Month: July 2017

What possesses them?
by Tom Sullivan

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that he didn’t know about the June 2016 meeting his son, Donald Trump Jr., and campaign aides Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had taken with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya “until a couple of days ago.” But in speaking with reporters on Air Force One later the same day, Trump admitted, “In fact maybe it was mentioned at some point.”

This is a pattern, not only with Trump Sr., but with the entire Trump entourage. Lie, and when the lie is revealed, admit to the lie (as little as possible). Then lie again, until that one proves false. Repeat. Explain the lies and the lies before them as no big deal. If only President Trumpstaff and his band of lying rascals were as comically harmless as Shakespeare’s. Or Monty Python’s gangsters, the Piranha bothers.

But they are not.

There is something more disturbing than the Trump orbit displaying toxic levels of wealth and privilege in trafficking in and defending its lies. It is that the conservative establishment remains committed to standing behind what looks (as if we did not already know) like an ongoing criminal enterprise for laundering “mob-connected money” from Russia. Not to mention standing with him knowing his team was willing to conspire with a hostile, foreign power to undermine American democracy.

Jonathan Chait parodied the responses from Trump and his supporters before the Air Force One admissions:

There was no hacking, Russia didn’t do the hacking, we didn’t meet with any Russians, when we met with the Russians we didn’t discuss hacking. The position of Trump’s conservative apologists is that this time they are probably telling the truth. It’s the law of averages. It’s like a coin came up heads 99 times in a row — the next one just has to be tails, right?

He takes the Wall Street Journal to task as one of the loudest and most influential conservative outlets, writing:

At every stage, the Journal and other Trump apologists have leaned heavily on the uncertainty of the facts not yet revealed, while disregarding the importance of every previous defense that has been disproven. Now faced with evidence more damning than anybody could have imagined — a promise of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, in writing! — the Journal is treating the clarity of the evidence as more reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

There is no point in going back to count the number of investigations into Benghazi or Clinton’s emails, nor the resources expended by Republicans in Congress in an attempt to land Hillary Clinton’s head on a platter. It is what they do. Political parties have their tribal loyalties and defend their loyalists. From the moment Hillary Clinton announced her run for president, she was bound to be her party’s nominee. With her long history as a party activist, of course she became the default choice of Democratic primary voters. There was no Obama this time to upstage her. But Trump is no party loyalist. He barely qualifies as a Republican. Yet Republicans fell into line behind him, their brand as empty as Trump’s own. To secure their precious tax cuts, watch how long flag-pin-wearing Republican leaders defend disloyalty to the country they themselves have sworn to defend. Watch how long Trump supporters do.

The breast-beating and flag-waving have long been pharisaical. Their public demonstrations of patriotic piety are the kind Christ condemned among the religious elite of his day. It is as if, like Trump and “winning,” they must constantly remind themselves and the public of their faith in America, a faith that is in practice a mile wide and an inch deep. (See Kris Kobach, et. al.) Perhaps it is Trump’s phoniness they relate to and see in themselves.

Liberals, we know, hate America and all it stands for. Book of Fox 24:7.

That’s why it was stunning last night to see Rachel Maddow’s plea for Trump to get better legal representation. After a review of the rogue’s gallery of hot-tempered lawyers Trump has assembled (not to mention the mob lawyer Trump Jr. has hired), Maddow argued that the president, any president, should have “competent representation” for the sake of American justice, and so it might be served and preserved:

As for Trump, we shall have more anon.

The Attorney General of the United States, ladies and gentlemen

by digby

Wow:

BREAKING: DOJ releases single, redacted page of Sessions’s SF86 security clearance form to American Oversight. https://t.co/9e7tkMHPAn pic.twitter.com/x7YGPfaCoY

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) July 13, 2017

In response to a court order directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to disclose the part of his security clearance form detailing his Russia contacts, the Department of Justice released a mostly blank page of paper.

The Thursday morning “disclosure” comes in response to a lawsuit from an ethics watchdog group.

According to NPR, a “recently-launched ethics watchdog group called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March for sections of the Standard Form 86 [i.e., security clearance] relating to Sessions’ contacts ‘with any official of the Russian government.’” On June 12, a judge ordered the DOJ to comply with the request within 30 days.

As recently as Wednesday, the DOJ said it planned to comply with the court order. But the deadline came and went this week.

On Thursday morning, the DOJ finally made an attempt to comply with the court order by disclosing a single page document that is almost totally redacted. The one exception is a box checked ‘No,’ indicating Sessions has not had contact with a foreign government in the last seven years.

Citing a DOJ spokesman, Natasha Bertrand of Business Insider reports that the former senator from Alabama is intentionally omitting meetings he had with Russian officials, including Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

But it is not clear Sessions was acting in his official capacity when he met with Kislyak during the campaign. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, one of Sessions’ meetings with Kislyak happened at the Republican National Convention — an event Sessions traveled to and from using campaign funds. What’s more, a person who was at the RNC told the Journal that Sessions and Kislyak discussed the Trump campaign.

In the margin of the single-page disclosure released on Thursday, Sessions cites two statutory justifications for not disclosing information about his meetings with Russians. Both of them claim disclosure “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

He isn’t the first lying crook to be Attorney General (John Mitchell still wears the crown — for now.) But he may be the first to be personally involved in a scheme to have a foreign government install a useful tool as president. That probably isn’t what happened but he sure is acting like someone with something to hide.

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Trump’s consiglieri

by digby

Seems like a terrific guy:

Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal attorney on the Russia case, threatened a stranger in a string of profanity-laden emails Wednesday night.

The man, a retired public relations professional in the western United States who asked not to be identified, read ProPublica’s story this week on Kasowitz and sent the lawyer an email with the subject line: “Resign Now.’’

Kasowitz replied with series of angry messages sent between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern time. One read: “I’m on you now. You are fucking with me now Let’s see who you are Watch your back , bitch.”

In another email, Kasowitz wrote: “Call me. Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up. If you don’t call, you’re just afraid.” And later: “I already know where you live, I’m on you. You might as well call me. You will see me. I promise. Bro.”

Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, said Thursday he couldn’t immediately reach Kasowitz for comment.

ProPublica confirmed the man’s phone number matched his stated identity. Technical details in the emails, such as IP addresses and names of intermediate mail servers, also show the emails came from Kasowitz’s firm. In one email, Kasowitz gave the man a cell phone number that is not widely available. We confirmed Kasowitz uses that number.

The exchange began after the man saw our story featured last night on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. We reported that Kasowitz is not seeking a security clearance even though the Russia case involves a significant amount of classified material.

Experts said Kasowitz could have trouble getting a security clearance because of what multiple sources described as a recent history of alcohol abuse. Former employees also said Kasowitz had engaged in behavior that made them uncomfortable.

Since the story was published, his spokesman issued a statement disputing several parts of the story: “Marc Kasowitz has not struggled with alcoholism,” Sitrick wrote. “He has not come into the office intoxicated, attorneys have not had to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters.”

The rigorous background investigation that goes into getting security clearance also considers “any information relevant to strength of character, honesty, discretion, sound judgment, [and] reliability.”

The exchange of emails Wednesday began at 9:28 p.m. Eastern when the man sent the following message to Kasowitz’s firm account.

Five minutes later, Kasowitz responded with two words:

Fifteen minutes after that, Kasowitz sent a second email:

The man responded politely:

But Kasowitz continued to harangue him:

And then, just 33 minutes after the man’s initial email, Kasowitz sent a fourth response, referring to his own Jewish heritage and the man’s name, which he presumed to be Jewish.

The man told us that the email exchange disturbed him so greatly he forwarded it to the FBI so there would be a written record in case Kasowitz followed through on the threat.

This article goes on to discuss what experts think about the possible legal liability but it really just sounds like the guy has … issues. Why would a busy lawyer who works for the president be bothered by something like that and take the time to engage it?

He’s very successful apparently so what do I know? And he fashions himself as some sort of tough macho dude so maybe he does this all day long. But it’s yet another example of the lowlife thuggish circles our president and his family run in.

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Off the wall

by digby

Today … oy:

Q You were joking about solar, right?

THE PRESIDENT: No, not joking, no. There is a chance that we can do a solar wall. We have major companies looking at that. Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border — the southern border. And there is a very good chance we can do a solar wall, which would actually look good. But there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall.

One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.

And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As cray as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall. But we have some incredible designs.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

By the way, he also that “the Wall”we have (aka a fence) mostly just needs to be “fixed” because it’s in bad shape and that we don’t really need a 2,000 mile wall because of mountains and stuff. Who knew?

The people who voted for him on the basis of this problem won’t care because really they just wanted to chant like a bunch of brainwashed cultists at his rallies and insult Mexicans. It was all about gathering together in one place to worship a moron who was willing to say out loud all the ugly, bigoted thoughts running through their own small, cramped minds.

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Welp, this Senate bill is as lethal as we knew it would be

by digby

Basically, the Cruz Amendment to the health care bill just takes us back to where we were before Obamacare, with unaffordable, skyrocketing premiums, bankrupting caps on payment and inability to get insurance at all for people who are sick. In other words, he’s trying to kill and bankrupt the American people:

Here’s what they are now going to be eliminating in the Senate health care bill:

All that’s fine if you’re not sick and will never get sick. In fact, why bother at all? Just assume that you will die instantly in a fiery car crash instead of getting cancer. Who needs health insurance then, amirite? If other people get cancer or heart disease or their kid is in an accident and needs major surgery and rehab to survive, well that just not your problem.

These Republicans aren’t all stupid. McConnell and Cruz certainly aren’t. They are intent upon killing people in order to remain in power. They’re apparently assuming that they will be able to blame the black guy when their own constituents start dropping dead. And they’re probably right.

Now think about the fact that this whole thing hinges on just three Republicans saying no. That means that 48 or 49 of these cretins are ready to do this heinous act. And most of them know exactly what they’re doing. They just don’t care.

And some of them are starry eyed little Tinkerbells who just want you to clap louder:

“You have to believe in freedom. You have to believe that leaving people alone, that the marketplace will bring the prices down” –@RandPaul pic.twitter.com/G29BRXojcx— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) July 13, 2017

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Ayeyayay, this guy

by digby

In this Reuters interview he pretty much says that he thinks there’s nothing wrong with working with a foreign power with a sophisticated spying apparatus to destroy your political opponents.

ON WHETHER HE WAS AWARE HIS SON DONALD TRUMP JR. WAS MEETING WITH A RUSSIAN LAWYER

“No. That I didn’t know. Until a couple of days ago, when I heard about this. No I didn’t know about that.”

“Look – that campaign … I actually always thought I’d win, to be honest with you, because I’ve been winning my whole life, to be honest with you, but we started a campaign as a non-politician, and many people were skeptical. Some weren’t, some people who know me weren’t … but many were skeptical. And it was a wild time. And we would meet with many people.”

“That same meeting: a person comes in, sits, leaves, quickly. It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I’m hearing. Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that. If you got a call and said, ‘Listen I have information on Hillary and the DNC,’ or whatever it was they said, most people are going to take that meeting, I think.”

“I think many people would have held that meeting.”

“And you have to understand, when that took place, this was before Russia fever. There was no Russia fever back then, that was at the beginning of the campaign, more or less. There was no Russia fever.”

“Most of the phony politicians who are Democrats who I watched over the last couple of days – most of those phonies that act holier-than-thou, if the same thing happened to them, they would have taken that meeting in a heartbeat.”

This is an admission as far as I am concerned that even if he didn’t know (which, of course, he did) he doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with it and that it’s just fine if people do this in the future.

Let’s just accept that’s what h’s saying and go from there. The president believes that working with a foreign government to disrupt our democratic processes and take power is standard operating procedure.

If that isn’t an impeachable offense I don’t know what is.However, since his party is supporting him all the way, it’s clear that this is now an entirely mainstream position and that we can expect them to do it going forward. (It will not be acceptable for their opponents for obvious reasons.

In the interview Trump said again that he asked President Putin twice if he had meddled, even cleverly asking it in two different ways, and he said absolutely not. Then he added this interesting little observation:

“Somebody did say if he did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”

I wonder if that “somebody’s” name is Vlad.(“Believe me, Donald, if I had done what they say I’d done, you would never know it. I am KGB. I am superman.”)

Is there really any doubt that Trump admires the Russian government more than his own, simply because the government and state media unctuously flatter him like a royal prince? I guess that’s fine. People have a right to admire anyone they choose. But you have to admit that it’s more than a little bit unusual for a US president to feel this way. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s unprecedented.

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Andy Murray may have lost, but nothing got past him post-match…#Wimbledon pic.twitter.com/Uniks77WKu

— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 13, 2017

A reporter commented on the American player, “Sam was the first American tennis player to reach a major semifinal since 2009. How would you describe the. . .” Murray interjected “male player.” The reporter said “I beg your pardon?” Murray repeated “male player” and the reporter laughed it off “first male player, thats for sure.”

To his point, multiple American women tennis players have made it to the Wimbledon semifinal since 2009 and, indeed, taken home the championship — Venus and Serena Williams are easily available examples.

This isn’t the first time Murray has publicly corrected men for their errors. Last year, BBC reporter John Inverdale told Murray he was first tennis player to win two Olympic gold medals. Murray responded by acknowledging similar achievements, “I think Venus and Serena won about four each.”

Additionally in 2015, Murray hired Amelie Mauresmo to be his coach. Murray defended his choice, “A lot of people criticized me working with her,”and added “And I think so far this week we have shown that women can be very good coaches as well.”

Murray added, “Have I become a feminist? Well, if being a feminist is about fighting so that a woman is treated like a man then yes, I suppose I have. My upbringing means that I’m quite attuned to the whole thing.”

It’s not all on Trump

Unpopular revolt
by Tom Sullivan

George Washington and his troops near Fort Cumberland, Maryland, before their march to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. (Public domain)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pressing forward to pass the “most unpopular legislation in three decades.” The latest version is expected to debut this morning looking much like the old version. Not a single state supports it. Writing for Reuters, political scientist Scott Lemieux recounts how wildly unpopular the Republican project is in general:

It’s not just healthcare. Every major item on the GOP’s agenda polls badly. After healthcare, Republicans want to pass more tax cuts for the rich, which are very unpopular among all voters except Republican elites. The rollback of environmental regulations – which under Trump’s EPA director Scott Pruitt has been one of the most consequential results of Trump’s victory – is widely despised. The public also opposes loosening workplace safety standards and defunding Planned Parenthood. The Republican agenda couldn’t be less popular if it was designed to repel majorities.

But majorities are not required, as Republicans see it. It is sufficient that they remain in charge, in a sham democracy if need be. Through sophisticated gerrymandering, voter integrity propaganda, voter purges, voter suppression measures, and by continuing to support a president compromised morally, ethically and politically, they hope to maintain their rule even as they pursue an agenda supported by an underwhelming minority of voters in an electorate that votes in ever shrinking numbers. Time for a popular rebellion about something more than whiskey.

John Nichols writes for The Nation:

The Republican Party, which has benefited from this dysfunction, is in no rush to change things. Indeed, it has at its highest levels embraced the voter-suppression lies and scheming of charlatans such as Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and President Trump’s Orwellian “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” So it falls to progressive Democrats, nonaligned independents and third-party activists to take the lead in the struggle for democratic renewal.

Rep. Don Beyers, a Virginia Democrat, introduced in late June the Fair Representation Act to address the gerrymandering problem. FairVote explains how it would work:

Smaller states with five or fewer members will elect all representatives from one statewide, at-large district. States with more than six will draw multi-winner districts of three to five representatives each. Congress will remain the same size, but districts will be larger.

They will be elected through ranked-choice voting, an increasingly common electoral method used in many American cities, whereby voters rank candidates in order of choice, ensuring that as many voters as possible help elect a candidate they support. Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate reaches the threshold needed to win, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. When a voter’s top choice loses, their vote instantly goes to their second choice. The process repeats until all seats are elected.

Using this approach, four in five voters would elect someone they support. The number of voters in position to swing a seat would immediately triple — from less than 15 percent in 2016, to just under half.

The districts themselves will be drawn by state-created, independent commissions made up of ordinary citizens. These larger districts would be nearly impossible to gerrymander for political advantage – and would force politicians to seek out voters with different perspectives and remain accountable to them.

The bill (H.R.3057) is in committee. It has two Democratic co-sponsors, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rep. Ro Khanna, of California, and little chance of going anywhere in this Congress. Ranked voting has its supporters, but I haven’t dug enough into it to speak to its merit and weaknesses. Nevertheless, Democrats need to be moving in this direction, writes Nichols:

The people are angry about gerrymandering. They want competitive elections and true representative democracy. (A 2013 Harris poll found that 74 percent of Republicans, 73 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents object to the pro-politician, anti-voter methods of redistricting that now prevail in most states for congressional and legislative elections.)

Combining support for the assault on gerrymandering that Beyer has proposed with support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling (as proposed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others in the Senate and House) and with support for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote and to have that vote counted (as Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison have proposed) would go a long way toward branding the Democrats as the party of reform that America needs.

By becoming the party of democratic renewal — promoting bold and meaningful changes that empower voters to end the malaise in Washington and state capitals nationwide — Democrats can make themselves the party of the future.

Can, maybe. But will they? According to local legend, back in prehistory when Democrats still firmly controlled both houses of North Carolina’s legislature, progressive activists approached the senate’s majority leader about moving to nonpartisan redistricting. He grinned and dismissed the idea saying, “Democrats draw great districts,” and lived to regret it.

Headline o’ the Day

by digby

From Huffpost Hill:

GOOD NEWS FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP! – What an interesting bar to be clearing only months into an administration. S.V. Date: ″Donald Trump Jr.’s hopes of getting Russian government help for his father in last year’s election have popularized a word for critics of the White House: ‘treason.’ And it is almost certainly wrong ― at least in the legal sense. ‘There is a lot of behavior that is really bad, and is a betrayal of the United States,’ said Carlton Larson, a law professor at University of California, Davis, and an expert on the topic. ‘But it’s not technically treason.’ … While the colloquial meaning of treason is acting against the interest of one’s country, the legal definition ― spelled out in the United States Code ― is much narrower. The law states that an American citizen who ‘levies war’ against the government or gives ‘aid and comfort’ to the nation’s enemies is guilty of treason, punishable by at least five years in prison and possible execution. ”

It must be a relief that our president of six months most likely isn’t gong to be tried for treason. At last not yet.

So much winning.

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