Month: November 2017

Let’s talk about judgment some more, shall we?by digby

Today, I’m reminded of that “Commander in Chief Forum” last fall for some reason. I can’t help but think of how the first 10 minutes of the show unfolded:

LAUER: What is the most important characteristic that a commander-in-chief can possess?

CLINTON: Steadiness. An absolute rock steadiness, and mixed with strength to be able to make the hard decisions. Because I’ve had the unique experience of watching and working with several presidents. And these are not easy decisions. If they were, they wouldn’t get to the president in the first place.

And when you’re sitting in the Situation Room, as I have on numerous occasions, particularly with respect to determining whether to recommend the raid against bin Laden, what you want in a president, a commander-in-chief, is someone who listens, who evaluates what is being told to him or her, who is able to sort out the very difficult options being presented…

LAUER: You’re talking about judgment.

CLINTON: … and then makes the decision. Makes the decision, that’s right.

LAUER: So judgment is a key.

CLINTON: Temperament and judgment, yes.

LAUER: The word “judgment” has been used a lot around you, Secretary Clinton, over the last year-and-a-half, and in particular concerning your use of your personal e-mail and server to communicate while you were secretary of state. You’ve said it’s a mistake.

CLINTON: Mm-hmm.

LAUER: You said you made not the best choice. You were communicating on highly sensitive topics. Why wasn’t it more than a mistake? Why wasn’t it disqualifying, if you want to be commander-in- chief?

CLINTON: Well, Matt, first of all, as I have said repeatedly, it was a mistake to have a personal account. I would certainly not do it again. I make no excuses for it. It was something that should not have been done.

But the real question is the handling of classified material, which is I think what the implication of your question was. And for all the viewers watching you tonight, I have a lot of experience dealing with classified material, starting when I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee going into the four years as secretary of state. Classified material has a header which says “top secret,” “secret,” “confidential.” Nothing — and I will repeat this, and this is verified in the report by the Department of Justice — none of the e-mails sent or received by me had such a header.

LAUER: Were some of the e-mails sent or received by you referring to our drone program, our covert drone program?

CLINTON: Yes, because — of course, there were no discussions of any of the covert actions in process being determined about whether or not to go forward. But every part of our government had to deal with questions, and the secretary of state’s office was first and foremost. So there are ways of talking about the drone program…

(CROSSTALK)

LAUER: And you said you thought your communications on that were fairly routine?

CLINTON: Well, let me say, the FBI just released their report about their investigation, they discussed drone matters in the unclassified section of their report.

LAUER: But Director Comey also said this after reviewing all the information. He said there is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

CLINTON: Well, Matt, I just respectfully point to the hundreds of experienced foreign policy experts, diplomats, defense officials who were communicating information on the unclassified system because it was necessary to answer questions and to be able publicly to go as far as we could, which was not acknowledging the program.

But I would be in Pakistan, as I was on several occasions. There might very well have been a strike. I would be asked in a public setting, in an interview, about it. It was known to have happened. We had to have an answer that did not move into classified area. And I think we handled that appropriately.

LAUER: You mentioned you’re in Pakistan. Some of the e-mails you sent and received happened while you were overseas. And Director Comey also said that while they have no proof, we assessed that it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail accounts.

CLINTON: Matt, there is no evidence. Of course anything is possible. But what is factual is the State Department system was hacked. Most of the government systems are way behind the curve. We’ve had hacking repeatedly, even in the White House. There is no evidence my system was hacked.

LAUER: Let us bring in Hallie Jackson of NBC News who’s been covering this campaign. She’s getting questions from our veterans. Hallie, who are you with?

JACKSON: Hi, Matt. I’m with Lieutenant Jon Lester (ph), who will stand with me here. He began his military career by enlisting in the Air Force and then switched over to the Navy before he retired, where he flew P-3 Orions in Desert Storm and in Desert Shield. He’s a Republican, and he has this question for you, Secretary Clinton.

CLINTON: Thank you.

QUESTION: Secretary Clinton, thank you very much for coming tonight. As a naval flight officer, I held a top secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearance. And that provided me access to materials and information highly sensitive to our warfighting capabilities. Had I communicated this information not following prescribed protocols, I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned.

Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself who were and are entrusted with America’s most sensitive information to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security?

CLINTON: Well, I appreciate your concern and also your experience. But let me try to make the distinctions that I think are important for me to answer your question.

First, as I said to Matt, you know and I know classified material is designated. It is marked. There is a header so that there is no dispute at all that what is being communicated to or from someone who has that access is marked classified.

And what we have here is the use of an unclassified system by hundreds of people in our government to send information that was not marked, there were no headers, there was no statement, top secret, secret, or confidential.

I communicated about classified material on a wholly separate system. I took it very seriously. When I traveled, I went into one of those little tents that I’m sure you’ve seen around the world because we didn’t want there to be any potential for someone to have embedded a camera to try to see whatever it is that I was seeing that was designated, marked, and headed as classified.

LAUER: Let us…

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: So I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously, always have, always will.

LAUER: Sir, thank you. Thank you very much for your question. Secretary Clinton, let’s talk about your vote in favor of the war in Iraq. You’ve since said it was a mistake. …

She was widely criticized for not being a good girl and allowing herself to look annoyed at that endless line of bullshit questioning.

Now recall how Lauer treated Trump. He just let him lie and lie and lie, and never challenged him on any of them:

LAUER: You heard me say to Mrs. Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and it didn’t completely work out toward the end there, as much as possible I’d like you to tell our veterans and our people at home why you are prepared for the role of commander-in-chief and try to keep the attacks to a minimum. We’ve had a year of that and maybe 60 more days of it.

TRUMP: To a minimum, absolutely.

LAUER: OK, perfect. To a minimum. I guess that’s a question of definition.

TRUMP: I guess.

LAUER: Any time you interview a president, sitting or past president, they will tell you that the most daunting…

TRUMP: Was I supposed to answer this question?

LAUER: No, no, no, I mean just keep the attacks to a minimum. Any time you talk to a president, they’ll tell you the most daunting part of the job is the role of commander-in-chief.

TRUMP: Right.

LAUER: What have you experienced in your personal life or your professional life that you believe prepares you to make the decisions that a commander-in-chief has to make?

TRUMP: Well, I’ve built a great company. I’ve been all over the world. I’ve dealt with foreign countries. I’ve done very well, as an example, tremendously well dealing with China and dealing with so many of the countries that are just ripping this country. They are just taking advantage of us like nobody’s ever seen before.

And I’ve had great experience dealing on an international basis. I look today and I see Russian planes circling our planes. They’re taunting us. I see in Iran, I see the boats taunting our ships, our destroyers, and I think…

(CROSSTALK)

LAUER: But what have you done in your life that prepares you to send men and women of the United States into harm’s way?

TRUMP: Well, I think the main thing is I have great judgment. I have good judgment. I know what’s going on. I’ve called so many of the shots. And I happened to hear Hillary Clinton say that I was not against the war in Iraq. I was totally against the war in Iraq. From a — you can look at Esquire magazine from ’04. You can look at before that.

And I was against the war in Iraq because I said it’s going to totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has. It has absolutely been a disastrous war, and by the way, perhaps almost as bad was the way Barack Obama got out. That was a disaster.

LAUER: People talk about you and commander-in-chief, and not just Secretary Clinton, but some of your Republican opponents in the primary season, and they wonder about your temperament. They say, does Donald Trump have the temperament to be commander-in-chief?

You said something recently that I found interesting. You admitted that sometimes in the heat of a debate or when you’re talking about a lot of issues you say things that you later regret. So can we afford that with a commander-in-chief — to have a commander-in-chief who says things that he later regrets?

TRUMP: Well, when you say regret, yeah, sure, I regret. But in the meantime, I beat 16 people and here I am. So, you know, to a certain extent there is a regret. I would have liked to have done it in a nicer manner. But I had 16 very talented people that I had to go through. And that was a lot of people.

LAUER: But when you say…

TRUMP: That was a record, Matt. That was a record in the history of Republican politics. I was able to get more votes than anybody ever has gotten in the history of Republican politics.

LAUER: But when you say inflammatory things… (CROSSTALK)

LAUER: … in a presidential campaign, it’s different than saying them when you’re commander-in-chief. If you say things you regret…

TRUMP: I agree with you.

LAUER: … when you’re commander-in-chief, you can spark a conflict, you can destabilize a region, you can put American lives at risk. Can we afford to take that risk with you?

TRUMP: Well, I think absolutely. I think if you saw what happened in Mexico the other day, where I went there, I had great relationships, everything else. I let them know where the United States stands. I mean, we’ve been badly hurt by Mexico, both on the border and with taking all of our jobs or a big percentage of our jobs.

And if you look at what happened, look at the aftermath today where the people that arranged the trip in Mexico have been forced out of government. That’s how well we did.

LAUER: Back in August…

TRUMP: And that’s how well we’re going to have to do, Matt.

LAUER: Back in August, when you admitted that you regret some of the things you said, you also said this. “I can promise you this: I will always tell you the truth.”

TRUMP: It’s true.

LAUER: So let me read some of the things you’ve said. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.” Was that the truth?

TRUMP: Well, the generals under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have not been successful. ISIS…

LAUER: Do you know more about ISIS than they do?

TRUMP: I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country. You have a force of 30,000 or so people. Nobody really knows. But probably 30,000 people. And I can just see the great — as an example- General George Patton spinning in his grave as ISIS we can’t beat. We had the greatest…

(CROSSTALK)

LAUER: Yeah, you’ve said if we had MacArthur today or if we had Patton today, we would not have ISIS, that the rise of these military commanders that we have today, they come up the chain of command, and by the time they get to the top, they’re too politically correct. And we know that’s not a compliment coming from you. Have you lost faith in the military commanders?

TRUMP: I have great faith in the military. I have great faith in certain of the commanders, certainly. But I have no faith in Hillary Clinton or the leadership. You look at what’s happened. And, you know, when she comes in and starts saying, oh, I would have done this, I would have — she’s been there for 30 years. I mean, we need change, Matt. We have to have it, and we have to have it fast.

LAUER: Let’s go to Hallie Jackson in our crowd. Hallie?

That was a shitshow of a candidate forum. Lauer made the stupid emails the center of the “commander in chief” discussion for Clinton and he let Trump lie his ass off about how he was against the Iraq war and ramble on about his qualifications and incoherent plans to defeat ISIS.

They were very friendly.

Lauer was criticized at the time for not being adept at dealing with Trump and it was mentioned in passing that he’s interrupted Clinton to tell her to speed it up while letting Trump ramble like a moron unchallenged. But as Rebecca Traister has so insightfully written, men like Lauer and Halperin and Charlie Rose along with many others who may not be blatant sexual harassers but whose misogyny colored their coverage of the 2016 race can give themselves a big pat on the back for helping to make Donald Trump possible.

Some of us watched it unfold in real time, appalled and shell-shocked. After it was over we were told that it was all her fault for being a “terrible candidate” despite the fact that she still won the popular vote by a substantial margin even as she faced the headwinds of am unpredictable demagogic circus clown from hell who sucked up all the oxygen, an FBI director who lived in his own world, foreign hacking and other interference on Trump’s behalf and a media that was led by people who commonly treat professional women like chattel and seemed determined to see her humbled come hell or high water. Despite what we all saw with our own eyes in real time, after the fact the overarching narrative was that she lost because she didn’t coddle insecure white men enough in her campaign. How very convenient.

So here we are. I guess there’s some justice that some of these men are paying a price for their more blatantly sexist behavior. But that pig is still in the oval office and the he might just get us all killed.

The full story on Lauer is here. It’s graphic. He’s another exhibitionist weirdo who waved his penis at people.

Money quote: “the protected the shit out of Matt Lauer”

Update: This piece about that debate by Adele Stan got it in real time.

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QOTD: Senator Brian Schatzby digby

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Americans are going to be screwed in this bill six ways to Sunday.

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Hump day for cray-crayby digby

It’s hard to know what set him off this morning but something did. Maybe he read all those stories showing that everyone knows he’s looney tunes. Whatever it was he went on a twitter this morning like no other, even earning a rebuke from British Prime Minister Teresa May.

President Donald Trump spent his Wednesday morning on Twitter, and the results were jaw-dropping—even for him. He used the platform to share fringe anti-Muslim content and then appeared to promote a false conspiracy theory that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of a former congressional intern.

Trump kicked off his eyebrow-raising activities Wednesday morning by retweeting three videos that claimed to capture Muslims assaulting people and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. The videos were shared by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First. (It’s unclear whether all the alleged perpetrators featured in the videos are actually Muslim.)

“Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said while defending the president. “His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security.”

Other observers, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, also denounced Trump’s decision to share the videos. But by then, Trump had moved on to the news that NBC’s Matt Lauer had been fired over accusations of sexual misconduct. The president took the opportunity to attack NBC—a network he has frequently slammed as “fake news”—and to suggest that its top executives should be fired, as well.

Less than two hours later, Trump followed up with a cryptic tweet aimed at Scarborough.

Scarborough responded to Trump’s attacks Wednesday morning, tweeting that the president was “not well.”

The man that assassinated British MP Jo Cox was Britain First, the fascist group that disseminated those videos.

This is an official statement from the British Prime Minister:

“Britain First seeks to divide communities in their use of hateful narratives which pedal lies and stoke tensions. This causes anxiety to law abiding people. British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudice rhetoric of the far-right, which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents; decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the president to have done this.”

He seems to be unraveling.

Keep in mind that he’s got people in congress also doing his crazy bidding, not just with their tax cut wet dream but bogus inquiries into Hillary Clinton and covering for the Russia interference.

And speaking of which, does anything think this freak couldn’t have said or done something insane that a foreign government couldn’t blackmail him with? Please.

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The tax plan deepens a crack in the GOPby digby

I wrote about the GOP’s tax plan and the future for Salon this morning:
On the morning of the presidential election last year, The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wrote about some long-term trends in the electorate and the possibility that the 2016 race, with its distinctive odd features of a celebrity demagogue and the first woman nominee, might just accelerate the change. His thesis was that the unfolding electoral order would see the GOP relying on “preponderantly blue-collar, white, and older Rustbelt states that have mostly favored Democrats in recent years,” while Democrats would “depend on white-collar, diverse, and younger Sunbelt states that as recently as the 1990s leaned reliably toward the GOP.” He concluded the piece with what turned out to be a stunning prophecy:

The worst-case scenario for [Hillary Clinton] is that Trump’s blue-collar blitz narrowly pushes him past her in some of the Rustbelt states she needs, while she cannot advance quite enough among minority and college-educated white voters to overcome his non-college-educated, non-urban, religiously devout coalition in Sunbelt states like North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, much less Arizona and Georgia. Transitioning between her party’s past and future, Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is that she might be caught awkwardly in between.

Since the election we have had a flood of postmortems blaming everything from Facebook to Russia to racism, misogyny, bad campaigning and good old James Comey. I’d guess it could be any of those things plus a dozen more. Maybe all of them in some measure led to Trump’s narrow victory in several states that won him enough votes in the Electoral College.

Trump likes to say that it was a great landslide (it wasn’t), that winning the electoral college is very difficult for Republicans (it isn’t) and that his overwhelming defeat in the popular vote was the result of voter fraud, mostly by undocumented immigrants (it wasn’t). While that historic election will undoubtedly provide fodder for political arguments for the next quarter-century at least, I’m more interested in whether or not the Trump circus and general Republican dysfunction has derailed those long-term trends Brownstein identified.

On Tuesday, Brownstein wrote a piece for CNN analyzing whether the appalling tax bill working its way through the Senate might fracture the GOP coalition. He goes some distance toward answering that question. The Republican Party has long operated on two tracks, the first of which appeals to cultural conservatives (with a strong strain of racial resentment), who include the Christian right and blue-collar and rural whites resistant to social and demographic change.

The GOP’s other track is all about big business, Wall Street and free-market capitalism. It appeals to plutocrats and wealthy heirs to large fortunes like the Trumps. Brownstein points out something that many have failed to recognize: Despite his outrageous behavior and alleged populist iconoclasm, Trump has not deviated from this dual track. He has “complicated this balance nonetheless by intensifying the pressure on each side of the fulcrum.”

We are all well aware of how Trump has pushed every button of racial resentment, apparently to the delight of his white, blue-collar base. His belated embrace of Roy Moore after the former judge was accused of assaulting underage girls has further bonded Trump with the religious right. But where Republicans in the past would produce tax cuts that merely tilted toward the rich, he’s given the green light to the GOP Congress to deliver massive tax cuts for the wealthy while actually raising taxes on everyone else to help fund them. Despite this, so far the GOP coalition has mostly held together. The defections that cost the Republicans a victory on Affordable Care Act repeal (which operated on the same logic) came mostly from representatives in suburban districts and senators whose constituents cannot stand Trump’s outrageous style.

One thing is for sure: The tax plan is tremendously unpopular, even among white-collar white voters one might expect to be enthusiastic about it. According to a recent Quinnipiac Poll, they oppose it by two to one, and largely believe that it helps the rich at the expense of the middle class. In fact, they like it a lot less than the blue-collar workers the Democrats have assumed would be open to their own populist agenda. Those voters are sticking with Trump and the Republicans, at least so far, for reasons that have nothing to do with their economic situation.

In the Virginia elections and others around the country earlier this month, college-educated whites went with the Democrats, while working-class and rural whites stayed with the Republicans. As Brownstein says, that pattern “suggests the GOP has more to fear from well-off voters who believe the Trump-era party is violating their values than from working-class voters who conclude it’s betraying their interests.”

A majority of college-educated whites have voted Republican since political scientists first started keeping track of such things, but the margin has been growing smaller over time. White, college-educated women in particular have been moving to the Democratic Party in recent years, which makes sense given that the gender gap overall between the two parties is large and growing. Donald Trump seems to be accelerating that change.

This article in The Washington Post about the Virginia elections last month focuses on suburban Chesterfield County outside Richmond, formerly a bastion of traditional Republican voters, which went for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the first time in 56 years. This was because of a huge jump in turnout, driven by grassroots energy and mostly organized by local women.

This phenomenon may even have an effect down in deep red Alabama, where the Trump base is defiantly sticking with Moore, despite the accusations by numerous women that he pursued or attacked them when they were teenagers. According to this article in the Post, “the percentage of women in the state who had a favorable view of Moore dropped 11 points between mid-October and mid-November, from 47 percent to 36 percent; among men, Moore dropped by just two points.” Once again it’s the suburban white GOP women who are defecting. Nobody thinks these women are likely to shift permanently to the Democratic Party. They are very conservative — only 16 percent of them voted for Barack Obama. But Roy Moore is a bridge too far.

Donald Trump’s over-the-top appeals to racism and his eagerness to rescind regulations and give tax cuts to the wealthy may be keeping the Republican coalition of blue-collar rural whites and the richest one percent happy. But that’s not enough. Without white, suburban, college-educated voters, particularly women, they will lose. Every day that Trump says something crude and obnoxious to excite his dedicated fans, he alienates more of the faction that is repulsed by that tactic. Each time Republicans in Congress try to stage giveaways to their donors at the expense of the middle class, they lose a few more.

Trump didn’t create this dilemma for the GOP. The cracks in its coalition have been growing for some time. But he has taken a sledgehammer to the party, and a huge chunk of it has fallen off all at once. Republicans hold power, for the moment. Holding onto it will be quite another story.

Only in it for the money?
by Tom Sullivan

Ordinary billionaires? They can measure their manhood by it, as James Taylor sings. So when the Koch brothers say their interest in purchasing Time, Inc. via the Meredith Corporation is purely about money, you can trust them, right?

Except with the Koch brothers, money is never enough. They want control. Jane Meyer writes for The New Yorker:

Those familiar with the Kochs’ history, however, have reason to be skeptical about their professed passivity. Charles Koch, in particular, is known for the unusually tight control he exerts over Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the U.S., and also over his and his brother’s political and philanthropic ventures. As I wrote in my book “Dark Money,” a former political partner of the Koch brothers, Murray Rothbard, once testified that Charles “cannot tolerate dissent” and will “go to any end to acquire/retain control.” His brother David, meanwhile, has been quoted saying that “if we’re going to give a lot of money, we will make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent.”

This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos burnished his public image by purchasing the Washington Post, Meyer writes. The Kochs may be attempting to do the same with Time, Inc. And more.

“There is zero chance that the Koch brothers are going to keep their hands off the content of these magazines,” Mary Bottari, the deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit that documents right-wing and corporate influence-buying, told me. “When they donated six hundred and fifty million dollars to Florida State University, they wrote a contract giving them control over hiring decisions in the economics department,” she said. “The entire point of the purchase is to infuse the mainstream media with their extreme views.”

That is assuming Meredith hangs onto Time magazine. The deal my put it within reach of David Pecker, the pro-Trump CEO of American Media, Inc., publisher of National Enquirer. Pecker has wanted to purchase Time himself.

The Daily Beast reports:

John Huey, the former editor in chief of Time Inc., told The Daily Beast: “It’s logical to assume that Meredith will dump Time and Fortune, which they never wanted. Perhaps the Kochs have already bought them, or arranged to sell them to suitable proprietors.”

Making the deal part of a larger picture?

Since Time has long been a strong force in warning of the consequences of climate change, handing it over to a pro-Trump publisher would achieve two of the Kochs’ aims in one stroke: It would silence a respected journalistic campaign and it would, if under Pecker’s direction, be transformed into a megaphone for the Kochs’ favorite causes including Trump’s ever-widening attacks on environmental regulations that the Kochs have long resisted.

One way of reading the appearance of the Koch brothers in the deal is that it fits a pattern that is only now emerging in which the Trump administration is actively attempting to rearrange the landscape of media ownership. The most salient example of this is the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the $85.4 billion merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

So. In case you haven’t, and you’d like to keep the Internet as an information source not controlled by media giants or the Koch brothers, let Congress know how you feel about the FCC’s intent to eliminate net neutrality.

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

Or maybe he’s just batshit crazyby digby

The New York Times is reporting tonight that our president creates his own reality.And he’s been doing it since he took office. In fact he’s been doing it for years. That “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’eyes” thing is not a strategy. He may not even know it isa lie. In case anyone’s wondering, this is very abnormal behavior:

Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

As the issue of sexual harassment has swept through the news media, politics and entertainment industries, Mr. Trump has persisted in denying allegations that he, too, made unwanted advances on multiple women in past years. In recent days, he has continued to seed doubt about his appearance on the “Access Hollywood” tape, stunning his advisers.

More generally, Mr. Trump’s views on the issue have changed depending upon the political party involved. He has praised women for coming forward after accusations were made against a Democrat, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. But in the case of Roy S. Moore, a Republican candidate for Senate from Alabama, Mr. Trump has said he believes Mr. Moore’s denials that he behaved inappropriately with teenage girls, and he has effectively endorsed Mr. Moore’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

Mr. Trump’s journeys into the realm of manufactured facts have been frequent enough that his own staff has sought to nudge friendly lawmakers to ask questions of Mr. Trump in meetings that will steer him toward safer terrain.

To the president’s critics, his conspiracy-mongering goes to the heart of why he poses a threat to the country.

“It’s dangerous to democracy; you’ve got to have shared facts,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And on so many of these, there’s empirical evidence that says no: You didn’t win the popular vote, there weren’t more people at your inauguration than ever, that was your voice on that tape, you admitted it before.”

Mr. Flake, who is not running for re-election, said in the interview that he was about to begin a series of speeches on the Senate floor outlining his concerns about Mr. Trump. The first, he said, will be dedicated to what Mr. Flake called the president’s disregard for the truth.

Many Republican lawmakers — not wanting to undermine the party’s fragile negotiations over a much-sought tax overhaul — declined to talk on the record about Mr. Trump’s pattern of plunging into what one senator called “his rabbit holes.” But the president’s success last year has also left some in his party in awe of his achievement and uneasy about angering his base of supporters.

[…]

“He’s nobody’s choir boy, but neither were people like Winston Churchill, for example,” said the senator. “This guy, I think, is a historic person of destiny at a time and place in America when we’ve got to make a right-hand turn here.” Asked if the truth still matters, Mr. Perdue said: “Oh, absolutely. Facts are what you base decisions on.”

But Mr. Trump seems to not want to fully accept those facts that are embarrassing or inconvenient.

In October 2016, when The Washington Post first emailed Mr. Trump’s aides about the dialogue from the “Access Hollywood” tape, Mr. Trump said the words described by the newspaper did not sound like things he would say, according to two people familiar with the discussions. However, when an aide played the audio after the newspaper posted it online, Mr. Trump, who had been preparing for his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, did not deny it.

“It’s me,” he told people in the room as he listened. Yet after The New York Times published an article last weekend revealing that the president had questioned the authenticity of the recording, White House aides refused to answer questions about whether Mr. Trump still believes it was him on the tape.

[…]

Mr. Trump’s friends did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events. One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time. The president continues to boast of winning districts that he did not in fact win, the lawmaker said, and of receiving 52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him.

Remember, Trump wasn’t talking to himself. Billy Bush was on that tape too. Weirdly he doesn’t share Trump’s delusion. He said:

“Obviously I’m embarrassed and ashamed. It’s no excuse, but this happened eleven years ago—I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I’m very sorry.”

And:

“Looking back upon what was said on that bus, I wish I had changed the topic. [Trump] liked TV and competition. I could’ve said, ‘Can you believe the ratings on whatever?’ But I didn’t have the strength of character to do it.”

Instead, Bush characterizes his younger self, who rode that bus with the future President of the United States, as a “sycophantic” “pleaser.” Describing the nerve-wracking assignment of covering both Trump and The Apprentice at the time, Bush lays out a scenario that might sound familiar to anyone who follows the civil-war currently raging inside the White House. According to Bush, Trump “decided a lot of times from day to day, moment to moment, who he liked, who was in and who was out. And my job was to remain in. I needed to be in, or maybe I’d be out.”

He seems to accept that it was Trump he was talking to that day and that he said what we heard. It is on tape after all.

Trump isn’t doing this as a strategy. He’s doing it because he has forced people to buy into his lies simply by asserting them for years. He may even believe them after he tells them enough times. He is so narcissistic that he thinks he can alter reality itself. He is ill.

You might wonderhow this can go on. Who knows? But at least they’ll get their motherfucking tax cuts.

Update: The Washington Post has more:

President Trump has expressed certainty that the special-counsel probe into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia will be finished by the end of the year, complete with an exoneration from Robert S. Mueller III, according to several friends who have spoken with him in recent days.

Trump has dismissed his historically low approval ratings as “fake” and boasted about what he calls the unprecedented achievements of his presidency, even while chatting behind the scenes, saying no president since Harry Truman has accomplished as much at this point.

Read on, there’s more. Good God.

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A Satanic Majesties Christmasby digby

What holiday? Day of the Dead?

The Daily Beast:

Anyone thinking of getting drunk at a White House Christmas party these next few weeks, or even President Trump on one of his nocturnal ambles, should be warned: the East Colonnade has become the most terrifying domestic space in America.

Melania Trump, with what looks like the help of Tim Burton, has designed an anti-Christmas wonderland of white branches set stark against the wall and casting creepy shadows on the ceiling, leading to—at the end of the corridor—in the East Garden Room, a traditional Christmas tree bathed in golden light.

The only thing missing is a dragon breathing fire, intent on stopping you getting your hands on a magic amulet.

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About that State Department redesign…by digby

It seems to have hit a snag:
Huh:

The senior State Department official charged with overseeing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s effort to overhaul the agency has resigned after just three months on the job, according to a department official.

Maliz Beams was named counselor to the department on Aug. 17, according to her biography on the State Department’s website. She has decided to return to her home in Boston, and Christine Ciccone, Tillerson’s deputy chief of staff, will step in to lead the redesign effort, according to the official, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

The departure is a blow for Tillerson, who had brought in Beams to oversee the signature initiative of his term so far — a restructuring intended to eliminate inefficiencies and overlap at the department. The plan has run up against resistance within the department and in Congress, where critics say it has contributed to key positions going unfilled and plummeting morale.

Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said Tillerson’s staff isn’t “anywhere close to having a plan to present relative to the reforms that they want to make there.”

Request to Congress

In the face of such criticism, the State Department official said that Tillerson will ask Congress to expedite approval of nominees for undersecretary for management and legal adviser.

Beams had led “highly successful organizational transformations in a variety of financial services industry sectors,” according to her State Department biography.

Beams was one of Tillerson’s most high-profile hires, and one of the few people appointed to a top post amid a wave of departures by senior officials. Before becoming counselor, she had been chief executive of Voya Financial Retirement Services, and before that president of TIAA Institutional and Individual Client Services.

I wrote about the “problems at State” yesterday for Salon. It looks like it’s getting worse.

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Flips and Flops and the Russia investigationby digby

I’m not sure what to make of this but it seems interesting:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey dined with President Donald Trump last weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida — where, a report said, they had a “lengthy conversation” at the main dining table surrounded by several of Trump’s friends, associates, and political allies.

A tipster told Politico’s Playbook about the conversation, which raised eyebrows given Woolsey’s centrality to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser.

Woolsey, who served on the board of Flynn’s lobbying firm, Flynn Intel Group, was at a meeting on September 19, 2016, with Flynn and Turkish government ministers in which they discussed removing the controversial Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen from US soil, Woolsey has said.

Woolsey apparently notified Vice President Joe Biden through a mutual friend about the meeting, which he thought could have been an illegal discussion, Woolsey’s spokesman, Jonathan Franks, said earlier this year.

Franks confirmed late last month that Mueller’s team had interviewed Woolsey about the meeting. He said Woolsey and his wife had been in touch with the FBI since before Mueller began overseeing the bureau’s Russia investigation in May.

“Ambassador Woolsey and his wife have been in communication with the FBI regarding the September 19, 2016, meeting Ambassador Woolsey was invited to attend by one of General Flynn’s business partners,” Franks said in a statement at the time. “Ambassador Woolsey and his wife have responded to every request, whether from the FBI, or, more recently, the Office of the Special Counsel.”

Franks released another statement responding to Politico Playbook’s tip on Monday. “Ambassador Woolsey has served 4 Presidents,” the statement said. “He has never communicated the contents of his conversations with any of them to a third party and doesn’t intend to start now.”

Woolsey’s participation in the September 19, 2016 meeting and another one the next day with two Turkish businessmen — during which he reportedly pitched a $10 million contract to help discredit Gulen — may have landed him on the FBI’s radar even before Trump won the presidency.

Now, Mueller has reportedly gathered enough evidence against Flynn and his son to charge them with crimes related to their previously unregistered lobbying work for Turkish government interests.
[…]
“Whenever a subject of a criminal investigation talks to a witness, the prosecution will ask questions about what was discussed during that meeting,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor. In this case, he said, the subject is Trump and the witness is Woolsey.

Woolsey is not a naif and he had to know he was going to be spotted and that it would raise eyebrows. Unless he’s reporting back to Mueller, which he very well might be, this is a very odd thing for him to do.  I do not believe he’ll lie to the feds for Trump. He’s a terrible person but he isn’t a Trump loyalist.

This crew never fails to amaze does it?

Update: here’s something more:

A Turkish-Iranian gold trader accused of violating US sanctions on Iran pleaded guilty on Tuesday, prompting speculation that he could be cooperating with prosecutors building a case against Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser whose lobbying work for Turkish government interests is under federal investigation.

The trader, Reza Zarrab, was arrested in March 2016 in Florida. His case was set to go to trial in New York this week on charges of fraud and money laundering, but he took a plea deal that will require him to testify against his codefendant in the same conspiracy, a defense lawyer said on Tuesday.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara wrote a memo last May alleging that Zarrab “facilitated millions of dollars-worth of transactions on behalf of Iran … through a global network of companies located in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates ” designed to evade US sanctions.

Bharara also accused Zarrab of wrongdoing that implicated top Turkish government officials. Zarrab, he alleged, had “engaged in a massive bribery scheme … paying cabinet-level [Turkish] governmental officials and high-level bank officers tens of millions of Euro and US dollars” to facilitate his transactions.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fiercely lobbied high-level Obama administration officials for Zarrab’s release, beginning shortly after Zarrab was arrested in Miami last March. Erdogan made personal appeals to both Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama, and he sent his justice minister at the time to meet with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to argue that the case was “based on no evidence.”

Zarrab was not released, but Erdogan apparently continued lobbying for his release into January. By the time Obama left office, the Turkish government had already begun establishing ties to people close to President Donald Trump, including former Flynn and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani joined Zarrab’s legal team in March, shortly after Flynn was fired over his conversations with Russia’s former ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak.

Federal prosecutors are now pursuing a separate but parallel investigation into whether Flynn used his cabinet position to secure Zarrab’s release from a New York jail and return to Turkey a controversial Muslim cleric loathed by Erdogan — in exchange for as much as $15 million.

Zarrab could have information about Flynn’s ties to Erdogan that could be useful to federal investigators examining the extent to which Flynn was working for the Turkish government both before and after the election.

“You can fill in the gaps that federal investigators are looking for any relation between Erdogan and Flynn,” criminal defense attorney Danny Cevallos told NBC last week. “So, to the extent that Zarrab has any connection or knowledge of that, it is very important that they’re flipping him.”

I’d say so …

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The steaming pile of offal (aka “tax reform”)by digby

If you are having a difficult time following the ins and outs of this steaming pile of offal known as “tax reform” wending its way through the senate right now, I thought I would share this handy overview from the New York Times David Leonhardt’s daily briefing. The details are changing constantly, but it’s just getting worse. At this point it’s unknown if they’ll get this through but if it fails it will, once again, only be because a couple of Senators decide not to blow up the country that day.

The independent evaluations of the Trump tax plan have been rough. They show a plan that deeply cuts taxes on the wealthy, causes the deficit to jump and does little to lift economic growth. 

Yet the plan’s defenders continue to describe it as a “beautiful” thing (President Trump’s word) that would transform the economy and bestow gifts on ordinary Americans. How do they keep making these claims? I count four major tactics that they’re using: 

1. Describe the benefits of a different tax plan — and make it sound as if they’re talking about this one. 

A group of longtime Republican economists took this approach in a long open letter, published yesterday by The Wall Street Journal. It’s titled “How Tax Reform Will Lift the Economy,” which sure sounds like an article praising the current plan before the Senate. 

But it actually describes a very different plan, a “revenue-neutral” plan that would offset its corporate tax cuts with fewer corporate loopholes. The Senate bill is radically different from this imaginary plan the economists are praising. Instead of being revenue neutral — technical talk for a bill that neither grows nor shrinks the deficit — the Senate plan would increase the deficit by more than $1 trillion over its first decade. 

The open letter is just one example of this deception. The bill’s defenders frequently say some version of, “We need tax reform.” But their plan bears little resemblance to meaningful tax reform. It’s akin to telling someone, “You need a new car,” and then giving the person a lemon.

(For those who want more detail on the open letter, Jason Furman walks through its distortions in more detail.)

2. Talk about the plan’s middle-class tax cuts — and ignore the middle-class tax increases.
The plan is a windfall for the wealthy, but it’s quite mixed for the middle class and poor. Some provisions raise taxes on the middle class and poor. Others cut taxes. Long term, most families would probably be worse off, as I’ve explained before.

One favorite sleight of hand from the plan’s supporters is to talk only about the provisions that help the middle class and conveniently fail to mention the other parts.

Take Senator Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, who went on “Meet the Press” this weekend to sell the bill. “The middle class tax cuts are in there,” Portman said. “It doubles the standard deduction up to 24 grand for a family. It doubles the child tax credit. It actually — it lowers the rates.”

All that is true. Unfortunately, Senator Portman left out the elimination of the personal exemption, which protects $4,000 per person from income taxes. He left out the elimination of various tax breaks that help the middle class. And he left out the introduction of a new inflation measure that will push more families into higher tax brackets over time.

3. Pretend that the future will never arrive.

To hold down the estimated cost of the bill, Senate leaders have set some of its biggest provisions — the ones that most benefit the middle class — to expire over the next decade. The corporate tax cuts, by contrast, are permanent.

But when the plan’s defenders describe the bill, they tend to be talking about a point before the bill is fully implemented — without admitting as much. If you hear a senator talking about a $1,000 tax cut that a typical middle-class family would receive, it’s in one of the plan’s early years.

(If you hear a senator talking about a bigger tax cut, as Portman and many others do, they’re usually talking about the upper middle class or affluent without saying so.)

By the time the bill is fully implemented, it will be a net tax increase on every income group below $75,000 a year. It will also leave federal taxes virtually unchanged for families making between $75,000 and $100,000. For the wealthy, it’s still a tax cut.

And all of these estimates understate the long-term damage to the middle class, because they ignore the cuts to education, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that will eventually be necessary to reduce the deficit.

4. Rush, rush, rush.

Perhaps the biggest giveaway about the plan is the way that its supporters are trying to push it through Congress as quickly as possible.

They’re not holding hearings where experts can debate the content of the plan. They are not even waiting for a final analysis from Congress’s official tax arbiter, the Joint Committee on Taxation. They understand that facts and debate hurt their cause. They are hoping that partisan loyalty is strong enough to overcome substance.

Related. “If the tax bill is so great,” Catherine Rampell asked in a recent Washington Post column, “why does the GOP keep lying about it?”

“Why would anyone write a bill full of provisions that evaporate over time?” Paul Krugman asks. “There’s no economic or policy logic behind it. Instead, it’s all about trying to have it both ways, making a safe space for political double talk.”

Poll after poll has shown that the tax plan is deeply unpopular, typically with a national approval rating around 30 percent. Three new polls show that the plan is similarly unpopular in Arizona, Maine and Tennessee, three states with swing-vote senators.

In fact, it’s not clear any piece of legislation so unpopular has ever before become law, as Seth Hanlon notes.