Citation?
by digby
.@robertjeffress: “The Bible gives @POTUS the moral authority to use whatever force necessary… to take out an evildoer like Kim Jong-un.” pic.twitter.com/UQZTE8fwzS— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 9, 2017
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2017
What are they so afraid of?
by digby
A top lawyer for President Trump slammed the special counsel’s office over the FBI raid of former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s Virginia home, accusing investigators of committing a “gross abuse of the judicial process” for the sake of “shock value” – and employing tactics normally seen “in Russia not America.”
Trump attorney John Dowd leveled the complaints in an email sent to a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote about the Manafort raid. The email was obtained by Fox News.
The email reflects Trump’s legal team moving to protect the president, amid speculation that the raid could be part of a broader effort to squeeze Manafort for information on Trump.
“These methods are normally found and employed in Russia not America.” – John Dowd, attorney for President Trump
Dowd, in his note, questioned the validity of the search warrant itself, calling it an “extraordinary invasion of privacy.” Dowd said Manafort already was looking to cooperate with congressional committees and said the special counsel never requested the materials from Manafort.
Let’s just say it isn’t normal for a lawyer who isn’t representing someone to speak out so forcefully to defend him. When that lawyer is representing Donald Trump all it does is raise even more suspicions about what they think Manafort might have to offer the Special Prosecutor.
Of course, Manafort did tell the Special Prosecutor about that meeting with Don Jr, Kushner and Russian emissaries. It’s unlikely that’s all he has to say.
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Graham needs a muzzle
by digby
Somebody shut this guy up. This is the last thing Trump needs to hear from a US Senator:
Sen. Lindsey Graham asserted Thursday that the United States cannot attack North Korea until they are “willing to finish the job.”
In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, Graham said the best foreign policy for dealing with a homicidal regime is to “assume the worst.”
“So here’s what I would assume, that if I fire one shot at North Korea, they’re going to unleash all of their weapons against South Korea and Japan and our forces,” he explained. “So the day you shoot once, you’ve got be willing to finish the job.”
“And I would not fire one missile or drop one bomb against North Korea unless we were ready to finish the job,” Graham continued. “And that would be a horrible circumstance, you know, a lot of damage to our allies and American interests, but that’s the price we must pay or be willing to pay to protect the homeland from a nuclear attack by a crazy man.”
Really? Nuclear holocaust to “protect the homeland?” How exactly does that work?
These people are talking casually now about tactical nuclear war.
But he’s not saying we won’t get our hair mussed….20, 30 million tops…
Reminder about what Trump said during the campaign:
Donald Trump repeatedly asked an unnamed foreign policy expert why the U.S. couldn’t use its nuclear weapons stockpile during a national security briefing earlier this year, MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday.
Scarborough told the anecdote amid an interview with former CIA director Michael Hayden, who said he could not see himself voting for the “inconsistent” and “dangerous” GOP nominee. Asked if he was aware of anyone among his peers who was advising Trump, Hayden said “no one.”
“I’ll have to be very careful here,” Scarborough said. “Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, at one point, if we have them, why can’t we use them? That’s one of the reasons he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him. Three times, in an hour briefing, why can’t we use nuclear weapons.”
Scarborough learned of the exchange “in the last few days,” according to an MSNBC executive.
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort denied the claim on Wednesday morning.
“Absolutely not true,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “The idea that he’s trying to understand where to use nuclear weapons? It just didn’t happen. I was in the meeting, it didn’t happen.”
In March, Trump refused to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons in the war against the so-called Islamic State.
“I’m never going to rule anything out — I wouldn’t want to say. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to tell you that because at a minimum, I want them to think maybe we would use them,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Politics.
In a followup interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Trump sounded unconcerned by the prospect of mutual assured destruction, going so far as to ask why the U.S. constructed nuclear weapons if it couldn’t use them.
“Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” he asked.
5 Lines of Defense Against Global Trump Disaster
by Spocko
Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S.
Saber, meet Rattler-in-Chief
Don’t worry folks! There are multiple ways we scientists from the future can fix things if they get really horrible. I’m going to tell about the 5 Lines of Defense Against Global Trump Disaster (GTDs)
1) The Trump Babysitting Team (TBT)
Ivanka Trump is our first line of defense.
She will pull him back from the brink of war. It’s her job. When Trump was elected the DoD hired her for her “Daddy Whispering” skills. Why do you think she’s around Daddy all the time? To talk fashion? She’s part of the TBT along with McMaster, Kelly and two undisclosed women who might be in the same room with him in the wee hours.
2) New Star Wars Defense System (GMD)
If North Korea launches its nuke it will be shot down lickity split by the revamped Star Wars Missile Shield, called the Ground-based Mid-course Defense System or GMD for short. This Warthog Defense video explains how it works.
It was a boondoggle program for decades, but it appears to work great now. My friend Guy sued first SDI makers and found out that those people were some of the biggest liars and cheats he ever met, but they are totally telling the truth about their programs now. They’re our second line of defense.
3) Disaster Fixing Machine (DFM)
If Ivanka fails and the GMD doesn’t work, we have a third line of defense. I’m telling you this on deep background, off the record, no backsies. no leaksies! The US has a machine that lets us go back in time 4 and 1/2 days (specifically 4 days, 6 hours, 3 minutes, 45 seconds, 14.5 nanoseconds.) George W. Bush used it first in 2002 to stop the nuke that went off in Baltimore (as depicted in the movie The Sum of all Fears, starring Ben Affleck.)
Bush also used it to stop the ferry bombing in New Orleans after Katrina (as depicted in the movie Deja Vu, starring Denzel Washington.) Thank science we had it! How many times did Bush use it during his reign? It’s still classified, but let’s just say it rhymes with bleven.
4) Someone Up There Will Save Us (SUTWSU)
As some of you know, I am an alien. As in, not of this earth. I’m not the only one. Luckily, another alien is in a position to help. He’s a strange visitor from another country. He’s not as tall as you would think, but he stands for Truth, Justice and the North American Way. And he has super powers. Yes, I’m talking about Justin Trudeau. He’s our fourth line of defense.
Below is a clip of what he did when Trump launched a preemptive strike at North Korea from his undisclosed location at a New Jersey golf club three days from now—before we used the DFM to fix the timeline.
Here’s more undisclosed footage from that time line Most of you don’t remember these timelines because duh, you are in the one that got fixed. But they seem familiar to you, right? Deja Vu!
These timelines are leaked to science fiction and military fiction writers by DFM insiders so they will create books and movies showing those horrific realities. (Where do you think that hack Tom Clancy got his ideas from, Schenectady?)
These serve as a warning for what will happen if, for example, we allow someone with no impulse control to control our WMDs. These lines of defense usually work. They should, they cost enough. It’s necessary now because Americans are further away from the realities of war than ever before. Why do you think Hollywood keeps churning out post-apocalyptic disasters? For the money? No. It’s to stick the image of the tragedy of war into the American public consciousness.
But here’s the problem, our machines don’t always work as advertised to the Pentagon. We can’t always shoot down the missiles and we can’t go back in time. Some aliens’ only superpower is hunkiness (which is a totally valid power by the way. )
5) Our Final Line of Defense: Humans
Regular old humans need to prevent Global Trump Disasters before they happen.
It’s hard to get human American’s to visualize the worse that could happen and act to prevent it.
I saw this with the Y2K problem. Some people with low-brain power thought that because nothing happened it wasn’t a big deal. It WAS a big deal, but we organized, acted and fixed the problem.
Some people have disaster fatigue from listening to the wrong people, the old “Fox that cried wolf” story. Others need to experience the tragedy in order to believe it. These people are tiresome, self-centered and Conservatives.
After the world crashes and burns they might say, “Well I guess you were right after all.” Which is great, but it’s too late and unless I can take them back in time do the right thing, it’s a Phyric victory.
Consider yourself lucky you can watch movies about what might happen so you don’t have to experience the actual tragic timelines. Believe me, it sucks having multiple horrific timelines crowding up your brain. If I wasn’t a Vulcan, with strong mental discipline, they would make my nose bleed green.
You’ve seen this movie before. The narrative doesn’t change because the characters don’t change. They do the same things unless you get up off the couch and do something. Maybe you eject the tape or unplug the isoliner chip, USB stick, but you need to do something to stop the movie.
Who knows, maybe you are the snowflake that will start the avalanche.
BTW, in case you are wondering, Obama never used the DFM, although I wouldn’t be breaking the temporal prime directive to tell you the one time he was tempted. No details but it rhymes with “Blut Blur Blemails!”
De-personalizing politics
by Tom Sullivan
Barbara Jordan delivering the keynote address before the 1976 Democratic National Convention (Public domain)
“Let’s recognize that no public official in this country, from Barack Obama on down, covered themselves in glory during the foreclosure crisis,” David Dayen writes at New Republic. Sen. Kamala Harris is catching special grief over her failure to prosecute bankers during the foreclosure crisis, and Dayen finds it dismaying that his January coverage of Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest bank is now a weapon to thwart a possible presidential run by the freshman California senator.
That’s not to say he’s a fan. But singling out Harris for not prosecuting Mnuchin is like singling out Hillary Clinton for her Iraq War vote. They both had lots of company.
While the left is arguing who’s more tainted than whom, the victims of the crisis remain out of public view. Dayen writes:
From the late Bush years through most of Obama’s presidency, at least 9.3 million American families lost their properties, whether to foreclosure or forced sale. The original sin of faulty loan originations, inflated appraisals, doctored underwriting, and improper placement into subprime loans led to fraudulent misconduct in securitization, loan servicing, loan modifications, and foreclosures, with millions of faked and forged documents used as evidence for the final indignity of eviction. There’s not a single step of the mortgage process that wasn’t suffused with illegal fraud during the housing bubble and its collapse.
The crisis resulted in a punishing recession and countless destroyed lives, not to mention what has been credibly described as an “extinction event” for the black and Latino middle class. Yet from New York to California, Arizona to Florida, Washington state to Washington, D.C., the political class and law enforcement elite responded largely with indifference. Powerful bankers with armies of lawyers were allowed to get away with the crime of the century (thus far).
If we are judging law enforcement officials on their performance during the foreclosure crisis, “everyone would be tied for last,” Dayen writes. The bailouts and wrist-slapping fines (at best) helped further erode faith in American justice. As further proof that the economy is organized for and advantages the elite, failure to crack down as millions lost their homes led in part to the rise of Trump. Moreover,
Every day in America, somebody gets tossed out of a home based on false documents. Their elected officials surely know this; if I get a steady stream of letters from people with consistent stories about mortgage fraud, then senators and congressmen surely do as well. So instead of debating who was “tough” on corporate criminals and who wasn’t—since no one was—we should implore these would-be leaders to speak the hell up about the perversion of justice happening every day in courtrooms and foreclosure auctions across the country.
Senator Harris represents California, where the unconscionable treatment of foreclosure victims continues to terrorize families. Senator Cory Booker styles himself a leader in New Jersey, home to the highest foreclosure rate in the nation. The last time Senator Bernie Sanders said a word about foreclosures was when he was trying to win a primary election in hard-hit Nevada. There are activist groups all over Massachusetts fighting foreclosures that could use some high-profile support from Senator Elizabeth Warren.
That’s the problem with the “politics of personality,” Dayen writes. The focus remains on high-profile politicians rather than on the people we expect them to serve. The victims remain out of sight until they can be made props in a political soap opera, not real people to be understood on their own.
Brittney Cooper’s complaints about the Harris dust-up at Cosmopolitan come from having a black woman’s perspective:
It’s not right to expect us to fix what white Americans are so committed to breaking. This debate, then, isn’t about Harris, but about the emotional and political labor that black women are expected to do to save America’s soul.
Women like Barbara Jordan and Maxine Waters have served as the conscience of the Democratic Party for decades, Cooper writes, citing their stands for holding America to its principles. “And then those on the far left use this same labor that we do to save democracy to argue that we are too deeply invested in the establishment.” They approach politics from another angle.
“Black women typically believe in a brighter future but that they also believe in keeping the lights on and in maintaining a solid foundation upon which to build the future they want to see.” It comes from having more to lose, something white activists miss. Black women “who have been called to take the scraps handed to us by the nation and painstakingly build communities, families, and institutions” are loathe to take a sledgehammer to what they’ve built just to satisfy others’ thirst for revolution. They’ve seen extinction events. With voting rights and not dying in random traffic stops on their minds, addressing financial crimes is not their top campaign issue.
What would make us all stronger is to accept that if others in the big tent adhere to the same major goals, they are not our enemies.
* * * * * * * *
Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
“All initial reports are false”
by digby
A White House Nazi speaks about terrorism:
The White House will not officially comment on the bombing of a Minnesota mosque because it may be a hate crime faked by a liberal, according to Trump national security adviser Sebastian Gorka.
An as-of-yet unidentified individual threw a makeshift bomb through the window of a mosque in Minnesota Saturday, and Gorka was asked on MSNBC Monday if the White House will comment. Gorka said that the White House will “absolutely” comment once there is a finalized investigation into the incident.
“There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false,” Gorka said. “You have to check them and find out who the perpetrators are. We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes by right wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to be prop propagated by the left. Let’s allow the local authorities to provide their assessment and then the White House will make its comments.”
But Trump has, in the past, commented on attacks without full information, including a recent June attack in the Philippines, which may have been a robbery gone wrong.
In fact, he has jumped the gun numerous times. But those were all attacks against non-Muslims. So it’s completely different.
Furthermore, bombing mosques isn’t really a problem, amirite?
Also, why is Sebastian Gorka, an actual Nazi, being welcomed on TV as a normal person? Is that no longer an issue?
There had been rumors that Gorka was a Nazi sympathizer, but Gorka dismissed them during a softball interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in February.
“Like Reince, like Bannon, like Jared, like Ivanka, like the president’s children, like Kellyanne, like Steve Miller, you, too, have come under fire,” Hannity said. “I just wanted to give you a chance to respond, because I know you’re being attacked unfairly… Even people suggesting you’re a Nazi sympathizer. What is your reaction?”
“I think we’re doing our job very well, don’t you, Sean? If this is the best they can do,” Gorka said. “I just find it amusing. My father was nine years old when World War II started. He lived through the siege of Budapest. He was put in prison by the communist dictators. And I’m the guy who’s some kind of extremist?”
The Nazi connection
But in mid-March, Forward, a Jewish-American publication, reported that Gorka was indeed some kind of extremist, a sworn member of a Nazi-allied group known as Vitézi Rend. According to the State Department, the group was “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II.
Leaders of Vitézi Rend told Forward of Gorka’s ties, and the revelation created a firestorm of controversy for a White House that had already, on multiple occasions, been accused of harboring and pandering to white supremacists.
Members of Congress called for Gorka to be suspended and investigated, and a number of activist groups quickly called for Trump to fire Gorka. Trump did neither of those things, but then Gorka, who had so often graced cable news and radio, went dark.
Gorka reappeared in early April, when he made an appearance on Fox News to discuss missile strikes in Syria. He was not asked about his ties to Vitézi Rend.
A few days later, he appeared on Hannity’s show, where Hannity treated Gorka with kid gloves. Hannity praised Trump’s decision to to attack Syria saying, “He did draw a line and said, ‘We cannot allow this moral boundary to be crossed.’ To me, that’s the right thing to do. Your answer.”
“You’re absolutely right, Sean,” Gorka said.
The two chatted for several minutes. Hannity did not ask about Vitézi Rend.
“Dr. Gorka, good to see you,” Hannity said. “Thank you.”
The next weekend, Gorka made another appearance on Fox, on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. The pair discussed North Korea. Other than occasional appearances on the very friendly network, Gorka kept quiet.
He was thrust back in the news cycle when, on April 30, The Washington Examiner reported that Gorka would accept a position outside the White House. CNN confirmed the report the next day, but later that week Gorka called the reports “very fake news.”
Around the same time, Gorka was spotted at the White House by some reporters, who asked if he was being forced out.
“Do I look like I’m going?” he responded.
Gorka’s Nazi affiliation is obviously a feature not a bug.
And for some reason, nobody has found the time to ask him about it.
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Is there really a question about what he’s going to “choose”?
by digby
The impending release of a key government report on climate change will force President Trump to choose between accepting the conclusions of his administration’s scientists and the demands of his conservative supporters, who remain deeply unconvinced that humans are the cause of the planet’s warming.
A White House official said on Tuesday that it was still reviewing the draft document that was written by scientists, some of whom have said they fear Mr. Trump will seek to bury it or alter its contents before it is formally released. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said the administration would not comment on the report before its scheduled release this fall.
He doesn’t care about it and doesn’t understand it. His base is all he cares about and some of them are getting shaky:
Even as the White House this week firmly insists President Donald Trump is determined to seek a second term, a new analysis of polling data shows that he’s caught in a three-way political squeeze in the states that tipped the 2016 presidential race, and will likely decide the 2020 contest.
On one front, Trump faces undiminished resistance from minority voters, who opposed him in preponderant numbers last year. On the second, he is confronting a consistent — and, in many states, precipitous — decline in support from white-collar white voters, who expressed much more skepticism about him last fall than GOP presidential candidates usually face. From the third direction, Trump’s support among working-class whites, while still robust, is receding from its historically elevated peak back toward a level more typical for Republican presidential candidates — especially in the pivotal Rust Belt states that sealed his victory.
These are among the key conclusions from a new analysis of the state-by-state Trump approval ratings released recently by the Gallup Organization. Those results, based on interviews with 81,155 adults in Gallup nightly tracking polls from January 20 through June 30, found that Trump’s overall approval rating had fallen below 50 percent in 33 of the 50 states.
Extending beyond those reported results, Gallup provided me previously unpublished findings that tracked Trump’s approval rating in key swing states among three demographic groups: non-whites, whites with at least a four-year college degree, and whites without a four-year degree.
Much, of course, will happen that could reshape the landscape between now and the next presidential election, which the White House this weekend insisted Trump plans to contest amid reports that Vice President Mike Pence and other possible contenders are preparing for the possibility the President might not run.
But these poll results challenge the conclusion that Trump’s political base has remained impregnable across the traditionally decisive swing states in presidential politics — as well as several other states that each side hopes to put into play by 2020. “The implications going forward are fairly problematic,” says long-time Republican pollster Glen Bolger. “He doesn’t have a lot of room to drop, and yet he is.”
It will be interesting to see if the college educated voters suddenly decide that his cretinism is a deal breaker. I’d guess it will all depend on whether the Democrats put up someone they can see as a president next time.
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Me too ….
by digby
Thinking about this HRC ad from January 2016. pic.twitter.com/dlBVroyVHf— ᴹᵃʳᵛ (@marv_vien) August 9, 2017
Fire and fury
by digby
He didn’t come up with those words himself. I’d guess it came from the Bannon-Miller corner.
President Trump’s warning on Tuesday that North Korea would experience “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued threatening the United States was a remarkable escalation of military rhetoric with little precedent in the modern era, historians and analysts said.
Mr. Trump’s menacing remarks echoed the tone and cadence of President Harry S. Truman, who, in a 1945 address announcing that the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, urged the Japanese to surrender, warning that if they did not, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump intended the historical parallel — White House officials did not respond to questions about how much planning went into his brief statement, or what was intended by the alliterative language — but it was a stark break with decades of more measured presidential responses to brewing foreign conflicts.
“It’s hard to think of a president using more extreme language during crisis like this before,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. “Presidents usually try to use language that is even more moderate than what they may be feeling in private, because they’ve always been worried that their language might escalate a crisis.”
Mr. Truman delivered his muscular message at a time when the United States had an overwhelming military advantage over Japan, which did not have a nuclear weapon; Mr. Trump’s threat was aimed instead at a government that has developed nuclear weapons and has been testing intercontinental ballistic missiles.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower used to say that the more shrill the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was in the language he used against the United States — promising “we will bury you” and “we’re turning out missiles like sausages” — the more tempered he would be, Mr. Beschloss said.
President John F. Kennedy was similarly restrained in his rhetoric in the run-up to the Cuban missile crisis, which was prompted by the discovery that nuclear missile sites were being constructed by the Soviet Union in Cuba, Mr. Beschloss said. In an address on Oct. 22, 1962, he called upon Khrushchev “to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations” and “move the world back from the abyss of destruction.” As for the United States, Kennedy said, “the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”
Mr. Trump’s statement, delivered from his Bedminster, N.J., golf resort, went far beyond the usual tough-but-vague language that past presidents have used to confront North Korea’s frequent provocations.
Their responses — full of strong condemnations and recognition of grave threats — have mostly left out the fiery, nationalistic language favored by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and his father, Kim Jong-il, before him. Mr. Trump’s, by contrast, seemed to have adopted it.
Well, the US seems to have elected our own Kim Jong-un, so it figures …
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QOTD
by digby
The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use, and be authorised to use, in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody, he doesn’t have to call the Congress, he doesn’t have to check with the courts.
Dick Cheney, Fox News 21 December 2008
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