Chris Hayes lays out the sexual harassment and assault evidence against Donald Trumpby digby
It’s just a helpful little reminder of all the women who came forward to accuse Donald Trump on camera:
And that doesn’t even include his ex-wife who said he raped her when he was angry that the plastic surgeon she’d sent him to botched his scalp reduction hair transplant surgery in 1989.
This was all aired just a year ago. 63 million people didn’t care. I doubt they care now.
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Ivanka’s Law is toxicby digby
But get this:
Republicans really can’t afford to give up on the tax bill, after suffering an embarrassing defeat on their health care effort. But when something is as central to their agenda as the tax rewrite, they’re going to have serious headaches if they can’t win more support with the public.
Uhm, maybe these serious headaches might be worse than being “embarrassed?” Like the fact that they are going to cause millions of people to pay more in taxes, critically degrade higher education and health care so that Ivanka gets a tax break? Those kind of “headaches?”
We know that their donors are demanding that they deliver and that’s why they’re doing this. So, let’s not pretend it’s anything other than that. Many of them realize that Donald Trump has destroyed their party and this is their last chance to pay back their rich benefactors and perhaps secure a future for themselves outside of politics.
This is a political crisis. But you knew that.
So himby digby
Charles Blow found this video of Trump that illustrates his future presidency so perfectly:
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When party becomes religion
by Tom Sullivan
“This is what happens when party becomes almost a religion,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid told Chris Hayes last night on “All In.” Reid was commenting on the GOP’s defense of Alabama’s Roy Moore and acceptance of a Republican president with a lengthy history of sexual misconduct. “We don’t care how low he takes this country, how low he takes our party,” she said, or “what a scoundrel he is, what a scam artist he is, what a con man. And literally, it can be a child molester as long as it’s a Republican … Nothing comes before party ever. Ever.”
The Republican Party and the country didn’t sink to these depths overnight. The right has, over decades, acculturated its base to lies as one of the basic food groups. Our sitting president is simply the main course.
Fear has been a conservative staple from the early days of the Cold War, the Birchers, and before. Robert Kagan noted before the election last year how “resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger,” the core of the now-president’s message, had incubated inside the party for years.
I recounted how creepy the appearance of “Rush rooms” was in the early 1990s, and how the dittoheads at work marinated their brains in his toxic message all day, every day.
As Rush faded, Fox News ascended. Fox News has been a propaganda channel for decades now. The “Fair and Balanced” network has dropped that branding and, with few exceptions, any pretension that what it presents is news. Where once there were Rush Rooms at lunch, now every other bar, restaurant, and public space has a telescreen broadcasting the message approved by Minitrue and News Corp.
Conservative chain emails have faded as well, replaced by Facebook. Through the Cold War years, we’d been warned that the communists would try to undermine America from within using propaganda and disinformation. With the emails, fathers and uncles were trafficking in it, passing them on to family and friends as instructed at the bottom of each. What made chain emails popular was they maligned people senders hated. With forward after forward, they built a discomforting community of resentment. I have a collection:
Now, out of those 200 chain emails, maybe three or four are not outright lies, distortions, and smears. Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
Their purpose was to get people angry and keep them angry about real and imagined slights committed against them by political enemies. After last year’s election and the revelations about Russian ads on Facebook, one wonders if some weren’t once drafted in St. Petersburg. The First Amendment has been weaponized and used against us.
Mr. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it” is simply a walking, talking, tweeting version of the conservative chain email. His fans don’t care if what he says is true so long as he attacks the people they hate and gives them approval to do the same.
David Brooks argued the other day that “naked liberalism” has undermined the social contract. He defines naked liberalism as an assumption shared by both right and left that “if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence.” The right wants to maximize economic choice while the left hopes to maximize lifestyle choice (in which Brooks glosses over both positions). This position, “all freedom and no covenant,” he believes, maximizes personal freedom while undercutting the bonds that hold a society together:
Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis. Freedom without connection becomes alienation. And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction. Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.
Or worse. “[P]eople will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.” In pursuing individual and economic freedom, we have sacrificed the bonds that held human society together for millennia. “Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism,” he writes. “Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.” These band-aids aren’t likely to hold back the erosion.
People under 40 get that these aren’t solutions, Brooks writes. I must agree. Steve Bannon wants to tear down the entire edifice and start from scratch, an answer not so different from one we heard from certain quarters on the left last fall. So far, Democrats haven’t offered a more compelling, healing narrative.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Friday Night Soother: Bearcats!by digby
Perth Zoo is celebrating the birth of the first Binturong cubs in the Zoo’s 119-year history.
Two cubs, a male and a female, were born September 6 to mother, Selasa, and father, Rabu. The parents arrived at the Zoo from Singapore Zoological Gardens, in 2016, to establish a Perth Zoo Binturong family.
Perth Zoo Keeper, Marty Boland, said, “It’s very exciting to welcome two rare Binturong cubs, less than 12 months after their parent’s arrival in Australia.”
“Binturongs are capable of delaying their pregnancy after mating until they feel the environmental conditions are favourable. So, it’s great to see that Selasa is feeling secure and content here in WA!”
“She is a first time Mum, but has been lovingly tending to her offspring in the nest box and also allowing us to photograph the cubs’ progression. She’s even trusted us to handle her cubs to quickly weigh them.”
“They tip the scales just over one kilogram, a good weight for Binturong infants,” said Marty.
The new arrivals recently opened their eyes, and they are beginning to take in the world around them. Zoo Keepers expect they will start exploring their exhibit in coming weeks and become more visible to the public.
Marty continued, “Visitors who are unsure of where to catch a glimpse of the Binturong family may smell them first. They are famous for their strong odor, which is often likened to popcorn!”
The Binturong (Arctictis binturong), also known as a Bearcat, is a viverrid that is native to South and Southeast Asia.
Binturongs are omnivorous, feeding on small mammals, birds, fish, earthworms, insects and fruits.
The estrous period of the Binturong is 81 days, with a gestation of 91 days. The average age of sexual maturation is 30.4 months for females and 27.7 months for males. The Binturong is one of approximately 100 species of mammal believed by many experts to be capable of embryonic diapause, or delayed implantation, which allows the female of the species to time parturition to coincide with favorable environmental conditions. Typical litters consist of two offspring, but up to six may occur.
It is uncommon in much of its range, and has been assessed and classified as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List due to a declining population trend that is estimated at more than 30% over the last three decades. The main threat to the species is severe destruction of habitats in their native parts of the world.
Those wanting to help save Binturong from extinction are encouraged to “adopt” one of Perth Zoo’s cubs. Zoo adoption packages ensure more funds are poured into giving wildlife a chance of survival. More information can be found at: www.perthzoo.com.au
Oh Godby digby
Politico says that we should all enjoy November because December is going to be a living hell:
DECEMBER is going to be really, really, really brutal. Spending caps deal. Government funding. Potential legislation to deal with the expiration of DACA. Action to prop up the health care law. And now, we hear that THE DEBT CEILING could be part of the mix in the final month of the year, as well. Treasury says Congress has until January to lift the debt limit, but some say if Congress is going to slap together a big package, the debt limit might as well be included. No one really wants to raise the debt limit in an election year, anyway. But the negotiations have to be going really well for the debt limit to be included. It’s not a must-pass at the end of the year, and it could just as easily slip to 2018. In other words, Republicans tell us they won’t let the debt limit be a bargaining chip for Democrats who are trying to get a DACA deal.
WE ALSO HEAR Congress will pass a short-term government funding bill in time for the Dec. 8 deadline, kicking the deadline toward the end of the month in time for a large spending deal. OH YEAH — THE WHITE HOUSE has made it clear they want tax reform done in December as well. Whoever wins the Alabama Senate race will join the chamber toward the end of December, too. THIS COULD EASILY BE the most consequential legislative month in years.
And that’s just the legislative stuff. We’ve also got Roy Moore and whatever freakshow Donald Trump puts on on a daily basis.
I’m so tired.
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Jared needs some Gingkoby digby
Jared has a real memory problem. Seriously. A bad one. He should have some tests. But not by this guy:
Mother Jones reports:
Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was aware of a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” but failed to provide that information to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the leaders of that committee said in a letter Thursday to Kushner’s lawyer. The reported overture is one of multiple revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russia that Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) disclosed in their letter accusing Kushner of improperly withholding information about the communications.
The letter marks the resumption of a joint Russia investigation led by Grassley and Feinstein. The two senators had stopped cooperating last month due to a disagreement about the scope of the probe.
The senators said they know Kushner withheld the information because people questioned separately by the committee disclosed emails detailing contacts with Russia on which Kushner was copied. “Other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ that Kushner forwarded to others,” the senators wrote. Kushner is one of several Trump associates who reportedly had multiple contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent transition period. Those include a November 16, 2016, meeting in which Kushner reportedly requested Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s help in setting up back-channel communications between Trump and the Kremlin. Kushner claims that he was responding to Kislyak’s request to set up a secure line to convey sensitive information on Syria. It is not clear if that meeting represented the “overture and dinner invite” the senators cited or if the overture is a newly disclosed contact between the Trump camp and Russia
Grassley and Feinstein also said that their committee has obtained communications, on which Kushner was copied, with Sergey Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman with multiple ties to Trump and his campaign. Millian, the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the United States and the owner of a translation service, once described himself as the Trump Organization’s “exclusive broker” helping Russians buying apartments in Trump buildings. Millian is also reportedly one of the key sources whose claims about Russian attempts to cultivate Trump were cited in the set of memos compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. The Washington Post has reported that Millian last year told associates he was in touch with George Papadopolous, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians. Papadopolous and Millian were Facebook friends, the Post noted.
We are insanely stupidby digby
No civilization where this happens can be expected to survive. It’s people are just too stupid:
A man accidentally shot himself and his wife at an East Tennessee church on Thursday while he was showing off his gun during a discussion on recent church shootings, police said.
Elder members of First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains were cleaning up about 1 p.m. after enjoying a luncheon held to celebrate Thanksgiving. They began talking about guns in churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks.
A man in his 80s pulled out a .380 caliber Ruger handgun and said, “I carry my handgun everywhere,” according to Parks.
He removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, and showed the gun to some of the men in the church. He put the magazine back in, apparently loaded a round in the chamber, and returned the gun to its holster, Parks said.
“Somebody else walked up and said, ‘Can I see it?’ ” Parks said. “He pulled it back out and said, ‘With this loaded indicator, I can tell that it’s not loaded.’ “
He pulled the trigger.
“Evidently he just forgot that he re-chambered the weapon,” Parks said.
The gun was lying on its side on a table. The bullet sliced the palm of the man’s upward-facing hand, then entered the left side of his wife’s abdomen and exited the right side, Parks said.
Both the husband and wife, who is also in her 80s, were flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center with injuries that police said didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Their names had not been released as of Thursday evening.
Charges will not be filed, Parks said.
It’s hard to believe a bullet in the abdomen isn’t life-threatening to a woman in her 80s but that’s good news.
Meanwhile, it great that this man will be allowed to keep his guns. What could go wrong?
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Sherrod Brown takes Hatch downtownby digby
Sherrod Brown really upset Orrin Hatch last night when he correctly described the tax plan as a giveaway to the rich. Hatch, a millionaire, says that he comes from “the poor” and he resents the implication.
The truth hurts:
Late last night, just before the Finance Committee passed the Senate’s version of the tax bill slashing taxes on corporations and the rich, a remarkable moment unfolded that perfectly captured the GOP’s whole handling of the tax debate — in all its dishonesty, misdirection and bottomless bad faith.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) engaged in extended sparring with committee chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) over who would benefit from the Senate bill, with Brown insisting that it fundamentally represents a tax cut for the rich and not the middle class. This drew an enraged response from Hatch, even though Brown’s argument was 100 percent correct:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had a tense exchange during a markup of the GOP tax bill on Nov. 16. (Senate Finance Committee)
Brown’s reference to an amendment offered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at the beginning of the exchange is crucial to what transpired. That amendment would undo the tax cuts on corporations if wages don’t grow. The Senate bill would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent — permanently — and one of President Trump’s and the GOP’s chief stated rationales is that the move will unleash massive wage growth. The amendment called the GOP’s bluff for messaging purposes.And it worked. Indeed, Brown’s questioning of this Republican argument is exactly what ticked Hatch off. Brown claimed that “this tax cut really is not for the middle class, it’s for the rich,” and that the GOP argument about tax cuts on corporations leading to higher wages is just a “good selling point.” Brown pointed out: “Companies don’t just give away higher wages just because they have more money. Corporations are sitting on a lot of money now. They’re sitting on a lot of profits now. I don’t see wages going up. Just spare us the bank shots.”
All this made Hatch angry. “I come from the poor people,” Hatch said. “And I’ve been here working my whole stinkin’ career for people who don’t have a chance. And I really resent anybody saying that I’m just doing this for the rich. Give me a break. I think you guys overplay that all the time, and it gets old. And frankly, you ought to quit it.” When Brown pushed back by suggesting that previous tax cuts for the rich haven’t produced the results Republicans are once again predicting, Hatch silenced him.
Now, Hatch was probably angered by the questioning of his motive — the idea that Republicans are disingenuously packaging a tax cut for the wealthy and corporations as a tax cut for the middle class. But whatever is in Hatch’s heart, this is exactly what the Senate bill does. It front-loads the benefits for non-wealthy people by making its various tax preferences and its cuts to individual income tax rates temporary and subject to expiration while making the corporate rate cuts permanent. It also ties tax brackets to an alternative inflation measure in a way that will result in out-year tax increases for everyone but the top 1 percent. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation has concluded that in 2027, most poor and working-class people will see a tax hike, while upper-income earners (who benefit from corporate tax cuts) continue to pay less.
Hatch, as other Republicans, claims to have “no intention” of raising taxes on lower-income people, meaning Congress will renew their tax cuts later. The suggestion otherwise got Hatch angry. But there is zero guarantee that this will happen, and indeed, this claim actually ratifies the objections of Brown and Democrats. It reveals in a backdoor way that the whole reason for making all these provisions temporary is to pay for permanent tax cuts on corporations, which is necessary to comply with the procedural need to avoid raising the deficit later. Indeed, the bill’s repeal of the individual mandate is also designed to cut health spending on less-fortunate people precisely to fund those corporate tax cuts — which shows, as Brian Beutler points out, that this bill partly represents another version of the massively regressive Obamacare repeal efforts that have already been defeated, this one just in a new packaging of grift.
As it happens, there is good reason to doubt Hatch’s motives — or, at least, those of the GOP more broadly. Multiple Republicans have admitted on the record that if Republicans don’t pass these tax cuts, their donors will stop giving them money. If Republicans wanted to cut taxes for the middle class, they could cut taxes for the middle class and remain within deficit and procedural constraints by limiting the bill’s massive giveaway to their corporate donors, which would not necessitate hiking middle-class taxes later. Yet Republicans aren’t doing that. Hatch claimed that pointing this out “gets old.” But this week’s Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans say by 59 percent to 33 percent that the GOP plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class, which means they are on to the GOP game.
Click over to read the rest. This bill is an atrocity. The donors want it and the people hate it.
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Bannon vs Roveby digby
I wrote about Bannon and Rove for Salon this morning:
It had been reported all week that President Trump wasn’t going to comment personally on the underage dating and sexual assault scandal whirling around Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore because he knew it would raise the issue of his own sordid history. Trump refused to take questions about it from reporters and let his press secretary say only that the White House found the complaints “troubling” but planned to let the people of Alabama decide what to do about it.
But obviously he was watching Sean Hannity late at night, as he is wont to do, and his uncontrollable, juvenile compulsions finally won out. The need to insult Sen. Al Franken was too overwhelming and he had to take to Twitter to let it out:
The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps? …..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2017
.And to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women. Lesley Stahl tape?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2017
Trump may not realize that the Alabama election isn’t for another four weeks and he’s likely to be grilled about his own “issues” every time he faces the press. And he has another little problem that he may not have counted on. The team at Breitbart News is not happy with the fact that the first daughter said that there was “a special place in hell” for people who do what Moore is accused of doing. This was Breitbart editor Alex Marlow on a talk radio program:
Caller: Well, when Donald was being accused of these things where there was definitely more proof and more opportunity, where was she then? But now she’s all outraged by Roy Moore. I don’t know why she just doesn’t keep quiet.
Marlow: Right, especially when there’s been so many allegations against President Trump, I don’t know why the daughter of President Trump who has been accused by [attorney] Gloria Allred and some dozen, maybe two dozen, women over the years doing something inappropriate, and nothing’s ever come of that. So why does Ivanka want to continue to pile on? I don’t know. I think that she just loves getting her name out there in the headline and they can put more photos up. So that’s her M.O.
Roy Moore is of course being backed by Breitbart’s executive editor, the former Trump campaign manager and senior policy adviser Steve Bannon.
Has Bannon decided that MAGA belongs to him now? According to this fascinating piece in the New Yorker by Susan B. Glasser, Bannon’s battle against the establishment is very personal and is not entirely motivated by his apocalyptic vision of impending chaos but something much more prosaic: a need to defeat the man who held his position in the previous Republican administration, Karl Rove.
I was unaware that Bannon was so competitive with Rove but according to Glasser’s article there’s so much bad blood there that Bannon decided to take on an incumbent Republican congressman in North Carolina solely because Rove knew the guy and gave a speech on his behalf. It’s the only House race in which Bannon has endorsed a primary challenger.
Breitbart published a story in which it called the incumbent, Rep. Robert Pittenger, a tool of the “Karl Rove-backed elites” who had “sold out his district.” But Pittenger is actually a hardcore Trump supporter who’s voted with the president 96 percent of the time. He told Glasser, “I’ve never met Steve Bannon, but it seems to be a game. There’s all kinds of games up there in Washington.” Pittenger and Rove both said that they’d known each other for a long time and that Rove was simply doing a solid for a friend.
One can understand why Bannon wouldn’t like Rove, who has been very critical of both Bannon and Trump in his Wall Street Journal columns and told Glasser that they knew nothing about electoral strategy and had no idea how to win races around the country, much less upend the establishment, as Bannon has vowed to do. Rove is probably right about that. The Trump operation, both inside and outside the White House, is a mess.
Until 2016, Steve Bannon was running his upstart web site, and that no doubt burns Rove, a political junkie who has spent a lifetime studying political history and the minutiae of electoral strategy, and worked in the political trenches for decades before he made it to the White House. Of course, that’s exactly what Bannon loathes about Rove, believing that he’s a dinosaur with nothing to offer the revolutionary new politics he and Donald Trump have created.
It’s interesting, however, how much the two men actually have in common. Both are autodidacts who think of themselves as strategic and tactical geniuses. Rove may seem like a staid elder statesman compared to Bannon, a self-styled “Leninist” and agent of chaos, but Rove was just as grandiose in his thinking when he came to Washington 17 years ago. He believes in realignment theory and thought that Bush’s hanging-chad victory in the 2000 election was the beginning of a major shift, led by him, to GOP dominance for the foreseeable future.
Bannon believes in a bizarre prophecy of “four turnings,” in which world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each that can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Under this nutbar theory, it’s been 80 years since fall came, in the form of the Great Depression and World War II, and now winter is upon us.
Both of these guys have way too much faith in their own insights and abilities. This article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic about Rove at the end of Bush’s second term should serve as a cautionary tale for Bannon. The arrogant, “go-it-alone” strategy in which the White House and its allies don’t bother with politics and simply depend on dominance didn’t work for Bush, who ended his disastrous reign having diminished the Republican Party to such a degree that it enabled the man whom he holds in total contempt to become its leader. All the mistakes that Trump and Bannon are making today were first made, if in less crude and obvious fashion, by the Bush administration.
Rove should be a bit more humble and Bannon should be a bit less smug. Neither one of them is nearly as smart as they think they are. And both of the men who employed them are even worse. Bush left the Middle East in ruins and presided over an epic financial crisis. Trump is busy finishing the job in the rest of the world and is turning the United States into a banana republic. Spare us any more of these “geniuses.” They’re killing us.
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