Month: October 2017

I’m sure this won’t give you nightmares or anything

by digby

It’s the assumption of many people around Trump, and perhaps the president himself, that these outbursts are cost-free: It gets the media in a tizzy, and diverts attention from current problems to a new cliffhanger. 

But what if Kim Jong-un takes the bait? We saw during the campaign that Trump is adept at getting an opponent’s goat (see water-guzzling “Little Marco”). 

So we’re counting on an unstable, insecure 33-year-old (with nukes!) to brush off Trump’s taunts.

There was a bit of reassurance this week from a top CIA official, who said at George Washington University that Kim’s actions aren’t those of a madman, but a “rational actor” motivated by long-term goals that revolve around ensuring regime survival, CNN reported. 

And a senior administration official told Jonathan Swan recently that the U.S. government doesn’t believe Kim Jong-un is suicidal: There’s a reason he’s threatening to fire rockets within range of Guam, not at Guam. 

One student of Trump emails: “Trump thinks he is leveraging Kim’s fear of war. Trump believes Kim will fear Trump’s unpredictability. This is an unsophisticated and uninformed view of Kim.” 

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that Trump “seems to think that this sort of threat will persuade North Korea or China or both to reconsider their ways.”

There are 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea right now, and 230,000 additional U.S. citizens (including families of those service members).

Keep an eye on flights to Japan: Evacuation drills are conducted every year. If the U.S. ever had to evacuate its citizens, that’s where they’d go first.

“Just something to keep an eye on if this is anything more than mind games.”

Good lord.

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Trump going back on a promise? Say it ain’t so …

by digby

I know you will be shocked to find out that Donald Trump is a goddamned liar. But he is:

U.S. President Donald Trump, who pledged to work with Democrats to protect “Dreamers” – young people brought illegally to the United States as children – called on Sunday for money to fund a border wall and thousands more immigration officers to be part of any deal.

Trump’s list of immigration “principles,” laid out in a document seen by Reuters, was a non-starter for Democrats, who are seeking a legislative fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that Trump ended last month.

The proposal includes a crackdown on unaccompanied minors who enter the United States, many of them from Central America. The plan was delivered to leaders in Congress on Sunday evening.

The White House wants the wish list to guide immigration reform in Congress and accompany a bill to replace DACA, an Obama-era program that protected nearly 800,000 “Dreamers” from deportation and also allowed them to secure work permits.

“The administration can’t be serious about compromise or helping the Dreamers if they begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers, to the immigrant community and to the vast majority of Americans,” said House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

“The list includes the wall, which was explicitly ruled out of the negotiations. If the president was serious about protecting the Dreamers, his staff has not made a good faith effort to do so,” they said in a statement

The White House priorities, if enacted, could result in the deportation of Dreamers’ parents.

Looks like he’s reneging on the “deal” with Chuck and Nancy. Bowl me over with a feather. Donald Trump’s word is usually like oak.

They’re going to draw this out and force the Democrats to agree to their stupid wall to save the DREAMers. It’s cruel and it disgusting. And, honestly, he is such a conman that I wouldn’t be sure that he won’t find a way to deport them anyway. He’s just that dastardly.

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Guns define modern conservatism: force, coercion and death

by digby

Right wing apostate Charlie Sykes is a bit less hyperbolic than I am about conservatives and guns but he does take issue with the NRA in this op-ed for the NY Times. He starts by pointing out that this tiny little step toward possible regulation of bump stocks is largely meaningless. Republicans are scared to death of the NRA.


He knows what he’s talking about:

I saw firsthand how the N.R.A. worked six years ago when I was a conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin. The context is important here: I was a longtime supporter of Second Amendment rights and had backed state legislation that would allow law-abiding citizens who passed training courses and background checks to carry concealed weapons (as every state now allows in some form). More than 16 million Americans have the permits.

In 2011, concealed-carry legislation was poised to pass both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature until the N.R.A. decided that it did not go far enough. It insisted that the Second Amendment should preclude even minimal safety requirements for concealed carry. The N.R.A., claiming that it was supporting what it calls “constitutional carry,” demanded that anyone be allowed to carry a concealed handgun without training, background checks or permits of any kind.

I thought this was nuts and said so. The N.R.A. position made no sense from the standpoint of either public safety or politics. How would an unlimited right to carry weapons enhance public safety or confidence if you could walk into Milwaukee’s Miller Park with a handgun without any training or a permit? That would be a nightmare for law enforcement and frankly unsettling even for many ardent Second Amendment supporters.

But the national gun rights lobby pushed back hard, targeting me and a radio colleague who thought the idea defied common sense. The headline on one pro-gun website declared, “N.R.A. Calls Out Milwaukee Talk Show Hosts for Ignorant Stance on Right to Carry.”

Darren LaSorte, a former lobbyist for the N.R.A. Institute for Legislative Action, appeared on an internet broadcast, insisting that “it’s embarrassing to see them do that.” By suggesting that people learn to use a gun before carrying it out in public, he said, my colleague and I “probably did more harm to constitutional carry and the fight there than any other people out there, the anti-gunners or anyone else.”

N.R.A. members, he said, “should be actively hammering them.” Many of them did so, as my email overflowed with angry gun-rights activists demanding unfettered concealed carry. But when I opened up the phones to listeners, the response was quite different. As polls suggest, most gun owners take a far more reasonable stance than the gun lobby. My listeners overwhelmingly supported gun rights but thought that requirements for background checks, safety training and permits just made sense.

Despite a costly campaign that flooded legislators with emails and calls, the N.R.A. lost its bid for “constitutional carry” in Wisconsin. But the organization is back again this year, pushing ahead with a new effort to eliminate the licensing and training requirements for concealed carry here and elsewhere. And the N.R.A. remains on the offensive: 12 states allow concealed carry without a permit.

Since we beat the N.R.A. back six years ago, the political environment on guns has shifted quite a bit. President Trump seems to understand not only that the gun issue helped him win states like Michigan and Wisconsin but also that opposition to gun control has now become a central test of loyalty in our tribal politics.

This is what many of the N.R.A.’s critics have been slow to grasp: The N.R.A. has successfully taken the issue of rational gun regulation out of the policy realm and made it a central feature of the culture wars. The issue is no longer simply about bump stock, or assault weapons, or specific regulations, or public safety; the debate over guns has become a subset of the larger cultural clash that pits us against them — liberals versus “normal” Americans. As Kurt Schlichter, a conservative columnist, insisted last week, “Leftists hate our rights because they hate us.”

The N.R.A. has pursued that strategy relentlessly and with great effect. It was hardly a coincidence that it decided to wade into the controversy over N.F.L. players’ kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. The group put out a video called “We Stand,” which linked the themes of freedom, patriotism and guns. “I stand for the children, the spouses and parents whose family made the ultimate sacrifice for us,” the narrator says. “We are all standing. We are the National Rifle Association of America and we are freedom’s safest place.”

In a recent video starring Dana Loesch, a popular radio talk show host, the N.R.A. checked all the boxes of the culture wars. Featuring apocalyptic images of protests and violence, the spot targeted educational indoctrination in the schools, Hollywood leftism and liberal news media bias. “The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth,” Ms. Loesch declares.

The video was part of a larger strategy. Last fall, the N.R.A. started its own television news outlet, known as NRATV. As Adam Winkler, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” notes, NRATV does not focus merely on guns. “Now it’s focused on immigration, race, health care,” he told The New Republic. “We’re seeing the N.R.A. become an extreme right-wing media outlet, not just a protector of guns.”

It’s actually more than that. The N.R.A. has effectively turned itself into the Id of the right. Despite the largely symbolic ban on bump stocks, the result is paralysis, both political and moral.

Actually, it’s been focused on the broader culture war for a long time, as I wrote here. It’s been one of their cleverest gambits. They have infiltrated all factions of the conservative movement, making themselves inseparable from all of them. They are at th center of the movement. There’s no escaping them unless they all agree. And they won’t.

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Scores of dead and wounded white people
by Tom Sullivan

“Rational” (from Best 25+ Man cave guns ideas — Pinterest)

NRA Executive Director Chris Cox got more than he bargained for when he agreed to appear on Fox News Sunday. Even Fox News isn’t buying the National Rifle Association’s blame shifting and subject changing.

When questioned on possible new gun regulations in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, Cox instead launched into an attack on Hillary Clinton for “hypocrisy” because she has an armed security detail. Beside hypocrisy, he tried to change the subject to “broader problems,” “underlying behavior,” to Michael Bloomberg and Diane Feinstein, to box cutters and bombs, Hollywood violence, video games, elites, single mothers in Chicago, and “common decency.” Chris Wallace wasn’t letting Cox off that easily.

Daily Beast:

After playing clips of Hillary Clinton calling out the Republicans for being “totally sold” to the gun lobby and Nancy Pelosi expressing her hopes for a “slippery slope” to more gun control, Wallace asked Cox, “I mean, here were 58 people killed, almost 500 injured, is it common decency to wait a day, two days, a week, a month. I mean, it is understandable — I know you don’t agree with their solution but what’s wrong with saying we need to address this?”

After Cox’s Clinton dodge, Wallace pressed on:

“Is that a sensible way to have this conversation, to try to turn it into class warfare,” Wallace asked Cox, “where if you’re for gun control somehow you’re part of an elite?” When Cox said, it’s not “class warfare,” but rather “what the American people want, Wallace stopped him in his tracks.

“That’s not actually true,” the host said. “If you talk about background checks, if you talk about automatic weapons — there are a lot of people, in fact a majority of people according to the polls who would like to see those gun controls. I have to say that I’m put off at the argument, if you believe in gun control, you’re an elite.”

“Reasonable” (from Top 100 Best Gun Rooms)

With Roger Ailes gone, Fox must be getting soft. Then again, hundreds of dead and wounded, white, country music fans have a sobering effect even on Fox anchors.

David Frum put up an Atlantic column over the weekend laying out the structure of how the gun lobby insists any sensible discussion of gun regulations must be conducted. Rules 3 and 4 read as follows:

Rule 3. The debate must always honor the “responsible gun owners” who buy weapons for reasonable self-defense. Under Rule 1, these responsible persons are presumed to constitute the great majority of gun owners. It’s out of bounds to ask for some proof of this claimed responsibility, some form of training for example. It’s far out of bounds to propose measures that might impinge on owners: the alcohol or drug tests for example that are so often recommended for food stamp recipients or teen drivers.

Rule 4. Gun ownership is always to be discussed as a rational choice motivated by reasonable concerns for personal safety. No matter how blatantly gun advocates appeal to fears and fantasies—Sean Hannity musing aloud on national TV about how he with a gun in his hands could have saved the day in Las Vegas if only he had been there—nobody other than a lefty blogger may notice that this debate is about race and sex, not personal security. It’s out of bounds to observe that “Chicago” is shorthand for “we only have gun crime because of black people” or how often “I want to protect my family” is code for “I need to prove to my girlfriend who’s really boss.”

Josh Marshall plays off those rules, observing that mass gun ownership is in itself a public health threat regardless of how many owners the NRA believes are “responsible.” The “fantasies, paranoias and need for power” are a factor in assembling personal armories, and those are off limits in discussing gun regulations:

The entirety of the gun debate is framed around the proposition that that man with a stockpile of 30 guns in his home has almost total freedom to own 3 or 30 or 300 guns while the society at large has virtually no standing to place any limits on that freedom to protect itself. That imbalance is compounded by the fact that the advocates of extreme gun ownership are allowed to make their case for what are really special rights with arguments which are seldom challenged even though they are often based on paranoia, conspiracy theories or claims that simply have no basis in fact.

It’s an argument the rules will not allow.

Suppose I wanted to stockpile gunpowder for my extreme reloading hobby, or store thousands of gallons of gasoline in my backyard, or a controlled chemical like phosgene (you know, for recreational use). Their very presence becomes a threat to the neighborhood no matter how “responsible” I am. Cities and neighborhoods have knock-down, drag-out fights over much less: short-term rentals, keeping urban chicken coops, sign ordinances, apartment density, and rezoning. You just cannot have such arguments about guns. It’s indecent.

Stories go around the business community I work in about a colorful character we might loosely describe as a “gun nut.” I won’t name him, but he’s known by a nickname straight out of “The Dukes of Hazard.” In one of the stories, he shoots himself in the leg while practicing his fast-draw. In another, his house catches fire. But his basement was crammed full of gunpowder. By the time firemen arrived, canisters of the stuff were exploding and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were “cooking off.” The fire department backed away to a safe distance and let it burn.

Other than that, one of the NRA’s responsible gun owners, not violent, and just the kind of guy you’d want living next door to your house with a basement no one knows is filled with explosives.

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Golden escalators for his royal highness

by digby

Remember that?

Trump’s probably feeling pretty cocky about his golden escalator after seeing this:

When King Salman landed in Russia, it marked the first official visit to the country by a Saudi monarch. However, the trip didn’t get off to the smoothest start, when the escalator set up to help him disembark the plane got stuck.

I feel sorry for the escalator mechanic.

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The Mooch used the only phrase that properly describes this

by digby

You know the phrase I’m talking about. The one where he described Bannon performing an act of autofellatio? 

That’s what this is. In fact, it’s pretty much all he ever does:

“They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels. And also when I walked in, the cheering was incredible.”

Has anyone in history ever bragged about himself with less reason to do so than Trump? It’s astonishing.

And when he’s not pleasuring himself he’s kicking others in the teeth:

He told Huckabee that [San Juan mayor] Cruz “did a very poor job,” adding that “She’s not a capable person,” he said. 

Trump said the media should have blamed Cruz rather than criticizing his efforts. 

You can watch that whole interview on Youtube. I wouldn’t recommend you do it after you’ve eaten.  Bleccch.

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L’etat c’est toi, mon roi

by digby

Trump must have called for another scoop of Haagen-Dazs  and an extra Diet Coke when he heard what his little servant boy did today:

The plan had been for Vice President Mike Pence to attend the Indianapolis Colts game at which Peyton Manning’s number is to be retired, a gala celebration of the former Colts quarterback’s contributions to Pence’s home state.

But Pence, the former governor of Indiana, left Lucas Oil Stadium after the national anthem, explaining his decision via Twitter early Sunday afternoon.

“I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem. At a time when so many Americans are inspiring our nation with their courage, resolve, and resilience, now, more than ever, we should rally around our Flag and everything that unites us,” he said in a statement. “While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask NFL players to respect the Flag and our National Anthem. I stand with President Trump, I stand with our soldiers, and I will always stand for our Flag and our National Anthem.”

Pence’s response appears to have been triggered by the decision of between 15 to 23 members of the San Francisco 49ers to take a knee during the anthem, as many NFL players have done to raise awareness of social injustice and racial inequality. Members of the Colts stood for the anthem with arms linked.

I stand with President Trump, I stand with our soldiers, and I will always stand for our Flag and our National Anthem.

Yeah, whatever. He has the right to leave just as they have the right to protest. But conflating standing for the flag with standing with Trump is a big much.

But that’s a cult requirement. Dear Leader IS the flag.

And Dear Leader couldn’t even let his pathetic little minion have that moment:

I’ve got your American carnage for you right here

by digby

This piece by Glenn Greenwald on factory pig farming is so horrifying it made me cry:

FBI AGENTS ARE devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.

While filming the conditions at the Smithfield facility, activists saw the two ailing baby piglets laying on the ground, visibly ill and near death, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead piglets. “One was swollen and barely able to stand; the other had been trampled and was covered in blood,” said Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), which filmed the facility and performed the rescue. Due to various illnesses, he said, the piglets were unable to eat or digest food and were thus a fraction of the normal weight for piglets their age.

Rather than leave the two piglets at Circle Four Farm to wait for an imminent and painful death, the DxE activists decided to rescue them. They carried them out of the pens where they had been suffering and took them to an animal sanctuary to be treated and nursed back to health.

Read on, but have a hanky and a strong alcoholic drink handy. It’s absolutely horrifying. The Federal government is pulling out all the stops to find the activists and prosecute them.

That’s right. They’re not going after the factory farmers who treat animals this way. They’re devoting resources to finding the activists who photographed the carnage and saved two of the victims.

Jesus.

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Sunday morning kindergarten

by digby

The historians are going to have such a field day with this. It’ll be like The Madness of King George.

That is, of course, if we survive:

President Donald Trump’s tweets Sunday morning claiming he denied Sen. Bob Corker’s request for an endorsement are false, two sources familiar with the discussions said.

Trump told Corker he was going to endorse him the day the Tennessee Republican announced his intention to retire, the sources said.

“The President called the senator early last week and asked him to reconsider his decision not to seek re-election and reaffirmed that he would have endorsed him, as he has said many times,” one of the sources said.

Trump attacked Corker in a series of tweets Sunday, days after the Tennessee Republican made public comments criticizing him, prompting Corker to respond by tweeting an insult later in the morning calling the White House “an adult day care center.”

The flare-up between the two leaders highlights the long-simmering differences between GOP leaders and the President, who has not shied away from attacking the leadership over their inability to move health care legislation. It also comes as Trump prepares to press Congress to advance his proposed tax overhaul and tensions reportedly grow between Trump and members of his own Cabinet — especially Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — on issues such as the way to handle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Corker’s vote will be critical on tax reform, and he remains an influential voice on Trump’s foreign policy challenges, including over how to handle the Iran nuclear deal.

It’s not the first time Trump and the White House have privately sent one signal to Corker while publicly saying something else. Following Corker’s pointed attack on Trump for his handling of the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Vice President Mike Pence quietly sought to repair ties with Corker after the President attacked the Tennessee Republican on Twitter, sources said.

Corker responded shortly after: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning,” Corker wrote.

Corker, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, announced late last month he would not seek another term in the Senate and has made some critical comments about Trump’s demeanor and temperament.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara, now a senior legal analyst at CNN, retweeted Corker’s response, remarking, “An adult day care center whose chief resident can’t count to 51.”

Oh. My. God. This is what it’s come to.

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Campaign of chauvinism
by Tom Sullivan

James Fallows yesterday pointed to a worthwhile read from a Dutch journalist. His ground-level observations on England and the Brexit debate/vote led him to support England’s exit from the European Union, not for England’s own good but for the continent’s. Britain’s “class divide and the class fixation, as well as an unhinged press, combine to produce a national psychology that makes Britain a country you simply don’t want in your club.”

His reasons and the obvious parallels on this side of the Atlantic give one pause.

Joris Luyendijk offers observations on the differences in conversational styles between the Dutch and the English, and what seems to him a destructive and culturally institutionalized level of competition, classism, and economic inequality:

There is another, final, side to this class system à l’Anglaise. It seems to breed a perspective on the world that is zero-sum. Your class system is a form of ranking. For one to go up, another must go down. Perhaps this is why sports are such an obsession. There, too, only one can win. It was striking for this Dutchman to see an innocuous school dance be concluded with the designation of a winner. The result: all the other eight-year-olds went home slightly or clearly annoyed for not having won. Why not just let them dance? There seems to be in English culture—with its adversarial courtrooms, and its parliamentary front benches two swords’ length apart—an almost reflexive need to compete, to conclude a process by declaring a winner. The expectation that English children will learn to put a brave face on the hurt of losing doubtless deepens the scars.

While much of the article from Prospect addresses the widening divide between the Leavers and Remainers, Fallows flagged Luyendijk’s observations on the role of England’s media in deepening passions in the run-up to the Brexit vote:

But that scene on the morning after the referendum encapsulates my disappointment with the country. Not only the division, but also the way it had been inflamed. Why would you allow a handful of billionaires to poison your national conversation with disinformation—either directly through the tabloids they own, or indirectly, by using those newspapers to intimidate the public broadcaster? Why would you allow them to use their papers to build up and co-opt politicians peddling those lies? Why would you let them get away with this stuff about “foreign judges” and the need to “take back control” when Britain’s own public opinion is routinely manipulated by five or six unaccountable rich white men, themselves either foreigners or foreign-domiciled?

Before coming to Britain I had always thought that the tabloids were like a misanthropic counterpoint to Monty Python. Like many Europeans, I saw these newspapers as a kind of English folklore, laying it on thick in the way that theatrical British politicians conduct their debates in the House of Commons. Newspapers in the Netherlands would carry on their opinion pages articles by commentators such as Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash—giving the impression that such voices represented the mainstream in Britain. Watching QI before coming to the UK, I remember seeing Stephen Fry banter with Jeremy Clarkson and imagining the former was the rule, and the latter the exception. Living in London taught me that it is the other way around. George Orwell is still correct: England is a family with the wrong members in charge.

Tabloid readers might see through the propaganda now and again, Luyendijk writes, as many did in voting for the “the demonised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn” in the recent elections. “But when it comes to Europe and the world beyond, the campaign of chauvinism has been so unremitting, over so many decades, that it is much harder to resist.” The Brexit vote, he writes, “should instead be seen as the logical and overdue outcome of a set of English pathologies.”

He continues:

I began to realise that there are powerful people in England who actively want the EU destroyed. They are full of aggressive contempt for everything the Union stands for. Even David Cameron could not bring himself to go to Oslo with other EU leaders to receive the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Given the deep competitiveness of the English, it may be that they need the EU to feel superior; we may have lost the empire and be less than 1 per cent of the world’s population but… at least we’re not “Yurup.”

One commenter responds:

For some time before the referendum, and certainly after it, there has been a seismic shift in our nation. A slipping of social and political tectonic plates. A sharpening of weapons. A hardening of attitudes. An alignment of wholly different philosophies across a fault line in the fabric of society. A temporary suspension of ancient hostilities between right and left. To make way for the birth of new and more intensive hostilities between Leavers and Remainers. A broken economic model, an ever growing inequality between the rich and the poor, those who are comfortable and those fighting the poverty line, have given impetus to protest. And rightly and inevitably so. The problem now is that the common good has been lost in the pointless trading of abuse and insult. The trivialisation of matters of national and international importance lend a kind of surreal quality to what are real questions requiring real solutions. All the old certainties about Britain, its general pragmatism and tolerance, its inclusiveness and diversity, its compromise and common sense, are gone. We are now engaged in a bitter civil war of ideology.

Hullabaloo readers don’t need the parallels slapped in their faces.

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