Month: February 2018

Is the gender gap growing among blue collar workers?
by digby

Ron Brownstein takes a look at the gender gap:

In 2016, the overall gender gap widened to its highest level since at least 1980: Hillary Clinton ran 13 percentage points better with women than men. But the gap was so large not because she ran particularly well among women: in fact, she drew a smaller share of the white female vote than the Democratic nominees did from 1996 through 2008.

Mostly the gender gap was so pronounced because Clinton posted historically low numbers with white men, especially those without college degrees. Although Clinton ran well among African-American women and college-educated white women, Trump beat her badly among married white women, narrowed the usual Democratic advantage among single white women, and posted the best showing for a Republican among non-college white women since Ronald Reagan in 1984, according to exit polls.

Trump’s success at carrying most white women against the first major-party female nominee showed the mistake of considering them a monolith through the all-encompassing prism of the gender gap. His inroads demonstrated that many blue-collar, evangelical, older and non-urban women responded to his nationalist, culturally conservative and anti-elitist messages — just as the equivalent men did.

An array of polls shows that women in Trump’s coalition take more conservative positions than Democratic-leaning and college-educated women not only on racially-tinged cultural issues such as immigration and civil rights, but also on gender-related questions about the proper roles of men and women.

In a 2016 PRRI/Atlantic survey, 40% of Republican-leaning women compared to just 28% of Democratic-leaning women, agreed that society is “better off when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks for which they are naturally suited.”

In its American Trends Panel on-line survey, the Pew Research Center has likewise found big gaps between Republican- and Democratic-women over gender roles, relationships and parenting, according to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN. In that survey, Pew asked about the impact of social changes that have seen “more women now work outside the home and more men … involved with household chores.” Democratic-leaning women were about twice as likely to say those changes had made it easier, rather than harder, to raise children; a plurality of Republican-leaning women said the changes had made raising children harder. Likewise, Democratic-leaning women by more than two-to-one said those changes had made it easier for a marriage to succeed; Republican-leaning women divided equally on whether the changes made it easier or harder. Far more Democratic- than Republican-leaning women in the survey said it was appropriate to encourage young boys to undertake activities usually associated with young girls.

On sexual harassment itself, a gap persists between Democratic- and Republican-leaning women. In a January ABC/Washington Post poll, Democratic women were much more likely than Republican women to describe sexual harassment as a “serious” problem for society (86% vs 61%.) Among Democratic women nearly twice many said the problem has not received enough, rather than too much, attention. By contrast, Republican women were three times as likely to say harassment has received too much, rather than too little, attention.

Nonetheless, Brownstein sees the differences between GOP men and women as being an important opening for Democrats. Recent polling is showing that blue-collar white women are starting to abandon Trump. There aren’t a lot of them, but there are enough that it could put a dent in his coalition:

Compared to his vote in 2016, Trump’s approval rating among those blue-collar white women has conspicuously declined. Trump won 61% of white women without a college degree in 2016, according to exit polls; but his approval rating among them tumbled to 48% in the full year 2017 average of Gallup polling.

He fell the same amount from college educated white women but they didn’t like him much to begin with. There are virtually no African American women Trum p supporters and he’s fallen from a pathetic 25% approval among Latinas down to 15%.

Why?

Most analysts believe the biggest reason for this consistent pattern of significant decline among women across the board is that Trump’s drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to pass a tax bill they saw as tilted toward the top has dented their confidence he will provide them more economic security. But polls also leave no doubt that many of these women have watched his volatile behavior as president with alarm.

I’m sure there are those who are disillusioned by his abandonment of economic populism. And there will surely be some more who are appalled by his behavior in the Porter scandal. But it’s that last that I would imagine has resulted in some of his women supporters losing faith in him: the chaos. His male followers may find all this “disruption” energizing and exciting but I’d imagine that more women find it threatening.

Like his right hand man Rob Porter, Trump is unpredictable and explosive. Some women probably sense that same danger in him.

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The secret sperm message
by digby

Keep in mind that Hannity is one of Trump’s most valued advisers and has the top rated show on Fox News:

The official portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama received a wide array of reactions when they were unveiled on Monday. But none has been quite as insane as the one Sean Hannity promoted on his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon.

“Obama’s portrait—a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo,” the Fox News host tweeted, linking to a truly bizarre article on his website written by “Hannity Staff.”

“PORTRAIT PERVERSION: Obama Portrait Features ‘SECRET SPERM,’ Artist Joked About ‘Killing Whitey’” the headline screamed. And it only got weirder from there.

The article promises “shocking allegations” that the artist behind the former president’s portrait, Kehinde Wiley, “included ‘secret sperm cells’ within the painting and once joked about ‘Killing Whitey’ during an interview.”

The evidence for the former claim comes from a 2008 New York Times article—conveniently not “fake news” when it supports Hannity’s agenda—that reports Wiley’s portraits “initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm.” Hannity’s piece includes a close up of a vein in Obama’s forehead in the portrait that someone on his “staff” apparently thinks looks sperm-like.

It appears that the whole “sperm” theory originated on—where else?—4chan, where a thread was posted on Monday proclaiming, “Official Portrait of Obama has SPERM on his face!!!” That post just happened to include the same close up of Obama that Hannity used on his site.

The “kill whitey” thing is a comment the artist made years ago in the context of classical art depicting Bible scenes. The fact that these people continue to get up in arms about “whitey!!!!” comments says everything about them.

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst”
by digby

I don’t think E.J. Dionne is a hysteric, do you? And yet he seem concerned. Very concerned:

The autocratic leader lies and then falsely charges his opponents with lying. He politicizes institutions that are supposed to be free of politics by falsely accusing his foes of politicizing them. He victimizes others by falsely claiming they are victimizing him.

The autocrat also counts on spineless politicians to cave in to his demands. And as they destroy governmental institutions at his bidding, they insist they are defending them.

In her classic 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt offered two observations that help us understand the assumptions and purposes behind the memo created by the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee turned propagandist for President Trump.

The totalitarian method of the 1920s and 1930s, she noted, was to “dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.”

She also said this: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Bear Arendt’s warnings in mind in pondering the Nunes screed whose sole purpose is to discredit an investigation that appears to be getting closer and closer to Trump.

A blatant McCarthyite hit piece that breaks little new ground, it cherry-picks from troves of information to feed a dangerous narrative: Even if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III gets the goods on Trump — on Russian collusion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, or all three — the facts won’t matter because the inquiry was driven by partisanship.

The memo pretends that the most important actor in the case is Carter Page, a Trump adviser who had left the campaign by the time the events it describes transpired. The memo’s core assertion is that in a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to authorize surveillance on Page, the FBI relied on the findings of former British intelligence official Christopher Steele without informing the court that Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, was paid by Democrats to collect bad stuff on Trump.

Actually, Page is a side player in the story, and his engagement with Russian spies was on the radar of intelligence agencies long before Steele prepared his now-famous dossier. Among the document’s many volumes of convenient omissions is that Fusion GPS was hired first by conservative foes of Trump. Even the Nunes memo concedes that the Russia investigation did not begin with Page, and Democrats say the court actually was given information about the origins of the Steele memo. But Republicans blocked Intelligence Committee Democrats from issuing their rebuttal at the same time Nunes’s claims went public.

The thinness of the memo explains why some in the White House, according to The Post and others, feared it would be a dud. To read it is to know why Trump’s own Justice Department and the FBI were so furious at Trump’s eagerness to make it public. And its underlying premise is laughable. To imply that the FBI’s leadership is a nest of left-wing Hillary Clinton sympathizers is as absurd as declaring that a majority of Philadelphians were rooting for the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

Equally specious is any suggestion of bias against Rod J. Rosenstein, a Republican named as deputy attorney general by Trump. It has been widely reported that Trump wants to fire him. This insubstantial account provides no justification for such a crisis-provoking move.

The Nunes exercise fits snugly with Arendt’s second observation. The cynicism of a significant part of the public, particularly Trump’s supporters, leads them to believe that everybody in every institution lies. The Nunes talking points toss out distorted and disconnected facts, not to advance the truth but to cloud it in confusion. Thus did Nunes’s ploy accomplish the opposite of its intention. It simply showed how petrified Trump and his backers are of a comprehensive probe.

Our democratic regime is further endangered by the proclivity of Republicans in Congress to enable the executive abuses they’re supposed to check. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s disgraceful complicity in the release of the memo was made all the more shameful when he declared this past Thursday that it “does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general.”

Trump put the lie to this Friday morning when he tweeted: “The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.” On Saturday, he claimed the memo “totally vindicates” him in “the Russian Witch Hunt.” Ryan and other Republicans claiming that putting out this memo would not serve to undermine the investigation are either fooling themselves — or us.

Autocrats don’t prevail unless they have allies to give them cover. Thanks to House Republicans, our country has taken another step toward the chaos that autocrats thrive on.

I just thought I put that out there. It’s not partisan mudslinging or crazy blogger click bait.

This is real.

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QOTD: Omarosa
by digby

On Big Brother:

“You would be worried about Pence. We would be begging for days of Trump back if Pence became president. He’s extreme. I’m Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things.”

I’m sure she’s right. But nobody would be begging for Trump back.

You have to deal with these atrocities one at a time I’m afraid.

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Trump’s 2018 strategery. Oy.
by digby

I wrote about Trump’s 2018 campaign plans for Salon this morning:

It’s always likely that a president’s party will lose seats in his first midterm election. Even if the president is popular, those who won tight races on his coattails often face stiff opposition without him on the ballot. It doesn’t always work that way, of course: Republicans actually won seats in George W. Bush’s first midterm, a year after 9/11.

No matter who became president last year, 2018 was always assumed to be a tough election for Democrats. The GOP has successfully gerrymandered the House of Representatives to the point that Democrats can fail to win a majority even if they win the popular vote by a significant margin. The Senate favors Republicans, in any case, because of the undemocratic system that gives states with more cows and rocks than people the same number of senators as New York and California. This looked like a particularly brutal year because Democrats would be forced to defend 25 of their 48 seats (now 49), while Republicans only had eight seats up for election. And it’s an ancient truism that older, white Republicans tend to vote more consistently in midterms, while Democrats often have trouble turning out their base.

But nothing about politics is predictable in the age of Trump, and so far the winds are blowing strongly in the Democrats’ direction. Midterms are always somewhat of a referendum on the president, and Donald Trump is historically unpopular. The so-called generic ballot has favored the Democrats all year and the off-year elections have overwhelmingly gone Democratic, even in deep red states like Oklahoma and Alabama, or in districts Trump won easily.

Furthermore, Trump has just released a slash-and-burn budget with some items in it that could be lethal for Republicans if Democrats can exploit them. Obviously, his base will not be bothered by the deficit projections or the cuts to the safety net. His promise to spend wildly on unnecessary military hardware and his total lack of compassion for the poor are some of the things they like best about him.

But there are also a couple of items in there that should cause some serious heartburn for any Republican running in 2018: The Trump budget proposes $25 billion in cuts to Social Security and a staggering $554 billion to Medicare. It’s one thing to take the food out of the mouths of low-income pre-schoolers, needless to say. But nobody cuts an old, white Republican’s benefits and lives to tell about it. Nobody. The Democrats really don’t have to get creative about this at all. They can simply repurpose Republican ads from the Tea Party election of 2010.

Considering the danger here, it’s small wonder that Mick Mulvaney, the head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, told reporters that the budget isn’t to be taken literally. He described it as a “messaging” document, which is par for the course for a president who treats the job as a TV performance rather than a serious responsibility.

The Trump administration is, needless to say, a target-rich environment. That can be a mixed blessing. Former Trump campaign CEO and senior adviser Steve Bannon recently told Bloomberg’s Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” He’s wrong about saying that the Democrats don’t matter, but he accurately describes what Trump is doing. And it’s an important part of his strategy to win in 2018, to the extent he has one.

According to Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan of Axios, the Republicans all understand that Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan (actually just a $200 billion federal outlay, with the rest coming from the states) will never pass and that his $4 trillion budget reads like “science fiction.” A Democratic strategist calls these initiatives “Potemkin legislation,” which is roughly the same as Mick Mulvaney calling them “messaging documents.”

Allen and Swan report that Trump is eager to get back out there and contribute in that special way only he can. He’s going to rile up the base:

A source close to the White House tells me that with an eye to getting Republicans excited about voting for Republicans in midterms, the president this year will be looking for “unexpected cultural flashpoints” — like the NFL and kneeling — that he can latch onto in person and on Twitter.

This is all Trump really knows how to do in politics. And let’s face facts — he’s good at it. He has a feeling for white America’s ugliest impulses and he gives millions of people permission to let their freak flags fly. It brought him to the White House, so he almost certainly believes he can save the GOP majority by getting out on the road on behalf of members of Congress. It’s unclear how many of them actually want his “help” during campaign season, but a lot of them seem to like his style and are backing him enthusiastically.

The question is what sorts of “unexpected cultural flashpoints” might give him the opportunity he needs. Obviously a terrorist attack would be a godsend for this purpose. He has reportedly wistfully mused about the aforementioned George W. Bush midterm of 2002, perhaps thinking ahead to how he might exploit a replay.

He would certainly be ready to react to any big Black Lives Matter or pro-immigrant demonstrations with angry rhetoric about “law and order” that would resonate with his older, white conservative base. The fact that his administration may be the most lawless in all of American history is irrelevant — this slogan is, and always has been, about keeping control of protesters and people of color.

The NRA is working on its plan to make the whole country vulnerable to any state’s inane concealed-carry laws. And who knows? Maybe House Republicans can even unleash their own special counsel dedicated to prosecuting Hillary Clinton. Nothing would thrill the base more than that.

It’s possible this tactic will work for the Republicans again. But I wouldn’t count on it. Flooding the zone with this ugly, angry rhetoric has an effect that Trump doesn’t seem to understand. It riles up the base, for sure. But it also riles up the opposition. If the special elections of 2017 are any indication, every time Trump gives his base the red meat they crave, the Resistance says “bring it on” and signs up 20 new voters.

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So long food stamps. Hello surplus garbage.
by digby

My God. These people are reinventing the wheel. And it’s square:

The proposal, buried in the White House’s fiscal 2019 budget, would replace about half of the money most families receive via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, with what the Department of Agriculture is calling “America’s Harvest Box.” That package would be made up of “100 percent U.S. grown and produced food” and would include items like shelf-stable milk, peanut butter, canned fruits and meats, and cereal.

But America’s Harvest Box, which USDA contends would save over $129 billion over 10 years, is not very comparable to startup meal-delivery companies like Blue Apron. For one, the Trump administration’s proposal doesn’t include fresh items, like produce or meat, which are the core of Blue Apron and its competitors. Such products perish quickly and are incredibly expensive to ship.

Asked about how delivery would work, USDA spokesman Tim Murtaugh clarified that states would “have flexibility” in how they choose to distribute the food to SNAP recipients. In other words, the federal government almost certainly would not be picking up the tab for any type of Amazon-style delivery system. “The projected savings does not include shipping door-to-door for all recipients,” Murtaugh said.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue praised the harvest box plan as “a bold, innovative approach” that would give SNAP participants the same “level of food value” as the current system while saving taxpayers money.

The idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations. Murtaugh said the concept was developed internally at USDA. Mulvaney on Monday credited Perdue for it during a briefing at the White House.

“Secretary Perdue wanted to give it a chance,” he said. “We thought it was a tremendous idea.”

Numerous questions remain, such as how these boxes would be customized for, say, a family that has a child with nut allergies — or for those who don’t eat certain types of meat out of religious or personal reasons. The proposal was so out of left field that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke.

Kevin Concannon, who oversaw SNAP during the Obama administration, was aghast when he saw the proposal.

“Holy mackerel,” said Concannon, who said it reminded him of when poor people had to line up and wait for local officials to dole out food and other welfare benefits. “I don’t know where this came from, but I suspect that the folks when they were drawing it up were also watching silent movies.”

Other anti-hunger advocates said the concept was reminiscent of wartime rations or soup lines during the Great Depression. The Food Research and Action Center, a prominent nonprofit group, called the harvest box idea “a Rube-Goldberg designed system” that would be “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.”

It’s astonishing how ridiculously unfit they are. All of them. They couldn’t run a PTA bake sale much less the US Government. And yet, we’re stuck with them.

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Predators welcome
by Tom Sullivan

President Dale: I want the people to know that they still have 2 out of 3 branches of the government working for them, and that ain’t bad.
— Mars Attacks (1996)

Crooks get protection. Abusers get cover. Families get deportation.

NPR reported yesterday that Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pulled the plug on a lawsuit against a predatory lender. Protecting American consumers is really more of marketing than mission with Mulvaney at the helm. He wrote in the bureau’s new strategic plan, “[W]e have committed to fulfill the Bureau’s statutory responsibilities, but go no further.”

NPR broke that down for listeners:

Within weeks of coming on board, Mulvaney has worked to make the watchdog agency less aggressive. Under his leadership, the CFPB delayed a new payday lending regulation from going into effect and dropped an investigation into one payday lender that contributed to Mulvaney’s campaign. In another move that particularly upset some staffers, the new boss also dropped a lawsuit against an alleged online loan shark called Golden Valley Lending. The suit says the lender illegally charges people up to 950 percent interest rates. It took CFPB staffers years to build the case.

“People are devastated and angry — just imagine how you would feel if years of your life had been dedicated to pursuing justice and you lose everything,” says Christopher Peterson, a former Office of Enforcement attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who worked on this particular case early on.

Golden Valley’s victims know just how they feel.

“Dismissal of this lawsuit shows an outrageous disregard for the rule of law,” says Peterson, who calls the lender “one of the worst of the worst” for swindling many people around the nation out of tens of millions of dollars.

A key backer of Golden Valley was recently convicted of racketeering charges in a case involving another online lender, according to court documents. Given this history, Peterson wonders why Mulvaney dropped the lawsuit against Golden Valley.

Mulvaney received $60,000 in campaign donations from payday lenders between 2011 and 2017.

So while one bureau of the Trump executive branch is protecting alleged online loan sharks, another is breaking up families. Only public outcry is preventing more of these stories:

With nothing but the clothes on his back and less than $300 in his pocket, Amer Adi was put on a plane and deported to Jordan, the country he left 39 years ago to pursue his American dream.

Adi owns several businesses in Youngstown, Ohio. He has a wife who is a U.S. citizen and four daughters, also U.S. citizens. CNN has more on his struggle.

Here’s another story, a Bangladeshi chemistry professor in Kansas:

His family says they couldn’t even tell him goodbye.

Immigration officials arrested Syed Ahmed Jamal in his Lawrence front yard on Jan. 24 while he was taking his daughter to school.

The 7th-grade girl ran into the house to alert her mother and brother, while Jamal, a chemist, was handcuffed and led into a car. When his wife tried to hug him, an agent said she could be charged with interfering in an arrest, said son Taseen Jamal, 14.

Public outcry ensued. An immigration court has stayed the deportation order, although Jamal remains in a detention facility near El Paso.

And another:

The father of a 5-year-old boy battling cancer has been fighting to stay in this country. Jesus Berrones had taken refuge inside a Phoenix church to evade deportation by federal immigration authorities.

On Monday, cheering erupted from inside the house of worship as Berrones’ attorney said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had granted a stay and a one-year work permit.

In Trump’s America, Golden Valley walks, wife beaters get White House jobs, and immigrants with families but without proper papers get tossed out on their ears.

Not to mention that White House personnel cannot be trusted with national security information about Russia, according to a just-released January 20 email from former Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice:

The previously undisclosed meeting was memorialized in an email written by then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day. A person familiar with the January 5, 2017, meeting said the Obama administration wanted to know whether the FBI and others in the intelligence community believed there was a national security reason to limit conversations with the Trump transition about Russia because some on the incoming President’s team could be compromised.

The Obama administration had imposed sanctions against Russia for interference in the 2016 election. Incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn had been in secret communications with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak regarding undoing those sanctions.

The email is available here.

Just another day of making America grate again.

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

Helping DREAMers should be an easy bipartisan win. Why isn’t it?
by digby

With numbers like these, why in the ever-loving hell are these right wing nativist bigots getting heir way on immigration? Why?

As the Senate kicks off immigration week, February 6, 2018 polling from Quinnipiac offers a reminder that the American public overwhelming supports Dreamers and strongly opposes key elements of the White House immigration framework.

Among the key findings in the new Quinnipiac Poll:

By an 81-14% margin, Americans want Dreamers to gain citizenship: Support is overwhelmingly pro-Dreamer when respondents were asked if they support, “allowing undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to remain in the United States and eventually apply for citizenship.”

Support for Dreamers is overwhelming across party lines – 94% of Democrats, 82% of Independents, and 68% of Republicans support citizenship: GOP voters support citizenship by a 68-24% margin, white men by a 75-20% margin, and voters over 65 by a 80-14% margin.

By approximately a 2:1 margin, the American public opposes a border wall – especially if Trump’s $25 billion price tag is attached: When first asked if they support or oppose a border wall with Mexico, the public opposes the wall by a 59-37% margin. A follow-up question, which includes reference to the $25 billion price tag that President Trump has requested to build such a wall, generates even stronger opposition – by a 65-33% margin.

As President Trump and allies seek to slash legal immigration levels, 78% of Americans are opposed: A majority of Americans (54%) support keeping legal immigration levels the same as current, while more Americans (24%) support increasing legal immigration rather than decreasing (17%). Even 71% of Republican voters want legal immigration levels to either stay the same (53%) or increase (18%). Additional poll questions found support for maintaining the current policy regarding family reunification/chain migration (49-43% support current approach that supports sponsorship for all immediate family members) and the diversity visa lottery (48-39% support).

The public overwhelmingly rejects the idea that undocumented immigrants take jobs from Americans or are prone to commit more crimes than Americans. Despite the transparent and relentless scapegoating efforts from this administration, Americans do not believe undocumented immigrants take jobs away from American citizens (63-33% reject this idea) and do not believe that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than American citizens (72-17% reject this idea).

Not even big business wants this one. And yet the government has not been able to solve this problem for over a decade.

There is no greater example of a sick democracy than the fact that those numbers have absolutely no effect on the Republican party. The only voters they care about are their old white racists.

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QOTD: Sarah Sanders
by digby

Sanders said today that Trump said he was very sad for poor Rob Porter and “absolutely” wished him well because:

I think the President of the United States hopes that all Americans can be successful in whatever they do and if they’ve had any issues in the past, I’m not confirming or denying one way or the other, but if they do, the President wants success for all Americans.

Has there ever been a more absurd press secretary than this person? She is just … so bad.

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