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Month: August 2017

QOTD: one of those Trump voters

Published by digby on August 30, 2017

QOTD: one of those Trump voters

by digby



From the “presidential campaigns are just a game show” files:

“We know he’s a nut. Everyone knew he was a nut. But there comes a point in time when you have to become professional. He’s not professional, forget about presidential.”

Apparently, they thought the presidential campaign was a TV show and they found him entertaining. For some reason they assumed their mean, nasty clown was going to turn into a president. That’s a very foolish and irresponsible assumption.

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Stealing money from disaster victims to please the Deplorables

Published by digby on August 30, 2017

Stealing money from disaster victims to please the Deplorables

by digby

They will probably reverse this now, but seriously. What is wrong with these people?

President Donald Trump is promising billions to help Texas rebuild from Hurricane Harvey, but his Republican allies in the House are looking at cutting almost $1 billion from disaster accounts to help finance the president’s border wall. 

The pending reduction to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief account is part of a spending bill that the House is scheduled to consider next week when Congress returns from its August recess. The $876 million cut, part of the 1,305-page measure’s homeland security section, pays for roughly half the cost of Trump’s down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

There’s only 2.3 billion left in the disaster fund anyway, so they’ll probably leave it alone.

But Trump is going out on the stump to hold a rally for tax cuts as we speak. Today. While southeastern Texas is still drowning.

He’s running the country like one of his failed casinos. And we know how that turned out.

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The Deplorables run the show

Published by digby on August 30, 2017

The Deplorables run the show

by digby

I wrote about the new Pew Poll for Salon today:

A couple of days ago, Salon’s Bob Cesca made the point that the tie that binds Trump to his followers is his eagerness to provoke liberals. He used this tweet from a Fox News analyst and Townhall.com writer to illustrate the case:

Personally, I thought the people wearing t-shirts like these, which are still selling briskly on Amazon, express this sentiment even better.

Despite the fact that these are obviously mature individuals, like Donald Trump they seem to revel in juvenile taunts against people they don’t like. And they don’t seem to like a lot of people.

So far, that base of Trump champions is holding fast in the opinion polls. The latest Pew Poll was released on Tuesday and it has him at a 36 percent approval rating, which tracks with most of the other polling, including Gallup, which has had him between 35 percent and 40 percent for most of his term.  It’s when you dig into the details of the Pew Poll that it becomes more interesting.

This particular poll surveyed how people describe the Trump presidency. The poll asked Republicans whether they agreed with Trump on the issues and  it breaks down fairly predictably on partisan lines. 69 percent of Republicans agree with his positions which isn’t a great number for a president in his first year but it’s still a majority. Unsurprisingly, 94 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners  disagree. All in all 15 percent agree with Trump on all or nearly all issues, 18 percent agree with him on many issues 21 percent agree on a few issues and 45 percent don’t agree with him on issues at all.

But Pew also asked respondents what they think of Trump’s conduct in office. Again, most Democrats and Democratic leaners are appalled, as one might expect. On this, Republicans are more divided. 19 percent don’t like his conduct while 46 percent say they have mixed feelings. But 34 percent like the way he conducts himself as president.

In fact, more Republicans either accept or embrace his aberrant presidential conduct than approve of his positions on policy. And the kicker is that when asked what people liked most about Trump’s presidency, the ones who approve of his performance actually cite his personality and conduct four times more often than his policies. In other words, those who like him, like him because of his unseemly, unpresidential behavior not in spite of it.

This group represents about a third of the Republican party, the same third that flocked to him in the primaries and enabled his win in the crowed field that split the other two thirds almost to the very end. These are older, conservative, white people for the most part who believe he should not listen to other Republicans and should follow his own instincts.

These are the people who some might refer to as “a basket of deplorables.” They like his coarse personality which means they approve of the fact that he treats women like his personal playthings. They enjoy it when he expresses sympathy for Nazis and Neo-confederate white supremacists. They laugh when he declares his love for torturing terrorist suspects and letting the police rough up suspects and mandating the death penalty. His odious birtherism was one of his greatest selling points.

This cohort of the Republican party didn’t vote for Trump because of his policy on trade or his promise to withdraw from NATO if the other countries didn’t pay up. They voted for him because he said out loud what they are thinking. Being a petty, sophomoric, crude bully is what they like in a leader.

Still, according to the Pew Poll, while these people are endlessly fascinating to the press they only comprise 16 percent of the population. That’s tens of millions of people, which is somewhat disturbing, but it doesn’t add up to a majority, not by a long shot. So surely the other 65 percent of the party that finds Trump’s personality and conduct to be unseemly would not want to vote for congressional and Senate candidates who align themselves with him, right?

Unfortunately, according to this Vanity Fair article by David M. Drucker the GOP consultant class doesn’t think so. They are among the 65 percent who think the president is a ghastly embarrassment to their party but that won’t stop them from pushing their candidates to embrace him and his style of politics:

[I]n meeting after meeting, Republican consultants have had one consistent message for clients and prospective clients running for office in 2018. It’s a message they tell me will not change, even after the avalanche of criticism directed at Trump by fellow Republicans for his failure to immediately condemn the racists who gathered in Charlottesville and his decision to conflate them with counter-protesters. “Your heart tells you that he’s bad for the country. Your head looks at polling data among Republican primary voters and sees how popular he is,” said one Republican strategist who, like most of the nearly two dozen I interviewed for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly and protect their clients. “It would be malpractice not to advise clients to attach themselves to that popularity.”

Those over 50, white, non-college educated voters are the GOP primary voters who come out in mid-term elections. They’re the people who stormed the castle in 2010 and 2014 to stack the congress with far right officials. And they scare the hell out of the GOP establishment which, despite years of flag waving and accusing liberals of lack of patriotism, they are apparently willing to do whatever it takes to perpetuate the toxic politics of the man they all know is “a bad guy.”

That means that the 16 percent of people whose reason for political participation is to tell others “Fuck your feelings” are basically in charge of one of America’s two parties.

Wetter living through chemistry by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 30, 2017

Wetter living through chemistry
by Tom Sullivan


Port Arthur, TX refinery.

As the water rises in Houston and human casualties mount, just what is happening at the many chemical plants and refineries in the Houston area? Not much good, you can bet.

Amidst the rolling disaster, the Houston Chronicle is still managing to glug out some news:

Flood waters from Hurricane Harvey created an emergency situation that could trigger explosions at the Arkema chemical plant northeast of Houston in Crosby.

Late Monday night, the facility lost power from both its primary supply and its backup generators due to flooding. Employees moved highly volatile organic peroxides into back-up containers to keep them cool. If this class of chemical gets too hot, it can cause fires or explosions.

“At this time, while we do not believe there is any imminent danger, the potential for a chemical reaction leading to a fire and/or explosion withing[sic] the site confines is real,” Arkema spokeswoman Janet Smith said on Tuesday.

The New Republic reported on Monday:

“Unbearable” petrochemical smells are reportedly drifting into Houston. As historic rainfall and flooding continue to pound America’s fourth-most populated city, residents of Houston’s industrial fence-line communities are reporting strong gas- and chemical-like smells coming from the many refineries and chemical plants nearby. “I’ve been smelling them all night and off and on this morning,” said Bryan Parras, an activist at the grassroots environmental justice group TEJAS. Parras, who lives and works in Houston’s East End, on Sunday said some residents are experiencing “headaches, sore throat, scratchy throat and itchy eyes.”

I’ve spent enough time in chemical plants that my damaged sense of smell might not even pick it up.

The online magazine ChemInfo has a brief report on the wider impact:

According to a report in ICIS, the plants that decided to take precautionary measures and close included ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery and chemicals plant, Celanese’s methanol operations in Pasadena, American Acryl Bayport’s acrylic acid plant along with refineries owned by Phillips 66, Shell, Petrobras and others.

Chevron has also shut down its petrochemical complex in Cedar Bayou, which is one of the country’s biggest chemical production sites. According to the Houston Chronicle, Chevron plans to keep the complex, which is in the midst of a $6 billion expansion, closed until Sept. 6.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, the plant closures have impacted 37 percent of the country’s production capacity for chlorine and caustic soda. Analysts also estimate that about 40 percent of the U.S.’s ethylne [sic] production has also been disrupted by Harvey.

Gas prices here spiked 16 cents overnight yesterday, so you’d better run out and stock up on chlorine and ethylene before those prices go through the roof too. If plants like Arkema don’t shut down properly, they could have no roofs to go through.

Acrylonitrile (ACN), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), ethylene oxide (EtO)? All made in the Houston area. Most are chemical processing intermediates, although hospitals use ethylene oxide gas to sterilize surgical instruments that cannot take the heat from an autoclave — because EtO kills pretty much everything. And it’s rather explosive.

Reuters reports that in Port Arthur, Texas, the largest refinery in the country is shutting down:

The refinery’s owner, Motiva Enterprises [MOTIV.UL], said the refinery was operating at 40 percent capacity on Tuesday evening. Earlier in the day, the refinery was operating at 60 percent of its capacity, the company said.

Energy industry intelligence service Genscape said the refinery was using its safety flare system on Tuesday night. Flares can be a signal of the shutdown of a unit or units at a refinery.

The flaring triggered messages on social media of a fire at the refinery.

Motiva reports no fires on Tuesday.

I’ve always said if work dried up here (no pun intended), I could always find some in Houston and environs. But I’ve managed to stay away, thank you. A colleague tells a tale of doing field work at a plant near Houston when a pressure safety device blew on a vessel nearby. A cloud of orange gas shot into the air and drifted into an adjacent open structure. Men working inside rushed to the handrails and puked their guts out.

Too much information?

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Some people just can’t learn from the past

Published by digby on August 30, 2017

Some people just can’t learn from the past

by digby

Trump today:

“We want to do it better than ever before, we want to be looked at in 5 years, in 10 years from now that this is the way to do it.”

Quartz


Normally, language in pool reports is brisk, factual, and dispassionate. For this one the pool reporter happened to be from a Texas paper, the Dallas Morning News, and what he heard was apparently enough to prompt a remarkable breach with pool protocol.

After the briefing, Trump did an impromptu rally type speech in front of a few hundred Trump supporters who somehow managed to know exactly where the president was doing the briefing. 

He stood on a raised platform of some type. Couldn’t tell if it was a step ladder or not. But he was not on a truck. Spoke into a microphone. 

“I love you, you are special, we’re here to take care of you. It’s going well.” 

“What a crowd, what a turnout.” 

Reporters heard no mention of the dead, dying or displaced Texans and no expression of sympathy for them. 

George W. Bush, 12 years ago:

“We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do … The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

“I believe the town where I used to come – from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much – will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to.”

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And they have the gall to call themselves patriots

Published by digby on August 29, 2017

And they have the gall to call themselves patriots

by digby

Jesus H. Christ:

Of all the aggrieved elites disoriented by Trump, none face a trickier calculation than the dark artists of the right, whose conspiratorial powers have always been oversold. Trump wouldn’t be president today if political operatives had a scintilla of the pull imagined by the commander-in-chief. It is true, however, that they don’t like the president all that much. They’re worried about his tweeting; his tone; his behavior; his character (or lack thereof)—ill will reinforced by his widely condemned response to an uprising of white supremacists and anti-Semites in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counter-demonstrator dead. They fret about Trump’s long-term impact on the Republican Party, on the country, and what his rise means for America’s international standing as the leader of the free world. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them lower.

Yet in meeting after meeting, Republican consultants have had one consistent message for clients and prospective clients running for office in 2018. It’s a message they tell me will not change, even after the avalanche of criticism directed at Trump by fellow Republicans for his failure to immediately condemn the racists who gathered in Charlottesville and his decision to conflate them with counter-protesters.

“Your heart tells you that he’s bad for the country. Your head looks at polling data among Republican primary voters and sees how popular he is,” said one Republican strategist who, like most of the nearly two dozen I interviewed for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly and protect their clients. “It would be malpractice not to advise clients to attach themselves to that popularity.

They’re talking about his popularity with the deplorable racist id of America. And they are whores who are happy to make money off of exploiting it.

These are people who have screamed for decades that liberals are unpatriotic and don’t care about their country. Now they are showing to everyone that they were projecting. They are the traitors, every last one of them.


This excerpt is from this article in Vanity Fair. read the whole thing. But not before you’ve had drink. You’ll need it.

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Good people stepping up all over the place

Published by digby on August 29, 2017

Good people stepping up all over the place

by digby

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars caught a great story on CNN:

Take a break from the steady diet of hopelessness and read this.

On CNN’s New Day, Alysin Camerota interviews Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, owner of Houston’s Gallery Furniture, who took in Katrina victims five years ago and is now welcoming Harvey flood victims.

She asked how many people he had in his stores today.

“We have two stores, one of them has about 360 people, the other one has 400,” he said. “So we’ve got lots of people displaced from the horrible flooding and we’re thrilled to have them.”

(I’m sorry, I’m trying really hard not to compare this with Joel Osteen’s response.)

“Some of them will stay two or three days, some will stay as long as a week until they get back on their feet but you know, these are great people,” he said. “They’re not hard on the inventory, they’re fine. We’ve got nothing but good things to say about all these people that have gone through these incredible tragedies.

“The other morning a young boy came up to me, he was about 7 years old, and he’s carrying, stumbled in here and he was crying and he said his parents, who obviously couldn’t speak English. he said, ‘can we stay here?’ Just breaks your heart.

“We’re thrilled to have these people here and life dealt them a bad hand, trying to help relieve some of the stress and anxiety on them right now and hope to get back to a life of normalcy in the future.”

He said each store has a large restaurant, and they’re feeding the guests.

“We feed all the folks breakfast, lunch and dinner and try to take care of them like they’d be taken care of at a hotel. If we can make life easier as they try to get something back, we’ve done something right in our life.”

What he’s done right is be a good, decent, generous person. We’re seeing a lot of it in these early days of the Harvey disaster. Lets hope it keeps up once the water recedes and the rebuilding begins. This guy will be on the right side.

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Is the GOP congress trying to block Mueller before he gets to them?

Published by digby on August 29, 2017

Is the Republican congress trying to block Mueller before he gets to them?

by digby

Oh, this is rich. Emptywheel flags the new proposal from Florida congressman Ron DeSantis to cut short the Mueller probe and notes something very interesting:

It’s interesting that DeSantis, of all people, would push this bill.

After all, he’s one of a small list of members of Congress who directly benefitted from Guccifer 2.0’s leaking. Florida political journalist Aaron Nevins obtained a huge chunk of documents from Guccifer 2.0.

Last year, a Republican political operative and part-time blogger from Florida asked for and received an extensive list of stolen data from Guccifer 2.0, the infamous hacker known for leaking documents from the DNC computer network. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that Aaron Nevins, a former aide to Republican state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, had reached out to Guccifer through Twitter, asking to “feel free to send any Florida-based information.” 

About 10 days later, Nevins received about 2.5 gigabytes of polling information, election strategy and other data, which he then posted on his political gossip blog HelloFLA.com. 

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins told the Journal. 

After setting up a Dropbox account for Guccifer 2.0 to share the data, Nevins was able to sift through the data as someone who “actually knows what some of these documents mean.” 

Among the documents stolen from the DCCC that Nevins published are five documents on the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ opponent, George Pappas. So effectively, DeSantis is trying to cut short the investigation into a crime from which he directly benefitted.

Call me crazy, but this seems like an ethical violation, and possibly a good reason to submit a bar complaint against DeSantis. And his constituents might want to ask why he’s trying to help Russia and its domestic enablers undermine democracy


I’ve written quite a bit about this. It’s one of the largely unexplored aspects of the Russian meddling.

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Trump’s Tower

Published by digby on August 29, 2017

Trump’s Tower

by digby

I wrote about Trump and his Moscow Tower for Salon this morning:

President Trump is a compulsive liar; we know that. He lies about things that are world-shattering and things that are trivial in equal measure. One of the more obvious lies he told during the campaign and since he’s been in office is his oft-repeated claim that he knows nothing about Russia and that the whole Russia scandal is a hoax made up by the Democrats to deny him his glorious electoral victory.

As CNN summarized in this article, Trump used to brag about his knowledge of Russia and claimed that he had a personal relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin — until February of 2016 when he suddenly began to claim that he had never met the man and had never done any business in Russia other than the now-legendary Miss Universe pageant in 2013. He slipped up at least once in the ensuing months, telling Bret Baier of Fox News he might know Putin but couldn’t talk about it, but for the most part his line was this one, told to a Miami TV station in July of 2016: “I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do. I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.”

As I said, Trump lies. A lot. So for a long time it was impossible to know whether he was lying when he said he was involved with Russia and knew the country well or when he said he had nothing to do with it whatsoever. That’s been cleared up.

Last spring Forbes reported that Trump had been in the process of putting together a deal with the Agalarov family, oligarchs who had helped bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, to build a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. Emin Agalarov, the pop-singer son of billionaire developer Aras Agalarov, told Forbes that they let it go when Trump decided to run for president but that they considered it to be on hold. (And yes, these Agalarovs are the same folks whose publicist arranged the infamous “Clinton dirt” meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer.)

On Sunday night, The Washington Post reported on yet another plan to build a Moscow Trump Tower in 2015 and beyond, while Trump was running for president. And on Monday, the paper, along with The New York Times, released emails about the project written by Trump’s longtime business partner Felix Sater and his personal friend and Trump organization executive, Michael Cohen. According to the Times:

Sater’s emails were sent to Cohen and boasted of connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin that would allow the project to get completed and help “get Donald elected.” 

Cohen emailed Putin’s personal spokesman to ask for help in getting the stalled project started again.

Later in the day, ABC News reported that Trump had signed off on the letter of intent in the fall of 2015, during the presidential primary campaign, confirming that he knew about the deal and proving once and for all that he’d been full of it when he insisted he’d never had any dealings with Russia.

The Sater emails included this startling claim:

I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process

Why building this tower was supposed to lead to Trump’s election is a mystery. Oddly, none of the emails the Times excerpted directly mention the tower project, raising plenty of questions about exactly what they might have been talking about.

Journalist Marcy Wheeler, among others, wondered why Cohen would have reached out to Putin’s communications chief about a real estate licensing deal. That communications chief, according to the “Steele dossier,” was “the ‘main protagonist’ of the kompromat campaign against Hillary.” Wheeler speculated that this alleged Trump Tower deal, never before revealed, might be cover for another kind of “deal” altogether.

Whether or not this turns out to be some kind of collusion or conspiracy with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton and get Trump elected, we’ve never seen anything like this: Associates of a presidential candidate directly asking the leader of a foreign adversary to help them arrange for what amounts to a multimillion-dollar payoff. It’s shocking on its face, especially since Trump lied about it repeatedly.

There has long been keen interest in both Cohen and Sater as part of this Russia investigation. The two men were boyhood acquaintances growing up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, around a lot of Russian émigrés. Sater is Russian-American, and Cohen is married to a Ukrainian national; both have years of experience working in the gray shadows of the Russian financial and business world. They also have years of experience working with Donald Trump on many projects, including Trump Soho, which was sued for fraud. In recent years, Trump’s real estate projects have sold nearly $100 million in condos to wealthy Russians.

Sater did time in prison for assault and was later convicted for fraud, after which he apparently went to work as an FBI informant. He has also claimed to have been involved with the CIA, tracing illegal arms deals in the Russian black market. He is, to say the least, an interesting character, and one that special counsel Robert Mueller presumably has his eyes on.

About two weeks ago, this rumor from Paul Wood at The Spectator floated around the internet and no one knew what to make of it:

For several weeks there have been rumors that Sater is ready to rat again, agreeing to help Mueller. “He has told family and friends he knows he and POTUS are going to prison,” someone talking to Mueller’s investigators informed me.’ 

Sater hinted in an interview earlier this month that he may be cooperating with both Mueller’s investigation and congressional probes of Trump.

“In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about,” Sater told New York Magazine. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”

Maybe he’s as much of a BS artist as his friend in the White House. He certainly seems like the type. But if this is true it might mean we finally learn whether Trump was merely making corrupt deals with Russian oligarchs to line his own pockets or was actively colluding with the Russian government to become president of the United States. What a choice.

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