Month: August 2017

The “Show Me Your Hands” state?
by Tom Sullivan

Branson photo – Missouri Division of Tourism

“How do you come to Missouri, run out of gas and find yourself dead in a jail cell when you haven’t broken any laws?” asked Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP.

The national NAACP has issued its first travel advisory for any state after recent violent incidents and threats against people of color. The advisory comes in part as a response to police shootings nationally and in anticipation of immigration legislation in Texas and Arizona:

The Missouri travel advisory is the first time an NAACP conference has ever made one state the subject of a warning about discrimination and racist attacks, a spokesman for the national organization said Tuesday.

Missouri became the first because of recent legislation making discrimination lawsuits harder to win, and in response to longtime racial disparities in traffic enforcement and a spate of incidents cited as examples of harm coming to minority residents and visitors, say state NAACP leaders.

Those incidents included racial slurs against black students at the University of Missouri and the death earlier this year of 28-year-old Tory Sanders, a black man from Tennessee who took a wrong turn while traveling and died in a southeast Missouri jail even though he hadn’t been accused of a crime.

Chapel says police are pulling over drivers “because of their skin color, they’re being beaten up or killed.” And the rate is going up, Chapel says.

The NAACP’s advisory also cites the most recent attorney general’s report showing black drivers in Missouri were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over than whites. Those reports have been showing the disparity since the attorney general began releasing the data in 2000.

In May, the owner of a Blue Springs barbershop found his shop windows stained with racial slurs. The same two words appeared on three separate windows in black paint: “Die (N-word).”

Normally, the State Department issues such advisories for countries facing instability or war. But after police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota in 2016, McClatchy reports, the Bahamas issued a travel advisory for its citizens visiting the United States, advising them to exercise caution, especially when interacting with police. The Bahamas is 91 percent black.

While the Missouri advisory is a first for the NAACP, the ACLU issued a similar advisory for Texas in May.

Sanders told police he suffered from mental illness and ended up in a cell, tasered, and dead after a tragedy of errors including a jail run by a sheriff already facing

… eighteen criminal counts in two unrelated cases. The sheriff is also a defendant in four federal civil lawsuits, including one that involves the 2015 death of an inmate and another in which he is accused of letting a pregnant inmate languish for so long without access to medical care that her baby was stillborn in 2014.

There goes your family vacation in Branson.

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American carnage

by digby

Trump adviser and neo-fascist Stephen Miller says that is meaningless because it was “added on later.” I don’t know why that would make it bullshit but that’s what he said.

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Where do they find these people?

by digby

H.R. McMaster managed to fire one of Bannon’s minions from the National Security Council after he wrote a crazy memo:

Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s presidency, including globalists, bankers, the “deep state,” and Islamists. The memo characterizes the Russia story as a plot to sabotage Trump’s nationalist agenda. It asserts that globalists and Islamists are seeking to destroy America. The memo also includes a set of recommendations, arguing that the problem constitutes a national-security priority.

“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed,” the memo warns. It argues that this has led “Islamists [to] ally with cultural Marxists,” but that in the long run, “Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety.”

Higgins wrote the memo in late May, and at some point afterwards it began circulating among people outside the White House associated with the Trump campaign to whom Higgins had given it.

Here’s an excerpt:

Through the campaign, candidate Trump tapped into a deep vein of concern among many citizens that America is at risk and slipping away. Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed. ….Islamists ally with cultural Marxists because, as far back as the 1980s, they properly assessed that the left has a strong chance of reducing Western civilization to its benefit. Having co-opted post-modern narratives as critical points, Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety at some future point. (NOTE! Communist take over of Russian revolution against the Czars, N Vietnamese against the South, Maoists against the democratic forces against the Chinese dynasty).

POLITICAL WARFARE ATTACKS–a primer

As used here, “political warfare’ does not concern activities associated with the American political process but rather exclusively refers to political warfare as understood by the Maoist insurgency model. Political warfare is one of the five components of a Maoist insurgency. Maoist methodologies are described as synchronized violent and non-violent actions. This approach envisions the direct use of non-violent operations arts and tactics as elements of combat power In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power. Functioning as a hostile compete state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the “counter-state.” Political warfare uses non-violent methods such as participation that undermines the morale or offers to engage in discussions, as a adjunct to violence. Political warfare methods can be implemented at strategic, operations, or tactical levels of operation.

Political warfare is warfare. Strategic information campaigns designed to delegitimize through disinformation arise out of non-violent lines of effort in political warfare regimes. They run on multiple lines of operation, support the larger non-violent line of effort, are coordinated with violent lines of effort, and execute political warfare agenda promoting cultural Marxist outcomes. They principally operate through narratives. Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives…..These attacks narratives are pervasive, full spectrum and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies….

Political Warfare has been described as “propaganda in battledress.”

Yikes …

It’s good he got rid of him. But how many of these loons are working in the administration anyway?

When you’ve lost Pepe …

by digby

Gosh, this looks bad for Trumpie:

Right-wing troll Mike Cernovich took to Periscope to announce that he’s doing “a big pivot” away from “being a pro-Trump guy.” Cernovich enthusiastically supported President Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign and in the first tumultuous months of the administration, but now says that “backing Trump has been bad for business,” and he will “specifically reject any kind of branding about pro-Trump or whatever.”

In a 46-minute rant on July 31, Cernovich expressed his dismay at the firing of (now former) White House Communications Director Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci. Cernovich, like many of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) trolls who fester in the alternative media environment and who rose to notoriety with Trump’s ascent to the White House, was a big fan of “the Mooch” from the start. However, more notably, Cernovich also declared that he has “pivoted from a pro-Trump guy to more of a journalistic guy” and that he’s going to continue making that pivot. It should be noted that Cernovich’s concept of journalism — which he describes as “part activism and part real journalism” — includes pushing baseless rumors about former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s health, promoting fake conspiracy theories, denying date rape exists, and generally making false, provocative statements, like “Bill Clinton is a rapist,” in an effort to garner a reaction and generate what he calls “news.”

In his Periscope broadcast (promoted by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange), Cernovich confused what he called “basic game theory” with cost-benefit analysis, saying “there is no upside” to “getting Trump’s message out.” He also said that supporting Trump was “bad for business,” as his book on Trump “sold way less than” his Gorilla Mindset book (a non-scientific self-help book that aims to teach young men how to channel their “mindset” to look better, make money, and pick up women, among other things).

I guess wingnut welfare isn’t what it used to be …

Blaming Reince

If it makes them feel better…

Of course there’s no indication that any of those people would have accepted or that their successors would have voted for the repeal. There’s a reason they couldn’t get to 50 — it was a piece of garbage.

But at this point fantasies about what might have been if only the Big Manly General had been in charge are all they’ve got.

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Yeah, we’re crazy. He’s doing great.

by digby

The last paragraph of Trump’s pouty statement about signing the Russian sanctions bill that removed the president’s ability to reward his pal Vlad.

Oh look, he’s doing great:

President Donald Trump plunges to a new low as American voters disapprove 61 – 33 percent of the job he is doing, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. White men are divided 47 – 48 percent and Republicans approve 76 – 17 percent. White voters with no college degree, a key part of the president’s base, disapprove 50 – 43 percent.

Today’s approval rating is down from a 55 – 40 percent disapproval in a June 29 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University. This is President Trump’s lowest approval and highest disapproval number since he was inaugurated.

American voters say 54 – 26 percent that they are embarrassed rather than proud to have Trump as president. Voters say 57 – 40 percent he is abusing the powers of his office and say 60 – 36 percent that he believes he is above the law.

President Trump is not levelheaded, say 71 – 26 percent of voters, his worst score on that character trait. Voter opinions of most other Trump qualities drop to new lows: 

62 – 34 percent that he is not honest; 

63 – 34 percent that he does not have good leadership skills; 

59 – 39 percent that he does not care about average Americans; 

58 – 39 percent that he is a strong person; 

55 – 42 percent that he is intelligent; 

63 – 34 percent that he does not share their values. 

“It’s hard to pick what is the most alarming number in the troubling trail of new lows for President Donald Trump,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“Profound embarrassment over his performance in office and deepening concern over his level-headedness have to raise the biggest red flags.

“The daily drip drip of missteps and firings and discord are generating a tidal wave of bad polling numbers.

“Is there a wall big enough to hold it back?”

American voters give Arizona Sen. John McCain a 57 – 32 percent favorability rating, with a 74 – 18 percent positive score from Democrats and a 60 – 28 percent positive rating from independent voters. Republicans give McCain a negative 39 – 49 percent rating.

Trump gets a negative 34 – 61 percent favorability rating, with a 79 – 17 percent positive score from Republicans. All other groups are negative, with white men at 47 – 48 percent. That Russian Thing

The president “has attempted to derail or obstruct the investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election,” American voters believe 58 – 37 percent.

Voters believe 63 – 31 percent that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election. Republicans don’t believe it 61 – 30 percent, while every other group believes by wide margins that the Russians interfered.

Trump did something illegal in dealing with Russia, 30 percent of voters say, while 30 percent say he did something unethical, but not illegal and 32 percent say he did nothing wrong. These numbers are similar for Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

American voters give Trump negative approval ratings for handling key issues:
41 – 52 percent for handling the economy;
36 – 59 percent for foreign policy;
46 percent approve of his handling of terrorism and 47 percent disapprove;
38 – 59 percent for immigration;
28 – 65 percent for health care.

Trump’s Tweets
Trump should stop tweeting from his personal Twitter account, American voters say 69 – 27 percent, the biggest no-tweet vote so far.

Gee, none of this should be surprising to anyone who paid attention to the presidential campaign. It’s not like he’s changed.

Oh, and by the way, General Kelly, the “new sheriff in town” was unable to stop him from issuing the most inane signing statement ever written about the Russian sanctions bill which he very clearly and obviously did not want to sign and did it in private.

But, you know, there’s nothing at all suspicious about that at all.

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Lock her up, goddamit!!!

by digby

That’s what they voted for and that’s what they want to see.

I have written before that the Republicans would love to get back  to harassing Hillary Clinton sooner rather than later so they could put on a big show to distract from the traitorous imbecile they installed in the White House. Imagine if they could get Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, Huma Abedin, (Hye, maybe even Obama) up on the Hill for hearings. It would electrify their base and probably many others who hate Trump a lot less than they hate Clinton. She is the anti-Christ across the political spectrum.

Anyway, here’s the latest update:

Between Russian meddling in last year’s election, Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey and the president’s public drubbing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the House Judiciary Committee has a lot it could be looking into.

But its Republican chairman, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, has a different priority: investigating Hillary Clinton.

Goodlatte has called for new scrutiny of decisions made by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server, as well as alleged Clinton ties to foreign governments and the leaking of classified information…

Republicans in Congress have struggled to calibrate their approaches to the Russia investigation and the current administration’s actions, with many of them torn between protecting a Republican administration from partisan attacks and conducting defensive oversight in case significant wrongdoing emerges.

The House Judiciary panel has remained unusually standoffish. When Democrats on the panel tried last week to force through a resolution demanding more information on Sessions’s role in Comey’s firing, Goodlatte and Republicans on the panel turned it into a request demanding new probes into Clinton.[…]
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee say they back Goodlatte’s position.

“The Democrats make sure that just about all we talk about in Judiciary is Russia — even though they don’t even know how to find Russia on the map,” said Representative Trent Franks of Arizona in an interview. “They just want to use it as a political bludgeon against Trump.”

Andy Biggs of Arizona, another Republican on the panel, says there are plenty of Russia investigations already underway. Like Goodlatte, he sees a need to investigate Obama administration officials, saying there are unresolved questions about Clinton’s emails and other topics.

“Those need to be answered,” he said at last week’s hearing.

I don’t know if they will be able to put on this show. But you know they want to.

Oh and by the way, the House Judiciary Committee — the committee which would have to start impeachment hearings — had no intention of looking into Trump and Russia or anything else pertaining to the current president.

Update:

This is unbelievable

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I wrote about Trump’s latest Russia hits for Salon this morning:

We may have finally reached the point at which it’s no longer tenable to offer President Trump the benefit of the doubt about his motives for trying to obstruct the Russia investigation. He is in so far over his head with this job, and so lacking in both temperament and knowledge, that there was always the chance that he simply stumbled into this coverup without really understanding the stakes.

But the latest blockbuster Washington Post story about the president’s personal involvement in crafting Donald Trump Jr.’s statement to the press regarding the now-famous meeting in June 2016 — the one with a lawyer advertised as an emissary of the Russian government, to talk about its program to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton — makes it impossible for anyone to maintain that he didn’t understand how deeply his campaign was implicated.

What we know now is that the president overruled his own attorneys and advisers to dictate a statement that was at best misleading, in which he passed off the event as a benign meeting about Russian adoptions. The reason we can no longer assume that was just his clumsy spin to exonerate his son as “any father would do,” as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it on Tuesday, is because of this timeline, courtesy of journalists Laura Rozen and Josh Marshall:

July 7th: On or before Friday July 7th Trump advisors and lawyers begin discussing how to respond to press inquiries about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who an intermediary told Trump Jr. had information tied to the Russian government’s support for Trump’s candidacy.

July 7th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for first meeting.

July 8th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for a second, unreported meeting, at which they discussed Russian adoptions, according to President Trump [in his July 19th interview with The New York Times.]

July 8th: Late evening, President Trump overrules advisers and lawyers to dictate a statement for his son in which he claims that the topic of the June 2016 meeting was Russian adoptions.

Marshall wrote:

Piecing together this timeline and based on President Trump’s own account, we can say that he knew his advisers were discussing how to respond to a press story about the June 2016 meeting. He had a secret conversation with President Putin at which they discussed the issue of Russian adoptions. Then hours later he dictated a false statement to be released in the name of his son in which he claimed that Russian adoptions were the topic of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. That is a highly troubling chain of events to put it mildly.

It is undoubtedly true that the June 2016 meeting at least partly concerned the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 federal law imposing sanctions on certain Russian officials that resulted in Putin banning Russian adoptions in the U.S. — sanctions that Putin is reportedly extremely anxious to have lifted. But in light of the fact that President Trump knew that the meeting with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort was about to explode in the press, discussing this subject privately with Putin is more than a little bit suspicious.

We still do not know if there was any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. It’s well within the realm of possibility that Trump and his people simply accepted the “help” without any specific quid pro quo. But clearly Trump is desperate to keep the investigation contained and has gone to incredible lengths to do so.

If overruling his advisers and lawyers within days, to dictate a statement that made his own son look like a liar isn’t convincing enough, consider Tuesday’s other big report. It’s a real “fake news” story involving a wealthy Trump donor by the name of Ed Butowsky who cooked up a false narrative, with help from Fox News, to make people believe that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was actually a leak perpetrated by a disgruntled staffer who was later murdered in what remains an unsolved crime.

NPR reported Tuesday that one of the participants, a Fox News consultant named Rod Wheeler, has filed a lawsuit against the network alleging that he was coerced into creating the false report. He also revealed that Butowsky took him to the White House and spoke with former press secretary Sean Spicer about the story, and produced documentation showing that Butowsky told him the president was personally overseeing the project.

Butowsky later said that he was just joking about that part, and the White House has denied the president had anything to do with it. But consider what Butowsky instructed Wheeler at the time:

One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion [between] Trump and the Russians … the narrative in the interviews you might use is that you and [Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman’s] work prove that the Russians didn’t hack into the DNC and steal the emails and impact our elections.

If you can, try to highlight this puts the Russian hacking story to rest.

The whole point of this project was not to deny that Trump colluded with the Russians but to create evidence that the Russians didn’t hack the DNC in the first place. Indeed, the president himself has always hedged on that and has recently said that if the Russians had hacked the U.S., they are so skilled that American intelligence services would never be able to detect it — which, as it turns out, is something Vladimir Putin told him! It seems almost as important to Trump to prove that U.S. intelligence has it all wrong and the Russian government wasn’t guilty of the interference as it is to show he didn’t collude with them.

None of this proves Trump was directly involved in this tawdry little fake news story. Indeed, if he weren’t so obsessive about denying the Russian involvement, it wouldn’t occur to anyone that a man in his position would be. But this president spends an inordinate amount of time on this subject. He obsessively watches cable news and often feels the need to respond via tweet to whatever he believes is unfair coverage of the story. He is micromanaging the scandal in every way, overruling his lawyers, his advisers and even his own family while trying (and failing) to keep the lid on it.

Personally, my money is still on the likelihood that Trump is desperate to keep his personal finances from being exposed. There’s a reason he’s hiding all the details about his fortune, and there’s also likely a reason that special counsel Robert Mueller is assembling a team of experts in the fields of fraud, public corruption, organized crime and foreign bribery. But whatever it is that’s got Trump so distressed, it’s so important to him that he’s risking everything, even the national security of the United States, to keep it a secret.

The schoolhouse door again
by Tom Sullivan

Vivian Malone entering Foster Auditorium to register for classes at the University of Alabama. (Library of Congress)

Why?

Yes, yes, discrimination against white people is just the sort of rumor Fox News enjoys throwing gasoline on for days at a time. But now the Trump Justice Department is getting in on the act.

A document obtained by the New York Times indicates the Justice Department’s civil rights division plans to sue universities that discriminate against white applicants in favor of minority ones:

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

“Intentional race-based discrimination” would seem to cover affirmative action efforts in place for decades. Never mind that the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in a Texas case just last year that universities had “considerable deference” in how to administer affirmative action programs. That Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling “affirmative action gone berzerk” was probably enough for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Washington Post’s account adds that officials within the civil rights division refused to work on the project, seeing it as contrary to the department’s longstanding approach to expanding educational opportunities. So the political division took over. Vanita Gupta, former head of the civil rights division under the Obama administration called the project “an affront to our values as a country and the very mission of the civil rights ­division.” She told the Post:

“Long-standing Supreme Court precedent has upheld the constitutionality and compelling state interest of these policies, and generations of Americans have benefited from richer, more inclusive institutions of higher education,” Gupta said.

Now, it is not as if discrimination against white people is an impossibility. Certainly current demographic trends make people accustomed to seeing this as a white, Christians-only country are nervous about being on the receiving rather than the giving end of racial discrimination. But other than Fox News’ interest in boosting its ratings, who is pushing for targeting universities on this? Neither report says.

In the past, conservative politicians went after universities as centers of liberal strength they meant to weaken. What is novel here, other than the attempt to intimidate universities and fuel the culture war, is the attempt to limit the access to them by non-whites by claiming it is whites facing discrimination. Not that Sessions fans are clamoring to get into engineering or law schools and failing to. But keeping others out of “white” institutions has a long tradition in places Sessions finds support, even among those who themselves will never attend. Discrimination is about maintaining the establish pecking order.

This Justice Department effort grows from another conservative tradition: “wedging.” Urban vs. rural, us vs. Them. Keeping resentment properly stoked is good politics out in red America. Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner spoke with political scientist Katherine J. Cramer who has studied voters in rural Wisconsin. Cramer tell him in spite of being city dwellers, Gov. Scott Walker and Donald Trump are masters of tapping rural resentment:

You can’t separate culture and economics. When people are telling me that they’re not getting their fair share, and they’re feeling like all the taxpayer dollars go to the cities, and that they pay in a lot of taxes but they don’t see that money in return, they’re also telling me, “That money is going to people who don’t deserve it as much as I do, and don’t seem to be working as hard as I do.” And some of that is racist sentiment. Whether we’re talking about cultural issues in terms of race or ethnicity or immigration, we’re also talking about it in terms of just the lifestyles of city people versus the lifestyles of people in rural areas, and the sense of who works hard: People who sit behind a desk all day or people who are doing manual labor? Economic insecurity is intertwined with their sense of deservingness, which is a very cultural notion. So in my mind you can’t really separate the two.

Or who deserves to get into college and who doesn’t. The Justice Department investigating universities isn’t any more about discrimination against white people than the president’s voter fraud commission is about election integrity. It is about keeping Republican base voters engaged for the next election. “Real Americans” consider any election they lose discrimination against them too.

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

What a dump!

by digby

Your president, ladies and gentlemen:

At most other golf courses in America the TV is tuned to Golf Channel, on mute, but throughout last summer and fall, the television in Trump Bedminster’s shop was on Fox News, with the sound blaring. As President, Trump has already made four visits to the club. He has his own cottage adjacent to the pool; it was recently given a secure perimeter by the Secret Service, leading to the inevitable joke that it’s the only wall Trump has successfully built.

Chatting with some members before a recent round of golf, he explained his frequent appearances: “That White House is a real dump.” Trump is often at his most unguarded among the people who pay for their proximity to him. Last November, the President-elect hosted a cocktail reception and dinner at Bedminster on the same weekend that he was holding interviews at the club with candidates for his Cabinet. At the dinner, Trump addressed the members of the club by saying, “This is my real group. You are the special people. I see all of you. I recognize, like, 100% of you, just about.” Then he issued an open invitation to drop in on his Cabinet interviews the next day.

Isn’t he great? It makes you so proud.

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