Month: March 2017

Making buck passing official

by digby

I’m so old I remember when a right wing Republican administration got their Justice Department to legalize torture so that those who ordered it and the men and women in the field who carried it out would have a legal defense if anyone objected. It actually worked.

Trump isn’t bothering with any of that. He’s busy tweeting and holding photo-ops. He’s just going to throw the whole thing to the military and say “have at it”:

The White House is considering delegating more authority to the Pentagon to greenlight anti-terrorist operations like the SEAL Team 6 raid in Yemen that cost the life of a Navy SEAL, to step up the war on the so-called Islamic State, multiple U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast.

President Donald Trump has signaled that he wants his defense secretary, retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, to have a freer hand to launch time-sensitive missions quickly, ending what U.S. officials say could be a long approval process under President Barack Obama that critics claimed stalled some missions by hours or days.

In declared war zones, U.S. commanders have the authority to make such calls, but outside such war zones, in ungoverned or unstable places like Somalia, Libya, or Yemen, it can take permissions all the way up to the Oval Office to launch a drone strike or a special-operations team.

Trump’s subsequent defense of the Yemen raid, and discussion of accelerating other counterterrorist operations, shows his White House will be less risk averse to the possibility of U.S.—or civilian—casualties, unlike the Obama White House, which military officials say was extremely cautious to the point of frustrating some military commanders and counterterrorist operators.

Yet that added authority might give Mattis and senior military officers pause, after Trump blamed military leaders Tuesday for the loss of Navy SEAL Senior Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens during the fraught Jan. 28th raid against al Qaeda in Yemen, instead of accepting responsibility for the raid’s outcome as commander in chief.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here,” Trump said Tuesday during a Fox News interview. “They explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”

Mattis and company must know he’s going to throw them over the side if anything goes wrong. I guess they figure they’re immune too and they probably are. Who’s going to cross them?

Former Obama administration officials tell The Daily Beast they’d already streamlined the approvals process for counterterrorism raids, following the failed 2014 mission to rescue U.S. hostages James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Kayla Mueller, who were being held by ISIS in Syria. The hostages were moved shortly before U.S. special operators arrived on the scene. 

“Obama gave a lot of leash to commanders in the field—but not on everything,” said one former senior Obama administration official. “It’s all about controlling escalation. Do I want to give someone else the authority to get me deeper into a war?”

The official explained that in some cases, Obama deemed it necessary to push authority down to his commanders, as when he gave the Navy SEALs the green light to shoot their way out of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, though firing on Pakistani troops might have triggered armed conflict with Islamabad. 

Obama used to give Mattis pre-delegation authority to act when he was head of Central Command on some issues, but not others, the official said. “Will you delegate authority if an Iranian boat gets close, I can take it out? Most presidents will think carefully about that,” he said. “There’s usually a healthy back-and-forth to come up with the right balance.” The official spoke anonymously to discuss the sensitive discussions on approving raids. 

Trump officials believe loosening the permissions process can help turn up the heat against ISIS—and counterterrorist-focused agencies like the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are lining up new targets in anticipation of more numerous and more rapid approvals.

Why do I keep thinking about this?

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 “A performance artist pretending to be a great manager”

A piece of the action
by Tom Sullivan

If Donald Trump’s speech last night to a joint session of Congress had moments that were “Reaganesque,” as Politico’s John Bresnahan described it, it was because we’ve seen this picture before. After the requisite immigrant bashing and more immigrant bashing after that, Trump’s promises recalled Reagan’s boast that he would expand the military and build a 600-ship navy while slashing taxes and balancing the budget at the same time. We know how that worked out.

There was the usual bragging about things with which he had little to do: business decisions by Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, etc. There was the display of victims of crime by immigrants, low by measure, but meant to impress us otherwise. There were promises to expand school choice (charters and vouchers) and health care choices as well. Except for reproductive choice, of course.

Trump stuck to the teleprompter and refrained from attacking his adversaries. If anything, many of his proposals cut against Republican orthodoxy. Republicans found themselves having to give tepid applause to proposals they really, really do not like.

My administration wants to work with members of both parties to make child care accessible and affordable, to help ensure new parents that they have paid family leave, to invest in women’s health, and to promote clean air and clear water, and to rebuild our military and our infrastructure.

The claims on women’s health and clean air and water run counter to actions he has already taken. At Vox, Emily Crockett notes that “family leave” is an expansion of the maternity leave Trump already Trump already proposed. Plans for investing in women’s health, she writes, “will be news to women’s health providers.” Politico’s analysts gave that idea a twenty percent chance of happening.

In the most jaw-dropping, shameless moment of the night, Trump pointed to the widow of William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL who died Yemen at the end of January. Michelle Goldberg describes the moment:

As Carryn Owens stood next to Ivanka Trump, tears streaming down her face, the assembled crowd heartily applauded her monumental sacrifice. She appeared overcome. Then Trump ad-libbed, “And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that, and he’s very happy, because I think he just broke a record.” In other words, Owens’ death had a happy ending because a lot of people clapped at Trump’s big speech.

But along with the xenophobia and self aggrandizement, there were promises to restore jobs. “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways, gleaming across our very beautiful land,” Trump promised.

To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States, financed through both public and private capital, creating millions of new jobs.

That is, the kind of federal program he name-checked Eisenhower for will be privatized under a Trump administration. That doesn’t have the same effect as direct federal spending and will cost taxpayers in fees what it may save them in taxes. And all this while giving the military a blank check and delivering “a big, big cut” in taxes. Reaganesque indeed. Politico’s analysts ranked the infrastructure plan’s chances at ten percent chance. But it was meant to impress, and that’s what many will remember.

Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) tweeted, “That was a good speech. Democrats will underestimate it at their peril.” She’s right.

Trump hit a lot of the right notes to reinforce for those who elected him. Trump again called the Obamacare “failing,” “unsustainable,” and “collapsing,” and vowed not only to repeal it, but to replace it. Easier said than done. But even now, Democrats are mobilizing to spread the news that Trump means to eliminate the protections under Obamacare. The problem is their permanent defensive crouch leaves Democrats trying to undermine Trump rather than compete for his audience and sell themselves. Trump may be a reality show president, but reality shows are popular. There will be much talk of whether last night’s speech was the so-called “pivot” the mercurial autocrat needed to make to succeed as president. But to compete, Democrats need to offer a better product, not just badmouth his. Democrats have got to stop trying to convince voters what’s wrong with Trump and pivot to persuading voters of what’s right with them. They will need more than their usual lackluster base turnout to gain back ground in 2018, whether or not Trump voters have buyer’s remorse.

Trump may be selling snake oil, but he knows how to sell it, and he did last night. One thing I remember from the Reagan and Bush II years: tax rebate checks. How many Americans remember little else? Democrats have to give voters something to fondly remember them by, or at least sell them on the idea that by voting for Democrats there is something in it for them. True or not, Trump is already reinforcing the notion that if they stick with him, they’ll see a piece of the action.

Pivot in his pants

by digby

If we’re supposed to believe that Trump’s had an epiphany on immigration and is “open” to a path to citizenship as long as “both sides” compromise, I’d try to get Sessions, Bannon and Miller on the record about what changed their views on this issue:

One night in September 2014, when he was chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon hosted cocktails and dinner at the Washington townhouse where he lived, a mansion near the Supreme Court that he liked to call the Breitbart Embassy. Beneath elaborate chandeliers and flanked by gold drapes and stately oil paintings, Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sat next to the guest of honor: Nigel Farage, the insurgent British politician, who first met Sessions two years earlier when Bannon introduced them. Farage was building support for his right-wing party by complaining in the British press about “uncontrolled mass immigration.” Sessions, like other attendees, was celebrating the recent collapse in Congress of bipartisan immigration reform, which would have provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented people. At the dinner, Sessions told a writer for Vice, Reid Cherlin, that Bannon’s site was instrumental in defeating the measure. Sessions read Breitbart almost every day, he explained, because it was “putting out cutting-edge information.”

Bannon’s role in blocking the reform had gone beyond sympathetic coverage on his site. Over the previous year, he, Sessions and one of Sessions’s top aides, Stephen Miller, spent “an enormous amount of time” meeting in person, “developing plans and messaging and strategy,” as Miller later explained to Rosie Gray in The Atlantic. Breitbart writers also reportedly met with Sessions’s staff for a weekly happy hour at the Union Pub. For most Republicans in Washington, immigration was an issue they wished would go away, a persistent source of conflict between the party’s elites, who saw it as a straightforward economic good, and its middle-class voting base, who mistrusted the effects of immigration on employment. But for Bannon, Sessions and Miller, immigration was a galvanizing issue, lying at the center of their apparent vision for reshaping the United States by tethering it to its European and Christian origins. (None of them would comment for this article.) That September evening, as they celebrated the collapse of the reform effort — and the rise of Farage, whose own anti-immigration party in Britain represented the new brand of nativism — it felt like the beginning of something new. “I was privileged enough to be at it,” Miller said about the gathering last June, while a guest on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show. “It’s going to sound like a motivational speech, but it’s true. To all the voters out there: The only limits to what we can achieve is what we believe we can achieve.”

The answer to what they could achieve, of course, is now obvious: everything. Bannon and Miller are ensconced in the West Wing, as arguably the two most influential policy advisers to Donald J. Trump. And Jeff Sessions is now the attorney general of the United States. The genesis of their working relationship is crucial to understanding the far-reaching domestic goals of the Trump presidency and how the law may be used to attain them over the next four years. Bannon and Sessions have effectively presented the country’s changing demographics — the rising number of minority and foreign-born residents — as America’s chief internal threat. Sessions has long been an outlier in his party on this subject; in 2013, when his Republican colleagues were talking primarily about curbing illegal immigration, he offered a proposal to curb legal immigration. (It failed in committee, 17 to one.)

Talking to Bannon on air in September 2015, Sessions, who has received awards from virulently anti-immigrant groups, described the present day as a dangerous period of “radical change” for America, comparing it to the decades of the early 20th century, when waves of immigrants flooded the country. He said that the 1924 immigration quota system, which barred most Asians and tightly capped the entry of Italians, Jews, Africans and Middle Easterners, “was good for America.” Bannon is also uncomfortable with the changing face of the country. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think — ” he said on the radio with Trump in November 2015, vastly exaggerating the actual numbers. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

I hate to be cynical but I just have to wonder if people like Bannon and Sessions might just have something sneaky in mind. These are hard core anti-immigration nativist white nationalists.

Keep this in mind as you listen to his happy horseshit:

Behind President Trump’s efforts to step up deportations and block travel from seven mostly Muslim countries lies a goal that reaches far beyond any immediate terrorism threat: a desire to reshape American demographics for the long term and keep out people who Trump and senior aides believe will not assimilate.

In pursuit of that goal, Trump in his first weeks in office has launched the most dramatic effort in decades to reduce the country’s foreign-born population and set in motion what could become a generational shift in the ethnic makeup of the U.S.

Trump and top aides have become increasingly public about their underlying pursuit, pointing to Europe as an example of what they believe is a dangerous path that Western nations have taken. Trump believes European governments have foolishly allowed Muslims with extreme views to settle in their countries, sowing seeds for unrest and recruitment by terrorist groups.
[…]
At the same time that the European share of migration has dropped, the overall foreign-born share of the U.S. population has increased, quadrupling in the five decades since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act took effect. In 1960, the U.S. had 9.7 million foreign-born residents. In 2014, it had 42.2 million.

That change has alarmed right-wing nationalists like Miller and Bannon, who see Trump’s administration as an opportunity to change those migration trends for decades to come.

The two men see the country’s long-term security and wage growth entwined with reducing the number of foreign-born people allowed to visit, immigrate and work in the U.S.

Nations, including the U.S., are undermined by too high a level of diversity, Bannon has argued.

“The center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a — and a reason for being,” Bannon said Thursday at the conservative gathering.

“Rule of law is going to exist when you talk about our sovereignty and you talk about immigration,” Bannon said.

The deportation orders and the travel ban were both designed to “protect the hardworking people” of the U.S. from income suppression, crime and terrorism, Miller said on Fox News last week.

“Uncontrolled immigration over many years has undermined wages, hurting prospects for people from all backgrounds and all walks of life and has made us less safe,” Miller said. “Proper controls will raise wages, improve employment, help migrant workers enter the middle class who are already living here and keep us safe from the threat of terror.”

Yeah. These guys are going to push through Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Trump said this a number of times during the campaign. He was often supposed to have “softened” his position on immigration and “pivoted”. It’s meaningless.

What isn’t meaningless are his Executive orders allowing ICE and the CBO to “take off the shackles.” That’s real. It’s actually happening.

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He Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere 

by tristero

Don’t kid yourself. He’s goin’ nowhere. They love their autocrats (and they hate democracy):

…Mr. Trump has more support among Republicans at this point in office than any president other than George W. Bush. 

“While there were deep divisions in the Republican Party during the campaign, it is clear that the G.O.P. rank and file are well unified behind Trump,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll.

So no, impeachment isn’t on the table. And “engaging” Democrats isn’t on the table. And “preventing the most egregiously wrong-headed things Trump/Bannon are planning” isn’t on the table. And protecting ourselves from disaster isn’t on the table.

And when it all goes poof – as it surely will, from sheer incompetence (but they might also push it along via an American Reichstag Fire ) – do you honestly think either Trump or Republicans have the slightest incentive to be introspective? As in “Wow, this is our fault, we are really fucking up?”

Please. They have the perfect herd of scapegoats: an African-American president (Obama), a woman Secretary of State (Clinton), a press that won’t tow the (Republican) party line, and liberals.

Are you starting to get it yet? I certainly hope so because it really is that serious.