Month: October 2017

“Real men go to Tehran”

by digby

Those who followed the craziness of the lead up to the Iraq war will recall that among the neocons, it was an article of faith that Iraq was kind of a wimps choice for a big Middle East war that would Change Everything. Real men wanted to invade Iran.

Apparently, the dream has never died and a new generation of warmongers has taken up the cause, led by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas (the man who wrote the ridiculous letter slamming the Iran deal that embarrassed the entire GOP caucus who failed to read it before signing.)

Anyway:

Cotton‘s recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations is of special significance here, as The Washington Post has reported that his address seemed “to preview the main elements of the administration’s plan” for dealing with Iran, starting with decertifying the JCPOA. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, approvingly tweetedthat Cotton’s speech showed “clear understanding of the Iranian regime and flaws in the nuclear deal.”

If one reads the speech closely, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Cotton’s actual goal is not attaining a better nuclear deal, but rather confronting Iran militarily and achieving regime change. Several passages in the speech clearly telegraph this objective, as do Cotton’s prior statements. The senator also so grossly misrepresents the JCPOA that one has to question whether he is more interested in improving the agreement or destroying it. Finally, Cotton’s own arguments contradict the notion that he seeks a better deal and instead imply that military force or regime change are the only viable options. Put simply: Cotton’s advocacy for a better nuclear agreement is a smokescreen for his true objective, which is putting the United States and Iran back on a path towards war.

Overtly Pushing Regime Change

Cotton frames the speech as offering a prudent strategy for improving the deal and pushing back on Tehran’s aggressive regional behavior. Yet it is obvious at several points that regime change is the senator’s deeper goal. Early on in the address, Cotton argues, “The threat is not the nature of Iran’s weapons; it’s the nature of Iran’s regime.” This is an explicit declaration that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not the primary issue, and that the Iranian threat can only be fully addressed through regime change, not through technical arms control arrangements.

Cotton’s desire for regime change is further illustrated by his critique of the Obama administration’s decision to ease sanctions pressure in exchange for Iran limiting its nuclear program. As he puts it, 

the multilateral sanctions were the toughest sanctions Iran had ever faced, and they helped to drive the regime to its knees. One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees, you drive him to the ground and choke him out. But President Obama extended a hand and helped the ayatollahs up.

The macabre wording clearly implies that Cotton believes the Obama administration should have “choked out” the Iranian regime by keeping the sanctions in place, rather than using the promise of sanctions relief as a carrot to negotiate limits to Iran’s nuclear program.

If you doubt this analysis of Cotton’s speech, you can take his own word for it. Earlier this year, he stated flatly, “The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” adding, “I don’t see how anyone can say America can be safe as long as you have in power a theocratic despotism.” read on …

Nikki Haley is reportedly on board with this too, pushing Trump to keep his hawkish posture. They’re calling her his “Iran whisperer.” 

Trump wants a war, there’s no doubt in my mind. The only question is where he’s going to have it. The dynamic duo of Nikki and Tom seem to be pushing him to this one. It worked out so well the last time why not try it again?

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The monopolyplace of ideas
by Tom Sullivan

George Lakoff’s simplifying assumption for explaining people’s political persuasions was based on whether their “strict father” (conservative) or “nurturant parent” (liberal) cognitive frame for rearing children was more dominant. If you’d rather not wade through 450 pages to better understand the conservative model, Shel Siverstein, the children’s book writer, reduced it to two lines in his song, “A Boy Named Sue”:

“Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough

That’s even simpler.

Johnny Cash made it famous, singing, “It’s the name that helped to make you strong.” Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. Certainly not a good president. But strong, you know? Which is why ours is not about to be outgunned by any of his predecessors.

As for strategy, liberals give their conservative counterparts too much credit. It’s simple, too. At the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. this weekend, Steve Bannon announced he is going to war against the Republican Party. (He’ll settle scores with the left later.) The Hill reports Bannon boasted his former boss, the sitting president, will “‘win with 400 electoral votes in 2020,’ following reports that he had lost faith in the president’s ability to complete his current term.”

Which is to say, as does Hullabaloo alum David Atkins, that “it’s all bluster and no real strategy.” At least for the front men. The billionaire backers and the remaining sane-ish Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have a semblance of strategy. But what passes for strategy is, as Silverstein described so colorfully, simply alpha-dog behavior behind a half Windsor knot.

Which is to say, there is often less than meets the eye to the chest-thumping and Value Voters Summits and competing in “the marketplace of ideas” rhetoric. What matters is not values or the Constitution. What matters is dominance, and whose dog and whose religion is in charge.

“We tried nice guys,” Value Voters Summit attendee Pat Flynn of Catholics for Freedom of Religion told the Guardian. “We had John McCain. Mitt Romney. They were nice, smiling at everybody, but they couldn’t beat out Hillary.” What values voters value isn’t values. It is to crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women. (2 Chronicles 17:35)

So there was, naturally, much bashing of “creepy little scribblers” from the press who expose such values to sunlight. (Like Adele Stan.) The press recording and accurately reporting what people do and say at such events is, of course, a longstanding gripe the right has against a free press.

“It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. And people should look into it,” said the man who pledged January 20th to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. (And who seems not to have read the 25th Amendment before Steve Bannon mentioned it sometime later.)

The Baltimore Sun, after quoting from the Constitution about the government not “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” had a more to teach him Sunday about its origins:

How the heck did that get in there, you may ask? It turns out that even with these pesky limitations on federal power, some people at the time feared that the Constitution would give the national government too much authority. So these anti-federalists insisted on specific protections for the rights of individuals against possibly tyrannical government actions like cruel and unusual punishment, seizure of property and forced self-incrimination. (There’s another one in there about the right to keep and bear arms that we’re pretty sure you’re familiar with, Mr. President.)

But surely the author of that amendment didn’t intend it to protect the press from saying mean things about the president, did he? Um, actually, yeah. It turns out that’s exactly what James Madison thought the First Amendment means, as evidenced by his opposition to the Sedition Act that was passed during the John Adams administration to insulate the president and his allies from criticism.

It set out criminal penalties for those who published “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with an intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either, or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.” And to be clear, the Adamsites had a pretty broad definition of “false” to include anything they didn’t like; they thought everything was “fake news,” too.

Just in case in addition to the 25th Amendment the 45th president was unaware of the Sedition Act.

Silencing critics, if not successfully drowning them out, has been a long-term goal behind the growth of conservative media organs such as Bannon’s Breitbart News. The Columbia Journalism Review considers what happens if the conservative project succeeds:

IT DOESN’T REQUIRE AN OVERLY ACTIVE IMAGINATION to picture the post-apocalyptic news landscape that so many conservatives seem to be working toward. Media fragmentation accelerates to warp speed. Agenda-driven publishers—be they professionally staffed websites or one-man YouTube channels—churn out narrowly tailored news for increasingly niche audiences. There’s still plenty of factual reporting to turn to when you want hurricane updates or celebrity news, and adversarial investigative journalism doesn’t quite go out of style. But it’s easier than ever for news consumers to ensconce themselves in hermetically sealed information bubbles and ignore revelations that challenge their worldviews. For most people, “news” ceases to function as a means of enlightenment, and becomes fodder for vitriolic political debates that play out endlessly on social media. (Like I said, it’s not hard to imagine.) Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own personal Pravdas—benefit most in this brave new world.

Reducing the press to rival outlets with the loudest, most dominant able to define reality to suit them is what the billionaire backers of conservative media are hoping for—not competing in a marketplace of ideas, but monopolizing it. It’s not Orwell, but an oligarchs’s version of Orwell. There is no principled allegiance to truth. There are no values to fight for. That’s for the rubes. There’s just dominating:

The concept of an obstinately objective press has been under assault in America for some time now, of course, and not just from the right. Critics like NYU’s Jay Rosen argue persuasively that news outlets do a disservice to their audiences when they coat their journalism in a sheen of artificial neutrality. Better to aim for transparency, the argument goes—to be honest about where you’re coming from, and to then strive for fairness and open-minded engagement. But there is a considerable difference between the proponents of this theory and those who cynically celebrate the “weaponization of information” and the rise of “alternative facts.”

The so-called marketplace of ideas only works when reality serves as a regulating force. For constructive debates to take place in a society like ours—and for national consensus to emerge on any given question—it’s essential we start from a broadly agreed-upon set of basic facts. Who will provide them if the mainstream media collapses into a melee of warring partisan publications?

Inevitably, the rich and powerful—those who can afford to buy and bankroll their own personal Pravdas. See above.

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

It’s Now RepubliCare 

by tristero

Republicans now own healthcare in the US. Not Trump. Republicans.

And healthcare in the US is atrocious. So if Democrats are smart, they will call it RepubliCare and vigorously dispute any attempt to label the present catastrophe by the names for healthcare legislation tossed out during the previous administration.

Democrats need make sure that every single American knows that Republicans are now fully and entirely to blame for this country’s awful health care system. And they should never let the American people forget it.

The evil clown thing

by digby

It just fits:

“Give me what I want or the planet gets it”

by digby

During the campaign, Josh Marshall astutely named the Trump phenomenon “dominance politics” which I think is a really accurate way of looking at what drives him and his supporters. He had some thoughts about the recent moves by Trump:

This morning President Trump tweeted out: “The Democrats ObamaCare is imploding. Massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!”

This is almost word for word the kind of chilling message a hostage taker sends. I’ve got your kids. You need to call me.

Why is Trump doing this? That’s a question I want to address on a broader canvas below. But why is he taking this particular step? Part of it is dominance. The desire to act, dominate, destroy. There’s the need to produce something for his most ardent supporters. But the biggest drive is what is contained in this tweet. To force Democrats hands by using Obamacare beneficiaries as hostages.

“Dems should call me to fix!”

Setting aside any moral calculus, this is folly in political terms. A lot of Senate Republicans get this. This hurts millions of Americans. But Trump is doing the damage in plain daylight. He’s shooting himself without even realizing it. If the ‘deal’ Trump wanted was one that helped people, Democrats might face a dilemma over whether to follow their political advantage or making good policy. (Actually they faced this question and chose policy – that was the bipartisan stabilization legislation that was being negotiated before it was torpedoed by Graham-Cassidy.) But there’s no conflict. For Democrats politics and policy line up entirely.

So again, why is Trump doing this?

The underlying driver here is Trump’s transactional, bullying way of approaching business which he brought from his predatory business to the White House. I don’t think you can understand what’s happening here except through that prism. For Trump, Democrats own Obamacare. It’s theirs. If he breaks it, it’s still theirs. It’s all on them. The “Obamacare” brand is the entirety of it. The more he breaks it, the more they need him to fix it. It’s like if the Democrats owned a building or a company. They more he damaged it, the more they’d need him to stop. This is a logic Trump understands. It’s his native environment. This is an organized crime mentality, one he used again and again in his private business. But that’s not how big social programs like this work.

Legislation and governance is fundamentally about people. That’s not just lofty rhetoric. The consequences of government play out in elections. Trump doesn’t get that. A lot of Republican Senators do.

But let’s draw back for a moment. President Trump signed his executive order on cross-state insurance policies yesterday. He just cut off CSR funding. He’s about the decertify the Iran nuclear deal. Each action is consistent with the campaign he ran in 2016. But they’re coming in a rush. Why now? Each move has some contingent logic. But I suspect the big driver is that rising pressures on the President are leading him to act out. And the acting out is escalating. As I wrote a year and a half ago, beyond the policy specifics and verbiage, Trump’s politics is about dominance and destruction. It’s a drive deep in him and one that he shares – albeit with very different life experiences – with his core political supporters. That’s the bond.

Most of us have seen this raft of articles talking about rising pressure in the White House, that the President is coming apart, angry, isolated. I’m skeptical of these reports, to the extent they suggest he’s about to blow apart or lose it entirely. But he does seem increasingly erratic, impulsive. He’s under pressure because he feels like he’s losing. For Trump these policies and policy moves are not just about politics. They are characterological. The more pressure rises, the more he feels besieged, the more he’ll take unilateral actions to assert himself, to balance himself.

I don’t know how much he’s cracking up but I suspect it may be more than Marshall thinks. Still the man has a sort of feral instinct taht got him where he is today and part of that is to throw tantrums until people give him what he wants. In a way, that’s what he’s doing now. He’s saying, “if you call me a fucking moron and write stories about how I’m losing my mind, I’m going to fuck over Puerto Rico and deny health care to sick people. And if you don’t get the message, I might just start a nuclear war. How do like them apples?”

He’s holding the world hostage with this crazy, domineering behavior. So far, nobody seems to be willing or able to stop him.

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Existential dread


by digby

Sure, this is fine

by digby

Former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka: “The left has no idea how much more damage we can do to them as private citizens.” pic.twitter.com/WZ24t67Ugp

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 14, 2017

This guy was in the White House until a month ago.

He’s an actual, real-life Nazi.

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“Nobody has respect for women like me!”

by digby

I was wondering when somebody in the press was going to inquire about this case. It seems like it might just be relevant considering that the right wing media is wallowing in ecstasy over Weinstein:

A high-stakes legal showdown is brewing for President Donald Trump, as a woman who said he groped her has subpoenaed all documents from his campaign pertaining to “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.”

The previously unreported subpoena was issued in March but entered into the court file last month. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Trump’s attorney.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on the Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice, accused Trump of kissing and grabbing her when she went to his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007 to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization. After Zervos made the accusation last October, just weeks before the election, Trump denied her accusation and called it a lie.

She responded by suing him for defamation. As part of that suit, her lawyers served a subpoena on his campaign, asking that it preserve all documents it had about her.

They also asked for “all documents” concerning other women who have accused Trump of groping them, including Jessica Leeds, Mindy McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Temple Taggart, Kristin Anderson, Cathy Heller, Jill Harth, and Jessica Drake. The subpoena seeks “all documents concerning any accusations that were made during Donald J. Trump’s election campaign for president, that he subjected any woman to unwanted sexual touching and/or sexually inappropriate behavior.” Last year, Trump tweeted a blanket denial, saying, “Nothing ever happened with any of these women.”

The subpoena did not make its way into the court file until last month, when Zervos’ attorneys, including the high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred, filed it as part of motion disputing a contention from Trump’s legal team that her subpoena was too broad.

Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the suit dismissed or at least delayed until he is out of office. His lawyers argued that he is protected from civil lawsuits in state court while in office. They also made a number of other claims in a July filing, among them that the entire suit is politically motivated and that Allred is using it to dredge up ammunition to impeach him. As for the subpoena, they argued that it is “far reaching” and “seeks wholly irrelevant information intended solely to harass the president.”

Last month, Zervos’s attorneys rejected that accusation and provided the subpoena as evidence.

Trump’s response to Zervos’ motion is due Oct. 31, according to Zervos’ attorney, Gloria Allred. In a statement Allred said: “We are hopeful that the court will deny President Trump’s motion to dismiss, so that we may move forward with discovery and obtain relevant documents and testimony.”

One suspects that the Supreme Court ruling which allowed Paula Jones’ attorneys to move forward with her suit against Clinton will be found to be a one time deal only applicable to Democrats. That seems to be the way these things work nowadays. Still, the press should at least be asking these questions. Harvey Weinstein is a movie producer who probably no more than 10 percent of the population had ever heard of until the last couple of weeks much less was ever elected to anything. 63 million people knowingly put a man in the White House who is on tape bragging that he did exactly the same thing.

I would have thought it natural to revisit that issue, check up on some of the women who bravely came forward to tell their stories about the man who was about to become the most powerful man in the world.  They’re wondering about this too:

For all the women who have cheered as accusations against the producer Harvey Weinstein force a public conversation about sexual misconduct, one small group of women has watched with frustration. They are some of the dozen women who publicly accused Donald Trump of groping or kissing them — accusations that Trump has denied.

In a sharp contrast to the women who accused Weinstein, Trump’s accusers did not see the public turn against him, the board of his company fire him, or the police launch an investigation. Instead, these women watched the man they say humiliated and abused them get elected president of the United States.

“When he won, I felt like I lost,” said Melinda McGillivray, a Palm Springs resident who came forward in October of last year to accuse Trump of groping her in 2003. She said she was assisting a photographer at a party at Mar-A-Lago when Trump came up and “grabbed my ass.” The photographer who was with her at the event, a Ray Charles concert, confirmed to the Palm Beach Post that she reported the alleged incident to him at the time.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this story. But last year, as women were continuing to come forward, Trump tweeted a blanket denial: “Nothing ever happened with any of these women. Totally made up nonsense to steal the election. Nobody has more respect for women than me!”

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Don’t worry Trump, keep sticking it to people your voters hate and you’ll be fine

by digby

President Donald Trump on Sunday attacked a New York Times reporter by name for not mentioning enough of what Trump cited as his own accomplishments in an article evaluating whether the President is working to fulfill his campaign promises.

Trump on Sunday criticized the New York Times, which he claimed is “failing,” for a “story by Peter Baker” that he said failed to mention his “rapid terminations” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris climate accord, his approval of two different pipelines or the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.

He tweeted:

The Failing @nytimes, in a story by Peter Baker, should have mentioned the rapid terminations by me of TPP & The Paris Accord & the fast…approvals of The Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines. Also, look at the recent EPA cancelations & our great new Supreme Court Justice!

TPM reports:

Baker on Saturday wrote in a New York Times piece headlined “Promise the Moon? Easy for Trump. But Now Comes the Reckoning” that Trump’s “expansive language has not been matched by his actions during this opening phase of his presidency.”

“A question for the president is whether partial actions will satisfy supporters demanding a full repudiation of the Obama era,” Baker wrote. “Mr. Trump often gives the impression with his public comments that he has gone further than he actually has.”

His supporters will believe anything he tells them. They don’t care about the details. All they care about is that he sticks it to the people they hate as often as possible.

But everyone else knows that he can’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag and has failed to accomplish anything legislatively despite having a majority in the congress. And, more importantly, he has made the world a much more dangerous place.

He knows this too which is why he’s spending his days tweeting the opposite. I think he probably convinces himself of it too on some level. In fact, if he’s as far gone as he seems, he might be at the point where he actually believes it too.

A matter of trust
by Tom Sullivan

The nastiness spread across my Facebook feed ahead of the 2016 election was as breathtaking as it was disheartening. A lot of “smart” progressives weren’t. Russian bots and trolls promoting fake websites and rumors were playing them even as they mocked GOP voters convinced that a blustering, former reality-TV-star-slash-real-estate-tycoon would serve America better than seasoned leaders with actual skills. How could his voters be so gullible?

Not only did the Russians succeed in undermining faith in the election, they undermined our faith in each other. In a city council primary here last week, a once-popular incumbent Democrat went down to defeat. Voters cited their loss of confidence stemming from the rancid, anti-Clinton Facebook posts the former investigative journalist (and many others) shared during the 2016 campaign.

The Guardian has a post-mortem on how the Russians gave people a push:

What has now been made clear is that Russian trolls and automated bots not only promoted explicitly pro-Donald Trump messaging, but also used social media to sow social divisions in America by stoking disagreement and division around a plethora of controversial topics such as immigration and Islamophobia.

And, even more pertinently, it is clear that these interventions are continuing as Russian agents stoke division around such recent topics as white supremacist marches and NFL players taking a knee to protest police violence.

The overarching goal, during the election and now, analysts say, is to expand and exploit divisions, attacking the American social fabric where it is most vulnerable, along lines of race, gender, class and creed.

It was not clear a year ago that some of this material was circulated by Russian agents, but much on my feed was obvious propaganda. Propaganda lapped up by friends whose judgment is now in question. “News” sites with no mastheads from domains a simple whois search revealed were registered months earlier. Reporters and opinion writers with no web histories. People were not of a mood to question sources.

In the last month – mostly through vigorous reporting and academic research – we have also learned that the impact of Russia’s Facebook infiltration was far more widespread than Mark Zuckerberg claimed when Barack Obama pulled him aside at a conference in Peru last November to inform the young titan he had a problem on his hands. As more evidence emerges revealing the extent of the Russian web invasion, it is clear that its footprint is far larger than the tech giants have ever conceded.

On Facebook alone, Russia-linked imposters had hundreds of millions of interactions with potential voters who believed they were interacting with fellow Americans, according to an estimate by Jonathan Albright of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who broke the story wide open with the publication of a trove of searchable data earlier this month.

Those interactions may have reinforced the voters’ political views or helped to mold them, thanks to the imposter accounts’ techniques of echoing shrill views and presenting seemingly sympathetic views with counterintuitive, politically leading twists.

Albright’s data focuses on just six sites used to reinforce or mold voters’ views. Others report some of the promoted material came from U.S. sources. The Russian bots helped make sure more eyes saw them.

“There’s some really intricate maneuvering going on,” said Albright. “It’s definitely set up not to directly force issues but to identify people that fall into the wedge categories that can be used to influence others or to push conversations elsewhere.”

The imposter pages included Secured Borders, an anti-immigrant account that grew to 133,000 followers; Texas Rebels, which parroted Lone Star state pride while criticizing Clinton; Being Patriotic, which attacked refugees while defending the Confederate battle flag; LGBT United, which subtly espoused “traditional” family values; and Blacktivists, a faux satellite of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Beyond social media, concerns abound that American voting systems themselves have been hacked and are vulnerable. The New York Times examines efforts to plug the holes. States are hurrying to acquire, shall we say, “hardened” voting equipment meeting new standards ahead of the 2018 midterms:

Experts have warned for years that state and local election equipment and security practices were dangerously out of date, but state and local election agencies short of cash have often lagged in updating their systems. The 2016 election, however, laid bare the seriousness of the threat.

Federal officials have said they are confident that November’s election results were not tampered with. But federal intelligence and security officials were so shaken by Russian attempts to compromise the vote that the Department of Homeland Security designated election systems a critical national infrastructure, like banking and the electrical grid, that merit special protection.

The new guidelines for voting equipment include a requirement that they produce verifiable, written records and that software or hardware errors cannot produce undetectable changes to vote tallies.

For all the expressions of resolve, money remains the biggest obstacle to a complete overhaul of the system. Many jurisdictions rely on equipment bought after the 2002 Help America Vote Act, Congress’s response to the problems exposed by the 2000 presidential election, allotted nearly $4 billion for new machines and other reforms. Many of those machines are at or past the end of their service lives; Georgia conducted November’s elections on voting machines running Windows 2000, and parts of Pennsylvania relied on Windows XP.

Most states still use paper ballots that are counted by hand or by machines. But four other states besides Delaware — Louisiana, Georgia, New Jersey and South Carolina — use paperless systems that leave no audit trail, as do large swaths of Pennsylvania and some other states. Virginia scrapped thousands of paperless voting machines in 2015 after discovering that even an amateur hacker could easily and secretly change vote tallies.

A number of states and jurisdictions are replacing old equipment, and Los Angeles County — with 5.3 million registered voters, the nation’s largest election district — has designed an election system from scratch, and is asking manufacturers to bid on supplying it.

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are not the only things that need rebuilding in this country.

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