Month: January 2018

QOTD: Trumpby digby

“There’s been no collusion whatsoever.There’s no obstruction whatsoever. And I’m looking forward to it…

You fight back, oh, it’s obstruction.”

He thinks that using the power of his office to get his buddy out of trouble and stop an investigation into his campaign is “fighting back.” That’s true, it is. But it’s also illegal.

Once again, it’s clear that Donald Trump believes that he is above the law and that as president he has the right to do anything he chooses. He has flouted all the norms and rules against conflict of interest and continues to profit from his company which is clearly selling influence. There was no law against doing that because nobody has ever had the brass to do such a thing before. So he did it.

But this is different. Even the president cannot “fight back” by breaking the law. He still doesn’t seem to know that.

And, by the way, his “no collusion” mantra may be equally uninformed. He knows there is no law against what he calls “collusion” so that means it’s fine to do it, just like it’s fine to make profits off of your own business selling access and influence while you are president.

But there’s another word that means the same thing that actually is illegal. It’s called “conspiracy.” “Money laundering” is illegal too, as is “income tax evasion” and “fraud” all of which could be uncovered by prosecutors. And he knows it.

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Spy vs Spyby digby

Fox is a very confused “news” organization these days:

“This is like Watergate but far worse,” Sean Hannity said on his Monday night Fox show. “This reeks of law-breaking, it reeks of conspiracy, and it reeks of obstruction of justice.”

Yet on Wednesday afternoon, Fox published an article on its website by reporter Jake Gibson, saying this theory was flatly wrong. Gibson writes, citing “federal law enforcement officials,” that the messages were deleted by a technical error, not malice — one that had affected not just Strzok and Page’s phones, but “thousands” of Bureau-issued devices between the dates of December 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017.

“The gap in records covered a crucial period, raising suspicion among GOP lawmakers as to how those messages disappeared,” Gibson writes. “But Fox News is told that the glitch affected the phones of ‘nearly’ 10 percent of the FBI’s 35,000 employees.”

So either one of two things is happening here: Fox News has gotten a huge story wrong in a way that deeply undercuts the president, or its big-name talk show hosts like Hannity have been peddling a narrative that has absolutely zero basis in fact — but dovetails directly with a broader attack on the FBI aimed at undercutting special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

Uhm that would be door number 2.

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Meanwhile in Davosby digby

Via Crooks and Liars:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is already making headlines in Davos, telling reporters there that a weaker dollar is better for trade. Joe?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: I am so confused. Stephanie Ruhle, let’s bring you in. …Even I know, you don’t want your Treasury Secretary to say this, do you, at Davos?

STEPHANIE RUHLE: Joe, that is exactly it. It is true, a weaker dollar suits President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda. But Steve Mnuchin is not a President Trump surrogate doing cable TV. He’s lost the advantage of having the US being the world’s currency. People in the administration have said this is Steve Nnuchin going rogue, a result of Steve Mnuchin having no advisers, no experience, and a skeletal staff. It will clearly impact the markets and it’s a huge break from protocol with Treasury Secretaries before him, not to mention Wilbur Ross being on TV saying we are in a trade war. Maybe Wilbur Ross has been falling asleep in meetings where President Trump says we’re not.

MIKA: Oh, my god.

Oh my God is right.

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“Samsung, if you’ve found the missing text messages …”by digby

Jonathan Chait unpacks the missing “text” stories so I don’t have to. Comparing the story to the DNC hacking, when Wikileaks carefully doled out only emails designed to be misleading,he writes:

Republicans didn’t steal messages from the FBI. They happened upon them because two FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, happened to be having an affair, and since they used their phones to communicate (to avoid detection by their spouses), the messages they sent fell into the laps of Congress. For weeks, Republicans have followed the WikiLeaks formula with these texts, selectively leaking snippets of conversation to feed a distorted story line to the media.

The first wave of stories revealed that Strzok and Page had criticized Donald Trump and referred to their investigation as an “insurance policy.” It sounded extremely suspicious. In fact, a reporter who reviewed the entire context explained that they were referring to an FBI policy favorable to Trump. The bureau was concealing its counterintelligence investigation of the Republican candidate, while making known its email-server investigation of the Democratic candidate, on the assumption that Hillary Clinton was certain to win. Strzok used the insurance metaphor — “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” — to describe the folly of treating an unlikely event as though it had no chance of happening.

Another pseudo-controversy arose when conservative reporter John Solomon broke the news that Strzok and Page had advance knowledge of a Wall Street Journal story. Here was proof of the Deep State leakers of which Trump had warned. “Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are two of the deep state sources planting lies and false stories in the Wall Street Journal and other places,” cried a breathless Rush Limbaugh. In fact, as Ryan Reilly and Nick Baumann later explained, the story in question was harmful to Clinton, and elsewhere they expressed concern about unauthorized leaks.

Republican senator Ron Johnson highlights a text of Strzok expressing reluctance to join Robert Mueller’s team, because “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” Johnson told a conservative talk-show host that this “jaw-dropping” comment amounted to a confession that Strzok knew that Trump was innocent and joined Mueller’s investigation to smear him. But maybe Strzok simply had an open mind and thought Mueller’s probe stood a strong chance of clearing Trump. Another Strzok “scandal” grew out of a text he sent expressing the opinion that Clinton would not be charged in the email investigation. The text “suggests they knew and, in turn, believed Loretta Lynch knew, that no charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton, even before the FBI had interviewed her over her unauthorized private email server,” reports Breitbart.

They knew! The fix was in! Or maybe they simply knew that the evidence of the private email server did not amount to a plausible federal case against Clinton.

Note that a Strzok text expressing his view that Trump would not be charged over Russia became evidence of a nefarious plot against Trump, and another Strzok text expressing a view that Clinton would not be charged over the emails became evidence of a nefarious plot to help Clinton. If Strzok had expressed a belief that Clinton or Trump were guilty, those messages would become scandals, too. This is the way the game works. When you begin with a suspicious of nefarious intent, a captured expression of candid thought can be turned into devastating evidence.

This is headache inducing. But that’s the idea.

A lot of people are apparently believing this swill. After all, they believed the swill about Clinton’s emails to begin with.

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Where’re the white women at?
by digby

I generally hate these sort of interviews with 2016 voters a year later but this one is actually pretty good and worth watching all the way through. It challenges some of the voter stereotypes if not the general sentiments about Trump and the current state of the economy and I think accurately portrays the extremely polarized views of the electorate:

The most horrible Trumpie in the group is the older white woman who clearly lives in a bubble which has led her to believe that everyone agrees with her retrograde bigotry. And there are a lot of female Trumpies just like her. The good news is that the number is getting smaller as more white women wake up to the Trump catastrophe.

Ed Kilgore had this the other day:

It’s no secret that there’s a “gender gap” in American politics, with men being more likely to vote Republican and women more likely to vote Democratic. And it’s also no surprise that in 2016, that gender gap increased: According to exit polls, Donald Trump won 52 percent of the vote among men and only 41 percent among women. By contrast, in 2008 John McCain won 48 percent among men and 43 percent among women, a five-point “gender gap” as compared to an 11-point gap in 2016. As the closest thing to an open misogynist leading a national ticket in a very long time, Trump’s weakness among women was predictable.

But according to new data from a year-long SurveyMonkey assessment of Trump’s approval ratings, which Ron Brownstein has broken down for us, it seems Trump’s weakness among women is intensifying as his presidency unfolds, even — and particularly —among the white working-class women who did support him at robust levels in 2016.

[H]is position has deteriorated among white women without a college degree. Last year he carried 61 percent of them. But in the new SurveyMonkey average, they split evenly, with 49 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval. His approval rating among non-college-educated white women never rises above 54 percent in any age group, even those older than 50. From February through December, Trump’s approval rating fell more with middle-aged blue-collar white women than any other group.

Similar if not quite as dramatic drops in female support for Trump appear elsewhere in the electorate.

Trump’s position has also eroded since 2016 among college-educated white women. In 2016, those white-collar voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Trump but gave her only 51 percent of their votes. Now, in the 2017 average, 66 percent of them disapproved of Trump and 58 percent strongly disapproved. In every age cohort, at least three-fifths of them disapproved.

And in demographic groups where Trump was already weak, women are very much in the vanguard of opposition to him:

Trump in 2016 narrowly won younger whites. But he now faces crushing disapproval ratings ranging from 62 percent to 76 percent among three big groups of white Millennials: women with and without a college degree, and men with a degree.

Let’s hope this translates into a resounding defeat at the ballot box in ten months.

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You need some hopeful news. Here it is.by digby

Sean McElwee in Huffington Post:

As the 2018 midterms come into focus on the political terrain, it’s safe to expect that media coverage will focus overwhelmingly on the possibility of Democrats gaining majorities in the House and Senate. But a revolution is taking place in states across the country where, frustrated not just by President Donald Trump but by entrenched politicians who are serving themselves instead of the community, tens of thousands of Americans are running for local office.

Democrats have already picked up 34 Republican-held state legislative seats this cycle. These victories, driven by a burst of enthusiasm in the progressive base, show we’re about to witness a remaking of the Democratic Party.

Democrats Really Are Running Everywhere

Much of this momentum has come from a simple source: Democrats are running in more places. In Virginia, everyone knows that Democrats won big, but many people overlooked how many of those victories simply could not have occurred in past elections, because the districts were uncontested. In 2013, 34 Republicans ran without major-party opposition. In 2015, that number rose to 44. But in 2017, it dropped to only 12. Six Republicans who lost their seats in 2017 held seats that were not contested in 2015.

Now in Texas, which recently had a filing deadline, Democrats are contesting 14 of 15 state Senate seats and 133 of 150 state House seats. In 2016, 60 Republicans ran without a Democratic challenger (out of 150 seats up for election) in the state House while six of the 29 state Senate seats up for election were uncontested (state Senate terms are staggered).

Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run For Something, tells me she’s been closely following Oklahoma where she’s seen an “influx” of candidates angry about Mary Fallin’s staunchly right-wing governorship.

And Nicole Hobbs, co-founder of EveryDistrict, says her group’s plan nationally is to win by “effectively mobilizing the base and by competing in a broad swath of purple-to-red districts,” even those that have previously gone uncontested.

An Explosion Of Diversity

These races will not just determine partisan control of these local bodies, they will fundamentally reshape the face of American politics. The candidates running now will be the talent pool of the Democratic Party in future races for higher office across the country. These candidates are far more likely to be women, people of color, LGBTQ, low-income and young than current representatives are.

The wave in Virginia had a huge effect on the diversity of the legislature, where the first openly trans woman, first two Latinas and first two Asian-American women all entered the House of Delegates. The percentage of white men in the House of Delegates fell from 71 percent before the November election to 59 percent after.

Litman says the candidates for local office are more representative of the Democratic base. “We’re seeing more women, more people of color, more nurses, teachers and artists running for office,” she notes.

Read on. The results so far are showing that this diversity is a real advantage. An energized Democratic base wants to vote for people who represent them. Who knew?

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The Nunes Memoby digby

I wrote a bit about the lunacy at the heart of the right wing pushback against their Dear Leader in my Salon piece below.
Here’s Greg Sargent with the details on Nunes’ latest tactic. I just watched MSNBC talk about it for at least half an hour. It’s made it into the mainstream and it’s now become a competing narrative to reality. Teh Republicans are making serious headway with their bizarroworld narrative:

Republicans may be on the verge of publicly releasing a secret memo compiled by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), one of President Trump’s most devoted bodyguards against accountability on Capitol Hill, that purports to show serious misconduct by the FBI and Justice Department toward the Trump campaign. The memo is the latest effort to build an alt-narrative that casts the FBI’s Russia probe — which became special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — as a Deep State Coup to remove Trump from power.

Byron York reports that around 200 House Republicans have privately read the Nunes memo, and GOP leaders may release it in one or two weeks. This comes after Trump’s allies — including his son — have called for the memo’s release.

In an interview with me this morning, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) — who is Nunes’s Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee — pushed back hard, alleging that the memo presents a profoundly doctored picture of what the classified information actually shows.

“It’s highly distorted spin by Nunes,” Schiff told me. “The Nunes spin memo distorts the underlying materials and has presented Members with a very misleading impression of what those materials show.”

Schiff also made a striking claim: He said that in allowing the memo to be accessed in a classified setting by House Republicans, Nunes has violated an agreement with the FBI and the Justice Department. Schiff added that its public release would also violate that agreement. The GOP leaders on the intel committee have allowed members of Congress to access the document, but Democrats chargethis is merely an effort to arm them with misleading talking points to attack the FBI on Trump’s behalf.

“The release of the materials by the chairman violated an agreement he entered into with the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Schiff told me, in a reference to the release of the memo to the membership of the House for reading. “The agreement was because of the sensitivity of the materials to limit their distribution,” Schiff also said. “There were certain conditions attached to the viewing of the materials which have been violated.”

Asked if it would violate the agreement if the memo were to be released publicly, Schiff said: “Of course.” He added that this was revealing that there may be “no limit” to “how far Nunes and the majority are willing to go to protect the president from the Russia investigation.”

Schiff declined to go into more detail. But he also told me that he’d offered a motion on the committee that would delay the release of the memo until all its members could get access to the underlying material, but Republicans voted it down on party lines.

“That’s pretty telling,” Schiff said. Asked repeatedly to detail how the memo distorts the underlying info, Schiff said he could not because the materials are classified. A Nunes spokesman didn’t immediately return an email for comment.

The memo created by Nunes purports to document classified information that shows serious misconduct by top FBI and Justice Department officials in getting authority from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to conduct secret surveillance on Trump campaign officials, in particular former foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Three people who have seen the memo told Politico that it also raises questions about the role of the so-called “Steele Dossier” in prompting that surveillance.

Thus, the Nunes memo appears to be the latest effort to delegitimize the Russia probe by painting it as born of partisan dirty tricks and an illegitimate abuse of power. Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored that dossier, testified that the FBI viewed his memo as corroboration of already-collected information, and the FBI reportedly began its probe (which became the Mueller investigation) after learning that a Trump aide knew of dirt Russia had collected on Hillary Clinton.

But the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation continues unabated, and the Nunes memo is at the center of it. Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted nonstop for the release of the memo, and Trump’s media allies are using its existence to call for Mueller to close his investigation down.

There’s more at the link. It is all batshit. But the cable nets are covering it now, taking the charges seriously and basically creating the impression that it’s just as legitimate as the Mueller investigation.

Good work Nunes and Fox. You win.

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Mueller, the purge and the right wing crazy

Just not the “greatest jobs president” for you
by Tom Sullivan

Image: CNN Money Trump Jobs Tracker

Trump University closed its doors years ago. What students paid handsomely to learn was not to trust Donald Trump. Carrier employees in Indianapolis paid to learn the same lesson with their votes. Earlier this month 215 more received pink slips after receiving promises from Trump that he would save their jobs. Those jobs are headed to Mexico. Like students of Trump University, Carrier workers got a schooling, just not the one they expected.

“We all voted for him,” Renee Elliott, 44, said of her Carrier colleagues. “We just thought he was going to protect our jobs. It sounded really good. And then, boom.”

The “greatest jobs president God ever created” has a talent for exporting them. His new 30% tariff on foreign-made solar panels will destroy more jobs at home while propping them up abroad.

The Guardian reports:

The Solar Energy Industries Association said 23,000 jobs would be lost in 2018, pointing out that most solar manufacturing in the US revolves around making parts for cheaper imported panels, rather than the cells and panels themselves.

The installation of panels accounts for around 130,000 further jobs.

“It boggles my mind that this president – any president, really – would voluntarily choose to damage one of the fastest-growing segments of our economy,” said Tony Clifford, chief development officer of Standard Solar, which finances and installs panels.

The new tariffs include imported washing machines.

South Carolina’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster earlier this month celebrated the opening in Newberry of a new $380 million appliance hub by Korean manufacturer Samsung. The new tariffs have the company reexamining its commitment to expanding its South Carolina operations. McMaster told the Charleston Post and Courier:

“I think they made an error,” McMaster said. “I’m disappointed, but we’ll work with it and we’ll do what we can to make sure Samsung’s investment is strong and productive for the people of our state.”

The decision was a major victory for Whirlpool, an American manufacturer headquartered in Michigan, who complained that foreign companies were flooding the U.S. market with cheap washers.

A shame South Carolina is not a swing state.

Something else that’s not arriving from overseas is tourists:

Travel to the U.S. has been on the decline ever since President Donald Trump took office, and new data shows the slump translates to a cost of $4.6 billion in lost spending and 40,000 jobs.

The latest data from the National Travel and Tourism Office shows a 3.3 percent drop in travel spending and a 4 percent decline in inbound travel.

The downturn has also caused America to lose its spot as the world’s second-most popular destination for foreign travel, ceding to Spain.

Increase in Dow under:
– Obama from Jan 20, 2009 to Jan 4, 2010: 33.2%
– Trump from Jan 20, 2017 to Jan 4, 2018: 26.5%

Increase in S&P under:
– Obama from Jan 20, 2009 to Jan 4, 2010: 40.7%
– Trump from Jan 20, 2017 to Jan 4, 2018: 20.0% https://t.co/ntJBwnRUvW— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) January 4, 2018

Trump claimed in September that “companies are moving back, creating job growth the likes of which our country has not seen in a very long time.” Politifact stated at the time, “Overall, job growth is strong, particularly this long after the recession, but the gains are not much different (and maybe a little worse) than they were during the last six years of Obama’s tenure.”

Even Fox News acknowledged this month that average monthly job gains in Trump’s first year were the least since 2010.

Politifact ruled Trump’s September claim half true. Renee Elliott’s job was just not in the true half.

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

In dreams: Farewell Ursula K. Le GuinBy Dennis Hartley

Geek flags at half-staff. Earlier today, we learned of the loss of Ursula K. Le Guin, sci-fi/fantasy writer extraordinaire. She was one of the last of a classic generation…Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury. She once said: “I saw that women don’t have to write about what men write about, or write what men think they want to read. I saw that women have whole areas of experience men don’t have—and that they’re worth writing and reading about.” It’s a huge loss. My favorite film adaptation of a Le Guin story is “The Lathe of Heaven”, which I wrote about here a few years back…
One of my favorite sci-fi “mind trip” films is The Lathe of Heaven. Adapted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel, the film was produced by Thirteen/WNET-TV in New York and originally aired on PBS stations in 1979. A coveted cult favorite for years, it was reissued on DVD by Newvideo in 2000.

The story takes place in “near future” Portland, at a time when the Earth is suffering profound effects from global warming and pandemics are rampant (rather prescient, eh?) The film stars Bruce Davison as George Orr, a chronic insomniac who has become convinced that his nightly dreams are affecting reality. Depressed and sleep-deprived, he overdoses on medication and is forced by legal authorities to seek psychiatric help from Dr. William Haber (Kevin Conway), who specializes in experimental dream research.

When Dr. Haber realizes to his amazement that George is not delusional, and does in fact have the ability to literally change the world with his “affective dreams”, he begins to suggest reality-altering scenarios to his hypnotized patient. The good doctor’s motives are initially altruistic; but as George catches on that he is being used like a guinea pig, he rebels. A cat and mouse game of the subconscious ensues; every time Dr. Haber attempts to make his Utopian visions a reality, George finds a way to subvert the results.

The temptation to play God begins to consume Dr. Haber, and he feverishly begins to develop a technology that would make George’s participation superfluous. So begins a battle of wills between the two that could potentially rearrange the very fabric of reality.

This is an intelligent and compelling fable with thoughtful subtext; it is certainly one of the best “made-for-TV” sci-fi films ever produced. I should warn you that picture quality and sound on the DVD is not quite up to today’s exacting A/V equipment specs; apparently the master no longer exists, so the transfer was made from a 2” tape copy. Don’t let the low-tech special effects throw you, either (remember, this was made for public TV in 1979 on a shoestring). Substantively speaking, however, I’d wager that The Lathe of Heaven has much more to offer than any $200 million dollar special effects-laden George Lucas “prequel” one would care to name.

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–Dennis Hartley

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