Month: July 2017

People are stepping up, people


by digby

Call me crazy but this seems like it might mean something:

As of the end of June, 209 Democratic challengers had registered with the FEC and raised at least $5,000. That more than doubled the previous high mark since 2003. In 2009, the Republicans had 78 challengers with at least $5,000. The early GOP challengers in 2009 foreshadowed the party’s regaining majority control. The question is whether the same will hold true for the Democrats in 2018.

They have already recruited more candidates than every midterm since 2009 combined.  We’re 18 months out.

Obviously, the Democrats could still lose. But maybe it’s not such a good idea to keep harping on the fact that Democrats are such  worthless pieces of garbage that there’s probably no point in even listening to what they have to say. All these people stepping up to do this thing and it might be useful to be a little bit more encouraging.

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Meanwhile, down at the border

by digby

The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer has been speaking to an ICE agent on background for some months. He’s  disturbed by what he’s seeing:

The agent’s decision to allow me to write about our conversations came after learning that ice was making a push, beginning this week, to arrest young undocumented immigrants who were part of a large wave of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border in recent years and who, until now, had been allowed to live in the U.S. Rather than detaining these young people, the government had placed them in the care of families around the country. Most of them are trying to lead new lives as American transplants, going to school and working. ice now plans to pursue those who have turned eighteen since crossing the border, and who, as a result, qualify for detention as legal adults. “I don’t see the point in it,” the agent said. “The plan is to take them back into custody, and then figure it out. I don’t understand it. We’re doing it because we can, and it bothers the hell out of me.”

The agent went on, “The whole idea is targeting kids. I know that technically they meet the legal definition of being adults. Fine. But if they were my kids travelling in a foreign country, I wouldn’t be O.K. with this. We’re not doing what we tell people we do. If you look next month, or at the end of this month, at the people in custody, it’s people who’ve been here for years. They’re supposed to be in high school.”

The agent was especially concerned about a new policy that allows ice to investigate cases of immigrants who may have paid smugglers to bring their children or relatives into the country. ice considers these family members guilty of placing children “directly in harm’s way,” as one spokeswoman recently put it, and the agency will hold them “accountable for their role in these conspiracies.” According to ice, these measures will help combat “a constant humanitarian threat,” but the agent said that rationale was just a pretext to increase arrests and eventually deport more people. “We seem to be targeting the most vulnerable people, not the worst.” The agent also believes that the policy will make it harder for the government to handle unaccompanied children who show up at the border. “You’re going to have kids stuck in detention because parents are too scared of being prosecuted to want to pick them up!” the agent said.

U.S. immigration courts are facing a backlog of half a million cases, with only a limited number of judges available to hear them and issue rulings. “We still have to make decisions based on a responsible use of the government’s resources—you can’t lock everybody up,” the agent said. “We’re putting more people into that overburdened system just because we can. There’s just this school of thought that, well, we can do what we want.”

Before this year, the agent had never spoken to the media. “I have a couple of colleagues that I can kind of talk to, but not many,” the agent said. “This has been a difficult year for many of us.” These people, not just at ice but also at other federal agencies tasked with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, are “trying to figure out how to minimize the damage.” It isn’t clear what, exactly, they can do under the circumstances. “Immigration is a pendulum—it swings to the left sometimes, or it swings to the right,” the agent told me last week. “But there was a normal range. Now people are bringing their own opinions into work.” In the agent’s view, ice is a changed agency.

What he’s seeing is a bunch of guys with guns and uniforms drunk with power believing hey have a free hand to go after a particular vulnerable population. I think

“I like predictability,” the agent said. “I like being able to go into work and have faith in my senior managers and the Administration, and to know that, regardless of their political views, at the end of the day they’re going to do something that’s appropriate. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

And the Trump administration wants to hire thousands more, many of whom will not be vetted or properly trained.

Many local police and border patrol and ICE and DHS have all adopted military tactics over the past few years. They see themselves as being at war. The enemy depends on the agency but it’s almost always black and brown.

Here’s how badly this can go sideways:

We don’t know if Philippine National Police Director General Ronald dela Rosa realizes it. But no other event since the Duterte administration came to power has dealt a greater blow to the credibility of the police in the war on drugs than the treacherous killing last Sunday of anticrime crusader Zenaida Luz in Oriental Mindoro.
Ms. Luz’s killers drove by her house on a motorcycle wearing a bonnet and a mask. It was close to midnight. She was shot in cold blood while standing in front of her house, waiting for someone who had contacted her asking for help. It was clearly a ruse.

Responding to a distress call from village officials, a police patrol team caught up with the fleeing masked killers, who traded shots with them. Cornered and wounded, the gunmen desperately shouted “Tropa, tropa!” to signal that they were friendly troops. To their horror and shock, the police recognized the gunmen as indeed from their ranks. The assailants turned out to be Senior Insp. Magdaleno Pimentel Jr. and Insp. Markson Almeranez—out of their uniforms, moonlighting as vigilante killers.

Are we there yet? No. But too close for comfort.

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Role Model

by digby

President Trump rolled his eyes and made a face Monday after a reporter hurled a question at him about Attorney General Jeff Sessions as the president was posing for a photo with dozens of White House interns.

Trump made a face, amid laughter from the interns, after the question about whether he thought Sessions should resign, which he did not answer.

A reporter then asked another question about whether he had a message about healthcare, to which Trump said, “Quiet.”
Trump turned to the interns standing on a podium behind him, telling them that the reporters are not supposed to ask questions at the photo opportunity.

“They’re not supposed to do that. But they do it, but they’re not supposed to,” he said.

Thanks Comey



by digby

One little acknowledged reason he fired him is because he hates the idea that his win was a fluke

The New York Times’ David Leonhardt:

The polling analysts who worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a name for the many Americans who didn’t like him but didn’t like Hillary Clinton either: “double haters.” 

Many of these double haters seemed likely to vote anyway, given their long voting history. “They were a sizable bloc,” Joshua Green writes in his new book “Devil’s Bargain,” the first deeply insightful political narrative of the Trump era, “3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters across 17 battleground states.” 

The double haters spent much of the campaign unsure what to do. In the end, as Green told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross last week, “they broke to Trump.” As part of his reporting for the book, Green got access to internal polls and memos from the Trump campaign, and this material makes clear that Trump’s aides believed one factor made a bigger difference than any other. 

It was the memo that James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, released about Clinton’s emails on Oct. 28. 

The memo, Green says, “got them to come out, not to support Trump but essentially to vote against Hillary, which in the end was the same thing.”

We knew this because the Trump campaign pollsters talked about it after the election. But nobody wanted to hear it then and I suspect nobody wants to hear it now.

Still, for the record, Comey’s bombshell did make the difference.

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Counting on the GOP to do their duty is a fool’s errand


by digby

I wrote about the Republicans cowards for Salon this morning:

I have the feeling that we may look back on the week just past as a watershed moment in the Trump era. I know it seems as if we have those every other day and it’s true that this isn’t the first one. Firing the FBI Director certainly counts as a historical turning point. But last week was the six month anniversary of the inauguration and it featured two events that I think may turn out to have been extremely important, even if nothing comes of it.

The first was the stunning interview with the New York Times which demonstrated that the president is psychologically unbalanced and dangerously ignorant. We knew that before. But he’s getting worse not better.

It wasn’t just the strange historical fantasies such as his assertion that Napoleon’s “one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities,” or his obvious confusion between life insurance and health insurance. It wasn’t even the fact that he seemed to have hallucinated that he’d instituted cast, sweeping reforms such as when he stated “I’ve given the farmers back their farms. I’ve given the builders back their land to build houses and to build other things.”  All of this was extremely bizarre to say the least. If you didn’t know better you might think it was some kind of elaborate put-on.

But underneath this farcical display of presidential ineptitude was something more sinister. He spent much of the time railing against law enforcement officials whom he perceives to either be disloyal to him personally by failing to corrupt themselves on his behalf or are corruptly serving his enemies.

He smeared former FBI Director Comey with the accusation that his private briefing of the Steele dossier was an attempt to get “leverage” on the president. He threatened Special Prosecutor Mueller that he’d better not go beyond what he sees as a very narrow mandate to look into the possible campaign collusion to
look into his finances.

He said the current acting FBI director is tainted by the fact that his wife ran for office as a Democrat and that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein can’t be trusted because he’s from Baltimore and it’s a Democratic city. Perhaps the most astonishing attack was made against his most loyal Republican ally, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he seems to have irrationally latched on to as the reason for all his troubles when he recused himself from the Russia investigation.

He is clearly terrified by the Special Prosecutor and is contemplating taking drastic action to put an end to his probe.

Which brings us to the second bombshell that happened last week. After this New York Times interview was published, the Washington Post reported that Trump has been talking to his lawyers about the presidential pardon and even if he might be able to pardon himself. If he wants to abruptly put and end to the investigation one imagines that might do it.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted this:

While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow appeared with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News and said that this tweet meant nothing and that pardons had not been discussed at all.  Then Trump’s new communications director Anthony Scaramucci told Fox News that he talked with president last week about the pardon but Trump said he wouldn’t have to do it because he hadn’t done anything wrong.  Clearly, it is on his mind.

The question of whether the president could conceivably pardon his accomplices and himself has been around since the drafting of the constitution. Indeed,  the possibility of that is one of the reasons George Mason gave for refusing to sign it.  He wrote:

The President of the United States has the unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason, which may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.

And who says no one ever anticipated someone like Donald Trump becoming president?

Other founders said that it was impossible to believe that any president would do such a thing. Why he’d be remembered as Benedict Arnold! James Madison wrote,  “If the President can be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him.” One might have assumed that at one time, but it’s looks as though that’s not going to work out.

After that shocking interview in which the president babbled ignorantly about history, policy and politics and then threatened and smeared law enforcement, inappropriately defined the boundaries of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation and attempted to get the Attorney General to resign so that he can replace him with someone who won’t recuse himself from the Russia probe, the Republican congressional majority gave a collective shrug. They don’t care.

A few of the usual suspects like Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she thought he should just let the investigation play out. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said that he believed Trump could pardon himself but “cautioned” him that there might be political fallout. For the most part, Republicans ran in cowardly fashion from the question, unwilling to stand up and do what’s necessary in this situation which is to tell the president that if he fires the Special Prosecutor or starts pardoning people, they will have no choice but to start impeachment proceedings.

It’s possible that they don’t think he’s really serious about this. It is pretty crazy. But it’s obvious by that loony interview that he’s losing his grip and that there aren’t people around him who will restrain his worst impulses. He already fired James Comey. There is nothing really to stop him from firing Sessions, Rosenstein and anyone else who stands in his way.

And he does have a plenary pardon power although it’s disputed whether he could pardon himself or issue a broad enough pardon to encompass a full scope of crimes his associates haven’t even been charged with. Nonetheless, it’s certainly possible that he will try and the only real way to stop him is for the Republican leadership in congress to let him know that they will not let him.

They have shown no sign that they will do their duty.

And yet their president is unsatisfied. It’s not enough for them to simply let him get away with destroying every ethical norm and pushing every law to the limit. He demands that they defend his outrageous behavior. On Sunday he tweeted:

It’s very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2017

He couldn’t be more wrong.  They are more loyal to him than they are to their own oaths to the constitution. He should be thanking them for their service.

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Legislative malpractice
by Tom Sullivan

Still from Roanoke Times video (below).

“Health care in the United States is pathetic … when you don’t have the insurance, you don’t have the access.” — Dr. Teresa Tyson, Executive Director of the Health Wagon

The Affordable Care Act needs reforming, Dr. Teresa Tyson told the Roanoke Times. Repealing it is not an option. Tyson’s team was treating patients at the annual Remote Area Medical free clinic weekend in Wise, Virginia. Obamacare is by no means the full answer to the health care crisis in this country, but it was an improvement. An improvement that needs improvement. Instead, Sen. Mitch McConnell means to roll it back.

This year’s RAM clinic weekend in Wise, Virginia crept up on me. I didn’t make the trip up as I did last year. But since McConnell and his band plan to try repealing Obamacare again this week, perhaps the timing and the little press it receives will open some eyes to what they mean to do. President Trump himself used that word, even as his administration was sabotaging the Obamacare program.

“Mr. Trump really needed to be here … There’s been absolutely no change in the number of people that come to these events since the day I started it in the United States … We are number 37 in the World Health Organization’s rankings.” — Stan Brock, Remote Area Medical founder

Stan Brock has held these free clinics in Wise for 18 years, the Roanoke Times reports. Most come for dental care covered as a luxury extra under most insurance, including the Obamacare exchange plans:

Located near the Virginia- Kentucky border, the clinic at the Wise County Fairgrounds attracts residents from a wide area. The clinic, the largest of the year, has 1,400 volunteers who serve thousands of people in one weekend.

At 5 a.m. Friday — the first day of the clinic — RAM founder and British philanthropist Stan Brock stood at the entrance of the clinic as volunteers prepared to let people through the gate.

Hundreds arrived at the fairgrounds in the dead of the night to secure a decent spot in line. They slept in their cars or pitched tents as they waited for the clinic gates to open. Before the sun crested the surrounding mountains, volunteers had given out all of the numbers for the day and began turning people away.

On the heels of this, Reuters reports that McConnell’s procedural vote to repeal Obamacare could come as early as Tuesday. In what conforms to a pattern of legislative malpractice by McConnell, his caucus doesn’t yet know on what legislation they will be voting.

The Associated Press report wasn’t any more specific:

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will make a decision soon on which bill to bring up for a vote, depending on ongoing discussions with GOP senators. Thune sought to cast this week’s initial vote as important but mostly procedural, allowing senators to begin debate and propose amendments. But he acknowledged that senators should be able to know beforehand what bill they will be considering.

“That’s a judgment that Senator McConnell will make at some point this week before the vote,” Thune said, expressing his own hope it will be a repeal-and-replace measure. “But no matter which camp you’re in, you can’t have a debate about either unless we get on the bill. So we need a ‘yes’ vote.”

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that thousands of Catholic nuns have written a letter to senators urging them to reject the Republican effort as “immoral and contrary to the teachings of our Catholic faith.” The letter signed by over 7,000 sisters insists senators vote against advancing “any bill that would repeal the ACA and cut Medicaid.” The report states that Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine are both Catholics. Both are cited as undecided on the measures under consideration.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) might also be independent enough from his caucus to play a roll in defeating any bill McConnell brings to the Senate floor. Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada and Rob Portman of Ohio are two other Republicans said to be on the fence. Sen. John McCain remains in his home state of Arizona after surgery for a blood clot. He is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor.

McConnell is short of votes as long as none of the fence-sitters votes to advance whatever bill McConnell offers.

Read this thread from Ben Wikler on how this week might go down. Note:

Unlike earlier phases of this battle, the hard right is now fully engaged. Koch organizations, Trump admin, the works. We must be louder. 4/— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) July 24, 2017

Watch the video below, then make some noise about how the GOP thinks “pathetic” needs to be made worse.

The Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121. I offer some immodest instructions for organizing an effort to bypass busy phone lines here. The Senate convenes at 4 p.m. EDT.

Unleash hell.

Politics and Reality Radio: Is Medicare-for-All the Path to Single-Payer?; Fighting Fake News; Susie Madrak on Trump’s Meltdown

with Joshua Holland

This week, we kick off the show with a brief tribute to the one and only Sean Spicer, may he rest behind a bush somewhere.

Then we’ll be joined by mild-mannered health care wonk Harold Pollack from the University of Chicago to talk policy on the left and the right: Why the GOP’s zombie bill never dies, and whether making a rapid transition to Medicare-for-All is a viable way to get to affordable universal coverage.

Then we’ll be joined by Ohio State University scholar Gleb Tsipursky to talk about The Truth Pledge — his scheme to use behavioral science to “nudge” people into combating fake news.

Finally, we’ll talk to Susie Madrak, a contributing editor at Crooks and Liars, about a pretty zany week in Trumpland that began with POTUS trashing everyone in sight to the NYT.

Well pardon us for even asking


by digby

So, he’s just chewing the fat about pardons all day because it’s an interesting topic. There’s absolutely no reason for concern:

White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Sunday said he and President Donald Trump discussed pardons during a meeting last week in the Oval Office. 

“I’m in the Oval Office with the President last week, we’re talking about that, he says he brought that up,” Scaramucci said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to Trump’s tweet about pardons. 

Trump on Saturday claimed “all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon.” 

His tweet came amid reports that Trump has inquired about his authority as it pertains to pardoning his staffers, family members and even himself. 

Jay Sekulow, an attorney on Trump’s outside legal team, said Sunday that “pardons are not on the table.” 

“We have not, and continue to not, have conversations with the President of the United States regarding pardons. Pardons have not been discussed,” Sekulow said. 

Scaramucci said Trump “doesn’t have to be pardoned.”
“There’s nobody around him that has to be pardoned. He was just making the statement about the power of pardon,” Scaramucci added. “And now all of the speculation and all the spin is, oh, he’s going to pardon himself.”

Scaramucci’s off to great start, I’ll give him that. I’m sure Trumpie is very pleased.

by digby

I think this is probably somewhat correct in that it’s hard to imagine that anyone could consciously lie about absolutely everything as Trump does:

On Sunday morning’s broadcast of CNN’s Reliable Sources, White House advisor Kellyanne Conway continued to wage war on the media—and CNN specifically—by arguing the network shouldn’t be so critical toward the president because Donald Trump simply doesn’t know any better. 

Conway took umbrage with the media’s insistence on covering such “non-stories” as the president of the United States continually lying to the American public. After host Brian Stelter argued that his network was committed to covering the many scandals emanating from the White House, an incredulous Conway pushed back, demanding to know what “scandals” Stelter was referring to. 

“The scandals are about the president’s lies,” replied Stelter. “About voter fraud; about wire-tapping; his repeated lies about those issues. That’s the scandal.”
Despite overwhelming evidence that the White House is indeed lying in both of those cases—there is zero evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim that 3 million people voted illegally, or that his office was wire-tapped—the administration continues to promise “investigations” into both matters. But Conway’s response on Sunday was a new approach to how the administration handles allegations of lying. 

“[Donald Trump] doesn’t think he’s lying about those issues, and you know it,” she said.

Sure, a lot of what he says are conscious, outright lies. We know that. But it’s also clear that he’s addled and out of touch with reality.  It’s hard to tell the difference, I understand that. But as Steltzer went on to point out, just because Trump believes his own lies it doesn’t make them true.

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Scaramucci’s cybersecurity expert revealed

by digby

I think this settles the whole Russia issue right here:

Anthony @Scaramucci unmasks his anonymous source. And you’ll never guess who it is! pic.twitter.com/bCDdvBiFtT

— Vic Berger IV (@VicBergerIV) July 23, 2017

That’s right. The president of the United States believes that the Russians are so good that they will outwit American, British, German, and every other western intelligence agency every single time. They are geniuses! The best! So, terrific, so fabulous, so great!

In fact, Donald Trump loves and respects the Russian government the way Tony “da Mooch” Scaramucci loves and respects Donald Trump. Unconditionally.