Month: June 2017

Oh good. The maniac is plotting a trade war. A big one.

by digby

It sounds like he’s deciding to go for it.

With the political world distracted by President Trump’s media wars, one of the most consequential and contentious internal debates of his presidency unfolded during a tense meeting Monday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, administration sources tell Axios.

The outcome, with a potentially profound effect on U.S. economic and foreign policy, will be decided in coming days. 

With more than 20 top officials present, including Trump and Vice President Pence, the president and a small band of America First advisers made it clear they’re hell-bent on imposing tariffs — potentially in the 20% range — on steel, and likely other imports. 

The penalties could eventually extend to other imports. Among those that may be considered: aluminum, semiconductors, paper, and appliances like washing machines.

One official estimated the sentiment in the room as 22 against and 3 in favor — but since one of the three is named Donald Trump, it was case closed.

No decision has been made, but the President is leaning towards imposing tariffs, despite opposition from nearly all his Cabinet.

In a plan pushed by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and backed by chief strategist Steve Bannon (not present at the meeting), trade policy director Peter Navarro and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, the United States would impose tariffs on China and other big exporters of steel. Neither Mike Pence nor Jared Kushner weighed in either way.

Everyone else in the room, more than 75% of those present, were adamantly opposed, arguing it was bad economics and bad global politics. At one point, Trump was told his almost entire cabinet thought this was a bad idea. But everyone left the room believing the country is headed toward a major trade confrontation.

The reason, we’re told: Trump’s base — which drives more and more decisions, as his popularity sinks — likes the idea, and will love the fight.

The problem, according to top officials who argued strenuously that the move is ill-advised: The trade war wouldn’t just affect China. The collateral damage would include a slew of allies, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Watch for: Trump was warned — and White House officials anticipate — that an affected industry like automakers is likely to seek a court injunction within hours of any tariffs on steel.

The good news is that trade wars never lead to real wars.

Oh wait …

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Nothing to see here

by digby

I suspect that many in the government don’t want to know whether this has happened because it would shake the faith of the American people in the electoral system. Unfortunately, that ship sailed a while ago. This, via TPM, is making things worse:

Pressure to examine voting machines used in the 2016 election grows daily as evidence builds that Russian hacking attacks were broader and deeper than previously known. And the Department of Homeland Security has a simple response:

No.

DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.

Asked about the decision, a DHS official told TPM: “In a September 2016 Intelligence Assessment, DHS and our partners determined that there was no indication that adversaries were planning cyber activity that would change the outcome of the coming US election.”

According to the most recent reports, 39 states were targeted by Russian hackers, and DHS has cited–without providing details–domestic attacks in its own reports as well.

“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.

Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”

DHS told TPM Wednesday afternoon it was confident in “multiple checks and redundancies in US election infrastructure” and referred to the testimony of Liles and Jeannette Manfra, DHS undersecretary for cybersecurity, who said US electoral systems were fortified by “diversity of systems, non-Internet connected voting machines, pre-election testing, and processes for media, campaign, and election officials to check, audit, and validate results.”

The new Brennan Center report, however, details the dangers of voting machines that aren’t properly secured, particularly the effect on public confidence of a very public successful hack, whether or not it managed to swing an election. “In the current hyper-partisan environment,” the authors noted, “evidence of this kind of hack could lead to accusations by each side that the other is rigging the election.”

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The war on the press now includes charges of blackmail

by digby

Honestly, this is just getting ridiculous:

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski accused the White House of trying to manipulate them with a National Enquirer story, writing in the Washington Post that a White House staffer claimed the tabloid would print a negative story about them unless they “begged the president” to stop it — something a fellow Morning Joe host described as “blackmail.”

Scarborough and Brzezinski’s op-ed was a response to President Trump’s tweets that called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Mika” and said that her face was “bleeding” after plastic surgery.

When the White House called, “We ignored their desperate pleas,” they wrote. (The story they’re referring to appears to be a report about the relationship between the co-hosts, who are now engaged.)

The allegation also came up when Scarborough and Brzezinski, who had planned to take a break for the Fourth of July weekend, returned to their show to condemn the president’s attack. Trump was watching, as his tweets later showed:

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

So apparently the White House is blackmailing members of the press now with threats to have their henchmen in the tabloid press go after them. I’m no lawyer but that sounds like it might be criminal.

There’s more:

On Friday, MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough made the explosive claim that three of President Donald Trump’s most senior White House aides “warned” the couple that the tabloid The National Enquirer would publish dirt on them unless they “begged” the president to intervene.

The Morning Joe co-hosts declined to name the multiple White House officials involved in this bizarre, ongoing feud. But one of those “top White House staff members” was senior advisor and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, two White House officials confirmed to The Daily Beast.

The White House says it was just a friendly conversation not a threat. And we don’t know if that was who Scarborough and Brzezinski were talking about in their op-ed.

But one thing is sure. Trump is not doing the job of president. He’s a celebrity managing his personal PR. He doesn’t seem to know that this is not the job of president.

Maybe in the end this will finally show us that our system being so dependent on the abilities of one person running a powerful branch of government isn’t a good idea. There’s a reason no other country in the world has adopted it. It’s just not that great. We’ve been lucky to have had mostly reasonably sane, if not entirely competent, presidents. I don’t know if we’ve ever had one who was both mentally unstable and intellectually limited like this one. He is clearly unfit. And the dynamic that put him in the office, a party that is ideologically extreme and incompetent, was probably a necessary precursor. So we have a perfect storm.

It’s not working. And I don’t know if it can be fixed.

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Trump has a lot more business in the former Soviet union than we knew


by digby

I wrote about a couple of Russia stories that dropped yesterday for Salon:

Not the sharpest tools in the shed

by digby

Fox News viewers are red. People who watch other news sources are yellow:

That’s right. The vast majority of people who watch Fox believe that it’s that Democrats fault that legislation isn’t getting passed in the congress — which has a GOP majority.

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The chancellor’s speech
by Tom Sullivan

If Donald J. Trump were smarter, emotionally balanced, and more in control, one might think he was using his newest tweet about women and blood yesterday to divert attention from his legal troubles. Not likely. National Rifle Association CEO Wayne Lapierre, on the other hand, knows just what he is doing, not that he is playing with a full deck himself.

On June 12, the NRA unleashed one of the most insane propaganda messages to date in this beleaguered republic. But after a tweet from Jeff Sharlet drew attention to it Wednesday, it exploded on social media. We are not going to link it here, but Think Progress summarizes:

In the one-minute spot, conservative media personality and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch says progressives “bully and terrorize the law abiding,” adding that “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight the violence of lies with the clenched first of truth.”

Loesch did not have to say what that fist should be clenched around or that Real Americans need to take up 2nd Amendment solutions. That was implied. The language echoes Lapierre’s rhetoric before the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in April:

“It’s up to us to speak up against the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites. These are America’s greatest domestic threats,” he said.

This new NRA ad is barely a whisper shy of a call for full civil war. https://t.co/N33s2KyvVz— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) June 28, 2017

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship responded directly to the bald-faced Othering in the script of the NRA propaganda piece:

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”

Shot a little tighter, the video might come from a remake of V for Vendetta with Dana Loesch playing the High Chancellor.

Moyers and Winship continue:

Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.

It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.

The two conclude, “To be choked with hate is a terrible fate, and it is worst for those on whom it is visited.”

Thus we head not into Guy Fawkes Day, but America’s Fourth of July. And with its fireworks, a little jumpier thanks not to ISIS terrorists but those of the NRA’s creation.

An uplifting story of basic human decency

by digby

It’s so easy right now to lose faith in humanity. But there are people all over the place who make small gestures of decency and generosity.

From CBS:

When Andy Mitchell spotted a young man in a fast food uniform walking along the side of a road on a 95-degree summer day in Rockwall, Texas, he felt compelled to pull over.

He rolled down his window and offered the man, a 20-year-old named Justin Korva, a ride — not knowing how much that small gesture would impact the man’s life.

While driving the Korva to work at Taco Casa, Mitchell discovered the young man normally walked 3 miles to work and home again every day. Korva said he was determined to save up money and someday, he hoped, he would be able to afford a car.

After dropping off Korva, Mitchell posted about the man’s determination on Facebook.

“To all the people that say they want to work but can’t find a job or don’t have a vehicle all I can say is you don’t want it bad enough,” Mitchell wrote.

Hundreds of people in the community saw his post, including Samee Dowlatshahi, owner of Samee’s Pizza Getti Italian Bistro and Lounge in Rockwell.

Dowlatshahi offered to put a donation box inside his pizza joint to aid Korva in his quest to buy a car.

In less than 48 hours, with some help from Mitchell, they’d raised more than $5,500.

That’s when Danny Rawls, general sales manager at Toyota of Rockwall and a friend of Dowlatshahi, heard Korva’s inspiring story.

“I presented it to my general manager and said, ‘Hey, let’s help the kid. It seems like a great story,'” Rawls told CBS News.

His boss agreed, and the pair reduced the price on a 2004 Toyota Camry that was available.

“I sent [Dowlatshahi] a private message and said, ‘Give me a call. I have a nice car that would work for the kid,'” Rawls explained.

Not only did they have enough money to buy the car, they had enough left over to pay for his insurance for a year, plus two years’ worth of oil changes and a $500 gas card.

Last Friday, they drove the white 2004 Camry to Taco Casa and asked Korva to come outside.

“Justin, you can’t imagine all the people who wanted to help you,” Mitchell said, as several people filmed the exchange on their cellphones in the restaurant parking lot. “So, instead of walking to work, buddy, you’re driving this car from now on.”

Korva looked at Mitchell in disbelief, “Are you serious?”

“It’s your car! This is your car,” Mitchell said.

Korva gave each man a hug, wiping tears from his eyes as he walked toward the car.

“We just want you to know, seriously, this community, nothing we love better than to have someone who works hard,” Dowlatshahi said. “We take a lot of pride in that. It’s so hot out here, I can’t believe you walk even one mile in this heat.”

Later that day, Rawls helped Korva complete the paperwork on the car and put the title in his name.

“Surreal” is the only word Rawls could use to describe the moment he watched Korva walk away with the keys.

“He’s a very humble young man and accepted it with stride,” Rawls said. “There couldn’t have been more of a deserving individual, for sure.”

It was a nice thing to do.

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All hands on deck for this one

by digby

It’s hard for me to see how this is constitutional but this is Trump’s America so I’m going to guess that looking at information on every voter in America is probably fine. If they use this information for political purposes, which of course they will because it’s the only reason to do this, is just a first step.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, issued the following statement today in response to news that Kris Kobach, vice-chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, issued letters to Secretaries of State seeking disclosure of identifying information on voters across the country:

“We fully condemn actions taken today by the President’s Election Integrity Commission seeking disclosure of data and personal information on virtually every voter across the country.  This meritless inquisition opens the door for a misguided and ill-advised Commission to take steps to target and harass voters and could lead to purging of the voter rolls. We urge Secretaries of State who received a letter from Kris Kobach to reject this request and discourage state and local officials from participating in this Commission’s dangerous activities.  Today’s action underscores the fact that the Election Integrity Commission is operating in a reckless manner and its activities threaten to have a chilling effect on minority voters.

We encourage the public to contact 866-OUR-VOTE to report complaints or any suspicious activity regarding the activities of the Election Integrity Commission.  We know that voting discrimination and voter suppression are the real threats to American democracy and we will resist the Commission’s attempt to divert federal resources and attention away from these problems.”

Meanwhile, if a foreign government wants to play in our elections be their guest. This is their priority.

The only way they’d ever crack down on cyber-interference would be if Mexico did it.

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A little boy scolds Rex Tillerson



by digby

You can’t make this stuff up:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s frustrations with the White House have been building for months. Last Friday, they exploded.

The normally laconic Texan unloaded on Johnny DeStefano, the head of the presidential personnel office, for torpedoing proposed nominees to senior State Department posts and for questioning his judgment.

Tillerson also complained that the White House was leaking damaging information about him to the news media, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Above all, he made clear that he did not want DeStefano’s office to “have any role in staffing” and “expressed frustration that anybody would know better” than he about who should work in his department — particularly after the president had promised him autonomy to make his own decisions and hires, according to a senior White House aide familiar with the conversation.

Ok, he got frustrated. And not without reason.

But check this out:

The episode stunned other White House officials gathered in chief of staff Reince Priebus’ office, leaving them silent as Tillerson raised his voice. In the room with Tillerson and DeStefano were Priebus, top Trump aide Jared Kushner and Margaret Peterlin, the secretary of state’s chief of staff.

The encounter, described by four people familiar with what happened, was so explosive that Kushner approached Peterlin afterward and told her that Tillerson’s outburst was completely unprofessional, according to two of the people familiar with the exchange, and told her that they needed to work out a solution.

Imagine that. Little Jared saying that the Secretary of State acted unprofessionally.

IN THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE!

I guess he should have tweeted an insult about DeStefano’s looks. That’s how professionals behave dontcha know.

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The point of Gilead is to break us

by digby

This quote by Michelle Goldberg about Trump’s misogyny just nails it:

I’m not sure that even well-intentioned men understand how relentlessly degrading this presidency is for many women. Having a man who does not recognize the humanity of more than half the population in a position of such power is a daily insult; it never really goes away. Perhaps this is why many women found the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale so resonant, even though Trump, the former owner of a casino strip club, is the last person one can imagine instituting a Calvinist theocracy. Gilead’s fictional dystopia captures our constant incredulous horror at finding ourselves ruled by thuggish, unaccountable woman-haters who appear to revel in their own impunity.

It is a daily reminder that for many, many people the fact that women are clearly, demonstrably unequal in this world in both institutional, professional ways as well as our place in society. We’re shown examples of it dozens of times a day and told by everyone, even each other, to stifle it, put it away, it isn’t important, we’re too sensitive etc, etc.

The rock of “civilized behavior” that usually sits atop this world’s essential, fundamental misogyny has been turned over by this obnoxious piece of gelatinous offal and we have to look at it over and over and over again as if it’s designed to make us stop objecting and accept it as the normal course of things.

That’s what we learn from The Handmaid’s Tale: the point of their relentless oppression is to break us. It doesn’t have to be a full blown dystopian theocracy. All it takes is the the normalization of rank misogyny by our leaders and a million small humiliating acts of degradation every day by people we’re supposed to trust.

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