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Month: September 2017

QOTD: San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz

QOTD: San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz

by digby

Regarding acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke’s vacuous comment that the Hurricane Maria relief efforts are a “good news story”:

“Well, maybe from where she’s standing, it’s a good news story. When you’re drinking from a creek, it’s not a good news story. When you don’t have food for a baby, it’s not a good news story. When you have to pull people down from their buildings — I’m sorry, but that really upsets me and frustrates me. You know, I would ask her to come down here and visit the towns, and then make a statement like that, which frankly, it is an irresponsible statement.”

“Damn it, this is not a good-news story. This is a people-are-dying story. This is a life-or-death story. This is a ‘there’s-a-truck-load-of-stuff-that-cannot-be-taken-to-people story.’ This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen because people are not getting food and water,” she continued. “It is not a good-news story when people are dying, when they don’t have dialysis, when their generators aren’t working and their oxygen isn’t providing for them. Where is there good news here? … I’m really sorry, but you know when you have people out there dying, literally, scraping for food, where is the good news?”

Meanwhile, here’s the president of the United States this morning:

This is truly unbelievable.
Yes, he’s obsessing about the cost of rebuilding. While people are suffering and dying.

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They just want to vote for “the craziest son of a bitch in the race”

They just want to vote for “the craziest son of a bitch in the race”

by digby

There have been many postmortems about the Alabama Senate primary runoff last Tuesday, mostly focusing on what its result tells us about Donald Trump and whether it affects Mitch McConnell’s future. These are good questions, since the candidate endorsed by Trump and McConnell lost to a deranged theocrat considered to be so extreme that even the National Rifle Association dropped nearly a million dollars’ worth of ads to try to defeat him. How can it be that a man who was opposed by just about everyone in the Republican Party won the Republican nomination in the most Republican state in the country?

One way of looking at this result is to simply note that President Trump didn’t back the Trumper candidate. In a rare moment of party comity, Trump agreed to help out Mitch McConnell and endorse the establishment’s chosen candidate, appointed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, against the wishes of Trump’s revolutionary wingman Steve Bannon. Trump was either convinced by his advisers and the party poobahs that wild man Roy Moore couldn’t win and he needed to back the winner or that Moore was nuts and Trump needed to pull Strange over the goal line with his massive popularity. Whatever the reasoning, Trump seemed to understand that he’d backed a dud when he mused out loud at his big rally for Strange last Friday night, “Maybe I’ve made a mistake.”

One can easily understand why so many Republicans from all factions of the party wanted to keep Judge Roy Moore out of the United States Senate. He is a notorious political figure from the most extreme corner of the religious right, who was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to enforce the rule of law. First it was for refusing to remove a 10 Commandments monument from the courthouse and then it was for ordering the state to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Moore is a vocal birther who believes that sharia law is being enacted in states around the nation and claimed that Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota should not be allowed to serve in Congress because he is a Muslim. Not only did he refuse to honor the Supreme Court’s order legalizing gay marriage, he thinks homosexual conduct should be outlawed. He has said that the 9/11 attacks and the Newtown mass shooting occurred because God was upset that we “legitimize sodomy” and “legitimize abortion.”

In other words, Moore is exactly the kind of fringe candidate that caused the Republicans to fail to win the Senate back in 2010 and 2012 after running kooks like Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and Sharron “Second Amendment remedies” Angle. As a leaked GOP memo about the Alabama race that was circulated among donors pointed out, the party leadership thought it had purged the self-destructive Tea Party impulse by running more mainstream candidates in 2014 and 2016 and winning the majority. Apparently you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

Charlie Sykes, a Trump critic and former right-wing radio host, pointed out in Time magazine this week that the right has been dealing with a strong strain of “crackpottery” for many decades. and it’s true. The modern conservative movement was hatched in the McCarthy era, after all, and the Republican party has been dealing with one group of flakes after another ever since, from the gold bugs to the theocrats to the gun nuts and sovereign citizens and more. It’s in the GOP DNA. Until recently, party leaders were able to skillfully exploit the prejudices and paranoia of those factions of their base, while keeping a lid on the worst excesses most of the time and maintaining a somewhat respectable reputation.

But talk radio changed everything and, along with Fox News and the newer online media platforms, has radicalized the grassroots. Starting in the ’90s, the Republican Party began to lose control of its own supposed constituency. Sykes quotes a fellow apostate in explaining his own epiphany:

Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, tried to diagnose the mindset of the Tea Party voters when he told the Washington Examiner, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans.” Massie continued, “But after some soul-searching, I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas. They were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class.”

Roy Moore, like fellow birther Sheriff Joe Arpaio, is likely to become a close pal of the president if he wins the election. He’s Trump’s kind of guy, a card-carrying kook. Trump isn’t likely to make the same mistake again and will be backing the extremists from now on. He may not know much about politics, but he knows his base.

The political press generally saw this campaign as a test of Steve Bannon’s political clout versus the president’s, and Bannon’s “win” as a high-profile Moore booster has them swooning. According to the New York Times, Bannon and his billionaire benefactors Robert and Rebekah Mercer are planning to run primaries against incumbent Republicans in order to “drain the swamp” and “blow up the establishment.” If this feels like déjà vu all over again, that’s understandable. Just a few years ago, the billionaire Koch brothers decided to do the same thing and financed the Tea Party movement. The philosophical goals are different — the Kochs are pro-business libertarians and the Mercers are eccentrics who want to usurp the establishment — but the process is the same.

The result for the Republican Party is likely to be what Sykes describes as “an endless feedback loop as it tries with diminishing success to placate its most bombastic voices. The most obvious consequence is their inability (so far) to legislate.” Longer term, the party seems to be headed for the long-awaited crack-up.

The GOP stuck together to vote for Donald Trump despite the misgivings of many more mainstream Republican voters. They are party loyalists and simply couldn’t imagine themselves voting for a Democrat, especially not the hated Hillary Clinton. Those voters aren’t the ones who will get fed up and leave. It’s far more likely that if the party finally splits it will be the people who want to vote for “the craziest son of a bitch in the race” who will go their own way. That’s not how Steve Bannon originally envisioned blowing up the establishment, but it could achieve his goal anyway.

Mitigating disaster by @BloggersRUs

Mitigating disaster
by Tom Sullivan

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) flies from Chicago to San Juan this morning to survey the damage and hurricane relief efforts.

“I won’t sit back and watch TV as another crisis like Katrina in New Orleans unfolds,” he said in a press release. “These are our people and they need our help right now.”

Disaster relief for Puerto Rico has been, shall we say, slow. So, it’s fair to ask why:

“I think it’s a fair ask why we’re not seeing a similar command and response,” said retired Lt. Gen. P.K. “Ken” Keen, the three-star general who commanded the U.S. military effort in Haiti, where 200,000 people died by some estimates. “The morning after, the president said we were going to respond in Port-au-Prince … robustly and immediately, and that gave the whole government clarity of purpose.”

Clarity is not exactly the sitting president’s métier. But since the lieutenant general asked, perhaps it is because disaster capitalists hot to snap up devalued Caribbean real estate for a song from desperate Americans who’ve lost everything simply don’t want them helped.

Does having no evidence to support that allegation make me sound presidential?

But consider: The sitting president suggested his reluctance to lift the Jones Act in support of Puerto Rican relief efforts was because shipping magnates opposed doing it. (It has since been lifted.) His first public response to the disaster wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricanes Irma and Maria was to wring his hands over “billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks.” It is the lens through which he views the world. He has friends in that. The kind who will drop $35,000 to $250,000 to hear him babble about catapults and car seats.

Paul Krugman doubts there is cynical calculation behind the tepid relief for Puerto Rico. The reality-show president is simply a “massively self-centered individual who can’t bring himself to focus on other people’s needs, even when that’s the core of his job.” Others’ suffering is simply not his concern. Perhaps.

The same is true, Krugman writes, with the administration’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act. They’re not even being coy about their efforts to undermine it.

Krugman writes:

Why are the Trumpists doing this? Is it a cynical calculation — make the A.C.A. fail, then claim that it was already doomed? I doubt it. For one thing, we’re not talking about people known for deep strategic calculations. For another, the A.C.A. won’t actually collapse; it will just become a program more focused on sicker, poorer Americans — and the political opposition to repeal won’t go away. Finally, when the bad news comes in, everyone will know whom to blame.

That’s wrong. For one, the sitting president clearly means to undo everything his pedecessor, the Kenyan Pretender, accomplished.

But as I frequently observe, conservatives in power, even this crew in the White House, never do anything that is not at least a twofer. If there’s a disaster, they smell profit. If their opponents achieve something, it must be destroyed … at a profit. Not-for-profit public expenditures are a crime against capitalism, unless they profit the right people and strengthen one’s grip on power. Power is the lens through which the president and his allies view the world. Money is its proxy. “Freedom” is its guise.

Assaults on labor both profit the business class and erode the political base for Democrats. Privatization of public assets in red states profits the business class and politically weaken cities (where the largest blocks of blue votes are). When the financial crises comes for blue cities, conservative legislators are counting on the public not remembering whom to blame, and that they’ll accept it was “Democrat” mismanagement.

Profiting politically and financially from natural disasters and victims’ suffering? Waste not, want not.

It is one way of looking at the world. The scavenger’s way. The predator’s way. There are plenty of animals that are successful at it in evolutionary terms. But it is not the only way and, I’d argue, not the American way.

Oddly enough, an insurance company has begun pointing to interdependence as a more human and humane alternative:

“But there’s another way to live — a way that sees the only path to fulfillment is through others, that our time here can be deep beyond measure … What the world taught as weakness, is in fact, our greatest virtue.”

I wonder do they really believe it, or just think it’s good marketing?

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

Blessed Be the Fruitcakes by tristero

Blessed Be the Fruitcakes

by tristero

Margaret Atwood was writing non-fiction:*

One of President Trump’s judicial nominees became something of a hero to religious conservatives after she was grilled at a Senate hearing this month over whether her Roman Catholic faith would influence her decisions on the bench. 

The nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor up for an appeals court seat, had raised the issue herself in articles and speeches over the years. The Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee zeroed in on her writings, and in the process prompted accusations that they were engaged in religious bigotry… 

Ms. Barrett told the senators that she was a faithful Catholic, and that her religious beliefs would not affect her decisions as an appellate judge. But her membership in a small, tightly knit Christian group called People of Praise never came up at the hearing, and might have led to even more intense questioning. 

Some of the group’s practices would surprise many faithful Catholics. Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a “head” for men and a “handmaid” for women. The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.

Read the whole thing.

*Update: according to an informant, the book was, in fact, based on a real-life sect where the women were called “handmaids.”

The wind took everything

The wind took everything


by digby

In a Puerto Rican Village: ‘The Wind Came and Took Everything’

In a village fifteen minutes from the capital of Puerto Rico, residents sit amid the rubble that was once their homes.

This is awful.

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A little something to add to the election postmortems

A little something to add to the election postmortems

by digby

Standard disclaimer: Hillary Clinton’s popular vote winning campaign was the worst in the history of politics. Having said that, this would seem to be an important bit of information to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of various strategies in 2016:

Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyperpoliticized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.

Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.

While it’s unclear what effect such content ultimately had on voters, the new study only deepens concerns about how the 2016 election may have been tweaked by nefarious forces on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. “Many people use these platforms to find news and information that shapes their political identities and voting behavior,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a lead researcher for Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, which has been tracking disinformation strategies around the world since 2014. “If bad actors can lower the quality of information, they are diminishing the quality of democracy.”

Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”

The dubious Twitter content also contained YouTube videos—including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced.
The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.

The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.

I have been hearing people on TV saying that this was really an attempt to sow discord in our democracy. That may be true. But they only seemed to want to sow discord on the left. There is no evidence that they ever bought any ads or launched any campaigns for “Never Trump.”

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Maybe a little waterboarding is in order?

Maybe a little waterboarding is in order?

by digby

Trump on Fox and Friends:

“I have so many friends that are owners. And they’re in a box. I mean, I’ve spoken to a couple of them. They say, ‘We are in a situation where we have to do something. I think they’re afraid of their players, you want to know the truth, and I think it’s disgraceful. And they’ve got to be tough and they’ve got to be smart.”

That’s the language he uses when he talks about terrorists.

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Tax cuts for the rich while people are dying

Tax cuts for the rich while people are dying

by digby

This is what Trump and the Republicans are spending all their time talking about and the media is covering while there is a humanitarian crisis for millions of Americans unfolding in real time:

1) A straight-up tax cut for the rich. The top tax rate in the United States is 39.6 percent. Trump and GOP leaders propose lowering that to 35 percent. It’s also worth noting the 39.6 percent tax rate applies only to income above $418,400 for singles and $470,700 for married couples. The outline doesn’t specify what income level the new 35 percent rate would kick in at. It’s possible the rich will get an every bigger tax cut if the final plan raises that threshold.

2) The estate tax goes bye-bye. Trump likes to call the estate tax the “death tax.” At the moment, Americans who pass money, homes or other assets on to heirs when they die pay a 40 percent tax. But here’s the important part Trump leaves out: The only people who have to pay this tax are those passing on more than $5.49 million. (And a married couple can inherit nearly $11 million without paying the tax.)

Trump frequently claims the estate tax hurts farmers and small-business owners. But as The Post’s Fact Checker team points out, only 5,500 estates will pay any estate tax at all in 2017 (out of about 3 million estates). And of those 5,500 hit with the tax, only 80 (yes, you read that right) are farms or small businesses.

3) Hedge funds and lawyers get a special tax break. The plan calls for the tax rate on “pass-through entities” to fall from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. Republicans claim this is a tax break for small-business owners because “pass-through entities” is an umbrella term that covers the ways most people set up businesses: sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations. But the reality is, most small-business owners (more than 85 percent) already pay a tax rate of 25 percent or less, according to the Brookings Institution.

Only 3 percent pay a rate greater than 30 percent. That 3 percent includes doctors, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other really well-off people. Instead of paying a 35 percent income tax, these rich business owners would be able to pass off their income as business income and pay only a 25 percent tax rate. (The tax outline released Wednesday “contemplates” that Congress “will adopt measures to prevent” this kind of tax dodging. But there’s no guarantee that will happen).

4) The AMT is over. Republicans want to kill the alternative minimum tax, a measure put in place in 1969 to ensure the wealthy aren’t using a bunch of loopholes and credits to lower their tax bills to paltry sums. The AMT starts to phase in for people with earnings of about $130,000, but the vast majority of people subject to the AMT earn over $500,000, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Trump himself would benefit from repealing the AMT. As The Post’s Fact Checker team notes, Trump’s leaked tax return from 2005 shows that the AMT increased his tax bill from about $5.3 million to $36.5 million. In 2005 alone, he potentially could have saved $31 million.

5) The wealthy get to keep deducting mortgage interest. Only about 1 in 4 taxpayers claims the mortgage interest deduction, the Brookings Institution says. “Upper-income households primarily benefit from the subsidy,” wrote Brookings scholar Bruce Katz in a report last year. In fact, the wealthy can deduct up to $1 million in mortgage interest every year. There have been many calls over the years to lower that threshold, but the Trump tax plan is keeping it in place.

The GOP is doing this even though the tax cuts would add to the United States’ debt, since it doesn’t raise enough revenue to offset all the money lost from the new tax breaks. The outline also calls for the charitable deduction to stay, another deduction used heavily by the top 1 percent.

6) Stockholders are going to be very happy. Trump is calling for a super-low tax rate on the money big businesses such as Apple and Microsoft bring back to the United States from overseas, a process known as “repatriation.” Trump argues companies will use all this money coming home to build new U.S. factories. But the last time the United States did this, in the early 2000s, it ended up being a big win for people who own stocks. Companies simply took most of the money and gave it to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

Guess what? Just about everyone (outside the White House) predicts the same thing will happen again. Corporations are even admitting it.

7) The favorite tax break of hedge fund billionaires is still safe. There’s no mention in the tax-overhaul rubric of “carried interest.” Those two words make most people’s eyes glaze over, but they are a well-known tax-dodging trick for millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street. Hedge fund and private-equity managers earn most of their money from their investments doing well. But instead of paying income taxes on all that money at a rate of 39.6 percent, the managers are able to claim it as “carried interest” so they can pay tax at the low capital gains rate of 20 percent.

Trump called this totally unfair on the campaign trail. During the primaries, he said he would eliminate this loophole because hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder.” But that change didn’t end up in the GOP plan.

8) Capital gains taxes stay low. The nine-page document also says nothing about capital gains, the tax rate people pay when they finally sell a stock or asset after holding on to it for many years. At the moment, the wealthiest Americans pay a 20 percent capital gains rate. Trump and Republican leaders aren’t proposing any changes to that, even though it is a popular way for millionaires to lower their tax bill.

9) The Obamacare investment tax goes away. The Affordable Care Act put in place a 3.8 percent surcharge on investment income (known formally as the Net Investment Income Tax). It applies only to individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and married couples earning more than $250,000. There’s no mention of this tax in the outline released this week, but Republicans clearly want to get rid of it. Repealing it was part of the GOP health-care bills that failed to pass Congress in recent weeks. One way or another, Republicans are likely to roll back this tax.

When reporters asked Trump whether the tax plan would help him personally, he quickly said no.

“No, I don’t benefit. I don’t benefit,” Trump said. “In fact, very, very strongly, as you see, I think there’s very little benefit for people of wealth.”

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), who was part of the team that worked with the White House to craft the tax-overhaul outline, was asked a similar question on Fox News. He, too, said this plan does little to help the rich.

“I think those who benefit most are middle-class families struggling to keep every dollar they earn,” Brady told Fox News.

But one look at this plan tells a very different story. It gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), a strong proponent of tax cuts, was more straightforward this week. He told reporters, “This is a supply-side approach,” another way of saying trickle-down economics.

He’s lying but that’s not even necessary to mention, is it? Of course he will benefit.

Meanwhile, dying Americans.

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Meanwhile millionaires fly around on private jets and government aircraft for free

Meanwhile they’re all flying around on private jets and military aircraft for free

by digby



Hard to believe, but true:

People evacuated by the U.S. from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico must sign promissory notes ensuring they fully repay transportation costs to the Defense Department, according to the State Department.

Evacuees from Dominica and other countries hit by the hurricanes also must sign the promissory notes, though their repayments would go through the State Department.

The notes fall under a longstanding but discretionary policy meant to ensure that evacuees pay transportation costs, which are based on “the price of the last commercial one-way, full-fare (not discounted) economy ticket prior to the crisis.”

Marketwatch first reported that the evacuees from Puerto Rico were required to put up the promissory notes.
It is unclear how many people have been evacuated on military flights from Puerto Rico, which has been hit by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in the last three weeks.

A State Department source said 225 people had been evacuated from Dominica. The source confirmed there had been evacuees from Puerto Rico, but could not provide a number.

According to the State Department’s website, the policy applies to all evacuees who boarded U.S. government aircraft or other vehicles to evacuate.

It’s possible that promissory notes could be waived.

Some promissory notes for people evacuated from Dominica were waived due to medical emergencies, for example, a State Department spokesman said.

It’s not clear if any waivers have been issued for evacuees from Puerto Rico, who would be overseen by the Department of Defense.

People who sign the promissory notes are effectively taking out a loan from the U.S. government. The loans, according to State’s website, are managed “by the Comptroller and Global Financial Services office in Charleston, South Carolina.”

A note on the State Department’s website says that due to “ongoing emergencies,” State is not accepting repayments on the loans right now.

“Currently, loan repayments cannot be completed due to ongoing emergencies in the region. We will update travel.state.gov/evacuate as soon as repayments can be made,” the State Department says.

Limits are placed on the passports of evacuees who sign the notes, the State Department’s website says.

“Upon evacuation, a Department of State official must limit an evacuee’s passport. In order to obtain a new passport, an evacuee must arrange payment as agreed upon via the promissory note,” the website reads.

The Trump administration has faced criticism from Democrats about the pace of relief efforts in Puerto Rico. The island is without power, and many of the territory’s 3.4 million inhabitants are without clean drinking water.

Trump has vowed that his administration would receive high marks for Hurricane Maria relief efforts.

“We’ve gotten A-pluses on Texas and in Florida, and we will also on Puerto Rico,” Trump said Tuesday. “But the difference is this is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean. It’s a big ocean, it’s a very big ocean. And we’re doing a really good job.”

Trump on Thursday [finally]mlifted shipping restrictions on relief efforts to Puerto Rico, allowing non-U.S. owned and crewed ships to deliver aid to the island.

Goldman Sachs millionaire is on TV right now pimping his tax cut plan. All the networks are covering it.

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