Month: December 2017

Win, dominate, subjugateby digby

So Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capitol today and most people think that Trump did it without understanding the ramifications and solely to appease his base of conservative evangelicals who want to bring on Armageddon. Josh Marshall explains why there is more to it:

I would say that this is 90% political and a matter of satisfying the President’s need for an act of self-assertion. The other 10% does slightly fall into the category of forward-moving gambits. It’s one you need to be exposed to the more extreme right-wing variants of Zionism to be familiar with.

It basically goes like this: What keeps the conflict going is Israel’s and the international community’s indulgence of unrealistic expectations on the part of the Palestinians. The path to peace is to make it totally clear, with established facts, that the Palestinians will essentially get nothing. Nothing here would be defined as a few autonomous self-governing zones within the West Bank under over-arching Israeli security control. No capital or even foothold in East Jerusalem. Not even a demilitarized version of sovereignty. No geographical contiguity. Nothing. Basically the right to self-govern in civil matters in the parts of the West Bank where there are too many Palestinians to outnumber with Israeli settlers. Once Palestinians expectations are set to a realistic level, you can get down to negotiations.

There are needless to say, a number of problems with this theory. But you hear it a lot as a sort of guiding theory of the case on the Zionist right. I would count it as 35% profoundly misguided idea, 65% mendacious self-assertion. That’s probably what the top Trumpers are telling themselves.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note the obvious. Not only did the President put the region’s issues in the hands of his neophyte son-in-law. He put it in the hands of a settlement activist. Obviously nothing possibly good can come of this.

This makes sense to me. There is a faction of hard-liners who believe what Grover Norquist said about Democrats back when the Republicans took the congress in 2002 applies to all their adversaries:

“Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”

This is how these far right folks think about everything. Win and exert your dominance and then everyone will be happy and docile in their properly assigned roles.
.

Who do you trust on taxes?by digby

That new Q poll shows a major shift on public opinion about taxes, which is significant. The GOP has the whole enchilada and they are losing their reputation as the part of fiscal responsibility. It’s always been bullshit but now they have Orange Julius Caesar making the argument for massive cuts for the wealthy and that brings the absurdity into stark relief.

Update:

Oh lordy:

A dozen high school students working for Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political network funded by Charles G. and David H. Koch, fanned out across the Little Havana neighborhood one day last week to make the case that the Republican tax bill was something to get excited about.

“We believe it’s time to fix our broken tax code and let families keep more of what they earn,” Barbara D’Ambrosio, a sophomore, dutifully told an elderly woman who answered the door in her slippers. After she finished her script, Barbara glanced up from the iPad she was carrying and asked if the woman would kindly call her senators to urge them to support the tax bill, which was hours away from being approved by the Senate.

The woman stared at her silently for a moment. Then she nodded, politely but unconvincingly.

So Ms. D’Ambrosio and her friends soldiered on, visiting about 40 houses that afternoon and finding more of the same: people who were often unenthusiastic, unaware or simply uninterested.

It’s the trickle down theory of selling tax cuts to the American voter. Conservative activist groups like Americans for Prosperity, celebrating what they expect is the imminent passage of a tax package that they and the Republican Party’s corporate backers have sought for a generation, now need to convince ordinary Americans that this is good for them too.

These groups have marshaled their resources in almost every state in a campaign that can sound at times as if it were something a Democrat dreamed up, complete with tributes to the American worker and the middle class.

“The American people have waited 31 long years to see our broken tax code overhauled,” the leaders of the Koch’s political network insisted in a letter to members of Congress on Monday, urging swift approval of final legislation. They added that the time had come to put “more money in the pockets of American families.”

The problem, as Republicans are learning, is that most Americans do not believe that is what the tax plan will do.

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist, said that amid all the talk about the need to score an important victory for their party, “it bears mentioning that the ‘win’ is something that is extraordinarily unpopular with 75 percent of the American people.”

[…]
“We Republicans get into the weeds and talk about technical tax policy and the budget process, and for the average American, that ends up sounding like the adults on the old Charlie Brown cartoon — wah, wah, wah,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, which has been among the groups pushing for tax cuts. “And the Democrats are messaging: ‘This is not fair to the middle class and the poor.’”

Ken Spain, a Republican consultant who works on financial and tax issues, said the legislation has become “a blank canvas” for the opposition to paint and that his party is to blame.

“There hasn’t been a cohesive messaging strategy to date, and the polling data reflects that,” he added.

So far, Americans for Prosperity and its field staff and volunteers have visited more than 41,000 homes and made 1.1 million phone calls. Cassi Alexandra for The New York Times
Americans also see the tax bill as inextricably linked to the Republican Party and Mr. Trump. And majorities of the country deeply disapprove of both.

In many public polls, Americans see the Republican tax plan in a more negative light than they did the Affordable Care Act before it became law in 2010. Never overwhelmingly popular, opinion on the health care law was generally evenly split at that time.

But the discontent runs deeper than an affinity for one party over the other. Not only do a majority of Americans doubt it is good policy, but people in conservative areas of the country have low expectations that it would do anything to help them, new polling has found.

In counties where Mr. Trump performed exceptionally well — that he won but Mr. Obama carried in 2012, or where he ran 20 percent ahead of what Mitt Romney received in 2012 — only 17 percent said they expect to pay less in taxes, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Another 25 percent said they expected their family would actually pay higher taxes.

Those numbers were similar to a recent Quinnipiac poll that found 59 percent of voters believe the Republican tax plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class.

Peter D. Hart, the Democratic pollster who helped conduct the NBC/Journal poll, called the tax cut package “penthouse populism” that risked tarnishing Mr. Trump’s image with those who see him as a “drain the swamp” crusader fighting powerful and entrenched interests. “The swamp isn’t only Washington to them,” Mr. Hart added, “it’s Wall Street. It’s the wealthy.”

Corey and the killerby digby

Lewandowski went into the lionesses den today and behaved as one would expect:

Corey Lewandowski appeared on Tuesday’s episode of “The View” to promote his new book, “Let Trump Be Trump,” co-authored with David Bossie.

The interview was uncomfortable as Lewandowski, who had been fired as campaign manager for Trump, fawned over the president.

He was tense and fidgety throughout the appearance. But a disturbing moment occurred when co-host Joy Behar interrupted Lewandowski’s praise of Trump to confront him with a passage from his own book highlighting Trump’s abusive behavior
.
Lewandowski immediately started screaming at her.

“What I say is, he’s tough! He’s a killer! I want a killer as president!” he screamed.

“You do?” Behar responded calmly.

“Absolutely! I want to make sure that we are the toughest, greatest in the world and that we are safe,” Lewandowski continued to shout.

I suspect this line is very effective among the Trumpies. It’s basically the old dominant bully line that appeals to the authoritarian mindset. Most people want a little more sophistication since this sort of thing often leads to disaster.

You can watch the whole thing over at Salon.

.

Trump’s privatized super-secret-spy agencyby digby

I wrote about the latest adventures of one of Trump’s weirdest and most dangerous pals, Erik Prince, for Salon today:
One unusual bright spot in these dark days has been the fact that some of the worst kooks in the Trump administration have been sent back to the private sector. The most obvious example is former Gen. Mike Flynn, who was in a very sensitive position and seemed to be coming unhinged. But Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are also out of the White House, along with the colorful if short-lived communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that there are no long any influential weirdos around Donald Trump. Bannon is said to be in regular contact with the president, encouraging his worst impulses as usual. The glowering anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller remains at Trump’s side. And some of the worst outside influences remain in Trump’s orbit, even through they’ve never had an official position in his campaign or his administration. The scariest of those is Erik Prince, CEO of the notorious “private contractor” company Academi — formerly known as Blackwater — who is busily pitching one crackpot idea after another.

Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and a longtime friend of Vice President Mike Pence. His history during the Iraq War as the head of Blackwater, which was essentially an unaccountable mercenary army, made him infamous. But his closeness with Donald Trump’s administration has put him in the spotlight frequently over the last year, and every new story about him is more bizarre than the last.

Back in August, there was a flurry of reporting about Bannon and Prince’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan based upon the colonial model of the British East India Company of the 19th century, including a post for Prince himself as the country’s “viceroy.” This concept was especially tailored to Trump, who can’t understand why the military hasn’t “won” since he ordered them to get ‘er done. It particularly intrigued him when he was made aware that there are minerals in Afghanistan that he believes should rightly belong to the U.S. Fortunately, the proposal was quickly shot down by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Bannon recently floated Prince’s name as a possible primary challenger against Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a conservative Republican. Previous reporting that Prince had acted as a conduit to Russia for the Trump transition team, traveling to the Seychelles Islands to meet with a Russian banker, has finally been confirmed. After months of waffling and denial, Prince finally admitted it in congressional testimony last week.

But all that is nothing compared to the bombshell report by Matthew Cole and Jeremy Scahill in the Intercept, which says, among other things, that the Afghanistan “viceroy” plan was actually an elaborate smokescreen for some even loonier schemes. According to numerous sources — and accompanied by official denials from the White House — the Trump administration is considering creating a private spy network to be run by Prince, legendary Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and a right-wing clandestine agent from the Reagan administration named John Maguire. Its goal would be to go around the intelligence community and gather information on its own for CIA Director Mike Pompeo and President Trump.

This is allegedly in response to what Trump, Pompeo and others perceive as a “Deep State” that is hostile to Trump. Cole and Scahill quote a former senior intelligence official paraphrasing White House discussions of the plan: “Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him. The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

Maguire was on the Trump transition team and is apparently convinced that Deep State operators plan to “kick the president out of office within a year” and must be stopped. He has reportedly told at least two people that he believes National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster ordered surveillance on Bannon, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and has “used a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.” Doesn’t this sound like just the kind of person you’d want around Donald Trump?

This plan is big. According to Cole and Scahill’s reporting, these guys would task the private spooks to gather intelligence all over the world, even in places like North Korea and Iran, where normal U.S. intelligence operations are extremely limited. A new global rendition program to kidnap and interrogate suspected terrorists is also being contemplated, along with a major Middle East propaganda effort.

The White House adamantly denies that any of this is true, but the Intercept and another report by BuzzFeed on the same subject have numerous sources confirming it. While one is tempted to say that this is just another Trump presidency sideshow, recall that Prince was taken very seriously by the George W. Bush administration before his company’s “brand” was tarnished with its unfortunate habit of committing war crimes. Some of Blackwater’s adventures during those days form the template for Prince’s current plans. As Cole and Scahill remind us:

When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications obtained by The Intercept. 

In a 2007 email, with the subject “Possible Opportunity in DEA—READ AND DELETE,” Prado sought to pitch the network to the Drug Enforcement Administration, bragging that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.” The longtime Prince associate said that the nexus of deniable assets has never gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better part of 15 years now,” he said.

Why let a good privatized “NOC network” (i.e., spies with “no official cover”) go to waste?

This seems very much like something that would thrill Trump. He could have his very own secret intelligence agency to do all the things the “Deep State” won’t do — like spy on political opponents and conduct economic espionage on behalf of The Trump Organization. It’s not as if these people have any scruples.

But there’s one huge problem with this plan. Trump can’t keep his mouth shut. He couldn’t even stop himself from admitting on TV that he fired James Comey over the Russia investigation. The next day he had to boast about it to the Russian ambassador and pass on some sensitive Israeli intelligence to impress them with his “great intel.” Does anyone think he could stop himself from bragging about his special private spooks, who are better than any of the official spies who can’t do anything right? Of course not. If this operation exists and Trump knows about it, it won’t remain a secret for long.

.

Raising some boats and sinking others
by Tom Sullivan

“Inequality between red and blue states persists despite booming economy“

Politics is about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. That seems pretty straightforward, except power is one of those things we don’t talk about in polite company unless we mean the military. We are forever nibbling around the edges of it.

The Harvey Weinstein and other workplace sexual harassment scandals are built on imbalances of power. The New York Times details how he used his to both get what he wanted, keep it, and use it as leverage to silence his victims.

Power is why plutocrats and their pet politicians loathe unions; unions counterbalance the power of capital. Whether it is money or civil rights or geopolitics, the specifics are secondary. Power is the bottom line? Congress is filled with alpha males who dream of being the alpha dog.

Republicans know this on a gut level. Democrats think we should all just get along, and government action should lift all boats. What matters more to their rivals is whose boats get lifted most. To the point of sinking their rivals’ dinghies if that’s what it takes to show who’s yacht is master of the seas.

Michael Tomasky almost gets at that in a post at Daily Beast. Tomasky observes that as much as conservatives and the press hammer on Democrats being “out of touch” with red-state America, that cuts both ways. It is Republicans who are out of touch with blue-states.

CBS News:

Over the past year, only a handful of red states have increased their employment-to-population ratio faster than the U.S. as a whole.

Utah Republican Sen. Orin Hatch is Exhibit A in Tomasky’s lesson. Now, don’t get him wrong, Hatch says, speaking about restoring funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). He’s as compassionate as anyone about helping those who really need it, but:

I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.

“When you first saw the Hatch comment,” Tomasky writes, “you probably thought he was talking, consciously or subconsciously, about black people. And maybe on some level he was. But I have an alternate theory. He was talking about some Utahans he knows.” In his book, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse provides anecdote after anecdote about shiftless youth in Nebraska. Tomasky argues that Sasse and Hatch extrapolate what they know to people they don’t. Particularly to blue states they don’t represent:

There’s a problem in rural Utah and Nebraska, but it’s not really one of shiftlessness. It’s one of structural economics. These are places that have been carpet-bombed by the global economy. As I noted in the Review, if young people today in these places have less initiative than the young people of 30 years ago did, maybe it’s because they see less opportunity for themselves. It would be nice to see Sasse and Hatch thinking about that, but addressing that would require some public investment, and, as Hatch said, sorry, there’s just no money. Have to cut rich people’s taxes.

Meanwhile, the problem in blue America is precisely the opposite one. There’s too much striving, too much pressure, too much initiative. But as problems go, I’d rather have this one. This is the America that produces the vast majority of our innovators and thinkers and scientists and creative people. This is the America that creates most of the nation’s wealth. Hillary Clinton may have won only 15 percent of the country’s 3,100-odd counties, but the 472 counties she did win account for 64 percent of GDP. This is the America that invents and designs and engineers; the America where there already really is so much winning.

Pushing back against the “out of touch” with Real America™ knock against Democrats is something long overdue. Every time it comes up, blue state dynamism ought to be thrown in accusers’ faces. But Tomasky explains why Republicans are out of touch with blue America this way:

Republicans know the Americans they represent: rural people and (especially) uber-rich donors. They give rhetoric about religion and values to the rural folk and trillions of dollars to the rich. They don’t know about the awesome dynamism of blue America. Indeed they seek to punish it. To wit, those obscene provisions in the House version of the tax bill that would tax people out of pursuing graduate degrees, which constitute nothing but a petty jab at a class of people whose values they don’t like.

But it’s not just pettiness. It’s strategic. Politics is about power. The GOP playbook isn’t about lifting all boats. It’s about lifting the right’s boats or, alternatively, sinking the left’s. If their heartland states are so righteous and all-American, why aren’t they doing as well the blue ones where the premiere economic magic happens? Hatch, Sasse, and their fellows who should be spending more effort to improve the lives of their constituents spend time and effort instead trying to undermine their rivals. To that end, they’ll drill holes in the boats of blue cities and states that are driving the economy. Because if they can’t raise the living standards of the Americans who keep them in office, they’ll lower those of Americans who threaten their status. And that’s just fine with some of their constituents. It’s one reason they elected elected a loudmouth incompetent for president — because he hates the people they hate.

A core conservative narrative is that taxes are about envy. But who’s really envious of whom?

* * * * * * * *

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

QOTD: Sad Seanby digby

It takes one to know one:

“Here’s my view on the Republican Party,” Hannity said to “Breitbart News Tonight” special edition host Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s former White House strategist.

“It is a dead party. They are morally corrupt, they are weak. … They are ineffective, they’re vision-less, and they have no identity,” he said.

Hannity said he doesn’t believe he’s ever changed politically, but he said he thinks the Republican Party left him.

“And I feel it is heartbreaking to me, because so many people trusted them in 2010, 2014 – ‘Give us the House, give us the Senate,’ ” Hannity said.

“Then they get the White House and then they turn on a man that’s advocating the same principles that they have been quoting for years on the campaign trail,” he said.

He seems to think the GOP has turned on Trump. If only it was true.

.

All the Trumpies knew Flynn told the Russians it was fine to interfere in American electionsby digby

And then they lied about it:

Trump’s team has portrayed Flynn as a rogue actor over his contacts with the Russians, in which he apparently promised that the new administration would ease sanctions imposed by Barack Obama on Russia in connection to its alleged online meddling in the 2016 elections. But emails seen by the Times show senior transition official K.T. McFarland had notified other staff that Flynn would be reaching out to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak as part of an effort to repair U.S.-Russian relations, “which has just handed the U.S.A. election to him [Trump].”

Transition officials worried that if the U.S. and Russia got sucked into a new Cold War, allegations Trump colluded with Russia’s election interference efforts would never end; it’s unclear whether McFarland believed the Russians genuinely did throw the election for Trump or was referring to a possible line of attack from Democrats.

In an email to another transition official, now-homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, McFarland wrote that “Russia’s response over the next few days” to Flynn’s outreach would be crucial. Per the Times, Bossert then forwarded that December 29th email exchange to at least six other officials including Flynn, Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon, and Sean Spicer. He added that everyone needed to “defend election legitimacy now.”

If that wasn’t clear enough, Flynn briefed everyone after the call, freely admitting he had discussed the sanctions:

In his phone call with Mr. Kislyak, Mr. Flynn asked that Russia “not escalate the situation,” according to court documents released on Friday. He later related the substance of the call—including the discussion of sanctions—to a senior transition official, believed to be Ms. McFarland. A few days later, he briefed others on the transition team.
Also, the president-elect was scheduled to talk with Flynn, McFarland, Priebus and Bannon on national security issues the same day the emails were sent.

So that’s pretty much everyone now, huh.

Aaaand ….

NYT now reporting that Sean Spicer received KT McFarland's Dec. 29 email about Flynn's call w/ Kislyak on sanctions.

Then why did Spicer tell the press on Jan. 23 that Flynn's call was about "holiday greetings"?

VIDEO CLIP: pic.twitter.com/V2OSWgxOr5— Just Security (@just_security) December 5, 2017

These people have been interviewed by the FBI. One certainly hopes they didn’t continue to lie to them the way they lied to the public or they could be in big trouble …

Update>

Also, Mike Pence, the man who headed the transition but for some reason was completely out of the loop on everything and if he did hear anything he’s forgotten it. He hasn’t been called yet.

.

One of these things is not like the otherby digby

Watergate: egregious abuse of power, using CIA and FBI to punish political enemies

Iran Contra: secretly selling arms to an enemy country under sanctions, using the money to fund foreign revolutionaries contravening the law

Whitewater-Lewinsky: ancient Arkansas land deal worth $36k and lying about extramarital affair

Russia scandal: working with an adversarial foreign government to win the presidency

.

Following the rublesy digby

This looks like an ominous development for the Trump team:

A U.S. federal investigator probing alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election asked Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) for data on accounts held by President Donald Trump and his family, a person close to the matter said on Tuesday.

Germany’s largest bank received a subpoena from Special Counsel Robert Mueller several weeks ago to provide information on certain money and credit transactions, the person said, without giving details, adding that key documents had been handed over in the meantime.

Deutsche Bank has lent the Trump Organization hundreds of millions of dollars for real estate ventures and is one of the few major lenders that has given large amounts of credit to Trump in the past decade. A string of bankruptcies at his hotel and casino businesses during the 1990s made most of Wall Street wary of extending him credit.

Mueller is investigating alleged Russian attempts to influence the election, and potential collusion by Trump aides. Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that it meddled in the election and Trump has said there was no collusion with Moscow.

A U.S. official with knowledge of Mueller’s probe said one reason for the subpoenas was to find out whether Deutsche Bank may have sold some of Trump’s mortgage or other loans to Russian state development bank VEB or other Russian banks that now are under U.S. and European Union sanctions.

Holding such debt, particularly if some of it was or is coming due, could potentially give Russian banks some leverage over Trump, especially if they are state-owned, said a second U.S. official familiar with Russian intelligence methods.

“One obvious question is why Trump and those around him expressed interest in improving relations with Russia as a top foreign policy priority, and whether or not any personal considerations played any part in that,” the second official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Yeah. Well, we already know that they were working overtime with several different actors including Felix Sater and the Agalarovs to build that Trump Tower in Moscow even as Trump was running for president. That actually should be enough to cause the congress to launch a full-scale inquiry into the possibility of Trump’s corrupt practices. (I know, lol. Simply imagine for a moment if Clinton had had such dealings during the campaign.)

Mueller is well within his purview looking at Trump’s transactions with Russia. I would just point out once again that all prosecutors have the ability to pursue any crime he or she comes across during an investigation. One can only imagine the possibilities in Trump’s finances. He burned all his bridges with legitimate lenders decades ago.

Trump warned Mueller that looking into his personal finances is a red line so I’m going to guess there will shortly be a clamor to fire him for over-stepping his bounds. Of course, firing Mueller is already something Trump is thinking about every minute of the day anyway. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before he pulls the trigger.

.

Think of all the underage girls he didn’t molest!by digby

Speaking of cretinism:

Jane Porter, a spokeswoman for embattled Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, told CNN on Tuesday that she doesn’t believe the women accusing the Alabaman of sexual misconduct — and that she doesn’t understand why people weren’t focusing on the many women who haven’t accused him of similar misdeeds.

.@PoppyHarlowCNN : Do you believe Roy Moore accuser Leigh Corfman?

Roy Moore campaign spokeswoman Jane Porter: "I don't believe her at all" https://t.co/KpLwiDbp46— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) December 5, 2017

She’s talking about the numerous underage girls he stalked and pursued who don’t claim that he assaulted them in the front seat of their cars or tried to “seduce” them in his underwear. They just said he took them on dates and kissed them when he was a 30 something District Attorney. Now he says he doesn’t know any of them. So, it’s all good according to this woman.

And this reprehensible, lying,right wing, hypocrite also said this:

“Congratulations on your unborn child. That’s the reason why I came down as a volunteer to speak for Judge Roy Moore, ’cause he’ll stand for the rights of babies like yours in the womb, where his opponent will support killing them up until the moment of birth,” Porter told Harlow.

I won’t write down all the words that flowed through by mind when I read this. I hope Poppy told her off air to STFU about her pregnancy that it’s none of her damned business. How dare this disgusting apologist for underage molestation and sexual assault talk about “the rights” of children. These people …

.