Month: July 2017

No strategery

by digby

He’s not a thinker. He’s a reactor:

Tim O’Brien, who authored the 2005 book “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald,” said on CNN’s “New Day” that Trump’s use of social media isn’t “strategically driven” and largely comes from a sense of self-preservation.

“I think there’s usually two ways of understanding what motivates what he does: Either self-preservation or self-aggrandizement,” O’Brien said. “I think in this case a lot of this is coming out of self-preservation.”

O’Brien said on Monday that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is hanging over Trump and is likely driving a lot of his decisions, saying it “cuts to core issues in Trumplandia.”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily even collusion or obstruction that preoccupies him,” O’Brien said. “It’s the money trail and what it might say about his business relationships and his past financial dealings.”

I think that’s true. He’s petrified at what the full power of the federal government to look at anything and look anywhere is going to turn up about his shady financial dealings. He doesn’t seem to have realized that being president might bring that sort of scrutiny on him. His juvenile, comic book view of the presidency has hurt him there. He thought it was a performance.

It may also be true, however, that some Republican operatives and members of his entourage decided to help the Russian government meddle in the election when they realized that it was trying to take down Hillary Clinton. They don’t think too much beyond their immediate need to destroy their political enemies. It’s their raison d’etre. Republican operatives that is. I assume that the Russian government had a more sophisticated plan in mind.

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Canción del verano

by digby

There are some songs meant to be heard on a tinny car radio driving down Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. That’s southern California culture, for better or worse. Today it’s for better. It’s beautiful.

Here’s my choice for song of the summer. It happens to be in America’s second language, the one that’s so common where I live that people don’t even notice it. For folks like me who live in

the Southwest, it’s as American as hot dogs and apple pie — and tacos. Same thing for New Yorkers and Floridians. The idea that Hispanic culture is “foreign” is just … incorrect.

Anyway, enjoy!

Madmen, traitors and spies from the very beginning

by digby

I wrote about Benedict Arnold and Michael Flynn for the Fourth for Salon this morning:

I’ve heard dozens of people over the pre-Fourth of July weekend make the comment that the founders must be rolling over in their graves at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Maybe they are, but not because they are shocked at the spectacle of an incompetent leader. After all, at the time Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence they were dealing with the Donald Trump of his day: Mad King George. In fact, they pretty much wrote the Constitution with him in mind. And he wasn’t the only one. There had been many European monarchs who were off their rockers, and much of the Enlightenment was informed by that fact.

Thomas Jefferson’s “Original Rough Draught” of Declaration of Independence (with revisions by John Adams & Benjamin Franklin): pic.twitter.com/Csv0pbLSIm

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 3, 2017

This comparison to Trump isn’t an original thought, of course. Almost from the moment he took office people have been comparing him to the Mad King. Last February in the New Republic, in the wake of the president’s bizarre first press conference, Jacob Bacharach surveyed unhinged rulers of the past from Caligula on down and recalled the 1994 film “The Madness of King George,” in which William Pitt, the prime minister, said:

We consider ourselves blessed in our constitution. We tell ourselves our Parliament is the envy of the world. But we live in the health and well-being of the sovereign as much as any vizier does the Sultan.

But the Trump administration isn’t just evoking images of the Mad King on this Fourth of July. As it happens, one of the more interesting dramas of recent years about the revolutionary period is the AMC series “Turn: Washington’s Spies,” about the famous Culper spy ring. It’s a harrowing story of daring and bravery that I enjoyed very much when I was a kid, and it served as my introduction to the Revolutionary War.

This version is sexed up for our time and, according to Revolutionary War buffs who have followed the show closely, some of the historical details are way off. For instance, every historical drama has to have a “24”-style torturing psycho, and this one decided to sully the good name of a British officer named John Graves Simcoe, the Culper ring’s nemesis. By all reliable accounts, the real Simcoe was an honorable soldier who went on to become the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. Overall, however, “Turn” gets pretty good marks for authenticity.

I have noticed, however, that since Trump’s election the theme of loyalty and betrayal has more resonance to current politics than it had before. You see, the Culper ring was responsible for uncovering information about one of the most infamous episodes in American history, the treason of Benedict Arnold, a homegrown war hero. “Turn” adds in some love-triangle stuff involving Arnold and a British spy named Major John André that isn’t historical. But the real-life spy ring was instrumental in repelling Arnold’s first action as a British turncoat (a planned surrender of West Point) based upon some intercepted correspondence between the general and the British agent. When it was foiled, Arnold defected to the Crown and led many raids and battles against the Continental Army.

The name Benedict Arnold remains synonymous with the word “traitor” in America. I’m sure once they learn the story, kids still call friends by that name when they feel betrayed. He is the most notorious turncoat in our history. If you discount the Civil War, in which dozens of U.S. Army generals took the other side, he’s the only general who ever defected. And his reasons were pretty parochial.

Arnold was a brave soldier who was gravely wounded in battle and was beloved by his troops. But he had a prickly personality and was a man his fellow officers found to be a pain in the neck. He was terrible at politics and got caught in a number of shadowy financial schemes trying to impress his 18-year-old loyalist fiancée. After that he survived a court martial but became so resentful and embittered about it that it drove him into the arms of the British.

Before he went over to the other side, Arnold wrote a series of hysterical letters to George Washington, in one of which he declared:

Having made every sacrifice of fortune and blood, and become a cripple in the service of my country, I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received of my countrymen, but as Congress have stamped ingratitude as a current coin I must take it!

He needed money, and that was part of it. But Arnold also felt that his country had betrayed him, which he rationalized as a justification for betraying his country right back.

As I watched the show and thought back to my school days and the stories I read about Arnold’s treachery, I couldn’t help but think of former Gen. Michael Flynn. By all accounts, Flynn was extremely resentful at being fired by President Barack Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and nursed grudges against his rivals in the other intelligence agencies. He had been popular with his own troops but others in the military came to mistrust him and considered him a little unhinged.

After Flynn left the government, at first he simply parlayed his insider knowledge into big dollars as a foreign agent lobbying for Russia and Turkey. When he met up with Donald Trump, Flynn evidently found an outlet for his resentment against his former rivals. We don’t yet know whether this actually led him to work with a foreign government to subvert his own. There are certainly allegations that he may have tried. Today Flynn finds himself in the crosshairs of a government investigation into both his financial dealings and his political activities.

One can easily imagine him testifying before Congress and saying, “I little expected to meet the ungrateful returns I have received of my countrymen, but as Congress have stamped ingratitude as a current coin I must take it!”

Karl Marx’s old adage holds that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. I’m not sure which one we’re witnessing at the moment. Let’s just say that there are echoes of another leader’s derangement and a different general’s obsessions in all this. America has been dealing with such human peculiarities from the beginning. The good news is that we seem to have a knack for surviving them.

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Happy Fourth

by digby

We the Rugged Individuals
by Tom Sullivan

Aerial photo of the California Aqueduct at the Interstate 205 crossing. Photo by Ian Kluft via Wikimedia Commons.

An acquaintance yesterday posted several tweets in response to one from a young attorney who insisted government can only take from some to give to others. Government cannot create. It only takes. Cousin to the familiar “Government never created a job,” it employs a tortuous definition of “create” to advertise, in a backhanded way, individual entrepreneurship by demeaning Americans’ collective efforts. All the more ironic, in this case, coming from a government employee working for the state Republican caucus. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Still, a million-plus workers alone in this country owe their cars, their homes, their kids’ education, their steady paychecks, and their retirements to the private-sector, free-market entrepreneurs of the American defense industry. Imagine this ad during the Sunday bobblehead shows:

The Defense Industry — meeting demand for fine consumer products like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the fuel-efficient M1 Abrams tank, Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer, and the Hellfire-equipped Predator drone. PREDATOR — reach out and touch someone.

Free Market Capitalism. Because government never created a job.

Or the U.S. Constitution, one supposes. Anyway, it reminded me of this post I wrote at Crooks and Liars four years ago after my last visit to the Golden State. (I had to fix one dead link.)

An America In Retreat?

Has America – and the American Dream itself – gone into retreat? Once the largest, most prosperous in the world, the American middle class is faltering, crumbling like our nation’s schools and bridges.

Flag-pin-wearing American exceptionalists tell crowds this is the greatest nation on Earth, and then repeat “we’re broke.” They hope to dismantle safety net programs, telling Americans working harder than ever – at jobs and looking for jobs – that they don’t have enough “skin in the game.” Wake up and smell the austerity. America can no longer afford Americans.

Some of us remember a time when America’s dreams were boundless.

One summer when I was a child, I traveled with my grandparents to visit my aunt and uncle in Lawton, Oklahoma. My uncle was serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Sill. They lived off-base with their toddler son. The apartment backed up to a drive-in theater. “Old Yeller” was playing.

We left from Chicago driving Route 66. (The Nelson Riddle theme to the TV show is still the hippest ever.) The trip took a couple of days. The highway was still two lanes as you went further west. That was already changing.

Beside Route 66 and elsewhere, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System – the vast system of roads most of us take for granted – was taking shape from border to border and from coast to coast. It was a national project worthy of a great nation. The country was on the move.

Astronaut Alan Shepard was a national hero. Our parents wanted us to go to college. Our president wanted us to go. Our country wanted us to go. Getting an education was not just a key to a future better than our parents’. It was a patriotic duty. Not just something you could do for you, but what you could do for your country.

America was going to the moon by the end of the decade. We needed scientists and engineers and new technologies. Between the G.I. Bill and government-backed student loans, America was making it more affordable than ever to get an education. It was good for you. It was good for your community. It was good for all of U.S.

On another trip last month through California’s dry Central Valley, I rode past miles and miles of crops and orchards. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Vegetables. Strawberries. Walnuts. Cherries. Pistachios.

San Joaquin Valley agriculture accounts for more than 12 percent of the nation’s output by dollar value, according to Associated Press. It produces 25 percent of America’s food on about one percent of U.S. farmland.

What goes onto your dinner plate and into your mouth is made possible in large part, not by daring, bootstrap entrepreneurs, but by the huge public works project we saw on our journey. Sierra snowmelt harnessed to grow food on dry lands. Dams. Reservoirs. Pumps. Pipes. Aqueducts.

And beside those canals, farms providing food and jobs along 700 miles of the California Aqueduct and the Central Valley Project. Begun during the Great Depression. Built with public money. By Americans. For Americans.

But today, that America is in retreat. Its dreams are shriveled. Instead of investing in public infrastructure like aqueducts, highways and bridges, we watch ours collapse as China’s rise. In Washington, pundits and politicians wring their hands over nickels and dimes for Americans while spending hundreds of billions of deficit dollars to maintain a global empire. Almost 900 overseas military bases? Was that our Founders’ vision of greatness?

Meanwhile, tax cuts starve cities and states of revenue until grasping investors – foreign and domestic – can gobble up public infrastructure built with your sweat equity. The privateers hope to extract the last drop of value out of what we, our parents, and our grandparents built to benefit all Americans. These patriots will hide their gains offshore and whine about tax rates they don’t pay while pocketing billions in public subsidies.

Tom Sawyer conned friends into paying him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. Tom Sawyer, Inc. is not far behind. These guys won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them.

When they have stripped America bare, the vulture capitalists will move on. Hands over their hearts, still waving their flags and humming the national anthem, they’ll move on, leaving America to crumble to dust. And they will shake the dust from their feet.

How much longer will We the People tolerate that?

Finally, as patriotic as it may be on Independence Day to celebrate free speech, the 2nd Amendment, and individual initiative by shooting yourself in the leg, try to find other ways to recognize public employees than by needing them to improvise a tourniquet and ferry you to the hospital.

Just say no

by digby

History will note that some people said no:

In a scathing post on LinkedIn, Justice Department compliance counsel Hui Chen announced her decision to resign last month, saying it was impossible to go after corporate fraud and corruption when President Donald Trump himself was engaging in such practices.

“Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome,” she wrote.

Chen, a former lawyer for Microsoft and Pfizer who since 2015 was one of the top attorneys in the DOJ’s Fraud Section, said her work began to feel hypocritical and hamstrung as investigations into the Trump administration escalated.

“Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts,” she wrote. “Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conducts. I wanted no more part in it.”

It’s disappointing there aren’t more of them. But it’s still early days. There will probably be more. Lets hope so anyway.

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There goes the Real America

by digby

Oh look, someone who got it right but nobody cares:

Ask Google the question “who predicted Trump winning the election?” and you get 19.3 million results.

Most are about professors with oddball prediction systems, or the rare pollster who got it right, or the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who famously sent out a mass gut-level warning about Donald Trump’s appeal last summer.

One name that doesn’t come up: Christopher Parker.

“Nobody in the media has called me up and said ‘you were right,’ ” says Parker, a political-science professor at the University of Washington for the past 11 years.

Parker has his suspicions about why he’s been overlooked, which we’ll get to in a minute. But first: He correctly foresaw in September 2015 that Trump would win the GOP nomination — eight months before Trump clinched it.

Then, last September, Parker told anyone who would listen, which was not many, that Trump could well win the presidency. And now, most important, new research shows Parker was more than just prescient about the outcome. He was nearly alone in nailing why it would happen.

“It’s what the data showed and what history would suggest, so I didn’t see it as some out-there guess,” Parker shrugs now. “It seemed like a no-brainer to me.”

On Monday researchers released the most comprehensive survey data yet aimed at understanding what actually went down in Election 2016. The group includes academics but also right-leaning outlets such The Heritage Foundation and left-leaners like the Center for American Progress.

What’s different about the Voter Study Group is that it tracks the attitudes and votes of the same 8,000 adults since before the 2012 election, and then throughout the 2016 election. So it’s like the nation’s largest, longest political focus group.

The story we’ve told ourselves — that working-class whites flocked to Trump due to job worries or free trade or economic populism — is basically wrong, the research papers released this week suggest.

They did flock to Trump. But the reason they did so in enough numbers for Trump to win wasn’t anxiety about the economy. It was anxiety about Mexicans, Muslims and blacks.

Here’s how they put it in academese: “What stands out most, however, is the attitudes that became more strongly related to the vote in 2016: attitudes about immigration, feelings toward black people, and feelings toward Muslims,” writes George Washington University professor John Sides. He notes that the media focused on less-educated whites, but negative racial attitudes fueled by Trump were a big motivator for college-educated whites, too.

A substantial share of Trump voters “appeared to embrace a conception of American identity predicated on birthplace and especially Christian faith,” Sides found.

This is the drum Parker has been banging for years. His 2013 book on the tea party, “Change They Can’t Believe In,” with professor Matt Barreto (now at UCLA), used survey data to show it was not a small government movement as advertised. It was more about America being stolen from “real Americans” — a reaction triggered by the election of President Obama.

“I’ve got three words for you: scared white people,” Parker says. “Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about, and it was plain as it was happening.”

To be clear: Neither Parker, nor the latest research, is saying that Trump voters are all racists. Most voting is simply party-line no matter who is running. What they’re saying is that worries about the economy, free trade and the rest were no more important in 2016 than in previous elections, but racial resentment spiked.

It makes sense, considering the candidate himself was maligning Mexicans and openly calling for banning Muslims.

What’s doubly interesting is that Parker suspects the reason his research gets overlooked is because he is black. He senses it’s assumed that as a black man he must be biased about race, or is too quick to invoke it.

“I get a whole lot more respect over in Europe,” Parker told me. “There, it’s all about the ideas and whether my social science is sound. It’s not about who I am, like it so often is here.”

Meanwhile, white writers such as J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” are seen as guru guides to Trump country. Even though the mostly colorblind story of economic dead-end-ism Vance tells apparently isn’t what really turned the election.

Parker and Barreto now are working on their own book, out next year, called “The Great White Hope: Donald Trump, Race and the Crisis of Democracy.” Will that get ignored, too?

“I get it, nobody wants to be told what they don’t want to hear,” Parker says. “People want there to be a more innocent explanation, about jobs or trade or something. But sorry, everyone — it just isn’t there. My plea to people is we ought to start focusing on what’s real.”

This is an inconvenient story and nobody wants to hear it because economic determinism does not explain it. And if there’s any true state religion in America, on all sides of the political spectrum, it’s economic determinism. Money explains everything.

Except it doesn’t. Humans are complicated creatures motivated by many things and money is only one of them.

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What kind of democracy is this anyway?

by digby

This is from Rosenberg:

The list of reasons why Americans feel their politics are broken is long and growing. Here’s one of many: The U.S. Senate, which due to the way the U.S. population has grown and settled, has developed a “small state bias” so grave that it is on the verge of becoming an undemocratic institution. The issue is serious enough that it has become necessary to question whether major reform of Congress, and particularly the Senate, is needed.

According to the 2010 census, it is now the case that half of the United States’ population lives in just nine states, with the other half of America living in the other 41 states. While the voters in these top nine states have equal representation in the House with 223 Representatives (the other half has 212), in the Senate it is a different story. Because of this population distribution, the half of the U.S. living in the largest nine states is represented by 18 Senators. The other half of the country living in the other 41 states has 82 Senators, more than four times as many. You don’t have to be good at math to see how much less representation in Congress those living in the big states have today.

Let’s take a closer look at this dynamic by examining California. With a population of about 37 million, California has more than 66 times the population of the smallest state, Wyoming, which has 563,626 people. California has 53 Representatives, and two Senators; Wyoming, one Representative and two Senators. So despite having 66 times the population of Wyoming, California has only 53 times the number of Representatives and an equal number in the Senate.

Furthermore, the four smallest states combined have eight Senators, giving California only a quarter as many Senators as Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, even though California has 14 times the population of these states combined.

And let’s not foget that we send a boatload of money to the federal government to help fund all these small states needs. I don’t think Californians mind that. But it would be nice if our votes counted the same as everyone else’s when it comes to the national government.

And it would be kind of nice not to be the right wing’s punching bag too. We are Americans whether they like it or not.

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Online civility

by digby

Here’s a little story about the journalist who noted on twitter that the person who created the president’s adorable video depicting him stomping CNN to the ground is a neo-Nazi.

Update: Paul Waldman writes about the media’s annoying reflex to excuse what Trump’s doing by saying “but his base loves it.” As he points out that’s not necessarily true but even if it is, it’s the wrong thing to say. (He doesn’t say, but I will, that his “base” are as awful as he is.)

He concludes:

… if you react to the latest vile Trump tweet with, “Whatever else you want to say about it, Trump’s base loves it,” you’re excusing his behavior. You’re putting it into a value-free context where the only thing that matters is whether it works. It probably doesn’t work, but even if it did, the president of the United States is sending out videos created by racist Reddit trolls that fantasize violence against the news media. That’s what’s important here, and if you don’t acknowledge that central and horrifying fact, you’re doing everyone a disservice.

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Oppositeland

by digby

At the picnic, when they blatantly lie about the effects of the ACA (as the Secretary of HHS, Tom Price did) suggesting that there are more uninsured than ever and the GOP is coming to “provide relief” throw this in their face:

Watch the uninsured rate drop across the country as the ACA went into effect. pic.twitter.com/IdmYgnwkc4

— Jason Sparks (@sparksjls) July 2, 2017

It was a very imperfect law that needed changes in a dozens different ways and the addition of a public option to make it work properly. But it was a big improvement on what was happening at the time and at least changed the structure of the system in such a way that further improvement was possible. But that assumed Republicans weren’t in the grip of a corrupt, sadistic, power trip. That didn’t work out.

They want to go back to what it was before — and make it even worse. It’s hard not to conclude that they are affirmatively trying to kill people.

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