Month: October 2017

There’s a call for help coming from inside the house. The White House


by digby

He’s losing it

I wrote about the reports that Trump’s coming unglued for Salon this morning:

From the moment Trump went down that golden escalator back in June of 2015 to announce his candidacy, people have been predicting that his improbable foray into politics was on the verge of imploding. There were a dozen disqualifying moments during the campaign and since he’s been president we’ve careened from one disaster to another, each time wondering if he’s going to survive. The smart money says that he does because he always has.

Having said that, a shift does seem to be taking place in Washington. It may just be the realization setting in that the man people saw on the campaign trail was the real authentic Donald Trump and he’s not going to change, but there are just too many reports coming from inside the administration and Capitol Hill expressing  concern at his behavior to write this off as just another example of a Trump storm that will soon pass. There are alarms going off all over Washington and it just feels different this time.

First there are the reports of Trump having to be handled like a small child because of his moodiness and irrational demands. This part does not surprise me. He showed his puerile temperament on the campaign trail from the beginning.  The infantile nicknames, his rage tweets, his narcissism all pointed to someone who was emotionally immature and intellectually in over his head.  Here’s just one example from very early in the primary season:

This childish combativeness didn’t change when he became president and it led to his greatest self-inflicted wound, the firing of FBI director Comey and the naming of a Special Prosecutor for the Russia investigation.

There is also a growing acknowledgement that he doesn’t understand the job and isn’t able to learn it. This too was obvious before the election. He was upfront about how he does business, admitting that he never bothered with market research or consultants of any kind. According to the Washington Post back in July of 2016 Trump said he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.” He told them that he didn’t trust experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees” and “when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do.”

No one should have ever expected that he would be willing or able to learn anything new as president and he isn’t. He believes he is omniscient.

Still, we are seeing a lot of reports that he’s getting worse. Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair wrote a piece yesterday in which numerous sources told him that the White House is in crisis and that Bob Corker’s comments have “brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.” He is described as “increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods” particularly since his candidate for Alabama Senate, Luther Strange, lost the election and he felt that “his cult of personality was broken.”

Sherman’s sources believe that Trump is losing it, there’s just no other way to put it. And there’s reason to think they’re right. Even by Trump’s standards, he often seems a little bit confused. For instance on Wednesday’s press availability with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he was asked how his lunch on Tuesday with Secretary of State Tillerson went. He replied:

Very good. You mean last week? John, you’re so far behind the times. Do you mean today or last week? Because today I didn’t have lunch with him.

No, I had a lunch last week, and we had a very good lunch. We have a very good relationship. The press really doesn’t understand that, but that’s okay. We actually have a very good relationship. 

It had been widely reported that he had lunch the day before with Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis.  It was on the official schedule and MSNBC ‘s Peter Alexander checked with the White House and they told him that the lunch did take place.  Sherman reports that the White House doesn’t want him doing any adversarial interviews because “he’s lost a step” which indicates that perhaps there’s something else going on.

On the other hand, Trump has never known what he was talking about and often just lies reflexively for reasons of his own. In fact, yesterday’s NBC report that Trump wanted to increase the nuclear arsenal ten-fold is a case in point.  Back in July he had looked at a chart of the U.S. and Russia’s nuclear capabilities over time that showed America’s stockpile at its peak in the late 1960s. He saw the highest number on the chart, about 32,000 and said he wanted that many again. Clueless as he is, he didn’t understand that decades of painstaking non-proliferation work is what brought the US nuclear arsenal down to about 4,000 which is more than enough to obliterate most of earth’s population. The people present didn’t take it as an order, mostly because his response to every item of military capability they brought up was “more, I want more” without any understanding or interest in the specifics.

On Wednesday, Trump denied ever saying he wanted to expand the nuclear arsenal. And yet even before that meeting there was this:

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

His response to NBC’s report, as we’ve all heard by now, amounted to a frontal assault on the First Amendment. He threatened to withdraw the licenses of NBC TV stations in retaliation for what he (of course) described as “fake news.”

It’s now widely assumed that Trump is going to declare that Iran is in breach of the nuclear agreement this week and send the issue to Congress to sort out, which pretty much forecloses any more negotiations with North Korea. Abrogation of this nuclear treaty means that it’s unlikely any nonproliferation agreement signed by the United States will be considered worth the paper it’s printed on from here on out.

For the most part, elected GOP officials remain craven, cowering before the throne and hoping to get their precious tax cuts passed and their right-wing judges seated before Trump hits the nuclear button. But even Trump’s close friends are worried enough that they are going public, and dozens of others are speaking to reporters off the record.

There’s a cry for help coming from inside the house — the White House. Everyone can hear it, but nobody can figure out how to disarm the crazy man who’s holding the country hostage. He has no intention of surrendering.

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Amendment the 25th
by Tom Sullivan

“I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!” the sitting president told his longtime security chief, Keith Schiller, according to Gabriel Sherman’s explosive piece in Vanity Fair.

The emotionally stunted chief executive hasn’t the intellect, judgment, character, experience or maturity for the job he holds. In his natural habitat, the reality show host would fire himself.

Aside from his other frustrations, he now has another reason to side-eye those surrounding him at cabinet meetings. Gabriel Sherman writes:

Even before Corker’s remarks, some West Wing advisers were worried that Trump’s behavior could cause the Cabinet to take extraordinary Constitutional measures to remove him from office. Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment—the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?”

The president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen.

Sherman continues:

According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term.

The rest of us are more concerned with what the country’s chances are.

Vanity Fair reported people close to the president say he is "losing a step," and "unraveling." WATCH: https://t.co/tm9jV5fbba— Hardball (@hardball) October 12, 2017

Last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Howard Fineman suggested to host Chris Matthews that the sitting president now has even more reason to hate his team:

Fineman: First, I’m going to make the assumption that Donald Trump has now actually read the 25th Amendment. And presuming he has, he might want to start being careful about who he puts on the Cabinet.

Matthews: Because they can knock him out.

Fineman: A majority can say that he is unfit to hold the office. I’m telling you, it’s going to completely change Donald Trump’s view of a Cabinet. He’ll probably never have a Cabinet meeting again.

He’ll likely demand loyalty oaths and pledges from nominees not to invoke the 25th Amendment if appointed. Which means he’ll ask them to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution the moment they take them, as he likely did with Emoluments Clause.

U.S. Senate, be forwarned.

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

It’s not just Donnie and Harve, folks

by digby

I haven’t written much about the Weinstein charges, mostly because I’m terrified that we are about to start nuclear war and I only have so much bandwidth. But since I worked in the Indie film business for a couple of decades, people have asked me what I think.

I think Weinstein is a pig and a criminal, of course. Worse than many other criminal pigs in this town in some respects but really it’s only a matter of degree. Treating women like sex slaves and sado-masochistic playthings is common in Hollywood although I certainly experienced it in other jobs too. It is an everyday aspect of the workplace for women regardless of field although the entertainment, media and politics businesses are arguably worse because the opportunities are so much rarer. If you say something you’d better be prepared to change careers.

Anyway, the election made me realize that I had assumed things had gotten demonstrably better than when I was young and that I was wrong about that. We have made little progress in this regard. So, the Weinstein allegations are not shocking to me and I don’t imagine it’s going to change much. After all, 63 million people just voted for a president who admitted to sexually assaulting women and nearly a dozen came forward to say that he had done it to them. Many more were rumored to have decided that taking on the GOP nominee for president of the United States was too risky.  (Imagine that.)

So you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t get too overwrought in this particular scandal and demand that everyone in politics disavow Hollywood.

Anyway, on the morning after the election I was sitting on my couch, shellshocked and crying, and I said to my husband, “I can’t believe they hate us so much.” He asked what I meant and I said, “women — they hate women.”

Later that day I read this piece by Michelle Goldberg and realized that I wasn’t the only woman in America who had that reaction:

Forty-six years ago, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, now we do.

On Tuesday, faced with a choice between a highly competent if uncharismatic female candidate and the deranged distillation of the angry white male id, America chose the latter. (Or, at least, the Americans whose votes count most in the Electoral College chose the latter: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.) We don’t yet have a full picture of the electorate, but according to exit polls published by the New York Times, 54 percent of women voted for Clinton while 53 percent of men chose Donald Trump. Men—joined by white women, a majority of whom voted for Trump—banded together to award the presidency to the most shamelessly misogynist candidate in modern history. They’ve given us a kakistrocracy because they couldn’t bear the sound of Clinton’s voice.

The fact that white women displayed so little gender solidarity is not that surprising; many women have always identified more with their race or religion than their sex. Near Trump Tower in Manhattan Tuesday afternoon, I saw a vendor selling buttons that read “Hot Chicks Vote Republican.” Women at Trump rallies donned shirts emblazoned with “Adorable Deplorable.” Given what our society values in women, it’s understandable that large numbers of women wouldn’t want to see themselves in someone reviled as shrill and unfuckable. Writing in the Atlantic earlier this year, Peter Beinart surveyed some of the academic literature on the anxieties that powerful women provoke in both genders. “A 2010 study by Victoria L. Brescoll and Tyler G. Okimoto found that people’s views of a fictional male state senator did not change when they were told he was ambitious,” he wrote. “When told that a fictional female state senator was ambitious, however, men and women alike ‘experienced feelings of moral outrage,’ such as contempt, anger, and disgust.” The rage is more aggressive in men, but it’s there in women, too.

As those of us opposed to Trump and Trumpism absorb the trauma of what happened in America on Tuesday night, there are going to be vicious recriminations on the left. I don’t begrudge any Bernie Sanders supporters the consolation of thinking that their man could have saved us from this calamity. All of us are grieving, trying to make sense of the worst thing to happen to our country in modern history. All I can say is that I’ve been to Trump rallies in the Midwest, South, and Northeast, and I never saw a single sign or T-shirt about free trade. I never heard chants about NAFTA or TPP. What I heard was “Trump That Bitch” and “Build That Wall.” When Clinton delivered her heart-shredding concession speech, traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange reportedly booed and chanted “Lock her up!” They know Trump’s victory was no rebellion against Wall Street.

Over the summer, University of Michigan researchers Carly Wayne, Nicholas Valentino, and Marzia Oceno surveyed 700 citizens, asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with statements such as, “Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.” As they wrote in the Washington Post, the researchers found that “sexism was strongly and significantly correlated with support for Trump, even after accounting for party identification, ideology, authoritarianism and ethnocentrism.” It’s striking that Zephyr Teachout, perhaps the congressional candidate most closely aligned with Sanders’ ideology, lost her upstate New York House race by a significant margin. Maybe Sanders could have won the general election—but not because his politics were better than Clinton’s, even though they were.

Had Clinton won, she would have done more than shatter the glass ceiling. For 25 years, she has been a synecdoche for unseemly female ambition. (In 1996, a 4,000-word Weekly Standard essay titled “The Feminization of America” ended with these words: “To put it more simply, Hillary is welcoming men to their new role as the second sex.”) Clinton ran for president on an explicitly feminist platform and promised a half-female Cabinet. Her victory would have been a sign that the gender hierarchy that has always been fundamental to our society—that has always been fundamental to most societies—was starting to crumble. It would have meant that men no longer rule. We have to come to terms with the fact that a majority of men would rather burn this country to the ground than let that happen.

One optimistic assumption undergirding the Clinton campaign was that we were moving toward a world in which gender would become less and less of a fetter on the shape of our lives. In such a world, women would have as much claim to leadership and full citizenship as men. Two weeks before the election, I went to a rally that Clinton and Michelle Obama held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They were introduced by women: former North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan and Democratic Senate candidate Deborah Ross. “Little girls hear the ugly things that have been said about women in this campaign, and it makes them feel terrible and doubt themselves,” Clinton said, and it struck me as unusual for a politician to speak about little girls’ feelings as a matter of political significance. For one afternoon, the rally offered a vision of what political stagecraft might look like if it were practiced by women and for women. Looking around, I thought, Maybe this is how politics feel for men all the time. And then I thought, No wonder they don’t want to give it up.

Still, I thought we were going to get there. I thought my daughter was not going to be consigned to a lesser life than my son. I no longer do. We are going to lose Roe v. Wade. There will be no push for paid leave (whatever Ivanka Trump might promise) or a higher minimum wage. If Trump’s campaign is any indication, our new administration will be a priapic junta. Roger Ailes was too toxic to remain at Fox News but not too toxic to be a close Trump adviser. Campaign CEO Steve Bannon has been charged with domestic violence and accused of sexual harassment. As Indiana governor, Vice President–elect Mike Pence signed a cruel law mandating the burial or cremation of miscarried fetuses. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed a female reporter so hard he left bruises on her arm, then tried to smear her as “delusional.” Trump senior communications adviser Jason Miller took journalists to a strip club the night before the Las Vegas debate. “Women, you have to treat them like shit,” Trump once said. It might be America’s new unofficial motto.

That’s the way it is. All you have to do is look at CNN’s coverage of this issue, dogging Hillary Clinton for comment and then insisting that it wasn’t good enough (of course) to understand why I think all the handwringing over Weinstein is actually just another bit of kabuki to pretend like something is changing when in reality it will just end up denying women career opportunities because men won’t hire them (and their insurance companies will tell them not to.)

Women will pay the price for Harvey’s sins again and for a long time to come, just you wait.

Here are just few quotes on the subject by the man who is sitting in the White House in 2016:

“I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?” Trump is quoted as saying of his then-wife in a 1990 Vanity Fair piece.

“Beauty and elegance, whether in a woman, a building, or a work of art, is not just superficial or something pretty to see.” Trump 101: The Way to Success

26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together? — twitter

“It’s certainly not groundbreaking news that the early victories by the women on ‘The Apprentice’ were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” — How To Get Rich

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” — from an interview with Esquire

“I mean, we could say politically correct that look doesn’t matter, but the look obviously matters,” Trump said to a female reporter in a clip featured on “Last Week Tonight.” “Like you wouldn’t have your job if you weren’t beautiful.”

“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” — Twitter, 2015

“The most difficult aspect of the prenuptial agreement is informing your future wife (or husband): I love you very much, but just in case things don’t work out, this is what you will get in the divorce. There are basically three types of women and reactions. One is the good woman who very much loves her future husband, solely for himself, but refuses to sign the agreement on principle. I fully understand this, but the man should take a pass anyway and find someone else. The other is the calculating woman who refuses to sign the prenuptial agreement because she is expecting to take advantage of the poor, unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp. There is also the woman who will openly and quickly sign a prenuptial agreement in order to make a quick hit and take the money given to her.” —Trump: The Art of the Comeback

“Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye — or perhaps another body part.” — Trump: The Art of the Comeback.

“[Angelina Jolie’s] been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby… And, I just don’t even find her attractive,” he said in an interview with Larry King in 2006.

“My favorite part [of ‘Pulp Fiction’] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” — TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, 2005

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recalled: “During one down period, I referred to him in print as a ‘financially embattled thousandaire’ and he sent me a copy of the column with my picture circled and ‘The Face of a Dog!’ written over it.”

“Cher is an average talent who’s out of touch with reality,” he said in a 2012 Fox News interview. “Cher is somewhat of a loser. She’s lonely. She’s unhappy. She’s very miserable.”

“Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred,” Trump said about himself one time. “Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.”

“All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.” — How To Get Rich, 2004

And then there was this, of course:

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Yes, he can.

All that was on the record before he won the election. And since it was settled the media has has spent most of their time blaming the woman who ran against him for failing to apologize for her alleged failings.  You’ll have to forgive me for not spending a lot of time fulminating about a piggish movie producer when we have an unfit demagogic moron in the White House who’s threatening to incinerate the planet largely because too many people voted for this documented sexual predator over a qualified woman. The problem runs a lot deeper than Hollywood.

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Trump’s bff sends a message

by digby

This interview with Trump’s good buddy Tom Barrack is mostly just cotton candy but he did make one comment that will likely get a reaction:

“He thinks he has to be loyal to his base. I keep on saying, ‘But who is your base? You don’t have a natural base. Your base now is the world and America, so you have all these constituencies; show them who you really are.’ In my opinion, he’s better than this.”

I’m not sure why Barrack gave this interview but I would guess the narrative about his influence is overstated. He wouldn’t take to the pages of the Washington Post if it weren’t. Sure, he says “show them who you really are” but Trump is not going to like him saying “you’re better than this,” not one bit.  He will read this as criticism, which it is.

Trump believes his base is the “forgotten” Americans who are sick and tired of all the blacks, browns, hippies and bitches getting all the breaks and disrespecting law and order and the Real Americans who make this country great. You know, white people.

Of course, all Barrack has to do is say that he never said that and Trump will believe it’s fake news and that will be that. But in the back of his mind he knows it true … he’ll never trust Barrack again.

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On North Korea: “My attitude is the one that matters” Trust him?

by digby

“It’s my attitude that matters”

He says he’s “tougher and stronger” than all the people who are giving him advice and ultimately he will do what’s right for the country and the world.

Trust him? Trust this imbecile?

“I think I have a little bit different attitude on N Korea than other people..but ultimately my attitude is the one that matters isn’t it?” pic.twitter.com/ATRcvX0mtZ

— Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) October 11, 2017

This is scaring the living hell out of me. It’s my worst nightmare about this guy, the thing I was writing about from hevery beginning. Putting someone with this temperament and this childlike intellect in charge of the world’s only superpower is a recipe for catastrophe.

We saw it. They did it anyway. And now they are letting him have enough rope to hang us all so that they can get their judges and their tax cuts. I don’t know what good they’ll do them when we’re all dead but they don’t seem to be able to think outside their tiny little ideological box long enough to contemplate that.

FYI:

“I think the probability of war has increased since January, partly because of actions that President Trump has taken or not taken,” [former defense secretary William]Perry tells Newsweek.

Perry’s comments, made in an interview on the sidelines of the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe, come as Trump is facing two escalating international situations with a nuclear dimension—the future of America’s nuclear agreement with Iran and the escalating rhetoric between the U.S. and North Korea.

On Iran, Perry is clear. “If the deal were abandoned, I think it’s quite clear that Iran will resume the nuclear program that they had before the deal was signed,” he says. “There will be no better deal, there will be no other deal. We will have either that deal or no deal at all.”

Media reports have suggested that Trump will fail to recertify the deal before an October 15 deadline, a move that would not automatically end it, provided that Congress does not decide to impose new sanctions on Iran.

But, says Perry, a presidential commitment to the deal is still important. “It’s not only a bad idea in terms of what it might do relative to Iran in particular.… I think it sends a very bad statement…[with] the United States not being willing to support diplomatic agreements that it has made in good faith.”

A longtime proponent of the Iran deal, Perry says it has gone “a long way to taking the danger away from a war with Iran. We don’t want to be in the position with Iran seven years from now that we are today with North Korea.”

Meanwhile, Perry says the world runs the risk of “blundering” into nuclear catastrophe over North Korea.

“And the blundering, it seems to me, is made more dangerous, more possible, by the inflammatory rhetoric between Kim Jong Un and President Trump, and so I think the rhetoric that the president is using is creating the danger that one side or the other will react.”

He adds, “I think it’s clear that the president does not have experience in international diplomacy, or in dealing with national security issues.”

Yeah, but he sure is entertaining and he insults all the people his voters don’t like. That’s all that matters.

Mr Popular

by digby

It may not be as easy as he thinks

Here’s a headline to cheer you up:

Trump Approval Dips in Every State, Though Deep Pockets of Support Remain.

A comprehensive survey of more than 470,000 Americans finds Trump’s approval has fallen in every state since taking office

Trump has failed to improve his standing among the public anywhere — including the states he won handily as the Republican nominee during the 2016 presidential election, according to the online survey, which was based on interviews of 472,032 registered voters across each state and Washington, D.C., from Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration to Sept. 26.

The negative swings in net approval ranged from as high as 30 percentage points in solidly blue Illinois and New York to as low as 11 points in red Louisiana. But in many of the states Trump easily carried last year — such as Tennessee (-23 percentage points), Mississippi (-21 points), Kentucky (-20 points), Kansas (-19 points) and Indiana (-17 points) — voters have soured on the president in 2017.

A majority of voters in 25 states and the District of Columbia said they disapproved of the president’s job performance in September, including those residing in Upper Midwest states with large Electoral College hauls that were critical to Trump’s victory over 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — and some of which are home to some of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats of the 2018 election cycle. Fifty-five percent of respondents in Michigan said they disapproved of Trump, as did 53 percent in Wisconsin and Iowa and 51 percent in Pennsylvania.

Fifty-one percent of voters in Nevada and Arizona, where the Senate GOP’s most vulnerable members are up for re-election next year, also disapproved of Trump’s handling of the presidency.

“It’s always hard, though not impossible, for the president’s party to maintain or even gain ground in an election,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said in a Sept. 21 interview. He cited solid approval numbers in recent years for former Presidents Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002, when their parties bucked midterm trends.

But, Kondik said, those types of gains are made when the president has favorable numbers.

“Again, these presidents were all popular,” Kondik said. “Trump is not right now, and his weakened standing could threaten Republican chances to defeat Democratic Senate incumbents in dark red states.”

Perhaps more concerning for Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of the 2018 midterms — which typically serve as referendums on the presidency — is a growing enthusiasm gap among GOP voters and dissenting partisans.

From January to September, the share of Republicans who strongly approve of Trump declined by 10 points, from 53 percent to 43 percent. Meanwhile, the intensity of disapproval among Democrats and independents has risen. Seventy-one percent of Democrats said they strongly disapproved of Trump in September, up 16 points from January, and among independents, there was an 11-point bump in strong disapproval, from 26 percent to 37 percent.

Those figures may encourage the Democratic Party, which is hoping to harness that energy — and a lack thereof for Washington’s ruling party — to ride a wave similar to the one that gave Republicans control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

This is why they need a war and a full blown vote suppression effort. Otherwise, they’re going to have a big problem keeping this miscreant in office. Better to blow up the planet.

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No biggie: At least 17 dead, more than 500 missing as California wildfires spread

by digby

Not that the media cares much, or anyone else in the country apparently. But this is really, really bad. And it’s not over yet:

The charred ruins of hundreds of homes in Coffey Park stretched on for two-thirds of a mile, block after block, cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac.

Cars had been flipped over, or knocked more than 100 feet away from their original parking spaces, residents here said.

The fire may have sent appliances into the air too. In one home, residents found a stove they said belonged in another person’s home — and that that person’s stove was found in yet another home.

The homes, which were part of a subdivision in Santa Rosa, were destroyed by the wildfires that have raged across Northern California this week. On Tuesday, residents were allowed to return to what was left of their homes — many now roofless, wall-less spaces.

No one was crying. Instead, residents methodically looked through their belongings. People wore respirator masks, but particles in the air still caused a burning sensation in the eyes.

In a nearby retirement community, a trailer park called Journey’s End, residents also sifted through the rubble. Nancy Cook pulled clothes from the debris of her home, folding some items.

The trailer park, near a Hilton hotel and other businesses that were destroyed, was leveled by the fire.

The fires are still raging all over the state.

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Yes, he’s an f-ing moron, That’s what’s so scary.

by digby

i wrote about Trump’s scary Korea talk today for Salon:

If there’s one thing we can be sure of it’s that President Donald J. Trump believes he is one of the smartest men in the world. He has told us so over and over again. He brags about everything, of course, but there is nothing, not even his alleged great wealth or the size of his “hands,” that he boasts about more often than his supposedly high IQ. He attributes this intellectual superiority to his “good German genes,” for which he says he’s very grateful.

In the PBS documentary “The Choice,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio explained that “the [Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

Indeed, Trump commonly claims that the accomplishments of his late uncle, John Trump, a prominent electrical engineer and inventor who taught at MIT for many years, is proof of his own genius. Trump has often repeated versions of this: “My father’s brother was a brilliant man . . . We have very good genetics . . . I mean, it’s a good gene pool right there,” pointing to his head. CNN counted 22 times that Trump has either referred to his own IQ or insulted someone else for having a low one (in his opinion). This is a key concept for him:

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2013

On Tuesday, Fortune published a long interview with Trump in which he was asked about the report that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called him a fucking moron. He replied, “I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.” One suspects that the vast majority of people have a good guess as to which one would win too.

A reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about that at Tuesday’s press briefing, and she said it had been a joke. Maybe the IQ challenge was, but it’s quite clear that Trump believes his intellect is superior to just about anyone, which is actually dangerous, since his words and actions indicate quite the opposite. What gets lost in all this is the reason Tillerson allegedly made the “fucking moron” comment in the first place.

He said it after a July meeting in the Situation Room with Trump and his national security team, where the president repeatedly demanded that the commanding general in Afghanistan be fired because he hadn’t won the war. Trump had apparently spoken with some veterans who told him that he wasn’t getting good advice from his top brass and that the NATO partners there were dropping the ball. He was also upset that Chinese firms have contracts for mineral rights in Afghanistan; he thinks U.S. firms should hold such rights, since America is waging a war in the country. He then told a story about how the 21 Club, a venerable Manhattan restaurant, had shut its doors for a year for a botched renovation recommended by a consultant, when they could have done better by asking the wait staff.

That story wasn’t true, of course, and it was a completely inappropriate anecdote. It showed in living color how poorly equipped and inadequate Donald Trump is for the job of commander in chief, whatever his vaunted IQ may be. Or, to put it another way, he’s a freaking moron.

Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, started sounding the alarm shortly thereafter, saying “I do think there need to be some radical changes. The president . . . has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.” Last week, as everyone knows by now, Corker went even further, saying that Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly are what “separate the country from chaos,” provoking an extended Twitter attack from Trump. Corker then spoke to The New York Times and told a reporter what was really on his mind: The president’s undisciplined behavior could be leading us into World War III.

The news cycle has been crazy these last couple of weeks, with Trump ginning up a culture-war battle over the NFL, the ongoing disaster in Puerto Rico, the horrific massacre in Las Vegas and now the Harvey Weinstein sexual-assault scandal. It is very difficult to focus on anything specific for longer than a few minutes before something new crashes into your field of vision. All of these are important issues, with lives at stake and tremendous cultural significance.

But what is happening with North Korea is an existential threat. With his ongoing Twitter taunts and insistence that only “one thing” will resolve the crisis (and it isn’t diplomacy), Trump seems to be preparing to start a war that could easily hurtle out of control into a nuclear conflagration.

In the middle of all this chaos, last week he held a meeting with his top military brass in the cabinet room to discuss North Korea and Iran. He told them, “Moving forward, I expect you to provide me with a broad range of military options, when needed, at a much faster pace.” It was after that meeting that he called the press in and said mysteriously, “This is the calm before the storm.”

Trump shoots his mouth off all the time, and it’s tempting to write this off as another reality-show promo. But this behavior is alarming people who understand the stakes and realize that at the very least, this presidential craziness could lead to a calamitous miscalculation. Since Congress appears to be paralyzed, it looks to be up to the president’s hand-picked generals to avert a potential nuclear war.

Tuesday evening on Chris Hayes’ show, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman said: “We have a White House where the staff views the president almost as a national security risk,” and reported that a prominent GOP source told him he imagines that Mattis and Kelly have had conversations about what to do if Trump lunges for the nuclear football.

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday night that Trump wants to go to South Korea on his upcoming trip to Asia, undoubtedly so he can stare even more menacingly across the DMZ than Mike Pence did. But whether he does or not, according to the report, “Trump is expected to send a ‘significant message’ to North Korea either verbally or ‘kinetically’ during the trip.” In this context, “kinetic” is a euphemism for military action involving lethal force.

At this point, all we can do is hope that Trump’s inner circle can prevent him from reaching for the button. The situation may sound farcical, but this is no joke.

They’re not anti-government. They’re pro-oligarch.
by Tom Sullivan

As Congress considers something the GOP brands as tax reform, Republicans in Kansas hope Congress will learn from The Sunflower State’s mistakes.

Gov. Sam Brownback’s 2012 tax cuts were supposed to kick-start the state’s economy by dropping the individual income tax rate from 6.4 to 4.9 percent and eliminating state income taxes entirely for pass-through entities such as sole proprietorships and LLCs (limited liability partnerships). The result was plunging revenues and a perpetual budget crisis. Tax cuts did not pay for themselves as advertised, something anyone who lived through the Reagan administration should have known.

But now, thanks to the sitting president’s tax framework and help from House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republicans are looking at repeating on a national scale Brownback’s “real live experiment” in conservative economic theory.

Those who survived it are not optimistic about its national prospects. Russell Berman writes in The Atlantic:

But the concerns of Kansas state legislators go beyond the pass-through policy. They worry that Republicans in Congress, including those in the state’s own delegation, are basing their tax overhaul on the same underlying assumptions about economic growth that have been articles of faith for the party since the Reagan era but turned out disastrously in Kansas. “This is designed to shrink government. It is not designed to grow business,” state Representative Stephanie Clayton told me. “I’ve seen it. It shrinks government. It doesn’t grow business.”

She alleged that Kansas’s representatives and senators in Washington had shown no interest in learning about the state’s experience and were simply following the orders of the Koch brothers, the powerful GOP donors headquartered in the state. “They don’t think anything’s wrong with it, but then again, none of them actually live in Kansas anymore, so what do they know?” Clayton said of the delegation. (None of the members of the Kansas congressional delegation I contacted were available for interviews about the tax plan.)

Anti-tax groups are running ads promoting taking the tax “reforms” national. Raw Story reports on one:

Critics of the Republican tax plan proposed by President Donald Trump describe it as a “gift for the rich.” Now, Ohio and New York media markets are running ads funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce swearing that it benefits regular Americans. Their problem, however, is that none of the people in the ads would benefit from Trump’s plan.

An Intercept report details that Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft are behind the ads, which feature a retail clerk, a mechanic, a man standing with tools, a factory worker and a woman sitting in an office. According to analysis of the plan, those in the ad would actually benefit the least, while those funding the ad would benefit more.

Another spot by Americans for Prosperity is funded by Koch Industries, the Kansas-based conglomerate:

The Intercept reports:

“Fixing our broken tax system isn’t about politics. It’s about helping people. It means the powerful, the well-connected, the politicians, they’ll stop benefitting from a rigged system,” says a woman in the Koch brothers-backed advertisement.

The ad does not disclose that it is sponsored by two of the richest men in the world, or that the legislation calls for eliminating the estate tax, which would allow the children of the Koch brothers, worth an estimated $94.8 billion, to inherit their parent’s wealth without paying a dime in taxes.

Truth in advertising. They’re not anti-big-government. They’re pro-oligarch.

The tax plan “shrinks government,” Clayton said. “It doesn’t grow business.” People like the Kochs don’t see that as a failure. Goldfinger wasn’t interested in stealing the gold at Fort Knox. In rendering it radioactive and worthless, he reduced world supply, thus dramatically increasing the value of his personal stockpile. The Kochs of the world don’t care if tax policy grows business if by shrinking the government’s power, theirs increases.

Blade Runner 2049 is what that world looks like. From an oligarch’s perspective, it is the opposite of dystopia.

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

Yes, this is what’s on our minds

Yesterday, I had CNN on with the sound muted while doing household chores. Before realizing what was being shown, I caught strikingly apocalyptic images of the Northern California firestorm out of the corner of my eye. For a split second, a deep dark dread came over me, and the first thing that popped into my mind was “Oh my god…he’s really done it. He has actually started World War 3.”

Seriously.

Why would I even think that? I’m a somewhat rational person.

Hiroshima aftermath, August 1945

Napa fire aftermath, October 2017