Month: June 2017

Jared speaks

by digby

This is the first time he’s spoken publicly. Behold the man who holds the keys to Middle East peace in his hands:

He speaks! Have you ever heard Jared Kushner’s voice before? Here you go. pic.twitter.com/QKElf1bynn

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 19, 2017

Trump is the guy whose known for hiring people via central casting, whether Pence, Tillerson or Mattis. Somehow I don’t think he would have normally cast Justin Bieber for the role of most important adviser to the leader of the world’s only superpower. But what else could he do? Ivanka married him and the whole scam depends on putting his family in the White House to consolidate power and ensure the family business is well taken care of.

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Yes, it can happen here

by digby

The scariest thing you will read today. Maybe ever. It’s piece by David Frum explaining how Trump can build an autocracy in America. It’s all very plausible:

It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term. The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. The president’s supporters credit his restrictive immigration policies and his TrumpWorks infrastructure program.

The president’s critics, meanwhile, have found little hearing for their protests and complaints. A Senate investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign sputtered into inconclusive partisan wrangling. Concerns about Trump’s purported conflicts of interest excited debate in Washington but never drew much attention from the wider American public.

Allegations of fraud and self-dealing in the TrumpWorks program, and elsewhere, have likewise been shrugged off. The president regularly tweets out news of factory openings and big hiring announcements: “I’m bringing back your jobs,” he has said over and over. Voters seem to have believed him—and are grateful.

Most Americans intuit that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss. Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really knows.

Anyway, doesn’t everybody do it? On the eve of the 2018 congressional elections, WikiLeaks released years of investment statements by prominent congressional Democrats indicating that they had long earned above-market returns. As the air filled with allegations of insider trading and crony capitalism, the public subsided into weary cynicism. The Republicans held both houses of Congress that November, and Trump loyalists shouldered aside the pre-Trump leadership.

The business community learned its lesson early. “You work for me, you don’t criticize me,” the president was reported to have told one major federal contractor, after knocking billions off his company’s stock-market valuation with an angry tweet. Wise business leaders take care to credit Trump’s personal leadership for any good news, and to avoid saying anything that might displease the president or his family.

The media have grown noticeably more friendly to Trump as well. The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner was delayed for more than a year, during which Time Warner’s CNN unit worked ever harder to meet Trump’s definition of fairness. Under the agreement that settled the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has divested himself of The Washington Post. The paper’s new owner—an investor group based in Slovakia—has closed the printed edition and refocused the paper on municipal politics and lifestyle coverage.

Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true.

Nobody’s repealed the First Amendment, of course, and Americans remain as free to speak their minds as ever—provided they can stomach seeing their timelines fill up with obscene abuse and angry threats from the pro-Trump troll armies that police Facebook and Twitter. Rather than deal with digital thugs, young people increasingly drift to less political media like Snapchat and Instagram.

Trump-critical media do continue to find elite audiences. Their investigations still win Pulitzer Prizes; their reporters accept invitations to anxious conferences about corruption, digital-journalism standards, the end of nato, and the rise of populist authoritarianism. Yet somehow all of this earnest effort feels less and less relevant to American politics. President Trump communicates with the people directly via his Twitter account, ushering his supporters toward favorable information at Fox News or Breitbart.

Despite the hand-wringing, the country has in many ways changed much less than some feared or hoped four years ago. Ambitious Republican plans notwithstanding, the American social-welfare system, as most people encounter it, has remained largely intact during Trump’s first term. The predicted wave of mass deportations of illegal immigrants never materialized. A large illegal workforce remains in the country, with the tacit understanding that so long as these immigrants avoid politics, keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, nobody will look very hard for them.

“The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”

African Americans, young people, and the recently naturalized encounter increasing difficulties casting a vote in most states. But for all the talk of the rollback of rights, corporate America still seeks diversity in employment. Same-sex marriage remains the law of the land. Americans are no more and no less likely to say “Merry Christmas” than they were before Trump took office.

People crack jokes about Trump’s National Security Agency listening in on them. They cannot deeply mean it; after all, there’s no less sexting in America today than four years ago. Still, with all the hacks and leaks happening these days—particularly to the politically outspoken—it’s just common sense to be careful what you say in an email or on the phone. When has politics not been a dirty business? When have the rich and powerful not mostly gotten their way? The smart thing to do is tune out the political yammer, mind your own business, enjoy a relatively prosperous time, and leave the questions to the troublemakers.

In an 1888 lecture, James Russell Lowell, a founder of this magazine, challenged the happy assumption that the Constitution was a “machine that would go of itself.” Lowell was right. Checks and balances is a metaphor, not a mechanism.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

No society, not even one as rich and fortunate as the United States has been, is guaranteed a successful future. When early Americans wrote things like “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” they did not do so to provide bromides for future bumper stickers. They lived in a world in which authoritarian rule was the norm, in which rulers habitually claimed the powers and assets of the state as their own personal property.

The exercise of political power is different today than it was then—but perhaps not so different as we might imagine. Larry Diamond, a sociologist at Stanford, has described the past decade as a period of “democratic recession.” Worldwide, the number of democratic states has diminished. Within many of the remaining democracies, the quality of governance has deteriorated.

What has happened in Hungary since 2010 offers an example—and a blueprint for would-be strongmen. Hungary is a member state of the European Union and a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It has elections and uncensored internet. Yet Hungary is ceasing to be a free country.

Read on there’s a lot more more and it’s powerful. This stuff is happening all over the planet. This is the conclusion:

Trump and his team count on one thing above all others: public indifference. “I think people don’t care,” he said in September when asked whether voters wanted him to release his tax returns. “Nobody cares,” he reiterated to 60 Minutes in November. Conflicts of interest with foreign investments? Trump tweeted on November 21 that he didn’t believe voters cared about that either: “Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!”

What happens in the next four years will depend heavily on whether Trump is right or wrong about how little Americans care about their democracy and the habits and conventions that sustain it. If they surprise him, they can restrain him.

Public opinion, public scrutiny, and public pressure still matter greatly in the U.S. political system. In January, an unexpected surge of voter outrage thwarted plans to neutralize the independent House ethics office. That kind of defense will need to be replicated many times. Elsewhere in this issue, Jonathan Rauch describes some of the networks of defense that Americans are creating.

Get into the habit of telephoning your senators and House member at their local offices, especially if you live in a red state. Press your senators to ensure that prosecutors and judges are chosen for their independence—and that their independence is protected. Support laws to require the Treasury to release presidential tax returns if the president fails to do so voluntarily. Urge new laws to clarify that the Emoluments Clause applies to the president’s immediate family, and that it refers not merely to direct gifts from governments but to payments from government-affiliated enterprises as well. Demand an independent investigation by qualified professionals of the role of foreign intelligence services in the 2016 election—and the contacts, if any, between those services and American citizens. Express your support and sympathy for journalists attacked by social-media trolls, especially women in journalism, so often the preferred targets. Honor civil servants who are fired or forced to resign because they defied improper orders. Keep close watch for signs of the rise of a culture of official impunity, in which friends and supporters of power-holders are allowed to flout rules that bind everyone else.

Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

That’s quite a call to arms.

He doesn’t mention it but it’s worth saying that part of the public apathy stems from the right wing’s cynical assertions of dishonesty and malfeasance where none existed (think Whitewater, Monica, “I invented the internet”, Swift-boats, Birtherism, Benghazi, emails) and the media’s unwillingness to sort out real corruption from partisan opportunism. Too many people believe the system is irretrievably iniquitous and so when a real corrupt leader like Trump comes along they see it as business as usual.

It’s an old story — the boy who cried wolf. Well, we have real wolf now.

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The forgotten educated

by digby

Check this out from Nate Cohn:

President Trump’s strength among less educated white voters has received plenty of attention since his surprise victory in last November’s election. His weakness among well-educated voters has been dissected less thoroughly. But he was nearly as weak among well-educated white voters as he was strong among less educated white voters. His losses — the voters who switched from Mr. Romney to Hillary Clinton — were largest in well-educated but traditionally Republican areas like Georgia’s Sixth.

I realize that educated people aren’t Real Americans and therefore, matter not one bit.  But it’s an interesting factoid.

The article is about the Ossof-Handel race which has taken on out-sized significance. It is one of the most well educated districts in the country and it has traditionally done extremely well with Republicans. College educated whites have voted Republicans since they began polling. But over the years, accelerating recently, they have been becoming more and more Democratic.

Some of Clinton’s strategy was based upon that shift and unfortunately, it didn’t quite get over the line in places where it could have made a difference. Trump loved the “poorly educated” (as he put it) and they loved him.

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Donald Trump IT expert

by digby

Remember when Trump bragged that the RNC was so much more secure than the DNC because he’d told them all about cyber-security and they did what he told them?

“At my suggestion — because I know something about this world — I said, ‘I want a very strong defensive mechanism. I don’t want to be hacked.’ And we did that,” Trump told reporters at a lengthy news conference, his first solo appearance before the press since taking office. “You have seen that they tried to hack us and they failed.”

“The DNC did not do that,” the president said. “And if they did it, they could not have been hacked. But they were hacked, and terrible things came in.” FBI Director James Comey did tell Congress last month that hackers only breached an old RNC server. But he also noted that they successfully infiltrated other Republican targets and declined to release those stolen files.

I love the “terrible things came in” like it showed the kind of nefarious deeds he’s been accused of instead of anodyne office politics.

Anyway, guess what?

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.

Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.

UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered Deep Root’s data online last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the protection of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not originate at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, shedding light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped propel President Donald Trump’s slim margins in key swing states.

Although files possessed by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its exposure in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. “This is valuable for people who have nefarious purposes,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of the data.

Oopsie. They apparently didn’t check with their cyber-experts Donald and Barron Trump (they know something about this world) who would have told them not to store all that highly confidential personal information on a public server.

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The president’s lawyer

by digby

I wrote about the president’s new lawyer Jay Sekulow for Salon this morning:

Last week, the Washington Post dropped one of the biggest bombshells of the Russia scandal to date when it published a story with five different sources saying that that special counsel Robert Mueller was looking into President Donald Trump’s actions with respect to the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. The sources were anonymous so the White House could have easily made no comment and let its outside surrogates construct some “alternative facts,” if only to buy some time.

Then the president, up in the middle of the night — probably obsessively watching “the shows” on his TiVo — took to Twitter to admit that he was under investigation and seemed to blame it on the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. By confirming the investigation, Trump moved the story along substantially for no good reason. But that’s him. He is congenitally unable to keep his cool.

It had been widely reported that Trump was unable to hire any of the top law firms to represent him because they believed he was likely to shoot his mouth off against their advice. According to Yahoo News one lawyer said the concerns were: “The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen.” So after Comey’s last public testimony, Trump unleashed his longtime private lawyer Marc Kasowitz to rebut the charges and it wasn’t a smooth performance.

The president apparently decided he needed someone with a little bit more experience in Washington. Since all the A-list defense attorneys were “unavailable” to come to the president’s defense he had to turn to the right-wing fever swamps and a man named Jay Sekulow, a familiar presence to viewers of Fox News.

It’s a bit unexpected for Sekulow to work for a president with a reputation as a crude libertine who clearly lacks any sincere commitment to religion and “traditional values.” Sekulow is best known for his work at the American Center for Law and Justice, the Christian conservatives’ answer to the ACLU, which Rev. Pat Robertson founded back in 1990.

The ACLJ is known in recent years for its work against gay marriage but it has been fighting at the front of every culture war battle of the last 27 years. Sekulow has argued some of its most important school prayer and abortion-clinic protest cases before the Supreme Court, and even represented the notorious anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue in a famous case which determined that the RICO Act used to prosecute organized crime could not be used against anti-abortion protesters.

Sekulow and the ACLJ have been heavily involved in the Christian right’s odious project to criminalize homosexuality in Africa. Mother Jones reported on this back in 2012:

Sekulow and his son Jordan opened affiliated offices of the ACLJ in Africa to lobby politicians to “take the Christian’s views into consideration as they draft legislation and policies,” according to ACLJ’s website. ACLJ’s Zimbabwe office has pushed an agenda that backs outlawing same-sex marriage and making sure that homosexuality “remain[s] a criminal activity.”

Their agenda includes ensuring that abortion is banned as well.

Why would Donald Trump hire a right-wing First Amendment lawyer rather than a defense attorney? Well, it’s obviously because Sekulow is a “legal analyst” for Fox News, which Trump watches obsessively. He likely saw Sekulow “defend” him on TV one night and decided he’d be a good “defense” lawyer.

So far, that’s not going too well. Sekulow made the rounds on all the Sunday talk shows (a feat known as the “full Ginsburg” after Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg, who hit all the shows in one famous blitz at the height of that scandal.) He insisted to anyone who would listen that despite the president’s tweeting that he was under investigation, he was really only responding to the news report and isn’t under investigation at all.

It didn’t make much sense, but Sekulow sounded highly confident in his assertion until he came to his home network, Fox News, to appear on Chris Wallace’s show. That’s when things fell apart. Wallace asked why, if the president isn’t under investigation, he would go after Rosenstein, describing the situation as a “witch hunt.” Sekulow lost his poise, and began explaining that Trump had taken the advice of the attorney general and his deputy, and “now the Department of Justice is investigating him.”

Wallace called him on it, and they had a spirited back and forth in which Wallace insisted that Sekulow had said what we’d just heard him say:

Wallace: Well, but you don’t know that he isn’t under investigation now, do you? 

Sekulow: Well, no one’s notified us that he is. So I — I can’t read people’s minds, but I can tell you this, we have not been notified that there’s an investigation to the president of the United States. So that — nothing has changed in that regard since James Comey’s testimony.
Wallace: Well, you don’t know that he’s not under investigation again, sir. I mean you might —

Sekulow: You know, I can’t read the mind — you’re right, Chris, I can’t read the minds of the special prosecutor.

Wallace ended the segment with “You don’t know. Oh boy, this is weird. You just told us that you didn’t know.”

You can see the whole exchange here:

Wallace: You’ve now said he’ is being investigated after saying he wasn’t.
Sekulow: No.
Wallace: You JUST said he’s being investigated. pic.twitter.com/KCXULFEXqM

— David Mack (@davidmackau) June 18, 2017

It’s not all that surprising that Trump would end up with a lawyer like Sekulow. But why is Sekulow doing this for Trump? He’s a religiou-right guy and while he undoubtedly voted for Trump, as did millions of other conservative Christians, the president seems an odd cause for him to take up. But they may have more in common than seems obvious at first blush.

According to Right Wing Watch, which has been tracking Sekulow for years, they have a similar approach to making money:

Several years ago, Tony Mauro wrote an article for The Legal Times entitled “The Secrets of Jay Sekulow” which examined how “through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, [Sekulow] has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle — complete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.”

Sekulow runs two multimillion-dollar nonprofits, the Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism and the ACLJ. His wife, brother, sister-in-law and two sons dominate the boards of both organizations, collecting millions of dollars through complicated legal structures.

It’s a highly lucrative nepotistic empire, not unlike the Trump Organization and the current White House. These two men sell different products, but they are cut from the same cloth.

Update: I didn’t have room for this little nugget:

The Jay Sekulow band was founded by Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice and includes an all-star cast: John Elefante former lead singer of Kansas, John Schlitt of Petra, Mark Townsend of DC Talk, Dr. Steve Guthrie, Marco Pangallo, and Scott Kirkman. Together they play songs that often resonate with the work and mission of the ACLJ. All these men above are Messianic-Christians and Pro-Israel-Yisrael / Pro-Zionism / Pro-USA!!

The mad king is not amused
by Tom Sullivan

Over at DKos, Hunter picks up on a throwaway line in a Politico story over the weekend about Trump v. DOJ:

Buried in an alarming-all-by-itself Politico article pondering how far down the line of succession we’d have to get, in the Justice Department, before we found someone who would not either have to recuse themselves from the Russia-Trump investigation or who an enraged Trump wouldn’t also summarily fire—oh, and by the way Trump might simply change the executive order setting the Justice Department’s line of succession, thus speeding up the process of, say, eventually just giving that job to Jared Kushner as well…

The basic story is pretty creepy:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has twice rewritten an executive order that outlines the order of succession at the Justice Department — once after President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to defend his travel ban, and then again two months later. The executive order outlines a list of who would be elevated to the position of acting attorney general if the person up the food chain recuses himself, resigns, gets fired or is no longer in a position to serve.

In the past, former Justice Department officials and legal experts said, the order of succession is no more than an academic exercise — a chain of command applicable only in the event of an attack or crisis when government officials are killed and it is not clear who should be in charge.

But Trump and the Russia investigation that is tightening around him have changed the game.

Norms meaning nothing to a wealthy businessman habituated to ignoring them and getting away with it, this is just another day at the Oval Office.

But towards the bottom is this gem:

Trump, too, is cognizant of the comparison to Nixon, according to one adviser. The president, who friends said does not enjoy living in Washington and is strained by the demanding hours of the job, is motivated to carry on because he “doesn’t want to go down in history as a guy who tried and failed,” said the adviser. “He doesn’t want to be the second president in history to resign.”

Hunter writes:

We’ve heard for a while that Trump doesn’t like the job and is feeling “strained” by it even after spending nearly every last sodding Friday-to-Sunday at Mar-a-Lago or, now that the season’s closed, hitting up one of his other golf courses—spending more time and taxpayer money on his own leisure than any president in recent history. He’s furious at the way he’s been treated in the press, and by opponents, and has been yelling at televisions and at his own staff for not making him magically successful and popular.

Now he’s under federal investigation by career public servants he can neither intimidate nor buy off. Don’t they know he’s the president?

Trump, the reality show celebrity with no experience in government, ran for the office to feed his insatiable ego and to get the world to stop laughing at him us. For the world’s greatest egotist, the presidency seemed like the world’s greatest prize. But once the alpha dog caught the car, he didn’t know what to do with it. Even the hapless wizard got the balloon off the ground, but not Trump. Instead, he signs presidential orders and empty directives in photo ops. He holds them up for the cameras like a first grader showing mom a finger painting. Do you love me now?

So Trump’s motivation for remaining in a job he hates and doesn’t know how to do, his motivation for wreaking more havoc on people’s lives, is not being viewed by history as a colossal failure. That’s … just … GREAT. Is that what #MAGA meant all along?

Maybe New York Public Theater should have gone with Lear.

The reasonable grown-up on Father’s Day

by digby

That would be Vice President Mike Pence who penned this op-ed back in 1999:

Just spent a memorable Fathers Day, like so many other all American Hoosier dads, with my kids at the new Disney film entitled, “Mulan”. For those who have not yet been victimized by the McDonald’s induced hysteria over this film, Mulan is a fictional account of a delicate girl of the same name who surreptitiously takes her fathers place in the Chinese army in one of their ancient wars against the Huns. Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts.

Obviously, this is Walt Disney’s attempt to add childhood expectation to the cultural debate over the role of women in the military. I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan’s story will cause a quiet change in the next generation’s attitude about women in combat and they just might be right. (Just think about how often we think of Bambi every time the subject of deer hunting comes into the mainstream media debate.)

The only problem with this liberal hope is the reality which intrudes on the Disney ideal from the mornings headlines. From the original “Tailhook” scandal involving scores of high ranking navy fighter pilots who molested subordinate women to the latest travesty at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, the hard truth of our experiment with gender integration is that is has been an almost complete disaster for the military and for many of the individual women involved.

When Indiana Congressman Steve Buyer was appointed to investigate the Aberdeen mess, he shocked the public with the revelation that young, nubile, 18 year old men and women were actually being HOUSED together during basic training. Whatever bone head came up with this idea should be run out of this man’s Army before sundown. Housing, in close quarters, young men and women (in some cases married to non-military personnel) at the height of their physical and sexual potential is the height of stupidity. It is instructive that even in the Disney film, young Ms. Mulan falls in love with her superior officer!

Me thinks the politically correct Disney types completely missed the irony of this part of the story. They likely added it because it added realism with which the viewer could identify with the characters. You see, now stay with me on this, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan.

Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.

Teaming up with a pussy-grabbing imbecile who thought avoiding VD was his own Vietnam — good idea!

This man is what they call a moderate now.

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“I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do? He already did something today where he said don’t blame them, essentially, for your incompetence.”

by digby

I was doing some research for another piece the other day and read the transcript of Trump’s last press conference of the 2016 campaign, which took place on July 27, just a few days after Wikileaks released its first batch of 20,000 DNC emails on the eve of the Democratic convention. He had a lot to say.

I still can’t believe that millions of people thought that was just great. I’ll never be able to understand it.

But if you look at what he said aside from his crude invitation to release Hillary Clinton’s personal emails from her personal server (which was never hacked, by the way) he has never altered his view one bit from that day.

He publicly doubts it was Russia and thinks that if it was it was purely because Russia didn’t respect our government which they would do if he were president so  we don’t have to worry that they would ever do it again. It all good because Clinton is corrupt and incompetent. We know that’s one of the main reasons Putin wanted to disrupt the election — his personal loathing for Clinton and a desire for retribution. He claims that Clinton had “rigged” the primary and later went on the say that she was rigging the general election too, refusing to say if he would recognize the outcome if it didn’t go his way.


All of this tracks with what has been reported as the strategy of a Russian Think Tank distributed last June just prior to the Wikileaks release. Maybe Trump didn’t know anything about that. He probably didn’t. But as with so many other instances, he seems to have had a coincidental mind meld with foreign agents who were trying to disrupt the election. What are the odds?

Update: You’ll note he says he doesn’t know Putin. Check out this speech in 2015 where he says he does. I know he’s said it bunch of times but I hadn’t heard this one.

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Politics and Reality Radio: New Study Blows Up White Working-Class Punditry; An Oligarchy Run by Jackasses?

with Joshua Holland

This week, we take a hard look at the right’s unhinged reaction to an abhorent but thankfully rare instance of left-wing violence.

Then we welcome John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, to talk about his new study that finds, among other things, that those white working-class voters everyone’s always talking about were already moving away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans before Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator.

Finally, we go back to the archives for a 2013 interview with UC Berkeley psychologist Paul Piff, whose research into the ethical standards of “high status individuals” tells us something about our Grifter-in-Chief.

Playlist:
Josh Ritter: “Getting Ready to Get Down”
Wax Tailor: “How I feel”
Serge Gainsbourg: “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus”

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Perlstein vs The Trumpie

by digby

Rick Perlstein offers the most powerful riposte to right wing Trump defenders and their gobblydygook:

Are you defending Donald Trump? A man who doesn’t even seem to care that a foreign government who is hostile to us is sabotaging not only our election process but the processes around the world? I mean, he’s never criticized that once.

The eye-roll heard ’round the world is at 5:25. https://t.co/xWnzCxWrDu

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) June 18, 2017

Seriously, this is what gets me. (I wrote about it in depth on Friday) Maybe he’s innocent. Maybe he’s just a fool who didn’t realize he was obstructing justice. I’m prepared to believe all that. But the fact that he refuses to accept the interference from Russia even happened and that it’s dangerous for our democracy is what truly disqualifies him.

This is serious business. It’s a form of modern warfare and our president, whether it’s because he’s implicated or just because his puerile ego is so inflated that he can only see the fact that it calls his dubious victory more into doubt, refuses to address it.

He may not have committed a crime. But he’s certainly abdicated his duty to the country.

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