Month: October 2017

Yeah, I know. He’s a liar.


by digby

When I think about the fact that Obama was burned as a heretic at the stake for telling people that they could keep their doctor …

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Who could be worse for CIA than Tom Cotton?

by digby

I wrote about the chilling rumors in DC about who might move into the CIA director’s slot if Mike Pompeo is moved over to Secretary of State for Salon this morning:

It may be that it took direct, vicious attacks on the mainstream media for its practitioners to understand the catastrophe of Donald Trump and cover him both factually and, more important, truthfully. They aren’t perfect, but they aren’t being the lapdogs we all saw during the Bush administration and thank goodness for that. Still, they have yet to kill some stale old tropes that desperately need to be thrown overboard. One of them is this idea that there are “grownups” out there somewhere who will come rescue us from the folly of our democratic choices.

Back in 2001, the entire press corps was delirious over the ascension of George W. Bush after the years of Bill Clinton and his hippie White House. Those so-called “grownups” wreaked havoc, and the press seemed to be chagrined enough by the Bush administration’s failures to let Barack Obama’s quiet dignity speak for itself. But with the election of Donald Trump and his infantile bullying, this meme has returned in a big way. I wrote about this latest iteration of the “finally, the adults are back in charge” line a few months ago, and it’s only become more frequent and more desperate as the administration sheds its original cast of characters in favor of what Trump refers to as “my generals.” (It’s like a remake of “Seven Days in May” around there these days.)

Well, it just got worse. The much-rumored upcoming departure of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has created lots of gossip about possible replacements, starting with UN ambassador Nikki Haley, known as “the Iran whisperer.” The other possibility being discussed is CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a Trump favorite who drives three hours a day from Langley, Virginia, to the White House to personally deliver the president his national security briefing just the way he likes it — short, sweet and with “killer graphics.“

If Pompeo were to be moved into Tillerson’s spot, that would open up the CIA job, and word is that Trump is considering Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for that position. Cotton is only 40 years old and has had one term in the House and three years in the Senate, so he seems a bit young for the job. (In fact, he’s the youngest current U.S. senator.) But he’s apparently enough of a grownup to join the Trump babysitters’ club. Axios reported:

MSNBC and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt — who talks frequently to Cotton on and off the air, and first floated the idea of Cotton for CIA — told me that Pompeo, Cotton, SecDef Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly would be “a quartet of serious intellectuals and warriors in the ‘big four’ jobs.” And you could add National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster as a fifth.

Hewitt also said that Cotton and Trump get along well and that he and Pompeo both “like and listen to the president” and “accept his realism in foreign affairs.” Trump’s views on foreign affairs are not of what is called the “realist” school, nor are they actually realistic, so I’m not sure what Hewitt’s referring to. But it sounds as though both men are champion Trump flatterers, which makes the president comfortable and happy.

On the substance, Cotton is a terrible choice. He comes from Arkansas, but he went to Harvard for both undergrad and law school. Then he served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger and worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, before embarking on his long-planned political career. (I wrote about him back in 2015, calling him Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree.)

His one term as a congressman was unremarkable, but he flew into the Senate like a whirlwind and immediately embarrassed the entire Republican caucus by catching them all on their way out of town and getting them to sign an ill-considered letter he wrote to the Iranian government telling them that the nuclear agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. As former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote at the time:

The document was crafted by a senator with two months of experience under his belt. It was signed by some members rushing off the Senate floor to catch airplanes, often with little close analysis. Many of the 47 signatories reasoned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s endorsement was vetting enough. There was no caucus-wide debate about strategy; no consultation with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has studiously followed the nuclear talks (and who refused to sign). 

This was a foreign policy maneuver, in the middle of a high-stakes negotiation, with all the gravity and deliberation of a blog posting. In timing, tone and substance, it raises questions about the Republican majority’s capacity to govern.

Those questions have now been answered. It has no such capacity.

Cotton is clearly an intelligent man, but his instincts are highly Trumpian. It’s seems likely that he’s among the advisers who pushed the president toward decertification of the Iran deal based on no evidence. As CIA director, he would have no compunction about doing whatever is necessary to “find” evidence to achieve his long-cherished goal of a war with Iran. (It wouldn’t be the first time the CIA director declared a “slam dunk” in such a situation.)

According to Molly Ball of The Atlantic, Cotton’s Harvard thesis reveals his philosophy:

Cotton insists that the Founders were wise not to put too much faith in democracy, because people are inherently selfish, narrow-minded, and impulsive. He defends the idea that the country must be led by a class of intellectually superior officeholders whose ambition sets them above other men. Though Cotton acknowledges that this might seem elitist, he derides the Federalists’ modern critics as mushy-headed and naive. 

“Ambition characterizes and distinguishes national officeholders from other kinds of human beings,” Cotton wrote. “Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.”

On the surface, such a belief would seem to be an odd mix with the allegedly populist Donald Trump and his “alt-right” white nationalist allies, but it really isn’t. Trump himself is a big believer in eugenics and Steve Bannon is looking for a few good men to lead his army into the big final battle. Tom Cotton may be just the grownup they’ve been looking for.

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QOTD: Coach Pop

by digby

The great San Antonio Spurs coach called up Dave Zirin to speak on the record about Trump’s latest atrocity:

“I’ve been amazed and disappointed by so much of what this president had said, and his approach to running this country, which seems to be one of just a never ending divisiveness. But his comments today about those who have lost loved ones in times of war and his lies that previous presidents Obama and Bush never contacted their families are so beyond the pale, I almost don’t have the words.”

At this point, Coach Pop paused, and I thought for a moment that perhaps he didn’t have the words and the conversation would end. Then he took a breath and said:

“This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner—and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers—is as low as it gets. We have a pathological liar in the White House, unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office, and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day. The people who work with this president should be ashamed, because they know better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I don’t know how long we and individuals can live with this rage. But as long as I have it I know I am not insane.

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I’m just a bill pill
by Tom Sullivan

The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” have exposed congressional and industry complicity in creating (and perpetuating the prescription opioid drug epidemic that has claimed tens of thousands of American lives. It is another object lesson in whose interests take priority on Capitol Hill.

The “60 Minutes” report Sunday profiled whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi who once ran the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of Diversion Control. The office is charged with preventing prescription drugs from reaching the black market. Congress came under pressure from pharmaceutical distributors after Rannazzisi’s efforts to prosecute corrupt pharmacists he calls “drug dealers in lab coats” began reaching higher up the supply chain:

JOE RANNAZZISI: This was all new to us. We weren’t seeing just some security violations, and a few bad orders. We were seeing hundreds of bad orders that involved millions and millions of tablets. That’s when we started going after the distributors.

Industry pushers began pushing back. Rannazzisi found his prosecutions systematically slowed by superiors. “Cases his supervisors once would have easily approved, now weren’t good enough,” the report explains. The industry began hiring former DEA lawyers to help quash their former agency’s prosecutions through lobbying and, in particular, through drafting legislation.

It’s easier to slip something by when the industry’s drafter knows how DEA investigations work and how to strategically circumvent them.

The Post reports:

A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.

The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.

The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar.

Naturally, Congress is shocked, shocked it was duped into passing an industry-written bill that made the epidemic worse:

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, says he’s horrified that a bill everyone approved — the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016 — made the epidemic worse.

“They made it and camouflaged it so well all of us were fooled. All of us. Nobody knew!” Sen. Manchin said. “There’s no oversight now … that bill has to be retracted … has to be repealed.”

The law sailed through the Senate last spring. It had the backing of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and was sponsored by members of both parties, so nobody in Congress thought to question it.

Missouri Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill introduced a bill Monday to repeal last year’s law. “60 Minutes” asks:

Who drafted the legislation that would have such a dire effect? The answer came in another internal Justice Department email released to 60 Minutes and The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act: “Linden Barber used to work for the DEA. He wrote the Marino bill.”

In a not-unrelated post this morning, Paul Krugman takes on the lies used to sell the GOP tax cut plan. He writes:

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the hope for tax cuts is the main thing keeping congressional Republicans in line behind Donald Trump. They know he’s unfit for office, and many worry about his mental stability. But they’ll back him as long as they think he might get those tax cuts through.

So what’s behind this priority? Follow the money. Big donors are furious at missing out on the $700 billion in tax cuts that were supposed to come out of Obamacare repeal. If they don’t get big bucks out of tax “reform,” they might close their pocketbooks for the 2018 midterm elections.

Money is speech, saith the Supreme Court. And those with the deepest pickets speak the loudest. It is commonplace to hear community activists protesting police violence to chant, “Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?” The rest of us should ask Congress the same thing. Even if the question is rhetorical.

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

Kim Jong Un understands American politics very well

by digby

I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed ….

A North Korean official told CNN the regime first wants to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of going “all the way to the East coast of the mainland U.S.” before engaging in diplomacy. North Korea isn’t ruling out diplomacy, but it wants to maximize its leverage before coming to the bargaining table.

That’s very wise of him. Any closer American cities just wouldn’t be that big of a big deal, amirite? He needs the leverage of threatening the east coast where the important people are.

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The Last Person You Want to See President 

by tristero

Oh, gawd.  Read the whole thing. It’s long but you won’t be able to tear yourself away. He’s profoundly incompetent, bigoted, hateful, corrupt, weak-willed, ruthless, sycophantic, and dumber than an amoeba with cognitive issues. He’s also one heartbeat away from becoming the most powerful person in the world.

Here’s a taste. The combination of cruelty, stupidity, and sheer incompetence is breathtaking. And this is just one of many, many stories Mayer tells:

In 2015, Ed Clere, a Republican state legislator who chaired the House Committee on Public Health, became aware of a spike in the number of H.I.V. cases in southern Indiana. The problem appeared to be caused by the sharing of needles among opioid abusers in Scott County, which sits across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. In a place like Scott County, Clere said, “typically you’d have no cases, or maybe one a year.” Now they were getting up to twenty a week. The area was poor, and woefully unprepared for a health crisis. (Pence’s campaign against Planned Parenthood had contributed to the closure of five clinics in the region; none had performed abortions, but all had offered H.I.V. testing.) That same year, the state health commissioner called Indiana’s H.I.V. outbreak a public-health emergency. 

Clere came of age during the aids crisis, and had read Randy Shilts’s best-selling account, “And the Band Played On.” He tried to get the legislature to study the possibility of legalizing a syringe exchange, which he felt “was a matter of life and death,” and could “save lives quickly and inexpensively.” 

But conservatives blocked the idea, and Pence threatened to veto any such legislation. “With Pence, you need to look at the framework, which is abstinence,” Clere said. “It’s the same as with giving teen-agers condoms. Conservatives think it promotes the behavior, even though it’s a scientifically proven harm-reduction strategy.” In March, 2015, Clere staged a huge public hearing, in which dozens of experts and sufferers testified about the crisis. Caught flat-footed, Pence scheduled his own event, where he announced that he would pray about the syringe-exchange issue. The next day, he said that he supported allowing an exchange program as an emergency measure, but only on a temporary basis and only in Scott County, with no state funding. Clere told me that he spent “every last dime of my political capital” to get the bill through. After Scott County implemented the syringe exchange, the number of new H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican leaders later stripped Clere of his committee chairmanship, a highly unusual event. “I commend Representative Clere for the efforts to help the state deal with this,” Kevin Burke, the health officer in neighboring Clark County, told me. “But he paid a price for it.”

Oh, gawd.

Is he worse than you-know-who? Okay… there are two last people you want to see president. But that doesn’t mean Pence is better.

While we’re ditching norms and rules, how about the Goldwater Rule?


by digby

I don’t know about you, but among all the ways the White House staff has to work overtime to deal with the unfit imbecile they work for, this is the most disturbing:

One defining feature of managing Trump is frequent praise, which can leave his team in what seems to be a state of perpetual compliments. The White House pushes out news releases overflowing with top officials heaping flattery on Trump; in one particularly memorable Cabinet meeting this year, each member went around the room lavishing the president with accolades.

Senior administration officials call this speaking to an “audience of one.”

That’s cute. But this is how people treat a king, not a president — a malevolent King like Joffrey from Game of Thrones.

It’s hard to believe that they need to do this since Trump flatters himself 24/7 but I guess it’s never enough. In fact, it’s a sign of serious mental and emotional impairment:

The removal of Trump using the Twenty-fifth Amendment is the aim of a newly launched social movement composed of mental-health professionals. The group, called Duty to Warn, claims that Donald Trump “suffers from an incurable malignant narcissism that makes him incapable of carrying out his presidential duties and poses a danger to the nation.” On Saturday, the organization held coördinated kickoff events in fourteen cities, where mental-health experts spoke out about Trump’s dangerousness and, in several, took to the streets in organized funereal marches, complete with drum corps.
Dr. John Gartner, the founder of Duty to Warn, told me that the event drew nearly a thousand participants across the country. At the Washington, D.C., event, the group presented an award to Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland and the sponsor of a bill that the group endorses. H.R. 1987 proposes an “Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity” that, under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, would serve as the congressionally appointed body for determining if the President cannot execute the powers and duties of his office owing to mental illness or deficiency.

According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, a majority of American voters now believe that Trump is not “fit to serve as President.” While many lay members of the public have observed Trump’s increasingly erratic and unstable behavior, commentary from mental-health experts about Trump’s mental state was slow to gather steam because of the Goldwater Rule, an ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association that says that psychiatrists cannot express professional opinions about public figures they have not personally examined. “Because we were silenced by the Goldwater Rule, we failed to warn the public that they were heading over the Niagara Falls,” Gartner said. The Duty to Warn movement now represents an outright rebellion against the yoke of the professional norm.

As I’ve written previously, the A.P.A. adopted the Goldwater Rule after members published harsh assessments of the Republican senator Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness to be President during his 1964 election campaign; the consensus was that these were little more than political opinions dressed up as authoritative psychiatric diagnoses. Earlier this year, in response to members’ questions and discontent about the Goldwater Rule’s application with respect to Trump, the A.P.A. debated the issue and announced that not just diagnoses but any “opinion about the affect, behavior, speech, or other presentation of an individual that draws on the skills, training, expertise, and/or knowledge inherent in the practice of psychiatry” was off limits.
[…]
Whatever the motivations and fears behind the rule, a taboo has been broken. Numerous Duty to Warn participants contributed essays to a new book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” which just landed on Sunday’s Times best-seller list—a sign of the public’s eagerness to know just how afraid they should be of Trump. Duty to Warn has also announced the formation of the “Twenty-fifth Amendment pac,” which will raise money for political candidates to run on the very issue of removing Trump via the Twenty-fifth Amendment. “We want to be to the Twenty-fifth Amendment what the N.R.A. is to the Second Amendment,” Gartner said. He believes that fear drives people to the polls, and “what people are most afraid of right now is Donald Trump.”

The formation of the new pac extends beyond simply advocating that psychiatrists and psychologists should be free to offer opinions on public figures. It pivots explicitly into the territory of political advocacy, organization, and activism—which is certain to remind many in the profession of the very sin that led psychiatrists to adopt the Goldwater Rule in the first place. Gartner said that Trump presents “the greatest psychiatric emergency in the history of the United States, maybe in the history of the world.” “The only psychiatric solution here is a political solution,” he said. 

The Goldwater Rule’s namesake led the delegation that was sent, in 1974, to tell President Richard Nixon, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, that he had lost support in Congress and could not avoid impeachment; Nixon resigned the next day. Many appear have given up on impeachment of President Trump for the moment. But it’s a real turning point when mental-health professionals are so willing to organize politically, break brazenly with long-standing protocol, and even risk discipline by licensing boards. After this, talk of Trump’s removal under the Twenty-fifth Amendment may not seem so crazy.

Talk of Trump being no worse than any other president is what’s going to keep him in office and get him re-elected.

He is a lunatic of epic proportions.

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Austria. Again.

by digby

Trump is uniquely dangerous and stupid. And he’s in office at a particularly dangerous time. This is not normal.

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Disturbed and dangerous


by digby

Yeah, this isn’t normal people, not even by GOP standards. I’m sorry, he is worse, far worse, than any president in our lifetimes.

Listen to this disturbed man talk like a gangster and pride himself on the carnage and calls for emergency measures he’s created. pic.twitter.com/CIzNTpyDnv

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 16, 2017

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Christian Right + Alt Right = True Love

The producers of “The Handmaid’s Tale” couldn’t have possibly known how timely their TV version of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel would be when they first pitched it. The horrifying misogyny of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was illustrated most vividly by his responses to women coming forward with complaints about his harassment and assaults over the years in the wake of the release of the Access Hollywood tape.

The shocking disclosures over the past year that Roger Ailes and Harvey Weinstein basically led reigns of terror at the top of the political media and entertainment world for decades brings Trump’s behavior once more into sharp relief. One would assume that America’s conservative Christians would be totally appalled. Instead, this past weekend, Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Family Research Council’s annual gathering, the Values Voter Summit, where he received a hero’s welcome.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Despite Trump’s long record of immoral behavior, white conservative evangelicals are among the most fervent and loyal of his supporters. A Reuters poll last month showed more than 60 percent of white evangelicals back him, a far higher number than his overall approval rating, which hovers in the 30s. At the gathering of activists this weekend, they responded in ecstasy as Trump robotically read a speech about how he and they were unified in their love of family, liberty, the constitution, the flag and the rule of law. According to Trump, their shared values are the most important of all:

George Washington said that “religion and morality are indispensable” to America’s happiness, really, prosperity and totally to its success. It is our faith and our values that inspires us to give with charity, to act with courage, and to sacrifice for what we know is right.

You just have to laugh.

Think Progress interviewed some of the attendees who said things like, “I love President Trump. He’s really evolved . . . he has a biblical worldview now as opposed to just a billionaire’s worldview.” That’s absurd, of course. He does value their votes, asking a group of religious leaders the other night, “The Christians, they know what I’m doing for them, right?”

Unlike the other big annual conservative confab, CPAC, the Values Voter Summit has generally focused on social issues. They did again this time, with Trump himself declaring victory in the war on Christmas:

You go to department stores, and they’ll say, “Happy New Year” and they’ll say other things. And it will be red, they’ll have it painted, but they don’t say it. Well, guess what? We’re saying “Merry Christmas” again.

Everyone cheered madly.

Fox News radio host Todd Starnes claimed that liberals want to criminalize masculinity and described the Boy Scouts’ recent (partial) decision to admit girls as “a war on boys.” The NRA’s Dana Loesch announced that “feminism is dead.” Patriarchy has many fans in that crowd.

The Islamophobes were out in force, openly agitating for their grand theory of the clash of civilizations. Wild-eyed former congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and anti-immigrant activist Brigitte Gabriel accused Muslims of everything from being rapists who have “no respect for women” to being carriers of infectious diseases. Frank Gaffney, perhaps the most paranoid anti-Muslim leader in the country, claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is working hand in hand with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

All of these are common right-wing Christian conservative battle cries, although they sounded harsher and more aggressive than usual. This year something new and disturbing was added to the mix: white nationalism. Breitbart chief and former White House strategist Steve Bannon and former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka were both big-name speakers at the summit. Neither is known for his piety, to say the least.

When asked about this association with white supremacist views, the attendees either said they were comfortable with it or simply refused to accept it. The same person who said she believes Trump has a biblical worldview said, “I don’t see them as white nationalists.” Another simply denied it all, saying “I’ve never heard them encourage hateful actions. I don’t attribute them to these hate groups.”

One woman knew who to blame for all this white supremacy stuff:

You know what’s emboldened neo-Nazis? Eight years of the previous regime saying “All white people are terrible and you have to pay back for what someone did 200 years ago” and stir up racial stuff.

None of these people had read the blockbuster BuzzFeed exposé about the extensive Breitbart collusion with white supremacists. Or if they had, they were fine with it.

Gorka got sustained applause for telling the audience, “The left has no idea how much more damage we can do to them as private citizens.” He got a standing ovation at the end of his talk. He didn’t talk about religion. He talked about waging war on the left.

Steve Bannon made his pitch to take over the Republican Party, exhorting the crowd to vote out everyone they’ve been supporting for years. He shared his unique apocalyptic worldview with a crowd that literally believes in the apocalypse — and they loved it. Tugging on their traditional values heartstrings in a new way that speaks to their love of Donald Trump and authoritarianism, he attacked Sen. Bob Corker for mocking and ridiculing “a commander in chief when we have kids in the field,” conflating Trump with the flag and the troops in a new and dangerous way. (The criticism of the anthem protests as attacks on the troops and their commander runs along similar authoritarian lines.)

Bannon told Donald Trump’s white conservative Christian base that liberals are scared of them: “They fear you. And they fear you because they understand you’ve had a belly full and you’re taking your country back.”

He didn’t have to explain whom they were taking it back from, since everyone present knew exactly who the enemies of God-fearing Real Americans are. It’s fair to say that many of them were already members of Bannon’s white nationalist posse, blaming Obama for causing all these problems with the you-know-whats and letting those Muslims run rampant with their Sharia law and all. But if anyone there wasn’t on board with this “alt-right,” neofascist vision for America, they didn’t seem disturbed by it in the least. They didn’t walk out. They gave Bannon an enthusiastic ovation.

The marriage of the Christian right and authoritarian white nationalism looks like a match made in heaven — or perhaps in the other place, depending on your perspective. “The Handmaid’s Tale” seems less and less implausible every day.

Thanks for the live tweeting by Adele Stan and Right Wing Watch throughout the weekend for many of the details included in this piece.

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