Month: April 2017

On being clueless
by Tom Sullivan

Driving home from a meeting in Raleigh takes over four hours. There is a lot of time to kill. On this particular drive, a friend from the New York City area via Los Angeles was riding along. She is an elegant woman with presence. You notice her immediately when you enter a room. She and her husband had run a travel-related business in southern California and retired in western North Carolina, we knew, but not much else.

So my wife and I started talking about how we had come to the South and a little about our family histories. I talked about how on both sides of my family were Irish Catholic, my father’s family from Dublin via Ontario, my mother’s from the Cork area (we think). My mother’s background is working-class. Her father was a fireman and a union man. My father’s family had been in shipping on the Great Lakes. My wife’s mother traces roots back to the Mayflower while, my wife jokes, her father was the bastard son of a coal miner. And a WWII combat veteran. Then it was our friend’s turn.

She grew up in Brooklyn, she said, but her family is from Puerto Rico. Her great grandmother was from Puerto Rico, she knew, but before that there was nothing. We didn’t have to ask why. She is black. The car went silent.

It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. It’s a common thing, family history. It had never occurred to us someone (other than an adoptee) didn’t have one, and our friend does not. There are websites devoted to geneaology, and online records.* It is something the two of us simply took for granted. Is that white privilege or simply white cluelessness? Whatever, it clued me in to how clueless I was and still am.

So the lefty upset over Barack Obama’s $400,000 fee for a prospective speech to Cantor Fitzgerald gnawed at me this week. A retweeted piece from Marcus H. Johnson got to part of why. (My Our Revolution friends won’t like his take, but for me it brought back a little of that conversation in the car.) Johnson writes:

In late 2016, nearly 9 out of 10 Black voters approved of President Obama. To many Black voters, he is the symbol of success for Black America. You might not agree with everything he has done, and I certainly haven’t agreed with everything, but you have to respect him for what he means to Black Americans — making it to the height of American politics and withstanding eight years of racist attacks. Sanders and his movement see Obama as symbolic of evil neoliberal corporate interests. Therein lies the disconnect. The far right holds disdain for Obama for some of the same reasons that the far left does: They see him as beholden to special interests instead of “those of the people.”

Black people can see this, they aren’t stupid. They see that the political fringe on the left and most of the right hates Obama for some of the same reasons. So when the far left comes out and says that the first Black President should be held to a different standard than Presidents before him — that he doesn’t deserve to get paid for his post-Presidential work or shouldn’t be compensated — the Black community feels that one of its largest symbols of success is under attack from an overwhelmingly white political movement.

[…]

Do you see how Black people see this? How we look at this and say “They don’t want Black people to succeed or to be represented in politics, business, or media? They don’t want Black people to make money?” This is a movement that hates identity politics, refused to campaign in the diverse southern states, and calls out prominent successful Black people for getting paid for their work. Vox wrote an article saying that Obama shouldn’t have taken the money not because it was corruption (it clearly wasn’t) but because the optics could make it appear so. Well, think about how the optics of how the far left appears to Black people. From a Black perspective, you can see how the far left and the far right’s criticisms of prominent Black people appear very similar?

What I can see isn’t the issue. Are Johnson’s views typical of his community? Maybe and maybe not. But I’m sure mine are not. Maybe his criticism that the “far left” (whatever that is) is “moving down a path that doesn’t get them the white working class and pushes away Black and Brown voters,” is unfair and maybe not. But having been blindsided once, memorably, by my own white cluelessness, they give me pause. My perspective is not right. It’s just mine.

* In 2013, a friend digitized and posted online a searchable archive of slave deeds from our county’s past, perhaps the first such record in the country.

He can’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag

by digby

Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker breaks down Trump’s backtrack on the border wall and concludes with this:

From a policy perspective, Trump’s reversal is welcome. There is no credible evidence that a twenty-two-hundred-mile physical wall is the best use of federal funds to deter unauthorized border crossings—never mind the message that a giant wall would send to the rest of the world. The members of Congress who know the issue the best think it’s a bad idea. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the southwest border said they support President Donald Trump’s request for $1.4 billion to begin construction of his promised wall.” And if Trump’s retreat from insisting on wall money helps keep the government open, he should be applauded for being flexible.

But, from a political perspective, Trump has given members of Congress another reason not to trust his word. He promised a health-care bill that would cover everyone, settled for one that would have kicked twenty-four million people off insurance, and then watched helplessly as the bill floundered. He promised a trillion-dollar infrastructure package that hasn’t materialized. And now the wall, Trump’s signature proposal on the campaign, has been shelved. This last point risks angering even Trump’s base supporters—Rush Limbaugh declared that he was “very, very troubled” by the news.

There are lots of reasons for Trump’s lack of legislative victories so far. His White House is ideologically divided, as are Republicans in Congress. Democrats have uniformly opposed his initiatives and Trump has done nothing to try to woo them, even though he will need at least some Democratic votes in the Senate to pass any meaningful measures.

But the biggest problem is Trump himself. The man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” is a terrible negotiator.

If nothing else has become obvious in the past three months, everyone should at least have been schooled about this particular bragging point. His endless self-promotion as the world’s greatest negotiator was one hundred percent prime grade bullshit. When he gets involved he actually destroys whatever chances there were for a deal. And that’s a blessing since every one of his promises, as well as Paul Ryan’s, are daft. If they can keep him away from existing agreements with foreign countries we might come out of this alive.

Take a few minutes to watch this nonsense from the campaign trail on his powers of negotiation and ask yourself why anyone ever believed it:

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Unless they’re buying favors the rich don’t want anything to do with the Trump brand


by digby

If you’re wondering why the Trumps are now looking to do deals in places like Oklahoma and Texas, this might explain it:

President Donald Trump’s election may have all the diplomats clamoring to stay at his Washington, D.C., hotel, but his controversial campaign’s harsh rhetoric and administration’s agenda have made many potential customers uneasy about giving their business to Trump’s properties. Residents of Manhattan’s Trump Place successfully changed their property’s name, two celebrity chefs famously backed out of D.C.’s Trump International Hotel and others were unwilling to replace them, and Trump’s new line of hotels won’t bear his name. Then last December, a month after three NBA teams announced they wouldn’t stay at his hotels, members of the Cleveland Cavaliers (including Black Lives Matter supporter LeBron James) refused to stay at the Trump Soho. Now, that hotel’s restaurant operator, Koi, an international chainlet of sushi spots for beautiful people, is shuttering its outpost there. But this isn’t a closing as usual. It’s collateral damage from the rise of Trump.

“Obviously, the restaurant is closing because business is down. I don’t think anyone would volunteer to close a business if they were making money,” Suzanne Chou, Koi Group’s general counsel, says with a laugh. “Beyond that, I would prefer not to speculate as to why, but obviously since the election it’s gone down.”

[…]

“Before Trump won we were doing great. There were a lot of people we had, our regulars, who’d go to the hotel but are not affiliated with Trump,” says Jonathan Grullon, a busser and host who has worked at the restaurant for a year and a half. “And they were saying if he wins, we are not coming here anymore.”

Ricardo Aca, who worked at the restaurant for four years until this February, concurs, noting twice that “the Kardashians stopped coming.” Following the election, Aca says that business dipped so much that he had to take a second part-time job while he was still working there. As a server in the hotel’s Koi-managed lounge, he saw his hourly earnings fall from about $20 to $15 an hour. And Grullon says he’s making almost $200 dollars less each week and that he, too, has had to get a second job.

According to Grullon, Koi now has just ten service employees, including those in the kitchen. Some staff started walking away once business evaporated, and now that news of the closing is public, more have started to leave. The dining room is often 30 to 40 percent full and never gets past 50 to 60 percent capacity. During lunch, they’ll serve fewer than 30 people in a restaurant that can seat 140.

“We’ve been getting cut all the time. There is no reason for us to be there,” Grullon says. “They say they’re going to close June 18, but I think it’s going to be sooner.”

So much for job creating.

As I wrote earlier, the boys and Ivanka are very worried about this. Their brand is seriously damaged for anyone who isn’t trying to buy favors from the president. And that world is pretty small, certainly too small to support an empire.

But they have a lot of experience hawking cheap gaudy consumer items to poor people so they should be ok in the end as long as Trump’s voter base stays with him. But their high end businesses may just be taking a fatal hit.

Update: Their cheap consumer goods are too:

On Monday, it was reported that Ivanka Trump apparel was being sold with an “Adrienne Vittadini Studio” label in the US discount chain Stein Mart. The company that makes Trump’s clothes under licence, G-III, then admitted it had been responsible for relabelling the items. 

So now even the people who paid to use Ivanka Trump’s name are secretly removing it? Yes, although we don’t know why. Apparently, it is common to remove or replace labels on high-end fashion items that don’t sell, in order to prevent the brand being seen in discount stores.

Her goods have always been in discount stores. (I know this because I shop in them.) The only reason they would do this is because her stuff isn’t even selling there.

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The oversight committee watchdogs are on the case

by digby

You may believe that congressional oversight has gone lax now that Trump is in the White House, but you should think again:

The private internet company hired by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to maintain her private email server has been obstructing a congressional investigation into its actions for more than a year, prompting a leading lawmakers to refer the case to the Trump administration’s Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has asked the DOJ to prosecute Platte River Networks CEO Treve Suazo for obstructing a congressional investigation into his company’s role in providing security for Clinton’s home brewed email server, which became the subject of widespread debate following revelations that it had multiple security vulnerabilities.

Smith, whose committee has jurisdiction over the investigation, said the Congress would not tolerate Platte River’s failure to comply with the investigation.

“The Committee is referring Mr. Treve Suazo, CEO of Platte River Networks, to the Department of Justice for prosecution under federal laws pertaining to failing to produce subpoenaed documents, making false statements to Congress regarding possession of documents, and obstructing Congress,” Smith said in a statement.

“Platte River Networks, a company hired by former Secretary Hillary Clinton, has deliberately withheld requested materials from the Committee and refused to comply with lawfully issued subpoenas,” Smith alleged. “With a new administration in place, I am hopeful that the Department of Justice will appropriately respond to the referral.  We cannot allow companies with valuable information to stonewall us in our oversight efforts.”

Senior congressional aides apprised of the situation said their investigation shows there is mounting evidence there were “pretty serious cyber security concerns” with Clinton’s server.

They’re not going to let anyone get away with such grave threats to our national security, nosirree. They are ON IT.

They don’t seem to be interested in the cybersecurity issue of the Russian hacking of the presidential campaign, however, which seems odd.

One member of the committee weighed in last fall on that:

Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said Thursday that it was “terrific” that voters got more truthful information about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, regardless of whether the hackers were Russian.

“The hackers, whether or not they’re Russian hackers, I don’t know,” the California congressman said. “I know the CIA and the FBI disagree as to who the hackers are. But whether they’re Russian hackers or any other hackers, the only information that we were getting from hackers was accurate information, was truthful. And that’s not gonna turn the tide. If the American people have been given more truthful information, that’s terrific.”

Contrary to what Rohrabacher said, US intelligence agencies have near uniform consensus blaming Russia for hacks during the presidential campaign into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. As CNN has reported, the disagreement between the FBI and CIA is over whether the Russians’ specific goal was to get Donald Trump elected, not as the lawmaker says over who is behind the cyber attack. Since that was reported earlier this month, Democrats and many Republicans, led by senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, have called for an investigation into Russian interference in the election. Trump, meanwhile, has said he does not believe the intelligence agencies that Russia was trying to help him win the White House.

In the interview on the John and Ken Show on 640 KFI California radio, Rohrabacher expressed skepticism that the hackers were Russian but praised them for doing better investigative journalism during the campaign than the American media.

He said, “It was truthful and in fact, whoever the hackers were, who could’ve been our hackers or Russian hackers or whoever, they were doing more investigative journalism into the corruption and arrogance of the liberal Democratic campaign for president than any of the national media, who were just hellbent to try to destroy Don Trump. That’s all they focused on.”

Rohrabacher, who is the chairman of the House subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, has made headlines in recent months for his affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin. In an interview earlier this month with Yahoo News anchor Bianna Golodryga, Rohrabacher said that the anchor’s claim that Russia was a human rights abuser was “baloney,” then accused her of bias because she was a political refugee from the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

In Thursday’s radio interview, Rohrabacher recounted a story of how he once played American football, went to a pub, and then arm-wrestled Putin while Putin was an official in the city of St. Petersburg. Putin won the arm-wrestling match, Rohrabacher said.

Trump’s a big Rhorabacher fan. He invited him to the White House after he saw Rohrabacher defend him on Fox News.

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“I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here. But this shit is hard.”

by digby

Dear God, we are doomed. Politico has published an article on “The Education of Donald Trump” and it is really alarming. It’s not just him. It’s the whole White House:

It was classic Trump: Confident, hyperbolic and insistent on asserting control.

But interviews with nearly two dozen aides, allies, and others close to the president paint a different picture – one of a White House on a collision course between Trump’s fixed habits and his growing realization that this job is harder than he imagined when he won the election on Nov. 8.

So far, Trump has led a White House gripped by paranoia and insecurity, paralyzed by internal jockeying for power. Mistrust between aides runs so deep that many now employ their own personal P.R. advisers — in part to ensure their own narratives get out. Trump himself has been deeply engaged with media figures, even huddling in the Oval Office with Matt Drudge.

Trump remains reliant as ever on his children and longtime friends for counsel. White House staff have learned to cater to the president’s image obsession by presenting decisions in terms of how they’ll play in the press. Among his first reads in the morning is still the New York Post. When Trump feels like playing golf, he does — at courses he owns. When Trump feels like eating out, he does — at hotels with his name on the outside.

As president, Trump has repeatedly reminded his audiences, both public and private, about his longshot electoral victory. That unexpected win gave him and his closest advisers the false sense that governing would be as easy to master as running a successful campaign turned out to be. It was a rookie mistake. From the indignity of judges halting multiple executive orders on immigration-related matters—most recently this week—to his responses to repeated episodes of North Korean belligerence, it’s all been more complicated than Trump had been prepared to believe…

As he sat in the Oval Office last week, Trump seemed to concede that even having risen to fame through real estate and entertainment, the presidency represented something very different.

“Making business decisions and buying buildings don’t involve heart,” he said. “This involves heart. These are heavy decisions.”

Fergawdsakes! This is infuriating. What in the hell qualifies him for the job then? Or any of them?

When Donald Trump gets angry, he fumes. “You can’t make them happy,” he said. “These people want more and more.”

He was complaining to friends that he had negotiated for weeks with Freedom Caucus members and he couldn’t believe the group was still against the health care legislation. Trump and his advisers were buzzing about making an enemies list and wanted to force a vote. But it was Trump, a man who hates to show weakness, who had to blink. As support flagged, the bill was shelved.

“I kind of pooh-poohed the experience stuff when I first got here,” one White House official said of these early months. “But this shit is hard.”

Maybe we should have hired someone for the job who has done something notable other than grab women by the pussy, hawk cheap consumer goods and say “you’re fired” on TV. Just a thought.

And it’s going to get worse:

The [health care] defeat represented an early inflection point for a president who is openly more transactional than ideological. More than anything, it reinforced the president’s conviction that he could only trust the tight circle of people closest to him.

Now, Trump is forging ahead alone on taxes, rolling out a dramatic package of tax cuts on Wednesday without input from Hill leaders. “We aren’t listening to anyone else on taxes,” said one senior administration official, referring to Ryan. “It’s our plan.”

Yeah, that’s already going well. Their “plan” (such as it is) explicitly focuses on giving people like Donald Trump and his kids massive tax breaks. That’s a really excellent political strategy.

The problem,of course, is him. He’s an incompetent imbecile with a monumental ego and they can’t change him at this late date. The man is 70 and he’s been dancing away from abject failure his whole life. It’s all he knows:

As Trump is beginning to better understand the challenges—and the limits—of the presidency, his aides are understanding better how to manage perhaps the most improvisational and free-wheeling president in history. “If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” said one Trump confidante. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”

Interviews with White House officials, friends of Trump, veterans of his campaign and lawmakers paint a picture of a White House that has been slow to adapt to the demands of the most powerful office on earth.

“Everyone is concerned that things are not running that well,” said one senior official. “There should be more structure in place so we know who is working on what and who is responsible for what, instead of everyone freelancing on everything.”

But they’re learning. One key development: White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.

“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”

Downplaying the downside risk of a decision can win out in the short term. But the risk is a presidential dressing-down—delivered in a yell. “You don’t want to be the person who sold him on something that turned out to be a bad idea,” the person said.

Advisers have tried to curtail Trump’s idle hours, hoping to prevent him from watching cable news or calling old friends and then tweeting about it. That only works during the workday, though—Trump’s evenings and weekends have remained largely his own.

“It’s not like the White House doesn’t have a plan to fill his time productively but at the end of the day he’s in charge of his schedule,” said one person close to the White House. “He does not like being managed.”

He also doesn’t like managing—or, rather, doesn’t mind stoking competition among his staffers. While his predecessor was known as “no-drama Obama,” Trump has presided over a series of melodramas involving his top aides, including Priebus, Bannon, counselor Kellyanne Conway and economic adviser Gary Cohn.

“He has always been a guy who loves the idea of being a royal surrounded by a court,” said Michael D’Antonio, one of Trump’s biographers.

He’s obsessed with the media and it pretty much determines how he sees the world. Nothing else really penetrates. He’s got a very important new adviser too:

Trump continues to crave attention and approval from news media figures. Trump huddled in the Oval Office with Matt Drudge, the reclusive operator of the influential Drudge Report, to talk about his administration and the site. Drudge and Kushner have also begun to communicate frequently, said people familiar with the conversations. Drudge, whose visits to the White House haven’t previously been reported, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Several senior administration aides said Trump loves nothing more than talking to reporters – no matter what he says about the “failing” New York Times or CNN – and he often seems personally stung by negative coverage, cursing and yelling at the TV. Kushner, too, sometimes calls TV personalities and executives, in particular MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, according to people close to the Trump son-in-law. (It didn’t go unnoticed in the West Wing that, at the height of the Kushner-Bannon war, the Drudge Report and Scarborough’s Morning Joe had an anti-Bannon flair to their coverage.)

If the goal of most administrations has been to set the media agenda for the day, it’s often the reverse in Trump’s White House, where what the president hears on the cable morning gabfests on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN can redirect his attention, schedule and agenda. The three TVs in the chief-of-staff’s office sometimes dictate the 8 a.m. meeting – and are always turned on to cable news, West Wing officials say.

This is so pernicious. As someone who has to watch all this crap let’s just say that it will warp your thinking. You have to read. A lot. You simply cannot understand reality if you depend on cable news, particularly Fox.

Relying on Drudge is actually very smart of Kushner. Drudge is a wingnut. Back during the campaign I wrote about how the beltway media also still follow him like the pied piper. There’s big money in it. He was instrumental in inflicting as much damage to Clinton as possible, giving big links and exposure to the mainstream media’s obsessive coverage of her emails and her health. If they can find the right formula for Drudge to guide the media to their side, it could be very useful. They need a Democrat to torture, unfortunately, and that’s tough right now since Republicans have the whole thing. But if anyone can figure out how to manipulate the press it’s Drudge. He rules their world.

And yes, he is full of shit:

The fact that 100 days, as a marker, has no legal or actual significance outside the media has not seemed to matter to Trump. While he has publicly derided the deadline as “ridiculous” on Twitter, he has decidedly reshuffled his schedule, priorities and agenda in the last two weeks to notch political points, knowing the deadline would get inordinate media coverage.

He has repeatedly pressed aides to have a health care vote before Saturday. He surprised his own staff by promising a tax reform plan by this week and urged them to round out his list of accomplishments. He has maintained an aggressive calendar, wooing conservative outlets and traditional reporters alike.

He told aides this week needed to be a busy one — just as he told them after his inauguration.

In days 1 through 10, it was executive orders on a federal hiring freeze, abortions abroad, withdrawing from an Asian trade deal and the explosive immigration order barring immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries. He got into a diplomatic row with Australia, one of America’s closest allies. The immigration order sparked international protests and was stopped in court. Trump later told advisers he regretted how it was handled.

In days 90 through 100, it was a flurry of executive orders. He got into a diplomatic row with Canada, one of America’s closest allies, threatening a trade war. He moved toward unwinding NAFTA. “There is no way we can do everything he wants to do this week,” one senior official said.

“Trump is a guy of action. He likes to move,” said Chris Ruddy, a close friend. “He doesn’t necessarily worry about all the collateral damage or the consequences.”

Just what we need in a Commander in Chief.

Read the whole thing. There’s actually a whole lot more and it’s all terrifying. It’s actually worse than I thought.

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The country may be going to hell but the Trump family grift is going better than ever

How dare those liberals disrespect broads like that

by digby

Jesse Waters is Bill O’Reilly’s heir apparent at Fox News. He was groomed by the man himself. And he learned well:

“It’s funny. The left says they really respect women and then when given an opportunity to respect a woman like that they boo and hiss … so I don’t really get what’s going on here, but I really liked how she was speaking into that microphone,” Watters said.

Watters gestured with his hand toward his mouth as he made the remark and then grinned at his co-hosts.

They’ve told him to take a few days off.

You have to love the fact that this guy was lecturing about how the left is hypocritical about respecting women for booing Ivanka and in the same breath said this. It’s not just misogyny although it is that. It’s the right’s patented “I know you are but what am I” junior high level snottiness that Watters so perfectly epitomizes. This style of politics is a true trademark of the right.

The interesting thing is that the Fox audience is made up of white, male, conservative, senior citizens who apparently never grew up. And they run the world. Explains a lot.

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Word salad strategery

by digby

That one-page list of tax cut talking points may not have been too well thought out:

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin today told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos that he couldn’t say how Donald Trump‘s sweeping tax overhaul plan would affect the president personally, while also declining to guarantee that middle-class families wouldn’t pay more under the proposal.

“I can’t make any guarantees until this thing is done and it’s on the president’s desk. But I can tell you, that’s our number one objective in this,” Mnuchin said on “Good Morning America.”

It’s hard to know what he to meant by that but let’s just say that it’s inevitable that “middle class families” will end up paying more so that the wealthy can pay less. We already know that they want to stick it to middle class people who have to buy health insurance in the private market. And somebody’s got to pay for that massive military build up.

Still, it’s interesting that they decided it was a good idea to put out a sheet of paper with a vague blueprint laying out tax cuts for Donald Trump and his family that makes it clear they didn’t give a second thought to the question of how it would affect the average working family. I assume they thought this would be popular.

And it undoubtedly will be popular with Trump’s base once the right wing media tells them to believe him or believe their eyes. Greg Sargent reported today:

With the White House visibly agitated by the possibility of brutally negative coverage of President Trump’s tenure thus far, he has insisted that the press is misrepresenting his record, while also vastly inflating it himself — thus preparing his voters to dismiss everything they are being told about his historic lack of accomplishments.

A new Post-ABC News poll suggests that this may be working for Trump. It finds that enormous majorities of his voters believe the news media regularly publishes false stories. Even bigger majorities of them believe the news media’s falsehoods are a bigger problem than Trump’s falsehoods are, while only small fractions think Trump tells falsehoods or that his lies are the greater problem. Just look at these findings, which I pulled from the crosstabs:

80 percent of Trump voters think it’s a bigger problem that news organizations produce false stories, while only 3 percent of them think it’s a bigger problem that Trump makes false claims. (Among Republicans overall, this is 69-14.)

Only 17 percent of Trump voters think Trump regularly makes false claims, while 76 percent of Trump voters think he doesn’t. (Among Republicans overall, this is 31-65.) 

By contrast, 78 percent of Trump voters think that news organizations regularly produce false claims, while only 19 percent of them think otherwise. (Among Republicans overall, this is 70-27.) 

Meanwhile, 84 percent of Trump voters think he’s keeping most of his major campaign promises, while only 4 percent think he isn’t, and 89 percent of them think he’s honest and trustworthy.

The question is whether those things are related: Amid increased press scrutiny of Trump’s falsehoods and failings, do Trump’s assaults on the media — and the related widespread belief among Trump voters that the media regularly produces false stories — further bond them to Trump and make them more likely to believe he’s succeeding?

It’s possible. Note this finding from another new poll of Trump voters, this one from the University of Virginia Center for Politics Poll:

Nearly nine in 10 respondents (88%) said that media criticism of Trump reinforces that the president is on the right track, and the same percentage agreed with Trump’s assertion that the press is “the enemy of the American people.” 

The lies that tumble from Trump himself are unprecedented in scope, audacity and frequency. The Post fact-checking team had documented more than 400 false or misleading statements as of Day 91 of his presidency. Other administration members have taken their cues from this, particularly press secretary Sean Spicer, who set the tone early on by lying about Trump’s inaugural crowd sizes and accusing the press of falsely diminishing them. Yet to Trump voters, not only does this reality not exist at all; such critical media scrutiny of him and his administration is a sign that he’s doing something right — that he’s on their side, and the news media is the enemy.

Trump has understood this better than anyone from the beginning:

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Voting Rights Jeopardy
by Tom Sullivan

“Alex, I’ll take Voting Irregularities for $100.”
It’s the solution to dead people voting.

“What is Voter ID?”

That is the conservatively correct response to every voting irregularity in the category. Dated voter rolls. Felons voting. Clerical errors. Registration errors. Non-citizens voting. Double voting. Machine tampering. Ballot box stuffing. Absentee ballot fraud (a big one). The entire gamut of election irregularities. For voter fraud vigilantes, one non-solution fits all and puts the voting rights of millions of legal voters in jeopardy in pursuit of the ever-elusive, voter imposter. Why is that?

Right-wing media has been flogging the results of an audit of the 2016 election released last week by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). Misrepresenting those results helps sell one single product that won’t prevent the overwhelming majority of suspected ineligible votes. On Fox & Friends Sunday April 23, guest J. Christian Adams declared, “The system is broken and needs work.”

Yet the Charlotte Observer Editorial Board concludes:

On Friday, the State Board of Elections released the results of an extensive, objective audit of the 2016 election. It found that 4,769,640 votes were cast in November and that one (1) would probably have been avoided with a voter ID law. One out of nearly 4.8 million.

Let that sink in. In fact, the audit identified 508 suspected cases of inelligible votes. Offsetting those (highlight in the original), “A provisional ballot audit resulted in 428 ballots of eligible voters being counted that would not otherwise have counted.” (They won’t be celebrating that on Fox News.) But before we get to the details, the Republican-led NCSBE is careful not to mischaracterize what the votes flagged as worthy of investigation represent (highlight in the original):

This agency strongly cautions readers not to refer to each of these cases as “voter fraud.” As stated earlier, “ineligible voters casting ballots” may be the result of unintentional or intentional conduct. Fraud, in most cases, is an intent crime that requires prosecutors to show that the voter knowingly committed a crime.

The evidence suggests that participation by ineligible voters is neither rampant nor non-existent in North Carolina. Our audits suggest that in the 2016 general election, approximately 0.01% of ballots were cast by ineligible voters. Most incidents are isolated and uncoordinated, and detecting technical violations does not always prove purposefully unlawful conduct. Our work indicates that ineligible voters are not isolated to one political party or any geographical region of the state.

Contrary to the alarmism on the right about election integrity, a 0.01% error rate would indicate a system that works pretty well, well below the defect rate for consumer electronics, actually. The Observer continues:

About 87 percent of those (441) were felons who voted. State law prohibits felons from voting until their sentence is fully served, including probation and parole. It is believed that many of the felons who voted did not realize they could not vote while on probation.

The probe found 41 non-citizens, from 28 countries, voted. All were here legally, but were not eligible to vote. The audit also found 24 cases of double-voting and two cases of voter impersonation (one by mail and one in person).

The two impersonation cases have been referred to prosecutors. They involve ballots by persons voting the preferences of recently deceased members of the family. (Both were Republicans.) The in-person case is the one identified out of 4.8 million that might have been stopped by a photo ID law.

It’s the solution to non-citizens voting

The Board is also careful to remind readers that these are for the most part only suspected cases of “ineligible voters casting ballots.” They’ve been flagged for further investigation. In many cases, the initial screening proves incorrect.

Investigations on non-citizen cases also have revealed the complexities
of immigration law and citizenship status.

For instance, some individuals achieve citizenship as a matter of law through “derived citizenship” as the child of a naturalized citizen, though paperwork showing that changed status is only available if requested and official databases may not reflect the correct status. An Application for Certificate of Citizenship costs $1,170. Individual contact with affected registrants has also illustrated the limitations of the data. Even where data from the Division of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the voter rolls matched exactly, a high proportion of flagged individuals were citizens.

And since the cases identified to date are all legal immigrants, they would already have government IDs.

It’s the solution to felons voting

As in the cases of felons returning to voting before completing their parole or probation, the Board believes “education and understanding of state law appear to be the primary problem.”

It’s the solution to double voting

The Board rarely encounters cases of double voting, but has flagged 24 records for further investigation. If past experience is any indication, suspected double voting will turn out in a majority of cases (I wrote about one case I know personally here) to be bad data matching or clerical errors:

Detecting double voting and voter impersonation is a time-intensive process. Database matching is not enough, as administrative errors can lead to voter history being assigned to the wrong person — such as when a poll worker checks off the wrong name on the poll book. Instead, data is only the starting point for cases that ultimately involve live interviews
and signature analyses. NCSBE has begun that process on possible instate double voting cases in 2016. This initial review of NC voter registration records indicates that there are a few dozen possible additional cases of double voting; however, this process is still in its preliminary stages and staff have not yet completed review of voter documents to determine whether the match was due to administrative error rather than illegal voting.

The NCSBE offers additional steps it is taking for reducing voting errors to augment deterrents already in place. They involve improved voter education, updated elections software (to check felon status at the time of registration), automated detection of transcription errors in real time, and continued use of the Interstate Crosscheck Program, among others.

But not voter ID, the all-purpose response when “election integrity” advocates play Voting Rights Jeopardy.

Bill O’Reilly may be gone from Fox but his id carries on

by digby

Via John Amato, I see that Fox is still inciting violence against abortion providers. Here’s The Five’s Greg Gutfield:

Greg Gutfield: “I have a problem with saying you’re pro-life but you respect the other side. Because that’s a PLC — I’m a PLC, I’m a pro-life coward, which means I believe, and it’s untethered to religion, that it is killing a baby. But I’m not going to do anything about it because I realize there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Kimberly Guilfoyle tried to help him out, “Well, you talk about it – You educate.”

Gutfeld replied, “Yeah, but think about it. If in the 1850s there was a talk show called the Ye Olde Five Shoppe and we’re sitting there and we’re going like, ‘I’m against slavery, but you know, I think it’s immoral, it’s wrong, but there’s nothing I can do about it.'”

“If you are pro-life and you believe it is murder, you should be willing to fight for it,” he continued. “That’s the hypocrisy behind this whole idea is that you should be able to start a war if you believe in this that strongly, but we aren’t. We aren’t because we are “PLCs.” I’m a “PLC.” I’m a pro-life coward. It’s what I am.”

He says he’s a pro-life coward because he isn’t willing to start a war over it. The good news for the highly paid TV celebrity, is that some of his viewers are the kind of guys who will happily take up the cause: