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Month: January 2017

From the people you trust by @BloggersRUs

From the people you trust
by Tom Sullivan

The newest, improvedest Republican Obamacare replacement plan is called the Patient Freedom Act of 2017, because of course it is. The bill was introduced yesterday by Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine. Cassidy is a doctor. You can trust him:

Under the proposal, states could stay with the Affordable Care Act, or they could receive a similar amount of federal money, which consumers could use to pay for medical care and health insurance. “We are moving the locus of repeal to state government,” Mr. Cassidy said. “States should have the right to choose.”

States’ rights are good for you, says the seersuckered Louisiana physician. The subhead for Charlie Pierce’s comments on the proposal claims, “You’re gonna be so free, you’re gonna get sick of it.”

“Obamacare is flawed, failing and not fixable, and it needs to be fully repealed,” said Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.

Meadows, my ever-freedom-lovin’ congressman, was a Florida real estate developer before he turned to a life of obstruction. You can trust him. If it’s not a legitimate repeal, Meadows’ Freedom Caucus has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

On the matter of whom you can trust, Alan Levinovitz has a worthwhile read at Slate:

Many who trust Trump to heal our body politic do so for the same reasons that people like my friend—normal, reasonable people—trust quacks to heal their bodies. They have been swayed by a powerful confluence of factors—specifically, epistemic uncertainty, existential panic, and anti-elitism. These factors ensure that even when reality hits, when insurance rates go up but the wall does not, the marks will place the blame somewhere else.

Epistemic uncertainty—the idea that traditional sources of knowledge cannot be trusted—has long been exploited by disingenuous medical gurus to attract patients. Their techniques mirror those that Trump brought to the broader public: Earn sympathy by identifying genuine problems—corrupt pharmaceutical companies that suppress data and bribe doctors, for instance, or entrenched corporate lobbying in Washington. But instead of proposing nuanced fixes—as an honest person would—exploiters of epistemic uncertainty turn these legitimate critiques into crude rhetorical bombs that allow them to attack the entire system. Big Pharma becomes a deceptive force of satanic proportion, invoked by anyone who wants to hawk an unproven treatment or assert the dangers of a treatment proven safe.

Donald Trump, a cross between P.T. Barnum and Minnesota Fats, is a political version of the New Age faith healer of the sort I came to know too well here in the 1990s. Levinovitz elaborates:

Charlatans, who are inevitably populists, know why their audience is listening: Elites have wronged the public, failed to solve their problems, sometimes even caused them. When the people fell ill, doctors said there was nothing to be done. When they complained about black crime in their neighborhood, they were called racists. When they chose to be stay-at-home Christian mothers, they were called backward failures. When they tried to create jobs by drilling for oil, the government regulated them. When they made lots of money in banking, liberal academics blamed them for exacerbating income inequality.

The charlatans give them a new refrain: We know our bodies best, not the elites. We know our jobs best, not the elites. We have the right to choose our own solutions. We reject the elites.

I knew a young woman with porcelain skin who contracted some common skin infection back in the 1990s. It was the sort of thing a physician might knock out with a prescription. But she didn’t trust western medicine. She went for months using “natural” remedies to heal herself as her face grew more mottled, swollen and pockmarked. It was a painful thing to watch and surely worse for her. When finally she became desperate enough to seek licensed medical help, the damage was done. The infection cleared up, but her face would never be the same. I don’t know if she chalked that up to the failure of western medicine or not.

Pray we are not all looking in the mirror just a few years of Trumpism from now and blaming the failures on the “know somethings.”

Trump’s travelling salvation claque

Trump’s travelling salvation claque

by digby

According to Henry Farrell in the Washington Post,  Trump’s habit of putting paid audience in his crowds is a well known tactic:

When Donald Trump visited the CIA over the weekend to make a speech, many commentators noted that his audience clapped and cheered enthusiastically. Now, according to CBS News, intelligence sources are pushing back:

Authorities are also pushing back against the perception that the CIA workforce was cheering for the president. They say the first three rows in front of the president were largely made up of supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign. An official with knowledge of the make-up of the crowd says that there were about 40 people who’d been invited by Trump, Mike Pence and Rep. Mike Pompeo teams. The Trump team expected Rep. Pompeo, R-Kansas, to be sworn in during the event as the next CIA director, but the vote to confirm him was delayed on Friday by Senate Democrats. Also sitting in the first several rows in front of the president was the CIA’s senior leadership, which was not cheering the remarks.

Still, as CBS notes, some of the CIA employees who turned up at the speech were probably real Trump supporters; they had to come into their workplace on the weekend to see him, which suggests that some at least were real fans.

So was this real applause, or was it fake? If the applause was, as it appears to have been, partly engineered, the difference is less important than you might think.

This isn’t the first time Trump has done this

This isn’t the first time that Trump has engineered applause. When he first announced his candidacy, he got wild cheers — from actors who had been paid to applaud him (Trump then stiffed the company that hired them for four months). When he gave his first news conference as president, he filled the back of the room with aides to cheer for him, and jeer at the journalists he was attacking.

There’s a specialist term for rent-a-clappers

Trump is actually reviving a very old tradition — the tradition of the claque. A claque is a group of people whose job is to generate applause. In the description of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, a claque is:

an organized body of professional applauders in the French theatres. The hiring of persons to applaud dramatic performances was common in classical times, and the emperor Nero, when he acted, had his performance greeted by an encomium chanted by five thousand of his soldiers. … The recollection of this gave the 16th-century French poet, Jean Daurat, an idea which has developed into the modern claque. … There are commissaires, those who learn the piece by heart, and call the attention of their neighbours to its good points between the acts. The rieurs are those who laugh loudly at the jokes. The pleureurs, generally women, feign tears, by holding their handerkerchiefs to their eyes. The chatouilleurs keep the audience in in a good humour, while the bisseurs simply clap their hands and cry bis! bis! to secure encores.

Trump, probably without knowing about the historical precedent, has revived this old tradition.

Read on for interesting stuff about how birds do it and bees do it too.

I always thought of this as” salting the crowd”, but apparently that phrase isn’t exactly apt. “Papering the house” is evidently another phrase that describes this phenomenon. The fact is that Trump does this because he is phony and a con man and he seeks to give the impression that he’s much more popular and successful than he is so he can gull his marks. That is what he cares about more than anything on earth.

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Submit, Citizens

Submit, Citizens

by digby

Look for more of this under the new Law and Order Regime:

The state’s new “Blue Lives Matter” law is already being used here in Acadiana. In the last year, Louisiana became the first state to offer hate crime protections to police officers.

St. Martinville Police Chief Calder Hebert hopes the law will not only save lives, but make offenders think twice before resisting arrest.

“We don’t need the general public being murdered for no reason and we don’t need officers being murdered for no reason. We all need to just work together,” said Hebert.

Hebert is very familiar with the new hate crime law, having already enforced it since it took effect in August.

“Resisting an officer or battery of a police officer was just that charge, simply. But now, Governor Edwards, in the legislation, made it a hate crime now,” said Hebert.

Under the new law, Hebert says any offender who resists, or gets physical, with an officer can be charged with a felony hate crime.

For example, if someone who’s arrested for petty theft, a misdemeanor, tries to assault an officer, that individual can be charged with a hate crime. A hate crime is considered a much more serious offense, with serious consequences.

That’s right, citizens. It’s not enough that they can taser you into total submission if you have the nerve to pop off at a cop,  in Louisiana you now risk being charged with a hate crime for any kind of resistance.

You must immediately submit to the authority of the government in all cases. Do not speak, do not resist. You WILL be arrested at the whim of any police officer and go to jail. Then later, maybe, if you can afford a lawyer, you will allowed to speak out for your freedom. But be sure to be very polite about it or you will be held in contempt by the justice system.

This is what we call freedom and liberty.

I have a sneaking suspicion that when this happens to some white people they will rethink it. But who knows? There is a strong strain of authoritarianism in our culture and they are yearning to let the police off the leash and knock some heads. And every last one of them heard Donald Trump promise to do just that. In fact, I believe that is the fundamental reason they love him so much.

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He’ll manage the government like he runs his business

He’ll manage the government like he runs his business

by digby

Eric Trump and Joey “No Socks” Cinque 

That’s not good.  The man’s business went bankrupt four times. He’s been sued 3500 times. And for all we know his debt load is so high that he’s in hock to criminals and foreign banks and will be selling our country to make it right.

As president-elect we’ve seen two Donald Trump “productions”, events that the alleged master showman and top flight businessman should have been able to pull off like clockwork or somebody would find themselves fired: the RNC and the Inauguration. Both were amateurish, disorganized and poorly planned. The Great negotiator couldn’t sweet talk anybody but Jon Voight, Toby Keith and some Airport Hilton cover bands to perform. In fact, his inauguration was so haphazard and unoriginal that they even got caught stealing the design for the Inauguration cake from the one that famous cake baker Duff Goldman made for President Obama.

The inauguration was also extremely expensive. Typical Trump business a lot of money for a terrible product. And he probably stiffed the vendors.

Infographic: Trump Collects Record Sum for Inauguration | Statista
You will find more statistics at Statista

I don’t think those wealthy donors got their money’s worth. But I’m sure they assume it’s a good long term investment.

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Patriotic devotion day

Patriotic devotion day

by digby

 According to the Federal Register, Trump declared his inauguration day the “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” Other presidents have similarly declared their inauguration days:

This one’s got a slightly different character:

I think this says it better, personally

By next year we should be able to get some tanks and missile launchers in the streets to celebrate a yearly “Day of Patriotic Devotion” don’t you think?

What’s most bizarre about it is the arrogant assumption that everyone is on the same page and that we are in the midst of a huge upsurge in national pride. The opposite is true. I think I speak for millions, probably a majority, when I say that I have never been more embarrassed and ashamed to be an American.

Here’s Obama’s for contrast:

The first protest of The Resistance was yuuuge

The first protest of The Resistance was yuuuge

by digby

I know it was organized by women and was largely about women’s rights so it really only counts for half, but still. Via Vox:

Crowd estimates from Women’s Marches on Saturday are still trickling in, but political scientists say they think we may have just witnessed the largest day of demonstrations in American history.

According to data collected by Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut, marches held in more than 500 US cities were attended by at least 3.3 million people.Sarah Frostenon

“Even using a conservative estimate, it was the single largest day for a demonstration in the US,” Chenoweth, an expert on political protests and civil resistance, told us.

Almost every state in America hosted a Women’s March, as you can see in the map above. The events ranged from tiny gatherings in small town squares to throngs of more than 500,000 people clogging streets in cities like Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. (If you see that crowd attendance information is missing from your city, please contact the researchers here.)

Pressman said he started to track crowd numbers from organizers, local media outlets, and citizens who emailed or tweeted with links and reports early Saturday morning.

Chenoweth offered to help him, after being struck by how many people she saw at the march in her hometown of Denver.

“It was much bigger than I expected, and by the time I got home I was really curious if that was happening nationwide or not,” said Chenoweth.

The researchers say much of their data is still incomplete and will change in the coming days as more estimates become available. Roughly 200 marches held across the US still haven’t released any attendance numbers yet.

But Chenoweth said she was stunned by how many communities across America held sister marches to the main event in Washington, DC. She and Pressman received data from places like Stanley, Idaho (population of 63), where nearly half the town — 30 people — came out to protest, including resident celebrity Carole King.


The turnout at events outside the US was significant, too. Chenoweth and Pressman have recorded over 100 international Women’s Marches with an estimated attendance of more than 260,000.

Chenoweth cautioned me that while 3.7 million Americans protesting on Saturday may be the largest turnout in US history in absolute terms, she wasn’t sure if it was the largest protest proportionally speaking. For instance, she said, it’s possible that protests in cities around the US against the Iraq War in 2003 may have drawn as many people or more relative to the population at that time.

As she and Pressman continue to collect data, she hopes that civic organizers will be more involved with gathering crowd data in real time to help researchers who study social movements.

“For people who organize these kinds of activity, there is something that can be learned in terms of techniques of using [satellite images or aerial photos] to estimate crowd density,” said Chenoweth. “It might be a good time to think about how we democratize that knowledge.”

I think democratizing knowledge is going to be extremely important going forward. In a world with “alternate facts” coming from the government we are going to be unable to function unless we develop some methods of keeping track of reality.

I don’t know if it’s true that the marches were larger than any in history. But they were big, very big and dispersed all over this country. And what really makes it special wasn’t the big crowds in DC, NY, Chicago and LA. It as that people in small towns in red states came out in defiance of their community’s majority and made themselves known. That’s never easy. It was difficult during the campaign for a lot of reasons. To do that takes guts and the women and their allies who did it this past week-end have my respect.

That’s the heart of The Resistance and I was proud to stand with them.

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QOTD: Philip Roth

QOTD: Philip Roth

by digby

In the New Yorker:

“It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type—the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist—that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.

“I was born in 1933, the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

He makes Nixon look honest and Bush look smart by comparison. And he is mentally ill, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.

He came on TV this morning blabbing some nonsense about trade (“we are going to trade but we want everything to be made in the United States… blah, blah, blah”) and I exploded at the TV screaming in anger after just two words.

I’m serious. My revulsion is strongly visceral, I can’t seem to manage it. I don’t think I can take four years of him.

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Donald Trump’s Big Orwellian Week-end

Donald Trump’s Big Orwellian Week-end

by digby
 

Up is down

The first 72 hours of Donald Trump’s presidency have been as exciting as we might have anticipated. He got things rolling on Friday with a dark, dystopian inaugural address like nothing we’ve ever seen before. He spoke of “inner-city poverty, crime and drugs and gangs,” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” He placed the blame for all those ills on the presidential predecessors and political colleagues sitting behind him on the dais. He declared, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

That’s actually quite a clever promise. Since the hellscape he describes is a figment of Trump’s imagination, it will be easy enough to say “Abracadabra” and convince his rabid followers that he’s made it all better. The rest of the country and the world, however, will remain chilled to the bone by his distorted vision of reality. The country Trump says he’s leading is a country that doesn’t exist. And he seems not to have any knowledge of or interest in the one that does.

On the night before he was sworn in, Trump lied about the inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial — featuring mostly unknown acts — telling the attendees that his team came up with the idea and that if it had been done before, “it was very, very seldom.” Of course that’s not true. Barack Obama had a huge bash there in 2009 featuring Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among others, and it’s where George W. Bush held his inaugural opening ceremony.

The inauguration parade was so poorly organized that some stands were largely empty, even near the White House where the president and family stood to watch. And the swearing-in ceremony and inaugural address did not get anywhere close to huge crowds that came to Obama’s first inauguration. Perhaps Trump’s team couldn’t have done anything about that. But one might have expected that a man who constantly brags about his own talents as much as he does could have pulled off a spectacular event. Like his amateurish convention in Cleveland, it was a dud.

Instead of acting like a leader and moving on to the important job of being president, Trump has obviously spent his time watching TV pundits as usual. He became angry and upset that the news was reporting that his inaugural was sparsely attended, which it was. So on Saturday he went to a scheduled event at the CIA, where he behaved boorishly in front of the Memorial Wall: He talked incessantly about himself, falsely denied that he had ever criticized the agency, falsely inflated the crowd size at his inauguration, excoriating the media and insisted that agency employees can trust him because he’s “like, a smart person.”

Later that day, in one of the weirder moments in presidential history, Trump sent out press secretary Sean Spicer for his first briefing, where he declared with angry gusto: “That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe.” Spicer cited more lies and misrepresentations as “proof.” PolitiFact rated the whole performance “pants on fire.”

A presidential press secretary lying outright to the media about easily disprovable facts is odd, to say the least. It is almost as if he were literally saying, “You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” At this early stage the Trump White House is banking on the the fact that his followers, the only Americans he seems to believe matter, will always choose to believe their leader and his minions over the “dishonest” press.

Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet the Press and unleashed a torrent of unresponsive rhetoric when asked by Chuck Todd about Spicer’s performance, angrily complaining that if he continued she was “going to have to rethink our relationship here” and finally stating that Spicer simply provided “alternative facts.” It was an echo of a similar comment made by another Trump mouthpiece, CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes, who said on NPR in December that Trump’s absurd insistence he won in a historic landslide was perfectly legitimate because “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”

The Trump people aren’t trying to hide behind their patented propaganda that the media is “liberal” and therefore politically biased, as Republicans have done for decades. That strategy served the party very well while its minions created an alternative media structure to offer their own ideological and political slant on events. It has been a long time since conservatives trusted anything other than right-wing media to help them understand current events.

This is a different approach, perhaps out of necessity due to Trump’s obvious unfitness for the presidency. In the past, disputes always hinged on the interpretation of facts, not the facts themselves. Trump and his staff are essentially saying anything that reflects negatively on them can be labeled “fake news” and replaced with their own “alternative facts.”

As Greg Sargent noted in this Washington Post article a couple of weeks ago, that could lead us into dangerous new terrain:

Trump’s unprecedented dishonesty and his refusal to revise his claims when they are widely called out as false … starts to smack of an effort to stamp out the very possibility of shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the news media or even on reality itself. It’s easy to imagine that, if and when a news organization uncovers potential conflicts, Trump will simply deny the reality of what’s been uncovered (“fake news”) and begin threatening “consequences” towards that organization.

On the first day of the Trump presidency, the press secretary went before the cameras and angrily derided the press for telling the truth, offering up more lies to “prove” his point. The next day the president’s counselor called those lies “alternative facts” and claimed that she would have to reevaluate the White House relationship to the journalist who asked her about it. Trump himself lied about the CIA’s role in leaking to the press.

It is hard to know whether these people believe their own falsehoods are true, or are cynically trying to manipulate reality to cover up for their ineptitude or worse. As much of a cliché as it might be to say this, it is literally Orwellian. This quote from “1984” was widely shared on social media over the weekend. It comes from a passage when Winston Smith reflects to himself that “the obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended”

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Washington postmarch by @BloggersRUs

Washington postmarch
by Tom Sullivan


Women’s March, Asheville, NC.

The numbers for Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country were stunning. Postmarch, lets’s review how we got here. The Los Angeles Times profiled the organizers. Like many, Teresa Shook was stunned by the November 8 presidential election results:

She decided to do something about it.

The next night, with some help from friends online, the retired attorney and grandmother living in Hawaii created a Facebook event page calling for a march on Washington after Trump’s inauguration. Before she went to bed, she had about 40 responses. When she woke up, she had more than 10,000.

New York fashion designer Bob Bland jumped in to coordinate other similar efforts and …

… recruited three longtime, New York-based activists to be co-chairs of the national march: Tamika Mallory, a gun control advocate; Carmen Perez, head of the Gathering for Justice, a criminal-justice reform group; and Linda Sarsour, who recently led a successful campaign to close New York City public schools on two Muslim holidays.

Like I wrote, “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” are five words have gotten me into all kinds of trouble. Shook too. She did something with her idea. The other women had the organizing chops to make it happen. And happen it did, in a big way. The Los Angeles Times caught up with Teresa Shook on Saturday:

Did Shook foresee this all culminating in Saturday’s march? “I hoped but no,” Shook said. “That night I just did it because it made me feel better in the moment. I hoped that people would get on board.”

With a D.C. crowd estimated at 500,000 and more than 600 marches around the country, clearly they did.

Now the trick is to sustain that energy and to keep it focused. Shook had an idea, but it took trained organizers to turn that idea into a worldwide event. That takes commitment and skills in addition to passion. Let’s hope we all have a longer attention span than President Trump. Long enough to acquire the skills it will take to overcome the next four years of #alternativefacts .

And now we return you to Trump Propaganda Minister Kellyanne Conway directing the Alternative United States Marine Band.

Tweet O’ The Week

Tweet  O’ The Week

by digby

I think Piers Morgan speaks very eloquently for his good friend Donald Trump and all his voters:

Instead of pink pussyhats,  some snappy uniforms and a little goose-stepping would really add to the whole atmosphere.

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