Month: December 2017

The rumor mill is going crazyby digby
I don’t know if any of this is well sourced or not. In fact, there’s some evidence that the Russian bots are involved in perpetuating lots of rumors at the moment. But this is a member of the House Intelligence Committee:

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo) told KQED Newsroom on Friday that she believes Republicans are trying to shut down the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Speier also said, “The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on Dec. 22nd, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller.”

If this were to happen, Speier said, it would cause a constitutional crisis. “That is Saturday massacre 2.0,” she said. “Without a doubt there would be an impeachment effort.”

Who’s going to lead an impeachment effort? Republicans?

I want what she’s smoking.

The shutdown of the House Intelligence probe does seem to be a real thing. Adam Schiff was all ove the place warning about it. And yesterday Trey Gowdy was quoted saying he doesn’t think Andrew McCabe will have a job next week. It does suggest a coordinated move between the White House and the House Republicans to clean house and end the Russia investigation. I don’t know what happens then but impeachment is highly unlikely.

Update:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained “many tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails, including sensitive emails of Jared Kushner, transition team sources tell Axios.

Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.

The emails include 12 accounts, one of which contains about 7,000 emails, the sources said.
The accounts include the team’s political leadership and the foreign-policy team, the sources said.

Why it matters: The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes.

“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads,” a transition source told me.
How it happened: The sources say Mueller obtained the emails from the General Services Administration, the government agency that hosted the transition email system, which had addresses ending in “ptt.gov,” for Presidential Transition Team.

Axios has asked the Special Counsel’s Office for comment and will update this story with the response.

The transition sources said they were surprised about the emails because they have been in touch with Mueller’s team and have cooperated.

“They ask us to waive NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] and things like that,” a second source said. “We have never said ‘no’ to anything.”

The twist: The sources say that transition officials assumed that Mueller would come calling, and had sifted through the emails and separated the ones they considered privileged. But the sources said that was for naught, since Mueller has the complete cache from the dozen accounts.

I will look forward to all the handwringing about privacy and abuse of power from the people who insisted that all the personal Clinton, DNC and Podesta emails be published on the internet.

I mean the guy who said this has no room to kvetch about government investigators looking at the transition emails he and his staff sent on a government server:

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Oh, by all means let’s see what the Trump voters are thinking todayby digby

I was really getting worried that we hadn’t taken the Trump voters’ temperatures in a couple of weeks to see how they’re doing. How can we judge the health of the country if we don’t keep up with the only important citizens within it? Luckily, CNN visited some Trump voters in Kentucky to see how they’re doing economically since their man was elected. They still love him, of course, and they are excited that he’s going to bring back coal and they’re re-opening a private prison there to house all the new felons from the opioid crisis which is ravaging their state. Good news. And they are excited about the prospect of a booming tourist industry because they live in a beautiful environment that attracts outdoors enthusiasts from other areas. Coal mining destroying that environment doesn’t seem to be a big concern. 

She is needy, although one wonders how it can be that they can’t afford insurance for her through either her husband’s job or the ACA. I have my doubts if that’s true. And it’s unclear if this person works herself. But in any case, her attitude is common. She needs it more than other people because those other people are lazy and refuse to work.

That’s part of what fuels Trumpism, the idea that these are the hard-working Real Americans who deserve the government’s help and they aren’t getting enough of it while a bunch of free-loaders, usually foreigners or blacks, are getting everything. It never occurs to them that they’re all getting screwed and they’re getting screwed by rich billionaires like Donald Trump.

But you knew that … we’ve always known that. They’d rather throw in their lot with the rich white guy than the browns and the blacks any day. And they don’t much like poor whites either.

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Useful idiot indeedby digby

I realize Steve Schmitt is a Republican and all, but I really enjoy his Trump commentary. You have to admit that when it comes to scathing vitriol, the Republicans are just way better at it:

"There's a phrase the Russians use it's called 'useful idiot' … Vladimir Putin is clearly looking at an American president thinking he has a 'useful idiot'" – @SteveSchmidtSES w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/JGDY28HQTK— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) December 15, 2017

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A few thoughts before the next accusation breaks 

by Spocko

I was listening to Howie Klein on the David Feldman show today.

They were talking about the Kentucky legislator Dan Johnson who committed suicide on Wednesday night following accusations he molested a member of his church when she was 17.

I had been following the stories of multiple sexual harassment cases in the Kentucky Legislature for weeks with stories like this:

• Sexual harassment claims against lawmakers were secretly settled out of court.
• Payoffs to the women involved came from private donors. 
• Four of the representatives involved lost chairmanships of committees, but are still state reps. 
• House Speaker Jeff Hoover stepped down but is  still a representative. 

So I knew about the Dan Johnson case, and I also knew that it was much more than a single accusation. There was a seven-month investigation based on more than 100 interviews and more than 1,000 pages of public documents. Read or listen to, “The Pope’s Long Con” the investigative series from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media.

Rep. Dan “Pope” Johnson singing with the Heart of Fire ‘Gun Choir’ from Guns. Com video.

But unless you read that story you will probably only hear about the most high profile or most recent accusations.

Feldman asked Klein about the case. Howie is never shy about stating his opinions about politicians, including Democrats. Dan Johnson was a gun toting, bible thumping, Republican Kentucky senator, not someone Howie would have a kind word for. I liked his response.

“I believe in due process, I really do. I mean he’s accused, I mean I’m not the judge, I’m not the jury I don’t even know all the facts.”

It’s important to have investigations, due process and accountability for all. Republicans, Democrats, men and women.

The Kentucky political harassment cases in particular interest me because I want to know what happened after the stories about the settled lawsuits came out. Is losing your committee chair the appropriate response?  Who decides?

There are multiple other charges that we know about Johnson that are true.  What would have been the legislative response to them? Lost of chairmanships?

Johnson’s wife is running for his seat. What are her qualifications? We shouldn’t tie the actions of the husband to the wife. But we should ask, what did she know and when did she know it?  Again, this is not a story about a single accusation in a vacuum. They show a pattern.

If there needs to be more investigations to prove it to the public, that should happen.

So many goodiesby digby

… for the wealthy in the tax bill. Here’s just one of them:

If we are to believe the Republican policymakers who control the current attempt to overhaul our tax system, a big point of the exercise is to help the middle class. So how best to explain a possible tax break of more than $30,000 per child for wealthy families who send their kids to private school?

That number is the potential net new tax savings, under the House tax plan, for parents who deposit a large amount of money when their kids are born. They would get that benefit by using the money for children starting private school in kindergarten and attending through high school.

Buried in Section 1202 of the tax bill are a number of proposals to consolidate and simplify various tax breaks for education savings. Part of the section in effect would neuter something called a Coverdell account, which families have used for years to save for both private school and college.

But then comes the big change: Elementary and high school expenses of up to $10,000 per year would become “qualified” expenses for 529 plans. Translation? You could pull $10,000 each year out of your 529 account for private school and avoid paying taxes on any previous growth. There are no income limits on who can use 529 plans, and you would be able to keep right on saving for college as well.

I will only cost the taxpayers 600 million. But, you know, if you’re sending your kid to Andover, these little perks are really nice.

So what would it mean to add private school benefits to 529 plans? Take a wealthy family in the highest tax bracket. It has a newborn baby, and through some combination of gifts and its own savings, it opens a 529 plan with $200,000 and never deposits another dime.

If the money grows at 6 percent annually, that family could take out the $10,000 each year, avoiding $2,380 in taxes annually. If it did that for 13 years (kindergarten through 12th grade), it would save $30,940 in taxes. Plus, according to numbers that Vanguard ran for me, it would still have enough left over after high school ($370,717) to pay for many pricey private colleges in full, as long as tuition inflation there ran no more than 3 percent annually.

The Republican bill would allow people to take $10,000 out of 529 plans each year to use for tuition for private school in kindergarten through 12th grade. Plus, you’d still be able to use the money for college. Here’s how far the money might go if you didn’t add another dime, assuming current private college costs of $56,330 and annual tuition inflation of 3 percent.

It’s so nice to see these Republican lawmakers valuing education again. Well, education for themselves and their rich friends. They’re doing everything they can to keep the rest of the population uneducated so they won’t understand that they are being screwed six ways to Sunday.

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Not the better half
by Tom Sullivan

TurboTax headquarters in San Diego, CA.

TurboTax may be working some late nights. Having resolved differences between the House and Senate versions of its tax bill, the GOP released its final version of the tax bill Friday and hopes to vote on it early next week. Vox has the full text here.

To no one’s surprise, Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) came aboard in support of the legislation after garnering some face-saving changes and earned media. Rubio got an increase to the child tax credit. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now appears to have the votes for Senate passage.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act marks the largest reduction in corporate taxes in U.S. history, dropping the rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, one percent lower still than either of the versions the House and Senate sent to conference committee. The top personal tax rate also emerges from committee lower than either of the versions, a gift to the wealthiest taxpayers to go with a temporary doubling of the estate tax exemption for married couples to $22 million. If white conservatives worry their ranks will be overwhelmed by poorer immigrants, the wealthiest will at least have twice the chance of expanding theirs through their heirs.

The bill also scraps the personal exemption while almost doubling the standard deduction. The Washington Post offers a detailed rundown of the changes.

Detailed analysis of the impacts are not out yet. The final bill is too new. But Tara Golshan observes at Vox:

All in all, the bill is a far cry from the simplified tax code that Republicans have long been promising, but it is a substantial reshaping of the nation’s tax base. Republicans are adamant that cutting corporate taxes will in turn increase investments and wages in the United States and lead to unprecedented economic growth — despite analyses that indicate otherwise.

Michael Bloomberg calls the bill “a trillion-dollar blunder,” explaining, “CEOs aren’t waiting on a tax cut to ‘jump-start the economy’ — a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company — or to hand out raises. It’s pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised.”

Todd Carmichael, CEO of La Colombe described it last night on MSNBC’s “The Beat” as a “dividend to the stockholders of the United States of America.” In the same segment, venture capitalist Nick Hanauer reinforced that analysis, describing the Republican Party as “a tribe run by their very wealthy donors.”

It is yet another demonstration of whom the GOP and the economy serves. But a two-week journey into “the dark side of the American Dream” gave Philip Alston, an international law scholar and human rights advocate at the New York University School of Law, insight into just how unequal all men are in an America that tells itself otherwise.

The Guardian reported on Alston’s travels:

Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has completed a two-week official tour of the US by releasing an excoriating attack on the direction of the nation. Not only does he warn that the tax bill currently being rushed through Congress will hugely increase already large disparities between rich and poor, he accuses Trump and his party of consciously distorting the shape of American society in a “bid to become the most unequal society in the world”.

“American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations,” he writes. “But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.”

Alaton told Kelly McEvers of NPR’s”All Things Considered” he was struck by the caricatured narratives repeated by politicians and officials to explain away systemic inequality:

ALSTON: So the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success. The poor, on the other hand, are wasters, losers and scammers. So as a result, money spent on welfare is money down the drain. Money devoted to the rich is a sound investment. The reality is that the United States now has probably the lowest degree of social mobility among all the rich countries. And if you are born poor, guess where you’re going to end up – poor.

The rich take care of their own. The riffraff can keep themselves from drowning.

Rose: Half the people on this ship are going to die.

Cal Hockley: Not the better half.

What Alston heard is the patter used to peddle trickle-down elixir from the back of wagons on America’s main streets since the Reagan years. But there is more to the story than the Owner class appropriating government of the people to service themselves. There is a political game at work as well. The tax cuts are prelude to another round of cuts to the social safety net for the so-called “wasters, losers and scammers.” It is not enough to have most of the cookies. Fewer for others widens the point spread and consolidates power for those who have it.

Michael Tomasky provides as concise a sketch as any of the Republican formula:

1. Pass massive tax cuts for the top 1 percent.

2. Run up the deficit.

3. A year or two later go, “Oh my God, look at the deficit! This proves that spending is just out of control!”

4. Start taking the axe to entitlement programs and the domestic discretionary budget.

But one is tempted to assume this is the game on the national scale only. It is not. State preemption laws aimed at preventing bluish cities from implementing progressive policies often go hand-in-hand with policies aimed at weakening cities economically, leaving city leaders with no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut services (and anger voters). A couple of cycles later, Republicans will run candidates who blame cities’ financial woes on “mismanagement and waste” by Democrats, and count on voters to forget by then who precipitated the crisis in the first place.

Just like deficits run up at the national level. It is a deliberate strategy.

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

Friday Night Sootherby digby

A sweet rescue puppy from Puerto Rico for you tonight

This brave puppy was found protecting his friends even though he was badly hurt. Rescuers worked so hard to help him heal — and then flew him to his new forever home 🐶 ✈️ ❤️ (via @TheSatoProject) pic.twitter.com/qs9xpAxtqo— The Dodo (@dodo) December 15, 2017

Puerto Rico animal rescue, at The Sato Project

The Sato Project is dedicated to rescuing abused and abandoned dogs in Puerto Rico, locally referred to as “satos”. Since its inception in 2011, The Sato Project has largely focused its efforts on a place unfortunately known as “Dead Dog Beach” in the municipality of Yabucoa, one of the island’s poorest. We have rescued over 2,000 dogs to date, rehabilitated them with the highest standards of veterinary care and placed them in loving homes in the mainland U.S. We are addressing the underlying causes of overpopulation, abandonment, and abuse through community outreach and a low-cost Spay, Neuter, Vaccine and Microchip Program. Since the devastation of Hurricane Maria, The Sato Project has evacuated over 300 dogs to safety and is working to keep families with their beloved pets, and to help the many animals left behind in the storm’s aftermath.

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Be prepared for peaceful protestsby digby

The tea leaves are settling into a formation that say Trump is seriously contemplating firing Mueller and probably some top level members of the FBI and the DOJ. We don’t know this for sure but there are signs everywhere as you can see from my earlier post.
Move On has created a website.
for you to sign up for an alert if it happens and instructions about where patriots will be gathering to peacefully protest.

Donald Trump is publicly considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller, the person leading the Department of Justice investigation of possible illegal actions by Donald Trump and members of his presidential campaign, and the efforts to conceal those activities.

This would be a constitutional crisis for our country. It would demand an immediate and unequivocal response to show that we will not tolerate abuse of power from Donald Trump.

Our response in the minutes and hours following a power grab will dictate what happens next, and whether Congress—the only body with the constitutional power and obligation to rein Trump in from his rampage—will do anything to stand up to him.

That’s why we’re preparing to hold emergency “Nobody is Above the Law” rallies around the country in the event they are needed.

Use the map or search below by ZIP code to find an event near you, or create one if none exists.

Rallies will begin hours after news breaks of a Mueller firing:

If Mueller is fired BEFORE 2 P.M. local time —> events will begin @ 5 P.M. local time
If Mueller is fired AFTER 2 P.M. local time —> events will begin @ noon local time the following day

This is the general plan—please confirm details on your event page, as individual hosts may tailor their events to their local plan.

This is our moment to stand up to protect our democracy. Let’s mobilize to show that we won’t let Donald Trump become the authoritarian that he aspires to be. The law applies to all of us, and it’s essential that it also applies to the most powerful people in our country.

Trump’s new low
by digby

That’s Nate Silver’s average of all the polls. Monmouth had him down to 32% this week.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post took a look at “America’s chaotic crazy, challenging, great, tumultuous, horrible, disappointing year”

Some highlights of public opinion:

You can read the whole rundown at the link.

His administration is a mess. We are in danger. And these fucking Republicans are voting themselves a big fat tax cut before they go down with the ship. I hope they are all very happy that they’re emboldening and enabling this dangerous imbecile in the White House. He’s going to believe he’s omnipotent — after all he got this tax bill even though he knows most of the country hates his guts and hates the bill. That’s real power. It’s a license to do whatever he wants.

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What did Paul Ryan know and when did he know it?by digby

Adam Schiff is not prone to hysteria so this is disturbing:

A friendly reminder: the DCCC was also hacked and Paul Ryan’s SuperPAC used proprietary information obtained from it to help Republicans in close races.
Ryan has a personal stake in this.

UPDATE:

Bloomberg’s congressional correspondent tweeted this. Something is happening:

This Lawfare piece from a while back explains why it’s going to be a shitshow if Trump decides to fire McCabe.

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