Month: February 2017

QOTD: Our beautiful president

by digby

Trump at law enforcement conference: “People say I was kidding. I don’t kid.”

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) February 8, 2017

I believe this may be the one true thing Trump has said all week. He doesn’t kid. He has no sense of humor at all — well unless you call his glee at bullying people “humor.” He never laughs.

I think it’s a mistake not to take him seriously AND literally. He lies constantly, pathologically, but he means what he says when he says it. He’s not a kidder.

Update: Oh lord, there’s more :

“And I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, better than I think almost anybody.”

Yes, he said that.

And the police chiefs and cops still applaud him wildly. Think about that.

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Trump’s beautiful new police state

by digby

So, the moron in chief gave speech to police chiefs today and sounded as stupid and angry as always. He’s really wound up:

President Donald Trump is promising “zero tolerance” for violence against law enforcement officers.

He told a group of police chiefs Wednesday morning that his administration will give their departments the resources to recruit and retain officers.
[…]
When it comes to people who may be living illegally in the United States and involved in criminal activity, the president wants law enforcement and the public to report them to the Department of Homeland Security.

In his words — “I want you to turn in the bad ones.”

Trump also asserted that had the right to enact his travel ban.

He told the group of police chiefs that his immigration order was “done for the security of our nation.” He said the provision supporting the order was written “beautifully” and was within his executive authority.

Trump said “a bad high school student would understand this.”

He has the worldview of a bad high school student so he would probably know. He ent on to claim that if the courts rule against him it will be because they’re political and biased. If they rule for him, of course, they will be because they’re fair. This tracks with what he said about the election — it’s rigged and he wouln’t accept the outcome  — unless he won.

As it happens I wrote about this subject before he gave his speech for Salon earlier:

It would appear that some of the folks who were hoping that Donald Trump was actually an isolationist “jobs” president, rather than the authoritarian white nationalist with imperial ambitions he clearly showed himself to be on the stump, are now being forced to face reality. Everything he has done since he was inaugurated proves him to be dead serious about unleashing the military and the police to enact his agenda, and he wants the other branches of government to understand that if they obstruct him he’s going to make sure his rabid followers know who to blame.

According to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, legal scholars of all stripes, even the torture advocate John Yoo, whom I wrote about on Tuesday, are disturbed by Trump’s executive actions and what he’s saying about them. Pretty much across the board, they anticipate that Trump will blame the courts , the media and the political opposition in the event of an attack. They believe he is anxious to use an attack as an excuse to “take the gloves off” in whatever way he deems necessary.

That could mean everything from registering and deporting Muslims to enhanced surveillance to an attack on a foreign country and the reinstatement of torture and “black site” prisons. (A draft executive order on the black sites has made the rounds already.) All we know at this point is that Trump is looking for an excuse, and odds are there will be one at some point.

But as much as the prospect of these civil-liberties violations are chilling, they aren’t the only area where Trump is getting ready to pounce. He has made no secret of the fact that he generally wants law enforcement to get tougher and more repressive. This is one of his bedrock beliefs going back to the late 1980s when he took out that newspaper ad in response to the Central Park Five case, headlined “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police.” He ostentatiously dubbed himself “the law and order candidate” during his presidential campaign, and actively courted police unions. In his “New Deal for Black America” the second item on his list says that his administration “will invest in training and funding both local and federal law enforcement operations to remove the gang members, drug dealers, and criminal cartels from our neighborhoods.”

Trump has been vague about his policy on marijuana, generally saying that legalization should be left to the states. But he has made many comments about the need to stop drug trafficking at the border, going all the way back to his announcement in which he famously declared that undocumented workers were flooding over the border, “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime.” He has made it clear that he is determined to jump start the drug war, and the man he has chosen to lead up the Department of Justice, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is a hardcore drug warrior.

Sessions is famous for quipping that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was all right until he found out that some of its members smoked pot, an odious comment on many levels. But his record goes far beyond that. He is hostile to all bipartisan congressional efforts to roll back the federal authority on marijuana laws, such as the CARERS Act, which would fix federal banking laws that prevent legal pot businesses from using the banking system and paying taxes. He opposed the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which protected states with medical marijuana laws from federal interference, and the McClintock-Polis amendment, which would have done the same for states that have legalized pot for recreational use. The principal sponsors of those bills, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Tom McClintock, are both conservative Republicans.

Sessions is also an enemy of sentencing reform, one of the few bright bipartisan efforts of recent years. Most observers believe the issue is probably dead under a Trump administration. Nobody wants to put people in jail and throw away the key more that Donald Trump. It’s a terrible setback because the cost in both dollars and human misery of our current sentencing practices is a national disgrace.

Another criminal justice issue that has generally had bipartisan support was the issue of asset forfeiture, a corrupt practice in which police agencies seize the property of suspected criminals and keep the booty. You can imagine that the incentives are very skewed, and there has been a concerted effort in recent years to address the unfairness of stealing someone’s property without any due process. Even those who are not convicted of any crime are almost always out of luck when the whole thing is over. It’s a bonanza for law enforcement agencies, but one that makes a mockery of our commitment to the idea of a presumption of innocence.

I cannot say I’m surprised that Trump is a big fan of that practice as well. After all, he believes “to the victor belongs the spoils” and is perhaps the only Republican in the country to defend “eminent domain,” which is the right of the government to force people to sell their property at fair market value in order to build necessary public infrastructure. Opposition to eminent domain has been a central element of the right-wing agenda for decades, but rank-and-file Republicans proved it was more of a talking point than an article of faith when they didn’t bat an eye at Trump’s defense of the practice to line his own pockets.

Yesterday the president invited a group of sheriffs who endorsed him to the White House and allowed cameras in the room as they chewed the fat about border security, “law and order” and other issues they felt had been ignored under the previous administration. One Texas sheriff brought up asset forfeiture, explaining that a state senator had produced a bill which would require a conviction before law enforcement could seize a person’s property.

Trump was aghast that anyone would suggest such a thing, replying, “Can you believe that? Who is the state senator? Do you want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career.”

All the sheriffs laughed heartily, but other people in the room visibly winced. We know that Trump likes to threaten people and if his early executive orders are any example, he’s serious about carrying through on his promises.

As former GOP congressman David Jolly said on MSNBC:

The president of the United States could destroy a member of Congress with a single tweet. And that’s why no member of Congress wants to speak out too much.

If that doesn’t work he has the whole Department of Justice and half the police in the country at his disposal. People may think he’s just joking, but Trump isn’t really a funny guy. His threats are real, and people should be careful about what they say to him.

That sheriff wisely refused to name names. Whether to do that is a question many people will have to ask themselves in the coming days. When it comes to bringing the strong arm of the law down hard, Donald Trump isn’t kidding.

The little ladies will sit down and shut up
by Tom Sullivan

Break out the pink pussyhats. It seems the voices of both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the late Coretta Scott King are unwelcome in the Senate old boys’ club. The Senate last night voted to silence Warren for reading a 1986 letter from King criticizing Jeff Sessions’ civil rights record. CNN:

The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”

Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell raised an objection, saying, “The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama, as warned by the chair.” A violation, he asserted, of Rule XIX:

2. No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.

The New York Times account continues:

When Mr. McConnell concluded, Ms. Warren said she was “surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate.” She asked to continue her remarks.

Mr. McConnell objected.

“Objection is heard,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, who was presiding in the chamber at the time. “The senator will take her seat.”

Warren was forbidden on a party line vote from further participation in the floor debate ahead of the Sessions confirmation vote expected today. Warren did not, but an appropriate rejoinder might have been, “Go ahead. Make my day.”

CNN notes how the move may backfire on the GOP:

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on the Senate floor.

The line was an instant classic — the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

Warren stepped outside to record the letter for a Facebook video:

McConnell’s objection meant millions more will hear the reading of the King letter. As of this moment, it has over 3.6 million views, 275k shares, and 54k comments.

I note, in particular, King’s several references to Sessions’ participation in 1984 voter fraud prosecutions of the use of absentee voting by blacks:

The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise. The investigations into the absentee voting process were conducted only in the black belt counties where blacks had finally achieved political power in local government. Whites had been using the absentee process to their advantage for years, without incident. Then, when blacks, realizing its strength, began to use it with success, criminal investigations were begun.

In these investigations, Mr. Sessions, a US Attorney, exhibited an eagerness to bring to trial and convict three leaders of the Perry County Civic League including Albert Turner, despite evidence clearly demonstrating their innocence of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, in initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behavior by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks in his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisers and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.

Republicans were crying voter fraud before Fox News, Drudge, and Breitbart made crying voter fraud “cool.” If you need some amusing reading to take the edge off this morning, check out these excerpts from the 2012 decision against the RNC by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The RNC’s voter fraud arguments were bogus in 2012. They are bogus now. And they were bogus when Jeff Sessions was pursuing black people for voting in 1984.

UPDATE: Then Oregon’s Sen. Jeff Merkley reads the King letter “uninterrupted” by the “old boys.” #ShePersisted

A picture worth a thousand words

by digby

Just, wow:

That is a picture of rabbis, handcuffed, being led down the street by New York City police officers. They were protesting the Muslim ban.

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Look at all the good white supremacist terrorists do for our country

by digby

I give you Congressman Sean Duffy:

Duffy said Trump was justified in stopping Syrian refugees from entering the United States “until in Syria they figure out this conflict in the civil war and this hotbed for terrorism.” Presumably, however, once the conflict is over, women and children, for example, won’t feel it is as necessary to escape their country to find a safe haven.

Host Alisyn Camerota pressed Duffy on Trump claiming that the media were intentionally covering up terrorist attacks and either not reporting or underreporting them. The White House later Monday released a list of 78 attacks it said backed up Trump’s claim.

The list notably did not include a recent attack on Muslims inside a Quebec City mosque that killed six people. Trump, who frequently tweets about terrorist attacks, also has not mentioned this one.

Duffy argued in his CNN interview that attacks by white people ― such as the one in Quebec City ― aren’t as big of a problem.

“You don’t have a group like ISIS or al Qaeda that is inspiring people around the world to take up arms and kill innocents. That was a one-off. That was a one-off, Alisyn,” Duffy said.

Camerota then pointed to the massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, as acts carried out by white terrorists. Duffy tried to make lemonade out of the Charleston attack, in which a white supremacist killed nine people:

CAMEROTA: How about Charleston, congressman? He was an extremist. He was a white extremist?

DUFFY: Yes, he was. OK?

CAMEROTA: How about that? That doesn’t matter?

DUFFY: No, it does matter. It does matter. Look at the good things that came from it. [Then-South Carolina Gov.] Nikki Haley took down the Confederate flag, that was great.

But you want to say I can give you a couple of examples. There’s no constant threat that goes through these attacks. And you have radical Islamic terrorists and ISIS that are driving the attacks, and if you want to compare those two, maybe you can throw another one ―

CAMEROTA: You can.
Duffy claimed that people on the left were manufacturing outrage, saying there was plenty of blame to go around.

“Look at Gabby Giffords. The Marxist, who took her life, a leftist guy, and now you see violence and terror in the streets all across America, burning and beating people with Donald Trump hats. The violence you have to look in, you’re trying to use examples on the right,” he said.

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) is not dead. As a congresswoman in 2011, she survived an assassination attempt, and she remains an outspoken proponent of gun safety reform.

Duffy said he’d be happy to help do something about white supremacy but he just didn’t know what to do: “Can we vet that? How should we vet that to keep ourselves safe? I will join you in that effort, what do you do?”

It’s hard to believe these people are even able to obtain driver’s licenses and graduate from high school but they are running the country now. Just plain straight-up stupidity there. Apparently, he really believes you can “vet” Muslim extremism from foreign countries but not white supremacy in the US.

By the way, there was a huge lie in his statement as well. Jared Loughner, who tried but did not succeed in killing Gabrielle Giffords, was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed in conspiracy theories. He was not a Marxist:

The director of research on hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that Loughner’s political positions were a “hallmark of the far right and the militia movement. In the aftermath of the shooting, the Anti-Defamation League reviewed messages by Loughner, and concluded that there was a “disjointed theme that runs through Loughner’s writings”, which was a “distrust for and dislike of the government.” It “manifested itself in various ways” – for instance, in the belief that the government used the control of language and grammar to brainwash people, the notion that the government was creating “infinite currency” without the backing of gold and silver, or the assertion that NASA was faking spaceflights.
Dislike for Gabrielle Giffords[edit]

According to a former friend, Bryce Tierney, Loughner had expressed a longstanding dislike for Gabrielle Giffords. Tierney recalled that Loughner had often said that women should not hold positions of power. He repeatedly derided Giffords as a “fake”. This belief intensified after he attended her August 25, 2007 event when she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer his question: “What is government if words have no meaning?” Loughner kept Giffords’ form letter, which thanked him for attending the 2007 event, in the same box as an envelope which was scrawled with phrases like “die bitch” and “assassination plans have been made”. Zane Gutierrez, a friend, later told the New York Times that Loughner’s anger would also “well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government.”

He was a mentally ill, anti-government misogynist who was armed to the teeth. Yes, what in the world can we do about that? This country is full of them.

So let’s ban Syrian babies. That’ will definitely make us much safer.

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Trump’s “common sense” doctrine

by digby

He said this today in response to a question about the Muslim ban:

“Some things are law, which I’m in favor of. Some things are common sense. This is common sense.”

He’s in favor of law, which is reassuring. very nice in a president. But apparently he believes that “common sense” as he sees it trumps law.  And that’ bad enough. But he also seems to think that banning babies and doctors and professors from countries that have not perpetrated attacks against the United States while allowing entry to people from countries than have qualifies as common sense.

In other words, Trump’s definition of “common sense” is to create terrorists by capriciously issuing draconian executive orders against people who have done nothing to threaten the nation.

Trump’s “common sense”  looks a lot like a continuation of Dick Cheney’s Iraq war when you think about it.

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Trump is the ultimate Unitary Executive

by digby

I wrote about John Yoo, the man who paved the way for Donald Trump for Salon this morning. Trump doesn’t know it, of course. But his lawyers certainly do:

I have written many times about what I consider to be the most horrific yet illuminating, aspect of Donald Trump’s character: his enthusiastic endorsement — actually, his self-professed love — of torture. He uses the word freely, without any sense that there’s a moral or legal taboo against it and without any idea that what he’s saying is an anathema to decent people everywhere. 

But as much as Trump has normalized the word, he isn’t the one most responsible for reviving this primitive form of violence as a method of interrogation. That honor belongs to members of the last Republican administration. And they didn’t just talk about it; they actually did it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the details of that awful chapter, the executive summary of the classified Senate torture report will fill you in or you could read investigative journalist Jane Mayer’s book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.” There were many torturers and enablers of torture including, shockingly a woman closely associated with the program, Gina Haspel, whom Trump has named to be second-in-command at the CIA.

But nobody is more notoriously connected to the Bush administration’s torture program than John Yoo, who was head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Council. Yoo is a Washington lawyer who sat behind a desk; he never tortured anyone. But it’s safe to say they couldn’t have done it without him.

Yoo was responsible for the famous memo, later repudiated, that said violence against prisoners must create pain equivalent to organ failure to be considered torture and that the Geneva Conventions were “quaint.” His opinion made it possible for the people who carried out the torture program to claim immunity since they were operating under a legal finding of the Department of Justice. It was a nice “get out of jail free” card that was never really tested in court. When the Obama administration shut down the program, it decided to not prosecute anyone. Some legal scholars believe Yoo himself remains liable for war crimes even today.

Yoo is most famous for his enthusiastic willingness to find ways to legalize uncivilized behavior, but it’s important to recall that the justification for his opinions was based upon a constitutional theory called the unitary executive theory. This essentially holds that during wartime a president can exercise virtually unlimited authority, which can be checked by Congress only by using the “power of the purse.” Since the “war on terror” was a unique construct that could not possibly have a definitive end, that meant the president was to have nearly dictatorial power for the foreseeable future. Among other things, according to Yoo, the president could suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the government to deploy the military for domestic police actions, and the Fourth Amendment, which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures, by holding that they don’t apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a “war on terror.”

Yoo was very popular with Dick Cheney, who heavily promoted the view that the executive branch is empowered to pretty much do anything in the name of national security. This is often referred to as the “One Percent Doctrine,” in reference to a comment made by Cheney shortly after 9/11:

If there’s a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis. . . . It’s about our response.

Donald Trump doesn’t have the vocabulary or the brains of Dick Cheney, but his theory about refugees is similar, isn’t it? Refugees and immigrants from the countries he’s chosen for his ban do not present a plausible threat of terrorism. But Trump believes that if there’s even a 1 percent chance that even one of them could be a terrorist, they all must be kept out. At least Cheney had the intellectual wherewithal to frame his argument about the possibility of loose nukes. Trump thinks an emotionally disturbed Muslim man with a machete is a bigger threat than 30,000 preventable deaths by gunfire every year.

There’s no way that Trump has ever heard of John Yoo or the unitary executive theory, even though he is running his administration under that theory. He’s operating solely by his playground bully instinct, which reveals just how unsophisticated the unitary executive theory really is in practice.

The best example of Trump’s crude deployment of bullying is his insistence that he has no obligation to divest himself of his business holdings and, in fact, intends to continue to benefit from them while he’s in office. This high-handed dismissal of the obvious conflicts of interest and inherent corruption is based upon what he says over and over again is the legal opinion of his White House counsel: “The president cannot have a conflict of interest,” as if that means it’s impossible for him to be corrupt. That goes beyond the unitary executive theory to the idea of a king who believes he’s been ordained by God.

Trump’s first two weeks have been spent doing nothing but signing executive orders. While all presidents use them, the power Trump believes is vested in these orders is unprecedented. And some of them, in particular his ban on immigration from certain Muslim countries, may be leading him toward a constitutional crisis, at least if his comments and tweets are any clue as to his intentions. He apparently believes the judicial branch should not be allowed to second-guess his decisions if they conflict with the law or the Constitution. Even Yoo didn’t go that far.

In fact, Yoo wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday expressing “grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s use of executive power.” He suggested that the travel ban was ill-conceived, the order for a border wall exceeded presidential authority, the slapping of tariffs on Mexican goods is unconstitutional and the ad hominem attacks against former acting attorney general Sally Yates “suggest a misconception of the president’s authority of removal.” When Yoo has grave concerns about the use of executive power, you know something very bad is happening.

Unfortunately, while Trump may not know or care about the legal precedents behind his actions, his lawyers surely do, and you can be sure they’ll be citing Yoo’s work on the unitary executive theory. No one could have predicted that Trump, of all people, would become president, but that’s exactly why the cumbersome checks and balances were put in place to begin with. You just never know who’s going to land in that office, or how he will want to use that power once it’s unleashed. If Trump gets away with this power grab, Yoo will have only himself to blame.

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The NYT reports that Trump refuses to read books or briefing papers but he did take the time to pore over a 17 page book of fabric swatches for re-doing the Oval Office, the accomplishment he is most proud of. Apparently, he got really excited about it when he found out the taxpayers foot the bill for it.  He really is intellectually challenged.

They are so busy rushing through unconstitutional executive orders (and likely making deals with foreign oligarchs) that they don’t have time to do the actual job:

After Senate Democrats’ 24-hour talk-athon and after Vice President Pence’s history-making vote, Betsy DeVos is expected today to become just the seventh member of President Trump’s team to win confirmation. By contrast, at this same point in time in 2009, the Senate had confirmed 23 Obama nominees, according to the Partnership for Public Service.

This incredibly slow start in forming Trump’s government is due, in part, to Senate Democrats dragging their feet. (“Cabinet confirmations the slowest since George Washington,” Senate Republicans have declared.) But it is MUCH more than that. For one thing, the Partnership for Public Service says Team Trump has nominated just 35 people to 693 key positions requiring Senate confirmation (or 5%). By comparison, Team Obama had nominated 37 officials by Jan. 30. The other component here is how slowly these nominees submitted their ethics forms, which delayed the confirmation process. Add it all up, and you have an administration that hasn’t even left the gate yet to get on the runway.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. He’s doing exactly what his cult followers hired him to do: run the country like he runs his business. He’s running it like the bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal.

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“We’ll destroy his career”

by digby

Here’s your thug president in action before the cameras today:

Sheriff tells Trump that state senator is doing something he doesn’t like

Trump: “Do you want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career.” pic.twitter.com/75y3t9zc54

— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) February 7, 2017

Hahahaha. He’s so funny. But he loves to issue threats like this. It’s how he rolls.

Consider what they are talking about in that clip. They are talking about asset forfeiture. The state senator Trump wants to destroy has taken in insane position that you should have to get a conviction before the state seizes all the property of an accused drug dealer.

Emperor Trump doesn’t like that. It suggests that there are laws by which the state must abide.

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