Month: March 2017

Meanwhile, the war machine cranks up

by digby

Oh heck. It looks like all that Trump isolationism isn’t really working out. It turns out that people probably should have noticed that when a man says he loves torture and wants to “bomb the shit out of ’em” he’s probably not a peacenik who wants to withdraw from the world.

Anyone who didn’t understand instinctively, in their bones, that Trump was a violent warmonger needs to take a good hard look at their assumptions.

The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

Already, President Trump has granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces of Yemen to be an “area of active hostilities” where looser battlefield rules apply. That opened the door to a Special Operations raid in late January in which several civilians were killed, as well as to the largest-ever series of American airstrikes targeting Yemen-based Qaeda militants, starting nearly two weeks ago, the officials said.

Mr. Trump is also expected to sign off soon on a similar Pentagon proposal to designate parts of Somalia to be another such battlefield-style zone for 180 days, removing constraints on airstrikes and raids targeting people suspected of being militants with the Qaeda-linked group the Shabab, they said.

Inside the White House, the temporary suspension of the limits for parts of Yemen and Somalia is seen as a test run while the government considers whether to more broadly rescind or relax the Obama-era rules, said the officials, who described the internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

The move to open the throttle on using military force — and accept a greater risk of civilian casualties — in troubled parts of the Muslim world comes as the Trump administration is also trying to significantly increase military spending and cut foreign aid and State Department budgets.

The proposal to cut so-called soft-power budgets, however, is meeting with stiff resistance from some senior Republicans on Capitol Hill, as well as from top active-duty and retired generals and admirals, who fear perpetual conflicts if the root causes of instability and terrorism are not addressed.

“Any budget we pass that guts the State Department’s budget, you will never win this war,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said during a hearing last week. Referring to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, he added, “As a matter of fact, ISIL will be celebrating.”

In a sign of mounting concern over the government’s policy review, more than three dozen members of America’s national security establishment have urged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to maintain the thrust of the Obama-era principles for counterterrorism missions, saying strict standards should be maintained for using force outside traditional war zones.

The former officials, in a letter sent on Sunday to Mr. Mattis, warned that “even small numbers of unintentional civilian deaths or injuries — whether or not legally permitted — can cause significant strategic setbacks,” increasing violence from militant groups or prompting partners and allies to reduce collaboration with the United States.

The article goes over the Obama administration own errors and how they came to see things differently by 2013. They weren’t perfect either by a long shot. But whatever improvements they made are all going to be dismissed.

Supposedly, the botched Yemen raid slowed the changes down. But I wouldn’t count on it changing dramatically. This guy is itching for a fight.

And by the way, don’t expect him to take responsibility when it inevitably turns to shit. He doesn’t do that.

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Thirsting for answers, people turn the news back on

by digby

This New York Times piece explores the odd new phenomenon of liberal political engagement:

There is a new safe space for liberals in the age of President Trump: the television set.

Left-leaning MSNBC, after flailing at the end of the Obama years, has edged CNN in prime time. Stephen Colbert’s openly anti-Trump “Late Show” is beating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight” for the first time. Bill Maher’s HBO flock has grown nearly 50 percent since last year’s presidential primaries, and “The Daily Show” has registered its best ratings since Jon Stewart left in 2015.

Traditional television, a medium considered so last century, has watched audiences drift away for the better part of a decade. Now rattled liberals are surging back, seeking catharsis, solidarity and relief.

“When Obama was in office, I felt like things were going O.K.,” Jerry Brumleve, 58, a retiree from Louisville, Ky., said last week as he stood in line for a “Daily Show” taping in Manhattan.

These days, he is a newfound devotee of Rachel Maddow of MSNBC — “She’s always talking about the Russians!” his wife, Yvonne, chimed in — and believes Mr. Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, has finally “hit his stride.”

“With Trump in office, I really feel the need to stay more informed,” Mr. Brumleve added. “You just don’t know what the hell this guy is going to do.”

Many others feel the same. Last month, Ms. Maddow was watched by more viewers than at any time in the nine-year run of her show.

The turbocharged ratings are a surprise even to seen-it-all television executives, who had been bracing for a plunge in viewership after the excitement of the presidential campaign. Before election night, networks were scrambling to generate new hits and digital offshoots that could stanch the bleeding.

Instead, the old analog favorites are in, with comfort-food franchises like “Saturday Night Live” drawing its highest Nielsen numbers in 24 years. Despite a dizzying array of new media choices, viewers are opting for television’s mass gathering spots, seeking the kind of shared experience that can validate and reassure.

“There’s definitely a sense of we’re-in-this-together-ness,” Mr. Noah said in an interview, noting that Mr. Trump’s election had infused his show with a new sense of purpose.

“People are finding a space here in saying, ‘Oh, I’m not crazy — somebody else is also outraged by this,’” Mr. Noah said.

Uncertainty and tumult have long driven ratings, and the interest is bipartisan. Fox News, already cable’s highest-rated network, is having another big year: In February, its prime-time viewership was up another 31 percent from a year ago.

One-fifth of the 48 million people who watched Mr. Trump’s address to Congress two weeks ago did so on Fox.

But MSNBC’s growth has outpaced its rivals — its prime-time audience in February was up 55 percent from a year ago — a striking turnaround for a channel once considered the also-ran of cable news.

The network has beaten CNN in total weekday prime-time viewers for six of the last seven months. (CNN still outranks MSNBC in prime time among the advertiser-friendly audience of adults ages 25 to 54.)

[…]

“There is this surge in civic interest and engagement,” Ms. Maddow said as she sprawled in a chair in her cluttered Rockefeller Plaza office, where the tip of an Emmy Award poked out of a metal beer pail. “It feels like a spontaneous, organic, pretty broad-based, heterogeneous, energized, constructive force, and it’s been interesting to me to see it happen everywhere.”

Still, Ms. Maddow smiled when told that some viewers say they turn to her as a source of sanity. “My standard response to that is, ‘That is a gossamer thread — you need to work on that in your life!’” she said, laughing. “I’m a TV show, and you shouldn’t depend on me. Anything can happen. Build up other sources of sanity.”

In some ways, television is the last mass medium that Americans turn to en masse in uncertain times. “It is a place where we congregate,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center for media and society at the University of Southern California. “We all gather around that hearth to know what’s going on out there, and be comforted by the people who come on our screens to say, things will be all right.”

Last week, outside a taping of Samantha Bee’s TBS comedy show, “Full Frontal,” Stacie Bloom, 44, said she was finding television “cathartic.”

“Maddow, I love her,” said Ms. Bloom, a scientist who lives in New York. “It’s reinforcing to watch. It’s the same reason I marched in the women’s march: It’s because I believe in it, and I want to be surrounded by other people who believe in it, too.”

Ms. Bee, in an interview, said she was glad her show could provide an outlet for liberals’ frustrations.

“I’m certainly requiring catharsis myself,” she said, laughing. “I wish I could be more helpful to them, actually. As much as they need the show, I need the show. I experience it in a different way than the audience experiences it, but I need it, too.”

Let’s hope this will cause the upper level brain trust at MSNBC to rethink their plan to hire Fox News personalities. Greta’s show is completely useless. If they put in Gretchen Carlson, as is rumored, they need to have their heads examined. Nobody who watches Fox will ever come to MSNBC. The new audience liberals who’ve been awakened to politics and they want to see liberal commentary.

That’s ok, people. Liberals are allowed to have their interests served too. And the hosts on MSNBC all still cling to the weird old-fashioned notion that facts and truth matter so their audience at least still lives in the real world. Someday, the conservatives might need to go back there too.

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Being Trump means never having to say you’re sorry

by digby

I wrote about his character flaw/dominance strategy for Salon this morning:

If there’s one thing we should have learned by now it’s that being Donald Trump means never having to say you’re sorry. Trump never apologizes for anything and does not clarify or correct the record. Sometimes he will simply pretend that he never said what he said and will change direction without explanation, while blaming others for his mistakes.

Trump was asked numerous times during the early part of the campaign by earnest religious questioners if he had ever asked God for forgiveness. He gave this cavalier answer:

I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so. . . . When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed.

Anderson Cooper followed up on that comment and asked him to clarify. This is what he said:

Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable person.

Jimmy Fallon asked Trump about this again and he said, “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong. . . . I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

When you look back at the presidential campaign, it’s astonishing how much Trump got away with: endless lies, unproven accusations, crude attacks and character assassination nearly every single day without his ever expressing regret. He never apologized for retweeting an unflattering picture of Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife, juxtaposed with an image of Melania Trump from a professional photo shoot. He shrugged it off, calling it justified retaliation. Not long after that, he accused Cruz’s father of being involved in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. There’s no evidence that he felt any regrets about that either.

Recall that Trump sent bigoted tweets throughout the campaign, retweeting bogus statistics on African-American crime statistics and passing along anti-Semitic tropes about rival candidate Hillary Clinton’s alleged corruption featuring the Jewish star prominently displayed in the graphic. He blamed his social media director and Clinton herself for spreading “false attacks.”

Trump never apologized to U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, after claiming he couldn’t be impartial in the Trump University fraud case because of his Mexican heritage. And to this day Trump has evaded responsibility for his reprehensible and childish mockery of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s physical disability; Trump claimed that he wasn’t doing what he was clearly doing.

Plus Trump said he had no regrets about insulting Ghazala Khan, who stood with quiet dignity next to her husband at the Democratic National Convention as he spoke out against Trump’s demagogic rhetoric and policies toward Muslims. He has never apologized to Megyn Kelly or Katy Tur or any other member of the press corps whom he has viciously attacked.

And then there was the most famous non-apology he ever gave, the notorious “rick-rolling” press conference when he gave a deplorable set of lies about the birther controversy. Here’s Trump’s spokesman Jason Miller’s statement:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for president. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.

In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

There was one campaign incident that led Trump to say he was sorry — the “pussy grabbing” tape. But that surely was one of the most ungracious apologies in history, a wooden taped performance, ending with a petulant whine to the effect that former President Bill Clinton was much worse than him and claiming that Hillary Clinton was the real bully.

Since Trump has become president, he has warned that if a terrorist attack were to happen on American soil he will hold the judiciary responsible, because judges shot down his blatantly unconstitutional travel ban. He crudely blamed the entire responsibility for the botched raid in Yemen, which left a Navy SEAL and 30 other people dead, on military commanders.

The buck always stops somewhere else.

A week ago on Saturday Trump caused a big stir by taking to Twitter to accuse former President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the presidential campaign — apparently Trump did so after reading some hyperbolic speculation on Breitbart News. Despite his long history of refusing to accept responsibility for anything, political leaders like Sen. John McCain have persisted in demanding that Trump do so. This past Sunday when asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about the wiretapping accusation, McCain replied, “The president has one of two choices: Either retract or provide the information that the American people deserve.”

We know that if Trump were to retract his statement it would mean admitting that he’d gone off half-cocked on his early-morning Twitter rant. That is simply not going to happen, so why waste any breath asking for it?

The sad fact is that Trump may be savvy in doing what he’s doing. A 2011 academic study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science called “Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power” explained it this way:

Powerful people often act at will, even if the resulting behavior is inappropriate — hence the famous proverb “power corrupts.” Here, we introduce the reverse phenomenon — violating norms signals power. Violating a norm implies that one has the power to act according to one’s own volition in spite of situational constraints, which fuels perceptions of power.

To illustrate how Trump instinctively understands that this pleases his followers, consider what he said when quizzed about whether he was sorry for insulting McCain by saying he “preferred people who weren’t captured”:

I don’t, you know — I like not to regret anything. You do things and you say things. And what I said, frankly, is what I said. And, you know, some people like what I said, if you want to know the truth. . . . You know, after I said that, my poll numbers went up 7 points.

Trump doesn’t take responsibility for the false or insulting things he says because he knows they make him look powerful to the only people he cares about — his voters. But he has real power now, and he’s going to be judged by results from here on in. Let’s hope those results aren’t as awful as his words have been or the whole country is going to be very sorry, very soon.

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Health Care: Dollars and sense
by Tom Sullivan

NC chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program march at HKonJ 2015.

Show of hands, allies: How many you would trade your country’s national health care systems for our “greatest health care system in the world“? Nobody?

Can’t imagine why. Neither can Katie Lee. The third-year medical student in Appalachia is a member of Students for a National Health Program, the student arm of Physicians for a National Health Program. She writes of the proposed Affordable Care Act replacement unveiled last week:

The Republican alternative presented this week is also woefully inadequate in terms of coverage. Instead, we should pursue the most equitable and just option – a single payer healthcare system. No, this is not “socialized medicine,” which would mean both the financing and delivery of care are government funded. We already have a form of this system for our veterans, and it leaves much to be desired. What I, and 20,000 other medical students and physicians, propose is a Medicare for All system.

[…]

The United States remains the only developed country with a system based on for-profit insurance companies. We are spending the largest amount per capita ($8,000+) on healthcare expenditures of any nation in the world, but without the best outcomes. The leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical bills, and an estimated 45,000 deaths annually can be attributed to lack of health insurance. Over 100 million Americans forgo professionally recommended medical care due to cost each year. Clearly, we have work to do. A single payer system by way of a Medicare for All structure would allow coverage for all Americans and would actually reduce spending.

Obamacare made medical care available to millions who had none, including Americans living in Appalachia. But it has the flaws one would expect from a system produced by a tortuous compromise between consumers and for-profit health care providers and insurers. Lee is not the only medical student to see its warts:

Most of the 200 medical students who gathered at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine building for the sixth annual summit of Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) said they think Obamacare is inadequate because it leaves an estimated 26 million Americans without health insurance. As for Trumpcare, or AHCA, the students hated the Republican Party-backed bill and called it “unethical,” “extremely detrimental,” and “a step in the wrong direction.”

So, what’s the cure for America’s health-care woes? The answer is a single-payer system, members of SNaHP repeated in speeches, breakout sessions, and interviews during the daylong gathering.

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute writes at The Week that the botched rollout of the Republican alternative may result in pushing the country towards “Medicare for All,” the plan we might be looking at had Bernie Sanders actually won the presidency:

… and it’s an answer that many Democrats wanted all along. Indeed, one way Obama sold Democrats on health reform that kept for-profit, private insurance central was by suggesting it was merely a way station to single payer. That idea is probably looking better and better to Democrats right about now, especially as the party continues to drift left. And maybe to the Republican president, too.

Don’t forget that Trump is a single-payer fan from way back. Plan beats no plan, and Republicans have so far been unable to cobble together an economically sound, politically acceptable ObamaCare alternative. The rollout of the AHCA inspires little confidence they ever will.

With all the energy Republicans spent maligning Obamacare since 2009, they might have powered a small city. Or they might instead have designed actual improvements to Obamacare. Or even a single-payer system modeled after cheaper systems in place in other countries, which is where we may end up eventually anyway. But that would make too much sense.

Sunday funnies

by digby

Colbert and the Grim Reaper celebrating Trumpcare

Who says you can’t go backwards?

by digby

Those of us who are in the individual health insurance market know this. But perhaps those who get their insurance through their employer, Medicare or the VA don’t. So it’s worthwhile having some charts.Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times provides them:

Congressional Republicans, evidently hoping that by repeating an untruth they’ll convince American voters, and perhaps themselves, that it’s a truth, on Wednesday said the Affordable Care Act has “failed.”

The undistilled version of this view came from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who emerged Wednesday from a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to assert: “This law has failed. Americans are struggling. The law is failing while we speak. … Things are only getting worse under Obamacare. … The healthcare system has been ruined — dismantled — under Obamacare.”

Every one of those statements is demonstrably untrue. How do we know this? We know because every measure of healthcare spending, access and cost has improved since the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Timothy McBride of Washington University in St. Louis has done the heavy lifting of pulling together the relevant charts and graphs, and posting them online in a series of 12 tweets compiled on Storify. We’ve culled some of the most important, and present them here.

We should add, first, that Ryan also pledged, once the GOP repeals the law, to “make sure that there is a stable transition to a truly patient-centered system. We want every American to have access to quality, affordable health coverage”

This is nothing but fatuous gobbledygook. The GOP has had six years to come up with an alternative plan, and never has done so. Its current strategy is to repeal the Affordable Care Act now, and then cook up a replacement sometime in the next two, three, even four years. (They can’t even agree on a time frame.) What exactly is a “patient-centered system,” anyway?

Here are the charts, courtesy of professor McBride.

First, the overall uninsured rate has come sharply down since the advent of Obamacare:

The decline in uninsured rates was especially pronounced among lower-income Americans, according to the Council of Economic Advisors and other sources:

Although Republicans claim that even if the Affordable Care Act brought down the uninsured rate, its enrollees had trouble seeing a doctor, that isn’t true. Numerous studies debunk claims that doctors shun Affordable Care Act enrollees. This sample by the Council of Economic Advisors shows that the decline in the uninsured rate is closely associated with a reduction in people who were prevented from seeking and finding medical care because of its cost:

Hospitals are major beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Council of Economic Advisors report. Hospitals’ uncompensated care costs fell sharply in Medicaidexpansion states, as patients treated as indigent in the past are now covered by Medicaid. Their uncompensated care costs fell from an average 4% of operating costs before the Affordable Care Act to less than 2% afterward, a decline worth tens of billions of dollars nationwide.

Overall national health spending has come down even faster than was predicted, as a share of gross domestic product:

The average growth in per-enrollee spending by private health plans in key categories has slowed materially since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, from annual growth averaging 5% in 2000-2010, to 1.5% in 2010-2015. Spending growth on hospital services, physician services and prescription drugs all slowed. Medicare, which has instituted numerous cost-control initiatives under the Affordable Care Act, has seen an overall decline in spending per enrollee.

Finally, even though employer-based insurance hasn’t yet been directly affected by the Affordable Care Act, there seems to be a spillover effect from the overall reduction in healthcare spending growth. Premiums rose by an average 5.6% a year in the 10 years prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act, but only 3.1% since, according to Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of employer health benefits.

Republicans have promised to give Americans a health insurance system better than the Affordable Care Act’s and at lower cost. This is almost surely a chimera; no plan that the GOP has considered would expand coverage beyond the Affordable Care Act. To the extent that the plans would reduce costs, they would do so by relieving the federal government of responsibility for paying for coverage and placing it even more heavily on the shoulders of individuals and families. That’s not lowering costs; it’s just shifting them to those least able to pay. The fact that the GOP will have to face is that bringing healthcare to more Americans costs money. Taking it away from millions of Americans will cost money, too.

No one claimed, either before the passage of the Affordable Care Act or afterward, that it was perfect or that it would solve America’s healthcare crisis in one swipe. What became evident in the three years since the individual insurance exchanges opened for business (on Jan. 1, 2014) is that the subsidies for premiums needed to be increased and improved. Because they’re inadequate, especially as households cross the threshold of 400% of the federal poverty line at which subsidies are eliminated — at about $97,200 for a family of four — middle-class families in the individual insurance market feel overburdened. They blame Obamacare for this injustice. The real culprits are Republicans who have refused to consider any approach to the Affordable Care Act except repeal. Now the GOP is “it” on healthcare, and it’s discovering that crafting a solution from scratch may be almost impossible.

What became evident during the most recent open-enrollment period for Obamacare exchanges is that “Obamacare is more popular than ever,” as Kevin Drum of Mother Jones observes. Enrollment grew to 12 million, up by about 1 million from 2015, even in the face of higher premiums. In any case, more than 85% of all enrollees are entitled to subsidies, which limits and in some cases cancels out the higher prices.

Yet the GOP pledges to overturn all that. The question the party never has found an answer to is: If this is what a failure looks like, how would it define a success?

As he says here are some real holes in the system that could be fixed if Republicans weren’t malevolent destroyers of worlds. The subsidies don’t go high enough and some middle class people are getting hit hard. That could be fixed. The medicaid expansion should be universal. We could add a public option. I’m sure there are million wonky details that could be fixed to make it better.

But there is simply no doubt that it is an improvement over what we had before. And there is also no doubt that repeal is going to take us right back there and their replacement is actually going to make it worse that it was before.

I know it’s their holy grail and they want it gone because it’s a government subsidized benefit and they are simply opposed to that no matter how many people suffer and die without it. But the reality is that we tried the “free market” approach to health insurance and it did not work. It was killing people and leaving families destitute. This is a hybrid system that incorporates as much “free market” as can be incorporated while making sure that people have affordable insurance and will not go bankrupt if they get sick.

I’d prefer something simpler, universal and comprehensive. Let’s call it … Medicare. It works fine. Expand the program to everyone and let’s go home. But we weren’t allowed to have that so this was the only option. And it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.

They may succeed in destroying this, they have all the power they need to get it done. And employed people, those on government health care like Medicare and the VA and well-off folks who can afford health insurance won’t feel the pinch at first. But all you have to do is look at the overall cost lines in those charts above to see that it’s not just us poor self-employers losers or Medicaid beneficiaries who will be impacted when these amateur wonks take a meat ax to the program without knowing what they’re doing. The whole health care sector will be hit hard.

Remember, the ACA wasn’t just about covering people in the individual market and expanding medicaid. It was an attempt to bring down spiraling costs through a complex set of regulations and requirements. The result of cluelessly reversing all that isn’t going to be pretty for anyone.

The horror of the election results just never ends …

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“Climate denial is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg”

by digby

David Roberts at Vox makes a vitally important point in this piece about the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s rejection of climate science. This is an even bigger problem than people realize:

The climate fight has long since moved past the stage when it was about the facts.

Allow me an analogy. Imagine you’re playing a basketball game. A member of the other team travels. The referee calls the travel, but the opposing player just shrugs and says, “I don’t care.” He refuses to surrender the ball and just keeps going. Then his team starts putting extra players on the court, fouling at will, and pelting your team with refuse. The referee continues calling violations, but the other team simply disregards him. They start appealing to their own referees, friends of theirs in the stands. “Bob says there was no foul.”

At that point, the dispute is no longer about what happened in this play or that play. The facts are not at issue. The dispute is over the authority of the referee. The question is whether both teams will honor the referee’s calls, and if not, how the game can be played at all and what “winning” means under the circumstances.

If it’s not obvious, the referee in this analogy is science.

When we say we “know” human beings are causing climate change, virtually none of us mean we know that in any direct way. Most of us don’t possess the skills to analyze primary data or construct climate models. What we mean is, “that’s what the scientists say.” We are implicitly appealing to the authority of scientists — of science itself.

We naive types like to think that this is how a modern society runs. We set up scientific institutions, governed by certain guild rules and norms regarding objectivity, reproducibility of results, peer review, etc. Those institutions gather and analyze knowledge and we collectively agree to grant them authority, to accept their results.

That is how we establish a common foundation of facts and understanding, without which it is virtually impossible to have coherent political debates.

Such knowledge-producing institutions — not only science, but also academia and journalism — are not immune to criticism, of course. And they are never entirely free of biases or error. Their procedures and results are always open to democratic dispute.

But absent some compelling reason to believe that those institutions have been corrupted or systematically distorted, we accept their results. Otherwise, epistemological chaos ensues, persuasion becomes impossible, and politics devolves into a raw contest of power.

Conservatives have never established any serious corruption or wrongdoing in the institutions and norms of climate science. All they have are wild conspiracy theories about hoaxes and grant money. All they have are appeals to counter-authorities, members of the conservative establishment largely operating outside mainstream scientific institutions. Like the basketball team ignoring the referee, they have simply chosen not to accept the results of climate science.

Restating, underscoring, or even strengthening those scientific results won’t solve that problem. The results already come from multiple fields, are reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, and have been vetted (extremely vetted, you might say) by several extended, multi-layered review processes. Collectively, we don’t know how to “know” anything more confidently than we know this stuff.

If someone chooses to simply reject those scientific institutions, procedures, and results, then piling on more facts is beside the point. It’s not about facts any more, it’s about the authority of the institutions.

Climate denial has had, and will continue to have, dire results, producing real suffering for real people.

But in a sense, climate denial is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. The right’s refusal to accept the authority of climate science is of a piece with its rejection of mainstream media, academia, and government, the shared institutions and norms that bind us together and contain our political disputes.

There’s also a certain individualistic arrogance in our culture which says that nobody knows anything more than you do. It’s that thing of wanting a president you’d like to have a beer with because you figure you could be president too. Maybe it’s the special snowflake theory coming home to roost — everyone thinks they’re just as smart as Einstein and anyone who says Einstein knew more than the average person is a smug elite who’s trying to insult the common man.

The referee, in other words, is just another know-it-all who thinks he’s better than the players.

On an institutional level, we’ve been watching this happen for a while. Recall that one of the quotes that animated the left over the past decade and a half was this one:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Nobody believes anyone in authority anymore Even the most basic facts are in dispute. We have a leader who completely disdains the truth and tells his followers to disdain it as well. I don’t know how it all ends but I do know that the loss of an agreed upon reality is causing all these end-times conspiracy theories. And that’s not a good sign.

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Douchebags like this …

by digby

On Friday night a woman and her friends went to take a look at the famous “defiant girl” statue that had been installed on Wall St to commemorate International Woman’s Day when one of a group of men horsing around the area decided to sexually grind himself against the statue of the little girl. The woman took pictures and wrote up the account on her Facebook page:

Kaloyanides, an architectural designer from Queens, snapped a photo of the incident and posted it to social media, writing: “Almost as if out of central casting, some Wall Street finance bros appeared and started humping the statue while his gross date rape-y friends laughed and cheered him on. He pretended to have sex with the image of a little girl. Douchebags like this are why we need feminism.”

Kaloyanides stood by the decision to share the image online, saying the man’s behavior was no laughing matter and shouldn’t be treated as such.

“This is just further perpetuating a mentality of ‘boys will be boys,’ and that ‘it’s okay, it’s a joke, just brush it off,’” she said. “This young man likely has a mother, a sister perhaps, a girlfriend, a wife — who knows? I’m getting tired of making excuses and laughing it off. I for one am not gonna laugh it off anymore.”

It’s clear what he’s doing. He’s grinding his penis into the little girl in front of a bunch of people, in public. Yes, he’s probably drunk. And he’s showing off for his friends, just being a jerk. But as a woman witnessing something like that it just feels like a punch in the gut. It’s violent and gross and says something about that guy and his friends they may not even know about themselves. It’s a public display of rank misogyny perpetrated against a sweet inspirational symbol of female empowerment. Fuck that guy.

And yeah, I’m getting sick of this too. But what do we expect? Over 60 million people in this country voted for a president who was caught on tape saying that he liked to grab women’s crotches against their will. He said he “tried to fuck” a married woman celebrity and was “on her like a bitch,” by which I think he meant she was the bitch, as in dog. Think about that. Those aren’t sexual acts. There’s no sensual pleasure in that for any woman. It’s a sheer act of violent domination.

I’m tired of making excuses for this shit too. I don’t care if people have economic anxiety, brushing off that pig Trump’s voluminous documented disgusting behavior toward women, wallowing in it, calling Clinton a bitch and and a cunt, the mob laughing and jeering about “locking her up” They knew what they were voting for. And they liked it. And yes, women participated in it. I’m sick of them too.

Update: Here’s the latest on the marine scandal nobody cares about in which  a secret online group of 20,000 marines were sharing nude photos of women, including their fellow marines, online. They shut down the group and just started up another one.

Here’s the group’s fatuous explanation:

Marines United post a statement regarding their secret @facebook group on @reddit after making national news. #USMC @adegrandpre @jaketapper pic.twitter.com/iT8Udexl1n— James LaPorta (@JimLaPorta) March 7, 2017

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Freedom to die

by digby

Via Think Progress we have Trump’s chief economic adviser who just left his job as president and COO of Goldman Sachs to come to the White House to help the president enact his populist agenda talking about the health care reforms:

“The numbers of who’s covered and who’s not covered,” Cohn replied. “That’s interesting and I know that may make some headlines, but what we care about is people’s ability to get healthcare and people’s ability to go see their doctor.”
Wallace noted that coverage “is really important if you lose it” and showed a 2015 clip of Donald Trump as a candidate vowing to “take care of everybody,” even if it cost him votes. 

Cohn answered that under Trumpcare, everyone would be offered coverage. He added that the administration does not think anyone will lose insurance at all, and suggested that the plan’s end of the Medicaid expansion would not actually mean cost anyone their Medicaid coverage. He also claimed that because the people buying insurance on exchanges with subsidies would receive less generous tax credits instead, they will all have the opportunity to buy insurance if they want it.

That’s what the Republicans are offering those of us who depend on the private market and medicaid for health insurance. They’ll make sure that some insurer somewhere will offer us some kind of shitty plan at whatever rates they choose and the government will give us a tiny tax break. That’s it. That’s their plan. Smell the freedom.

In other words it’s the same plan Former congressman Alan Grayson described as “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”

I happen to be a person who will be affected by this — along with a bunch of other middle class duffers my age who are too young for medicare but old enough to be intensely concerned about getting sick or dealing with chronic illnesses already. We are going to be hit very hard, even the ones who voted for Trump. The Republicans among them will probably believe Trump when he tells them it’s Obama’s fault or crooked Hillary’s fault. But there might be a few Independents or stray Democrats who thought Trump was lots of fun who may have regrets.

Of course, it will be too late then. If they succeed in dismantling this, those of us who are caught in this tangle will suffer greatly. And the whole system will crash and burn eventually. It was unsustainable before the reforms and it’s going to be unsustainable again.

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The ragged few still clinging to reality

by digby

I’m not one to give Bush administration officials credit since they were among those who laid the groundwork for Trumpism, but I do think it’s important to note when some of them are still living in reality, which isn’t saying much for most Republicans:

MICHAEL GERSON: I think there are lots of ties that are being discovered between the Trump inner circle and Russia.

And, in fact, the attorney general had to recuse himself because of unreported contact. And we have learned that Flynn, the former national security adviser, was doing work on behalf of individuals associated with the Turkish government.

So, you’re creating the impression of a foreign policy bought and sold by dictators. This is quite serious. This is an unfolding, ongoing ethics disaster at the highest levels, I think we’re seeing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, again — Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: Just one thing I want to point out, Judy.

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood at the brink, Soviets and America, over the Cuban missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy sent Dean Acheson, a former secretary of state, to see General Charles de Gaulle to tell him exactly, brief him personally, as the president’s emissary, on what was going on.

At the end of that talk, he said to General de Gaulle, I have been authorized by the president to show you the photographic evidence we have, and for your eyes only. And General de Gaulle said, no, no, no, that’s not necessary. All I need is the word of the president of the United States.

There comes a time in every administration when you need the president to be credible, the president to have the trust and confidence of leaders around the world in a time of crisis.

And I can see no reason that anybody would ever say this about Donald Trump: All I need is the word of the president of the United States.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Michael, how does this administration get beyond this? Are we looking now at something that is just going to go on for months and months, if not years?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, I think we’re seeing that self-investigation through the attorney general is not going to be useful in this case.

Someone is going to have to have a real inquiry here. You could do a select committee. You could do a special prosecutor. You do some other voice of authority here. The FBI doesn’t have a huge amount of credibility, particularly given what Comey did in the election, which may have helped Trump more than the Russians did.

I think the administration, whenever you hear the phrase “Sean Spicer says,” it makes the statement more incredible, not more credible.

And I think that we have a Congress that’s quite politicized on this set of issues. We’re going to need some type of independent voice to determine what’s happening in this case.

Gerson has a lot to answer for on Iraq. He helped make the propaganda case for it. But leaders have been lying their way into war since the advent of war. Trump and his people aren’t just liars, they’re attacking the very notion that there’s such a thing as truth. You could see it coming during he Bush years, but this is a whole new level.

Gerson is right about the need for a special prosecutor. Even those who believe that there was no collusion and that Russia hasn’t also been involving itself in Europe on behalf of right wing authoritarians all over Europe, you should want to take the investigation out of the partisan atmosphere as much as possible. Sadly, I think most Republicans are all too happy to see their ignorant madman of a president get away with mammoth corruption and a nationalist crackdown, as well as the almost certainty of war, as long as they get their pet policies. Indeed, those ARE their pet policies.

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