Month: April 2017

Dusk of the Dead revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by La Tête Krançien via Creative Commons.

Zombie lies. They just won’t die. A head shot works for normal zombies, but lies have no heads. [Film idea: headless zombies. How then do the eat brains?] Voter fraud, that really unstoppable zombie lie, gets its genealogy mapped at Politico. The lie’s history goes back decades, but for those just catching up, Lisa Rab begins in 2002. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sent federal prosecutors on a snipe hunt:

“Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he told the attendees of the Justice Department’s inaugural Voting Integrity Symposium. “Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”

Guess what color he imagined those seeking “public relief” were. The same color we all do. We’ve been conditioned to it since at least the Reagan years. Race has been the subtext to voter suppression measures since the days of Jim Crow and literacy tests. Who knows what color Ashcroft thought the zombies were.

The U.S. attorneys found no evidence of any massive conspiracy. By July 2006, they had only 86 convictions to show for over 300 investigations. The Bush Justice Department abruptly fired seven U.S. attorneys that December (and two others later), critics said, for failing to prosecute thin evidence of election fraud. The scandal resulted in a congressional investigation and the resignations of then United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and several others.

But this stuff never goes away no matter how often it’s debunked. In January 2012, S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Shwedo tesified — and got big headlines for saying so (Dusk of the Dead, 2-25-12) — that 950 dead people had voted in the state’s 2010 elections. The Institute for Southern Studies reported the investigation’s findings:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The last I heard, the SCGOP was still looking. Eventually, however, the party’s national branch turned from pursuing the dead to accusing the living. Now it’s non-citizen immigrants behind the alleged widespread and undetectable conspiracy. Plus the threat from people who move from one state but another remain on the voter rolls in their former states for a few years.

In 2014, the Institute for Southern Studies again weighed in on the alleged fraud carried out (somehow) by people registered in two states:

Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies just as quickly debunked the study by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach whose office, after checking 5 million voter records in 2013, “couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.” Because the data, Kromm writes, “offers no proof such fraud is occurring.” Requiring citizens to present identity cards to vote would have no effect on voting in multiple states.

But millions of dead still on the voter rolls (over two and a half million Americans die each year) and the existence of two-state registrants translates, in Republican minds anyway, to millions of actual votes cast against Republican candidates. Cast by whom, they cannot say, but rest assured they have a mental image of their skin color. President Donald Trump is convinced that 3 million or more voted illegally in 2016 and he’s put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of finding them. Just don’t expect Trump to ask Congress for funding to help states upgrade their voter registration systems and do better list maintenance.

Lisa Rab concludes:

The Republican narrative of massive voter fraud persists despite evidence from the party’s own crackdown—what election law expert Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine professor, calls “a whole lot of nothing.” For many conservatives, fears about voting by felons, who they say lean Democratic, and ACORN registration drives have simply been replaced with concerns about undocumented immigrants. (ACORN shut down in 2010 after conservative activist James O’Keefe posed as a pimp and filmed a misleading video of ACORN employees supposedly advising him and a prostitute on how to get a mortgage. O’Keefe later paid a $100,000 settlement to one employee whose name he had smeared.)

[…]

“Just because someone can fill out a registration form doesn’t meant they get on a [voter] list, doesn’t mean they cast a ballot, doesn’t meant the ballot is counted,” Becker says. “There’s a variety of checks in place … that would easily prevent widespread fraud.”

Studies conducted by academics and secretaries of state have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. There are small-scale examples, such as the Texas city councilwoman who was sentenced to five years in prison for registering noncitizens to vote during a 2006 primary. But Lorraine Minnite, a public policy professor at Rutgers, studied the Justice Department’s voter fraud crackdown during the Bush years and found that only 14 noncitizens were convicted of voting between 2002 and 2005.

But promoting the threat of voter fraud is a cottage industry, as I’ve said repreatedly:

Every couple of months, their agents (figuratively) fling smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “voter fraud.” By the time the smoke clears and reporters realize there’s no fire — and no fraud — all viewers remember are hearing the words “voter fraud” over and over again, and the eye-popping crawlers on the news at six about dead people voting. Thus is spread an urban legend.

The voter fraud promotion industry conflates any and all kinds of election irregularities with in-person voter fraud to manufacture a significant problem where there is none, undermine confidence in elections (Vladimir Putin would approve), and build a constituency for photo ID and other election suppression laws that target minority voters with almost surgical precision. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database frequently referenced to support the need for state election “reforms.” But try finding in it actual cases of in-person fraud among 462 criminal cases of vote-buying, registration fraud, double voting, and election rigging by local officials dating back to 1990. In-person fraud is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of votes cast in each election.

Point this out and you might be accused of not valuing election integrity. That the potential exists that someone might vote improperly, the argument goes, demands greater vigilance and higher hurdles to participation. That so few people go to their polling places on Election Day to commit felonies is no counterargument to fraud believers. States allowing concealed and open carry of firearms means millions might breeze into banks and rob them, yet there is no concomitant push for heightened bank security. Nor calls for more barriers to widespread carrying of firearms. Because more regulations simply infringe honest Americans’ rights, and we can’t have that.

Mike Pence will have as much chance of finding those millions of elusive illegal voters as finding space aliens. As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:

The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.

Since we know Trump gets some of his “intel” from Infowars conspiracist Alex Jones, perhaps reporters should ask whether Trump believes he has ever been abducted by aliens and if Alex Jones might be the better leader of the search for extra-legal voters.

Sunday night prep

by digby

The Trump era requires a little light-heartedness at the end of the week-end before we dive headfirst into another freaky week. So, here’s a video that will make you laugh. Watch all theway to the end:

This is the best video on the Internet currently. pic.twitter.com/KPNZddth5S

— Philip Lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) April 1, 2017

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Paging Harry Caul

by Dennis Hartley

Pre-Twitter: Nixon used to wander the White House in the wee hours, drunk as a skunk, talking to paintings of dead presidents.

At least he kept those 3 am ramblings to himself, God bless ‘im:

The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2017

Trump really needs a new hobby. Maybe he can learn to play the sax.

“The tip of the proverbial iceberg for the Commander-in-Chief”

by digby

New Marist poll: 

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating stands at 38%, down slightly from the 41% he received in the February McClatchy-Marist Poll. Trump’s low approval rating is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg for the Commander-in-Chief. A majority of adults have an unfavorable opinion of him, and only 37% of voters grade his performance as either an “A” or “B” which falls short in comparison with the 58% who scored former President Barack Obama in this way as he approached his first 100 days in office.

“Donald Trump is spending political capital he didn’t acquire on Election Day and hasn’t cultivated since,” says Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “Question by question, there is erosion at his base, making it more difficult to move his legislative agenda through Congress.”

[…]

Although Americans are more positive about President Trump’s role in strengthening the nation’s economy than his approach to foreign policy, the verdict is still out. The president has a credibility problem. Many Americans say they trust their favorite news source more than Trump, and more than six in ten say they cannot rely on the White House to provide factual information.

Trump also has a problem with his Republican base. While many GOP’ers still support the president and his positions, the proportion of those who do, has declined in the past month.

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating is upside down with 38% of registered voters reporting they approve and 51% saying they disapprove. This has dipped from the president’s 41% job approval rating in late February.

There has been a shift in Republicans’ views about Trump’s job performance. While more than three in four Republicans, 78%, have a positive opinion of how the president is performing in his post, the proportion has declined from 85% last month. Comparatively, 84% of Democrats and 52% of independents disapprove of how Trump is doing his job as president.

When asked to describe President Trump’s performance using a letter grade, 37% of registered voters think Trump deserves an “A,” 15%, or “B,” 22%. At this point in the presidency of Barack Obama, 58% of the electorate scored the former president with either an “A” or “B.” Nearly half, 47%, grade Trump using either a “D,” 15%, or “F,” 32%. 15% give him a “C.” 77% of Republicans rate Trump with above average grades while 81% of Democrats give him below average or failing marks.

President Trump’s favorable score also remains upside down. 54% of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the president while 37% have a favorable one. These proportions are nearly identical to those reported in February, 54% and 38%, respectively. Here, too, fewer Republicans have a positive impression of Trump, 78%. This is down from 87% last time.

Americans are also not convinced that the president is changing the nation for the better. In fact, a plurality, 42%, perceive him to be changing the country for the worse. Nearly one in five, 19%, say he is not having any impact, and 36% report he is making positive changes to the nation. Three percent are unsure. There has been little change on this question since it was last reported.

There has been a profound shift in public opinion about whether or not President Trump is fulfilling campaign promises. 57% of Americans either strongly agree, 18%, or agree, 39%, that Trump is making good on the promises he made on the campaign trail. This is down from 71% in February. Regardless of party, fewer voters think he is keeping his word. Of note, 83% of Trump’s Republican base, down from 96% previously, believe Trump is fulfilling campaign promises.

[…]

When it comes to whether President Trump’s conduct makes Americans feel proud or embarrassed, there has also been a change among the GOP faithful. Two-thirds of Republicans, 66%, report the president makes them feel proud, down from 78% in February. Among the overall population, 60% of Americans say they are embarrassed by President Trump’s actions. 30% are proud. These proportions are similar to those reported last month.

Taking a closer look at the issues, a majority of Americans, 56%, think Trump has weakened the role of the United States on the world stage. 35% believe the country’s global position has been strengthened. These proportions are similar to those reported in late February. Again, Trump is down among Republicans. While 71% of the GOP believe the president has bolstered the United States’ role internationally, that proportion has declined from 82%.

A majority of Americans, 54%, think President Trump’s meetings with foreign leaders have weakened the standing of the United States. This is an increase from 48% previously. 37%, compared with 42% in February, report Trump’s talks with foreign leaders has strengthened the position of the United States. Republicans, 77%, down from 84%, think these meetings with international leaders have positively affected the standing of the United States. And, a plurality of Americans, 48%, still perceive Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin to be a negative for the United States. 39% consider it to be advantageous. These proportions are little changed from the February survey.

[…]

In the eyes of the American public, President Trump has a credibility problem. 70% of Americans with a favorite news source say they trust their preferred source of news over Donald Trump. 23% of residents nationally say they trust the president more. Last month, 67% said they had more faith in their favorite media outlet while 28% said they placed their trust in Trump. There has been a marked change among Republicans. They currently divide with 48% saying they trust Trump more and 43% reporting they trust their favorite news source. Previously, 68% of Republicans had more trust in the president compared with 28% who had more faith in their favorite news source.

More than six in ten Americans, 61%, also have little, 22%, or no, 39%, trust in the Trump Administration to deliver accurate and factual information to the public. 37% report they have a great deal, 13%, or good amount, 24%, of confidence in the White House to do so. This is little changed from when the McClatchy-Marist Poll previously reported this question.

Seven in ten Americans, 70% up slightly from 66%, consider the president’s communication through Twitter to be reckless and distracting. 19%, down from 25%, think it is an effective and informative tool. Here, the largest change has been among the president’s own party. A plurality of Republicans, 45%, think Trump’s use of Twitter is reckless and distracting while 36% say it is effective and informative. Last month, a majority of the GOP, 54%, described Trump’s Twitter communication as effective and informative, and 29% said it was reckless and distracting.

[…]

What do Americans think Congress should do about the issue of health care? 64% of residents want Congress to either let the Affordable Care Act stand, 18%, or change it so that it does more, 46%. This is a slight increase from 60% of Americans who had these views in February. It is of note that the proportion of those who want to expand Obamacare has increased from 39% last month. 33% of Americans currently, compared with 36% previously, say they want it changed to do less, 7%, or to repeal it completely, 26%. Among Republicans, 30% up from 21%, think Obamacare should be left alone, 7%, or should be expanded, 23%. Here, too, the proportion who want Obamacare to do more has increased from 16% in February.

Most Americans, 83%, favor providing a “Pathway to Citizenship” for undocumented immigrants who are currently in the United States as long as they meet certain criteria. 15% oppose such legislation. There has been little change on this question since last month.

Looking ahead to the 2018 election for Congress, 47% of registered voters say they would support the Democratic candidate in their district. 38% would back the Republican, and 8% say they would not support either candidate. Seven percent are undecided. There is a wide partisan divide. Among independents, 41% say they would cast their ballot for the Democrat, and 30% report they would support the Republican. 16% would not choose either.

Not surprisingly, Americans perceive a disconnect between their elected officials and the public. Nearly eight in ten Americans, 78%, say that individuals who are in positions to make decisions for the country mostly see things differently than the public. In contrast, only 15% report those in power see things the way the public does. When this question was last reported in December 2016, 73% of adults thought the two did not see eye-to-eye. 22% thought elected officials and the public were on the same page.

Do Americans trust the institutions of the United States? Residents are more likely to have a great deal or a good amount of trust in the Intelligence Community such as the CIA and the FBI, 61%, in the courts, 61%, or in the fairness of elections, 55%, than in public opinion polls, 36%, the Trump Administration, 35%, the media, 34%, or Congress, 27%.

Nearly six in ten Americans, 59%, think the nation is moving in the wrong direction while 34% say it is moving in the right one. In February, 55% reported that the nation was off course, and 38% said it was traveling in the right direction. Among Republicans, the proportion of those who believe the country has gone off the rails has nearly doubled since last month, 26% up from 14%. 68% of the GOP currently believe the country is on track, down from 82% previously.

Those are just the highlights. There’s more.

I find this a bit terrifying, actually. This guy is in big trouble and I don’t know how he and his freaky henchmen will handle it. He has no credibility. We’re already drifting into a wider war in the middle east. Just imagine how a terrorist attack will be dealt with in this age of propaganda and “fake news.”

Oy.

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Reckless, petulant, full of self-regard

by digby

The LA Times editorial board is as edgy as a scruffy blogger these days:

Yeah. What they said.

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Politics and Reality Radio

with Joshua Holland

This week, we’ll be joined by Harold Pollack, a mild-mannered health wonk from the University of Chicago, for a post-mortem on the disastrous GOP bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act — and a look at what may lie ahead for healthcare.

Then we’ll speak with Daniel Dudis, director of Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch, to discuss a new report he and a colleague wrote about the Chamber of Commerce’s legal philosophy and litigation strategies. This is timely, as Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia on the nation’s highest court, hasn’t said much about his own philosophy, but used to represent the Chamber in private practice.

Playlist:
Haley Reinhart and Postmodern Jukebox: “Creep”
Patty Loveless: “Two Coats”
Marcia Griffiths: “Working to the Top”
Cachao: “Los Tres Golpes”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

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Headline o’ the day

by digby

Yeah, I’m thinking the guy who says he loves torture and wants to “take out the families” probably doesn’t care too much about human rights.  And, by the way, neither do his supporters. Unless they are personally being denied them, of course, in which case they are huge believers.

Anyway:

Egypt’s military ruler Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was never invited to the Obama White House, where he was viewed as a brutal tyrant with little regard for human rights and democracy.

On Monday, President Donald Trump will roll out the red carpet for him.

Reviled by activists for what they call the harshest political repression in Egypt’s history, Sisi has emerged as an early Trump favorite among world leaders. The two men first met during the presidential campaign in September, leading Trump to call Sisi a “fantastic guy,” and Sisi was the first foreign leader to reach Trump after his election.

Their meeting Monday will offer important clues about how Trump plans to engage with foreign dictators with poor human rights records. It is also key to Trump’s effort to bolster ties with Arab allies in the fight against Islamists across the Middle East.

While Western governments have protested Sisi’s imprisonment of thousands of people on dubious political charges, Trump has openly praised the Egyptian autocrat’s ruthlessness.

“He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it,” Trump said in a September interview with the Fox Business Network. Sisi claimed the title of president after a June 2014 election in which his official vote total was 96.91 percent.

Trump and his advisors admire Sisi’s hard—many say brutal—stance against Islamic radicalism. The Egyptian general helped lead the overthrow of an elected Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government in July 2013, and denounces the Islamic State. Other Sisi backers in the White House include senior adviser Stephen Bannon; counter terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka; and Derek Harvey, the National Security Council’s top Middle East official. Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also back better ties with Egypt.

I’d guess the president is just looking for some tips.

You know, “better ties” is one thing, inviting him to the White House is something else. Trump is basically just telling people who care about human rights to go fuck themselves with this one.

Cozying up to Assad and Sisi in the course of a week, I’d guess we know which way the wind is blowing. Not that I’m surprised. I’ve been screaming about his love for authoritarians almost since the day he announced his nomination. It’s not just about Putin, people. The president of the United States is a man who has little knowledge of or interest in fundamental human rights or the constitution and has expressed a frightening admiration for dictators. And he’s completely open about it.

I guess we can hope our institutions will save us but they aren’t exactly looking robust at the moment.


I wrote this back in August of 2015, two months into the presidential campaign, before any of the primary debates:

Ever since The Donald descended that escalator at Trump Tower a couple of months ago to announce his entry into the presidential race, Democrats have been laughing. Watching the Republicans squirm and Fox News jump through hoops has made the GOP presidential primary a delightful entertainment for their rivals on the other side of the aisle. I don’t know how many of them had it in them to watch the whole Trump Town hall extravaganza in Derry, NH, on Wednesday — but those who did were unlikely to be laughing by the end of it.

There was the standard braggadocio and egomania that characterizes his every appearance and weird digressions into arcane discussions of things like building materials (for The Wall, naturally.) He complained about the press and politicians and declared himself superior to pretty much everyone on earth. But after you listen to him for a while, you come away from that performance with a very unpleasant sense that something rather sinister is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon.

Trump was still talking when Chris Hayes opened his show that night with this comment:

I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here because I think what we are seeing is past the point of a clown show or a parody. I believe it is much more serious and much darker…You have someone now who is getting huge crowds, who is polling at the top of the GOP field, who polls show is beating Jeb Bush by 44 to 12 percent on the issue of immigration, going around the country calling little children, newborn babies, anchor babies saying that he’s going to use that term which I find a dehumanizing and disgusting term. Talking about giving the local police the ability to “do whatever they need to do to round up” the “illegals”. Building a wall, talking about basically chasing 11 million people out, talking about deporting American citizens to “keep families together”, talking about what would essentially be the largest most intrusive police state in the history of the American republic to go about this task, that is the person that is right now at the head of the Republican party’s presidential contest.

And the delirious crowd applauded all those those things just as they loudly cheered this reference to Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier held by the Taliban for more than five years:

“We get a traitor like Berghdal, a dirty rotten traitor, who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him. And you don’t even hear about him anymore. Somebody said the other day, well, he had some psychological problems.

You know, in the old days ……bing – bong. When we were strong, when we were strong.”

It’s that pantomime of him shooting Berghdahl dead and saying “when we were strong, when we were strong” that appeals so much.

Trump repeatedly paints a picture of America in decline — weak, impotent and powerless, in terrible danger of losing everything unless we get a leader who will cast off all this “political correctness,” this effete insistence on following the rules. He promises to “make America great again” by cracking down on the “bad people” and being very, very strong.

When talking about Iraq, he characterized the the Iraqi people as cowards, “running whenever the bullets are flying.” He said “the enemy has our best equipment, we have the old stuff” and that the country is a mess because of all the “years of fighting unsuccessfully — because of the way we fight.” (The implication is that we didn’t take the gloves off.) He said, “the problem is that as a country we don’t have victories anymore. When was the last time we had a victory?” And he declared, “I believe in the military and military strength more strongly than anybody running by a factor of a billion… We are gonna make our military so strong and so powerful and so incredible, so strong that nobody’s gonna mess with us, folks, nobody. And we don’t have that right now.” This garnered huge cheers from the crowd.

On economics, it’s all about other countries taking advantage of the US. He said, “They’re up here, we’re down there. I don’t blame China or Mexico or Japan. Their leaders are smarter and sharper and more cunning — and that’s an important word, cunning — than our leaders. Our leaders are babies…our country is falling apart.”

He explains the problem:

China is killing us. They’ve taken so much of our wealth. They’ve taken our jobs. They’ve taken our business, they’ve taken our manufacturing, [audience member screams out “our land”] Our land? The way they’re going they’ll have that pretty soon.Think about it, we have rebuilt China — somebody said to me “that’s a harsh statement” — it’s the greatest theft in the history of the United States. Now I have great respect for China and their leaders. The largest bank in the world is from China. They’re a tenant of one of my buildings. I love China I think it’s great. But we don’t have the people that know what they’re doing so … they’re killing us. You know what that is? They call it a sucking action. They’re sucking the jobs and the money right out of our country.That’s what they’re doing. We’ve rebuilt China. They have bridges, they have airports so do other countries and we’re like a third world country…They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money.They take our jobs they take everything and we owe them money. How does that happen? It’s magic. That’s not gonna happen with Donald Trump.

If a person feels as if this country isn’t what it used to be, that they’ve lost their place, that their future isn’t promising, Donald Trump is telling them right up front that foreigners are to blame. It isn’t the government being unwilling to collect taxes from people like Donald Trump so we can build infrastructure — we’re rebuilding China instead of our own country. It isn’t that we spend vast sums of money to maintain the world’s only superpower military, it’s that people from other countries are stealing us blind. And Trump will fight all these foreigners to take our country back from them wherever they are.

Of course, there is no foreigner who is wrecking this once great country more than the undocumented immigrant and he plans to cleanse our culture of their evil influence:

…we have crime all over the country, we have … the borders, the southern border is a disaster…The other night a 66 year old woman, a veteran, raped sodomized, brutally killed by an illegal immigrant. We gotta stop we gotta take back our country. We’ve gotta take it back! [huge applause]

I love this country and I know that I can make it great again.

We have to build a wall, we have to get the bad people out. A lot of the illegals, if you look at Chicago with the gangs,… you look at Baltimore, you look at Ferguson, a lot of these gangs, the most vicious, are illegals. They’re outta here. The first day I will send those people … those guys are outta here. [cheers] They talk about guns, I’m a big second amendment person, I believe in it so strongly [cheers]. Big. But they talk about guns and you look at Chicago, Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the US by far, and people are being shot with guns all over the place. You need enforcement but you also have to get the bad people out, the people that aren’t supposed to be here and we’re gonna get em out so fast, so quick — and it’s gonna be tough. It’s not gonna be “oh please will you come with us please will you please come with us.” Because you know these law enforcement people, and I know the guys in Chicago, the police commissioner’s a great man. They can do it, if they’re allowed to do it. I know the guys, I know em, New York, they’re great. Bratton, great. They can all do it. They can all do it. But they have to be allowed to do their job, they have to be allowed to do their job. [Cheers]

It isn’t just liberals like Chris Hayes who are becoming alarmed by this. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos sees the attraction of Trump in similar terms:

When a government that has pledged to do everything can’t do anything, otherwise sensible people turn to the strongman. This is how the autocrat, the popular dictator, gains power. We are seduced by his success and strength… As our old, inflexible government grows beyond its capacity to service a complex and adaptive society, and its failures deface our landscape, it creates demand for efficiency. Who can bring order to this chaos? Who has the guts and the strength to make the mess we have made work?
Then, the call goes out for the strongman. Who cares what he believes or promises? And with the voice of the common man, though he is anything but, the strongman comes and pledges to make America great again.

Castellanos agrees with Trump that America is going to hell in a handbasket largely due to liberal failure, but doesn’t think that consolidating power in the hands of a single billionaire is a great way to deal with it.

It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as the words of a kook. But he’s tapping into the rage and frustration many Americans feel when our country is exposed as being imperfect. These Republicans were shamed by their exalted leadership’s debacle in Iraq and believe that American exceptionalism is no longer respected around the world — and they are no longer respected here at home. Trump is a winner and I think this is fundamentally what attracts them to him:

I will be fighting and I will win because I’m somebody that wins. We are in very sad shape as a country and you know why that is? We’re more concerned about political correctness than we are about victory, than we are about winning. We are not going to be so politically correct anymore, we are going to get things done.

But his dark, authoritarian message of intolerance and hate is likely making it difficult for him, or any Republican, to win a national election, particularly since all the other candidates feel compelled to follow his lead. (Those who challenged him, like Perry and Paul, are sinking like a stone in the polls.) And while Trump’s fans may want to blame foreigners for all their troubles, most Americans know that their troubles can be traced to some powerful people right here at home. Powerful people like Donald Trump.

Still, history is littered with strongmen nobody took seriously until it was too late. When someone like Trump captures the imagination of millions of people it’s important to pay attention to what he’s saying. For all his ranting, you’ll notice that the one thing Trump never mentions is the constitution.

[I was too optimistic, obviously. But his appeal has always been very, very clear.– ed]

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Why we have an inheritance tax
by Tom Sullivan

Inheritance taxes date back to ancient Egypt, according to several sources. The earliest of several short-lived inheritance taxes in the United States date back to its founding, the last of those being rescinded in 1902. The Internal Revenue Service explains what happened next:

The years immediately following the repeal of the inheritance tax were witness to an unprecedented number of mergers in the manufacturing sector of the economy, fueled by the development of a new form of corporate ownership, the holding company. This resulted in the concentration of wealth in a relatively small number of powerful companies and in the hands of the businessmen who headed them. Along with such wealth came great political power, fueling fears over the rise of an American plutocracy and sparking the growth of the progressive movement. Progressives, including President Theodore Roosevelt, advocated both an inheritance tax and a graduated income tax as tools to address inequalities in wealth. This thinking eventually led to the passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the enactment of the Federal income tax. It was not until the advent of another war, World War I, that Congress would enact the Federal estate tax.

Winston Churchill observed that death duties are “a certain corrective against the development of a race of idle rich.”

The topic comes up this morning on the news that Donald Trump’s 36 year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will oversee a White House Office of American Innovation to “overhaul the federal government” and “fix government with business ideas.” The government desperately needs this, Stephen Colbert quipped, because “somebody keeps putting totally unqualified people in charge of really important stuff.”

“The government should be run like a great American company,” Kushner told the press. His “SWAT team of business executives” (Washington Post) will, Matthew Norman of The Independent snarks, “apply the commercial mores that have done so much for US wage growth and job security.” Perhaps Kushner will also sort out the Israel-Palestine question on his lunch break.

Kushner, as Colbert points out, was born into a wealthy real estate family and married into a wealthy real estate family. He got into Harvard “despite poor grades” the same year his father donated $2.5 million to the school and made “similar one-off donations to Cornell and Princeton.” This makes him well-prepared to teach America how to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. To advise the Office of American Innovation, Kushner has recruited “Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk.”

When Kushner bought the New York Observer in 2006, he hired Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers as editor-in-chief. On Thursday, Speirs offered her observations on Kushner’s qualifications for his latest White House job.

At the Observer Speirs inherited an office computer of Kushner’s: a recent-vintage Mac loaded, counterintuitively, with a Windows operating system. Her IT tech explained that Kushner preferred the Windows OS, but liked the Apple box for its design:

“So he was basically using a $2,500 desktop as a monitor?” I asked. The IT guy shrugged.

It was a vanity object for Kushner, and a metaphor for his view of the Observer. Speirs explains that even after the paper had its first profitable quarter, Kushner wanted to lay off staff to further goose the returns. He would not put money into the paper to build for the future, saying, “Why should I put more money into the Observer when I could invest in a software company?”

Why buy a newspaper and expect it to work like a software company? Speirs asks. She suggests Kushner in his new role will again attempt to misapply to government lessons from industry that don’t apply, say, to maintaining a nuclear arsenal. This is the same forward-looking bureaucrat whose office expects to be “modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency” when those offices, Speirs suggests, are still using floppy disks because Congress won’t appropriate the money for the upgrades.

Furthermore:

Kushner’s claim to business knowledge, beyond admiring Silicon Valley, boils down to his work for his family’s commercial real estate company, which is hardly comparable to a government institution. And if industry dynamics are not transitive across the board, expertise isn’t, either.

On that count, I don’t even know how to quantify Kushner’s expertise, anyway. Yes, he ran the company — which he inherited, not uncommon in New York’s dynastic, insular real estate world. But he was sure he had the goods. When I worked for him, I didn’t think he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.

Speirs concludes, “You could construe my evaluation as a reasonable observation by an outsider with a set of ‘fresh eyes,’ but you’d be nuts to hand me a billion-dollar commercial real estate company because of it.” Or appoint someone to remake American government who doesn’t know how it works.

Churchill gets the “idle rich” wrong, or else England’s rich are not as insatiable as America’s. The problem with the “idle rich” here is not their propensity to drop out of the labor force. It is inflated egos that convince them their wealth is proof of capabilities that are not there, and that encourage them to seek greater fame and fortune mucking about in affairs for which they are ill-prepared. Donald Trump and his family are proving the Dunning-Kruger effect is not limited to individuals with limited education.

Here’s how the Office of American Innovation might present itself on television:

America, rogue nation

by digby

Via Al Jazeera:

The United States has said that it is no longer focused on ousting President Bashar al-Assad as it seeks a new strategy to end Syria’s civil war.

American officials have been shifting away for some time from their former insistence that he must go, but now they have made it explicit.

In New York on Thursday, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, condemned Assad’s history of human rights abuses against his own people.

But she said Washington would focus on working with powers such as Turkey and Russia to seek a political settlement, rather than focusing on Assad.

“You pick and choose your battles,” Haley told reporters.

“And when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit and focus on getting Assad out.”

Shortly after Haley briefed a small group of journalists, US officials tried to clarify her comments.

A US mission official told Al Jazeera that while the US does not believe that Assad is a legitimate leader of Syria, his future is not the country’s only concern.

The official said the US is also very interested in trying to create the conditions so that the Syrian people themselves can pick their new government, one without Assad.

Other aims of the US in Syria are to get rid of the threat from ISIL and to curb Iranian influence, the official said.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also addressed the future of Assad at a news conference in Turkey.

“I think the … longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people,” Tillerson said, standing alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The comment reflected language long used by Assad’s ally Russia, whose assistance Washington is courting.

I have heard people saying that this is simply saying out loud what has been obvious for some time. There’s no use worrying about Assad, he’s safe,let’s justa join hands with him and Vlad and call it a day. That’s certainly Trump’s view. He could not care less about Assad, if he even knows who he is.

There are reasons why the previous administration didn’t outright back Assad even beyond odious Real Politik.

The Syrian opposition, whose cooperation will be needed in any negotiated solution, reacted furiously to the US shift in stance.

“The opposition will never accept any role for Bashar al-Assad at any phase,” said Monzer Makhos, a spokesman for the High Negotiations Committee, which represents the opposition in negotiations over Syria’s war.

“There will be no change in our position,” he warned.

Under Barack Obama’s administration, the US made Assad’s departure a key goal, but new president Donald Trump has put the accent on defeating the Islamic State of Iraq of the Levant group, known as ISIL or ISIS.

“Our priority is to really look at how do we get things done. Who do we need to work with to really make a difference for the people in Syria?” Haley said…

Words matter…

So do actions. This story by the AP shows reveals that just as he told ICE and the Border Patrol to take off the gloves, he’s done the same thing with the military:

Week by week, country by country, the Pentagon is quietly seizing more control over warfighting decisions, sending hundreds more troops to war with little public debate and seeking greater authority to battle extremists across the Middle East and Africa.

This week it was Somalia, where President Donald Trump gave the U.S. military more authority to conduct offensive airstrikes on al-Qaida-linked militants. Next week it could be Yemen, where military leaders want to provide more help for the United Arab Emirates’ battle against Iranian-backed rebels. Key decisions on Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are looming, from ending troop number limits to loosening rules that guide commanders in the field.

The changes in President Donald Trump’s first two months in office underscore his willingness to let the Pentagon manage its own day-to-day combat. Under the Obama administration, military leaders chafed about micromanagement that included commanders needing approval for routine tactical decisions about targets and personnel moves.

But delegating more authority to the Pentagon — and combat decisions to lower level officers — carries its own military and political risks. Casualties, of civilians and American service members, may be the biggest.

The deepening involvement in counterinsurgency battles, from the street-by-street battles being fought in Iraq right now to clandestine raids in Yemen and elsewhere, increases the chances of U.S. troops dying. Such tragedies could raise the ire of the American public and create political trouble with Congress at a time when the Trump administration is trying to finish off the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and broaden efforts against similarly inspired groups.

Similarly, allowing lower level commanders to make more timely airstrike decisions in densely populated areas like the streets of Mosul, Iraq, can result in more civilian deaths. The U.S. military already is investigating several bombings in Mosul in mid-March that witnesses say killed at least 100 people. And it is considering new tactics and precautions amid evidence suggesting extremists are smuggling civilians into buildings and then baiting the U.S.-led coalition into attacking.

Alice Hunt Friend, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cited yet another concern: Military operations becoming “divorced from overall foreign policy” could make both civilian leaders and the military vulnerable to runaway events.

“Political leaders can lose control of military campaigns,” she warned.

(For more on this, read this tweetstorm.)

Trump said he was going to bomb the shit out of them and that you have to take out the families. He’s keeping his word on that.

These are very scary developments. Trump is begging for terrorist escalation and looking for an excuse to go heavy into the middle east (and possibly China.) He truly believes that making America great again means dominating the world — with economic bullying and violence if necessary. That’s his worldview. He didn’t keep it a secret and it was part of what his voters liked about him.

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O’Reilly is a pig. But we knew that.

by digby

I don’t even want to think about what they were talking about

I suppose some people thought when O’Reilly was exposed years ago as a disgusting sexual harasser in the Andrea Makris case that he learned his lesson and would never do it again. I doubt many women believed that was likely though.

Anyway, he didn’t:

An investigation by the New York Times released on Saturday reveals that at least five women have taken a total of $13 million in settlements after accusing top Fox News host Bill O’Reilly of sexual harassment.

In exchange for the money, the women—both his coworkers and guests on his show—have agreed not to pursue lawsuits against O’Reilly or speak publicly about their accusations. But their initial complaints about his behavior, according to the Times, included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded like Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating, according to documents and interviews.” Multiple women recorded O’Reilly’s inappropriate comments to use as evidence in their cases.

The revelations come after the ousting of the network’s chairman, Roger Ailes, over a similar pattern of serial harassment. Like Ailes, O’Reilly is alleged to have retaliated against the careers of women who rebuffed his sexual advances. Ailes left Fox with a $40 million “exit package,” and briefly offered his services to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In addition to the settlements, former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros filed a lawsuit against the network last summer accusing O’Reilly and Ailes of sexual harassment. She says she suffered professional retaliation after making the complaints. Her lawsuit describes an “effort to silence Tantaros by threats, humiliation and retaliation,” as well as lurid descriptions of the work environment for its female employees.

“Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny,” Tantaros’ suit reads.

It must have been a lot of fun to spend your days fending off Ailes and O’Reilly. Brain bleach, stat.

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