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Month: November 2017

A very fine Nazi

A very fine Naziby digby

And he’s a big supporter of the GOP

A Minnesota man accused of committing war crimes when he commanded a Nazi-led unit during World War II contributed thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee, a Daily Beast review of federal campaign records found.

Michael Karkoc is wanted for arrest in Poland after the country’s war crimes prosecutors said they are “100 percent” certain that Karkoc commanded a SS company and that there was “no doubt” that his men razed two Polish villages, killing 40 civilians. In July, Poland requested Karkoc’s extradition from the U.S. and is waiting for a decision. (The Justice Department said it does not comment on extradition requests.)

In June 2013, the Associated Press reported Karkoc was a SS officer and that one of his men told Soviet investigators that his unit had been ordered to “liquidate all the residents” of the village of Chlaniow, Poland, resulting in the deaths of men, women and children.

After the AP published its exposé, Karkoc made three separate contributions to the Republican National Committee totaling $3,850 between September 2013 and May 2014. These are the only federal campaign contributions he has made, according to available records.

The RNC did not respond to a request for comment.

Karkoc’s son, Andriy Karkos, told The Daily Beast the contributions were made only because Karkoc has been a “lifelong Republican.”

“He has a picture of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his bedroom,” Karkos said.

Asked to explain his father’s affinity for the GOP, Karkos replied: “Republicans oppose communists…Under FDR, the White House was penetrated by Soviet agents of influence.”

“I’m assuming he voted Republican [in the 2016 presidential election],” Karkos added, remarking that he sees no reason for his father to have changed his support for the GOP.

I had a landlord who was a Polish immigrant of that generation and he worshiped Ronald Reagan too. I don’t think he was a an actual Nazi. But he could have been. He certainly didn’t like Jews. But then he also believed so fervently in his rights as a “property owner” that he would come into my apartment day or night even when I was sleeping and there was nothing I could do to convince him that I had rights too. He would wave his deed in my face and scream “This is my house! I own this! You own nothing!” So, he may not have been a Nazi but he was at the very least a Paulite.

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Do the Republicans believe in winning by any means necessary? lol.

By any means necessaryby digby

Asking David Bossie if doing something to help the GOP win is worth it “at any cost” is kind of hilarious. There is nothing on this earth he wouldn’t do to win. He is a ruthless political assassin and I would not be surprised if he’s putting together oppo on the Roy Moore accusers right now.
Via Raw Story:

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade called out Citizen United President David Bossie after he asserted that Alabama Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore must win even though he is accused of molesting underage girls.

During a Wednesday interview on Fox & Friends, Kilmeade asked Bossie if President Donald Trump had done the right thing by endorsing Moore.

“Absolutely,” Bossie replied. “We have to win this Senate race.”

“At any cost?” Kilmeade interrupted.

“Well, I don’t know what that means, Brian,” Bossie snapped. “But I think that the cost of this election of having a liberal Democrat who is for open borders and for gun confiscation and for abortion on demand is not what the people of Alabama want.”

“I think that tax reform becomes endangered if we lose a Senate seat,” he added.

“The Young Republicans say, ‘I’m not voting for him,’” Kilmeade interrupted again. “The GOP doesn’t support him, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell doesn’t support him. So, it’s the lesser of two evils?”

“The people of Alabama get to vote,” Bossie remarked, curbing his defense of Moore. “And I think that’s the important takeaway is that the people of Alabama have the next couple of weeks to decide.”

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This takes the cake (the pumpkin cake)

This takes the cake (the pumpkin cake)by digby

Many years back (before the pumpkin spice craze) on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake on the blog and received a very nice note from Washington Post journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she’d been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it. Ever since then I’ve called it Karen Tumulty cake.
It’s easy even for non bakers and it really is very good.

For cake

* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs

Icing

* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.

Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.

Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.

Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.

Icing:

Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.

The flavors actually improve with time so you can make it ahead if you like.

Bon Appetit!

Trump’s deportation madness — and the immigration that’s going to do him in

Trump’s deportation madnessby digby

I wrote about the latest action to feed Trump’s obsession to rid America of all foreigners for Salon this morning. But because he doesn’t really understand who is foreign and who isn’t he’s got a little problem:

President Trump issued two presidential pardons on Tuesday and to the nation’s great relief they didn’t go to anyone named Manafort or Flynn. They were for a couple of other turkeys called Drumstick and Wishbone and in his usual classy fashion he joked around about how he loved to rescind his predecessor’s orders and had looked into withdrawing the pardons for last year’s turkeys but was told he couldn’t do it. He seemed quite pleased with himself.

Unfortunately, there are millions of Americans not feeling quite so happy this Thanksgiving. The Trump administration dropped a lovely bombshell this week on the 58,000 Haitians who came to America after the catastrophic earthquake in 2010 as part of the temporary permit program and told them they have to leave.

Recall that these Haitians were displaced by a massive earthquake in 2010 that killed over 100,000 people and destroyed an estimated 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings.There were so many bodies they had to be buried in mass graves. Nearly all infrastructure, including communications airport, roads and power were destroyed. Cholera broke out and killed more than 8,000 people. In other words the country was decimated.

The disaster was so monumental that help and pledges came in from all over the world. But the task has been overwhelming and corruption has been rife, particularly in one egregious case involving the American Red Cross which NPR and Pro Publica reported in 2015 had mismanaged $500 million dollars that had been donated for disaster relief and rebuilding of the country with very little to show for it. Seven years later the country has barely begun to fully recover, at least partly due to the fact that much of the help they were promised never materialized.

Haiti is one of the most impoverished countries in the world and the poorest in the Americas. It has a population of 11 million and the average life expectancy is only 50 years. According to the World Bank, “more than 6 million out of 10.4 million (59%) Haitians live under the national poverty line of US$2.41 per day and over 2.5 million (24%) live under the national extreme poverty line of US$1.23 per day.” It is not exactly the land of opportunity.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration has decided that despite the fact that many of these people have American children and are working and contributing to the country they have to go back. They are determined to deport as many people as possible regardless of their circumstances, what they are facing in their home countries and how much they have enriched our communities. For now this seems to be the final word for these Haitians but Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin, Chris Van Hollen and Dianne Feinstein have proposed legislation to protect undocumented immigrants living under temporary protected status in the future by allowing them to apply for permanent legal status after three years. It’s unlikely this will ever pass with the immigrant hating Trump in the White House but it could happen if the Democrats take control in 2020.

And that could happen as a direct result of such harsh and cruel policies. Right now Puerto Rico is still in the midst of a catastrophe not all that different from what happened in Haiti in 2010. It has not faced the massive loss of life because there was warning of the hurricane and people were able to prepare. But the broken infrastructure and loss of basic necessities in the disaster’s wake is also devastating. And in this case, the island is an American territory which could have expected the kind of professional, efficient disaster relief that any American state would receive.

We know that didn’t happen in the immediate aftermath. The response to Hurricane Maria was a disgrace and if the administration wasn’t plagued with scandals, gaffes, investigations, palace intrigue and non-stop misconduct and incompetence, the president’s reaction to the disaster and his behavior when he went to visit would have been the low point. We’ve already seen one glaring example of corruption with the rewarding of a very expensive contract to restore power to an inexperienced friend of Trump’s interior secretary Ryan Zinke. (The project is a mess.)That’s just one of many shocking examples of Trump’s malfeasance, almost forgotten now in the avalanche of news that’s happened since.

However, Puerto Rico is still in serious crisis. The unofficial death toll as gathered by CNN is around 500 people. The LA Times reports that economist Tony Villamil, an expert in Puerto Rico, believes that it “going to take a decade at minimum for the island to recover and regain some sense of normalcy.The ports, the power grid, the highways all need to be rebuilt with significant improvements. There needs to be a strong public-private sector relationship that is developed to help in these efforts.”

To date Congress has approved $5 billion in aid for Puerto Rico. Governor Ricardo Rossello has requested nearly $94 billion more. The chances of that happening with this GOP congress are remote, to say the least. Their priority is placating their wealthy benefactors with gigantic tax cuts.

The people of Puerto Rico are Americans and like every other American,they can move wherever they want. And that is exactly what they are doing. The government’s poor response has people leaving the island at a rate of 2,000 people a day. According to the NY Times, 168,000 Puerto Ricans have emigrated to Florida since the hurricane and many more are expected. And since they know very well that the island is being neglected and it’s presumed it will take years to repair, they are putting down roots on the mainland.

Unlike the Haitians and Nicaraguans who are in the US on a temporary permit, they can stay. They can go to school, work, and start businesses. They can also remember who it was that threw paper towels when he came to the island for a photo op and then never bothered to talk about the crisis again.

And they can do something else once they take up residency on the mainland: vote.

President Trump is in Florida for Thanksgiving. At some point during his sumptuous feast perhaps the fact that he only won the state by 1.2% in the last election will come up in the conversation and maybe someone will mention that next time the state will be filled with new voters whose lives were upended by hurricane Maria. He will ask how long before they can be deported back to the island and someone will tell him that they can stay as long as they like. It might just ruin his holiday.

Do unto others…first by @BloggersRUs

Do unto others…first
by Tom Sullivan

In states under the control of legislatures radicalized by the T-party, citizens watched Republican lawmakers hyper-gerrymander congressional and state districts, constrict access to voting, and impose on cities measures designed to weaken them both financially and politically. Where the GOP gained power during the Obama presidency, it moved swiftly to consolidate it and lock it in for as long as possible into the future.

The sitting president’s Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity promises to attempt at the national level what voter “integrity” measures have done in the states: limit the franchise to the right (the right’s) voters.

Politico now reports that the White House will propose Thomas Brunell as deputy director of the Census Bureau with the power to oversee the 2020 census:

Brunell, a political science professor, has testified more than half a dozen times on behalf of Republican efforts to redraw congressional districts, and is the author of a 2008 book titled “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”

[…]

The pick would break with the long-standing precedent of choosing a nonpolitical government official as deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau. The job has typically been held by a career civil servant with a background in statistics. It does not require Senate confirmation, so Congress would have no power to block the hire.

When in power, consolidate.

Jonathan Chait sees such efforts and the flogging of the “IRS scandal” as the Republican “blueprint for the use of government as an implement of partisan domination and revenge.”

He writes about the “retaliatory state” at New York magazine, drawing on Richard Hofstadter’s classic analysis:

“The enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.” Conservatives simultaneously suspect that Democrats have perverted government as a tool of partisan domination and that this is a proper and normal — or at least inevitable — use of executive power.

Here in the provinces, small-government conservatism now seems quaint. In state after state, conservative legislatures with the power to do so have sought to privatize local infrastructure, gerrymander local government, target uppity cities audacious enough to pass minimum wage laws or restrictions on fracking, and in some cases effectively abolish local governance.

With their proposed tax bill, conservatives are no longer being coy about its design. Chait cites Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation on the tax bill. Some of the “pay fors” in the bill, Moore chuckles, “help defund the left.” Chait adds:

Moore argues that subjecting income spent on state and local taxes to federal taxation — a change Republicans might be expected to oppose as a form of double taxation — will have the delicious secondary effect of pressuring state government to shrink. “The big blue states either cut their taxes and costs, or the stampede of high-income residents from these states accelerates,” he gloats. “The big losers here are the public employee unions — the mortal enemies of Republicans. This all works out nicely.”

Not to mention (Moore does) the tax provisions targeting universities that “indoctrinate 21-year olds with an increasingly vacuous and illiberal education.” Education is on the enemies list too. Chait observes, “Supply-side economics has given way to revenge-o-nomics.”

It would be a saving grace if, as Jamelle Bouie suggests, Republicans displayed “an inability not just to govern but to do much of anything outside of ideological posturing.” But that assumes governing as their goal. They want to rule.

To that end, the GOP strategy in Washington, D.C. and in state capitols is do unto others before they can do unto you. It is not just policy debates conservative leaders practice in bad faith, but citizenship.

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

Some, I’m sure, are very fine people

Some, I’m sure, are very fine peopleby digby

Only two ther countries agree with them:

The United States says it was one of three countries to vote against a U.N. resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism over freedom of speech issues and concerns that Russia was using it to carry out political attacks against its neighbors.

The resolution entitled “Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” was approved by the U.N.’s human rights committee on Friday with 131 in favor, 3 against with 48 abstentions.

Ukraine and Palau were the other no votes.

Apparently, the Obama administration also voted against this resolution in the name of free speech. Of course when they did that Nazis weren’t marching with torches in the streets of America shouting “Jews will not replace us” and the president wasn’t calling them “fine people” who were just trying to preserve their heritage and threatening to shut down the free press.

So, you know, things are different now.

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Hope Hicks has seen it all

Hope Hicks has seen it allby digby

David Corn runs down the story of Hope Hicks’ involvement in the Russia scandal. She is right in the middle of it. So Mueller’s interview is not a benign little exercise in understanding her boss’s schedule. He concludes with this:

Hicks was putting out false information—but it was a line consistent with the campaign’s stonewall. Its top officials had been informed that the Kremlin was trying to covertly assist Trump, yet Trump and his aides constantly denied Putin was meddling in the election. And some of the contacts between Trump campaigners and Russians—particularly those of Papadopoulos and Page—were known by senior campaign officials. Yet the campaign revealed none of these interactions during the election, when Russia’s involvement was a major controversy.

Is it possible Hicks was unaware of all this activity? She did know about Page’s trip to Moscow; she commented on it publicly. And she was directly informed that Trump Jr. had been in contact with WikiLeaks. According to The Atlantic, after Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior campaign aides, including Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Brad Parscale to tell them WikiLeaks had reached out to him. Kushner forwarded this email to Hicks.

Hicks has been by Trump’s side since 2014, when she went to work for the Trump Organization. (Prior to that she was at a New York public relations firm contracted by Ivanka Trump.) She was with Trump when he decided to fire FBI chief James Comey. She was on Air Force One when Trump reportedly got involved in drafting a misleading White House statement regarding the meeting between Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort and the Russian emissary. Mueller and his crew have much to talk about with Hicks. But she is not just any witness. She is part of the cover-up.

I find her to be one of the more intriguing characters in the Trump inner circle. She is a very beautiful, young woman who came into the Trump organization via a job at Ivanka’s clothing brand company. Her relationship with Trump is apparently quite close although I’ve never heard that it’s anything beyond professional.

But whatever it is, she’s privy to a lot of information and there’s no doubt that the special prosecutor will have many questions for her. She should not be so foolish as to protect her boss. She is in serious legal jeopardy which I’m sure her lawyer has told her. Let’s hope she’s smart enough to listen. Trump wouldn’t stick by her if the roles were reversed.

It’s fine to seduce 14 years olds because they are so pure

It’s fine to seduce 14 years olds because they are so pureby digby

Right Wing Watch caught a pastor who supports Moore in a radio show this week. It’s hard to believe he actually said this, but he did:

“I think that, number one, you need to understand, 40 years ago, what the Sitz im Leben was like in Alabama,” Benham said. “Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere. So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies … He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.”

When the hosts pointed out that Moore’s wife, Kayla, was divorced when she married Moore, which rather undermined Benham’s contention that he was looking for “purity” in a potential mate, Benham tried to change the subject by asking the hosts if it is acceptable for an adult man “to date and court a young lady who is 14 year old with their parents’ consent.” Benham clearly thinks that it is, but that line of questioning did not work out particularly well, since it prompted Murphy to ask Benham if he thinks it is acceptable for a man to date a 10-year-old girl if he receives permission from her parents, which caused Benham to angrily stumble around for a reasonable response.

“I don’t think that that would happen,” was all Benham could come up with while meekly insisting that the question was just “another logical fallacy.”

When Murphy explained he was asking the exact same question that Benham had posed but had simply changed the age of the girl in question, Benham endlessly protested and tried to dodge the question before eventually agreeing that a grown man dating a 10-year-old girl would be inappropriate.

“Congratulations, Flip,” said Murphy. “Now you are in the modern world.”

It’s nice that he doesn’t think it would be ok or a grown man to date a 10 year old girl. That’s very reassuring.

People really need to keep their young girls away from conservative Christians.

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The past of angels

The past of angelsby digby

This is where we are now. Trump says Moore has denied it (as he himself has) and that Doug Jones is very bad on crime. What he means by that is that Doug Jones was a prosecutor who got convictions for the white KKK members who blew up a church. Those men were undoubtedly “fine people” who just wanted to preserve their heritage and Trump and his white supremacist followers don’t think it’s right that they had to go to jail for that. After all, they only killed four little black girls.
He says there’s no proof and you have to take his word as much as the long line of accusers and witnesses. One might say that Trump is just standing up for due process but that would be the first time he’s ever done that. In the past even DNA exoneration hasn’t been enough for him:

My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.”

Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels. This case has not been dormant, and many people have asked why it took so long to settle? It is politics at its lowest and worst form.

What about the other people who were brutalized that night, in addition to the jogger?

One thing we know is that the amount of time, energy and money that has been spent on this case is unacceptable. The justice system has a lot to answer for, as does the City of New York regarding this very mishandled disaster.

Information was being leaked to newspapers by someone on the case from the beginning, and the blunders were frequent and obvious.

As a long-time resident of New York City, I think it is ridiculous for this case to be settled — and I hope that has not yet taken place.

Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.

Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.

What about all the people who were so desperately hurt and affected? I hope it’s not too late to continue to fight and that this unfortunate event will not have a repeat episode any time soon — or ever.

These guys are guilty no matter what. Roy Moore deserves the benefit of the doubt. Doug Jones is soft on crime because he prosecuted KKK members.

That’s pretty much where we are.

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Both sides arguments for dummies

Both sides arguments for dummiesby digby

This may be the worst “both sides” argument ever:

I guess they’re taking the position that child molestation is the better choice?

They might not have thought this through.

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