Month: February 2017

A shooting war, Mandrake?

by digby

I wrote about the possibility for Salon this morning:

On Wednesday NBC News released a poll reporting that 66 percent of Americans surveyed were worried that the United States will become involved in another war. One might think that’s surprising since President Donald Trump has famously been portrayed as an old-school isolationist, an image mostly based upon his lies about not supporting the Iraq War and his adoption of the pre-World War II isolationist slogan “America First.”

As I laid out for Salon a few weeks ago, that assumption is wrong. Trump is anything but an isolationist. He’s not much on alliances, preferring to strong-arm other nations into supporting the U.S. “for their own good.” But if they are willing to cough up some protection money, he might agree to fulfill our treaty obligations. His adoption of the phrase “America First” reflects his belief that the U.S. must be No. 1, not that it should withdraw from the world.

In other words, while Trump has no interest in perpetuating the global security system under which the world has lived since the dawn of the nuclear age, that’s not because he believes it hasn’t worked. He doesn’t know what it does, how it came to be or why it exists. He simply believes other countries are failing to pay proper respect and he is aiming to make sure they understand that America isn’t just great again; it’s the greatest.

This has nothing to do with American exceptionalism. Trump is happy to admit that American pretenses to moral leadership are hypocritical, and he’s openly contemptuous of anyone who believes that the U.S. should try harder to live up to its ideals. If you want to understand what Trump believes, “to the victor goes the spoils” pretty much covers it. He means it in terms of his family, which continues to merge the presidency into its company brand all over the world, and he means it in terms of the United States, believing that this is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and we can take whatever we want.

One of his goals is to “defeat ISIS.” And when he says defeat, he means to do whatever it takes to ensure it does not exist anymore. That does seem like a nice idea. After all, ISIS is an antediluvian, authoritarian death cult and the world would be better off without it. The question, of course, has always been how to accomplish such a thing.

Thoughtful people rationally understand that “defeating” radical extremism of any kind isn’t a matter of killing all the people. Indeed, the more extremists you kill, the more extremists you tend to create. But while Trump simply sees the world by playground rules, his consigliere Steve Bannon sees the threat of ISIS as a preordained apocalyptic confrontation between Western countries and the Muslim world. In a notorious speech he gave at the Vatican in 2014, Bannon put it this way:

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict . . . to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.

He has called Trump his “blunt instrument” to bring about this global conflagration. Bannon is now a member of the National Security Council and is said to be running a parallel national security agency called the Strategic Initiatives Group, which he has stacked with kooks who share his views. He is a powerful influence.

Trump has promised to take the gloves off, and I think we all know exactly what he meant by that. He said it many times during the campaign: He favors torture. And he reiterated it just last month in his interview with ABC’s David Muir saying, “When ISIS is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times, would I feel strongly about waterboarding? As far as I’m concerned, we have to fight fire with fire.”

And Trump went on to grudgingly promise that he would listen to the secretary of defense and hold back on torture if that was his recommendation. But Trump also claimed that he’s talked to people at the highest levels of the intelligence community who told him that torture works like a charm. So we will have to see if the president is really able to restrain himself. (His CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has been all for it in the past. Maybe they’ll simply decide to leave Defense Secretary Jim Mattis out of the loop.)

But what about Trump’s promises to “bomb the shit out of ’em” and “take the oil?” What about Bannon’s desire to bring on WorldWar III? Will that really happen? It might, and sooner than we think.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

More American troops may be needed in Syria to speed the campaign against the Islamic State, the top United States commander for the Middle East said on Wednesday.

“I am very concerned about maintaining momentum,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the United States Central Command, told reporters accompanying him on a trip to the region.

“It could be that we take on a larger burden ourselves,” he added. “That’s an option.”

Despite his unfounded reputation for isolationism, it’s obvious that Trump is itching for a war. Responding to a debate question about whether he would follow a military commander’s advice to put troops on the ground, Trump said, “We really have no choice; we have to knock out ISIS. We have to knock the hell out of them.” When asked how many troops he thought might be needed, he replied that the number he had heard was 20,000 to 30,000.

Nobody thought much of Trump’s bluster at the time. But now he’s in the White House with an apocalyptic crackpot whispering in his ear and generals on the ground talking about taking on “a larger burden.” Whether his administration’s military advisers, Defense Secretary Mattis and his newly installed national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, are as eager for this battle remains to be seen. But it appears that the two-thirds of Americans who are worried that we’ll be dragged into another war are anxious for good reason.

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Mars ain’t the kind of place …
by Tom Sullivan

Artist’s impression, view from planet orbiting TRAPPIST-1. M. Kornmesser / European Southern Observatory (ESO).

A mere 39 light-years away floats Trappist-1, a star system with seven Earth-sized planets, several in the dwarf star’s “habitable zone.” That is, at a distance where the surface might sustain liquid water. Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. Maybe one of the Trappist-1 planets. Even the Google doodle is jazzed by the announcement in Nature.

The Washington Post:

The newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultra-cool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of our sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit and the most distant takes about 20 days.

[…]

The researchers call these worlds “Earthlike,” though it’s a generous term. The planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system do resemble Earth in terms of size, mass and the energy they receive from their star, but there’s a lot that makes our planet livable besides being a warm rock. Further observation is required to determine the composition of the TRAPPIST-1 bodies, if they have atmospheres and if they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide — the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures,” or signs of life.

It’s inspiring and hopeful news in a period where U.S. governmental science programs are under the thumb of anti-science throwbacks and the Washington Post feels the need to change its slogan to Democracy Dies in Darkness.

Frankly, that reads like a teaser for Alien: Covenant (4 min. clip here). But I suppose it’s better than “In space no one can hear you scream.” Which is what it must feel like about now to be a Republican congress-critter at a town hall meeting.

Tonight! What does 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' mean to you? #LSSC pic.twitter.com/ib9NZ5prVv— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) February 23, 2017

Toddler Trump

by digby

Remember. He has the nuclear codes:

President Donald Trump’s former campaign staffers claim they cracked the code for tamping down his most inflammatory tweets, and they say the current West Wing staff would do well to take note.

The key to keeping Trump’s Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump’s desk.

“If candidate Trump was upset about unfair coverage, it was productive to show him that he was getting fair coverage from outlets that were persuadable,” said former communications director Sam Nunberg. “The same media that our base digests and prefers is going to be the base for his support. I would assume the president would like to see positive and preferential treatment from those outlets and that would help the operation overall.”

Staff members had one advantage as they aimed to manage candidate Trump’s media diet: He rarely reads anything online, instead preferring print newspapers — especially his go-to, The New York Times — and reading material his staff brought to his desk. Indeed, his media consumption habits were on full display during his roller-coaster news conference this past Thursday, when he continually remarked on what the media would write “tomorrow,” even as print outlets’ websites already had posted stories about his remarks.

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Trump is also, however, a near-nonstop consumer of cable news, and his staff’s efforts were not always enough to keep Trump from tweeting on topics that were far from his campaign’s core message. Throughout the campaign, whatever messaging the candidate’s staff had planned was continually accompanied — and often overshadowed — by a string of feuds that played out both on and off Twitter.

But his team believed that its strategies would keep Trump from taking to his preferred social media outlet to escalate his personal or political conflicts.

For example, when Trump engaged in a Twitter war with Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier in Iraq, the team set up a meeting with Gold Star Mothers of Florida and made sure to plant the story in conservative media. Breitbart also wrote stories about Khan’s relationships with the Democratic Party. “We made sure that conservative media was aware of it, they connected the echo chamber,” the former official said.

I get that this sort of thing would happen in monarchies. The idiot son inherits and you’re sort of stuck trying to keep the country together by managing him. But this is a mature democracy. Supposedly.

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Heckuva job Trumpie

by digby

I know it’s cheap to keep posting poll numbers, but seeing them is one of the few ways I reassure myself that I’m not crazy. I suspect a few of you may feel the same way:

TRUMP SLUMPS AS AMERICAN VOTERS DISAPPROVE 55% – 38%
QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY NATIONAL POLL FINDS;

VOTERS TRUST MEDIA, COURTS MORE THAN PRESIDENT

American voters today give President Donald Trump a negative 38 – 55 percent job approval rating, his worst net score since he took office, down from a negative 42 – 51 percent approval rating in a February 7 Quinnipiac University national poll.

President Trump’s negative scores are 36 – 59 percent among women and 41 – 50 percent among men, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds. Republicans approve 83 – 10 percent, while negative approval ratings are 5 – 91 percent among Democrats and 38 – 55 percent among independent voters.

Trump gets a negative 39 – 55 percent favorability rating, also his worst net score since taking office. 

Vice President Mike Pence gets a split 41 – 40 percent favorability.

Opinions on most of Trump’s personal qualities also are negative, as American voters say:

 55 – 40 percent that he is not honest;

 55 – 42 percent that he does not have good leadership skills;

 53 – 44 percent that he does not care about average Americans;

 63 – 33 percent that he is not level-headed;

 64 – 32 percent that he is a strong person

 58 – 38 percent that he is intelligent;

 60 – 37 percent that he does not share their values.

Trump is doing more to unite the country, 36 percent of American voters say, while 58 percent say he is doing more to divide the nation.

“President Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking like a rock,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“He gets slammed on honesty, empathy, level headedness and the ability to unite. And two of his strong points, leadership and intelligence, are sinking to new lows.

“This is a terrible survey one month in.”

It’s a terrible presidency one month in.

But who in their right mind ever thought this cretinous carnival barker  could be a president?  We’ll be scratching our heads over that one for centuries. If we survive.

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Even the centrists are sounding the alarm

by digby

“Unparalleled in its meanness ….”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement in response to guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security to implement the president’s executive order on immigration.

“The guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security creates an unprecedented situation for undocumented immigrants living, working and paying taxes in the United States, as well as Homeland Security, which is now charged with picking up otherwise law-abiding people in their homes and places of work.

“Up until this point, the priority for removal has been dangerous criminals. But under this new guidance, 11 million undocumented immigrants are now priorities for deportation. This is simply unparalleled in its meanness, scope and most likely its enforceability.

“The solution that will prevent the separation of families is passing our bill to repeal President Trump’s executive order, introduced last week by Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto from Nevada.”

He’s giving his voters what they want. It’s the main reason they voted for him and he knows it:

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To the right of Scalia

by digby

That’s Ian Millhiser’s analysis of the man who will almost certainly become our next Supreme Court justice. He lays out the particulars in this article in alarming detail. He’s not a Scalia clone it turns out. He’s a Thomas clone, which is worse.

Here’s the conclusion:

So let’s take stock one more time of what we know about Judge Gorsuch.

We know that he embraces the same theory of constitutional interpretation touted by conservative Justices Scalia and Thomas.

We know that Gorsuch votes as a staunch social conservative, siding against women seeking birth control and against Planned Parenthood. He is all but certain to be a vote against Roe v. Wade. 

We know that Gorsuch is inclined to overrule Chevron, a decision that would drastically weaken agencies like the EPA and consolidate power within the judiciary at the very moment when Republicans are about to seize control over the courts.

We know that, when confronted with issues that divide Scalia and Thomas, Gorsuch appears to land to Scalia’s right.

This evidence suggests that Gorsuch may vote consistently with Justice Thomas if confirmed to the Supreme Court. At the very least, senators should know whether Gorsuch shares’ Thomas’ views about matters such as child labor laws before they vote on Gorsuch’s nomination.

Now this is how you move the court right. You pick someone who is even more extreme than the far right extremist he’s replacing.  I shudder to think who they would choose to replace Thomas.

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When it comes to making big bucks, our president is all “do as I say, not as I do.”

by digby

I, for one, am shocked. Shocked!

Donald J. Trump has cast himself as the anti-globalist president.

But Donald Trump, the businessman, is a different story.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s organization continued to file dozens of new trademarks, in China, Canada, Mexico, the European Union and Indonesia, and one of his companies applied for trademark protection in the Philippines more than a month after the election, a review of foreign records by The New York Times showed.

His trademarks in recent years have covered all manner of potential products, including soap and perfume in India, engineering services in Brunei and vodka in Israel. Even last week, the government in China, where his companies have filed for at least 126 trademarks since 2005, announced it was granting Mr. Trump rights to protect his name brand for construction projects, affirming a decision made in November.

The contrast with his hard-line anti-globalism since taking office is stark. During his first weeks as president, Mr. Trump denounced China and Mexico for unfair trade practices and derided the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany.” He ended American involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sprawling trade pact with Asian nations, and said he would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Trump seems to be the archetypal businessman with mercantilist instincts,” Dani Rodrik, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said in an email. “‘Open your market for me to do business in it, but you can have access to mine only on my terms.’”

The trademarks are the natural outgrowth of a global-spanning strategy. Like any businessman, Mr. Trump has long sought to protect his brand and products legally with trademarks, whether by registering a board game he once tried to sell, slogans like “Make America Great Again” or simply the name “Trump.”

But the trail of trademarks offers further clues to his international business ties, which leave the president vulnerable to potential conflicts of interest, or at least perception challenges. The Chinese government’s trademark announcement last week came just days after Mr. Trump retreated from challenging China’s policy on Taiwan in a call with China’s president, Xi Jinping.

The Times review of nine databases identified nearly 400 foreign trademarks registered to Trump companies since 2000 in 28 countries, among them New Zealand, Egypt and Russia, as well as the European Union. There are most likely many more trademarks, because there is no central repository of all trademarks from every country. The Trump Organization has been filing trademarks for decades, and has said that it has taken out trademarks in more than 80 countries.

I hate to do this because it’s so tediously common, but I can’t help it in this case. Just imagine if anyone but Trump were in this position. It’s mind-boggling that he can get away with this. He is corrupt. It is obvious. And his kids are carrying out his corrupt kleptocratic agenda on his behalf as he clearly does what’s necessary on the inside of the oval office.

I can’t even believe we’re talking about this.

Here’s a random collection of headlines I gathered on google in two minutes:

Trump’s Sons Heading To Dubai As Business Interests Continue To Expand Overseas

Eric Trump’s Business Trip To Uruguay Might Cost US Taxpayers Almost $100k

Trump sons will fly into Vancouver for posh, private opening of tower

American Tax Dollars Are Already Helping Trump Make Money

Trump family’s elaborate lifestyle is a ‘logistical nightmare’ — at taxpayer expense

Politics is all dirty, we know that. And we know that all the politicians are corrupt on one level or another because of it.But this is something else, people. It’s not normal. And those who are insisting that some of us are being hysterical because Obama-Clinton-Kerry etc are just as bad are simply refusing to see hat’s in front of their faces. This is next level and it’s extremely dangerous.

Let’s see what happens when one of Trump’s properties gets attacked. He’s already convinced of “l’etat c;est moi.”

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American Carnage in his pants



by digby

I wrote about Trump’s feral instinct to pretend it’s 2009 and then take credit for the recovery for Salon this morning:

As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country; you see what’s going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places, low pay, low wages, mass instability overseas, no matter where you look. The Middle East is a disaster. North Korea — we’ll take care of it, folks; we’re going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know, I inherited a mess.
— Donald Trump, Feb. 17

That’s not quite as evocative as the president’s doomsday inaugural “American Carnage” address, but it may be more effective in the long run. Trump is ignorant in most ways a president should be smart, but he does have an unerring instinct for hype. One of his favorite tall tales is the miraculous “comeback” story. You’ve heard him endlessly recount the tedious details of his Great Campaign in which nobody said he could get the nomination and yet he defied the odds and vanquished 16 men, Carly Fiorina and one Crooked Hillary, ultimately winning a historic landslide of epic proportions. No, it wasn’t historic and it wasn’t epic and it wasn’t a landslide, but that’s part of the myth Trump has created for himself: He only wins big.

The point is that he’s making himself out to be a hero who can defy tremendous odds to fight back and win. That’s why he insists that he inherited a terrible mess that will take a heroic effort to turn around, and he’s the only guy who can do it.

The country he describes is actually very familiar. The economy is terrible, millions of people are going bankrupt and losing their jobs, their homes and their health care. People who have saved for decades have seen their retirement funds shrunk to nothing in the stock market crash, while Wall Street Masters of the Universe collect millions and tell everyone they are simply “too big to fail.” Major industries are on the verge of collapse. Banks are closing all over the country.

Tens of thousands of troops are still stationed overseas in a war that seems to never end. Terrorist bombings are happening all over the world and nobody knows when the next one is going to hit close to home. Even natural disasters are catastrophic, taking out whole American cities and seeming to portend more of the same as the climate changes and nobody knows what to do about it. The future seems bleak indeed.

We all know that country. It was America in 2009. It was the mess our last president inherited, not this one. (If you need a little refresher course on how bad the employment situation was during the Great Recession, you can read all about it in this recap from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) It was the worst economic recession in the lifetime of anyone under the age of 70 and it came on the heels of a period of tremendous fear and anxiety after 9/11 and the debacle of the Iraq war.

Now that was a real mess.

To be sure, the recovery has been a long, uneven slog and many people are still reeling. There are long-term economic trends that have hit some communities very hard for decades and the Great Recession exacerbated their suffering. And much of the gains have gone to the upper 1 percent.

But millions more people have jobs, homes and health care today than they did eight years ago. That is just a fact. The idea that Donald Trump is facing an emergency of that magnitude, even among many of those white working-class folks who remain underemployed and insecure is ridiculous. We were on the verge of another global Great Depression. Now we’re not.

As I pointed out before the election last September, whoever won was going to have the economic wind at his or her back, which is a lucky thing for any president. I quoted economist Jared Bernstein writing in the Washington Post that “poverty fell sharply, middle-class incomes rose steeply, and more people had health coverage” in 2015, which meant that many of those who had been left behind by the recovery were starting to see the benefits. But there is often an emotional hangover after a deep economic crisis that takes some time to dissipate; even when things have improved people still feel anxious for some time afterwards.

One suspects Trump understood from the beginning that the economy was rebounding. But in order to take advantage of his reputation as a wealthy businessman he needed to pump up those feelings of anxiety so that he could take credit for the upturn once in office. The dystopian hellscape that he describes today will quickly give way to Morning in America for his followers. And he doesn’t have to do anything.

This is lucky for him, since Trump doesn’t have a clue about what a president has to do in a real crisis, and doesn’t have the temperament or skills to do it anyway. As Jonathan Cohn wrote in this piece for Huffington Post on Tuesday, as much as Trump and his minions insist that his has been a historically successful first month, it’s actually been nothing more than endless gaffes, scandals and flashy edicts that are far less substantial than the sweeping and complicated legislation President Obama ushered through Congress in the same period.

Cohn relates Trump’s attitude toward the hard work of creating policy:

During the presidential campaign, Trump mocked Hillary Clinton for her wonkishness: “She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day,” he said during one interview. “It’s just a waste of paper.” At one point, Trump’s own policy advisers quit because nobody was paying them or taking them seriously.

That’s appalling. But unless Trump’s GOP colleagues in the Congress muck things up badly by repealing the Affordable Care Act or making such drastic cuts that employment falters, he doesn’t really have to do much. He can just tweet about saving some manufacturing jobs that CEOs are happy to pretend he personally negotiated, and his followers will be happy to give him credit for “saving” an economy that was already on the upswing.

There is one problem with his cunning plan, however. If a healthy economic environment requires the confidence of the people that their future looks bright, then this growth may just come to a screeching halt. The “carnage” he likes to describe may not exist today. But millions of people are frightened to death that the nightmare of Donald Trump may make it very real in the days to come.

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Freistaat Trump?
by Tom Sullivan

It’s hard to go a week here in the “newly insane state of North Carolina”* without someone in elected office (as a patient in D.C. puts is) seeing somebody in court over something. Since the NCGOP took state government by the throat in 2013, that something has frequently involved matters Republicans euphemistically refer to as “election integrity,” known in less deranged climes as voter suppression.

With Democrat Roy Cooper in the governor’s mansion and Democrat Josh Stein as Cooper’s replacement as NC attorney general, power in Raleigh has shifted somewhat. How much will depend on what courts do with the legal messes left over from One-term Pat McCrory’s tenure.

Yesterday afternoon, Stein tweeted:

The right to vote is our most fundamental. Today, I moved to dismiss the pending petition to the U.S. Supreme Court on the 2013 voting law. pic.twitter.com/K7Rn4ginr3— Josh Stein (@JoshStein_) February 21, 2017

In his final days in office, McCrory had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the state’s appeal of the case it lost in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last July. The point here is for the new Democratic electeds to pull the plug on the appeal of the Republican voter suppression law before a new Justice Gorsuch turns a 4-4 Supreme Court into a 5-4 conservative one. Withdrawing the appeal would allow the lower court ruling to stand. As Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog notes, Stein’s pointing out the potential for saving NC taxpayers up to $12 million in attorney’s fees for dropping the case is a nice touch. Plaintiffs included the League of Women Voters, individual plaintiffs, and the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.

Not so fast, say Republicans. A spokeswoman for Republican Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger claims Cooper and Stein cannot fire the attorneys for the state:

“Roy Cooper’s and Josh Stein’s desperate and politically motivated stunt to derail North Carolina’s voter ID law is not only illegal, it also raises serious questions about whether they’ve allowed their own personal and political prejudices and conflicts of interest to cloud their professional judgment,” Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore said in a joint statement.

Yes, they really do talk like that, and they legislate in similar tones.

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Thomas Farr, a Raleigh attorney who has represented the lawmakers for several years in the elections law case, sent a letter to William McKinney, Cooper’s general counsel, arguing that neither the governor nor Stein have the authority to discharge him and others at his firm from the case and that he and others plan to continue in the case.

If the request by Cooper and Stein to withdraw the appeal is granted, the State Board of Elections, its individual members and its executive director will not immediately be withdrawn from the case. They would have to make similar requests.

And thanks to the legislative follies of the special session back in December, who controls the state Board of Elections is still in question. The Republican law restructuring the board has already been to the state Supreme Court. Judges issued an injunction pending a trial on March 7.

Rick Hasen writes, “I’ve gone into the morass before trying to figure out who can control NC litigation in these circumstances and I will have to leave this to NC law gurus.” Or maybe to the exorcists?

Some Republican lawmakers have offered amendments to the North Carolina Constitution that would remove a provision prohibiting the state’s secession …

Another amendment “focuses on language stating a citizen owes paramount allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and U.S. government. That proposal would eliminate the reference to the government.”

Perhaps the Tar Heel state could rebrand as Freistaat Trump? I hear South Carolina has a lightly used flag it doesn’t know what to do with.

(* trademark Charlie Pierce)