Month: October 2017

They want more than tax cuts

by digby

They have more on their agenda. And this should dispel any notions that the Senate Republicans aren’t working with elements in the White House to get it done. They don’t care that Trump is a lunatic:

The White House on Sunday night appeared to scuttle a deal on so-called Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children—when it released a series of largely conservative policies that it wanted included in the final package.

Top congressional Democrats immediately denounced the proposals as poison pills, meant to undermine efforts to codify an Obama-era program to shield Dreamers from deportation, dubbed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

But though they were caught off guard by the announcement, the signs were certainly there beforehand.

For weeks, top officials to the president have been working behind the scenes to upend a DACA deal that President Trump had been struck with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. And spearheading the campaign of behind-the-scenes impairment was White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

A need for a deal had been necessitated by the Trump administration’s decision to end DACA over the course of six months. But in the weeks after that decision was made, the president, along with Schumer and Pelosi agreed to a framework to protect DACA recipients in exchange for enhanced border security measures that notably did not include funding a border wall, Miller got to work.

Miller, a staunch immigration hawk, was conspicuously left out of the bipartisan dinner meeting where that DACA framework had been formed. By the morning after the dinner, Miller, sources say, was already in discussions with Capitol Hill offices about how to ensure conservative policy gains ended up in the final deal his boss might cut.

A hard-lined anti-immigration advocate, Miller strategized with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) about a more specific, more conservative, set of extractions the White House would demand in the deal. Cotton was the natural choice—he is one of the Senate’s most conservative members on the immigration issue, and the co-author of legislation, dubbed the RAISE Act, to significantly limit the number of legal immigrants to the U.S.

Stephen Miller is the stealth fascist behind the throne. And he’s working with others in the congress. Trump is their instrument.

.

How the world sees our “exceptionalism” on guns

by digby

This sounds right to me. It’s a disease:

Vox writes:

Sunday with Lubach, which is sort of like the Dutch version of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, looked at guns — specifically, the US’s love of firearms. And it’s very telling. 

For one, the satirical Dutch video describes America’s love of guns as so bad that it is an illness: Nonsensical Rifle Addiction, or NRA — a reference to the biggest gun lobby group in the country. 

“Dear fellow Europeans,” the video’s narrator begins, “a devastating humanitarian crisis is threatening a small country on the coast of North America: the United States of America.” 

The video goes on to list some of the statistics related to America’s gun homicides and accidents from Gun Violence Archive: 24,000 injuries and 11,000 deaths so far this year, culminating to roughly 40 deaths a day. The video pins this on “a terrible epidemic.” 

“NRA is a constitutional disorder caused by a dysfunction of the prefrontal Second Amendment in the nonsensical cortex, causing patients to shoot people,” the narrator explains. “It starts with an innocent Colt, but soon patients will show signs of shotguns, sniper rifles, and M16s even. Often, patients use silencers to hide their condition.”
The video goes on like this, showing pictures that you’d expect to see in a typical humanitarian crisis PSA about a major disease halfway across the world — black and white images, sad people, children suffering, and so on. 

There are things in the video that some Americans, particularly supporters of gun rights, will surely disagree with or even find offensive. 

But that’s kind of the point. To the rest of the world, this problem is straightforward: If you have a problem with guns, then you should deal with the guns directly. That’s what other nations have done, from Canada to the UK to Australia to Japan — and they see dramatically fewer gun deaths. 

The empirical research shows these are related: Where there are fewer guns, there are fewer gun deaths. And gun control measures are truly followed with a reduction in gun deaths, suggesting that they save lives. 

That America as a whole doesn’t seem to get this is baffling to much of the rest of the world. So Sunday with Lubach reaches far for an explanation: It must be a disease.

It is. But then it’s just one symptom, isn’t it?

Look who’s in the White House.

.

One year ago today

by digby

Last year at this time. Nobody cared. Not really. And as James Fallows pointed out on twitter, within minutes of that tape being release, Wikileaks released the hacked Podesta emails.  Coincidence I’m sure. .

The US Senate is full of potted plants


by digby

I wrote about the Corker “revelations” for Salon this morning:

On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence spent taxpayer money on a stunt orchestrated by the president: He walked out of an NFL game when some players took a knee during the national anthem. Now some team owners are apparently acceding to Donald Trump’s demands that they punish players for failing to stand, which must make the president feel like a powerful man indeed. Trump has traded on a weird, kitschy patriotism from the very beginning, going so far as to literally hug the flag at times. He has often voiced a worrying admiration for public displays of military power, recently telling reporters that he was planning large military parades for the next Fourth of July.

Trump sees patriotism as a show of dominance. This is reflected in his endless paeans to “toughness” and the increasingly alarming way he conducts American foreign policy with threats, demands and broad hints that he is preparing to go to war.

He telegraphed all this during the campaign, running on a platform of global military dominance without any constraints of international law. Trump wondered aloud why we have nuclear weapons if we aren’t going to use them and told our allies that unless they ponied up a lot more money, they might as well get nukes too, because the U.S. would be looking out for No. 1 from now on. He made it clear in a dozen different ways that he cared nothing for democratic norms, treaties or alliances and promised to tear up or ignore any existing agreements he didn’t like.

After Trump said all that for more than a year, the Republican Party nominated him for the presidency and almost 63 million Americans voted for him six months later. So it’s not exactly surprising that he believes he’s been given a mandate by his voters to behave like a despotic madman. You can say a lot of things about Trump, but he has never tried to hide who he is.

It was obvious to the other half of the country that the man was both intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be president by any measure and that he had little understanding or regard for the Constitution or democratic values. But the vast majority of Republicans, including virtually all the party’s elected officials, ended up backing him and have been making excuses for him all along. Since he’s been president, the Republican establishment has cravenly clung to tax-cut zealot Grover Norquist’s dictum that Republicans need not worry about the character or competence of their president:

We know what direction to go. . . . We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.

It turns out the “modern conservative movement” is a bunch of hot air, as demonstrated by its inability to accomplish anything at all, even with a president who would sign a grocery list if he could strut around afterward and call it a “win.” More importantly, it’s always been the case that the presidency is more than signing the holy grail of tax cuts. When you install a man who ran as a despotic madman, he might turn out to be one.

Virtually all left-leaning commentators have been documenting the atrocities in detail, and there have been some vociferously critical conservative pundits and analysts as well. Some elected Democrats stepped up early and often to point out that Trump is beyond the pale. But it has been more than a little bit disorienting to watch most congressional Democrats and all but one or two Republicans pretend that Trump’s presidency is business as usual. Sure, they have policy disagreements and they hold high-stakes votes on important issues where they all make big speeches denouncing each other’s positions. The leadership goes up to the White House and has photo-ops and eats Chinese food and “makes deals,” while the emperor is walking around stark naked and raving mad — and he’s becoming more reckless and dangerous by the day.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was the first elected Republican to tell it like it is when he said last August that Trump “has not shown the stability or competence required for an American president to succeed.” That caused a bit of a ripple, as did Corker’s comments last week about how Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House chief of staff John Kelly are keeping the country from descending into chaos. (That’s assuming it isn’t, of course.) But Corker’s recent interview with The New York Times in which he said that Trump “may be setting the U.S. on the path to World War III” really got people’s attention. Corker is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and not given to hyperbole.

Of course he’s right. The list of Trump’s affronts to the office of the presidency may be a mile long, but nothing he’s done is more reckless and dangerous than this ongoing brinksmanship with North Korea and his determination to trash the Iran nuclear agreement.

Corker also let the cat out of the bag about his colleagues, who he said all agreed with his assessment of the president’s dangerous unfitness. On Monday, reporters piled on, saying they had heard similar comments from many officials of both parties. Some Democrats, notably Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, made strong statements affirming the view that Trump is out of control and imploring their GOP colleagues to stop worrying about their precious tax cuts and focus on this urgent situation. But if anyone expected other Republicans to step up to back Corker, they were sadly disappointed.

Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the House Freedom Caucus chair, may have made the most revealing comment of all the Republicans when he said of Corker, who is not running for re-election, “It’s easy to be bold when you’re not coming back.” Evidently it’s too much to expect that Republican lawmakers might speak up about their president recklessly careening toward World War III when they have an election to worry about. (That’s still more than a year away.)

James Fallows wrote a fine piece in the Atlantic about what Bob Corker can do to turn his words into action. He is a powerful United States senator, after all, and he bears some responsibility for enabling Trump in the first place. But it should not stop with him. These congressional Republicans are not potted plants — they are the only ones entrusted with the power to protect the nation in the case of a rogue president.

It’s hard to believe that the party that fetishized macho nationalism and swaddled itself in the flag for decades is now sitting idly by while the schoolyard-bully president puts the whole world in danger. But apparently they have defined patriotism down to the demand that football players stand for the national anthem and that’s about it. Profiles in courage? Not exactly.

.

“I think it’s fake news,” Trump said, “but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

Yes, I think we can all agree on that.

He also said this:

Trump also told Forbes that he has purposefully not filled many jobs throughout the federal government, including at the State Department, where many of the top positions remain vacant. 

“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be — because you don’t need them,” Trump said. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”

And you know he’s been very careful to ensure that the jobs he’s not filling are unnecessary. Because he’s smaaaht.

.

Burning down the restaurant
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Twitter

You run into them from time to time: dilettantes with more money than sense who want to “play restaurant.” It is something they always wanted to do. They like eating out. They enjoy the experience of dining in a fine restaurant. With their years of eating experience, they just know they could do it better themselves. Now that they have some change to spare, they decide to open their own restaurant. They won’t make the mistakes others make, no. Their restaurant will be everything they always imagined. Everything will be “just so” — the food, the ambiance, the service. They will get to play host to all their friends and be the talk of the town.

But running a restaurant is a business, not dress-up. They are bankrupt within 18 months, and probably sooner.

Now we have a guy like that playing president. He tried and failed at running casinos. Now he is giving being leader of the free world a go. He always wanted to be leader of the free world. How hard can it be?

The issue before the rest of us is, it is not his money he’s playing with, but our beloved country.

With Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee declaring the White House an adult daycare center, Eugene Robinson wonders what the rest of us are going to do about it:

The alarming problem isn’t Trump’s policies, to the extent he has any coherent set of policy positions. This crisis isn’t about conservative governance vs. progressive governance. It’s about soundness of mind and judgment.

The Constitution does not offer much of a playbook for the situation we find ourselves in. Impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors” — a phrase that means anything Congress wants it to mean. Assume special counsel Robert S. Mueller III eventually concludes that Trump obstructed justice or even participated in a collusion scheme with the Russians. Would Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican majority in the House actually move to impeach the president? Or would they be too fearful of the wrath of the GOP base? Unless the evidence were overwhelming, would there really be enough votes in the Senate to remove Trump from office?

I’m skeptical on all counts. Impeachment is, and will remain, a very long shot.

The biggest obstacle to agreeing to remove him to save ourselves and our country is how divided we are. Not that there isn’t common ground. Michael Gerson writes that the country is divided “between those who think the country is going to hell in a handcart and those who believe the country is going to hell in a handbasket.”

The former speechwriter for George W. Bush observes:

Those of us who remember politics in the Reagan era have a mental habit of regarding conservatism as more optimistic about the American experiment and liberalism as more discontented. But representatives of both ideologies — in their most potent and confident versions — are now making fundamental critiques of American society. They are united in their belief that the United States is dominated by corrupt, self-serving elites. They are united in their call for radical rather than incremental change. While disagreeing deeply about the cause, they see America as careening off course.

Both left and right believe “those who are not permanently enraged are not paying proper attention.” We simply disagree about who is to blame for what we perceive as America’s decline over the past half century. (Except for 60 percent of African Americans and Hispanics who perceive their lots as having improved.) In the left’s narrative, the American Dream is “an exploitative myth” in which eventually the rich eat the poor, while the conservative nostalgia for the 1950s expresses “a damning tolerance for oppression” and a “longing for lost privilege.”

Put another way, the left demands America live up to its ideals. Conservatives pine for it to live down to its past, averting their eyes from its real blemishes and burying their heads in public idolatry surrounding flags and anthems and iconic “Real Americans.”

Gerson’s recommendation is “not to sanitize our country’s history or excuse its manifold failures,” but to follow the examples of “reforming patriots” from Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He quotes Barack Obama’s exhortation to “decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals.”

But to Gerson’s sociological admixture and Robinson’s concern for a man “dangerously unfit” to be president, add a wild-card, Steve Bannon-led strain that wants to tear it all down. As Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight:

… some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Others just want to play restaurant with other people’s country.

The question Gerson never quite states is, if I may paraphrase, with the house on fire, can we put aside our philosophical differences for after the fire is put out?

* * * * * * * *

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

Sinatra knew how to deal with Trump

by digby

He told him to go fuck himself:

Weisman managed Sinatra from 1975 to 1998 and recounted the incident in his book The Way it Was, released this month. He said Sinatra was due to perform at the opening of Mr Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City and had a deal in place with the new venues original operator Mark Grossinger Etess, who died in a helicopter crash.

The businessman then stepped in to take over the deal which is when he questioned how much Sinatra expected to be paid for his 12 performances. According to Weisman, Mr Trump began the new negotiations by saying the cost for the 12 dates Sinatra was slated to perform was “a little rich”

Mr Trump then also decided he did not need to book the other acts included including Sammy Davis Jr, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, and husband-and-wife pop duo Steve and Eydie. When challenged by Weisman, Mr Trump asked “Who’s Steve and Eydie?”. Weisman says he then tried choking the future president by his tie, but that his son restrained him.

He said he then called Sinatra to tell him what had happened, and singer told him he had two choices; either tell Mr Trump “to go f*** himself” or give the reality show star’s phone number to Sinatra so that he could do it himself.

Weisman says he returned to Trump’s office and told him “Sinatra says go f*** yourself!” Sinatra ended up playing at the Sands in Las Vegas instead.

Trump made a big mistake. But then Trump is a terrible businessman. He’s cheap and he’s stupid. I mean, how many people have lost money on casinos, golf courses and Manhattan real estate? No wonder he was reduced to being a pitch man for cheap ties and steaks with his name on them before he ran for president. He needed the money.

.

He needs to start deporting more Latinos if he wants to keep rural America

by digby

He’s slipping in popularity with his rural base. This is good news. Sadly, the one thing he can do to get them back is to start persecuting Latinos even more than he already is. For some reason these white, rural Americans who have virtually no contact with immigrants just really, really hate them. Those of us who live among immigrants don’t have that attitude.

I’m so glad these people have much more representation in our government than all of us who live in metropolitian areas do. They’ll keep us pure.

Outside the Morgan County fair in McConnelsville, in a rural swath of Ohio that fervently backed U.S. President Donald Trump in last year’s election, ticket seller John Wilson quietly counts off a handful of disappointments with the man he helped elect.

The 70-year-old retired banker said he is unhappy with infighting and turnover in the White House. He does not like Trump’s penchant for traveling to his personal golf resorts. He wishes the president would do more to fix the healthcare system, and he worries that Trump might back down from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.

“Every president makes mistakes,” Wilson said. “But if you add one on top of one, on top of another one, on top of another, there’s just a limit.”

Trump, who inspired millions of supporters last year in places like Morgan County, has been losing his grip on rural America.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll, the Republican president’s popularity is eroding in small towns and rural communities where 15 percent of the country’s population lives. The poll of more than 15,000 adults in “non-metro” areas shows that they are now as likely to disapprove of Trump as they are to approve of him.

In September, 47 percent of people in non-metro areas approved of Trump while 47 percent disapproved. That is down from Trump’s first four weeks in office, when 55 percent said they approved of the president while 39 percent disapproved.

The poll found that Trump has lost support in rural areas among men, whites and people who never went to college. He lost support with rural Republicans and rural voters who supported him on Election Day.

And while Trump still gets relatively high marks in the poll for his handling of the economy and national security, rural Americans are increasingly unhappy with Trump’s record on immigration, a central part of his presidential campaign.

Forty-seven percent of rural Americans said in September they approved of the president’s handling of immigration, down from 56 percent during his first month in office.

Poll respondents who were interviewed by Reuters gave different reasons for their dissatisfaction with the president on immigration.

A few said they are tired of waiting for Trump to make good on his promise to build a wall along America’s southern border, while others said they were uncomfortable with his administration’s efforts to restrict travel into the United States.

“There should be some sort of compromise between a free flow of people over the border and something that’s more controlled,” said Drew Carlson, 19, of Warrensburg, Missouri, who took the poll.

But Trump’s “constant fixation on deportation is a little bit unsettling to me.”

The Trump administration would not comment about the Reuters/Ipsos poll.

To be sure, Trump is still much more popular in rural America than he is elsewhere.

Since he took office, “I like him less, but I support him more,” said Robert Cody, 87, a retired chemical engineer from Bartlesville, Oklahoma who took the poll.

Cody said that Trump may rankle some people with the way he talks and tweets, but it is a small price to pay for a president who will fight to strip away government regulations and strengthen the border.

Hey, nuclear showdowns are fine and dandy as long as he enables big business to poison the populace and we get rid of the Mexicans. He’s got his marching orders.

.

Politics and Reality Radio: One in 11 Americans Have Impulsive Anger Issues and Guns; Digby on Weinstein and False Equivalence

with Joshua Holland

This week, we begin with Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of Psychiatry at Duke University, who will talk about an eye-raising study that he and his colleagues published in 2015 which looked at the number of Americans who display signs of impulsive anger and have ready access to a firearm. There was a subgroup among them that should be especially alarming.

Then we’ll be joined by Heather “Digby” Parton to talk about the media’s obsessive desire to draw parallels between Harvey Weinstein, a sleazy Democratic donor, and Donald Trump, a sleazy reality-TV host whom the Republican party nominated to run for president of the United States and who is now far more popular among the party’s rank-and-file than most elected officials who didn’t confess to being serial sexual harrassers.

Finally, we’ll be joined by Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, to discuss his study of the media landscape — including social media — which shaped the 2016 presidential election.

Playlist:

Italiano Technico: “Hey Mambo”

Son Little: “O Me O My”

Ricky Nelson: “Lonesome Town”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Grooming the next generation of lunatics


by digby

I wrote about the latest Steve Bannon gambit for Salon this morning:

Over the week-end, in between tweeting insults to Senator Bob Corker and running “Mission Accomplished” videos that would have made Leni Rieffesntahl proud, Donald Trump re-tweeted this:

Thanks for your support! https://t.co/iqUM1RfQso

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2017

He also told the press corps that he believes Chief of Staff John Kelly would be around for “7 years” indicating that he assumes he’ll have the White House for two terms. Politico’s Gabriel DeBenedetti reports that he’s already gearing up for the campaign, looking at upcoming midterms in certain states for insight into the best path forward:

The stepped-up attention to 2020 is partly a recognition that dozens of Democrats are already seriously eyeing presidential runs of their own. But it’s also a reflection of the near-obsession with keeping Trump’s base voters on his side — a mind-set that permeates the White House, said multiple Republican operatives and lawmakers.

What’s unclear to Trump-backing Republicans: the degree to which the president’s base support in the industrial Midwest is waning or holding fast; whether the young minority voters who failed to show up for Hillary Clinton after supporting Barack Obama will return to the next Democratic nominee; and whether the power of Trump’s political celebrity is wearing off.

It’s quite clear that Trump dislikes governing and really just wants to hold rallies and have everyone cheer him like rock star then go and play golf. It’s not surprising that he would prefer to think about the 2020 campaign since that’s where all the fun is for him. I think we can be sure that he’ll be hitting the trail on a regular basis very, very soon.

His public feuds with Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain and now Bob Corker show that he has no interest in shoring up his relationship with the party establishment and will attack anyone he feels someone has been unfaithful to him. Most elected GOP officials have assiduously avoided doing anything to displease him, following the lead of Speaker Paul Ryan whose unctuous obsequiousness reached new heights last week when he solemnly affirmed that Trump’s “heart is in the right place” on racial issues and declared that “he has tremendous compassion” which can be discerned by the fact that he “drops everything” to go to disaster areas.

Trump appreciates that, no doubt, but it won’t buy Ryan any good will from the president. He should remember that even Trump’s most submissive sycophants have been tossed aside without a second thought if he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one morning.

To the extent Trump’s following any plan or strategy, it would appear that the aforementioned base stroking is about it. But that will dovetail nicely with his former senior adviser and keeper of the alt-right flame, Steve Bannon’s plan to stoke division within the party and oust incumbents so as to replace them with people who are more likely to advance his apocalyptic vision of the future. His endorsement of the odious wingnut Judge Roy Moore is a perfect example of the type of person he’d like to see in the US Congress. The crazier the better as far as he’s concerned.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that he’s chosen his next candidate, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious Blackwater security which came under investigation for killing civilians in Iraq. He’s been under investigation by the government for money laundering and attempts to broker military services to foreign governments. According to Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Cole of the Intercept, “working with a small cadre of loyalists — including a former South African commando, a former Australian air force pilot, and a lawyer with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel — Prince sought to secretly rebuild his private CIA and special operations enterprise by setting up foreign shell companies and offering paramilitary services.”

Is it any surprise that he’s welcomed into Trump’s inner circle?

More recently, he has been implicated in the Russia investigation after attempting to set up a back channel between Trump and Russian President Vadimir Putin in the Seychelles islands. Oh, and he has been pushing the idea of mercenaries taking over many of the duties of the “inefficient” US Military which is unfortunately hamstrung by laws against war crime. He got Trump interested in his plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan using the colonial British East India Company as his model and installing himself as the Viceroy by telling him that there were many minerals available for the taking. (We know how Trump feels about that — to the victors belong the spoils). Luckily Defense Secretary Mattis chased Bannon and Prince out the door when they presented him their nifty plan.

But Prince is just the right combination of radical and crazy for Bannon’s total GOP destruction strategy. He’s got access to lots and lots of the family’s Amway money and they are all far right evangelicals who have run in Mike Pence’s circles for years. Prince could be a real asset to the Trump-Bannon chaos crusade.

He’s planning to take on Wyoming Senator John Barasso, a hard core conservative who’s backed Trump every step of the way. Taking on someone like Barasso is seen as Bannon’s shot at a random conservative, someone with whom he and Trump have no particular beef, just to prove he can.  Installing an unstable radical in office is his specialty so he might just do it.

Normally, I’d think exchanging Barasso for Prince is fine. They would likely vote the same way at least 90% of the time anyway and it might keep Prince out of trouble to be stuck in the slow moving rich man’s club of the US Senate instead of being out causing trouble in the real world.  But Prince is very rich and he’s got a certain creepy charisma, which is Bannon’s special presidential recipe. If Trump manages to win again in 2020, Senator Erik Prince would be a much more logical successor. And Trump wouldn’t think twice about throwing the subservient Mike Pence overboard do a macho ex-Navy Seal could follow in his footsteps.

.