of people who will die as a negotiation tool (damn guilty conscience!).

Can someone please call Trump on his bullshit and describe what an actual “repeal without replace on day one”would mean? It would be a shitstorm of death and financial chaos.  Actual people would die.

Out of sight, out of your mind

Americans have a hard time connecting losses or wins to the person who caused them, especially when they happen months and years in the future.

Trump knows that people want a quick win. That’s why he’s taking credit for stuff that he didn’t do. If something fails. he will find a scapegoat.

You need to understand the mind of the man who wants to sit at the head the table. Trump wants to be the good guy, the hero. We are assuming he will betray the people who voted from him in favor of the health insurance industry like regular politicians.

That’s because it is set up that this fight is between Trump and “the government/AKA ObamaCare” but it can easily be shown to be a fight between Trump and the health insurance industry. Here’s how you could do it based on what is actually happening and the patterns we have seen.

Imagine if Trump found out that one of the top insurance company Aetna Inc., MetLife Inc or Centene Corp had their people going around telling investors that they “got Trump under control.” or “Don’t worry we will remain profitable”  Or maybe they are telling congress people they will get their way like they did with Obama because Donald Trump is a puppet and a joke.  And imagine these companies are all top donors to Hillary,

I think you can envision the mean tweet that would provoke from the Trump.
(And by mean tweet I’m thinking about his Boeing tweet that caused its stock to dive and scared the bejeebers out of the business community.)

Now I’m not saying that we make up stuff, we just need to show him what these insiders are actually telling people in private or in forums that aren’t on the TV for Trump to catch between tweets.

Trump will want to prove that he is the boss. We just need to show that those insurance companies backed the wrong horse and they are saying he won’t really do what he says. Add something personal from one of the CEOs and BOOM! Those are tweeting words!

To get Trump to see ObamaCare as the health insurance industry and not the government it needs to be personal. Did the Centene CEO, Michael F. Neidorff diss Trump at a Christmas party? Did Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini fail to grovel at Trump Tower after Hillary lost? Is there a story about Steven A. Kandarian, the CEO of MetLife calling DJT slow-witted while at a Harvard MBA wine and cheese party? Who knows? Odds are something exists.

Trump has enemies and allies. If you can’t get an enemy to speak up, get one of his allies to rat out an enemy.  The merger and consolidation business in health care insurance is big now. It would be a shame if one company faced the wrath of a Trump tweet,wouldn’t it?

Now if this all sounds too tin foil hatty, I assure you that there are multiple real stories out there that can be used to bait Trump in the healthcare area. The problem is that most people think that telling stories of Trump voters losing health care will touch him. Appealing to his empathy for poor uninsured won’t work.  You have to appeal to his winning/losing side with people he wants respect from.

We already know what the lobbyists have been saying behind the scenes. We already know how regular politicians react.  If Trump is baited in this area and he reacts the standard way politicians do, then we will use our standard methods. But we need to prepare for a different response.

I’m sure there are people out there who wonder, “Is it morally acceptable to push Trump into a corner where he will over react, endangering the lives of others?” I say it depends on who the others are. Trump is going to crush some group on the way to his “win” of repealing ObamaCare. I’d rather the group crushed be the health insurance industry executives–I hear they have great coverage.

They want to rule, Part Deux
by Tom Sullivan

Make that LEGISLATURE.

Weren’t we just here earlier this week? They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. I guess this got lost in the Republicans’ ethics office shuffle.

A few days after a Republican legislator filed a bill in the Florida House of Representatives “… urging Congress to propose to the states an amendment to the United States Constitution that allows Congress to deem a law that has been declared void by certain federal courts active and operational,” in the U.S. House Rep. Steve King (R-IA) decreed:

Obamacare should be ripped out by the roots and thus, I have introduced this legislation in conjunction with my repeal bill in an effort to look ahead and bar the Supreme Court from citing Obamacare in forthcoming decisions as binding precedent.

Yup. That’ll fix ’em. Now that GOP has total control, all that legal-precedent-separation-of-powers stuff seems — how did Alberto Gonzales put it? — “quaint.” And the Geneva Conventions aren’t the U.S. Constitution dictated by God himself to our sainted Founders. Anyway, those who have been watching the “newly insane state of North Carolina” since 2013 know where the republic under Republicans is headed.

The gist of King’s bill reads as follows:

Under Article 3, Section 2, which allows Congress to provide exceptions and regulations for Supreme Court consideration of cases and controversies, the following cases are barred from citation for the purpose of precedence in all future cases after enactment: Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566, 2573, 183 L. Ed. 2d 450 (2012) and King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2485, 192 L. Ed. 2d 483 (2015) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2782, 189 L. Ed. 2d 675 (2014).

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo writes:

The proposal had the health care law world “chuckling,” according to Timothy Jost, a health law specialist at the Washington and Lee University.

“He obviously hasn’t read these opinions,” Jost said. He pointed to National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, which Jost said “contained very strong statements about state rights;” King v. Burwell, which “included language in which the court basically limited deference to administrative agencies;” and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which “was all about religious liberty.”

“These are three precedents that one would think Representative King would affirm very strongly,” Jost said.

Eugene Volokh calls it “political theater,” adding, “But it seems like pretty poor theater.” Volokh writes that among other things,

The bill would also tell the Supreme Court how to decide its own cases, which I think would unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers. Congress can’t just overrule the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions, such as National Federation of Independent Business (absent a constitutional amendment). It can’t tell courts how to decide cases (again, absent a change in the substantive law on which the case is based), see United States v. Klein (1871). It can’t strip a court decision of its preclusive effect on the parties, see Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc. (1994). Congress therefore likewise can’t try to limit the force of the Supreme Court’s precedents (and especially its constitutional precedents) by telling the courts not to cite those precedents. Article 3, section 2 lets Congress limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to hear the cases — it doesn’t let Congress tell the court how to decide a case that the court has the jurisdiction to hear.

Not to mention that the Congress cannot prohibit the legal reasoning that went into settling those cases from being employed again in other ones.

Rick Hasen tells Law Newz:

Prof. Rick Hasen from the University of California-Irvine School of Law tells LawNewz.com that he “cannot imagine that such a bill is constitutional as it infringes on the powers of the judiciary.” By that he means, “It presents a classic separation of powers problem, telling another branch of government how to do its job.”

Hasen even questioned whether it was serious proposal, rather he expects “it did get Rep. King some attention, which was probably the point.”

If these guys crave attention and are going to act like Lionel Hutz, can we make them dress in bright, primary colors? And orange skin to match Dear Leader?

“Well, he’s had it in for me ever since I kinda ran over his dog… Well, replace the word ‘kinda’ with ‘repeatedly’ and the word ‘dog’ with ‘son.’”

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Some happy bears to make you smile:

These bears love to play after being rescued from life as "dancing bears." pic.twitter.com/INrgkSFsR7— The Dodo (@dodo) January 6, 2017

Trump and the right wing Putin cult

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon back in 2015:

Donald Trump’s got Putin fever: The GOP frontrunner is stumping for a Russian strongman

By Heather Digby Parton|Dec. 21st, 2015

Despite the fact that this past weekend featured a Democratic Party presidential debate, the news continues to be Donald Trump and the GOP race. One assumes the press was not interested in the debate simply because the three candidates are professional, intelligent, well-informed and serious. In other words they are not a circus act. Luckily we still have Trump to entertain them, and he’s doing a bang up job.

For instance, when “Fox and Friends” ran a clip on Sunday of Clinton criticizing him in the debate the night before, Trump, on the phone, responded, “could you imagine that as president? I’m just watching and to see that as president just doesn’t work.” That got a big smile from one of the hosts, Tucker Carlson, who is know for a famous quip about Clinton which he repeated often in the last election:

“She scares me. I cross my legs every time she talks…every time, involuntarily. It is like those pictures you see of the soccer goalie when they’re about to get the free kick. That’s me when she talks. I can’t help it.”

But Trump’s comment about Clinton was a throwaway line. What the Sabbath Gasbags were most interested in were his comments about Vladimir Putin. Trump has been saying for some time that he and Putin would get along great. Months ago he told Anderson Cooper, “I think the biggest thing we have is that we were on ’60 Minutes’ together and we had fantastic ratings. One of your best-rated shows in a long time. So that was good, right? So we were stable mates.” They weren’t actually on “60 Minutes” together, there were simply stories about each of them on the same program, but that’s Trump. They made ratings together so that makes them blood brothers.

In fact, they’ve never met.

Nonetheless, on that and on numerous other occasions, Trump has said that he believed he and Putin would “probably work together much more so than right now.” And last week, Putin returned the compliment. In an end of year press conference he called Trump “a very bright and talented man,” and an “absolute leader.”

Trump nearly swooned at the compliment saying, “it is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.” It didn’t matter in the least that the media was gobsmacked, he was thrilled, telling Joe Scarborough “when people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.” He even went out of his way to defend him against the charges that Putin had been responsible for the deaths of opposition journalists, saying “our country does plenty of killing.”

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday he went to the mat for him:

“They are allegations. Yeah sure there are allegations. I’ve read those allegations over the years. But nobody’s proven that he’s killed anybody, as far as I’m concerned. He hasn’t killed reporters that’s been proven.” 

He said it would be terrible if true, but “this isn’t like somebody that stood with the gun and taken the blame or admitted that he’s killed. He’s always denied it. He’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country.”

This is the same man who calls for the summary execution of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in every stump speech, usually followed by a nostalgic comment about how we used to do such things “when we were strong.” It’s also the same man who routinely points to the press in the back of the hall at his rallies and calls reporters disgusting and “scum,” sometimes even naming names.

The GOP establishment is clutching their pearls over all this under the assumption that saying you admire Vladimir Putin surely will be the ultimate put-away shot. After all, we just had a debate in which the candidates were variously vowing to “punch Russia in the nose” and to shoot Russian planes out of the sky. Perhaps the most bellicose was Chris Christie who has long criticized President Obama for being soft, saying a few months back, “I don’t believe, given who I am, that [Putin] would make the same judgment. Let’s leave it at that.” Evidently, “who he is” is so macho that Putin will roll himself into a ball and have a good old fashioned cry if Christie looks at him sideways.

Mitt Romney tweeted furiously about Trump’s coziness with Putin and his former advisers were all up in arms throughout the week-end calling him a “seriously damaged individual.” Trump responded by saying, “they’re jealous as hell because he’s not mentioning” them.

Trump doesn’t care one whit about any of this carping. His reasoning is clear in this one comment:

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Later he said, “I think that my words represent toughness and strength.”

Trump understands the base of the GOP a lot better than Mitt Romney and the Sunday talking heads. These GOP base voters like Putin. Like so much else, Trump is just channeling an existing right wing phenomenon. Marin Cogan at National Journal wrote about the right wing Putin cult two years ago:

Putin­phil­ia is not, of course, the pre­dom­in­ant po­s­i­tion of the con­ser­vat­ive move­ment. But in cer­tain corners of the In­ter­net, ad­or­a­tion for the lead­er of Amer­ica’s No. 1 frenemy is un­ex­cep­tion­al. They are not his coun­try­men, Rus­si­an ex­pats, or any of the oth­er re­gion­al al­lies you might ex­pect to find al­lied with the Rus­si­an lead­er. Some, like Young and his read­ers, are earn­est out­doorsy types who like Putin’s Rough Rider sens­ib­il­ity. Oth­ers more cheekily ad­mire Putin’s cult of mas­culin­ity and claim re­l­at­ive in­dif­fer­ence to the polit­ic­al stances — the anti-Amer­ic­an­ism, the sup­port for lead­ers like Bashar al-As­sad, the op­pres­sion of minor­it­ies, gays, journ­al­ists, dis­sid­ents, in­de­pend­ent-minded ol­ig­archs — that drive most Amer­ic­ans mad. A few even ar­rive at their Putin ad­mir­a­tion through a strange brew of an­ti­pathy to everything they think Pres­id­ent Obama stands for, a re­flex­ive dis­trust of what the gov­ern­ment and me­dia tells them, and polit­ic­al be­liefs that go un­rep­res­en­ted by either of the main Amer­ic­an polit­ic­al parties… 

[T]he Obama’s-so-bad-Putin-al­most-looks-good sen­ti­ment can be found on plenty of con­ser­vat­ive mes­sage boards. Earli­er this year, when Putin sup­posedly caught — and kissed — a 46-pound pike fish, posters on Free Re­pub­lic, a ma­jor grass­roots mes­sage board for the Right, were over­whelm­ingly pro-Putin:

“I won­der what photoup [sic] of his va­ca­tion will the Usurp­er show us? Maybe clip­ping his fin­ger­nails I sup­pose or maybe hanging some cur­tains. Yep manly. I can’t be­lieve I’m sid­ing with Putin,” one wrote. “I have Pres­id­ent envy,” an­oth­er said. “Bet­ter than our met­ro­sexu­al pres­id­ent,” said a third. One riffed that a Putin-Sarah Pal­in tick­et would lead to a more mor­al United States.

Is it any wonder that Trump is saying he’s “honored” that Putin thinks highly of him?

But the pearl clutching about all this Putin love from the other presidential candidates is seriously hypocritical. They may not be tapping into the macho Putin cult as directly as Trump, but they are very much on Putin’s authoritarian wavelength. Just like Putin they are very upset at the idea gay people might have equal rights and they are prepared to use government power to discriminate against them:

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee vowed to push for the passage of the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), legislation that would prohibit the federal government from stopping discrimination by people or businesses that believe “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman” or that “sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”

The pledge is supported by three conservative groups: the American Principles Project, Heritage Action for America, and Family Research Council Action.

Apparently, Bush, Graham, Paul and Trump, have also publicly expressed support for FADA. In the name of freedom, of course, just as the old Soviets would have done. These liberty lovers may shake their fists and pretend they are in opposition to Putin’s tyrannical ways, but when you get down to it they’re all on the same page.

And the rest of us should probably stop laughing and start paying attention according to a warning from someone who knows what she’s talking about, Maria Alekhina, aka Masha of Pussy Riot:

“When Putin came to his first term or second term, nobody [in Russia] actually thought that this is serious. Everybody was joking about it. And nobody could imagine that after five, six years, we would have a war in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, and these problems in Syria,” in which Russia has become involved. 

“Everybody [is] joking about Donald Trump now, but it’s a very short way from joke to sad reality when you have a really crazy president speaking about breaking every moral and logic norm. So I hope that he will not be president. That’s very simple.”

Strongman cults of the likes of Putin and Trump are often dismissed as silly and unserious at first. And then, all at once, it’s too late.

Just saying.

Your new president ladies and gentlemen

by digby

Taking his job very seriously:

You can see how his minds works. It’s not comforting.

It would be one thing if this imbecile was surrounded by competent people. But he’s not. He’s got lunatic alt-right freaks and mentally unstable advisers (some of whom are both) and his children who don’t actually seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed. And there’s Reince, another ball of fire.

Honestly, people. I hate Mike Pence with a passion but he is not likely to accidentally start a nuclear war. Trump could very well do that. And he’s going to sign Mike Pence’s wetdream agenda anyway.

He’s cray-cray …

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“He doesn’t value words the way most people do”

by digby

On CNN International this morning right wing journalist Salina Zito of the Washington Examiner said that people understand that Donald Trump doesn’t “value words the way most people do.”  There’s a word for that type of person: “liar.”

She explained that Trump voters never expected him to tell the truth because it made them feel good to be a part of something bigger that delivered tangible benefits. (No I don’t understand that either.)

Zito said she spoke to Trump voters who told her they’d be happy to pay for the wall and that they knew he was a disrupter. And while they love their generals and their security agencies they’re still mad about Iraq so they’re fine with Trump and he Russian thing.

I don’t know if Trump apologists get just how stupid these rationalizations makes Trump voters look. But at some point those voters may just catch on that they’ve been played. I doubt it will be pretty when they do.

Trump’s Rasputin

by digby

I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017

You cannot make this stuff up ….

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