Month: November 2017

Uncle Jeff knewby digby

He says he knew nothing whatsoever about any Russians. And yet over and over again we’ve seen that Russians were being met with and talked about.

Looks like Jeff Sessions perjured himself.

Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election has entangled the attorney general. In his sworn testimony during his confirmation hearing in January, Sessions was asked by Senator Al Franken, “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?” Sessions responded: “Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”

But George Papadopoulos’s guilty plea indicates that there were attempts in the Trump campaign to arrange a meeting with Putin, and that Sessions was aware of them. As CNNreports this morning, “The chairman of Trump’s national security team, then Alabama Senator and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, shut down the idea of a Putin meeting at the March 31, 2016, gathering, according to the source. His reaction was confirmed with another source who had discussed Sessions’s role.”

I’m not convinced that he really “shut it down.” Sound more like “shhhh, ixnay on the ollusion-cay talk in a publicx meeting.” But either way, it’s hard to believe Sessions forgot about this exchange too.

Trump lies are destroying his voters’ livesby digby

Trump is not going to “bring back coal.” This isn’t going to end well.

When Mike Sylvester entered a career training center earlier this year in southwestern Pennsylvania, he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.

He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course.

”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.

Despite broad consensus about coal’s bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

Trump has promised to revive coal by rolling back environmental regulations and moved to repeal Obama-era curbs on carbon emissions from power plants.

“I have a lot of faith in President Trump,” Sylvester said.

But hundreds of coal-fired plants have closed in recent years, and cheap natural gas continues to erode domestic demand. The Appalachian region has lost about 33,500 mining jobs since 2011, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Although there have been small gains in coal output and hiring this year, driven by foreign demand, production levels remain near lows hit in 1978.

A White House official did not respond to requests for comment on coal policy and retraining for coal workers.

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation’s poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

I guess he just wants to work in a coal mine and get black lung disease. That’s his privilege. But it’s a real shame that Trump promised him that he’d deliver that dream to him when it’s obvious that he cannot and will not do it.

Mission Accomplishedby digby

There is new polling on the right’s latest propaganda campaign:

Attempts by Trump world, Fox News, and other affiliated interests to try to turn the Russia news back onto Hillary Clinton have had some effect. A month ago we found that among Trump voters 41% thought Russia wanted Clinton to win the election last year, to 29% who thought it wanted Trump to win. Now that’s up to 56% who think Russia wanted Clinton to win and just 18% who grant that it wanted Trump to win.

That’s part of a general pattern when it comes to Trump voters and the Russia story. Only 7% believe that members of Trump’s campaign team worked in association with Russia to help him win the election, to 83% who don’t think that happened. And even if collusion is proven they don’t care- just 11% think Trump should resign if that’s the case to 79% who believe he should remain in office. 75% dismiss the entire Russia story as ‘fake news,’ to 13% who disagree with that assessment. This poll was conducted mostly after the news that indictments were coming was out, but before the actual indictments were released.

Support for impeachment is up too:

PPP’s newest national poll finds a record level of support for impeaching Donald Trump. 49% of voters support impeaching him, to 41% who are opposed to doing so. This marks the 6th month in a row we’ve found a plurality of voters in favor of impeaching Trump, and it’s the closest we’ve found to a majority.

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They’ve never stopped fighting the civil warby digby
My column for Salon this morning is about John Kelly and the civil war:
Back in 1990 as the nation prepared to launch the first Gulf War,Ken Burn’s epic documentary series “The Civil War” was broadcast for the first time on PBS and, by all accounts, it had quite an effect on some of the top military brass. Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell recalled in his memoirs that he had told General Norman Schwartzkopf, the Commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, the leader of the coalition forces, “at least now people will know what war is about.”

Schwarzkopf recalled in his memoirs that Powell had related to him that after he’d asked for more troops and time at one point, an “official” who’d watched the series compared him to General George McClellan, the first commanding Union General known for his overly cautious strategy. The official reportedly declared, “My God, he’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf wrote that the person in question “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.” Twenty pages later he mentioned that then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney sent him “The Civil War” series on video just before they commenced the bombing making it obvious who the unqualified civilian had been.

Apparently, the brass and the warhawks were all greatly influenced by this documentary series which may explain why General John Kelly sent a little shockwave through the country when he echoed his boss’s obtuse “both sides” comments about Charlottesville by telling Laura Ingraham in an interview on Monday night that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand” as part of a defense of confederate General Robert E. Lee.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended his comments from the podium on Tuesday morning saying:

“I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War, but I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War. There are a lot of historians that think that and there are a lot of different versions of those compromises.”

Author and civil war buff Ta-Nahesi Coates gave a twitter lesson on all the compromises that were attempted in advance of the civil war and civil war historians stepped up to take issue with Kelly’s comments.

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait explained that Shelby Foote’s analysis, and the Burns series generally (which was made nearly 30 years ago) is a misrepresentation of the facts but also a sadly common misconception among the American people even today. He points out that “a 2011 poll found that 48 percent of Americans identify states’ rights as the war’s main conflict, while only 38 percent identify it as slavery.”

Despite America fighting a bloody civil war over slavery, it still hasn’t been honestly dealt with in our culture.

The first Republican president dealt with this subject of “compromise” in 1860 at the Cooper Union in New York. He spoke for a long time about the question of the expansion of slavery and what the founders intended when they wrote the constitution about federal power and jurisdiction. And then he addressed the Southern people, pointing out that their contemptuous attitude toward the other parties made them deaf and blind to their own self-interest, their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith and even accept when they had been granted a victory.

He laid out each moment in the fraught history of “compromise” over slavery and showed how the southern leadership had refused to take yes for an answer. And he explained, with great insight, why:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them?

Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

If this sounds familiar it’s because the political faction that organized itself around slavery still exists and carries that chip on its collective shoulder to this day. What Lincoln described in the Cooper Union speech is the attitude and temperament of the racist tribe of America. They call themselves Republicans today but until 50 years ago they would have identified as Democrats.

Today the racist tribe is once again as paranoid and angry as it was before the civil war. And as they did then, they are cheating and lying constantly, from blatantly suppressing the vote to breaking democratic norms and rules to using every lever of institutional machinery to preserve their power, such as the stunning refusal to fill a Supreme Court seat named by a president of the opposing party.

As we’ve seen, this isn’t new. But it’s as dangerous as it’s ever been. The country isn’t going to physically break in two this time and the issues around racism and modernism are more diffuse. It’s a different nation and a different world. But the stakes are actually much higher: it appears they’ve even decided to enlist foreign actors to help them defeat their rivals if that’s what it takes. They will accept nothing less than total and complete fealty to their beliefs and ideology and if the country comes apart, that’s a price they’ve always been more than willing to pay.

Indeed, it’s becoming clear that when Donald Trump promised to make America great again, he was talking about the Confederate States of America, not the good old USA.

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The authoritarian’s compromise
by Tom Sullivan

A tweet the other day quipped that Republicans are the party of law and order so long as they write the laws and give the orders.

It wasn’t always so. Democrats of the Old South were committed to law and order: states’ rights (to maintain slavery), property rights (to treat humans as), and to compromise. We learned yesterday from White House chief of staff John F. Kelly it was lack of compromise that led to the Civil War. So long as the North compromised by acknowledging that black slaves were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race,” the union would remain intact.

Facing westward expansion and the addition of new, free states that, over time, would erode slaveholders’ power in Congress, the South saw its only path forward was for the North to compromise at the muzzle end of a cannon.

It is a peculiar notion that laws — and democracy itself — are only legitimate so long as one can predetermine an outcome. To persons of a certain cast of mind, when public attitudes and demographics shift, weakening their position, compromise in the form of an opponents’ surrender or gaming the legal process is required.

Jonathan Chait observes the drift among Republicans to assert the president’s right to quash any legal investigation he chooses. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page the other day asserted:

A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey. If a president can be held to account for “obstruction of justice” by ending an investigation or firing a prosecutor or law-enforcement official — an authority the constitution vests in him as chief executive — then one of the presidency’s most formidable powers is transferred from an elected, accountable official to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.

If only Richard Nixon had asserted this claim regarding a certain hotel break-in. Chait writes that the efforts of modern-day GOP reformers such as Steve Bannon are “easily understood as an effort to cleanse its ranks of any members who might be inclined to uphold the rule of law at Trump’s expense.” The only path Republican lawmakers have to remaining in office, in Bannon’s view, is to compromise whatever integrity they have left.

Dahlia Lithwick and Stephen I. Vladeck observe in the Washington Post a dangerous effort to discredit any judges that rule against the sitting president. Those who do have joined “the resistance.”

Lithwick and Vladeck write:

But discrediting federal jurists as having joined “the resistance” isn’t merely an argument lacking in analysis or evidentiary support; it’s also profoundly dangerous, for it suggests that any and all rulings against President Trump are not just doctrinally incorrect but also illegitimate. Much like criticism of all unflattering media reports as “fake news,” and attacks on the loyalty or patriotism of legislators who don’t vote in support of the president’s agenda, denouncing and dismissing all judges with the temerity to rule against Mr. Trump represents a direct attack on the independence and integrity of the entire judicial branch.

Attacks on individual judges based on a single ruling or upon the geographic location of their court or the president who appointed them are broadsides against the entire judicial branch. These attacks undermine public confidence in the impartiality of judges and will make it harder in the future for the courts to stand up to the political branches, even in cases in which their current critics think they should.

Undermining the courts is not just a Beltway pastime. North Carolina Republicans have found federal courts decidedly uncooperative, having ruled against a string of their legislative efforts to game the state’s elections process. But since the NCGOP has no authority over federal courts, members have targeted state judges for some creative compromise. They propose exposing them to more political pressure by making them run for office every two years.

The unusual move by legislators prompted unusual comment from sitting Wake County Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens, who calls the maneuver “an affront to the rule of law, an attempt to compromise the integrity of the separation of powers.”

It’s what you get when a party’s principles are whatever works and its commitment to the Constitution is a mile wide and an inch deep.

But undermining the rule of law is what people of a certain cast of mind — call them Confederates, if you will — do when they cannot prevail through legitimate means. If they cannot win court cases, they delegitimize the courts, remove their jurisdiction, or rewrite the laws by which judges are chosen and courts operate. If they cannot win elections, they prevent the “wrong” people from voting and erode the franchise to ensure their power doesn’t erode further. Whatever ethical compromises are required to maintain power.

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

Happy Halloweenby digby

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