Month: December 2017

Yes, the president directed them to investigate. He did it on national TV.by digby

I wrote about the week’s latest Mueller pushbacks for Salon this morning:
One of the more disturbing comments President Trump has made in recent months, and that’s saying something, is what he said last month to radio talk show host Larry O’Connor in the wake of the indictments of Paul Manafort and others.

You know the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it. I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department. Why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her — the dossier.

He continued with a rather stilted explanation that he as president couldn’t be involved but that he “hoped” someone was looking into it. Later that same day, he spoke to the press as he prepared to leave for his Asia trip:

You want to look at Hillary Clinton. I’m not involved with the Justice Department. But they should be looking at the Democrats. They should be looking at a lot of things.

There was something about the way he said it that was . . . off. It seemed practiced. Indeed, he had started out the morning with this tweet, as if he had decided this would his theme for the day:

….People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!

Trump has been using “Crooked Hillary” as a foil for almost two years now, and it remains true that his crowds are still weirdly stimulated and aroused at the mere mention of putting her in prison. But this was the first time that Trump had said something as president that suggested a serious intention to follow through, if only he were allowed to direct the Justice Department and the FBI to do his bidding. MSNBC’s Ari Melber noted at the time that Trump was “doing in public what Nixon would only do in secret. He is openly musing about pushing the DOJ to investigate or prosecute political opponents.”

That’s how it appeared to me too. Trump had already gotten himself in trouble when he personally asked former FBI Director James Comey to go easy on his buddy Michael Flynn, so he had learned the hard way that presidents are not supposed to be “involved” with the Justice Department. Thinking he was being clever, he just said publicly what he wanted to be done, as if he were speaking off the cuff.

Why he would want to pursue Hillary Clinton after all this time is obvious. He wants to muddy the waters with a parallel investigation into the hated Hillary and discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the Russia scandal by any means necessary. His loyalists had been casting about for the best way to fight back and settled on a sort of mirror conspiracy theory: While others accuse Trump of conspiring with the Russian government to tilt the 2016 election in his favor, they accuse Clinton of conspiring with the FBI and the Justice Department to steal the election from Trump.

It’s crazy, but that’s what they’re going with. Over the past week, this has ramped up from a number of different directions. On Thursday, NBC News reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed DOJ prosecutors to “ask FBI agents to explain the evidence they found in a now-dormant criminal investigation into a controversial uranium deal that critics have linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton.” This is, of course, the debunked story from the book “Clinton Cash,” cranked out by Steve Bannon’s phony Government Accountability Institute.

Sessions had promised the Senate that he would recuse himself from all decisions about the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation, because of his criticisms of her during the campaign. Apparently he didn’t mean it. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted on Thursday that the president didn’t “direct” Sessions to investigate the uranium deal, but then, he didn’t need to. He’d already made it clear what he wanted done.

Sessions’ recusal was as worthless as the one House Inteligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., promised after he was caught sneaking around in the middle of the night hatching plots with the White House last spring, when he was supposed to be conducting an impartial investigation. Now Politico has reported that Nunes and a handful of fellow Trump disciples on the committee have been conducting a secret investigation, without informing their Democratic colleagues, that sounds an awful lot like what the president “mused” about in those comments back in November:

The people familiar with Nunes’ plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. . . . The sources familiar with the separate inquiry said it was born out of steadily building frustration with the Justice Department’s refusal to share details of the way the Trump dossier was used to launch the FBI’s investigation of his campaign team last year.

Senators are getting in on the act as well. Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wants Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe fired because his wife is a Democrat and he’s suspected of having been hostile to Trump during the election (which apparently translates into him covering up Hillary Clinton’s crimes). Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has become downright hysterical:

Time to investigate high ranking Obama government officials who might have colluded to prevent the election of @realDonaldTrump! This could be WORSE than Watergate!— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 21, 2017

But for all this bluster from Trump’s increasingly sycophantic congressional supporters, if this plan is to work he has to persuade a majority of the public that he’s more honest than Robert Mueller, the FBI and the Department of Justice. That part’s not looking good. CNN released some polling on public attitudes about the Russia investigation on Thursday and this result is astonishing:

[The] things Donald Trump has said publicly about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have been …

8% completely true

28% mostly true

32% mostly false

24% completely false

Only 8 percent of the American people believe that their president has been completely truthful about an investigation into whether he colluded with a foreign government to win the election. One imagines Mueller isn’t losing sleep worrying about about his reputation being tarnished by someone with a credibility gap of that magnitude. Trump’s the one who’s looking tired these days.

As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going. Together we will get through this.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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Envy is as envy does
by Tom Sullivan

The people who decry government picking winners and losers just passed a massive tax restructuring aimed at favoring “certain taxpayers and activities while disfavoring others — and for no discernible policy rationale.” Thirteen tax experts conclude that in a document titled “The Games They Will Play: An Update on the Conference Committee Tax Bill.”

That is, assuming “to the victor go the spoils” doesn’t count as policy.

Thomas Edsall comments on the report in detail at the New York Times. Edsall’s piece, writes Josh Marshall, captures “the mix of cynicism, greed, and sloppiness that created this bill.” Not to mention the self-dealing of the legislators who stand to benefit “bigly” from it. Edsall concludes:

All of this raises a basic question. How could nearly every Republican representative — and all 52 Republican senators — support the tax bill? The best answer may be the most cynical: because it benefits key leaders, their friends, their heirs and their donors.

But a survey at the Times of reactions to the tax plan from the left and the right yields this quote from James Piereson of the conservative American Greatness:

“To survive in a competitive universe, blue state governors and legislatures may have little choice but to reduce taxes and pare back public services and public employment — in other words, to abandon the blue state model.”

Piereson follows up with a jeremiad against public employee unions and how many members they still retain, concentrated in blue-ish states. The caps on state and local tax deductions, as well as other changes, he believes, “will increase the pressure on high-tax states to reduce taxes and rein in spending” and perhaps “reorder the political dynamic in blue states” where lie all those unions.

It seems pretty clear who Piereson believes should lose in the tax restructuring. He joins the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, who gloated to Business Insider, the tax bill would be “death to Democrats,” arguing unintelligibly that any tax increases the bill inflicts on blue states are the fault of liberals:

“Blue staters tend to send liberal politicians to office, who then vote for bigger federal spending — even though a greater share of the money goes to the red states.”

Piereson concludes, “As blue state leaders adjust their policies, their states will gradually become more competitive with their peers in the federal system.” Which is another way of saying, in a race to the bottom they will join red states on the lower tier of productivity. Rather than build up red states using a blue-state model, he’d rather see blue states cut down to red-state size.

For all their by-you-own-bootstraps zeal, red states lag blue ones in labor force participation. Robin Brooks, managing director and chief economist at the Institute for International Finance told CBS weeks ago:

“When the financial crisis hit you had a ton of people basically exit the labor force,” Brooks said. And while some of them have returned, they haven’t returned equally. “For blue states, people are getting crowded back into the labor force, but it’s not happening for red states,” he said.

“Since 2014, we’ve had a very strong labor market, the monthly pace of jobs created has been running between 160,000 and 200,000, and it’s just not working for red states,” he added. The labor participation rates in those two sets of states have diverged in recent years: growing in blue states and falling in red. And that pattern has continued since the presidential election. “The robust economic picture at a national level is therefore not healing the red versus blue state divide,” IIF wrote.

Red states especially are suffering from a reliance on “brick-and-mortar industries like retail and manufacturing,” especially for industries in decline. Contrarily, blue states “have an above-average reliance on high-tech and medical jobs, which are growing faster than average.” Austerity policies put in place in red states such as Kansas have slowed their recoveries.

To repeat what Michael Tomasky observed, blue America:

… 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.

The Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley observed in November 2016 it is “unprecedented, in the era of modern economic statistics” for a losing presidential candidate to have represented so large a portion of the country’s economic base.

Yet attacking that economic base in the name of expanding it is just what some Republicans admit they are doing, and for partisan reasons rather than economic ones. Conservatives like to argue that raising taxes for public purposes is about envy. So, it seems, is lowering them.

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You thought 2017 was crazy? Fasten your seatbelts.
by digby

FDR lighting the National Christmas tree

I don’t know about you but I’m going to be glancing at my news feed a little bit more frequently over the next couple of weeks just in case President Trump decides to pull the trigger and fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. He’s said he won’t, but he lies constantly. If he wants to do it, he will.

2018 is probably going to be a more tumultuous year than 2017, if you can believe that. We have an election coming and while we always say it’s the most “important election of our lifetimes”, this time it actually is. The Republicans must be repudiated by the American people at the ballot box or something even worse than Trump will happen to this country.

If this tax cut atrocity doesn’t tell us anything else, it should be clear that the single most important thing we can do is take back control of congress to stop any more legislation like this from ever getting into Trump’s tiny hands again.

And then there is the desperate need for real congressional investigations into what happened with the cyber attacks of 2016. Regardless of whether they actually put Trump and his cronies on the hot seat, they simply must hold public hearings about the election interference, educate the nation about what we face in the future.

And regardless of whether Trump fires Mueller, this next year will feature the ongoing drama of the Russia investigation and potential criminal charges of some of the president’s closest associates and maybe himself no matter what, whether it moves to state courts or another federal prosecutor takes up the case down the road. Remember, when Nixon fired Archibald Cox he ended up appointing a conservative Republican, Leon Jaworski, to lead the probe and he was as appalled Cox when he saw the evidence of the president’s criminality.

There’s a reason that many members of the Department of Justice and the FBI were stunned by what they saw in the Russia investigations before and after the election and it wasn’t because they loved Hillary Clinton or were liberal Democrats.

Whatever happens, it’s not going to be over any time soon. It is vital that we stay on top of this, that we don’t withdraw, as tempting as it is. We can’t escape the consequences of what this president and this party are doing to our society, our country and the world. We have to remain engaged.

I’ll be covering it closely here at Hullabaloo every single day. I hope that those of you with busy lives who do not have the time to closely follow the ins and outs of politics every day will use this blog as a place to stop in and at least get a feel for the zeitgeist. I try very hard to keep my eyes open and my mind clear, despite all the gaslighting and the normalization of this craziness.

This is not normal. It can never be allowed to become normal if we are to come out of this with our country intact.

If that’s something that matters to you too, perhaps you’ll drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking this year. I would be most appreciative of anything you can contribute.

As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going. Together we will get through this.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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Only 8 percent of the public believe the president has told the whole truth about Russiaby digby

The survey also reveals widespread mistrust of Trump’s public statements on the Russian investigation. A majority of Americans, 56%, say Trump’s comments on the Russia probe have been mostly or completely false vs. only 35% who say they’ve been true.

Notably, only 8% of Americans overall — including only 15% of Republicans and 18% of those who approve of Trump overall — say Trump’s comments have been completely true.

Seriously:

Here it is:

That is amazing. He’s the president of the United States and he’s been accused of colluding with a foreign government to win the office. And only 8% of the public believes he has told the entire truth about it.

Wow.

It’s the holiday season and if you’d like to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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The best thing I’ve heard in weeks! Steve Bannon is thinking of running for President in 2020.by digby

I know, I know. It’s too good to be true. But apparently, he looks in the mirror and sees a president instead of a derelict. Gabriel Sherman joined him on the road for his trip to China and speeches to conservative groups recently. He may be more narcissistic than Trump, if that’s even possible. Yes, he’s probably smarter, but that doesn’t make him a genius. That bar is very low.
An excerpt:

“I realized if you’re not out there for the hobbits, you’re not in their lives,” Bannon said, using his affectionate moniker for Trump voters. During the week I traveled with him from New York to Tokyo to South Florida, for what was Bannon’s first major profile since leaving the White House, he made a half dozen speeches to conservative groups, hosted Breitbart’s talk-radio show, and helped market a new biography Bannon: Always the Rebel. Inside the right-wing echo chamber, Bannon is lionized as a conquering folk hero. Well-wishers flock to snap selfies, press the flesh. At one event I chatted with an elderly man waiting his turn on the receiving line. “If I could ask him one question, it would be, why aren’t you president?’”

That has at least been a passing thought. In October, Bannon called an adviser and said he would consider running for president if Trump doesn’t run for re-election in 2020. Which Bannon has told people is a realistic possibility. In private conversations since leaving the White House, Bannon said Trump only has a 30 percent chance of serving out his term, whether he’s impeached or removed by the Cabinet invoking the 25th amendment. That prospect seemed to become more likely in early December when special counsel Robert Mueller secured a plea deal from former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on Trump, telling advisers his former boss has “lost a step.” “He’s like an 11-year-old child,” Bannon joked to a friend in November.

While Bannon praised Trump during our conversations—he said he’s the best orator since William Jennings Bryan—he doesn’t deny he was unhappy in the White House. “It was always a job,” he said. “I realize in hindsight I was just a staffer, and I’m not a good staffer. I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.” He told me he now feels liberated. “I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

Not surprisingly, the idea of Bannon as a political figure, let alone a presidential candidate, inspires ridicule and venom from the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Bannon’s roster of candidates a bunch of “cranks and outliers.” Former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes said Bannon is a “white supremacist.” Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, told me that Bannon is “an odd, strangely repulsive figure who is trying to use the political process to work through personal issues of anger and frustration.” He added, “like many people in their first campaign, he confused his candidate winning with the fantasy voters supported him.”

A prominent Republican described Bannon’s crusade as a vanity exercise doomed to fail. “I think there was a lot of rage when he was in the White House,” the Republican said. “Steve had to subsume his ego to Donald, who Steve thinks is dumb and crazy. With Steve, it’s not about building new things—it’s about destroying the old. I’m not sure he knows what he wants.” As evidence, he pointed out the recent Virginia governor’s race, where Republican Ed Gillespie got crushed by nine points running on a Bannon-esque platform defending Confederate monuments and inciting fear over illegal immigrant crime. “The issues didn’t just fail, they failed miserably,” the Republican said.

Bannon’s response to all this criticism is a variation on his personal motto: Honey badger don’t give a shit. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told me when I visited him one morning at the Bryant Park Hotel. “You can call me anything you want. Do you think I give a shit? I literally don’t care.”

He seems nice.

I do hope he runs. He’s got all of Donald Trump’s nasty aggression without the show business celebrity and the glamorous life. I would love to see him challenge Trump in a primary. Unfortunately, he plans to run in case Trump is impeached or removed with the 25th Amendment which he thinks is a serious possibility because he losing it and acts like an 11 year old. Oh my.

It’s the holiday season and if you’d like to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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Praising the deityby digby

I know I mentioned this yesterday, but you really have to see all of this to truly appreciate the unctuous sycophany of these Republicans. Honestly, it’s disturbing. Very disturbing:

This Mike Pence "prayer" of thanks to Trump is excruciatingly, stomach-churningly uncomfortable to watch. The ritual submission and exaltation is nearly pornographic. This is not America. pic.twitter.com/FN6y2X2K73— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) December 20, 2017

Good to see it went on when the cameras went away pic.twitter.com/UXheIthdwn— Mike Sacks (@MikeSacksEsq) December 20, 2017

If you want to see them patting each other on the back, this little self-love fest happened today. I especially enjoyed the North Dakota congresswoman who said that an extra $1600.00 is life changing for average Americans and then went on to talk about how Orrin Hatch had everyone in tears yesterday with his obsequious paean to Donald Trump.

This toady phenomenon is really starting to creep me out. I understand the cynical manipulation of Trump’s monumental juvenile ego by foreign leaders. But these people are supposedly representing a co-equal branch of the US government. I’ve never ever seen this level of groveling from cabinet members, Senators and Congressional representatives before. It’s bizarre and grotesque.

It’s the holiday season and if you’d like to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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There’s a political bombshell hidden inside the GOP tax cut billby digby

I wrote about the atrocity known as the Tax Cut bill for Salon this morning and the possible political bombshell contained within it:
So the Republicans had their first really good day all year on Wednesday. They finally passed “tax reform,” the GOP Holy Grail, magically imbued with “powers that will provide happiness, eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance.” Indeed, for as long as I can remember, tax cuts have been their answer no matter what the question. If the country is flush, Republicans insist that taxes have to be cut, because, as George W. Bush said repeatedly, “it’s your money!” When the economy crashed a few years later, once again tax cuts were prescribed. In good times and bad, war and peace, growth and recession, cutting taxes is at the very top of the GOP agenda.

Considering their obsession with tax cuts for all occasions, one might have thought they would have had several proposals they could pull off the shelf once they had full control of the government. Certainly they managed in the past to put together a plan that at least appeared to cut more taxes for the middle class than the vastly wealthy and didn’t add trillions to the deficit. They held hearings and spoke to experts and even got some Democrats on board so they could call it bipartisan. Yes, it was mostly phony, with tax cuts sunsetting in the out years so they could pretend the whole thing was fiscally responsible. But they adhered to congressional rules and used a common set of numbers and assumptions that everyone could agree upon.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that in the age of Donald Trump, they seemed to have no idea what they were doing. Congressional leaders rushed out a piece of legislation that makes little sense on either a political or an economic level. It does reward Republican donors, Donald Trump and his family and many members of Congress personally, so in that respect it’s a big win. But its effect on the rest of the country is at best a small, insubstantial payout and at worst a tax hike.

For all the Republican promises of the last four decades about simplifying the tax code so we could all file on a postcard, this thing is best described as the professional tax preparer’s job security act. Even the experts aren’t exactly sure how it works, and Trump and the Congress are in a big hurry to get the whole thing enacted before they figure it out. So who knows what kind of chaos we’ll be dealing with in the next year?

The reason for the big rush is just as delusional as the idea that the bill is going to create 5 percent growth: Republicans believe that the minute people see an extra few bucks in their paycheck, their approval ratings are going to go through the roof. Most of them are multimillionaires and obviously have no clue how people live in 2017. Recall this comment from Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn:

If we allow a family to keep another thousand dollars of their income, what does that mean? They can renovate their kitchen, they can buy a new car, they can take their family on vacation, they can increase their lifestyle . . .

How far back in time do you have to go to buy a new car for a thousand bucks? I can answer that. You’d have to go all the way back to 1922, when a Studebaker Light Six model cost just under that amount.

They truly seem to believe that these minor tax cuts are going to thrill people so much that the Donald Trump White House of Horrors presidency will be erased and they will sail to victory in 2018. They should have taken a look back at Barack Obama’s experience. He delivered tax cuts in 2009 as part of the stimulus program. And the people famously delivered him a “shellacking” in 2010. By the way, unlike Donald Trump, who sits as low as 32 percent approval in some polls, Obama was at the low point of his presidency — at 45 percent.

Many middle-class people will see a small change in their paychecks, and the very wealthy will get a tremendous windfall, which undoubtedly makes them very happy. But there is another group that is going to see some very unpleasant results from their tax hike: college-educated folks earning $80,000 to $250,000 in urban areas and wealthy suburbs. Tens of millions of upper middle-class people in those areas will see major tax increases from the changes in home mortgage deductions and local sales taxes.

Many of these people also happen to be traditional Republicans, some of whom have been moving toward the Democrats on social issues but have largely stuck with the GOP on economics. Some are fiscal conservatives who worry about deficits. This plan hikes the deficit by somewhere in the vicinity of $1.5 trillion, and these Republicans are shrugging their shoulders saying “don’t worry be happy.” Other members of this professional class have just always figured they’d personally do better under Republicans.

These are not people who are unaware of the complexity of taxes. They are the ones who will be hiring all those accountants, who will tell them that nobody has a clue what’s going to happen from year to year with this thing — the volatility built into this slapped-together plan is one of its most stunningly ill-thought-out features — and deliver the bad news about how much money they just lost so the very rich can hog even more of the nation’s wealth for themselves.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that even some of Trump’s Wall Street fans who were eagerly awaiting the tax cuts are dismayed to find out that billionaires are going to reap most of the benefits, and they are going to lose money:

Atop their list of worries: New limits on deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes — relatively high throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — will cost them thousands of dollars annually while depressing the value of their homes. That would chop local tax revenues and erode the quality of schools and other amenities traders expect for their families.

This will affect other upper middle-class families in expensive suburbs, even in states like Texas and Florida. Perversely enough, it could affect the handful of Republican lawmakers who voted against the bill, many of whom represent these upper middle-class suburbs, even more than those who voted for it. They were already weakened and vulnerable, and knew what this bill was going to do to their constituents. They will pay for their party’s sins nonetheless.

The Republicans got their tax-cut Holy Grail. But in the process they exacerbated their most challenging demographic crisis: Their growing estrangement with white, college educated voters in the upper middle-class. There aren’t enough billionaires and white working-class Trump fans in this country to save them.

It’s the holiday season and if you’d like to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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President Tony and UN Ambassador Carmela make the world an offer it can’t refooseby digby

President Tony:

Carmela:

The UN didn’t capitulate to their threats. Mark Goldberg at UN Dispatch gives the overview of what happened at the UN today.

In remarks ahead of the vote, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley explicitely threatened to cut American funding for the United Nations over this vote. This is a dangerous conflation between the work of the UN around the world and the individual actions of countries who are members of the UN. As Richard Hobrooke once famously quipped, blaming the United Nations when votes do not go in America’s favor is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.

Should the US make good on this threat, the world could be thrown into profound disarray.

The US is the largest financial supporter of the UN, paying about quarter of the regular budget and 28 percent of the budget of UN Peacekeeping. The US is also among the largest funders of humanitarian agencies like UNICEF, the World Food Program and the UN Refugee Agency. Reducing or cutting funding to the UN and its agencies would have a devastating impact around the world. The idea that the United States would punish vulnerable people in need of food aid because other countries in the world do not agree with its decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel makes no sense.

Yeah, well, that’s how we roll these days.

Trump behaved like a thug and so did Haley. “We’re taking names” and “we won’t be taken advantage of anymore.” In other words do what we say or we’ll tear this place apart.

The ramifications of this behavior are going to be with us for a long time to come. The most powerful nation on earth is currently run by 3rd rate gangsters who think the US is a protection racket. This sort of thing rarely ends well.

It’s the holiday season and if you’d like to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby

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Banks of the Ohio revisited
by Tom Sullivan

Politico reported last night that Republican members of Congress, meeting in secret, are building a case for discrediting the Justice Department and the FBI ahead of further revelations from Special Counsel Mueller in the Russia probe.

A group of House intelligence committee members led by Chairman Devin Nunes of California seeks to “highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement.” Republican members believe, Politico reports, the FBI and DOJ have conspired to hurt President Trump and/or protect Hillary Clinton.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the committee’s top Democrat, tells Politico he was unaware of the Republicans’ secret meetings, but believes building a case against the FBI and Bob Mueller is consistent with “an effort to undermine the investigations and these institutions out of fear of what they’ll find and try to discredit them in advance.”

Schiff went further last night on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” saying:

This is a real precarious moment for our democracy when you have two categories of Republican members of the Congress. One category that is basically saying and acting the part that if this investigation gets too close to threatening either the president or our majority or our chairmanships, we are prepared to burn down the house.

The second category, Schiff said, is “standing mute while they do it.”

Schiff is only saying what I’ve said again and again and again. Republican leaders and many of its members are acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. You know the ones, where the rejected suitor declares, “If I can’t have you, then no one can!” Then he murders her.

Only Say That You’ll Be Mine

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

It’s the Holiday Season and if you feel like putting a little something in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking this year it would be much appreciated.

This post will stay pinned at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for new material — thanks

A little something for the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking?
by digby

We’ve made it through Trump’s first year. We knew it would be a doozy and it was. Yesterday I did a short rundown on the ongoing horrors that was hardly comprehensive. Today he will get his first big legislative win: a massive tax cut for himself, Ivanka, Jared and the rest of the 1%. The “blue collar billionaire” will strut and march around as if it’s VE Day and his sychophants, enablers, cronies and fellow travelers will rejoice. They have always believed that tax cuts will fix everything and now we’re about to find out if they can fix their president’s 32% approval rating. We know they will fix whatever unhappiness their donors might be feeling.

But enough about the Republicans. Let’s talk about the Democrats. They have actually hung together, can you believe that? It’s a first as far as I can tell. Even the red state Senators in states Trump won big last year haven’t broken ranks, even to cut taxes, which is nothing short of a miracle. I think it says everything about the extremism and incompetence of the GOP but it also shows that Democrats have decided that opposing Trump is mandatory. I hate to say it but even though Trump is sui generis I kind of assumed they’d fold.

But let’s face it, it’s not about them. It’s about this:

If a Democratic official votes with Trump and the Republicans they will be destroyed by their own base. They seem to have learned that Democrats and Independents will simply not put up with Trump and GOP appeasement anymore. The lines have been drawn.

And here’s the really good news:

Democrats’ already wide advantage over Republicans in a hypothetical Congressional matchup has grown, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. At the same time, enthusiasm about voting next year has increased among Democrats nationwide following an unexpected win in Alabama’s Senate special election and a strong showing in Virginia’s state government elections last month.

Among registered voters, 56% say they favor a Democrat in their congressional district, while 38% prefer a Republican. That 18-point edge is the widest Democrats have held in CNN polling on the 2018 contests, and the largest at this point in midterm election cycles dating back two decades. The finding follows several other public polls showing large double-digit leads for Democrats on similar questions.

Independent voters favor Democrats by a 16-point margin, 51% to 35%, similar to the 50% to 36% margin by which they favored Democrats in fall of 2005, ahead of Democrats’ 2006 recapturing of the House and Senate. The Democrats hold a larger lead overall now because Republicans make up a smaller share of the electorate than they did in 2005.

And those Republicans who are still in the electorate are less enthusiastic about voting next year than Democrats. Overall, 49% of registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for Congress next year, compared with 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters who say the same.

The 18 point advantage in the generic ballot is unprecedented. If it holds, 2018 will be a tsunami not a wave. They won’t be able to pass legislation over Trump’s veto but they can stop this wholesale looting of the nation — and they can hold hearings, lots and lots of hearings.

This is happening because of The Resistance and a Democratic Party that’s being responsive to its base. That’s what the next year is going to be all about.

I hope you’ll stick with us here at Hullabaloo as we document what’s going on and give analysis you may find useful. My morning contributor Tom Sullivan is close to the ground down in North Carolina and tied in with grassroots activism all over the country. I’ll be following the big picture as I always do.

If you’d like to drop a little something in the Christmas stocking in anticipation of sharing this exciting upcoming election year it would be much appreciated. As always I’m immensely grateful for all of you who drop by to read this creaky old blog. It’s what keeps me going.

Happy Hollandaise everyone! Keep the faith.

cheers — digby