Month: July 2017

Politics and Reality Radio: Jacob Hacker: A Tough Road to Universal Coverage; Katha Pollitt on the Psychological Toll of Trumpism

with Joshua Holland

This week, we kick off the show with a look at the hero worship of John McCain and the remarkable cowardice of 49 of his Senate colleagues.

Then we’ll be joined by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, one of the intellectual forebearers of Obamacare, to talk about what might be ahead in the fight to establish universal health care in the US, now in its 105th year.

Finally, we’ll talk to Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, about a piece she wrote last week surveying how some liberals and progressives are coping after six months with Donald Trump in the White House. Their reactions are more diverse than you might imagine.

Playlist:
Foo Fighters: “My Hero (Acoustic)”
Southern Culture on the Skids: “Camelwalk”
Celine Dion: “God Bless America”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

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Feminists are the problem dontcha know?

by digby

I wrote a piece for DAME Magazine this week in which I explain why I believe (have always believed) that the first woman president will most likely be a conservative. It starts off with some discussion of what happened in 2016:

How many different ways can we get the message that women don’t count? Just this morning, in fact, two female GOP senators who have consistently voted against the repeal-and/or-replace health-care bill—even as one of them has been threatened by the secretary of the Interior—were overshadowed by Senator John McCain, who swanned in with his surprise “no” vote, and guess who emerged the hero? McCain’s vote even moved Democratic senator Chuck Schumer to tears—but he seemed unmoved by Murkowski and Collins, and even the disabled activists who put their bodies on the line. 

At least Schumer is consistent, because earlier in the week, as he unveiled the Democrats’ new slogan and strategy—”A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future”—it seems pretty clear that both parties have decided to run against Hillary Clinton in 2018, pushing their truism that it was the terrible Democratic candidate who did herself in. That narrative of the campaign was set in the early days of national stunned disbelief when various pundits and political players with axes to grind told the tale of a group of angry white working-class men whom Clinton allegedly ignored in favor of a campaign which foolishly assumed that in 2016, a majority of Americans were decent people who would be persuaded to reject the most openly misogynist, bigoted demagogue in modern political memory.

She was right about that. She won 3 million more votes than he did. But some quirks of the system gave Donald Trump the victory anyway when the Republican party united behind him and cobbled together a decisive electoral college victory. Nobody could call it a democratic result but by the archaic rules of the electoral college he became president and she was relegated to diving into a bottle of Chardonnay and wandering the Chappaqua woods.

And women all over the country muttered under their breath, “Yep. Even when we get the highest score, we still don’t get the job.” We simply don’t count, no matter what we do.

Women are half the population but only hold 20 percent of the political representation in the U.S. federal government. We place 100th in the world for female political representation with only 20 percent of offices held by women. The business press cheered wildly at the news that the share of women CEOs surged in the last year—from 4 percent to 6 percent. Women comprised just 7 percent of Hollywood film directors last year, down 2 percent from the year before. Across the board American women are lagging in leadership posts in absolute terms and in comparison to other nations.

As the early days of shock turned into an inchoate need to vent and share, women’s frustration and despair found at least some expression in the woman’s march which morphed into a grassroots movement that is working all over the country to resist the Trump administration and elect Democrats to office. Nonetheless, it became clear that any talk of the election as an illustration of the enduring sexism and misogyny in our culture was not going to be tolerated.

As Rebecca Traister chronicled in her brilliant post-election profile in New Yorkmagazine, when Hillary Clinton herself dared to mention it as a factor in her defeat, pundits and analysts held her up for ridicule accusing her of making excuses for her own failure and demanding she apologize. When she tweeted congratulations to the new DNC chair, a well-known columnist responded with a simple command to “retire” suggesting that even having the temerity to participate in social media was unacceptable. A Daily News columnist put it more bluntly: “Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.”

And women who voted for Clinton got the message, loud and clear. It wasn’t just about her. It was about them too. As the New Yorker’s Daniel Kibblesmith satirically remarked, “It is time for Hillary Clinton to disappear from our magazine covers and our television screens, and gracefully retire from public life. Ideally, taking all other women with her.”

But the fact that nobody wants to reckon with the truth does not change the fact that sexism did play a role—a big one—one so big that, if you stop and think about it, is so obvious it’s shocking that there’s even any controversy. After all, the reaction of the Republican party to what everyone assumed was be the inevitable nomination of the first woman presidential nominee was to choose a man so crudely misogynist that he was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. Republican voters wore T-shirts that said “Don’t be a pussy. Vote for Trump”; “Trump that Bitch”; “Hillary Sucks, but not like Monica”; and “Hillary for Prison.” They sold pins that had pictures of a boy urinating on her name. And that’s just for starters.

These lovely items weren’t just produced on the sly by enterprising entrepreneurs catering to the fringe. They were sold at the Republican National Convention, the gathering which introduced the nation to the “lock her up” chants that resembled nothing so much as an angry 16th-century mob hysterically demanding a witch burning.

It was vulgar, rank misogyny. It was primal. It was explicit. And unlike the crude subterranean racism that roiled beneath President Obama’s two races, it was sanctioned by the highest reaches of the GOP and celebrated before a national television audience. And yet we are supposed to pretend that it didn’t happen. And if it did, the woman was asking for it because she was a terrible candidate, even though she won 3 million more votes.

Despite the virtual gag order on talking about sexism in 2016, there have been some intrepid souls who have analyzed polling data and it backs up what we all saw with our own eyes. The Blair Center Poll from the Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas polled 3,668 individuals immediately after the election using the Modern Sexism Scale, a tool similar to those employed by social scientists to detect racial resentment. They asked people to agree or disagree on a scale of one to ten with the following statements:

Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for “equality.”

Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.

Feminists are seeking for women to have more power than men.

When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.

Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States.

The results are very thorough and complex and show that the 2016 electorate was very much in the grip of sexism. 36.2 percent were clearly sexist and another 16.7 were neutral, although if you have a neutral response to those questions it’s a good indication that you aren’t exactly a crusader for women’s rights. Over half the public has a pretty low opinion of women and their response to those questions explains why nobody wants to hear about it.

Please click over to read on about why the majority of white women voted for Trump, how the GOP became so sexist and why they are still able to produce a woman leader from time to time without disturbing the patriarchal system. Phyllis Schlafly came up with a formula that not only served conservative women but served the conservative movement as a whole.

And, by the way, I do hope fervently that I am wrong and that it will be a feminist who becomes the first woman president. One got more votes last time, so it’s certainly not impossible. But any liberal feminist woman is going to have some big hills to climb even within her own coalition.

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The Squire of Gotham
by Tom Sullivan

What with daily Twitter outbursts from the president’s phone, it is hard to ignore the fact that the entity now leading this country is both malevolent, malformed, emotionally and morally stunted. People wanted a businessman running the country as a business. What they elected was a 70 year-old child who has never run anything but a closely held family business. He has no conception what accountability to others even means. Donald Trump couldn’t manage a convenience store if the employees weren’t relatives hanging on for their inheritance.

So it is with his White House.

Today's cover: In the latest episode of “White House Survivor,” the West Wing descends into chaos https://t.co/IcHnEGTW70 pic.twitter.com/wl7XnA6jEK— New York Post (@nypost) July 28, 2017

Charles Mathewes, Professor of Religious Studies at the university of Virginia, along with PhD candidate Evan Sandsmark comment on the toxic effects of great wealth in the Washington Post. They do not mention the sitting president by name. They don’t have to. But he is the occasion for their examination.

The pair cite studies, etc. on the corruptions of wealth, but you don’t need a weatherman to know which way Trump’s hair blows (or Anthony Scaramucci’s, for that matter).

It was once accepted wisdom, the two write, that wealth had a corrosive effect on the soul:

The idea that wealth is morally perilous has an impressive philosophical and religious pedigree. Ancient Stoic philosophers railed against greed and luxury, and Roman historians such as Tacitus lay many of the empire’s struggles at the feet of imperial avarice. Confucius lived an austere life. The Buddha famously left his opulent palace behind. And Jesus didn’t exactly go easy on the rich, either — think camels and needles, for starters.

That folk belief still holds in many quarters. Pope Francis’ quarters in an otherwise opulent Vatican are essentially “a small suite in what is effectively the Vatican’s hostel.” But our contemporary view has shifted to something more akin to the NRA’s view of firearms. Wealth doesn’t corrupt, corrupt people misuse it. As with firearms, we had help reaching that conclusion:

Getting here wasn’t straightforward. Wealth has arguably been seen as less threatening to one’s moral health since the Reformation, after which material success was sometimes taken as evidence of divine election. But extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore. But it is hard to argue that a company’s top earners are literally hundreds of times more talented than the lowest-paid employees.

Perhaps the sitting president is simply an extreme case among extreme cases. In Trump’s frequent invocation of savage imagery to paint entire populations as “animals” and in systematic public humiliation of his own attorney general, Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune finds not just cruelty, but sadism.

If we survive his tenure, perhaps this administration will provide an object lesson in the toxicity of great wealth. But don’t bet on it.

After another tumultuous week under this president, the persistent image of Trump I am left with is the entity Trelane from the Star Trek episode, “The Squire of Gothos.” A man with godlike powers but with the temperament of a spoiled child, Trelane fancies himself a 18th century Earth general. He torments the Enterprise crew until they are rescued by the disembodied voices of Trelane’s parents who scold him as “disobedient and cruel.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just playing,” Trelane whines. “Oh, but you saw. I was winning. I would have won. Honest.”

“You must forgive our child,” Trelane’s mother tells Captain Kirk. “The fault is ours for indulging him too much. He will be punished.”

Money may corrupt. But there’s something worse in charge of the White House. And no one yet to call the spoiled child to stop and come inside.

Saturday Night at the Movies




Sisters are doin’ it for themselves: Landline (**½) & Mali Blues (***½)

By Dennis Hartley

Why are New Yorkers always screaming at each other? Is it in order to be heard above the constant din of traffic, sirens, and subway brakes? Maybe there really is something in the water (that same “whatsit” in NYC tap water that makes the bagels taste so…intense).

There’s even more screaming than usual in the latest NYC-based film, Landline. That’s because director/co-writer Gillian Robespierre (Obvious Child) sets her tale of two sisters in the mid-1990s, a not-so-bygone era when humans were still experiencing “face time” with each other (now the only time people turn off their goddam personal devices is when they pay $15 to sit in the dark-and watch characters in a film text each other for 2 hours).

Not that there is anything wrong with a dialog-driven film…and every character in Landline has plenty to say, particularly the two sisters I mentioned earlier. Dana (Jenny Slate) is the older of the siblings. She’s recently become engaged to her live-in boyfriend Ben (Jay Duplass), who is a bit of a milquetoast in contrast with his quirky, bubbly fiancée. That could explain why Dana seems to be vacillating about this big commitment.

Something else has been weighing on Dana’s mind…she is beginning to suspect that her father (John Turturro) has been carrying on a longtime affair. When she confides this to her sullen teenage sister Ali (Abby Quinn), the estranged pair begin to bond as they brainstorm on how to dig deeper without sending up red flags to their mom (Edie Falco).

Lots of family angst (and yes, screaming) ensues. Fortunately, there are laughs as well. That said, you do have to wade waist-deep in neurotic New Yorker whingeing for 90 minutes to net the choicest zingers (which average about once every five minutes or so).

Frankly, what primarily keeps this at times blatantly derivative mashup of Hannah and Her Sisters and glorified episode of HBO’s Girls afloat is the appealing cast. The always-reliable Turturro and Falco do that voodoo that they do so well, and Slate and Quinn nicely hold their own against the more seasoned players. Slate, in particular is a young actor I’d love to see more of; she has an unselfconsciously goofy charm that is hard to resist. She’s like the lovechild of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. For all I know…she is.

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

-H.L. Mencken

African women live through too much hell and suffering
We should look again at our ancestral beliefs and assess them
Keep what’s good for us, and reject all that harms us
African women live through too much hell and suffering
They cut it…stop female circumcision!
Mother, it hurts so much
It hurts so much

-from “Boloko”, by Fatoumata Diawara

Needless to say, self-taught Mali guitarist-singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara does not make her living churning out moon-June pop tunes. She is a creative artist who is fiercely and fearlessly dedicated to speaking truth to power. That’s the kind of stance that makes you a lightning rod anywhere in the world (especially if you are a woman), but it borders on suicidal in an impoverished West African nation where Islamic militants have declared war on music and musicians. From a 2012 Guardian article by Andy Morgan:

The pickup halted in Kidal, the far-flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy award-winning band Tinariwen. Seven AK47-toting militiamen got out and marched to the family home of a local musician. He wasn’t home, but the message delivered to his sister was chilling: “If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.” 

The gang then removed guitars, amplifiers, speakers, microphones and a drum kit from the house, doused them with petrol, and set them ablaze. In northern Mali, religious war has been declared on music. 

When a rabble of different Islamist groups took control of the region in April there were fears that its rich culture would suffer. But no one imagined that music would almost cease to exist – not in Mali, a country that has become internationally renowned for its sound. 

“Culture is our petrol,” says Toumani Diabaté, the Malian kora player who has collaborated with Damon Albarn and Björk, to name but a few. “Music is our mineral wealth. There isn’t a single major music prize in the world today that hasn’t been won by a Malian artist.” 

“Music regulates the life of every Malian,” adds Cheich Tidiane Seck, a prolific Malian musician and producer. “From the cradle to the grave. From ancient times right up to today. A Mali without music? No … I mean … give me another one!”

In his new documentary, Mali Blues, Lutz Gregor follows popular world music artist Fatoumata Diawara as she prepares for her appearance at the 2015 Festival of the Niger. Originally born in Ivory Coast to Malian parents and currently living in France, Diawara has not been back to Mali since she left at age 19. That is why her participation in the festival has profound personal significance; it signals Diawara’s first performance in her home country since achieving international recognition and success as a recording artist.

Several of Diawara’s fellow Malian musicians also appearing at the festival are profiled as well, including Taureg guitarist Ahmed Ag Kaedi, rapper Master Soumy, and ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate. As a guitar player, I was particularly taken with Kouyate’s mastery of his instrument…he’s like the Hendrix of the ngoni. I have never seen anyone play an electrified ngoni before; much less enhanced with pedal effects (like a wah-wah). To just look at this oddly rectangular, 4-string banjo-like instrument, you’d never imagine one could wriggle such a broad spectrum of power, beauty and spacious tonality out of it.

Beautifully photographed and edited, with no voiceover to take you out of the frame, Gregor’s documentary plays like a meditative narrative film. In the film’s most bittersweet scene, Diawara performs “Boloko” (her song about the draconian practice of female circumcision) for a small audience of women and girls in a Mali village where she spent her formative years. After a moment of silence once the song ends, the women begin to ruminate. “A song is nothing without its meaning,” one of the women says to Diawara, continuing, “You are good and courageous.” And, as this extraordinary film illustrates, a culture is nothing without its music…or its poetry, literature, or art for that matter. Those who would destroy it will never hold a candle to the good and courageous.

Previous posts with related themes:
Tibet in Song

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

You want heroes?

by digby

These people literally put their lives on the line to protest the monstrous conservative ideology that would deny health care to tens of millions. That’s what I call heroic.

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A Good Cop

by digby

Josh Marshall at TPM has a cop reader who writes in from time to time. This came in response to the brownshirt rally in Long Island yesterday:

I’m fucking furious.

This two-bit gangster, would-be dictator just set police-community relations back by a quarter of a century.

“When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over,” he mimicked an officer putting a handcuffed person in the back of a squad car, the officer’s hand over the suspect’s head. “Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody? Don’t hit their head?”

“I said, you can take the hand away, OK?” he concluded, to laughter, and then loud applause.”

The reaction of officers in the room to the President’s words as described is troubling and embarrassing. Any officer who causes injury to a person in custody is open internal disciplinary charges, criminal Assault charges, Official Misconduct, and Federal civil rights violations, as well as civil liability. This is NOT the Wild West, as POTUS seems to imagine.

Police Officers are not judge and jury. We do not meet out punishment. Every person has the constitutional right to a presumption of innocence. We are authorized to use minimum force necessary to take a person into custody. Once in custody, police are responsible for the health and well-being of the arrestee.

I would direct the POTUS to the definition of the word “custody”

I get that a lot of people in this country really think they want the cops to bring the hammer down on all the “bad people.” You know, the ones who aren’t white. Aside from the un-American immorality of such a point of view, they should realize that once you let this genie out of the bottle anyone can become the target.

I know an older white man who spent his life raging about racial minorities and extolling police brutality who got stopped by a cop after he’d been drinking and he said something rude, got tasered, wrestled to the ground and his nose was broken. He didn’t think that was fair at all. In fact, he was very angry that it happened to him. He felt his rights had been trampled. Imagine that.

Had he been black he very easily could have been shot, of course. They deal with this in a whole different lethal dimension. But even white people who believe that the police see them as good guys are subject to police brutality. Once you say it’s ok, they figure they can do whatever they want whenever they want and even old white men don’t have any constitutional rights.

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Four years of this? Really?

by digby

This morning:

The Republicans in Washington know very well that this man is dangerously stupid and temperamentally unfit even if their delusional cult members do not. He is our Kim Jong Un.

This is their fault. They are enablers. They have to stop him.

by digby

Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial board:

President Trump announced late Friday on Twitter—how else?—that he is replacing White House chief of staff Reince Priebus with Homeland Security secretary John Kelly. The decision was probably inevitable given how the President publicly humiliated Mr. Priebus in recent days, but this shuffling of the staff furniture won’t matter unless Mr. Trump accepts that the White House problem isn’t Mr. Priebus. It’s him. 

Presidents get the White House operations they want, and Mr. Trump has a chaotic mess because he seems to like it. He likes pitting faction against faction, as if his advisers are competing casino operators from his Atlantic City days. But a presidential Administration is a larger undertaking than a family business, and the infighting and competing leaks have created a dysfunctional White House. 

Perhaps Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, can impose some order on the staff. But then that’s what Anthony Scaramucci was supposed to do for the communications team, only to blow up in adolescent fashion this week by trashing Mr. Priebus and others in public. White House leakers then let it be known that Mr. Trump liked Mr. Scaramucci’s X-rated rant. 

The reason Mr. Priebus wasn’t as effective as he could have been is because Mr. Trump wouldn’t listen to him and wouldn’t let him establish a normal decision-making process. Mr. Trump has a soft spot for military men so perhaps he’ll listen more to Mr. Kelly. He’d better, because on present course his Presidency is careening toward a historic reputation where names like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon reside.

Uhm, Jimmy Carter wasn’t a crook and an imbecile. Even Nixon wasn’t an imbecile. That is an unfair comparison. He isn’t careeing toward anything. His reputation is already way past anything we’ve ever seen before.

And no, he won’t listen to Kelly. He doesn’t listen to anyone who doesn’t say what he wants to hear. The Mooch and Ivanka and Jared and God knows how many others outside the White House have easy access to him and he pays just as much attention to them. Probably Junior, Eric and Barron too — when they have their meetings about what Dad needs to do to help the Trump Organization and the Kushner family. (That is job one, after all.)

Josh Marshall wrote a quick tweet-storm on this that’s worth sharing:

Many people fail to see what an anomaly Trump is and it’s a real problem. They are driven to put him in the same category as previous presidents or fit him into a convenient slot in the partisan ecosystem.

He’s something new.

That’s not to say that the conservative movement and the GOP aren’t responsible for him. They are. They created the political environment and the propaganda mill that made him possible. He is their creature. But he is unique and it’s important to recognize that and remember it. This is not normal. And anything can happen.

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Priebus Out. Kelly In. Scaramucci Wins. 

by Spocko

A lot of people predicted that Priebus would be pushed out, so no big woop. So now the question is, “Will this be good or bad for Donald Trump?”

Donald Trump believes this is going to be good for him, and for at least one news cycle,  it will be. Especially if the Sunday shows aren’t too busy martinizing John McCain’s record.

 Of course Fox and Friends will praise the move, but I also think most of the MSM will  reserve judgement on the new staff, so that will be a win in Trump’s book too.

Stopping leaks is a big priority for Trump and Scaramucci will be credited with the tough talk that led to senior assistant press secretary Michael Short resigning. But what Trump and Scaramucci don’t know is that the leak economy is a big part of how the WH communications process works. Priebus understood this, but I don’t think Scaramucci does. Yet.

While everyone was commenting on Scaramucci’s colorful language in this story in the New Yorker, what jumped out at me was this.

“Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.”

Scaramucci is a comms novice. That was a major blunder and a rookie move. Scaramucci should have confirmed the rules at the beginning of the call or before he started ranting. Asking for something to be off the record afterwards only works when a relationship has been established.

Trump has no self control, so he wants to control the press

All White House administrations use multiple methods to control the establishment media. Some methods are very sophisticated. The “no videos” gambit during the briefings wasn’t one of them. It was a childish move made for the benefit of The TV Watcher-in-Chief

However, the drying up of leaks will have a positive short term impact on Trump. Sustaining it will be hard longer term. (And by longer term I mean past two news dump Friday afternoons or three horribly stupid tweets from the T-man, whichever comes first.)
Scaramucci will try being nice to the press first, and it will work for a while, since there are plenty of media whose WH sources will have gone mute, but the publishers still want their gossip crack.

I expect they will go crawling to Scaramucci trying to get more crack. This means now is a dangerous time for staff, we’ve already seen how misunderstanding from the WH leads to purges.

The funny thing is that the nicer Scaramucci is to the media the worse he will do. Because in a Republican administration the worse you treat the media, the better they respond. Eric Boehlert wrote about this in his great book Lapdogs. The stories of  how  Karl Rove and Karen Hughes punished media  are nasty, but it worked. The media rolled over for them.

Moochie’s Mistakes Will Help Crash The Trump Train  

It’s not too hard to predict Moochie will make another mistake on a critical sensitive issue. But with no experience and no good will, he will have a hard time recovering. I don’t think he is stupid, the issue is can he learn fast enough on the job.

The outdated notions of the media he carries around in his head will be his undoing. For example, just because you are talking to The New Yorker doesn’t mean you talk New York tough guy with them. And NEVER assume that you are off the record. Ryan Lizza isn’t Tim “Everything is off the Record” Russert.

We might never know how many times Reince saved Trump from himself, but with Moochie we’ll find out soon enough.

What will happen next? Well I don’t think I’m violating the temporal prime directive by telling you that there will be some think pieces on “The Mooch” coming out from Axios, Politico  CNN, CBS 60 Minutes and MSNBC.  They will use some variation of “He’s misunderstood, but really wants to turn things around.” narrative because they are trying to be fair and balanced.

Then there will be at least one more staff resignation or firing by next Friday. That’s designed to cement Scaramucci’s badassery.

Without a professional who can stand up to Trump, the communications problems will not stop.  This is bad for Trump, but good for us, because Moochie’s mistakes will help send the Trump Train over the cliff.

As Scaramucci himself has said, “The fish rots from the head down.” And we all know who has rottenest head in the White House.

Heroes of the #Resistance
by Tom Sullivan

Woman removed from wheelchair during Capitol Hill Trumpcare protest. Photograph: (Twitter)

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, received applause upon arrival at the Bangor, Maine airport last at night, a Twitter user reported. Collins was one of the GOP no votes when the Obamacare “skinny repeal” bill failed in the U.S. Senate early Friday.

Arizona’s Sen. John McCain garnered the lion’s share of press attention and endless video replays after his no vote bucked both the GOP leadership and President Trump’s wishes. But it was Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Collins who stood up against the pressure longer and more fiercely. They objected because the repeal would hurt people rather than for the procedural reasons McCain gave. They objected as well to how the all-male-drafted GOP plan hurt women’s health, hardly a pressing concern for Donald Trump.

When the president tried to apply pressure on Murkowski by having Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke threaten to kill further development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he was trying to bully the first successful write-in candidate for Senate since Strom Thurmond. Not to mention Murkowski being the senator in charge of the committee that oversees Zinke’s department and who won’t face reelection until 2022. As the New York Times’ Gail Collins quips, that’s a lot longer than Republicans are likely to be dealing with Donald Trump, and demonstrates why Trump “has barely managed to exercise enough clout to get a building renamned.”

(The Monday Morning President is berating Republicans to Get smart! and MAKE CHANGE! this morning. They should have done what he would have done had he the first clue about or any regard for how governing works.)

This is true: Susan Collins on our plane to Bangor, gets applause as she passes through Bangor airport waiting area. pic.twitter.com/a1s2QTpldd— BLCKDGRD (@BLCKDGRD) July 28, 2017

The months-long efforts by activists to keep up pressure on Congress has received less credit for the repeal defeat. Charlie Pierce decided yesterday that credit was overdue to the activists who took to the streets or traveled to the Capitol, some of them sick, all of them uneasy:

The primary force driving the events of Thursday night and Friday morning was the energy and (yes) persistence of all those people who swamped town hall meetings, who wrote, or called, or e-mailed various congresscritters to show them what real political pressure felt like. I remember watching town halls in Maine, to which people drove hundreds of miles to tell Susan Collins what they thought. Those people bucked up vulnerable Democratic senators so that Chuck Schumer could count on a united Congress.

They brought pressure on Republican governors, too. People like Brian Sandoval in Nevada and John Kasich in Ohio were handed put-up-or-shut-up choices from their constituents. Perhaps the most significant Republican governor was Doug Ducey of Arizona, whom McCain repeatedly said he would consult before voting. Late on Thursday afternoon, Ducey came out strongly against the bill. But it all begins with the people who put themselves in the streets, and the people in wheelchairs who got roughed up on Capitol Hill, and all those impassioned voices on the phone, just as Lisa Murkowski’s continued political survival depended on all those Alaskans who took the extra time to write in her name on a ballot.

Lawrence O’Donnell observed last night that it is the senator who casts the last vote that decides a close issue who always gets the glory. Yet Murkowski and Collins were “unwavering in their opposition” throughout and paved the way for McCain’s grandstanding thumbs-down vote. But how might they have voted, O’Donnell asked, had millions of women not taken to the streets across the country and the planet the day after Trump took office, had men and women not appeared to voice opposition at town halls, had disabled Americans in wheelchairs not put their health and their bodies on the line to defend their own freedom and the health of 23 million others? The #Resistance showed them the way.

Outside of the last week of a campaign, this has been perhaps the most tense and stressful many of us have seen. But Pierce’s reflection on how activism works is perhaps as comforting as it is instructive:

As I walked back into the Capitol, what came to mind were all the people I have heard over the years who told me that political activism was a sucker’s game, a rigged wheel, a space for performance art with an audience of rich people. I agreed with a lot of the last part of that, and still do. But there are only two ways to go, even if you accept the latter part of the premise. You can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and give up, or wrap yourself in the robes of ideological purity as though they were suits of armor. Or, you can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and then engage in political activism to make it less so.

This week you made it a little less so.