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Month: February 2018

Will America ever be able to recover from Trump’s court packing? @AmandaMarcotte

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

Will America ever be able to recover from Trump’s court packing?
by digby

That will be a huge part of his legacy. And it’s really, really bad. Amanda Marcotte wrote about one of these judges for Salon today:

On Thursday, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the support of four Democrats, recommended a Senate vote for Kurt Engelhardt, a district court judge in Louisiana who has been nominated by Donald Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That means Engelhardt will likely be up for confirmation very soon, despite his history of disturbing rulings on cases involving racial violence and injustice, as well as cases involving sexual harassment and workplace discrimination against women.

Engelhardt got national attention in 2013 for his ruling in one of the most scandalous cases of racial injustice and police brutality in the 21st century: The Danziger Bridge shootings following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in which New Orleans police officers shot six unarmed black people, killing two and shooting the arm off one woman. The victims were evacuees from the hurricane, and one was chased down and shot in the back by police as he fled for his life. To conceal their guilt, the officers involved tried to frame the victims as the assailants.

“The Danziger Bridge case is something straight out of a movie,” Kristine Lucius, an executive vice president at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told Salon. “People were killed and the police officers involved tried to cover it up. No one disputes those two facts.”

Prosecutors initially throw the book at the police involved, getting sentences ranging from 38 to 65 years for the four officers involved in the shooting and six years for another involved in the coverup. But the presiding judge, Engelhardt, made it known from the get-go that he was displeased with efforts to hold these police fully accountable for the murders, claiming there was as “air of mendacity” around the prosecution and complaining that the plea deals prosecutors got from cooperating witnesses prevented him from issuing lighter sentences to the murderers.

Soon enough, Engelhardt was able to get rid of those heavy sentences when it was discovered that three of the federal prosecutors had left anonymous comments on a local website regarding the case. Claiming that the comments created a “prejudicial, poisonous atmosphere” for the jury — even though there was no evidence that any jurors had read the comments — Engelhardt threw out the convictions. The police were retried, this time only getting 7 to 12 years for murder, and three years for the coverup.

“It was a really remarkable, almost unheard-of remedy,” said Dan Goldberg, the legal director for Alliance for Justice. “Danziger Bridge is further illuminating when you compare it with another decision of his, a decision called Truvia v. Julien, where he denied the civil rights claims of two African-American plaintiffs who were held in prison for 27 years before they found out that their constitutional rights were violated because exculpatory evidence had been withheld at their trial.”

In this latter case, Engelhardt dismissed the claim that the defendants had been victims of prosecutorial misconduct, even though what the prosecutor’s office did — withholding exculpatory evidence — was far more serious than posting anonymous comments on a news site. Worse, this was part of an ongoing pattern of unconstitutional civil rights violations from the New Orleans district attorney.

There’s more.

I wrote a lot about the Danziger Bridge incident in the weeks and years after Katrina. It’s a shocking story of racist violence, government corruption and cover up. Stunning, really. It perfectly encapsulated the right wing authoritarian reaction to Katrina — a very scary harbinger of what could easily happen in other large scale national emergencies like that.

It’s mind-boggling that they would promote this judge, of all judges.

But it is Trump’s country now. If he can be president, anything is possible.

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About that skating rink

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

About that skating rink
by digby

In announcing his big infrastructure agenda today Trump talked about his success building a skating rink in New York as the prime example of how he is uniquely qualified to rebuild America’s crumbling roads and bridges.

I said, ‘You know, I’d like to be able to have my daughter Ivanka — who is with us — I would like to be able to have her go ice skating sometime before she doesn’t want to ice skate. And I got involved, and I did it in a few months and we did it for a tiny fraction, tiny fraction of the cost. It’s really no different with a roadway, it’s not different with a bridge or a tunnel or any of the things we’ll be fixing.It was a big deal at the time. It remains a big deal. Sometimes the states aren’t able to do it like we can do it. Or like other people can do it. Or like I used to do it.


It was a publicity stunt. Of course.

And it was a fucking ice-skating rink.

If Trump has any particular genius, it is for jumping to the front of the parade and acting like it is where he has been all along. Agreeing to take on the rink was in this category. It is not as if Trump decided to take over the Second Ave Subway or other long-stalled (and far more complicated) city development projects. “I mean c’mon, it’s a skating rink,” said Vitullo-Martin. “Any halfway decent construction person would have been able to build the damn thing.” There were no real environmental reviews, limited public safety concerns, and delays usually associated with refurbishing a landmarked property were removed as a condition of Trump taking over the project. Plus, the city was limited by a review process and by hiring the lowest-bidding contractor. As a private entity, Trump was able to ignore all that, paying contractors at below cost by promising more work later on in one of his many projects.

Rudolph Rinaldi, the director of construction in the Parks Department at the time, recalled Trump taking his team to Canada to see how a similar project was refurbished, and showing up to tour the site in Central Park with one team of architects and engineers, only to show up the next time with a completely different set of architects and engineers. “We did projects that were much more complicated without Trump,” Rinaldi said. “But we couldn’t fire all of our architects and a hire a whole new team just because we felt like it.”

At the time, City Hall was mystified that Trump was even interested. “You generally don’t see developers try to fix someone else’s capital project,” recalled Vitullo-Martin. “I mean, who does that? Have you ever seen a developer come in and say to a city, ‘Oh, I can fix your crumbling bridge?’ You need a narcissist who will come forward and say, ‘You don’t know what you are doing. I know what I am doing, I will fix it and you will put my name on it.”’

“Any real estate developer in the city could have done that project, but why do you think they didn’t?” asked Adrian Benepe, then a spokesman for the Parks Department and later its commissioner. “It’s because most major real estate families in New York want to work behind the scenes and do the deals, and so many of them do many more deals and build many more buildings than Donald Trump ever does.

“There are so many myths about this thing,” Benepe continued. “One was that he did it for free. No, he did it for whatever the budget was. Another myth: he did something the city never could have done. Well, no, the project was largely complete by the time he took over.”

“A major, major factor”

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

“A major, major factor”
by digby

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg doubled down on comments she made last year that sexism “no doubt” played a role in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election defeat.

During a Columbia University Women’s Conference event on Sunday, Ginsburg was asked to clarify remarks she made last September, in which she said sexism was a “major, major factor” in how the election played out.

“I think it was difficult for Hillary Clinton to get by even the macho atmosphere prevailing during that campaign, and she was criticized in a way I think no man would have been criticized,” Ginsburg said.

“I think anyone who watched that campaign unfold would answer it the same way I did: Yes, sexism played a prominent part,” she continued.

Oh, what does she know about anything …?

There’s definitely a cover up — but don’t forget the crime

Published by digby on February 12, 2018
There’s definitely a cover up — but don’t forget the crime
by digby

I wrote about Trump’s cavalier attitude toward national security for Salon this morning:

This latest Trump White House scandal, involving one high-level staffer’s firing and another’s hasty resignation, after reports surfaced that they had been accused of domestic violence, has been infuriating. As is par for the course, the president stepped forward to defend Rob Porter, the man accused of abusing not one but two wives, telling the nation that he was sad for the poor man and that he “absolutely” wished him well. It was reminiscent of his earlier comments after Charlottesville, when he expressed the sentiment that some of the Nazis who rallied there were “very fine people.” He always seems to find the good in violent white men.

But this scandal is about more than the rampant misogyny surrounding Donald Trump. The irony in the fact that Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, and his chief of staff, John Kelly, allowed Porter to operate without a top security clearance in a job that handles the United States’ most sensitive secrets cannot be overstated. This president ran an entire campaign insisting that his rival should be jailed for using a private email server for non-classified State Department correspondence. Yet here we are, a year after the inauguration, and the Trump White House is reportedly employing dozens of people who cannot qualify for a security clearance. One of them was in a job that requires the highest level of clearance and another, Jared Kushner, has apparently been given access to the same intelligence the president gets.

Aside from the ongoing horror at every aspect of this presidency, this issue once again raises the question of just how fast and loose Trump and his aides play with these national security issues. If they can be this cavalier about handling the nation’s most sensitive secrets in the White House, is it really hard to believe they might have been open to a little deal-making with a friendly Russian or two during the campaign?

It seems as if many observers believe that special counsel Robert Mueller is homing in on Trump over issues of obstruction of justice. It is the one case that offers the most public evidence, mainly stemming from the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey and various leaks about Trump’s clumsy demands that just about everyone who walks into the White House do whatever it takes to get him off the hook. It’s not much of a stretch to think there might be a case there.

There is more to the Russian investigation than obstructing it, however. We don’t have a clear idea what that might be yet, which is as it should be, but there is enough evidence in the public domain to see the basic outlines. Jonathan Alter and Nick Akerman stitched it together nicely in this piece for the Daily Beast.

They make the common-sense observation that during the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon was never shown to have known about the original crime and was done in by the coverup, but the current political environment is quite different and will likely require the underlying crime be proven as well. After all, this case is about a conspiracy with a foreign government and if there is evidence that actually happened, it’s something that should be properly adjudicated. It’s not your run-of-the-mill corruption investigation.

Alter and Akerman point out that Nixon’s prosecutors had almost all the information they needed more than nine months before he resigned, and they assume Mueller too has amassed most of the evidence for his case, which they believe consists of “conspiracy, wire fraud, illegal foreign campaign contributions, or all three.” For the conspiracy, they point to Michael Flynn’s statement to the court admitting that he’d lied to the FBI about something that “had a material impact” on the FBI’s probe “into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the [Trump] Campaign and Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election.” They write:

The conspiracy case — the heart of Mueller’s efforts — almost certainly boils down to an old-fashioned quid pro quo. Flynn’s “quid” — the substance of his recorded conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — was lifting the sanctions that President Obama imposed on Russia in late 2016 and the earlier sanctions related to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. The “quo” was collusion (“conspiracy” in legal terms) with Russians to harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which Flynn effectively admitted was “material” to his lies after the election. Anyone associated with this deal is in deep legal trouble.

They note that fraud charges could be related to any “overlap between the illegal Russian fake news posts and the Trump campaign’s routine micro-targeted negative messages — a painstaking but manageable set of data comparisons.” There is also the suspicion that campaign contributions were routed through the NRA — and there is the major line of inquiry into money laundering and the Trump Organization. That’s the one we have seen the least amount of information about that could be the real blockbuster.

According to Alter and Akerman, the legal definition of “conspiracy” is simply “a mutual understanding, either spoken or unspoken, between two or more people to cooperate with each other to accomplish an unlawful act.” This understanding can happen before, during or after the crime. Furthermore:

“It is not necessary that a defendant be fully informed of all the details of the conspiracy, or all of its participants,” the model jury instructions continue. “You need not find that the alleged members of the conspiracy met together and entered into any express or formal agreement.”

With all the meetings and emails, public pronouncements and guilty pleas, it does appear that there may be more to all this than a coverup of a crime that never took place. Since this gang has been shown to be so lax about national security even after they entered the White House, it’s entirely possible they didn’t understand or didn’t care about the implications of their actions during the campaign and the presidential transition.

Unfortunately for them, while being ignorant and careless may be a selling point in the Republican Party these days, it’s still no excuse for breaking the law. This time around, the crime could very well be worse than the coverup.

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Did you hear? The Deep State planted Rob Porter to embarrass Trump

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

Did you hear? The Deep State planted Rob Porter to embarrass Trumpby digby

I tweeted a few days ago that I wondered if the Trump people may be disregarding the need for the security clearances because they think the “Deep State” is out to get them.

At least one former member of the administration thinks that might be happening:

“If they want to gum up the works and make the Trump administration’s job harder and harder, they play bureaucratic slow rolls…It might be a deliberate minefield put in place where they know somebody like this has skeletons in their closet and they slow roll everything to make things like this explode a few months later,” Gorka told Pirro.

They’re that good.

If you want some more Pirro cray-cray, watch her “opening statement” where she blames Obama for the wife beaters in the Trump administration.

The great reckoning by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 12, 2018

The great reckoning
by Tom Sullivan

There will be no Great Awakening among members of the Trump cult, no Road to Damascus experience in which the scales fall from their eyes and they repent their sins.

When the Great Awakening took the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, it was because the traveling revivalist Rev. George Whitfield, with his actor’s training, brought “a potent combination of drama, religious rhetoric, and imperial pride” to his sermons. Whitfield’s passion left even skeptic Benjamin Franklin emptying his purse.

Critic Charles Chauncy, a minister of the First Church of Boston, wrote:

But so far as I could judge upon the nicest observation, the town, in general, was not much mended in those things wherein a reformation was greatly needed. I could not discern myself, nor many others whom I have talked with and challenged on this head, but that there was the same pride and vanity, the same luxury and intemperance, the same lying and tricking and cheating as before this gentleman came among us.”

The #MAGA rallys and promises to “drain the swamp” are perhaps sad echoes of those performances, but the evangelicals who reacted against the Enlightenment back then bought into Trump’s invective against the Other in 2016. However, with Trump’s consistent defense of men in his circle who, like himself, face against accusations of abuse of women, and his just as consistent dismissal women making those accusations, David Remnick wonders whether the fall of one after another Trump aide will finally cut through to women who have experienced it themselves.

Even former White House adviser Steve Bannon sees handwriting on the wall. Reacting to the black dresses at the Golden Globes ceremonies and the sustained applause for Oprah Winfrey’s “Their time is up!” speech, Bannon told journalist Joshua Green:

“It’s a Cromwell moment!” Bannon said. “It’s even more powerful than populism. It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that—this is the Puritans. It’s anti-patriarchy.”

Bannon, whose history is hardly one of feminism, was stunned by the fervor of what he was seeing, and, charmingly, he spoke of it not as justice but as a threat of wholesale emasculation. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room,” he said.

And yet Bannon, who is partial to grand pronouncements, acknowledged the political stakes, not least for the President. “You watch. The time has come,” he said. “Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward . . . The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.”

Don’t hold your breath. Bannon loves his headline-generating pronouncements. Women will make that call, not him.

“Trump’s cruel and clueless remarks,” says Remnick, may soon bring a great reckoning. In November if not sooner. When even his closest aides seem finally shocked by his casual cruelty, consequences may lie ahead. We can only hope.

* * * * * * * *

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

Genocide by tristero

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

Genocide 

by tristero

The bizarre, insane chaos in the US has distracted many from a terrible atrocity. This article is an excellent introduction to the tragedy of the Rohingya in Myanmar and Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s inexcusable behavior and at least tacit complicity in the genocide.

Agreed: the situation in the US is, while often masquerading as a sick farce, in a real sense, far more dangerous. We are poised over an abyss with a madman trying to push us in. And if we go to war with Korea or Iran or wherever-the-hell-else he has in mind, the hideous suffering of the Rohingya will be multiplied 1000 times around the world.

But ignoring a human catastrophe of the scope of the Rohingya… this too is not normal and it must stop.

**
In addition, today the NY Times reported that two Reuters reporters were arrested by Myanmar authorities for their meticulous report of a massacre.

They’re coming for Ryan

Published by digby on February 12, 2018

They’re coming for Ryan
by digby

REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OHIO) to CHRIS WALLACE on “FOX NEWS SUNDAY” about SPEAKER PAUL RYAN:

JORDAN: “Of course he’s got problems, but the key is let’s see what happens next in …”

WALLACE: “You say he’s got problems Congressman, is it time for a change?” JORDAN: “Ah well look we’ll have that debate at the appropriate time, you asked me if he has—if there’s concerns with the Speaker, I think there are big concerns because he just presided over one of the biggest spending increases in the history of this country in a time where we were elected to do just the opposite.

These are the people who just passed a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy and corporation which they insisted was going to actually bring in vast sums more money because of the increased growth. That’s what they said. The entire party went into euphoric, orgiastic mass fugue state when it passed as if it was the end of history itself. Now these same people are whining about spending.
I suppose that’s consistent if they are honest about their real philosophy which is the cramped, ugly vision of Ayn Rand and her sophomoric worship of manly millionaires and the hot sexy ladies who love them.

Ryan loves Rand too and is playing a longer game even if Jim Jordan, one of the thickest members of the Freedom Caucus, doesn’t understand the strategy. As soon as the Democrats are back in charge they will haul out their old arguments about “debt” and very sincerely tell everyone in America that this is the real problem. This is what they do. It’s what they’ve always done. And they will do it with or without Ryan.

*standard disclaimer: assuming we survive Trump which is not guaranteed by any means.

ICYMI

Published by digby on February 11, 2018

ICYMI
by digby

I thought it might be useful for me to link to my Salon pieces from the previous week in one post just in case there’s something there that you might be interested in but missed. I’m generally following the news cycle pretty closely on a day to day basis so it’s probable that some of it is outdated even by the time you get to the end of the week.

But if you’ve been busy living your life and just want to catch up on the latest Trump atrocities, this will give you a peek into some of what just happened.

John Kelly’s true self and ICE’s mission creep: Tyranny is spreading

Another day, another FBI conspiracy theory: GOP says, “Thanks, Obama!”

Democrats’ big selling point: At least we’ll hold public hearings on Trump

Lock them all up! Trump’s desperate new strategy: Investigate everybody

After years of sleazy partisan attacks, suddenly Republicans are outraged

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