Month: May 2017

Comey and the media in full effect

by digby

I am not getting into all the nonsense that’s going on right now about Hillary Clinton because it’s just so tiresome. Other than the article I posted below I have nothing more to say about her interview yesterday except to note that the behavior of the media afterwards, demanding that she apologize (again and again and again) reminded me of the slavering, febrile hatred apparent in the “lock her up” chants at a Trump rally. It’s more clear to me than ever that it was miracle she won the popular vote with the media’s “lord of the flies” reaction to virtually anything she says. It is a very, very creepy reflexive response that the media has never, and as far as I can tell, will never question.

But there is a matter of history and what actually happened to make Donald Trump the president of the United States. The media seems to have decided that (notwithstanding the three million more votes she received) Hillary Clinton was such a catastrophically terrible candidate that it was inevitable Trump would win. They covered the race perfectly and they have no reason to even think about what they might have done differently.

However, there are some people who are looking at this, one of them being Nate Silver who has written a long postmortem on the Comey matter that shows the data proving that it was decisive:

The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
So why won’t the media admit as much?

Filed under The Real Story Of 2016

This is the tenth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

The letter isn’t the only reason that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every decision the Clinton campaign made. Other factors may have played a larger role in her defeat, and it’s up to Democrats to examine those as they choose their strategy for 2018 and 2020.

But the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter. The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or “FBI” even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway. Books on the campaign have treated Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile. And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter — including in comments she made at an event in New York on Tuesday — many pundits have preferred to change the conversation when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the merits of the case.

The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result. The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia). And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.

One can believe that the Comey letter cost Clinton the election without thinking that the media cost her the election — it was an urgent story that any newsroom had to cover. But if the Comey letter had a decisive effect and the story was mishandled by the press — given a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its substantive importance, often with coverage that jumped to conclusions before the facts of the case were clear — the media needs to grapple with how it approached the story. More sober coverage of the story might have yielded a milder voter reaction.

My focus in this series of articles has been on the media’s horse-race coverage rather than its editorial decisions overall, but when it comes to the Comey letter, these things are intertwined. Not only was the letter probably enough to swing the outcome of the horse race, but the reverse is also true: Perceptions of the horse race probably affected the way the story unfolded. Publications may have given hyperbolic coverage to the Comey letter in part because they misanalyzed the Electoral College and wrongly concluded that Clinton was a sure thing. And Comey himself may have released his letter in part because of his overconfidence in Clinton’s chances. It’s a mess — so let’s see what we can do to untangle it.

Clinton woke up on the morning of Oct. 28 as the likely — by no means certain — next president. Trump had come off a period of five weeks in which he’d had three erratic debates and numerous women accuse him of sexual assault after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public. Clinton led by approximately 6 percentage points in national polls and by 6 to 7 points in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina were narrow, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa. But it was a pretty good overall position.

Her standing was not quite as safe as it might have appeared from a surface analysis, however. For one thing, there were still lots of undecided voters, especially in the Midwest. Although Trump had a paltry 37 percent to 38 percent of the vote in polls of Michigan, for instance, Clinton had only 43 percent to 44 percent. That left the door open for Trump to leapfrog her if late developments caused undecideds to break toward him. Furthermore, in the event that the race tightened, Clinton’s vote was inefficiently distributed in the Electoral College, concentrated in coastal states rather than swing states. While she had only an 11 percent chance of losing the popular vote according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast that morning, her chances of losing the Electoral College were a fair bit higher: 18 percent.

Another danger to Clinton was complacency. Several days earlier, the Times had written that she was on the verge of having an “unbreakable lead.” And there was a risk that people looking at statistical forecasts were misreading them and “rounding up” a probable Clinton win to a sure thing. (We’ll take up that topic up at more length in a future article in this series.) But Clinton had actually slipped by a percentage point or so in polls since the final debate on Oct. 19. And the news cycle had become somewhat listless; the most prevalent story that morning was about the trial in the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff. Clinton was in a danger zone: Her lead wasn’t quite large enough to be truly safe, but it was large enough to make people mistakenly think it was. 

The Comey letter almost immediately sank Clinton’s polls

News of the Comey letter broke just before 1 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 28, when Utah. Rep Jason Chaffetz tweeted about it, noting the existence of the letter and stating (incorrectly, it turned out2) that the case into Clinton’s private email server had been “reopened.” The story exploded onto the scene; Fox News was treating Chaffetz’s tweet as “breaking news” within 15 minutes, and the FBI story dominated headlines everywhere within roughly an hour. In an element of tabloid flair, it was soon reported that the emails in question were found on a computer owned by Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, as part of an investigation into whether he’d sent sexually explicit messages to teenage girls.

Few news organizations gave the story more velocity than The New York Times. On the morning of Oct. 29, Comey stories stretched across the print edition’s front page, accompanied by a photo showing Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife. Although some of these articles contained detailed reporting, the headlines focused on speculation about the implications for the horse race — “NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS.”

That Comey’s decision to issue the letter had been so unorthodox and that the contents of the letter were so ambiguous helped fuel the story. The Times’s print lead on Oct. 30 was about Clinton’s pushback against Comey, and a story it published two days later explained that Comey had broken with precedent in releasing the letter. It covered all sides of the controversy. But the controversy was an unwelcome one for Clinton, since it involved voters seeing words like “Clinton,” “email,” “FBI” and “investigation” together in headlines. Within a day of the Comey letter, Google searches for “Clinton FBI” had increased 50-fold and searches for “Clinton email” almost tenfold.

Clinton’s standing in the polls fell sharply. She’d led Trump by 5.9 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s popular vote projection at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 28. A week later — after polls had time to fully reflect the letter — her lead had declined to 2.9 percentage points. That is to say, there was a shift of about 3 percentage points against Clinton. And it was an especially pernicious shift for Clinton because (at least according to the FiveThirtyEight model) Clinton was underperforming in swing states as compared to the country overall. In the average swing state,3 Clinton’s lead declined from 4.5 percentage points at the start of Oct. 28 to just 1.7 percentage points on Nov. 4. If the polls were off even slightly, Trump could be headed to the White House. 

Is it possible this was all just a coincidence — that Clinton’s numbers went into decline for reasons other than Comey’s letter? I think there’s a decent case (which we’ll take up in a moment) that some of the decline in Clinton’s numbers reflected reversion to the mean and was bound to happen anyway.

But it’s not credible to claim that the Comey letter had no effect at all. It was the dominant story of the last 10 days of the campaign. According to the news aggregation site Memeorandum, which algorithmically tracks which stories are gaining the most traction in the mainstream media, the Comey letter was the lead story on six out of seven mornings from Oct. 29 to Nov. 4, pausing only for a half-day stretch when Mother Jones and Slate published stories alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

[…] 

It’s rare to see stories linger in headlines for more than two to three days given how quickly the news cycle moves during election campaigns. When one does, some effect on the polls is often expected. And that’s what we saw. The sharpness of the decline — with Clinton losing 3 points in a week4 — is consistent with a news-driven shift, rather than gradual reversion to the mean.

We also have a lot of other evidence of shifting preferences among voters in the waning days of the campaign. Exit polls showed that undecided and late-deciding voters broke toward Trump, especially in the Midwest. A panel survey conducted by FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins and other researchers also found shifts between mid-October and the end of the campaign — an effect that would amount to a swing of about 4 percentage points against Clinton.5 And we know that previous email-related stories had caused trouble for Clinton in the polls. In July, when Comey said he wouldn’t recommend charges against Clinton but rebuked her handling of classified information, she lost about 2 percentage points in the polls. Periods of intense coverage of her email server had also been associated with polling declines during the Democratic primary.

So while one can debate the magnitude of the effect, there’s a reasonably clear consensus of the evidence that the Comey letter mattered— probably by enough to swing the election. This ought not be one of the more controversial facts about the 2016 campaign; the data is pretty straightforward. Why the media covered the story as it did and how to weigh the Comey letter against the other causes for Clinton’s defeat are the more complicated parts of the story. 

The Times thought it was covering President-elect Clinton’s first scandal

Re-read one of those New York Times front-page stories from Oct. 29 — “This Changes Everything’: Donald Trump Exults as Hillary Clinton’s Team Scrambles” — and you’ll be surprised by how strange it is. It begins by describing the Comey letter in dramatic terms, as “the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race”:

Everything was looking up for Hillary Clinton. She was riding high in the polls, even seeing an improvement on trustworthiness. She was sitting on $153 million in cash. At 12:37 p.m. Friday, her aides announced that she planned to campaign in Arizona, a state that a Democratic presidential candidate has carried only once since 1948.
Twenty minutes later, October delivered its latest big surprise.
The F.B.I. director’s disclosure to Congress that agents would be reviewing a new trove of emails that appeared pertinent to its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server — an investigation that had been declared closed — set off a frantic and alarmed scramble inside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and among her Democratic allies, while Republicans raced to seize the advantage.
In the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race, Donald J. Trump exulted in his good fortune.

And yet the same Times article told readers that this rarely-if-ever-seen turnabout wouldn’t cost Clinton the election. She had banked too much of a lead in early voting, the story said, and it came too late in the campaign. Instead, the Comey letter could “cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting”:

With early voting well underway, and Mrs. Clinton already benefiting from Mr. Trump’s weekslong slide in the polls, Democrats’ concerns were tempered — more in the realm of apprehensiveness than panic.
[…]
Mrs. Clinton has an enormous cash advantage — $153 million in the bank for her campaign and joint fund-raising accounts as of last week, compared with $68 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign and joint accounts — which means Mr. Trump has limited means to use the F.B.I. inquiry to damage Mrs. Clinton with television ads. 

With more than six million Americans having already voted as of Monday, any efforts by Mr. Trump to claw his way back into contention could come too late. The Clinton campaign says its early voting turnout data points to a Democratic advantage in several swing states, including Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Iowa. 

But the specter of an F.B.I. inquiry could cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting. News had hardly spread when exasperated Democrats and donors were ruefully dredging up painful memories of the seemingly constant tug of congressional investigations on Bill Clinton’s White House.

What the heck is going on here? Why was the Times giving Comey’s letter such blockbuster coverage and at the same time going out of its way to insist that it wouldn’t affect the outcome?

The evidence is consistent with the theory that the Times covered the Comey letter as it did because it saw Clinton as the almost-certain next president — and Trump as a historical footnote. By treating the letter as a huge deal, it could get a head start on covering the next administration and its imbroglios. It could also “prove” to its critics that it could provide tough coverage of Democrats, thereby countering accusations of liberal bias (a longstanding hang-up at the Times). So what if it wasn’t clear from the letter whether Clinton had done anything wrong? The Times could use the same weasel-worded language that it often does in such situations, speaking of the Comey letter as having “cast a cloud” over Clinton.

That is my emphasis. Considering their behavior for the last 20 years, during the campaign and even after, this seems obvious to me. They were getting a head start on the crucifixion.

There is a lot more at the link and this story is very, very important if you actually care about figuring out what got Donald Trump elected. 

Nobody’s saying Clinton didn’t make mistakes.  She said so herself although the media typically behaved as if she was whining by giving an analytical answer that included some of what Nate Silver is saying here.

Silver says the numbers show definitely that the Comey letter affected the race by enough points to have made the difference.

The Comey letter wasn’t necessarily the most important factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it’s probably the one we can be most certain about. To explain the distinction, consider Clinton’s decision to run a highly negative campaign that focused on branding Trump as an unacceptable choice. One can imagine this being a huge, election-losing mistake: Trump’s negatives didn’t need any reinforcing, whereas Clinton should have used her resources to improve her own image. But one could also argue that Clinton’s strategy worked, up to a point: Trump was exceptionally unpopular and needed a lot of things to break his way to win the election despite that. The range of possible impacts from this strategic choice is wide; perhaps it cost Clinton several percentage points, or perhaps it helped her instead. The range from the Comey letter is narrower, by contrast, and easier to measure. It was a discrete event that came late in the campaign and had a direct effect on the polls.

The standard way to dismiss the letter’s impact is to say that Clinton should never have let the race get that close to begin with. But the race wasn’t that close before the Comey letter; Clinton had led by about 6 percentage points and was poised to win with a map like this one, including states such as North Carolina and Arizona (but not Ohio or Iowa) My guess is that the same pundits who pilloried Clinton’s campaign after the Comey letter would have considered it an impressive showing and spoken highly of her tactics.

Thus, you have to assess the letter’s impact to do an honest accounting of the Clinton campaign. If you’re in the “Big Comey” camp and think Clinton would have won by 5 or 6 percentage points without the letter, it’s hard to fault Clinton all that much. Even given all of Trump’s deficiencies as a candidate, that’s a big margin for an election in which the “fundamentals” pointed toward a fairly close race. “Little Comey” believers have more room to assign blame to Clinton’s campaign, in addition to Comey (and the media’s coverage of him).

But campaign postmortems almost always involve a lot of results-oriented cherry-picking. It’s easy to single out things that Clinton did poorly — her handling of the email scandal, her inability to drive a positive message and her poor Electoral College tactics would have to rank highly among them (although those Electoral College choices probably didn’t swing the election). There are also some things the campaign did well, however. For instance, Clinton got a huge bounce after her convention, and she won all three debates according to polls of debate-watchers. She also made a fairly smart VP pick in Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. These aren’t minor things; in normal presidential campaigns, preparing for the debates, staging the conventions and picking a solid running mate are about as high-stakes as decisions get. Clinton did poorly in the unscripted portions of the campaign, however, and the campaign went off script in the final 10 days.

If I were advising a future candidate on what to learn from 2016, I’d tell him or her to mostly forget about the Comey letter and focus on the factors that were within the control of Clinton and Trump. That’s not my purpose here. Instead, it’s to get at the truth — to figure out the real story of the election. The real story is that the Comey letter had a fairly large and measurable impact, probably enough to cost Clinton the election. It wasn’t the only thing that mattered, and it might not have been the most important. But the media is still largely in denial about how much of an effect it had.

Comey said today that he wouldn’t do anything differently because to do otherwise would have led to a disillusionment with the justice system. He’s our hero who saved us. I’m so glad we all voted for him to lead us.

Oh wait. We didn’t.

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“He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling”

by digby

Dave Weigel posted a little note about how the media reflexively reacts to Clinton that illustrates the phenomenon quite well:

It was hardly the headline from Hillary Clinton’s interview with Christiane Amanpour — it came near the end of a 35-minute session — but one comment from the 2016 Democratic nominee perfectly illustrated why liberals remain furious at how the campaign was covered. In a riff on how to create jobs, Clinton made the fairly ordinary point that “if you don’t have access to high-speed affordable broadband, which large parts of America do not,” large employers will overlook your town. She continued:

If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles. And so, even in towns — so, the president was in Harrisburg. I was in Harrisburg during the campaign, and I met with people afterward. One of the things they said to me is that there are places in central Pennsylvania where we don’t have access to affordable high-speed Internet.

“You cannot get cell coverage for mile,” Clinton says of the places that voted against her.

And the floodgates opened. From a CNN reporter, expressing some befuddlement as to why Clinton was talking about a state that broke against her.

“Clinton NOW talking about Pennsylvania, rural cell service. Uhhh.”

From a regional National Republican Senatorial Committee director, asking whether Clinton was making excuses for her loss.

Is @HillaryClinton adding cell coverage to “List of reasons not including myself why I lost” list? 

 From a Silicon Valley start-up:

This anti-rural snootiness doesn’t help Dems. I’m from deep-red, no-cell-coverage MO; Clinton fans there (my folks) wouldn’t appreciate. https://t.co/AKHxywYJo9

The point: Elliott’s tweet fed a quick, afternoon round of mockery for Clinton, who as ever had been out of touch. But anyone who’s covered politics — certainly, anyone who’s done a reporting trip to rural West Virginia or Iowa or New Hampshire — could recognize what Clinton was talking about. She campaigned on a quarter-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, which, in the unappealing campaign-speak of her news release, included “giving all American households access to world-class broadband and creating connected ‘smart cities’ with infrastructure that’s part of tomorrow’s Internet of Things.”

Now, the press corps of 2016 was under no obligation to regurgitate campaign news releases. But it’s 2017, and a president who was opaque about many of his policy plans during the campaign is now being asked to fund rural broadband projects. This is exactly the sort of issue policy reporters are familiar with, and it’s the sort of issue you typically see litigated during a campaign. Candidate X has this plan for wiring rural America; candidate Y, on the other hand, has that plan. This was how the eventual Trump float of a child-care plan was covered.

But narrative can overwhelm that. And the firmly established narrative of Clinton and Trump is that she couldn’t connect to rural voters, whereas he was a “blue-collar billionaire” who made surprising emotional connections. Trump may be the first president whose plunge to 40 percent approval was marked by stories about the voters who still loved him. And Clinton may be the only politician who can talk about the need for rural broadband — at this point, an almost banal priority of rural politicians — and be accused of snobbery.

That’s how they rolled. And continue to roll.

Good on Weigel and some of the other younger reporters for seeing this weird phenomenon and pointing it out. It gives me hope.

Here’s some typical click bait of the moment. It’s enough to make you sick.

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It is often pointed out that the presidency provides a “bully pulpit” for whomever holds office at the time. But generally, that is a figure of speech; not every POTUS necessarily abuses that “privilege”. And yes, “they’ve all done it” at one time or another, regardless of party affiliation. However, I think I can safely say that (in my lifetime, at least) we’ve never seen a bigger bully in the White House than Donald J. Trump. And as we all remember from grade school, bullies are empowered by submission. Which is why this was so cathartic:

The right’s new love affair with Russia

by digby

Back during the campaign, I wrote about the right’s love affair with the he-man Vladimir Putin. I thought it was a strongman personality thing. Turns out it was something bigger than that.

They relate on the issue of guns, God and gays:

Growing up in the 1980s, Brian Brown was taught to think of the communist Soviet Union as a dark and evil place.

But Brown, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, said that in the past few years he has started meeting Russians at conferences on family issues and finding many kindred spirits.

Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has visited Moscow four times in four years, including a 2013 trip during which he testified before the Duma as Russia adopted a series of anti-gay laws.

“What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” he said. “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.”

A significant shift has been underway in recent years across the Republican right.

On issues including gun rights, terrorism and same-sex marriage, many leading advocates on the right who grew frustrated with their country’s leftward tilt under President Barack Obama have forged ties with well-connected Russians and come to see that country’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, as a potential ally.

The attitude adjustment among many conservative activists helps explain one of the most curious aspects of the 2016 presidential race: a softening among many conservatives of their historically hard-line views of Russia. To the alarm of some in the GOP’s national security establishment, support in the party base for then-candidate Donald Trump did not wane even after he rejected the tough tone of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who called Russia America’s No. 1 foe, and repeatedly praised Putin.

The burgeoning alliance between Russians and U.S. conservatives was apparent in several events in late 2015, as the Republican nomination battle intensified.

You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you,” Trump said to cheers. (The Washington Post)
Top officials from the National Rifle Association, whose annual meeting Friday featured an address by Trump for the third time in three years, traveled to Moscow to visit a Russian gun manufacturer and meet government officials.

About the same time in December 2015, evangelist Franklin Graham met privately with Putin for 45 minutes, securing from the Russian president an offer to help with an upcoming conference on the persecution of Christians. Graham was impressed, telling The Washington Post that Putin “answers questions very directly and doesn’t dodge them like a lot of our politicians do.”

The growing dialogue between Russians and U.S. conservatives came at the same time experts say the Russian government stepped up efforts to cultivate and influence far-right groups in Europe and on the eve of Russia’s unprecedented intrusion into the U.S. campaign, which intelligence officials have concluded was intended to elect Trump.

Russians and Americans involved in developing new ties say they are not part of a Kremlin effort to influence U.S. politics. “We know nothing about that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said. Brown said activists in both countries are simply “uniting together under the values we share.”

It is not clear what effect closer ties will have on relations between the two countries, which have gotten frostier with the opening of congressional and FBI investigations into Russia’s intrusion into the election and rising tensions over the civil war in Syria.

But the apparent increase in contacts in recent years, as well as the participation of officials from the Russian government and the influential Russian Orthodox church, leads some analysts to conclude that the Russian government probably promoted the efforts in an attempt to expand Putin’s power.

Falwell declared Trump a “dream president for evangelicals.”

There’s more at the link. It’s interesting because it tracks with the rightward lurch around the world, although the “alt-right” here in the US and Europe is a pretty decadent movement. These folks are hardcore conservative in the more traditional way.

It explains why some members of the right wing are so complacent about a foreign government infiltrating the presidential campaign. They see them as allies in a transnational movement. But it will be very interesting to see how they react if there is a conflict with Russia — the nationalism Trump ran on explicitly would run straight into conflict with any sense of solidarity with Russian conservatives.

It’s quite a turn of events, I’ll say that. It certainly signals the end of the Reagan epoch on the right. I wonder if Trump will supplant him as the right’s true north?

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The truth in your gut
by Tom Sullivan

Stephen Colbert’s blowhard character made “truthiness” a thing when he promised “to feel the news at you.” As much as us liberal elitists hate to admit it, that is how an awful lot of people (no baskets here) make key decisions. With their guts.

Responding to Jimmy Kimmel’s tearful, on-air explanation of his newborn son’s emergency heart surgery and defense of Obamacare, former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) checked in with his gut yesterday and tweeted this response:

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

No doubt Walsh knows on an intellectual level that he pays for a lot of other somebodys’ defense — trillions cumulatively — in other countries that pay no U.S. tax. But we’re talking gut here, not head. Shedding our sons’ and daughters’ blood for foreigners is one thing, but sharing the cost of health care for fellow Americans? Hell, no.

Now, sure, we could logically debate fiscal conservatism, libertarian philosophy, and the value of social Darwinism for culling the herd, but your gut already tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Walsh’s pre-existing condition. Many in his party share it, Mo Brooks. Sadly, the only treatment for it seems to be an eye-opening personal tragedy. Even that is experimental.

Barring a caucus-wide road-to-Damascus experience, Republicans in Congress still want to repeal Obamacare care and replace it with something more Darwinian if not Dickensian. The Republican health care plan was hanging by a thread before Kimmel spoke out. But Kimmel’s moving statement puts sitting Republicans’ plan for repealing Obamacare in a tougher bind, the Washington Post reports:

On Capitol Hill, influential Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) came out against the plan, dealing a major blow to proponents trying to secure enough votes to pass it in the House. Across the country, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional story about his newborn son’s heart condition reverberated on television and the Internet. And former president Barack Obama, who signed the bill Republicans are trying to dismantle, took to Twitter to defend it.

All three voiced concerns about losing a core protection in the Affordable Care Act for people with preexisting conditions, as is possible under the latest GOP plan. Such growing worries threatened to derail the revamped attempt to revise key parts of the ACA — or at least send Republicans back to the drawing board.

The Republican whip count is shaky:

“I told the leadership I cannot support the bill with this provision in it,” Upton said. “I don’t know how it all will play out, but I know there are a good number of us that have raised real red flags.”

A Washington Post analysis shows 21 House Republicans either opposed to or leaning against the bill, and 22 more either undecided or unclear in their positions. If no Democrats support the bill, the Republicans can lose no more than 22 GOP votes to pass it in the House.

Kimmel urged the congress to get past the partisan squabbles, but it is not partisanship that is the problem, writes Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

It’s an ideologically deranged party and its know-nothing leader in the White House. The fact that approximately half the voters in this country support that party is a much less comforting thought than the one about America coming together to care for kids like Billy. Until we face up to that pre-existing reality, we don’t have any chance of ensuring that we live in a society that truly cares for its most vulnerable citizens.

The Kimmel video went viral on Tuesday:

Congress is feeling the heat. You bring the fire. If you haven’t already, now is your chance.

What he said

by digby

The New York Times’ Charles Blow, that is:

Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.

America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.

[…]

Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.

As New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his 2016 book, “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?”: “The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.”

Thompson also notes that “Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,” warning that:

We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.

[…]
In January, Vanity Fair attempted to answer the question: “Exactly How Much TV Does Donald Trump Watch in a Day?” They did so by producing this utterly frightening roundup:

Early on in the campaign, Trump told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he gets military advice from TV pundits. He couldn’t get through a 50-minute Washington Post interview without repeatedly looking at the TV and commenting about what was on it. In November, during the transition, The Post noted that, based on his biography, ‘He watches enormous amounts of television all through the night.’ And just this week, a source told Politico that Trump’s aides are being forced to try and curb some of his ‘worst impulses’ — including TV-watching, apparently: ‘He gets bored and likes to watch TV … so it is important to minimize that.”

Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.

At no time is this more devastatingly obvious than when he grants interviews to print reporters, when he is not protected by the comfort of a script and is not animated by the dazzling glare of television lights. In these moments, all he has is language, and his absolute ineptitude and possibly even lack of comprehension is enormously obvious.

In the last month, Trump has given interviews to print reporters at The Times, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. Read together, the transcripts paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.

In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.

It’s Orwellian, but I think we are having a hard time grappling with that because we assumed that an Orwellian world would spring from someone or a group of someones who planned it with ruthless efficiency. I don’t think it ever occurred to us that it would come about because our institutions would bend to a perceived necessity of propping up a celebrity imbecile and we’d all be sitting at home watching it happen on TV.

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“It’s just pop…”

by digby

I know that people don’t like being told what to eat. I try to stay out of the food wars. But Michelle Obama’s program for kids was a really positive, upbeat, fun way to try to get kids to eat healthy foods, which is something all adults should be for. If that’s some kind of “liberal” plot then this culture is well and truly fucked and we might as well just pack it in.

Ok. We might as well just pack it in:

Michelle Obama had a strikingly successful record of fighting the obesity epidemic and improving nutrition — both symbolically and through advocacy for legislation. But many Obama-era efforts to push the food industry in a healthier direction are now under threat.

Over the past couple of weeks, a number of reports have surfaced suggesting that the food industry is trying to capitalize on Trump’s anti-regulation agenda and push back on reforms aimed at making our food supply healthier. The food lobbyists, emboldened by the current White House, are pushing back on recent healthy food and transparency mandates that would hurt their bottom line.

Some of the key battlegrounds — school lunches, food and menu labels — are familiar terrain for anybody who has been observing the efforts to clean up the US food supply. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s been happening, and the top three areas to watch.

1) School lunch standards are under siege — again

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 centered on cleaning up school food. Getting the act passed became a key focus of Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity.

But the new US Department of Agriculture chief, Sonny Perdue, put announced steps on Monday that’ll give schools more flexibility in meeting federal nutrition standards for school lunches.

To understand what’s changing, we need to grasp what the Obama administration pushed for: It required the federal government to use recommendations from the Institute of Medicine to make the National School Lunch Program more nutritious, with more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and less sodium, full-fat milk, and meat.

The law also mandated that schools stop marketing the fat-, sugar-, and salt-laden snacks — like sugary beverages and chocolate bars — in cafeterias and vending machines and replace those offerings with lower-calorie and more nutritious alternatives like fruit cups and granola bars. Finally, it made it possible for schools whose students have high poverty rates to provide free breakfasts in addition to lunches, without requiring paperwork on whether individual students meet certain poverty criteria.

Under Perdue’s USDA, schools will have more wiggle room for interpreting the standards around milk, whole grains, and sodium. Schools can now push back targets to further reduce sodium in lunches for at least three years, serve 1 percent flavored milk again, and get exemptions from having to move to whole-grain products, the Hill reported.

“This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals,” Perdue said in a USDA statement.

It’s still unclear what this loosening of standards will mean in practice and how schools will interpret them. But health advocates were hopeful that easing up on regulation won’t completely undo the Obama-era reforms.

American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown pointed out that nearly all US schools are already meeting the new school nutrition standards. The majority of parents also support the legislation. “Improving children’s health should be a top priority for the USDA, and serving more nutritious foods in schools is a clear-cut way to accomplish this goal,” she said in a public statement.

They are also going to delay or completely reverse the new requirements for food labeling. Because what you don’t know wont hurt you, amirite???

Michelle Obama’s legacy lives on, however. Gardening has spiked and her growing the White House kitchen garden is given some credit for it. And some other initiatives do too:

Obama championed healthy living and exercise on venues as diverse as Ellen and Elmo. She also worked with the food industry to remove calories from the food supply, increase transparency in labeling, and create and market healthier food choices for families — efforts that have already had an impact and will continue after the Obama White House.

The Partnership for a Healthier America, which launched in conjunction with (but independently from) the Let’s Move campaign, helped get food companies — such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and General Mills — to commit to cutting calories from their foods. At the latest count in April, the initiative had already removed 6.4 trillion calories (or 78 calories per person) by reformulating products and shrinking serving sizes.

Another milestone came in June 2015, when the FDA banned trans fats from the food supply within three years. The policy brought the US in line with other countries that have already banned these processed unsaturated fats, which increase the risk for heart attacks and strokes, including Denmark, Austria, Iceland, and Switzerland.

It’s difficult to imagine food companies packing calories and trans fat back into their products at a time when American consumers are demanding healthier options. And that’s momentum that won’t die.”

I don’t know. I feel as if all momentum has died and we’re either spinning our wheels or going backwards. But yes, companies have no good reason to go back to transfats and hopefully the public will hold its ground and demand food labeling whether Donald Trump and his wrecking crew are president or not.

And who knows? Maybe Melania will take up the cause. It would be great if she would if only to get those right wingers to embrace the cause. Their kids needs to eat healthy foods too.

Update: This too

Ivanka’s got the girl beat.

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Their monsters are turning on them

by digby

Even the wingnuttiest wingnuts aren’t wingnutty enough. This op-ed is written by a serious wingnut, who worked for both wingnut DeMint and wingnut Tom Coburn btw:

The story of DeMint’s ouster begins in 2010 with then-Heritage President Ed Feulner’s ill-conceived decision to create a version of the Heritage Foundation with “fangs.” As Feulner and Needham wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

The Heritage Foundation has been called “the beast” of all think tanks. Last week our beast added new fangs with the creation of a new advocacy organization. This institution—Heritage Action for America—will be able to spend money to push legislation we think the country needs without the obstacles faced by a nonprofit like the Heritage Foundation.

DeMint succeeded Feulner in 2013. In the fall of that year Heritage proper under DeMint and Heritage Action under Needham worked in tandem to back a disastrous plan to force President Obama to “defund” Obamacare through a government shutdown. The argument was absurd. If members would only “stand firm” we could win 60 votes in the Senate and persuade Barack Obama to sign a bill undoing his signature achievement using a shutdown as leverage. In reality, Needham took conservatives hostage and begged Obama to not shoot.

Coburn rightly described the effort as “not intellectually honest” and exploitive of the base while DeMint, Needham, Senator Ted Cruz and Cruz’s undisciplined staff derided dissenters as being in a “surrender caucus” that secretly liked Obamacare (never mind that Coburn, a doctor, had offered dozens of amendments to Obamacare and had offered a leading Obamacare replacement plan). The split was personally and professionally disappointing because two mentors and allies were at odds. In the Senate, DeMint was Coburn’s most reliable partner on a host of fights, including Coburn’s campaign to end earmarks that Coburn started in earnest as a member of the House in 1998.

After the shutdown debacle Heritage’s influence waned considerably. Many Heritage scholars left and other thinks tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Mercatus Center and new institutions like The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) rose in prominence.

By the time DeMint realized the “beast with fangs” was out of control it was too late. The beast fought back and won. According to a report by Philip Wegmann at the Washington Examiner, DeMint specifically suggested Heritage Action should be scaled back or disbanded.

he narrative presented in a recent Politico story was scoffed at by my sources inside Heritage (who requested anonymity) as a transparent effort to blame DeMint for Needham’s flaws. It was Needham, one Heritage staffer explained, not DeMint, who made the operation too political.

It goes on and on and on with recriminations flying in every direction. The fact is that every single person mentioned in the article is a right wing loon. It’s a circular firing squad with bullets dipped in poison.

Enjoy!

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QOTW: Spicey

by digby

Kim Jong Un has led his country forward in the face of lots of threats. He’s a young guy with nukes and you have to admire that:

“He assumed power at a young age when his father passed away. And there was a lot of potential threats that could have come his way, and he’s obviously managed to lead a country forward, despite the obvious concerns that we and so many people have. You know, he is a young person to be leading a country with nuclear weapons. And so that set aside, I think the president recognizes the threat that he posed and is doing everything he can to isolate that threat and to make sure we bring stability to the region.”

Hookay …

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He has a good brain

by digby

I wrote about our historian in chief for Salon this morning:

President Donald Trump said something profoundly ignorant yesterday.   I know that shocks you. He is, after a man who has told you over and over again that he is smarter than just about anyone you’d want to mention.  He has said:

“I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.“

“I understand money better than anybody. I understand it far better than Hillary, and I’m way up on the economy when it comes to questions on the economy.”

When asked why he refuses to take the daily intelligence briefing, he explained:

I don’t have to be told – you know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.

“Nobody knows more about trade than me”

“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”

Regarding the legality of his travel ban:

I was a good student. I understand things. I comprehend very well, better than I think almost anybody.

“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am“

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”

At the CIA right after the inauguration he said:

Trust me, I’m like a smart person

“There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me.”

On who he consults on foreign affairs:

I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things … My primary consultant is myself, and I have, you know, I have a good instinct for this stuff.

It’s all in the genes:

My uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! 

You can read the whole comment in this tweet:

This is a sentence spoken by Trump, not a piece of modernist stream-of-consciousness pastiche. pic.twitter.com/vfhdKzg9Uy

— Stig Abell (@StigAbell) August 9, 2016

That’s just small sample of the times he’s asserted that he is gifted with a vast knowledge and prodigious intellect that far outstrips anyone else in the entire world, perhaps anyone else who has ever lived. And apparently millions of people believed him, likely because he has a lot of money. Apparently they didn’t know that along with his extraordinary “genetic inheritance” came an extraordinary financial bequest. (Trump literally believes in eugenics, often comparing him and his family to thoroughbred racehorses with superior breeding.)

So for all that it’s odd that a man of such unequaled intelligence would say, for instance, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice” apparently unaware that Frederick Douglas is one of the most famous figures in American history, studied by every schoolkid, and that he’s been dead for over a century.

And his comments about Andrew Jackson this week seem equally strange for a man of such erudition. He said to reporter Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner:

My campaign and win was most like Andrew Jackson, with his campaign. And I said, when was Andrew Jackson? It was 1828. That’s a long time ago. That’s Andrew Jackson …

I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to he Civil War, he said “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?