Month: March 2018

Fatuous BS quote of the day


by digby

“It’s totally not on a straight line,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said of Trump’s negotiating style. “It’s zigzagging, something like a pinball machine. But he does move [the ball] down.”

Reince Priebus said something similar on one of the Sunday shows insisting that Trump let’s his people “fight it out” and then makes an informed decision. Total nonsense. Trump’s decisions are made on the basis of shallow ideas he’s had since the 1980s and whatever he heard on Fox News.

How pathetic these sycophants are.

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Trumpies everywhere

by digby

She seems nice:

Cellphone video of a woman telling a Long Beach couple, “You need to go back to your home country,” has gone viral, and the woman’s employer has issued a statement condemning the comments.

“I want you to tell everybody why you told us to go back to our country,” Tony Kao can be heard saying before Tarin Olson affirms his remark as she walks away.

The video was shot last week as the couple was on a walk with their infant on a residential street in Long Beach.

Kao can also be heard saying he and his wife were born and raised in the United States.

CBS2 News spoke to Olson, a counselor at Golden West College, at her home Sunday, though she refused to give an on-camera interview.

She did tell CBS2 that her students know she is not a racist.

A statement from Olson read, “I feel my perspective will be twisted if discussing the skewed video which cut out part of the incident.[…] If you would like to have a full normal interview about the displacement of European-Americans then I gladly am available to enlighten the public.”

Golden West College, located in Huntington Beach, issued the following statement on its Facebook page:

“It has recently come to our attention that there was a video posted on Facebook of a GWC faculty member making comments that the College does not condone or support. Golden West College believes in an inclusive and welcoming environment for all students.”

Kao followed up his initial post by thanking the community for its support in the face of the shocking comments.

“First, I wanted to express our sadness of experiencing racism first-hand with our baby who was exposed to this at such a young age in public and in broad daylight,” Kao wrote on his Facebook page.

The message continued, “Second, we wanted to express our surprise that this type of racism can exist in Long Beach of all places.”

The sentiment was echoed by Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia.

“I mean, this country is a country of immigrants and of diversity, and this city is a very diverse, beautiful place I think people love and feel very comfortable in,” Garcia told CBS2 News. “So, I never want any families to feel like they’re not welcome here; we’re welcoming of everybody,” said the mayor.

CBS2 spoke to several Long Beach residents who felt the same way.

“My reaction, especially in this city, is it’s appalling,” one woman said. “Long Beach is known for its diversification. We’re accepting of all cultures, and for anybody to say that to begin with is horrific.”

One man blamed a person “at the top.”

“It’s what’s happening out there,” Ray Sebastian. “I think it starts at the top, as far as who’s at the top. So I think it’s part of today’s landscape. I mean, it’s sad, but it’s true.”

Kao posted a another update Sunday, saying he had “NO intention of besmirching the offender’s personal life or career.” He asked the public not to foster more hatred, saying, “there’s enough of those feelings in this world.”

CBS2 spoke to Golden West College, who said they were aware of the video and that they were handling it internally, since it is a personnel matter.

I had an incident over the week-end at my local grocery store with a woman who’s worked there for at least 20 years. We’ve always been friendly, saying hi and chatting about the weather. But for some reason she decided to rant at me about how California is going to hell with all the immigrants and the high taxes and she’s moving to Texas. I mentioned that there were many immigrants in Texas and she said, “yeah but they know how to handle ’em down there.” Just creepy.

I suspect that as one gets older a lot of these wingnuts see you as one of them and for good reason. But it still surprises me that anyone in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica would just make that assumption. I’m pretty sure this town went about 95% for Clinton.

Anyway, it just goes to show that there are pockets of Trumpism everywhere. And every once in a while they just have pop off.

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Trump’s wag-the-dog trade war


by digby

I wrote about the president’s tariff gambit for Salon this morning:

Upon learning that President Xi Jinping of China had unilaterally ended term limits in China, I wrote a piece for Salon in which I contemplated how jealous President Trump surely was that Xi had such power. He does admire a strongman. Lo and behold, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago fundraiser on Friday night he “joked” about that very subject, saying:

He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.

The recording shows that that the audience of wealthy donors (from whom Trump will reportedly demand hundreds of millions of dollars for his 2020 campaign) found the joke to be hilarious. It’s always wise to laugh at the king’s jokes, even if they aren’t funny.

Keep in mind that a poll taken last summer showed that a majority of Republicans said they would support postponing the 2020 election until we can “fix” all the supposed illegal-immigrant voting, if Trump proposed doing so. They aren’t joking.

First there was the fundraiser on Friday where Trump “joked” about being dictator for life, whined that the system is rigged and mused that Hillary Clinton must be very unhappy. Then there was the Gridiron dinner the next night, at which Trump told some professionally written jokes in between insulting his enemies (he said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., should be given an IQ test). At both he was edgy and aggressive, obviously trying hard to behave as if the wheels haven’t come off and are bouncing down the road almost out of sight. But they are.

He knows — and everyone else knows too — that the headlines for his presidency are as bad as they’ve ever been, and that’s saying something. Here is just a smattering:

Mueller team asking if Kushner foreign business ties influenced Trump policy

The wild wars within the Trump White House

FBI counterintel investigating Ivanka Trump business deal

Many Trump Staffers Are Trying To Leave His Out-Of-Control White House

White House meltdown on full display

Trump adrift: Tumult in West Wing amid exits, investigation

Trump’s Chaos Theory for the Oval Office Is Taking Its Toll

Just as reporters are starting to hear from people who have been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller that he’s homing in on the Trump inner circle and is starting to look at whether the Trump White House is delivering favors for money and paying back Russia for its help during the campaign, Trump is no doubt getting reports from his staff saying similar things. Not being a person who ever shows grace under pressure, he’s not handling it well.

According to the various reports linked above, some even naming as many as 22 White House staffers, Trump is raging and pouting and screaming into the void about how unfair it all is. He’s demanding to know why we’re all ignoring the real collusion scandal between the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign and the Russians, which his obsequious factotum Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., keeps assuring him will deal a devastating blow to all his enemies, if only he can get a new special prosecutor to go around Attorney General Jeff “Mr. Magoo” Sessions.

Trump keeps blaming former President Obama for failing to keep the Russians from helping the Trump campaign win the election:

Question: If all of the Russian meddling took place during the Obama Administration, right up to January 20th, why aren’t they the subject of the investigation? Why didn’t Obama do something about the meddling? Why aren’t Dem crimes under investigation? Ask Jeff Sessions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2018

All of this has finally taken its toll. Evidently, Trump got so upset he decided to just go for it and do the one thing he’s been wanting to do since the 1980s — slap some tariffs on those lily-livered foreigners and show them who’s boss. For months there had been reports that he was having tantrums, screaming “I want tariffs!” Axios reported this last August:

Trump, addressing [chief of staff John] Kelly, said, “John, you haven’t been in a trade discussion before, so I want to share with you my views. For the last six months, this same group of geniuses comes in here all the time and I tell them, ‘Tariffs. I want tariffs.’ And what do they do? They bring me IP. I can’t put a tariff on IP.” (Most in the room understood that the president can, in fact, use tariffs to combat Chinese IP theft.) 

“China is laughing at us,” Trump added. “Laughing.” 

Kelly responded: “Yes sir, I understand, you want tariffs.”

Someone pulled out a chart and Trump said, “I don’t even know what I’m looking at here.” Then he railed against the “globalists,” clearly not having a clue what that means and demanded his tariffs once again.

In the midst of his meltdown last week, he finally pulled the trigger and imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports. He’s doing it exactly as he has promised since the ’80s and as recently as the 2011 CPAC, where the crowd cheered wildly even though conservatives supposedly favor laissez-faire free trade.

During the presidential campaign, Trump would often lay into Japan as well, clearly unaware that it is no longer 1987, when he said exactly the same things, in exactly the same words, as he did 30 years later. Never let it be said that he learned even one thing in the interim.

I’ll leave the question of whether the proposed tariffs will hurt the economy and jobs to the economists. But it’s clear that his typical blunderbuss approach is hurting America’s relationship with allies for no good reason.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018

In that tweet, the president openly describes his approach as a “trade war,” apparently aware that this move could escalate into something much more disruptive, which is what he apparently wants.The European Union immediately objected, as did Canada and Britain, making the case that they are not breaking the rules and don’t deserve to be caught up in Trump’s anachronistic power play. If one didn’t know better, one might assume that in the midst of all of his troubles — with the family being implicated in corruption and the Russia investigation getting closer — Trump has decided to start a trade war to wag the dog.

It’s such a coincidence that driving a wedge between the United States and its allies in Europe and Canada just happens to be the fondest wish of the president of Russia; Russia has been set against the Western alliance for about 70 years. That alliance contained the Soviet Union until it fell and has forged a very successful economic partnership. It also tended to make the Russian government unhappy by pointing out that nation’s human rights violations, something Trump would never do.

I doubt Trump is doing anything more than shaking his tiny fist at the world here, although the ramifications of his actions could be serious. But you can bet his promised “trade war” is being toasted with high-end vodka in offices in the Kremlin. This guy delivers to his real friends, even when he doesn’t mean to.

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Who do you serve? Who do you protect? – Beltway Edition
by Tom Sullivan

A tweet from Marcy Wheeler caught my attention and one link led to another.

I'm betting Glenn will be proven right on this tweet but I hope he's wrong… https://t.co/oK12GHjHLS— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 4, 2018

If Mueller's probe now includes how Gulf State money buys influence & policy in DC, it will expose the hidden underbelly of how Washington has worked forever. It will also produce some awkward silence from certain DC think tanks which normally cheer every new Mueller article.— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 4, 2018

Greenwald may indeed be right. But the scandal isn’t just about how Gulf States buy influence. It’s also about how domestic players buying influence with lawmakers is de rigueur, and a source of the growing distrust Americans feel towards their government. We’ll need an especially shiny distraction from that should Gulf State influence blow up in the press.

Case-in-point from The Intercept. Consumers are following animal rights activists in revolting over factory farming abuses. The Market (bless its holy name) is demanding humane alternatives. Eggs, for example:

But in response, the powerful poultry industry — which long invoked principles of the “free market” to justify their torture-derived products being available to consumers — have now reversed course. With consumers choosing more humane egg products, lobbyists for the poultry industry are pushing laws that would force stores to carry their products even if doing so offends their moral sensibilities and ethical judgments.

The poultry lobby in Iowa proposed and the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill requiring any store that participates in the Women, Infants and Children federal food assistance program to sell eggs from industrial caged egg producers.

Because principle, you know. “Now that consumers are choosing humane treatment of hens,” The Intercept report continues, “that free-market principle has been kicked to the curb.”

There is much more at the Intercept, which adds that California’s ballot initiative to prohibit the worst hen confinement practices passed in a landslide. A followup measure required all eggs sold in California but produced in other states to comply. Responding to consumer demand, “100 grocery store chains and dozens of chain restaurants and food manufacturers — Nestlé, McDonald’s, and Walmart among them” pledged to abandon caged eggs over the next decade.

So “free market” caged producers have turned to laws to compel stores to carry their products. To pass those laws, they turn to lawmakers in state capitols and in Washington, D.C. who tend to hear the voices of industry before they hear the voices of consumers.

In Parkland, Florida, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School noticed something similar. The voices of the gun lobby are louder in lawmakers’ ears than those of the victims of gun violence.

From The Atlantic:

The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas are discovering that they can’t trust their elected officials to take action on gun control. And why should they? The Columbine massacre occurred in 1999, before any of these children were born. Legislators have had 18 years to ensure that American schools are safe places for students to learn. Instead, students are so familiar with drills to protect themselves from mass shootings that one enterprising high schooler, Justin Rivard, has designed a metal brace that can secure a classroom door from an active shooter who blasts off a lock. Tragically, Rivard’s clever hack has a much better chance of being adopted than legislation to institute universal background checks, which 97 percent of Americans support.

Meanwhile, parents feel they need to send their kids to school with ballistic armor in their backpacks to protect them from flying bullets. What kind of sane country tolerates that? [Emphasis mine.]

Watching the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students engage with their elected leaders is a crash course in understanding how people develop mistrust in representative democracies. The fear is that the experience will quickly teach the students that change is impossible. The hope, instead, is that they will learn that change can occur, but perhaps not through the methods they’ve been taught to use. While the Florida legislature prioritizes debating the health risks of pornography over considering gun control, online campaigns have convinced airlines, rental-car companies, and banks to cut their ties with the NRA. The uncomfortable lesson may be that corporations are more responsive to customer concerns than lawmakers are to their constituents. This may be good news in the short term for activists, but it should be a bright red flag for anyone concerned for democracy in the long term.

Don’t offer merit badges to corporations, though. They respond to their bottom lines just as politicians do. It’s just that corporations evaluate theirs every quarter, not biennially. They do what’s right when it aligns with what’s profitable.

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland shootings writes in Harper’s Bazaar:

We are kids, we are parents, we are students, we are teachers. We are tired of practicing school shooter drills and feeling scared of something we should never have to think about. We are tired of being ignored. So we are speaking up for those who don’t have anyone listening to them, for those who can’t talk about it just yet, and for those who will never speak again. We are grieving, we are furious, and we are using our words fiercely and desperately because that’s the only thing standing between us and this happening again.

The problem is, in state capitols and inside the Beltway, money speaks louder. But while there is still a smidgen of democracy left in this republic, votes speak loudly as well.

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

Politics and Reality Radio: War on Unions May Have Unintended Consequences; Rightwing Violence Against Cops; Anti-Choicers’ New Strategy

with Joshua Holland

This week, we’re joined by union organizer Shaun Richman, who explains why Janus v. AFSCME, corporate America’s latest assault on organized workers, may come back to bite them in the form of more labor unrest.

Then we welcome Luke Barnes from Think Progress to discuss his piece on fringe right-wing violence against law enforcement, and how it often goes under-reported by the national press.

Last but not least, Rewire News investigative reporter Sofia Resnick tells us about the Red Rose Rescues — and anti-abortion activists’ latest strategy to deny women the right to choose.

Playlist:
Bitter: Sweet: “The Mating Game”
Lil Troy: “Wanna Be a Baller”
The 5 6 7 8s: “Woo Hoo”
Ray Charles: “Hit the Road Jack”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Joke? Think about all the strongman stuff he’s been saying lately

by digby

I’m feeling a little under the weather today so I figured I’d just re-run this from last week — for obvious reasons:

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

The new strongmen

by digby

I wrote about the global strongman phenomenon and Trump’s place in it for Salon this morning: 

The New York Times had a startling headline on Monday morning, which describes a global phenomenon that we’re only beginning to grasp in America. It said: “With Xi’s Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen.” The story itself was about Chinese President Xi Jinping abolishing term limits and announcing he would lead China indefinitely.

Term limits are fairly recent in China having been put into the constitution in the 1970s by Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the long succession crisis under Mao Zedong. Still, as the Times points out, there was a time not long ago when this would have provoked a strong outcry from the United States, which used to have some moral authority when it came to democratic norms. Those days are no more. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the tepid statement: “I believe that’s a decision for China to make about what’s best for their country.” And that was that.

But the more chilling aspect of the headline is its evocation of “the era of the strongman,” naming Vladimir Putin of Russia, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey as the prime examples of the era’s new authoritarian leaders. One could certainly also add Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Kim Jong Un of North Korea. There is also, of course, the one with the biggest hands in the business, President Donald Trump, although he is better characterized as a “rhetorical” strongman, at least for the moment.

Still, it’s telling that as Trump slags American neighbors and allies on a daily basis (he went after Canada on Monday) he is complimentary to all the aforementioned leaders. Yes, he has called Kim of North Korea “Little Rocket Man” — but that’s actually an affectionate nickname, compared to what he says about some American politicians. In the past Trump has complimented Kim, saying,“You gotta give him credit, how many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden … he goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss.” As we know, he has had nothing but kind words to say about Putin, Sisi and Erdogan, all of whom have taken steps this year that would have caused major diplomatic disruptions in the past. Trump only has admiration for their bold “defenses” of their countries.

Just this week, Axios reported that Trump constantly tells people that he wishes he had the authority to do what the Asian strongmen do:

He often jokes about killing drug dealers … He’ll say, “You know the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.” 

But the president doesn’t just joke about it. According to five sources who’ve spoken with Trump about the subject, he often leaps into a passionate speech about how drug dealers are as bad as serial killers and should all get the death penalty. Trump tells confidants a softer approach to drug reform — the kind where you show sympathy to the offenders and give them more lenient sentences — will never work. 

He tells friends and associates the government has got to teach children that they’ll die if they take drugs and they’ve got to make drug dealers fear for their live

He grudgingly admits that it would be difficult to pass such a law but he would “love” to do it.

Trump just “loves” the death penalty, period. He’s been agitating for it since the 1980s when he took out that infamous full-page ad calling for the Central Park Five to be executed. (Those five young men were subsequently found innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.) During the presidential campaign, after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, Trump promised he would seek the death penalty for anyone who killed cops. (This was the one occasion where he eschewed his tiresome solution that mass shootings could be stopped if only everyone were armed. After all, they all were. It didn’t help.)

Trump has been generous with his praise for Philippine president Duterte, telling him that he was dealing with drugs “the right way,” which evidently involves extrajudicial killings and mass incarceration.

He and Duterte have something else in common. Everyone knows that Trump bragged about assaulting women by grabbing their genitalia against their will. According to the Guardian, last week Duterte directed a group of soldiers to tell female rebels that there was” a new order coming from the mayor: “‘We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina.’” This would, he said, render them “useless.”

Duterte runs on the cruder side of the strongman spectrum but Trump apparently finds him refreshing. He invited him to the White House to the consternation of decent people everywhere. Duterte at least had sense enough to decline the invitation.

So far Trump’s worst assaults on civil liberties and due process have been stymied by the courts and the Justice Department. (He is having better luck with the Department of Homeland Security, which is moving quickly in an authoritarian direction.) With respect to foreign policy, he is such a buffoon that one would normally only worry that he’d make a fool of himself here at home while the career diplomats at the State Department step in behind him and clean up the mess.

Sadly, the State Department itself is a mess. Rex Tillerson hasn’t bothered to fill most of the important political appointments, and is sidelining the career foreign service people who know anything. Nothing could be more alarming than the fact that we still have no ambassador to South Korea and instead sent the totally unprepared Ivanka Trump to represent our nation at the Winter Olympics.

Meanwhile, the latest report from Politico is that Tillerson is having a fit over son-in-law Jared Kushner, UN ambassador Nikki Haley and national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s constant interference. White House chief of staff John Kelly apparently agrees with him, and made the mistake of repeating to Kushner Tillerson’s remark that “there cannot be four secretaries of state.” Kushner, who still has no security clearance, reportedly replied, “No, but we need a secretary of state who is supportive of the president.”

It’s always about personal loyalty to Trump with these people. That’s the hallmark of the strongman leader. It’s all about them. Trump is not as efficient as Xi, Putin or Erdogan, and he’s not quite as far gone as Duterte. But he’s the closest we’ve come to a true strongman leader in the United States, and he’s just getting started.

Global trade war FTW

by digby

If you’re confused about why Trump is pushing these tariffs, he explained that it was important to have big hands back in 2011 at his first CPAC:

I think he and his audience really believe that bullshit.

And he wasn’t just talking about China. He’s going after the whole world:

A top White House official Sunday suggested President Donald Trump would decline to exempt allies of the United States from tariffs he’s pledged to impose on steel and aluminum imports to protect domestic industries.

The scope of Trump’s proposed tariffs has been one of the major questions looming over the plan since it was first announced last week.

Pressed on “Fox News Sunday” about whether the president would exempt Canada or the European Union from the tariffs, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said: “That’s not [Trump’s] decision.”

“As soon as he starts exempting countries, he has to raise the tariff on everybody else,” Navarro said in the combative interview. “As soon as he exempts one country, his phone starts ringing from the heads of state of other countries.”

European officials have pledged retaliation for Trump’s tariffs proposal, which is expected to be outlined in greater detail next week.

Asked about potential exemptions for U.S. allies on ABC’s “This Week,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Trump has had conversations with a number of world leaders but that “as far as I know he’s talking about a fairly broad brush.”

A “broad brush” on trade in this case translates into just dropping a nuclear bomb and letting God sort it out. Basically, lets just piss off people even when we don’t have to just to prove we are really, really stupid and dangerous.

Should be interesting …

Trump’s not the only one who’s losing it

by digby

Add caption

I don’t know what’s in the water in Washington but it’s making people insane:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said this week that a war with North Korea would be “worth it” in the long term.

Graham made the comments in an interview with CNN.

“All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” the senator told CNN.

Graham’s remark comes amid reports that the U.S. is prepared for the possibility of a military strike against North Korea.

Korean leaders are pushing diplomacy in the troubled region in the weeks following the Winter Olympics. South Korea’s president told President Trump in a phone call earlier this week that he is planning to send a special envoy to Pyongyang.

Graham has in the past repeated a warning that the U.S. is “headed toward a war” with North Korea and praised Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric against the country. He praised the Trump administration for drawing a hard line on North Korean aggression and also told CNN that he is “completely convinced” that Trump rejects a containment policy.

“They’ve drawn a red line here and it is to never let North Korea build a nuclear tipped missile to hit America,” he said.

A former national security adviser in the Obama administration on Friday pointed out Graham’s comment on Twitter, writing that the senator has “lost his god damn mind.”

I gues he thinks it would be worth it for all the dead people too? What a despicable thing to say. War is never “worth it.” What the hell is wrong with him?

If you would like to read a piece about just how not “worth it” it would be, Vox put together an explainer that will make your blood run cold to think that a US Senator would ever say such a thing. This is just an excerpt:

The experts I spoke to all stressed that Kim could devastate Seoul without even needing to use his weapons of mass destruction. The North Korean military has an enormous number of rocket launchers and artillery pieces within range of Seoul. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that Kim could hammer the South Korean capital with an astonishing 10,000 rockets per minute — and that such a barrage could kill more than 300,000 South Koreans in the opening days of the conflict. That’s all without using a single nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.

And retired South Korean Gen. In-Bum Chun, who spent 40 years in uniform thinking about a confrontation with North Korea, underscored that Kim also has a different kind of weapon: 25 million people — including 1.2 million active-duty troops and several million reservists — who have been “indoctrinated since childhood with the belief that Kim and his family are literal gods whose government must be protected at all costs.”

“You’re talking about people who have basically been brainwashed their entire lives,” Chun said. “It would be like what you saw on Okinawa during World War II, where Japanese civilians and soldiers were all willing to fight to the death. This would be a hard and bloody war.”

What follows is a guide to what a conflict with North Korea might look like. War is inherently unpredictable: It’s possible Kim would use every type of weapon of mass destruction he possesses, and it’s possible he wouldn’t use any of them.

But many leading experts fear the worst. And if all of this sounds frightening, it should. A new war on the Korean Peninsula wouldn’t be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse.

The official position of the Trump administration, like that of its predecessors, is that North Korea’s nuclear program is unacceptable and that Pyongyang has to give up all its nuclear weapons. If the US and South Korea went to war with the North, their key strategic goal would be to capture or destroy all of Pyongyang’s nuclear sites, as well as the bases that house its long-range missiles.

In a startlingly blunt letter to Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) last October, Rear Adm. Michael Dumont, speaking on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the “only way to ‘locate and destroy — with complete certainty — all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs’ is through a ground invasion.”

Estimates of the exact numbers of US troops that would take part in a push north vary widely, but current and former military planners uniformly believe it would require vastly more forces than took part in the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan.

A South Korean military white paper from 2016, for instance, said the US would need to deploy 690,000 ground troops to South Korea if war broke out. Bruce Bennett, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation who has spent decades studying North Korea generally and the Kim family specifically, believes those numbers are on the high side, but he thinks the US would need to send at least 200,000 troops into North Korea. By way of comparison, that would be significantly more troops than the US had in either Iraq or Afghanistan at the peaks of those two long wars.

The 2016 assessment says the Pentagon would also need to send 2,000 warplanes and other aircraft to South Korea. The US hasn’t had that much airpower deployed to a single conflict since Vietnam.

The experts I spoke to believe Kim and his generals know that US ground forces are better trained and equipped than North Korean troops, and that North Korea’s aging fleet of 1,300 Soviet-era warplanes is no match for Washington’s state-of-the-art stealth fighters and other jets. So what would happen if US and South Korean troops started pouring into North Korea while American planes launched wave after wave of airstrikes?

The consensus view is that Kim would try to level the playing field by using his vast arsenal of chemical weapons, which is believed to be the biggest and most technologically advanced in the world. (Kim is estimated to have between 2,500 and 5,000 metric tons of deadly nerve agents like sarin, which can cause paralysis and, ultimately, death.)

With so many artillery pieces and rocket launchers trained on Seoul, Kim has the ability to quickly blanket the densely packed city with huge amounts of nerve agents. The human toll would be staggeringly high: The military historian Reid Kirby estimated last June that a sustained sarin attack could kill up to 2.5 million people in Seoul alone, while injuring nearly 7 million more. Men, women, and children would very literally choke to death in the streets of one of the world’s wealthiest and most vibrant cities. It would be mass murder on a scale rarely seen in human history.

But yeah, that would all be “worth it” to prove that the US of A won’t stand for anyone using weapons of mass destruction.

Can you see the problem with that logic? I knew that you could.

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Nobody believes anything

by digby

A majority of Americans have little to no faith that the Trump administration will stop foreign governments from interfering in the 2018 midterm elections, according to an Axios-SurveyMonkeypoll. Republicans overwhelmingly trust the administration, but independents and Democrats don’t, by large margins.

Why it matters: This is a huge issue that could undermine public confidence in the elections — and President Trump and the White House team are going to face constant questions about it between now and November. Try to think of the last election where the public didn’t trust the president to prevent foreign meddling.

Don’t forget: Adm. Mike Rogers of the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency has testified that Trump hasn’t given him the authority to disrupt Russian election hacking operations.

The big picture: Most Americans say the federal government and tech companies have the responsibility to prevent foreign governments from using tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google to manipulate elections. The public doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the tech companies either, but they’re more evenly divided than they are on trust in the Trump administration.

The numbers that matter:

Overall, 66% of Americans say tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter have a “major responsibility” to stop foreign interference in the elections.

 
63% say the federal government has a major responsibility to do the same. 

Americans are evenly split, 48% to 48%, on whether they trust the tech companies to prevent foreign meddling. 

Eight out of 10 Americans blame the tech companies for not doing more to keep their platforms safe from meddling in the 2016 elections, while 55% blame the Obama administration for not doing more on their end.

The bottom line: Americans are not in a good mood heading into the midterms — and that’s a recipe for more than the usual distrust and fighting over the closest races.

If the Democrats win, the Republicans will believe their Dear Leader who is back to saying “the system’s rigged, the system’s rigged!” They won’t examine why he doesn’t fix it, they’ll just lash out at others as usual.Any ideas that because they believe he’s doing everything he can means they are compelled to accept the restuls is foolish. They are not bound by consistency.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has reporters wondering if the Democrats are going to go crazy if they don’t win in November because they’ve foolishly gotten their hopes up and so are playing into Russian hands.

Good times.

Florida Senators Won’t Ban AR-15’s. Now what Emma, Cameron and David?


by Spocko

Dear Emma, Cameron and David:

As I predicted the day before you went to Tallahassee, certain politicians pretended to listen to you, and then did what the NRA wanted.  On Saturday your Florida Senators voted 21-17 to defeat an  amendment to ban sales of AR-15s.
Who didn’t pass it?
This guy: Joe Negron, Senate President, (Hey didn’t you meet with Joe?  What did he say then vs. what he did now? ) 

Joe Negron, Florida Senate President, Republican @joenegronfl
NRA Grade A+ 

Negron voting record and endorsements on guns


And these people.

1. Baxley
2. Bean
3. Benacquisto
4. Bradley
5. Brandes
6. Broxson
7. Gainer
8. Galvano
9. Grimsley
10. Hukill
11. Hutson
12. Lee
13. Mayfield
14. Passidomo
15. Perry
16. Simmons
17. Simpson
18. Stargel
19. Steube
20. Young

What is your next move? I won’t tell you what to do, because everyone is looking at YOU to do things differently this time than what was done by us veterans of the gun law fights.

One thing that you might want to do differently is not to accept this vote. There are things you can do in addition to voting these politicians out in November. Act now!

For example: You can employ additional pressure. David, remember when you asked students to not come to Florida for Spring Break if there wasn’t an AR-15 ban? There isn’t! Now it’s 
time for your friends to start making calls to hotels, airlines and theme parks canceling reservations. 

If your friends do that right now the big business folks will make some calls to senators at home, on Sunday! (Old people call each other on the phone, they don’t tweet or text, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tweet at them today. )

If you make it clear:
NO AR-15 Ban, No Spring Break Dollars.

When the money they are counting on stops coming in the tourism folks freak out.

When lawmakers are getting calls at home from Disney, Universal, Budweiser, Hilton, Marriott, Delta and United they will know things are different.  Politicians need to know this isn’t BUSINESS as usual.

Nobody wants to be on the side of the NRA now. Every normal person wants to be on YOUR side. You are the hot new band, the streaming hit.

Lawmakers still think they need to listen only to the NRA, and it will be fine. But you might want to start following the Delta story.

It looked like the NRA won, costing a major employer a tax break, But it also pissed off a major employer, and that is going to cost those politicians. Delta execs are not stupid. Any money that Delta might have been giving to NRA politicians will dry up right now. And that is what REALLY scares the politicians.

Cameron, you asked Marco if he would stop taking NRA money. He said no. Imagine if OTHER business execs said this to your state politicians “We aren’t going to give you money either because you didn’t do the right things by these kids. Also, don’t try and screw us like Georgia politicians did to Delta. These kids are our future customers. They are our kids and our friends’ kids. You picked the wrong horse to back in this race.” 

(When rich old people are double crossed by politicians they punish them by taking away their money. The NRA uses this leverage on politicians to keep them in line.  But there are more  people on your side now, ask them to help you out by not giving money to those politicians on that list. It’s a pretty easy ask. ‘Hey, stop giving money to these jerks!”)

Also, now that you have CNN producers’ emails, ask to go on some of those Sunday shows.  Nobody you know watches them, but big business types do because they want to see if their name is mentioned. You could have a lot of fun if there was a Florida lawmaker on who had to explain why he just couldn’t do an AR-15 ban and now Spring Break revenues will be down 78%.

Speaking of explaining and excuses. I watched the senators try and spin their bill. “We did so much good stuff! Like money for people with guns in schools! We came up with more money to turn schools into fortresses, but we just couldn’t pass an amendment to stop AR-15 sales because that would COST THE NRA MONEY.”  They are selling this as a WIN! They will whine that you all should be grateful they are getting you more armed police. As Emma would say. “It’s BS.”

But don’t listen to me, I don’t want you to be accused of being a puppet whose strings are pulled by big money interests. (BTW, if anyone asks if you are funded by George Soros say “No, I’m funded by George Clooney!” It’s true! Even I think he’s dreamy, and I’m a logical Vulcan.)

Who am I? I’m just a fictional Star Trek original series character who developed the model that destroyed the right wing media advertising model costing them 100’s of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

I hope you can do something different this time because otherwise this is looking more and more like the darkest timeline, and I really don’t want to grow a goatee, but I will if I have too.