Month: March 2017

Burying the Lede

by tristero

What with another perfectly-timed Wikileaks embarrassment, the Republican unHealthcare bill, and of course, Trump’s madness-with-an-ever-so-cunning-method twittering, guess what’s no longer on the front page of the NY Times right now (March 8, 2017 11:47 EST)?

Oooooops. Let’s look a little closer. Click down once. Twice. Now squint. Yesssssss! There it is:

He’s ba-aack: Freewayblogger
by Tom Sullivan

“How mad do you need to get?” — Freewayblogger. Photo: Freewayblogger.

There’s no way we can take four years of this bullshit, and no way in hell we’re going to take it without a fight. — Freewayblogger

This fight is going to be a long one. With friends already shell-shocked and wondering how to ward off activism fatigue, it puts a smile on the face to see somebody doing it with style and without having to rely on a computer or Mark Zuckerberg.

Freewayblogger is back at DKos:

How mad do you need to get? How many lies do you have delivered straight to your face by this administration? How long do you just sit there and take it?

I’ll be honest with you, if it wasn’t for a bizarre set of circumstances I’d never have started doing this. And if someone else had I’d think it was a great idea. I’d cheer them on, but I wouldn’t start doing it myself. Why? I don’t know. Same reasons most of you don’t I suppose: it’s too dangerous, I’d probably get caught, it’s just something I don’t do.

What would actually get me going? Probably the security of numbers. If I knew that thousands of other people were doing it I’d be right there with them. It doesn’t matter how cheap, easy, fun or necessary it is — so long as nobody else is doing it, I’m not either. It’s one of our most primal fears: the fear of looking foolish.

Five words that will get you into a world of trouble are: Why doesn’t somebody do something? They take over your life when it finally dawns on you that you are somebody. No doubt Freewayblogger heard them in his head. Now he speak truth to horsepower.

And here’s the ironic part — you don’t actually look foolish: you’re not even there at all. After the few seconds it takes to put up the sign, you just walk away. The relationship is over. (Okay, technically unless you wear gloves your fingerprints will be all over the thing, but if that mattered I wouldn’t be here writing this.)

Berkeley, CA. Photo: Freewayblogger.

Cardboard. Housepaint. Clothes hangers and bungees. America. He even shows you how.

Thousands served.

https://t.co/byFh8FaaEg pic.twitter.com/WH2639fL4Y— Patrick Randall (@PatrickRandall) February 13, 2017

QOTD: Mick Mulvaney

by digby

When asked about the cost of Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall, the director of the Office of Management and Budget pretty much said, “it depends.”  But this was unintentionally … revealing:

“Some places, a solid concrete barrier might be desired,” Mulvaney said. “In other places, the border folks are actually telling us, border control’s actually telling us that they like the one you can see through, because it reduces the number of violent attacks on our folks. So it’s a complicated program.”

People are saying he’s talking about this thing we call a “fence” there. I’m guess it’s more of an imaginary wall. Which is fine. Let’s build that.

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Looks like they may not take yes for an answer again

by digby

I wrote this for Salon on December 7th last year. I still don’t know how it will all come out, of course. But let’s just say that the above tweet isn’t altogether surprising:

What a difference eight years makes. At this point back in 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was systematically putting together his Cabinet, studying policy briefs and pretty much keeping a low profile as he and his team prepared to take over the most important job in the world. Obama did some interviews and made himself otherwise available to the press from time to time, but there were no victory rallies or abrupt reversals of decades of diplomatic protocols.

As the inauguration grew closer, Obama gathered bipartisan luminaries from both parties to break bread with him, get to know him a little bit and understand his overall strategy. He spent an evening laying out what he called a “grand bargain,” which was described by one attendee, The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne:

The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something. Only such a balance, they argue, will win broad support for what Obama wants to do, and thus make his reforms “sustainable,” the other magic word — meaning that even Republicans, when they eventually get back to power, will choose not to reverse them.

The pillars of the grand bargain were health care reform, “entitlement reform,” tax reform and limits on carbon emissions.
[…]
The White House and the Democrats spent the next year trying to pass health care reform and managed to do it only with party-line votes and parliamentary maneuvering. The Republicans were not going to help and therefore had no stake in making the program sustainable. Nonetheless, the president persisted in this idea that if Democrats could achieve “balance” by giving the Republicans some of what they wanted, such as cutting “entitlement” programs in exchange for letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, he could get a buy in for his grand bargain…

The Republican leadership under then House speaker John Boehner knew it was the chance of a lifetime to have Democrats do their dirty work for them — cutting Social Security was the GOP establishment’s dream although their constituents’ nightmare — but they could never get the hard-core Tea Partyers to sign on. They simply refused to accept anything apart from total capitulation, which required that the president agree to all their terms, including the repeal of Obamacare, his signature program. So the president wised up and the proposed Social Security cuts were finally abandoned, much to the relief of most Democrats.

But this fight fueled the Tea Party types with growing hostility against their own party and its political leadership. They did not trust Republican leaders in the House and Senate and refused to believe that more obstructionist tactics wouldn’t force the president and a Democratic Senate to do their bidding. That mistrust flowed into the strong anti-Establishment atmosphere that gave us candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

The logic of President Obama’s grand bargain always seemed dubious. Republicans would never feel any commitment to health care reform just because they got something else they wanted. They don’t think that way. In any case, Obama never got his grand bargain and now the Republicans are strutting about declaring that they will finally fulfill their No. 1 desire immediately after Trump takes taking office in January: repeal of the hated Obamacare.

But it appears that the more things change the more they stay the same. According to Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye, the usual infighting among Republicans is heating up already. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s plan to “repeal and delay” Obamacare on a slow timetable, until they can put together a replacement down the road, isn’t going over very well with the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus. It seems those members want a repeal accomplished immediately and as usual they refuse to compromise.

Ryan and McConnell are trying to delay for purely cynical political reasons. They want to leverage the possibility that people will lose their health care to force Democrats to the table to sign on to whatever flimsy piece of garbage they come up with to replace the current law. If they can delay the worst elements of this change until after the 2018 midterm elections and force Democrats to run showing support for the replacement plan, the Republicans can get this done without too much political damage. They can read the polls showing that the hostility to Obamacare is dissipating now that they have a Republican president. It turns out that most of their voters really just hated Obama, not his health care law.

Nonetheless, the true believers of the Freedom Caucus and some conservative movement groups like the Koch brothers’ FreedomWorks have lurched into gear demanding that the repeal of Obamacare take place immediately — and thereby setting up another showdown that could end up stopping the repeal altogether. It would be an amazing twist of fate if just as they inadvertently saved Social Security, the Tea Party loyalists ended up thwarting Donald Trump and saving Obamacare because they simply cannot take yes for an answer.

The winner really is La-La Land

by digby

Politico:

The Trump administration wants to gut the Coast Guard and make deep cuts in airport and rail security to help pay for its crackdown on illegal immigration, according to internal budget documents reviewed by POLITICO — a move that lawmakers and security experts say defies logic if the White House is serious about defending against terrorism and keeping out undocumented foreigners.

The Office of Management and Budget is seeking a 14 percent cut to the Coast Guard’s $9.1 billion budget, the draft documents show, even as it proposes major increases to other Department of Homeland Security agencies to hire more border agents and immigration officers and construct a physical barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The budget numbers mark the most detailed breakdown yet about how President Donald Trump envisions restructuring DHS to meet his pledge to halt illegal immigration and deport some of the millions already here.

Overall, DHS would get a 6 percent boost to its budget, to $43.8 billion. But to help pay for that, the administration would slice the budget of the Coast Guard and cut 11 percent in spending from the TSA — reductions that critics say would weaken safeguards against threats arriving by sea or air.

OMB also wants to cut 11 percent from the budget of FEMA, which oversees the national response to disasters such as floods and hurricanes.

The budget gambit is sure to meet fierce opposition at the hardest-hit agencies and on Capitol Hill, where a leading Republican is accusing White House budget officials of living in “la-la land.”

During the campaign I used to quip that Trump would like to build a wall along the two coasts to keep the immigrants and bad trade deals out. Maybe I wasn’t kidding …

As for FEMA, cutting it is a great idea. When people die in natural disasters it gives the angry right wingers a good chance to blame the federal government for being inept and that’s what really matters. So much winning.

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This Is Not an Immigrant 

by tristero

Trump is recycling corporate press releases. Because of course he is.

This probably isn’t even worth noting except to say that if a different administration did it it would be front page news. But with this dumpster fire, it’s a small, irrelevant footnote:

President Donald Trump praised ExxonMobil on Monday for the oil giant’s announcement that it would continue a multi-billion dollar initiative to expand its presence in the Gulf Of Mexico.

The President’s statement came two hours after he was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, formerly the company’s CEO, and an hour after Exxon’s current CEO announced the expansion at an energy conference.

Both the company and the White House specified that the expansion in the Gulf of Mexico began in 2013, during the Obama administration.

“President Donald J. Trump today congratulated Exxon Mobil Corporation on its ambitious $20 billion investment program that is creating more than 45,000 construction and manufacturing jobs in the United States Gulf Coast region,” a laudatory statement from the White House read Wednesday afternoon.

Shortly before the White House’s release, according to the company’s website, ExxonMobil put out its own statement on the expansion.

Neither the White House nor ExxonMobil immediately responded to TPM’s request for comment, but White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House had been in touch with the oil giant.

“Exxon made it clear to the White House and to the President that because of his policies that they continue to expand their investment,” he told reporters Monday afternoon. “It is information that has been provided to us by Exxon about the number of jobs and investments in America that we go off.”

In fact, one paragraph in both statements – from Exxon and from the White House – is nearly identical. The latter spelled out “U.S.” and removed “expansion” from the phrase “Growing the Gulf expansion program,” from the company’s statement, printed below:

“ExxonMobil is strategically investing in new refining and chemical-manufacturing projects in the U.S. Gulf Coast region to expand its manufacturing and export capacity. The company’s Growing the Gulf expansion program, consists of 11 major chemical, refining, lubricant and liquefied natural gas projects at proposed new and existing facilities along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Investments began in 2013 and are expected to continue through at least 2022.”

According to a schedule emailed to reporters late Sunday night, Trump was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State Tillerson, who left his job as Exxon’s CEO to join Trump’s Cabinet, at 1:35 p.m. According to an agenda posted online by CERAWeek, the energy conference at which the announcement was made, Exxon CEO was scheduled to speak at 2:10 p.m. ET.

Starting at 4:19 p.m. ET, Trump congratulated the company to his 26 million Twitter followers.

I guess we know what Trump and Tillerson talked about. And it wasn’t foreign policy.

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The sad state of the State Department

by digby

I wrote about the sad state of the State Department for Salon this morning:

Salon’s Matthew Rosza reported on Monday on the incredible shrinking man, Rex Tillerson, the formerly larger-than-life Exxon CEO turned secretary of state who — despite the world’s high level of interest in the Trump administration’s new foreign policy — has barely been seen since he was sworn in. Nobody knows whether Tillerson is just keeping out of the eye of the Trump tornado or if he’s been sidelined by the White House in favor of the “shadow secretary,” President Donald Trump’s 35-year-old son-in-law Jared Kushner. Whatever the case, it’s unusual. The department is said to be rudderless and demoralized, carrying on without any sense of direction or purpose.

Monday was supposed to be the first State Department briefing since former President Barack Obama’s final day in office, but it was canceled because of the announcement of Trump’s new travel ban. One would think that would be an excellent day to begin, but apparently the administration doesn’t want the Department of State meddling in foreign affairs. The lack of these briefings is one more oddity in the new Trump regime. They were held at the State Department every day since the Eisenhower administration and for a specific purpose. Such briefings are the main method of disseminating the government’s diplomatic agenda abroad. There may not be more than a handful of American reporters and C-SPAN junkies paying attention, but they are closely watched all over the world by foreign governments. It’s been radio silence since Jan. 19.

The administration says the briefings will begin again and has hired Heather Nauert of “Fox & Friends” to lead them so perhaps all this is nothing but more inefficiency and bad management. Reports coming out of the department are dismal.

The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe wrote an in-depth piece about the current state of the State Department and it’s rather shocking. She described a department where people wander around without any work to do, no visitors arrive at the building, key staffers are left out of the loop and no requests for analysis or information have been forthcoming from the White House. People spend their days sending out résumés in anticipation of Trump’s promise to deliver a cut of more than 30 percent to the department’s staff.

In some ways, this should not be such a huge surprise. Trump is clueless, of course. He can’t run the Oval Office much less oversee the executive branch. But modern conservatives have long been skeptical of the State Department and have sought to limit its influence for many decades.

The famous espionage case of Alger Hiss, who had been a high-ranking diplomat involved with the Yalta Conference (a right-wing bugaboo), and the creation of the United Nations after World War II focused anti-communist attention on the State Department in the late 1940s. That set the table for the next phase of the Red Scare in 1950, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy launched his famous crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia, by waving around a piece of paper and declaring that it was “a list of 205″ State Department employees known to the secretary of state as communists. In later public pronouncements, McCarthy’s number would vary: Was it 57 commies, 81 or maybe just 10? He never produced a name.

McCarthy went on to smear much of the rest of the government and even the military before he was through, being helped every step of the way by his ally Richard Nixon as well as his lawyer Roy Cohn — who also happens to have been Donald Trump’s mentor. What a small world!

Throughout the Cold War the right-wingers remained suspicious of the State Department with its squishy mandate for treaties and diplomacy, which they believed was a weak way to face the Evil Empire. When the Soviet Union broke up, they lost that rationale but quickly replaced it with new ones.

After the war in Iraq started to sour in the summer of 2003, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, being the cunning propagandist he is, wrote an essay for Foreign Policy called “Rogue State Department,” which placed the blame where the right always places it. The subhead was this evergreen conservative riff: “Anti-American sentiment is rising unabated around the globe because the U.S. State Department has abdicated values and principles in favor of accommodation and passivity.”

The Christian Coalition’s Pat Robertson even got into a spot of trouble for musing on his show, “Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up like Newt Gingrich wants to do,” referring to the Washington neighborhood west of the White House where the State Department has long had its headquarters.

By the time of the 2016 campaign the conservative movement had gone back to its roots with conspiracy-theory claims that the State Department had been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s aide. It’s always something.

One might assume that this pattern informs the Trump administration. But even though the president is weirdly smearing for President Barack Obama for alleged McCarthyism (while simultaneously planning to purge the government of suspected disloyal employees), Trump doesn’t really operate by the normal right-wing playbook. As much as conservatives have battled with the State Department for being too passive, no Republican administration ever shut it down.

Trump has no idea what the State Department does, and in any case he’s too busy ranting on Twitter to bother with it. His close associates are almost all novices without a deep connection to conservative movement history or philosophy, so the abandonment of the State Department is most likely attributable to Tillerson’s lack of experience and Steve Bannon’s chilling if half-baked plan for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

Ioffe quoted a midlevel State Department officer in her Atlantic article who said, “They really want to blow this place up. I don’t think this administration thinks the State Department needs to exist. They think Jared [Kushner] can do everything. It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”

But this isn’t a developing country. This is the U.S. State Department, and these are career government employees who have gone through many transitions and never seen anything like this. The planet’s only superpower and guarantor of global security for more than 70 years has abruptly withdrawn from its diplomatic role in the world, without any plan to replace it.

“Strikingly regressive” ACA replacement
by Tom Sullivan

House Republicans last night unveiled their first pass at a replacement for Obamacare. It comes in two parts. You can read the American Health Care Act here and here. There is a summary of changes here. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the costs of the proposal. Moments after its release, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) dubbed it Obamacare 2.0. Other Republicans are lining up against it, CNN reports:

Conservative and moderate Republicans have raised concerns about key provisions within the bill. Conservatives say have argued that refundable tax credits are little more than a new entitlement program and some Republicans from Medicaid-expansion states have said they would not support plans that could kick millions of people off the Medicaid rolls.

It is a bill that doesn’t know what it is trying to do, writes Ezra Klein at Vox, calling it “strikingly regressive.” He adds, “It is difficult to say what question, or set of questions, would lead to this bill as an answer.” Or what’s better about it. The bottom line?

In reality, what I think we’re seeing here is Republicans trying desperately to come up with something that would allow them to repeal and replace Obamacare; this is a compromise of a compromise of a compromise aimed at fulfilling that promise. But “repeal-and-replace” is a political slogan, not a policy goal. This is a lot of political pain to endure for a bill that won’t improve many peoples’ lives, but will badly hurt millions.

Of course, it defunds abortion providers (Planned Parenthood) for one year, so maybe it does know it’s trying to do that much. But let’s get to what else it does.

Goodbye subsidies. Hello tax credits.

That’s enough to explain the perspective of people who wrote this bill. Government expenditures for Them : bad. Government tax breaks for me : good. Rather than basing tax credits on income as the ACA does, this bill bases them on age. Sarah Kliff writes at Vox:

But under the Republican plan, insurers would be allowed to charge the oldest Americans five times as much as the youngest Americans. Their financial help would not scale nearly as much as their premiums would.

“You’re both jacking up the prices and giving people less of a subsidy, which is a damaging combination,” says David Certner, legislative policy director for the AARP, which lobbies on behalf of Americans over 55.

This new tax credit structure could also hurt to many low-income Americans, whose subsidies would fall substantially. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that that these new tax credits would be anywhere between 31 and 82 percent lower for a 60-year-old who earns $20,000, depending on where that 60-year-old lives.

Higher-earning Americans, however, could see their benefits increase significantly. People who earned $48,280 or more under Obamacare got no help — but now anyone under the $75,000 threshold gets the biggest tax credit.

“Incentive” means punishment

“Incentive” in the repeal bill, translated from Republican, means punishment. Under SEC. 133. CONTINUOUS HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE INCENTIVE, for anyone with a lapse in coverage of more than 63 days, “issuers will assess a flat 30 percent
late-enrollment surcharge on top of their base premium.” Under Obamacare, a fine for being uninsured went to the U.S. Treasury. This plum goes to the insurers for a year.

Funding still muddy

Vann R. Newkirk II writing for The Atlantic explains:

This is where it gets really tricky for the CBO scoring. The new proposed bill cuts almost all of the revenue-generating pieces of Obamacare, from its tanning taxes to its medical-device taxes. The individual mandate to purchase insurance and the employer mandate to provide it are levied as taxes, and the Republican plan would repeal those as well. Although this plan will probably lower long-term Medicaid outlays, it’s unclear if the relatively generous tax credit and its rescission of revenue-generation will lead the bill as a whole to have a positive impact on the deficit.

And there is a tax break for insurance companies that pay their CEOs more than $500,000 per year.

Klein is incredulous:

After literally years of complaining Obamacare was jammed down the American people’s throats with insufficient information or consideration, the GOP intends to hold committee votes on their bill two days after releasing it, and without a Congressional Budget Office report estimating either coverage or fiscal effects. It’s breathtaking.

Now it's a race to see if GOP can pass repeal law before people realize that everyone loses their coverage.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 6, 2017

There is a good chance this is only an opening gambit, but if the Republican House can slip it under people’s doors before resistance can rally, they’ll take it. They may have a higher hill to climb in the Senate:

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday, Republican Sens. Rob Portman, Shelley Moore Capito, Cory Gardner, and Lisa Murkowski laid out concerns regarding the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, in what could be the beginning of serious trouble for the GOP’s plan to overhaul the healthcare law.

Stay tuned, and don’t forget to contact your congress critters. They can’t wait to hear from you.

Joe and Mika see the light. Again.

by digby

We’ve been through this before with the MorningJoe duo. During the campaign they started out as big boosters, then lost faith then came back on board. I don’t know why they have such a hard time with this.

Anyway, this was this morning:

“I think he just doesn’t care. All he wants to do is blow something up, as big as an explosion as possible to distract from other things,” Scarborough said. “Everything is the short game. It proves he is a day trader and he does live in the eternal now. So he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care who he hurts.”

Brzezinski was visibly emotional at one point in the show, distraught over Trump’s conduct in his first 45 days.

“I thought this presidency could happen. I thought he could win. He certainly wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to have hope and I wanted to have an open mind,” she said. “It’s past time that we lower the bar so low that we are in the ditch.”

Scarborough seemed to agree. He singled out Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who is said to have the ear of the president. Scarborough called Bannon “the most dangerous person” and a guy who “wants to destroy the government.”

“Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski once had hope for the Trump administration.

“When this presidency started, I had hope and an open mind; I am losing hope and my mind is closing,” she said Monday, turning to a mournful Joe Scarborough.

“You even had Van Jones over at CNN saying [the night of Trump’s first address to Congress was when] Donald Trump becomes president of the United States,” co-host Scarborough remarked.

After his speech to Congress got rave reviews, it took only 24 hours for the Trump adminstration to become more in scandal once again.

By Wednesday night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had come under fire for lying during his congressional hearing, which led him to recuse himself from Russia investigations on Thursday. Meanwhile, the news of top Democrats calling for Sessions’ resignation was quickly offset by President Trump’s bizarre tweeting Saturday, in which he accused President Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower.

“What Donald Trump did on Saturday morning has shaken this government and the confidence of its people to the core,” Scarborough stated. “It is hard to overstate how reckless that tweet was. The 45th president of the United States accusing the 44th president of the United States of personally tapping his phones… calling him sick.”

“Uncouth,” Brzezinski added.

Trump has always been a fan of Breitbart’s conspiracy theories, such as the racist “birther” myth.

However, “for people comparing this to the birther controversy, context is necessary,” Scarborough pointed out. “It is one thing when a reality TV star accuses a president of a sleazy conspiratorial theory. But when a president of the United States accuses another president, the context changes and it becomes dangerous…. We are in crisis.”

He’s got a point.

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