Month: November 2017

Democrats win. Trump, NRA lose.
by Tom Sullivan

In Virginia, it was “a tsunami election.” For the National Rifle Association, maybe not an earthquake, but perhaps a tremor.

Virginia Lt. Governor Ralph Northam became governor-elect last night. Northam held the governor’s mansion for Democrats by felling veteran Republican operative Ed Gillespie. Polls Monday night gave Northam a three point advantage. He won by nine.

In New Jersey, Democrat Philip Murphy defeated Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno from the outgoing Gov. Chris Christie administration. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio won a second term, as expected, winning 65 percent of the votes.

Virginia Democrats erased a 32-seat Republican advantage yesterday, with control of the House of Delegates still hanging in the balance. They picked up three open seats and defeated 13 Republicans, potentially, pending recounts. Democrats are in a positioned to veto, if not draw, 2021 redistricting maps.

Journalist Danica Roem became the country’s first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature. The heavy metal singer defeated Bob Marshall, the man who wrote Virginia’s anti-trans bathroom bill.

The Richmond Post-Dispatch reports:

“It’s quite an experience to experience a tsunami election, and this is it!” said House Minority Leader David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, who conceivably could become the next speaker of the house instead of Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights.

The tsunami resulted from the electoral earthquake a year ago that put Republican Donald Trump in the White House, Toscano said. “You can’t get away from this being a very clear reaction to Trump.”

The Washington Post reports turnout in Virginia was “five percentage points and 10 percentage points higher than the last two” elections, the highest in 20 years for a gubernatorial election. In Charlottesville, the scene of white supremacist violence in August that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, “raw votes cast were up 31 percent,” reports FiveThirtyEight.

The Posts’s Dave Weigel tweeted that buried in the exit polls were results showing that Northam, F-rated by the NRA, split the vote with Gillespie among voters who ranked gun policy as their most important issue:

How much we might attribute that softening to the mass shootings in Las Vegas and the church shooting on Sunday in Texas is unknown. But in the Southwest Virginia college town of Blacksburg, the on-air murder of broadcast journalist Alison Parker is still fresh after two years. Last night, Parker’s boyfriend, Chris Hurst, running as a first-time candidate, defeated an NRA-backed candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.

The Guardian reports:

Hurst’s victory, just two days after a mass shooting at a Texas church left 26 people dead, was hailed by gun control advocates as proof that it is possible to make progress on America’s gun violence crisis at the local level. Despite a series of increasingly frequent, deadly mass shootings, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump continue to block any attempt at gun law reform in Washington.

Hurst’s girlfriend, 24-year-old journalist Alison Parker, was shot dead on live television during a routine morning broadcast in 2015, along with WDBJ7 cameraman Adam Ward. Parker had been quietly dating Hurst, another reporter at the station, and they had just moved in together. A reported 40,000 people watched the shooting live.

A year after Parker’s death, Hurst was sent to cover a very similar workplace shooting, this one at a Roanoke rail car manufacturing company. Hurst covered the news, but he was shaken by the similarities between the two shootings, and said he decided to leave his job as a television journalist that day.

Last night Hurst defeated Joseph Yost, a Republican incumbent with an A-rating from the NRA.

The feeling of being able to tell my mom, a survivor of the horrific #SandyHook shooting, that tonight in VA (the backyard of the @NRA) every. single. gun sense. candidate on the ballot won, is one I will treasure for a long time. pic.twitter.com/w38Ov2BBHq— Ashley Cech (@AshleyCech) November 8, 2017

One thing last night proved: red areas of purple states are politically frackable, with the right pressure applied at just the right weak points. Democrats have a lot of ground to recover in state legislatures by 2020 if they hope to reverse the radical gerrmandering and voter suppression efforts Republicans implemented after 2010. It helps if Democrats field candidates. After last night, they will have many more surfacing, and not just in Virginia.

The #Resistance has solid wins under it’s belt. Democrats are awakened. Their party still needs a message.

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

Partying like it’s 1995by digby

The Trumpies are working hand in glove with Judicial Watch and David Bossie to build up the case against Hillary Clinton. Victoria Toensing’s involved. They’re even making the “mistake” over and over again of referring to “the Clinton administration” or “President Clinton” when they speak about all this.
It’s pretty obvious that they are so sad that Clinton lost the election that they’ve decided to just carry on as if she did. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so bizarre and I watched them go after Bill Clinton for killing Vince Foster by shooting a watermelon in a congressman’s back yard. At least Bill was actually president at the time.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s assignment of as many as several hundred State Department officials to quickly clear a huge backlog of public records requests is being met with deep skepticism by rank-and-file employees.

Tillerson says his goal is transparency. But many State workers fear the real reason is political: expediting the public release of thousands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official emails.

The staffers also suspect the move — which will reassign many of them from far more substantive duties and has already sparked a union complaint — is meant to force many of them to resign out of frustration with what are essentially clerical positions.

The issue spotlights the deepening distrust toward Tillerson at Foggy Bottom, where his attempts to restructure the department, cut its budget and centralize policymaking have already hurt morale. But it is drawing applause from conservative groups, which have been pressuring Tillerson to act on a backlog of 13,000 Freedom of Information Act requests — many of them relating to emails and other records from Clinton’s tenure.

“We haven’t understood why there’s been a slow-walking of releasing records, and we’ve been quite public in counseling the administration to take an approach of extreme transparency,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group that has sued the Trump administration for more Clinton documents.

“It looks like someone’s listening,” Fitton added.

Current and former career diplomats scoff at such talk. They say the real story is Tillerson’s contempt for a State Department workforce he sees as bloated, and one that President Donald Trump views as a Democratic stronghold loyal to Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009-13.

While many of the people assigned to open-records duty are lower-level staffers and interns, some have previously held prestigious posts, helping shape U.S. foreign policy and engaging in high-level diplomacy.

“Nothing better illustrates the view of the Trump administration that U.S. diplomats are nothing more than overpaid clerks,” said Thomas Countryman, a retired career foreign service officer who served as assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Tillerson announced his decision to ramp up FOIA processing in an Oct. 17 email to State employees. Tillerson has set an ambitious — some say implausible — goal of clearing the backlog by the end of this year.

Suspicions around his motivation are being fueled in part by an Oct. 27 CNN report that, citing unnamed sources, said Trump is pushing the State Department to release any remaining Clinton emails it may still have and that the president had asked Tillerson to clear the department’s backlog of unfulfilled records requests.

According to Judicial Watch, the State Department has yet to process about 40,000 pages of at least 72,000 records that contain Clinton emails. However, State Department officials have indicated they believe that many of those still-unreleased documents are duplicates of information already shared with the public. Recent waves of releases of Clinton-related records have yielded little fresh material.

These right wing character assassins don’t need specifics. All they have to do is find some little thing to peg to their conspiracy theory and that will be that. This is clearly going to be their mission for the next three years, maybe longer.

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QOTD: emptywheelby digby

That certainly doesn’t make me feel confident.

Marcy Wheeler has been tracking the odd timeline of events surrounding young Jared’s trip to Saudi Arabia. It’s very interesting. You can click over to see the whole thing. Here’s the kicker:

It’s all just so curious, the unanswered questions, the odd timing: Aided and abetted by GOP-led Congress, Trump pulls out of an anti-corruption initiative while Treasury Department appears to work on anti-corruption, and Kushner meets on the sly with the Saudi crown prince just days before an anti-corruption crackdown.

Hmm.

Keep in mind that in this context “anti-corruption” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

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Why blatant racism doesn’t alienate Republican moderates anymoreby digby
There aren’t any, at least when it comes to race. They’re either racists themselves or they just don’t care about it as long as they get their tax cuts:

Over the past 30 years, the parties have diverged, driven by elite strategies: with Democrats tying racial liberalism to economic liberalism and conservatives using racist appeals to undermine support for the welfare state. This process has taken time, because most Americans don’t pay close attention to politics, and because political attitudes are set early in life and remain sticky. The Republican Party is full of people who subscribe to racist views, while Democrats are increasingly liberal on issues of race. The result of this realignment is that Republicans are less concerned about alienating their base with racial ads. Summarizing their recent research showing that explicitly racist appeals are no longer enough to change respondents’ views on policies, political scientists Nicholas Valentino, Fabian Neuner, and Matthew Vandenbroek conclude that “Many of our subjects simply did not reject political arguments that explicitly derogate Black Americans.” It’s clear that Republican politicians have internalized this lesson. In New Jersey, Kim Guadagno is running Willie Horton–style ads in a race she’s almost certain to lose. In Virginia, white male House of Delegate candidates are sending out racist mailers attacking Latina candidates over non-existent sanctuary cities. And elected Republicans like Steve King openly flirt with white-supremacist rhetoric. It’s hard to claim, as some political scientists once did, that candidates would face electoral penalties for explicit racism. And it’s about to get much worse.

Read the whole piece. It’s a very interesting look at the politics of race and explains why as much as we’d all like to pretend that if we can just come up with the right unifying message about money, everything will fall into place., it’s just not likely. The parties are going to be fighting on these grounds whether we like it or not. It’s not just a moral imperative — which it certainly is — it’s also the only strategic choice.

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Say it ain’t so Wilbur!by digby

Oh heck, it looks like there’s another narcissist in the White House who’s so embarrassed that he isn’t really a billionaire that he lied about it to hide the fact that he’s only worth a piddling 700 mil. Can you blame him?

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. has lied about his net worth since 20o4, according to a new report from Forbes, in a story called “The Case of Wilbur Ross’ Phantom $2 Billion.” According to financial-disclosure forms Ross filed after his nomination to President Trump’s Cabinet, Ross has less than $700 million in assets. Ross, meanwhile, claims he has more than $2 billion in trusts for his family that were not disclosed in those forms. “After one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed,” the magazine reports. “It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004.”

No wonder he didn’t want to divulge the fact that he’s in bed with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law. He didn’t want to have to give it up for some stupid government job. He’s poor!

This is why Donald Trump is so great. He understands the struggle of people like Ross. That’s why his populist message resonates with the average working person. It’s authentic and from the heart.

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Jared and the other crown princeby digby
Now we know why Trump likes the new Saudi Arabian despot so much.

“The Saudi Vision 2030 is increasingly turning out to be a failure in economic terms. It has more and more the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. This new city, Neom, in the Gulf of Aqaba that is supposed to attract five hundred billion dollars of investment and where normal rules of Saudi society aren’t going to apply—meaning women can do things—will have more robots than people. This isn’t serious. This is the kind of thing used to divert people from the real issues,” Riedel said.

And the consequences look like they may be perfectly Trumpian too:

The Crown Prince’s regional strategy has also either stalled or backfired, too. “His signature policy is the Yemen war, which has come home to haunt Riyadh,” Riedel, now at the Brookings Institution, said. “Its Qatar blockade is a failure. It wants Qatar to be like Bahrain, just an appendage. And Qatar hasn’t given in.”

Those are excerpts from a new story in the New Yorker about the current events in Saudi Arabia. It’s complicated and like all stories about Middle East politics it seems to depend upon who you talk to and what angle you choose to take.

Keep your eyes on this:

As David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post on Sunday, the 32-year-old crown prince has developed a special relationship with the person closest to holding that title in America – Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser. 

According to Ignatius, the Saudi royal was emboldened to make his move by the support he has received from members of Trump’s inner circle, who view him as “a kindred disrupter of the status quo” with a Trump-like combination of populism and personal wealth. Kushner is seen as key among these backers, and spent days with the prince during a trip to the kingdom last month. “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy,” Ignatius reported.

What could go wrong?

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“I never knew there were so many countries”
by digby

I wrote about Trump and guns for Salon this morning:

Donald Trump’s excellent Asian adventure continued on Monday in Japan with more demonstrations of his impressive knowledge of world affairs. At a state banquet he spoke about his close relationship with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

He explained, “So my relationship with Shinzo got off to quite a rocky start because I never ran for office, and here I am. But I never ran, so I wasn’t very experienced and after I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world.

“I never knew we had so many countries.”

Trump tells Japanese dignitaries he never knew there were ‘so many countries’ until he was elected pic.twitter.com/ZwApCynTT4

— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) November 6, 2017

The Japanese are a stoical people who do not often display uncontrolled emotion. One can only imagine imagine what they thought of that inane little admission. Apparently, Trump hadn’t even looked at a world map before he was elected president at the age of 70.

After the news broke about the horrific church massacre in Texas on Sunday, Trump (or, more likely, a surrogate) tweeted out the usual “thoughts and prayers.” But at a joint press conference, the president responded to a question about the shooting this way:

I think that mental health is your problem here. This was a very — based on preliminary reports — very deranged individual. A lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries. 

But this isn’t a guns situation. I mean, we could go into it, but it’s a little bit soon to go into it. But, fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it would have been — as bad it was, it would have been much worse. 

But this is a mental health problem at the highest level. It’s a very, very sad event. These are great people, and a very, very sad event. But that’s the way I view it. Thank you.

There’s no doubt that Japan and all other countries have people with mental illness. It’s a disease of the human species. But Trump sounded like a fool trying to compare the United States with a country like Japan in that context. The Texas killer shot more people in the course of a few minutes on Sunday than the total number of people who have been shot dead in Japan in the last five years.

As Michael Daly at the Daily Beast reported, 13,286 people were shot and killed in the United States in 2015. (That’s not counting suicide, which would more than double that number.) In Japan there was one. Japan does not allow ordinary citizens to own handguns or rifles of any kind. Sports shooters can own shotguns for hunting and skeet shooting but must qualify for licensing with a four-month class in gun safety.

One can assume that the Japanese people wouldn’t trade their situation for ours, and certainly not for the fatuous insistence that if someone else is “shooting in the opposite direction” it mitigates the horror of 26 innocent people being gunned down in church on a Sunday morning. The rest of the world no doubt sees the United States as primitive and irrational on this issue. Because we are.

Many people have already pointed out how differently Trump responds to mass killings depending on if the apparent perpetrator is an immigrant, a Muslim or a person of color. In this case, he once again tried to assume the lugubrious tone of all Republicans on the day of a gun massacre carried out by a white American, insisting that it’s “too soon” to go into the details and expressing his “sadness” at the massive casualties. If it had been a Muslim, he would have no interest in the shooter’s mental health and would have immediately called for strict policy changes to eliminate the threat.

Keep in mind that Trump has no plans to deal with mental illness, any more than he plans to deal with gun regulations or the other common thread that ties many of these shootings together: domestic violence. It’s not just that he already reversed an Obama-era policy that would have prevented people who are on disability for mental illness from buying guns. He believes that mowing down dozens of innocent bystanders with semi-automatic weapons is a fact of life that will never change, so we simply must accept it.

After the shooting at a community college in Oregon two years ago that killed nine people and injured nine more, Trump gave a long disquisition on “Morning Joe” the next day when asked what he would do about these mass shootings:

First of all, you have very strong laws on the books, but you’re always going to have problems. I mean, we have millions and millions of people, we have millions and millions of sick people all over the world. It can happen all over the world and it does happen all over the world, by the way. But this is sort of unique to this country, the school shootings. And you’re going to have difficulty no matter what. . .  

You know, it’s not politically correct to say that [people are going to slip through the cracks] but you’re going to have difficulty and that would be for the next million years you’re going to have difficulty. People are going to slip through the cracks. And even if you did great mental health programs people are going to slip through the cracks. . . . 

I’m sure it’s going to be found that this guy was probably, you know they seem to be loners, they have all sorts of difficulties, they call people and nobody wants to go out with them, you know, it’s the same old story. But what are you going to do? Institutionalize everybody? You’re going to have difficulties with many different things. 

That’s the way the world works, and that’s the way the world has always worked.

Unlike his vicious response to the perceived or real threat of violence from Muslim zealots, he’s very philosophical about this, isn’t he? He believes the only choice we have is to accept that innocent people are going to be gunned down on a regular basis, or institutionalize anyone who is a loner or has a mental illness diagnosis. And we can’t do that because some people would slip through the cracks anyway. “That’s the way the world works.”

Except, of course, it doesn’t. It’s just the way America works. And it’s destroying us, one horrific bloodbath at a time.

Unmaking the American Century revisited
by Tom Sullivan

It is election day once again. Tuesday, for no good reason. The eyes of the media will be on the mayor’s race in New York City, and on races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Voters will not likely pause the internal horse race narratives long enough to consider what kind of world the competition is creating. They should.

Malcolm Harris wonders whether encouragement to compete against one another hasn’t turned childhood itself into “a debilitating endurance test.” His “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials” suggests millennials’ reward will not match their investment. Even as educational achievement in the U.S. climbs, wages stagnate. A millennial himself, Harris writes in the New York Times:

The thing is, we don’t even really know what we are racing for, much less how to tone down the competition. And most people don’t seem to be benefiting from this frantic contest, either as students or as adult workers. Americans are improving themselves, but the rewards keep flowing uphill to the 1 percent.

Over the period from 2000 to 2016, high school graduations or the equivalent have topped 90 percent for the first time and post-graduate degrees for people 25-29 have risen from 5 to 9 percent. The debt they incur in boosting their “human capital” was an issue in the election that took place a year ago.

But rather than ensuring a more secure future, the intense competition benefits employers more than prospective employees, Harris argues:

If firms want workers who can speak Mandarin or code Python, why should they pay trainees to learn when they can scare kids into training themselves? Within this system, all an individual kid can do is try to put a sufficient number of their peers between themselves and poverty.

There are some winners, but the real champions are the corporate owners: They get their pick from all the qualified applicants, and the oversupply of human capital keeps labor costs down. Competition between workers means lower wages for them and higher profits for their bosses: The more teenagers who learn to code, the cheaper one is.

Publisher’s Weekly dismisses Harris as expecting “nearly everything in life to be remunerative. Readers will come away agreeing that millennials have gotten a raw deal but unconvinced that they represent the new proletariat.” But Harris has a point.

In the ’70s, the economist Gary Becker theorized that employers would shift the costs of developing human capital onto workers, from paid on-the-job training to unpaid schooling. He figured that, though they need skilled labor, corporations would be disinclined to pay for training since other companies could then lure away “their” human capital.

But in citing Becker from 1975, Harris misses a more global trend in corporate cost-avoidance that emerged later. U.S. corporations began offshoring the cost of worker training. As I wrote in 2011:

In the Atlantic’s “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland describes the super-rich as “a nation unto themselves,” more connected to each other than to their countries or their neighbors. Freeland writes that “the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting ‘their’ taxes to paying down ‘our’ budget deficit.” Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, explains that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Why should it be?

In a global economy driven more and more by bottom-line thinking, public education is just another community expense the elite would rather not bear, isn’t it? The rich can afford private schools for their children and have little need for educated workers in the multiple cities where they own houses. How much education do gardeners and waiters really need anyway?

It’s not just each other against whom American millennials must compete in what Harris describes as an “academic arms race.” It is their peers around the world. And that world is driven by an economy and economic actors who view them as raw material to be obtained at the lowest price possible, then used up and discarded.

Something to consider when we go to the polls today. Do we want to serve the economy or do we want an economy that serves us?

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

QOTD: F-ing Moron abroadby digby

Here’s your embarrassing, humiliating presidential quote of the day:

Addressing how he first became acquainted with Japanese Prime Minister Abe — who Trump referred to by his first name, Shinzo — Trump made the off-hand comment, appearing to go off-script from his prepared remarks.

“So my relationship with Shinzo got off to quite a rocky start because I never ran for office, and here I am,” Trump remarked. “But I never ran, so I wasn’t very experienced. And after I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world. I never knew we had so many countries.”

Go to the 14 minute mark:

Hire an idiotic reality TV star con man and this is what you get.

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They loved Trump from the startby digby

This is strange. The Russians backed Trump very early. Why would they do that?

Kremlin-backed support for Donald Trump’s candidacy over social media began much earlier than previously known, a new analysis of Twitter data shows. Russian Twitter accounts posing as Americans began lavishing praise on Mr. Trump and attacking his rivals within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015, according to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

….In the three months after Mr. Trump announced his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015, tweets from Russian accounts reviewed by the Journal offered far more praise for the real-estate businessman than criticism—by nearly a 10-to-1 margin. At the same time, the accounts generally were hostile to Mrs. Clinton and the early GOP front-runner, Jeb Bush, by equal or greater margins.

Kevin Drum takes a stab at some of the reasons why they might have chosen to back this gadfly so early in the primary season:

It was just a test. Social media manipulation was new to the Russians too, and they figured Trump might make an interesting test of how effective it could be.

In the early days, you had to be very, very cynical about the United States to think that a race-baiting blowhard like Trump had a chance to win. Maybe Putin knew us better than we knew ourselves.

The Russians never really thought Trump had a chance of winning. He just seemed like a good vehicle to sow a bit of random chaos.

This whole thing started at a fairly low level by some guy who’d been pushing to “really try out this social media stuff.” His superiors finally got tired of him and told him to knock himself out. This low-level guy, it turns out, was a big Trump fan for personal reasons we’ll never know.

I’ve got another one: they had a deal.

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