Month: December 2017

Make America Great Again — by starving the elderly
by digby

I know everyone hates the baby boomers like me and not without reason. But I fear that serious suffering is going to end up being an awful consequence of our nation’s growing antipathy for the elderly:

In 2011, the first cohort of the 75 million baby boomers turned 65. Over the next 18 years, they will continue to age, and the country’s population pyramid will grow increasingly vase-shaped. Caring for the tens of millions of boomers is a demographic challenge without precedent in the United States. Meals on Wheels, among the most iconic and popular social programs in America, should be gearing up to deal with the impending increase in demand. But instead, the program faces funding shortfalls and service cutbacks. This year, its programs served 23 million fewer meals than in 2005. One estimate shows that less than a fifth of eligible seniors can actually avail themselves of home-delivered meals because of limited resources. Today, Cotten has a single assistant to help her serve a county larger than Connecticut. In 1987, she oversaw a staff of 36 that served thousands of meals a year. And her program isn’t the only one—today, Meals on Wheels programs around the country are withering just as Americans need them more and more.
[…]
Advocates claim that the services Meals on Wheels chapters provide are multipotent: Home visitors bring not just food to frail seniors but also offer companionship and referrals to social services. The deliveries also encourage clients to perform “activities of daily living” like housework and dressing themselves as they prepare for guests. “We’re required to observe everything: their verbal and visual ability, emotional health, their skin color,” Cotten said. “If we notice anything—if they’re unstable walking—we call a case manager. If it’s critical, we call 911.” Ninety percent of seniors on the program say that Meals on Wheels “makes them feel more safe and secure.”

But virtue and a sense of safety aren’t enough to pay for lunch. Broadly speaking, we underfund social programs for the elderly. Less than 2 percent of corporate, community, and foundation donations go to programs related to aging, which has been a problem for Meals on Wheels programs. “There’s more and more competition for a smaller share of donations,” said Ellie Hollander, CEO of MOWA. For more than a decade—in which both political parties have had their shots at controlling Congress and the White House—federal funding for the OAA has been flat while the cost of food and inflation have both increased and tens of millions of baby boomers retire.

I know people who depend on Meals on Wheels. It’s often the only time some elders ever interact with people in their home and it can be eyes and ears for some kind of trouble brewing for many who are alone. Cutting back on nutritious food and home visits for people who are too frail to work is just as cruel as denying food to babies and children.

Old people don’t evoke much sympathy, though. I hear it all the time on my social media feeds — that they deserve it because of all the terrible things that were done in this world. But, you know, “generations” don’t do things. There were many people who fought all the terrible things that have been done in the last 50 or 60 years. And plenty who fought for all the progress that has been made too. And most people were just trying to live their lives, raising kids, working, being part of their community. Punishing old people for the bad things that happened during their lifetimes is another form of collective punishment and decent people should stop and consider what they’re saying before they spout off.

If Donald Trump and his rich cronies have their way, old people in America will be dying younger and that will save some dollars. Likewise, if we can keep maternal death rates going up and kids being malnourished and uneducated that will probably save some money too, at least on the front end. You have to wonder if they aren’t crunching the numbers with that in mind.

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Are you now or have you ever been a member of the … Democratic Party
by digby

I wrote about this weird anti-Mueller Florida cabal for Salon this morning. It’s probably all one big coincidence, of course:

Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News dropped a small bombshell this quiet holiday week that hasn’t really exploded yet but might just explain the GOP’s recent full-court press to discredit the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. Rep. Francis Rooney, a Florida Republican, explained:

I would like to see the directors of those agencies [the DOJ and FBI] purge it and say, “Look, we’ve got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here.” Those are the people to see and know the good work’s being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state.

On Wednesday, Rep. Ron DeSantis, another Florida Republican, went on “Fox & Friends” and backed up his colleague’s sentiments, saying, “You look at a guy like Peter Strzok [the FBI agent demoted for ending derogatory texts about many politicians including Trump]. If he’s gonna say that it’s his job as an FBI to prevent a certain candidate from getting elected. . . . Anyone who turns up in that situation, I think they should get another line of work.”

For what it’s worth, Strzok is a counterintelligence agent who appeared concerned that the “certain candidate” might be acting as an agent of a foreign adversary, which was important information the nation didn’t have before the election. In any case, from what we can gather, these Republican congressmen identify nefarious “deep state” actors as those who cannot swear that they are not now and have never been a . . . Democrat.

As one can imagine, the use of the word “purge” brought forth some rather unfortunate historical images. We haven’t seen evidence that they plan the usual accompanying show trials, but give them time. Republicans in Congress are working feverishly to prepare hearings on the Hillary Clinton “Russian uranium email treason” hearings so there’s a chance we’ll see some kind of facsimile before 2018.

The hysteria that’s now raging seems a bit of an outsized reaction for this particular phase of the scandal, especially considering that Mueller actually did remove the offending “deep-staters.” Isikoff may have come across a different motivation than simple loyalty to President Trump. He wrote:

In just the last few weeks, his prosecutors have begun questioning Republican National Committee staffers about the party digital operation that worked with the Trump campaign to target voters in key swing states. They are seeking to determine if the joint effort was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate, according to two of the sources.

It would not be surprising if certain Republicans were to become a bit nervous when the investigation into Russian interference turned in that particular direction. It’s flown under the radar since the election, but the fact is that it wasn’t only the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s email accounts that were hacked. The intelligence community identified the same group of Russian-affiliated hackers as behind the hacking of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

I’ve been intrigued by this aspect of the Russian hacking story since the New York Times published an early report about it back in November of 2016. Recall that at first the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 released personal information that was used to intimidate Democratic candidates, but then he/she/they suddenly became more sophisticated and targeted, dumping valuable tactical information:

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.

People have wondered ever since if the hacker(s) might have gotten some expert assistance.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that so much of the information in question was republished on a website called HelloFLA by a Florida Republican and former congressional staffer named Aaron Nevins, who was connected to Trump associate and longtime political operative Roger Stone. It could be completely random that among the core group of Mueller antagonists, those calling the probe a “coup d’état” and demanding purges of members of the “deep state” are Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who proposed that Mueller’s funding be cut off, and the aforementioned Rep. Francis Rooney, who’s been all over TV talking about purging the FBI.

Indeed, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out a while back, one of the ringleaders of the movement to discredit the Department of Justice and Robert Mueller, Rep. DeSantis, directly benefited from Guccifer 2.0’s leak to Nevins after the latter published five documents regarding the DCCC’s recruitment of DeSantis’ Democratic opponent, George Pappas. According to The Wall Street Journal, Guccifer 2.0 even sent a link with a HelloFLA article directly to Roger Stone, who told reporters he didn’t forward the hacked material to anyone — the answer to a question nobody asked,

If Mueller’s team is looking into the digital operation and Roger Stone’s interactions with Guccifer 2.0, as one would expect them to do, then these shenanigans in Florida are also coming into view. That may explain why this little circle of Sunshine State GOP congressmen are so anxious to shut him down.

Donald Trump may think their vociferous attacks on Mueller are all about loyalty to him personally. After all, this group all flew down to Florida together on Air Force One earlier this month. But these guys have skin in the game now and may very well be caught up in the maw of the Russia investigation themselves.

They might not be the only ones. According to The New York Times, material from the DCCC hack was first used by Miami-area Democrat Joe Garcia, a former congressman, to win a tight primary race. Then “the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material” to undermine Garcia and re-elect Rep. Carlos Curbelo, the Republican incumbent.

It should be noted that there were some candidates who refused to use the hacked material against their opponents. This gang of Florida Republicans who are now so loudly attacking the FBI for its supposedly unethical behavior were not among them. As we all know, neither was Donald “I love WikiLeaks” Trump.

Is it Not-Golfing-gate yet?
by Tom Sullivan

Newsweek cover, August 11.
The president got back to work this week not golfing. He’s not golfing a lot.

So it is totally unfair for Vice News to report otherwise:

DAY 342 Dec. 27
President Donald Trump golfs. A lot.

The White House tries to hide that fact. A lot.

On Wednesday, though, the White House evidently stepped it up a notch: As reporters tried to catch a glimpse of Trump golfing near his private club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, a white box truck drove in front of the president and blocked reporters’ view.

Just as it was totally frustrating for CNN’s crack team of paparazzi who believe getting footage of the president not golfing is not nearly as trivial as it is.

“You Can’t See Me” ❌ 👀 A large truck is attempting to block cameras from capturing video of President Donald Trump golfing 🚚 🏌 https://t.co/qeO0k6c4YP pic.twitter.com/YO34DA6MGq

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) December 27, 2017

The sitting president has only spent a third of his presidency at one of his properties, after all. But there is a reason White House aides are trying to obscure the fact that the president is always out on the golf course.

NBC is all over Not-Golfing-Gate like one of Trump’s suits:

Pres. Trump has arrived at his south Florida golf club again this morning, marking his 86th day at a Trump golf property, and his 112th day at a Trump property since taking office. https://t.co/lDLsKoQdnL pic.twitter.com/9NtDIOrAXa

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) December 27, 2017

Who knew not golfing could be so complicated?

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

Don’t falter Democrats. This could be the last chance.
by digby

As we start to shift into election season (ohmygod) it’s going to be important to keep in mind that for all of our excitement over the predicted tsunami, Democrats can still blow this.

First the good news:

When Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, they were propelled by a big swing toward the party among women. Now, signs are emerging Republicans could be handicapped in 2018 by women shifting away from the GOP.

In particular, women with a four-year college degree have moved toward favoring Democratic control of Congress, recent polling shows, helping to account for a substantial Democratic lead in multiple surveys on the question of which party Americans want to see leading Congress after the midterm elections.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Democrats with a 20-point edge among women on control of Congress. That lead is larger than the 12-point Democratic edge among women during the last midterms, in 2014.

The Democratic advantage is even bigger among women with college degrees. These women would rather see Democrats than Republicans lead Congress by 32 percentage points, 62% to 30%, far larger than the party’s edge among these women in the past two midterm years, the latest Journal/NBC News survey found.

Asked which party should control Congress, women with a four-year college degree have shifted toward favoring Democratic leadership more forcefully than have other voter groups.

With the two parties now at about parity among men, the Democrats’ big advantage among college-educated women helps account for the party’s 11-point lead among Americans overall in the last Journal/NBC News survey, conducted Dec. 13-15.

Republican leaders in Congress have said that while next year’s elections could be challenging, they believe the strong economy and the just-enacted tax bill will win over voters. The party will “do bold things that work and prove our principles in practice,’’ House Speaker Paul Ryan said recently.

Journal/NBC News polling has found that women without college degrees also have moved toward favoring Democratic control of Congress in recent midterm elections, as have men with and without degrees. In December’s survey, men without degrees were the most open to GOP control, with 44% favoring Republicans and the same share backing Democratic leadership.

But women with college degrees have moved most dramatically over time. As a group, they hit two weak spots for the GOP: The party traditionally trails among women, and, more recently, it has slid in popularity among college graduates overall.

Stephanie Martin, a 44-year-old mother in Chapel Hill, N.C., said she had long considered herself a Republican and fiscal conservative, though she didn’t vote for Donald Trump last year. Now, she wants Democrats to take control of Congress. Among the reasons, she said, was the GOP’s support for former Judge Roy Moore in Alabama’s Senate election this month, after he was accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls. Mr. Moore denied the accusations.

“I don’t know where the party is going to from here, but they are going to have to do a lot to get me back,” said Ms. Martin, a former corporate executive who holds a master’s degree.

Opinions like those could become a point of concern for the party. College-educated women make up about 15% of the voting-age population, but they account for a larger share in 39 of the 60 or so House districts likely to have the most competitive races next year. In some, they account for as much as 28% of voting-age residents.

College educated women, and white college educated women specifically, have traditionally voted GOP. They’ve been moving toward the Democrats for a while, but now they are making the shift in large numbers. I know some of them. Trump is viscerally repulsive to most women, although he obviously feels he’s God’s great gift to the ladies.

In this #Metoo moment, one hopes that the Democratic party understands the significance of this shift and does not follow the lead of the media and treat the white working class male as the only voter that matters. I’m not sure why we seem to be obsessed with this faction but if the Democrats fail to embrace their base of people of color and this new shift of college educated women in order to prove their hardscrabble, rural, white, blue collar bonafides, it will be a huge error.

Picture this scenario. Trump is out saying that he’s going to pass a big infrastructure bill with the help of Democrats who will be grateful to work with him on something they both want. They pass a big bill and Trump gets his victory lap replete with a huge bipartisan celebration on the white house steps. The media sees this as Trump’s Big Pivot, he learned from his mistakes in the first term, he is now the big hearted populist he always said he was, his base is thrilled to see that he’s finally being celebrated as the Great President they knew he would be and they come out in droves in 2018 to thank the Republicans for their service.

Meanwhile the Democratic base, particularly the women and people of color who make up the vast majority of it, realize that the Resistance is futile and they withdraw back into private life hoping wanly that Robert Mueller may come up with something because that’s all they have — knowing that their horror at the prospect of this racist, misogynist, monster being validated over and over again is irrelevant to the Democratic party. White working class men and the women who love them are the only people who matter in this country.

Do you think it can’t happen? Oh, sure it can. If we let it.

As I have written before, the only bipartisan deals the Democrats need to make are those that are on their own terms. They don’t have to give Trump his Big Bipartisan Win in order to appeal to some white working class men who will never vote for them anyway. In fact, it will simply push them more deeply into Donald Trump’s faux populist Republican party.

Hopefully, my fears about impending capitulation to Trump are overblown. I admit that I’m probably scarred by decades of Democratic sellouts. But just in case my fears have some validity, I hope everyone will stay vigilant and let their Democratic representatives and candidates know that they expect them to hold. the. line.through 2018.

Midterms are referendums for the party in power and we must keep in mind that 90% of the base of the Democratic party is overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump and what he and his party represent. I’m going to be following this very closely and I promise to let you know when I see the party’s resolve slipping.

If we don’t repudiate this man and his party in 2018, I fear we might not get another chance. Yes, he is that dangerous.

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A malevolent Forrest Gump
by digby

Here’s an op-ed that will soothe your wired mind and make you realize you aren’t going crazy. It starts off in the opposite direction, running down all these year-end pieces about Donald Trump’s foreign policy achievements and finding that he’s a savvy player who’s been underestimated. It’s enough to make you take up drinking lighter fluid.
Here’s an example:

The historian Arthur Herman locates a “Trump doctrine” based upon the “concept of ‘principled realism,’” which he says rests on a certain “philosophical underpinning,” primarily the recognition that we live in a competitive world. The Asia scholar Daniel Blumenthal sees a White House fashioning a “strategic approach” to his region of expertise, including an “inspiring vision” for the future of the Korean peninsula.

I was ready to give up (I can only take so much bizarroworld literature.)He commends people for trying to see the bright side and recognizing that certain of Trump’s policies show a kind of rough consistency.

But seriously, people. Let’s get real:

[T]here is something amiss in the effort to uncover coherence in Trump’s statecraft. The president is the lynchpin of the American constitutional system. And there are no unresolved questions about this particular president’s capabilities.

Trump gave a number of extended interviews on foreign policy during the campaign, and they did not reveal the mind of a Talleyrand or a Metternich. One finds instead the crudest of formulations punctuated by gibberish. A single sampling must stand in for the whole: “certainly cyber has to be a, you know, certainly cyber has to be in our thought process, very strongly in our thought process. Inconceivable that, inconceivable the power of cyber.”

His most crippling weakness, however, is a gaping hole in his character that creates an insatiable craving for adulation. That in turn leads him to soak up flattery, especially from autocrats abroad.

A sumptuous banquet at the Saudi royal court and a massive five-story portrait of himself projected onto his hotel façade were enough to make Trump swoon with delight toward a country he had formerly faulted for 9/11 and ripping off the American economy. When Trump traveled to the Philippines, strongman Rodrigo Duterte greeted him with gaudy baubles that led our president to gloat over his reception: “It’s a red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever seen.”

For every step Trump takes that has the appearance of purposefulness, there’s another step that reveals an infantile mind giving vent to impulses never successfully subjected to discipline 65 years ago in the sandbox: “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’” is what Trump, while on a state visit to Vietnam, tweeted about North Korea’s nuclear-armed tyrant.

In light of Trump’s mode of discourse, it is farcical to speak seriously about his foreign policy “visions and aspirations.” To expand on the “philosophical underpinning” of Trumpian “concepts” is to descend into the absurd.

The man who has boasted about grabbing women by the genitals, who cannot distinguish truth from falsity, whose ignorance is only exceeded by his hatefulness, who disses allies and puffs up dictators, whose daily intelligence briefings have been dumbed down to approach the level of The Cat in the Hat, whose own secretary of State reportedly has called him a “moron,” is more of a malevolent Forrest Gump than anything resembling a master statesman.

Amirite? He is an f-ing moron. He is a daily danger to the future of mankind. And he’s not improving.

By the way, that was written by a Republican national security expert. I doubt I agree with him on much of anything else but at least we see the same Donald Trump which is reassuring.

You are not crazy and neither am I. Whew.

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Flynn goes on the discard pile
by digby

Oh look, they’ve had to “pivot” from discrediting Mueller to discrediting Flynn. All those liars out to get Trump.

President Trump’s legal team plans to cast former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn as a liar seeking to protect himself if he accuses the president or his senior aides of any wrongdoing, according to three people familiar with the strategy.

The approach would mark a sharp break from Trump’s previously sympathetic posture toward Flynn, whom he called a “wonderful man” when Flynn was ousted from the White House in February. Earlier this month, the president did not rule out a possible pardon for Flynn, who is cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
[…]
Earlier this month, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of lying to to the FBI, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Prosecutors said they will recommend a sentence from zero to six months in prison as part of his cooperation deal. Flynn’s son, who served as his chief of staff, also faced the risk of criminal charges, according to people familiar with the plea negotiations, but was spared.

Trump’s legal team has seized on Flynn’s agreement with prosecutors as fodder for a possible defense, if necessary. In court filings, the retired lieutenant general admitted that he lied to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the December 2016 transition.

“He’s said it himself: He’s a liar,” said one person helping craft the strategy who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

Probably not a great idea to blast out the plan this way even though Mueller undoubtedly expected this. It’s a standard defense.

But it may explain this weird story:

Joseph Flynn — brother of former presidential national security adviser Michael Flynn, who recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — demanded a pardon for his brother on Tuesday.

“About time you pardoned General Flynn who has taken the biggest fall for all of you given the illegitimacy of this confessed crime in the wake of all this corruption,” Flynn tweeted to President Donald Trump, in a post that was later deleted.

You can imagine how that went over with Flynn’s lawyers. It’s not a good idea for him or anyone around him to be begging for a pardon when Junior still faces multiple criminal charges.

These people aren’t very bright.

I’m sure Flynn was told by his attorneys that Trump was going to turn on him and make him into a lying, treasonous Benedict Arnold. At this point one doubts that his feelings will be hurt. He has to know by now that cozying up to Trump was the biggest mistake of his life. He could have been making millions quietly lobbying for all those foreign countries right now and instead his life is ruined.

If it’s any compensation, he’s far from the first fool who bought some snake oil Trump was selling and lost everything.

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Today’s dispatch from Trumplandia
by digby

They’re ok. They still love him.

I know you were worried that maybe nobody’s checked in with the Trumpies today. How are they doing? Are they ok? Are they unhappy or depressed or in any way concerned about the fact that their man told all his rich friends down in Mar-a-lago that they “all just got a lot richer” now that he passed his tax plan?

You can breathe easier. The AP is on it and they’ve got good news. The Trumpies are happy. And that’s all that matters in this whole big country:

The regulars amble in before dawn and claim their usual table, the one next to an old box television playing the news on mute.

Steven Whitt fires up the coffee pot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.

People like it that way, he thinks. It reminds them of a time before the world seemed to stray away from them, when coal was king and the values of the nation seemed the same as the values here, in God’s Country, in this small county isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Everyone in town comes to his diner for nostalgia and homestyle cooking. And, recently, news reporters come from all over the world to puzzle over politics — because Elliott County, a blue-collar union stronghold, voted for the Democrat in each and every presidential election for its 147-year existence.

Until Donald Trump came along and promised to wind back the clock.

“He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here,” says Whitt.

“I still see it.”

Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains profoundly popular here in these mountains, a region so badly battered by the collapse of the coal industry it became the symbolic heart of Trump’s white working-class base.

Do you ever get the feeling that they’ve got some Russian bots churning out this drivel from somewhere in St. Petersburg? It sounds like a parody at this point.

But hey, as long as we can all be reassured that the Real Americans are happy we can all relax. They will decide the fate of the world for us.

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The Russians found a very well tilled ground for dirty tricks and ratf**kingby digby

I wrote about the latest reporting on ongoing Russian propaganda efforts for Salon this morning:
Someone asked me over the weekend to use one word to describe how I’ve felt over the last year and I replied, “disoriented.” It’s amazing how off balance I still feel, more than a year after Donald Trump won the biggest upset in presidential election history. It’s not just the fact of having such a witless, unqualified person leading the country, although that’s plenty disorienting. It’s that there continues to be this challenge to what we commonly define as reality, which makes each day something of an emotional roller coaster. The sheer number of “alternative facts,” the degree of “whataboutism” and the extent of “I know you are but what am I” reactions from Republicans and conservative media is enough to give you a headache every day before noon.

This is not to say this is all a brand new thing. The right has practiced this form of politics for a very long time, if not so relentlessly. You could go back to Nixon and the dirty tricks and “ratf**king” of the Watergate era to see “meddling” in campaigns, such as the tactics employed against Sen. Ed Muskie, who ended his 1972 presidential campaign after he responded badly to a fake letter to the editor implying that he was prejudiced against French-Canadians.

As far as propaganda goes, the Republicans led by onetime House Speaker Newt Gingrich used to hold seminars and offer courses on how to use demeaning buzzwords to describe their Democratic opposition as unnatural and deviant. He spent two decades training the right wing in today’s hardcore rhetorical battles, with the conscious goal of distorting Americans’ perceptions of such previously anodyne concepts as the common good, inalienable rights and the general welfare into nefarious schemes to steal money from hard-working citizens and turn American culture into a sewer of decadence and immorality.

By the time George W. Bush won the election by dubious means in 2000, we were very far along the path of all-American “active measures” to deceive the public with sophisticated misinformation. Case in point: the Iraq war. Former Vice President Al Gore wrote a book about all this a decade ago called “The Assault on Reason,” which contains this quote:

As we now know, of course, there was absolutely no connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In spite of that fact, President Bush actually said to the nation at a time of greatly enhanced vulnerability to the fear of attack, “You can’t distinguish between them.”

Thomas Jefferson would have recognized the linkage between absurd tragedy and the absence of reason. As he wrote to James Smith in 1822, “Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.”

The Obama years were an interregnum, during which the right gathered its strength after a fateful cratering of its agenda at the end of the Bush administration. Its forces recovered in time to steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and somehow pull off Donald Trump’s stunning upset.

It is important to keep that context in mind as we contemplate the latest reports of efforts by the Russian government to “sow chaos” and meddle in the election on Trump’s behalf last year. Let’s just say that the ground had been well tilled by American conservatives before Mark Zuckerberg was even a gleam in his daddy’s eye.

Having said all that, this story in The Washington Post is an eye-opener. Speaking to numerous former and current government officials, reporters Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Jaffe conclude that the Russians had been trying for years to do what they did in 2016, and the U.S. government didn’t take the threat seriously. These same foreign actors will likely seek to disrupt and discredit the elections in 2018 and 2020. If the administration continues to deny that it’s even happening, they may even try to tamper with results.

Nobody knows to what extent Russian agents were effective in actually putting Trump in office. These things are difficult to measure, and there were a dozen different factors that could account for the close result. But they’ve been at it for years, to one degree or another, and had honed these techniques in other countries, which ought to have served as a warning to Americans. All the evidence suggests Russians or their allies are continuing to employ them even as we speak. According to the Post, the Trump administration isn’t exactly putting the pedal to the medal to thwart this — even assuming U.S. officials have a clue how to do that, which they don’t.

Apparently, the Obama administration didn’t either:

The events surrounding the FBI’s NorthernNight investigation follow a pattern that repeated for years as the Russian threat was building: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin’s ambitions. Top U.S. policymakers didn’t appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back. In the end, big plans died of internal disagreement, a fear of making matters worse or a misguided belief in the resilience of American society and its democratic institutions.

It doesn’t appear that things have gotten any better, particularly since President Trump is so sensitive about the topic that his advisers are afraid to even bring it up for fear that he’s going erupt and the whole day will be ruined.

Former House Intelligence Committee chair and former acting CIA director Michael Morell (who called Trump “an unwitting agent” of Russia back in August of 2016) wrote an op-ed contending that Russian agents are still active on social media, attacking GOP Trump critics and the FBI. Apparently, they even helped push a boycott of Keurig, the manufacturer of coffeemakers, when it pulled its advertising from Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. Oddly, the Russians still seem to believe that the best way to “sow discord” and “create chaos” is to help Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

At this point, these Russian agents are just extensions of the Republican political operation, which has been at the disinformation and propaganda game for a long time and which is obviously happy to have help from outside experts. Indeed, it’s hard to know who’s leading and who’s following at this point. Maybe special counsel Robert Mueller can unravel that for us too.

If you feel like dropping a little something into the Hullabaloo kitty over this holiday period, I would be most appreciative. Together we can get through this.

Happy New Year, everybody.

cheers — digby

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Democracy gets new lifeby digby

Harriet the bald eagle is expecting eaglets. Here she is on the livestream just hanging, waiting for the big event with the breeze blowing through her neck feathers.

If you feel like dropping a little something into the Hullabaloo kitty over this holiday period, I would be most grateful. Together we can get through this.

Happy New Year, everybody.

cheers — digby

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Starving the beast cuts both ways
by Tom Sullivan

Indiana overdose victims. Via WTHR.

Magician and psychic debunker James Randi once wrote, “A magician will instantly see the truth behind any colleague’s illusion. But we have a bit of an advantage: We know we are being fooled.” Scientists taken in by psychics aren’t accustomed to their data trying to fool them, as Randi knows. They are over-confident. They believe themselves too smart to be fooled. And get fooled.

Forever frustrating is progressives’ belief in our own intelligence and schooling. We think they somehow immunize us from making mistakes of fact and judgment. They do not. One former investigative journalist and author in my Facebook feed spent much of 2016 sharing rabid, anti-Clinton posts. Some of those surely included propaganda revealed as being churned out by the “Alice Donovans” in the employ of Vladimir Putin and published by lefty outlets like Counterpunch. Liberal smartness was no prophylactic.

So it was not surprising that at the highest levels counterintelligence officials in the Obama administration were caught off guard. They believed Russians would not dare use propaganda efforts here to help elect Donald Trump and sew discord among Americans. The Washington Post again yesterday reported on how long it took for officials to realize they’d been had. But eventually they sent a delegation to warn NATO allies about what they had uncovered:

For the first time since the days after 9/11, the American officials in Brussels sounded overwhelmed and humbled, said a European ambassador in the room.

When the briefers finished, the allies made clear to the Americans that little in the presentation surprised them.

“This is what we’ve been telling you for some time,” the Europeans said, according to Lute, the NATO ambassador. “This is what we live with. Welcome to our lives.”

That’s the long way around to suggesting those who have lived with populist authoritarians like our sitting president may know a little something about populist authoritarians. Rather than assume our smarts will keep us from being outwitted, maybe we should listen.

Venezuelan economist Andrés Miguel Rondón has been issuing warnings for a year at least:

Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Never forget that you’re that enemy. Trump needs you to be the enemy, just like all religions need a demon. A scapegoat. “But facts!” you’ll say, missing the point entirely.

What makes you the enemy? It’s very simple to a populist: If you’re not a victim, you’re a culprit.

It’s political “wedging” on steroids. A Republican state representative here visited neighborhood after neighborhood in his district following a simple formula. Find out what riles people. Give them someone to blame. Promise to fix it. Deliver what’s easy. Forget what’s hard. Blame Them for your failures.

Rondón wrote yesterday in the Washington Post that his country lived in a postfactual world for decades under Hugo Chávez. He has advice for Americans struggling to understand why blow after blow and scandal after scandal fail to bring down Donald Trump. “If you want to fight Trump effectively,” he suggests, “you have to learn to think like [his supporters] do.”

Rondón explains:

What you call scandal is only a sign that he is fighting back. Indeed: that he is fighting you. To his supporters, this is no scandal at all — he’s doing exactly what he promised he would do.

It does not matter that he is eroding the nation’s democratic institutions. That this combat is dangerous, hypocritical, built on lies. That you, after all, are innocent. His supporters are convinced that you are to blame. Until you can convince them otherwise, they will cheer him on. The name of the game is polarization, and the rookie mistake is to forget you are the enemy.

Normal politicians collapse in the face of scandal because the scandals show them dozing on the job or falling back on their promises. To get elected, they offer a bargain: “Vote for me: I will make you richer/fight for your rights/assure your progress.” Scandals reveal they can’t do that, and thus, they tumble. However, like all populists, Trump offers a much different deal — “Vote for me: I will destroy your enemies. They are the reason you are not rich/have less rights/America is not great anymore.” Scandal is the populist’s natural element for the same reason that demolishing buildings makes more noise than constructing them. His supporters didn’t vote for silence. They voted for a bang.

States and regions where people believe they don’t matter voted for “a wrecking ball to disrupt the system.”

Rondón concludes:

This is not a call for appeasement, only for efficiency. If dwelling on scandal too much can be counterproductive, then the focus must be elsewhere. Again, I believe it should rest on understanding and empathizing with the grievances that brought Trump to power (wage stagnation, cultural isolation, a depleted countryside, the opioid crisis). Trump’s solutions may be imaginary, but the problems are very real indeed. Populism is and has always been the daughter of political despair. Showing concern is the only way to break the rhetorical polarization.

It is not clear whether Rondón is right. Chávez opponents survived him, but never defeated him. Still, failure can be instructive. Rondón wrote last January:

But we failed. Because we lost sight that a hissy-fit is not a strategy. The people on the other side, and crucially Independents, will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. Worst of all, you will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re just giving the Populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.

The key may be to focus less on Trump’s perfidies and more on how his base’s American dreams go unrealized. As any Trekker knows, the way to disarm a creature that feeds on negative emotion is to stop feeding it. In this case, however, highlighting sympathetic victims of Trump’s actions could have an effect. Tribalism is his strength. Weakening it makes him vulnerable.

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