“I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally — and that’s the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system — and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.”
Pressed by anchor Jake Tapper if he meant US institutions were under assault internally from the President, Clapper responded,
“Exactly.”
Clapper called on the other branches of the federal government to step up in their roles as a check on the executive.
“The founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances. I feel as though that is under assault and is eroding.”
I guess James Clapper is now a Democratic partisan hack carrying the party line for Hillary. That’s what the Republicans on my TV said all day anyway.
I wrote about this before but it’s worth mentioning again:
Trump’s views on exercise were mentioned in a New Yorker article this month and in “Trump Revealed,” The Washington Post’s 2016 biography of the president, which noted that Trump mostly gave up athletics after college because he “believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.”
Politics and Reality Radio: Digby on Trump’s Melt Down — The Resistance Tackles a Monstrous AHCA
with Joshua Holland
It’s hard to believe that Donald Trump could create so much chaos in such a short amount of time. This week, we’ll kick off the show with Heather “Digby” Parton talking about what was arguably his craziest week yet.
Then we’ll be joined by Andy Slavitt, who served as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama. Now Slavitt’s working with The Healthcare Townhall Project to make sure that people who live in districts represented by Republicans who are too cowardly to face their constituents have an opportunity to participate in a townhall and learn about the ACA repeal bill.
Finally, we’ll be joined by Caroline Isaacs, program director for the American Friends Service Committee in Tucson, Arizona. Caroline will discuss Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ plan to reinvigorate the disastrous War on Drugs, and will tell us the truth about what’s happening on the Southern border.
Playlist:
Caro Emerald: “Back it Up”
Salt n Pepa: “None of Your Business”
Deee-Lite: “Deee-Lite Theme”
Los Lobos: “Flor de Huevo”
Forty-six percent of Americans, including 74 percent of Democrats, say they agree with the statement that Trump fired Comey to slow down the FBI investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.
That’s compared with 38 percent of respondents, including nearly two-thirds of Republicans, who agree that firing was due to how Comey handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It’s possible, of course, that some of those Republicans think he fired him because he failed to “lock her up.” But that’s not the reason given in the Rosenstein memo. And even so, it’s obviously daft since Trump admitted that he did it for other reasons. They believe what they want to believe.
And there’s more:
Just 29 percent of Americans say they approve of President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, while 38 percent disapprove, according to results from a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 32 percent of respondents don’t have enough to say on the matter.
Yet among those who say they have read, seen or heard “a lot” about the firing, 53 percent say they disapprove, versus 33 percent who approve.
The NBC/WSJ poll — conducted May 11-13, after Trump’s dismissal of Comey — doesn’t show a significant change in the president’s overall standing.
Trump’s job-approval rating stands at 39 percent, which is one point lower than last month’s NBC/WSJ survey — well within the poll’s margin of error.
Thirty-eight percent of Americans hold a positive view of the president, while 52 percent have a negative opinion — again mostly unchanged from last month’s 39 percent positive/50 percent negative score. (By comparison, the FBI has a 52 percent positive/16 percent negative score in the new poll, and Comey’s is 18 percent positive/26 percent negative.)
And a combined 41 percent have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in Trump as president, compared with a combined 57 percent who have no or “not much” confidence — again mostly unchanged from April’s poll.
Thirty percent say Trump’s decision to fire Comey has given them a less favorable impression of the president, versus only six percent who say they have a more favorable view; 61 percent maintain that the firing hasn’t changed their opinion of Trump.
By party, 58 percent of Republicans say they approve of Trump’s firing of Comey, while 66 percent of Democrats disapprove. Independents break 36 percent disapprove, 21 percent approve.
A combined 65 percent say they have a “great deal” of confidence or “some” confidence in the FBI’s ability to conduct a fair and impartial investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, versus a combined 40 percent who say the same of Congress.
And asked if they prefer Congress or an independent commission or special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s involvement, just 15 percent pick Congress, while 78 percent support an independent commission or special prosecutor.
That’s nice. But maybe it’s time for the rank and file Republicans to admit that their man is a menace. Maybe they never will.
The head of Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney talking about the GOP health care plan:
“We have plenty of money to provide that safety net so that if you get cancer you don’t end up broke. That doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.”
I’d imagine Ivanka and Jared will be chairing the death panel deciding which diagnoses are worthy of medical care and which ones aren’t.
I can’t believe these people are openly admitting what we’ve all been saying all these years but they are.The problem is that may very well pass this monstrosity even if 80% of the country rise up in anger. God help us.
If you’re not pissing ’em off, you’re not doing it right
by Tom Sullivan
Conservatives lost it over Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional, late-night monololgue May 1 about his newborn son’s emergency surgery. People like this charmer:
Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care.— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 2, 2017
Or this headline from the Washington Times:
Under the New York Post headline, “Jimmy Kimmel’s obscene lies about kids and medical care,” Michele Malkin wrote:
Kimmel implies that opposition to ObamaCare-style insurance mandates is both un-American and indecent. Had he been less hysterical, he would have acknowledged that different health-care systems have pros and cons — and decent Americans can have legitimate differences of opinion on such matters.
Kimmel responded to critics on Monday:
The episode served as an example of something Drew Westen wrote about Democrats’ need for a master narrative in “The Political Brain,” (2008, softcover, pg. 165-166; my highlights):
The task, as I hope to show in the remaining chapters, is to make conscious the “rules” that unconsciously guide most of us on the left as we make moral and political judgments in everyday life, and to weave them into a story that resonates with the average American.
That story should feel to the majority of Americans like their story. The story of the party and its principles should sound like a natural extension of the story of the nation and its principles. If the master narrative of the Democratic Party doesn’t make 60 percent of the electorate feel at home (roughly the percent of self-identified Democrats and Independents), it isn’t a good narrative. The party’s narrative needs to have enough elasticity that candidates in different parts of the country can draw out its implications in ways that fit their values and those of their neighbors. And it needs to draw on shared sentiments that have become associated with the other party, allowing moderates to cross over without feeling like strangers in a strange land. Democrats believe every bit as much in hard work and personal responsibility as Republicans. The problem is that they rarely say so.
Conversely, if the master narrative doesn’t alienate about 30 percent of the electorate, it isn’t a good narrative, either. About a third of the electorate won’t turn left under any circumstances, and if the Democrats’ story doesn’t make them angry, there’s something wrong with it. A substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate, and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles. They are the antagonists of the Democratic story, and if they aren’t antagonized by it the same way liberals are antagonized by listening to George W. Bush’s storytelling, the Democratic story isn’t getting its message across.
Or as I paraphrase Westen: If you’re not pissing ’em off, you’re not doing it right.
Jimmy Kimmel was doing it right. It helped a lot that he has the platform he does, but the reaction proves Westen’s point. Kimmel didn’t set out to piss off conservatives. They were upset because his story touched people and threatened both their narrative and the Trumpcare 2.0 vote.
Anat Shenker-Osorio wrote in February about Democrats’ reluctance to piss people off:
The problem with a message that attempts to turn no one off is that it cannot fire up the most enthusiastic believers. Messaging based on mitigating backlash must pull punches. The base may nod along. But they won’t be parroting your words to others.
Consider the Republican approach to talking to persuadable voters. Ed Goeas, a Republican campaign strategist, characterized this to me by saying, “we don’t look at grabbing the middle. We look at grabbing the majority.”
This distinction between “middle” and “majority” is a key part of why Democrats struggle to engage their voters and generate turnout. Their hot-dog vendor approach — believing you get the most takers by positioning yourself closest to the most people — wrongly assumes people come to political judgments like they seek out fast food.
Placing yourself the shortest ideological distance from middle-of-the-road voters only works if there’s a fixed set of ideas and values that make up a middle. Yet people assess what’s at the center based on what’s introduced to the left and right of it.
But there is more to it than edgy messaging. Kimmel’s monologue was open, honest and heartfelt. It had emotional content, something the left shies from deploying, as if it is cheap or gauche. It often takes a personal or national tragedy for lefties to break out of “smartest kids in class mode,” let down their guard, and speak from their guts to other people’s. We see that as cheapening our politics. Many voters read it as authentic when it is, and often when it isn’t. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have it — what Joel Silberman calls “the ‘It’ factor — and I don’t recall them having to cry to reach voters and top piss off the opposition.
Expressing passion is not a problem they have on the right.
Daily Beast conservative columnist Matt Lewis told CNN viewers, “The passion, I think, is sincere. I don’t think that this is the right move for him to do to politicize this.”
Because when emotional appeals after a tragedy tilt the playing field against conservatives, that’s wrong. When conservatives use emotional, fear-based messaging over a hundred hours each week on nationwide radio and television to move the needle their way, that’s principled. Clearly.
Axios reviewed the reaction to Kimmel’s monologue on social media:
• On Facebook, Kimmel’s monologue clip received over 14 million views and 230,000 reactions in less than 24 hours. His posts typically don’t receive more than 1 million views.
• On Instagram, the video post of his monologue received 122,968 views and 20,022 likes. That’s about double his average Instagram post engagement.
• His tweet of the video received over 26,000 retweets and 79,000 likes. His tweets don’t typically earn more than a couple hundred retweets.
I keep going back to this short video that illustrates the difference between messages with emotional content and those without:
It’s nearly time for the Seattle International Film Festival (May 18th to June 11th). SIFF is showing 400 shorts, features and docs from 80 countries. Navigating festivals takes skill; the trick is developing a sense for films in your wheelhouse (I embrace my OCD and channel it like a cinematic dowser). Here are some intriguing possibilities on my list after obsessively combing through the 2017 SIFF catalog (so you don’t have to).
Let’s dive in, shall we? SIFF is featuring a number of documentaries and feature films with a socio-political bent. Dolores (USA) is a documentary about influential American labor & civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, who has been given short shrift by the history books. Another political doc, The Reagan Show (USA) assembles archival footage to illustrate how the “original” showbiz president sparked the transformation of American politics into the post-modern theater of the absurd we’re watching now on the nightly news. White Sun (Nepal/USA/Qatar) is a drama set against the backdrop of post-civil war Nepal about a Maoist rebel trying to reconnect with his politically antithetical family.
More politics…The Young Karl Marx (France/Germany/Belgium; North American Premiere) is a promising biopic focusing on the early days of Marx and Engels. Nocturama (France/Belgium/Germany) is a drama about “a group of young, multiracial radicals with no stated ideology” who hole up for the night in a mall after committing terrorist attacks in Paris (The Breakfast Club meets Fassbinder’s The Third Generation?). I’m especially interested in seeing This is Our Land (France), which involves an idealistic nurse who is approached by a far-right party to run for mayor. Claiming to be a study on “…how populist ideology can quietly but decisively contaminate ‘good’ people”, the main character is also said to be based on Marine Le Pen. Talk about timely!
I’m always on the lookout for a good music documentary, and SIFF offers an eclectic assortment to pick from this year. Bill Frisell, A Portrait (Australia) takes a look at the elusive, genre-defying Seattle-based “guitarist’s guitarist”, one of those artists who most people have never heard of, yet (paradoxically) has worked with seemingly every recording artist that everybody has heard of (in addition to releasing 35 of his own albums to date). I am intrigued by Chavela (USA), as I admit to being previously unaware of Mexican “rabble-rousing, cigar-smoking lesbian iconoclast” Chavela Vargas.
More music: A Life in Waves (USA) is the first feature-length doc to profile the esoteric yet wildly successful electronica/New Age music pioneer and entrepreneur Suzanne Ciani. Rumble: the Indians Who Rocked the World (Canada) purports to be exactly what its title infers; a celebration of Native Americans (Link Wray, Robbie Robertson, Buffy Sainte-Marie and many others) who have left an indelible mark on modern music.
Speaking of indigenous peoples, SIFF is spotlighting several more indigenous-centric films this year. Angry Inuk (Canada) looks to be conversation-starting documentary that gives a voice to the Inuit side of the controversies that have been raging for years regarding subsistence seal hunting (the director herself is an Inuit activist). Searchers (Canada) is “an indigenous take” on John Ford’s revenge tale The Searchers, centering on an Inuk hunter’s pursuit of a band of marauders who have taken his family (Inuk hunters have a very specialized set of skills!). The icy north also figures into the doc Dawson City: Frozen Time (USA), billed as “a haunting chronicle of the transformations in a Yukon Territory Gold Rush town” (I spent 2 weeks there one night on an Alcan trip).
I have a soft spot for road movies, and several have caught my eye. American Folk (USA) is a drama starring two real-life folk singers as “two strangers who take an impromptu, cross-country road trip in the days after 9/11” (I’m getting a Once vibe). I’m eager to see Weirdos (Canada), the latest from my favorite Canadian director Bruce McDonald (Roadkill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo), a “sparkling coming-of-age road journey” set in 1976. The Trip to Spain reunites director Michael Winterbottom with stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as they bring their patented brand of whining and dining back to the table. Borders (Burkina Faso) is a drama examining a burgeoning friendship between four women from different regions as they cross West Africa by bus.
More African cinema! The action-comedy Bad Black (Uganda) comes straight outta the no-budget “Wakaliwood” studio, and has been a hit with audiences at other festivals. It promises to deliver “ass-kicking commando vengeance unlike anything you have seen before.” Looks like a lot of fun…I’m in! On what I would assume to be a much lighter note, The Wedding Party (Nigeria) offers up “a fresh, female take on Nigerian culture.”
There are thrillers, mysteries and crime dramas aplenty to keep you on the edge of your seat. Bad Day for the Cut (Ireland) pits a “seemingly” mild-mannered Irish farmer against thugs who have killed his ma, and features what is touted as “a career-making lead performance from Nigel O’Neill.” Godspeed (Taiwan) is a crime thriller centering on a down-and-out taxi driver who “accidentally picks up a drug mule” one fateful night (echoes of Michael Mann’s Collateral). Here’s a twist on the hit man genre: Kills on Wheels (Hungary) follows the travails of two handicapped young men who cross paths with “a wheelchair-bound hit man who seems to come straight out of a comic book.” Oy.
Funny stuff: Ears (Italy) is a B&W surrealist tragi-comedy about who wakes up with a strange ringing in his ears and a “cryptic note on his fridge” that jumpstarts what looks to be a pretty weird day. Free and Easy (China) concerns a “soap-peddling shyster” who picks the wrong isolated mountain town to drift into…it’s agog with “idiosyncratic con artists” (I sense irony). Gook (USA) is said to be a mashup of Kevin Smith’s Clerks with Spike Lee’s social commentary sensibilities. It’s a day in the life of two Korean brothers hanging out in their dad’s South Central shoe store-on the first day of the 1992 L.A. riots.
I never miss a chance to get my fantasy/sci-fi/midnight movie fix. Where to start? The Door (China) is a sci-fi mindbender about an auto mechanic who stumbles onto a magic door that leads to an alternate reality (as one does). Also from China: Have a Nice Day, “a grim, animated noir” with “Tarantino-esque dialog” (you had me at “animated noir”). Infinity Baby (USA) is billed as an “absurdist, droll black comedy” concerning “a company who farms out three month-old babies who will never age due to a freak pharmaceutical side effect.” More nightmare fuel: Meatball Machine Kodoku (Japan), is an “utterly insane, blood-and-guts-soaked, action-packed cyber-punk comedy.” OK then.
Obviously, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the catalog. I’ll be plowing through screeners and sharing reviews with you starting next Saturday. In the meantime, visit the SIFF website for the full film roster, and info about event screenings and special guests.
At some point in the coverage of every scandal you’ll hear the chestnut “It’s always the cover-up, never the crime.” This refers of course to the historical reality that scandal-bound figures make more problems by denying or lying about their misdeeds than they would if they had come clean from the start.
This saying first became really popular in the Watergate era—which is significant for what it suggests about the gravity of the underlying crime in that case. Richard Nixon’s beleaguered press secretary Ron Ziegler, a Sean Spicer–like figure of that era, oversold the point when he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a “third-rate burglary.” But the worst version of what Nixon and his allies were attempting to do—namely, to find incriminating or embarrassing information about political adversaries ranging from Democratic Party Chairman Lawrence O’Brien to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—was not as bad as what came afterward. Those later efforts included attempts to derail investigations by the FBI, the police, and various grand juries and congressional committees, which collectively amounted to obstruction of justice.
And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.
Combined with this it makes for a lethal combination:
The nature of the president Richard Nixon was a dark but complex figure. Of his darkness, this obituary/denunciation by Hunter S. Thompson provides a nice overview. Of his complexity, assessments from Garry Wills’s seminal Nixon Agonistes in 1970 to John Farrell’s Nixon: A Life just this spring emphasize the depth and sophistication of his political and strategic intelligence. He was paranoid, resentful, bigoted, and a crook. He was also deeply knowledgeable, strategically prescient, publicly disciplined—and in some aspects of his domestic policy strikingly “progressive” by today’s standards (for instance, his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency).
Donald Trump, by contrast—well, read the transcripts of his two most recent interviews, and weep. He is impulsive, and ignorant, and apparently beyond the reach of any control, even his own.
Read on for the other three reasons. They are all correct, IMO especially the one about the abject cravenness of today’s Republican Party.
I have always suspected that the real issue with Russia is financial entanglements. But who knows? Whether or not Trump personally colluded with Russia doesn’t change the fact that he is refusing to even admit that there is a danger in the fact that they were able to interfere in the election campaign in these new ways that threaten our ability to govern ourselves. And he’s certainly behaving as if he’s got something to hide so even skeptics of big Russian conspiracy should be concerned.
When NASA launches its new big rocket for the first time — more than a year and a half from now, at the earliest — there will be no astronauts along for the ride.
In February, at the request of the Trump administration, NASA began studying whether it was possible to add crew for the first flight of its Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket under development for deep space missions.
On Friday, the space agency announced it would not. During a conference call with reporters, Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., the acting NASA administrator, said the change was technically feasible, but that the additional cost, time and risks outweighed the benefits. “It really reaffirmed the baseline plan we have in place is the best way to go,” he said.
Putting astronauts on the first flight would have added $600 million to $900 million to the $24 billion price tag, Mr. Lightfoot said, and delayed the launch until probably the first half of 2020.
Oh phooey! I guess he’ll just have to build that wall all the way up to the moon now!
