Month: March 2018

This is very, very bad

by digby

He really is losing it. And I’m not being hyperbolic:

President Donald Trump bemoaned a decision not to investigate Hillary Clinton after the 2016 presidential election, decrying a “rigged system” that still doesn’t have the “right people” in place to fix it, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors in Florida on Saturday.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day.”

The remarks, delivered inside the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate during a lunch and fundraiser, were upbeat, lengthy, and peppered with jokes and laughter. But Trump’s words reflected his deeply felt resentment that his actions during the 2016 campaign remain under scrutiny while those of his former rival, Hillary Clinton, do not.

“I’m telling you, it’s a rigged system folks,” Trump said. “I’ve been saying that for a long time. It’s a rigged system. And we don’t have the right people in there yet. We have a lot of great people, but certain things, we don’t have the right people.”

Trump has repeatedly said that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, should launch investigations into Clinton, and has continued to lambast Sessions on Twitter for not taking what he views as appropriate steps to probe Clinton’s actions involving her private email server.

The stewing anger with Sessions has soured Trump’s mood over the past week, including on Wednesday evening, when he fumed inside the White House over his attorney general’s decision to release a statement defending himself after Trump chastised his approach to an investigation into alleged surveillance abuses as “DISGRACEFUL” on Twitter.

The episode was just one irritant in a long series of upsetting moments for Trump this week. Morale at the White House has dropped to new lows, and Trump himself has seethed at the negative headlines.

On Saturday, among donors gathered in the grand ballroom named for himself at Mar-a-Lago, Trump pondered the happiness of his former rival, wondering aloud whether she was enjoying life after the campaign.

“Is Hillary a happy person? Do you think she’s happy?” he said. “When she goes home at night, does she say, ‘What a great life?’ I don’t think so. You never know. I hope she’s happy.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump went after former President George W. Bush for his decision to invade Iraq after faulty intelligence indicated the country had weapons of mass destruction. 

“Here we are, like the dummies of the world, because we had bad politicians running our country for a long time,” he said.

Trump called the Iraq invasion “the single worst decision ever made” and said it amounted to “throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest.”

“That was Bush. Another real genius. That was Bush,” Trump said sarcastically. “That turned out to be wonderful intelligence. Great intelligence agency there.”

I wonder how much money those rich idiots gave to this lunatic at that event.

It’s just a joke. It’s all one big joke.

‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages

Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility — with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center.

These are the darkest days in at least half a year, they say, and they worry just how much farther President Trump and his administration may plunge into unrest and malaise before they start to recover. As one official put it: “We haven’t bottomed out.”

Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air defenders. He revives old grudges. And he confides to friends that he is uncertain about whom to trust.

Trump’s closest West Wing confidante, Hope Hicks — the communications director who often acted as a de facto Oval Office therapist — announced her resignation last week, leaving behind a team the president views more as paid staff than surrogate family. So concerned are those around Trump that some of the president’s oldest friends have been urging one another to be in touch — the sort of familiar contacts that often lift his spirits.

In an unorthodox presidency in which emotion, impulse and ego often drive events, Trump’s ominous moods manifested themselves last week in his zigzagging positions on gun control; his shock trade war that jolted markets and was opposed by Republican leaders and many in his own administration; and his roiling feud of playground insults with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
[…]
Trump’s friends are increasingly concerned about his well-being, worried that the president’s obsession with cable commentary and perceived slights is taking a toll on the 71-year-old. “Pure madness,” lamented one exasperated ally.

Retired four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey said the American people — and Congress especially — should be alarmed.

“I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and this is not going to end well,” McCaffrey said. “Trump’s judgment is fundamentally flawed, and the more pressure put on him and the more isolated he becomes, I think, his ability to do harm is going to increase.”

This portrait of Trump at a moment of crisis just over a year after taking office is based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and advisers to the president and other administration allies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Trump’s state of mind.

Nothing to worry about. He’s just a kidder.

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The great becoming
by Tom Sullivan

Mountaintop Removal site near Kayford Mountain, WV, January 4, 2006. Photo by Vivian Stockman, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

America is forever reinventing itself. Synthesizing today and yesterday and turning them into tomorrow. It was folly to believe a reality TV star could turn back time and recapture some halcyon yesterday. Yet many did.

But those many are growing fewer, argues Joy-Ann Reid at the Daily Beast. We are two countries, she argues, “one lurching for the future, one yearning for the past.” The latter are losing to the inevitable becoming.

There is not just an urban-rural rift in America, but a generational one. Pew Research finds America is getting younger and more liberal. Opinions on race and immigration are trending liberal.

The trend is accelerating writes Jonathan Chait:

It is hard to focus on this trend at a moment when Republicans have full control of government, and are heading into an election where gerrymandering gives them a large advantage in maintaining Congress. But this fact runs headlong against a much longer deterioration of the conservative position within the electorate. Many conservatives supported Trump precisely because they were panicked about this trend. So far, Trump is merely accelerating the demise they feared.

Instead of making America great again, Donald Trump is instead hastening “the very decline his supporters so feared,” Reid concurs. There will be no return to a world where white men rule and all others know their places and remain in them:

But here’s the thing: the past really is past. Coal is still a dying industry and America will never again have an industrial revolution. It’s other countries’ turn to do that now. Black and brown people aren’t giving up our dignity, including the right to protest and to survive mundane encounters with police. Immigrants aren’t going away (and in fact we need them to keep the economy and the safety net flush). LGBT people aren’t going back into the closet. And women are staying in the workforce, with many aiming to become the CEO, while insisting on hanging onto our reproductive liberty. There is indeed a sizable minority of Americans who want to go back to the old times. But we aren’t going back.

Change is as inevitable as the tides and just as impossible to hold back. What the rising anger over the Parkland, FL shootings demonstrates is that the old cannot hold ground against the next generation either. They are coming. For those holding onto the past, it won’t be pretty. Even as the president boasts of renewed American greatness on his terms, his tenure has, Reid says, “the feel of a decrepit regime looting the palace in its final days.”

Reid explains why:

Far from becoming more conservative with time, young Americans are staying right where they were when Barack Obama was first elected—on the left of center—if not growing more progressive. It’s why Republicans are so keen to suppress their votes. Where my generation, Generation X, polls at 51-41 percent blue over red, for Millennials the Democratic-over-Republican preference is a daunting 62-29, while Boomers are 48-46 D versus R and their parents, in the Silent Generation, tilt Republican 51 to 45 percent. The main reason for the increasing liberalism of the younger cohorts? These generations (including the youngest group, Generation Z) are chock full of young people of color. They are the most racially diverse generation in modern American history. And by next year, Millennials will be the single largest generational group in America, with their ranks swelled by immigrants (which explains the urgent right wing push for mass deportation.)

Reid’s essay suggests that forward-looking America resides in “hundreds of counties versus Trump’s thousands.” But that characterization does little justice to the diversity in areas portrayed in black-and-white (if not daguerreotype) imagery as “Trump country.”

The New Yorker‘s Benjamin Wallace-Wells examines the West Virginia teachers’ strike for signals of where the American middle class is headed and spoke with historian Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. She argues that while Appalachia is handy shorthand for Trump country, that flattens the perspective. The region may have voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the 2016 general election, but there was also strong support for Bernie Sanders in the primary. “Where were, for example, the ‘Bernie Country’ pieces about Appalachia?” Catte asked the New Republic.

Wallace-Wells writes:

She points out that the diversity of the region is badly underrecognized (“There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African-American than as Scots-Irish”) and emphasizes the region’s radical labor history: the mine-labor fights of Harlan County, Kentucky; the community health clinics; the training school for civil-rights organizers. “If you saw through my eyes you’d see hands in pockets and hands on guns and toes on picket lines,” she writes of Appalachia.

Teachers protesting in Charleston, West Virginia last week donned red to echo the costumes worn by picketing mine workers in 1921 at the Battle of Blair Mountain. Teachers were striking for better pay and benefits, but for more than that.

“One of the things they are really fighting for is to be recognized as professionals of value,” said Stephen Wotring, the superintendent of schools in Preston County. Yes, there is economic anxiety, but more of a concern about where their state and, for that matter the middle class, is heading.

Wotring believed that a certain political understanding had crystallized for the teachers, a sense of where they stood. “If I really think this was fuelled by anything this year, as opposed to any other year, it’s probably been in the political culture that we find ourselves in—that everybody is willing, at this point, to stand up and state their opinion and stand for it,” he said. “People feel more entitled to do that than ever before.”

“Forward together. Not one step back!” as Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II exhorts crowds.

Wallace-Wells concludes:

“Appalachia was not different from the rest of America,” the Appalachian historian Ronald Eller wrote ten years ago, in his history of the region, “Uneven Ground.” “It was in fact a mirror of what the nation was becoming.”

Perhaps the tensions we now feel, Wallace-Wells writes are because “it isn’t at all obvious what the nation is becoming.”

The future will come of its own accord whether we acquiesce to it or work to shape it. But the future will belong to those most willing to fight for it.

* * * * * * * *

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

Saturday Night at the Movies

Ich bin ein Netflix-binger: Babylon Berlin (***½) and Mute (*)

by Dennis Hartley

How do I describe the genre-defying Netflix series Babylon Berlin? Does “cop-on-the edge” / conspiracy thriller/ historical drama/ musical-fantasy pique your interest? Nein? How about: The Singing Detective meets Seven Days in May at the corner of Berlin Alexanderplatz and Cabaret? Does that help-or does it at least make your ganglia twitch?

You see, it’s very simple to follow:

It is 1929 Weimar Republic-era Berlin. There are contingents of German Communists, Monarchists, and National Socialists fighting amongst themselves; meanwhile the German police are investigating contingents of Russian White, Trotskyite, and Bolshevik emigres, who are fighting amongst themselves. The German police are also investigating a porn film ring…and themselves. There’s an Armenian crime lord with an interesting variety of ways to make you talk. Nearly everybody is jockeying and scheming and blackmailing each other to get dibs on a train car believed to contain a fortune in gold bars. Oh-and there’s something about the possibility of a military coup, and a magic ring.

There’s actually nothing about a magic ring, but as “Babylon” in the title infers, there’s lots of sex and drugs and Reich ‘n’ roll to hold your interest, should the byzantine political milieu make your eyes glaze over. Truth be told, the politics take a back seat to an array of fascinating characters to follow, led by two terrific lead performances from Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries. Bruch plays vice squad Inspector Rath, a WW1 veteran suffering from PTSD (he keeps ampules of morphine handy for countering “the shakes”).

Rath’s fate becomes significantly intertwined with that of Fries’ character, Charlotte. Charlotte is a “flapper” (she dances a mean Charleston!) who lives with her highly dysfunctional family in the Berlin slums. She scrapes by as best she can while she yearns to one day break the Berlin police department’s glass ceiling by becoming a homicide detective (needless to say, that’s an uphill battle for an ambitious young woman in 1929).

There are nearly as many characters to keep track of as in a Tolstoy novel. However, with the luxury of 16 episodes, most are nicely fleshed out. I do want to mention two more standout performances. First, Peter Kurth’s turn as Chief Inspector Wolter, a complex, morally ambiguous career cop who could have popped right out of a James Ellroy story.

I’ve become an instant fan of Severija Janušauskaitė, as Countess Sorokina, a Mata Hari-like character who spies for the Soviet secret police when she’s not busy performing her drag cabaret act or juggling love affairs with a Trotskyite leader and a right-wing German industrialist. It’s a meaty role, and the Lithuanian actress tackles it with aplomb (speaking of the cabaret acts…Roxy Music fans should be on the lookout for a Bryan Ferry cameo).

It was a bit of a coup for Netflix to secure the domestic broadcast rights (it premiered last October on Germany’s Sky 1 Network). Co-directed and co-written by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International, Drei), Achim von Borries, and Hendrik Handloegten, the production is based on the first volume of Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin: Book 1 of the Gereon Rath Mystery Series. Babylon Berlin is also said to be the highest-budgeted non-English language TV series to date. The lavish sets, stylish production numbers and large-scale action sequences seem to bear this out, giving the narrative a Dr. Zhivago-style historical sweep.

Still, it’s the intimate moments that are most absorbing. While the viewer never loses sense of the huge sociopolitical upheaval in Germany at the time, the filmmakers wisely remember that whether the story’s characters are good or bad, rich or poor, it’s those teasing glimpses of our shared humanity (flawed or not) that compel us to keep watching.

Unfortunately, one could say exactly the opposite of Mute, another recent addition to the Netflix catalog: in this case, the story and the character development takes a back seat to the slick, shiny production design. The sci-fi mystery-thriller is the latest feature film from Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie and the director of the 2009 cult favorite Moon).

Oddly enough, this story is also set in Berlin; however we now move forward in time 100 years from the 1920s (give or take a decade or two). In the umpteenth take on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner model, we are presented with an eye-filling cityscape of deco-futurism, replete with flying cars, vaguely punkish fashionistas, and an overdose of neon.

Alexander Skarsgård plays Leo, a (wait for it) mute bartender working at a Berlin strip joint. A brief flashback in the film’s opening attributes his condition to a childhood mishap, in the course of which Leo received a serious throat injury and nearly drowned. Leo is dating one of the waitresses, Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). We get the impression right off the bat that Leo may be a little more devoted to the relationship than Naadirah; while she is affectionate, something about her demeanor when she is with Leo seems tentative.

We don’t get much time to mull that over, as Naadirah suddenly and mysteriously disappears. We don’t get much time to mull that over either, because the narrative abruptly shifts to a pair of shifty American surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux) who run a black market clinic (most of their clients appear to be mobsters who require the odd slug to be removed, with no questions asked). The pair are suspiciously reminiscent of Hawkeye and Trapper John in the movie version of M*A*S*H. Not only do they crack wise while cutting into patients, and go by similar nicknames (“Cactus Bill” and “Duck”), but Rudd constantly wears a parka and sports a 3-day growth and 70s-style ‘stache-all clearly modelled on Elliot Gould’s “look” in the aforementioned Altman film.

Frankly, keeping myself amused with playing “spot the influence” was the only thing that kept me from dozing off from that point forward…otherwise, I kept waiting for something to happen. Like a cohesive narrative. The two storylines meander aimlessly until eventually converging in the 3rd act. While it does bring a symmetry to the story, it’s too little, too late. It’s like Jones was afflicted by ADD while constructing his screenplay (co-written with Michael Robert Johnson). It roars out of the gate like it’s going to be a character study (with no character development), quickly shifts to a mystery (but with no tension or suspense), then toys with Tarantino-esque flourishes (sans any of the flourish).

It is pretty to look at; but great production design alone does not a good story make. Skarsgård is a fine actor (he filled his mantle last year with a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a SAG award, and a Critic’s Choice Award for his performance in HBO’s “Big Little Lies”), but he is given little to do (much less anything to say, as he is playing a mute) aside from staring into space…and occasionally beating the crap out of someone. The same goes for Rudd and Theroux; both good players, but they’re stuck with a poor script.

It’s puzzling why this has been positioned as “sci-fi”. Aside from the futuristic vision of Berlin, and the flying cars, there’s no sense of integration with the setting-it is simply a backdrop. There is a reference to Jones’ aforementioned Moon, with that film’s star Sam Rockwell doing a cameo (he pops up, in full Moon character, as part of a court hearing playing on the TV in the bar where Skarsgård works). The only good news about Mute is that I didn’t have to buy overpriced stale popcorn, or circle endlessly for a parking space.

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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–Dennis Hartley

So much for criminal justice reform

by digby

I think this might depress me as much as anything Trump’s done. And that’s saying something:

Before President Trump picked him to be part of a federal commission that sets policy on how to punish criminals, William Otis spent years staunchly advocating for harsher penalties and a larger prison population.

In several public testimonies and years of published commentary, Otis decried a criminal justice system that he says has favored criminals over victims. He hailed the tough-on-crime approach of the Reagan and Bush administrations — one that Trump, through his attorney general, is resurrecting. “Increased use of incarceration and reining in naive judges,” he once told NPR, “has worked” to curtail crime.

Otis’s appointment, which the White House announced Thursday, is another sign that the Trump administration is restoring the 1980s and 1990s war on drugs that incarcerated many minority defendants and overcrowded the country’s prisons. Last May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences — a move that Otis praised.

“It was right then and it’s right now,” Otis wrote on a popular legal blog. “It amounts to telling prosecutors to charge what the defendant actually did. This is so obviously correct — aligning the allegations with the facts — that I have a hard time seeing any serious objection to it.”

Otis’s nomination was met with criticism from advocacy groups. In a statement Thursday, Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, called Otis’s views “outdated.”

“This is not a person who will be guided by evidence and data. The Senate should reject this nomination,” Ring said.

In a short email to The Washington Post, Otis said he is honored “to have been selected for this important position by the President” and declined to comment further. The White House and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Otis, a former federal prosecutor who’s now an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University, is perhaps also best known in the legal community for his commentaries on the Crime and Consequences blog, which describes itself as the voice that represents the “perspective of victims of crime and law-abiding public.”

Some of his writings are racially tinged. One example is a 2013 post titled “The PC Attempt to Intimidate Judges.” Otis defended a judge who was criticized for saying that minorities are more violent than white people.

“Thus, when Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones said at a University of Pennsylvania Law School talk that blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites, a consortium of civil rights organizations filed a complaint,” Otis wrote. “The complaint calls for stern discipline on the grounds that the remarks were ‘discriminatory and biased.’ ”

He added, “So far as I have been able to discover, it makes no mention of the fact that they’re true.”

Scroll down to the comments section of that post, and you’ll find that Otis talked about Asians, too: “Orientals have less incidence of crime than whites. … The reason Orientals stay out of jail more than either whites or blacks is that family, life, work, education and tradition are honored more in Oriental culture than in others. Values, not race or skin color, influence choices.”

In some of his posts, Otis also sarcastically referred to offenders as “Mr. Nicey.”

“Mr. Nicey might consider quitting the smack business and getting a normal job like everybody else,” he wrote in a post praising Sessions’s directive to federal prosecutors.

I’m sure Trump would love this guy if he ever heard of him. They’re soul mates. But this is a Sessions move. He and the boss may be on the outs but that doesn’t mean they don’t see eye to eye on race and crime. It’s what drew them to each other in the first place.

We were on the verge of making some real progress with criminal justice reform until The Miscreant showed up. The libertarians on the right had finally shown they had some decent purpose in life and it appeared that some common sense had finally prevailed in this one corner of American politics.

Now this. We’re back to the antediluvian eye-for-an-eye philosophy, informed by the kind of rank racism that filled out prisons in the first place.

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When you’ve lost country music…

by digby

Mike Huckabee is a terrible person, nasty to his soul. But there was a time when it would have been suicide for the country music association to diss him.

Not anymore:

Jason Owen, co-president of Monument Records and owner at Sandbox Entertainment, called the appointment a “grossly offensive decision” in an email to the association’s CEO Sarah Trahern and CMA Foundation executive Tiffany Kerns.

Owen wrote that due to Huckabee’s election to the CMA Foundation’s board, neither his companies nor anyone they represent would continue to support the foundation.

Owen and his husband, Sam, are fathers to a young son and are expecting twins. Owen said that Huckabee’s stance on the LGBT community “made it clear my family is not welcome in his America.”

“The CMA has opened their arms to him, making him feel welcome and relevant,” wrote Owen, who represents artists including Little Big Town, Faith Hill and Midland.

“Huckabee speaks of the sort of things that would suggest my family is morally beneath his and uses language that has a profoundly negative impact upon young people all across this country,” he added. “Not to mention how harmful and damaging his deep involvement with the NRA is. What a shameful choice.”

The CMA Foundation is the charitable arm of the Country Music Association, devoted to growing and supporting music education programs across the country. Its board consists of 12 members.

Sugarland’s Kristian Bush visited Dodson Elementary School in Hermitage last week with the CMA Foundation. His manager, Whitney Pastorek, who is a CMA member, penned an email to CMA executives questioning how many children in the school’s diverse population Huckabee would choose to welcome.

“What a terrible disappointment to see (the CMA Foundation’s) mission clouded by the decision to align with someone who so frequently engages in the language of racism, sexism, and bigotry,” Pastorek wrote. “While Gov. Huckabee’s tenure in Arkansas may have resulted in valuable education reform over a decade ago, I find his choice to spend the past ten years profiting off messages of exclusion and hatred (not to mention the gun lobby) to be disqualifying.”

Huckabee’s inclusion on the board had sparked hundreds of comments from outraged fans on social media, many of which were threatening to boycott the CMA, the CMA Music Festival and in some cases country music as a whole.

Longtime country music executive and CMA board member Joe Galante explained in a statement that Huckabee was elected to the position because the CMA Foundation could benefit from the knowledge gained during Huckabee’s extensive political career.

“Gov. Huckabee led an impressive administration while serving the state of Arkansas and his policy experience with education reform is something we are fortunate to be able to learn from,” Galante said.

Huckabee raised his profile in the Nashville area in recent months. He tapes his talk show “Huckabee” just outside of town. “Huckabee” airs on TBN and includes news commentary along with religious, political and musical guests.

The two-time Republican presidential candidate also has held strong, polarizing views on education, including publicly calling for the end of the Department of Education as well as Common Core.

In 2010 he made several controversial statements relating to same-sex marriage and adoption. The Associated Press reported he compared legalizing same-sex marriage to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use, and, while explaining his opposition to gay couples adopting children, stated “children are not puppies.”

To date, the CMA Foundation, a nonprofit, has invested over $20 million in 84 programs across the national public school system, after-school programs, summer camps and through community outreach organizations.

This week’s episode comes four months after the association came under fire for its media guidelines at the annual CMA Awards. The CMA had previously asked media outlets to avoid questions about the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas, gun rights or political affiliations at the awards show, or risk losing their credentials and being escorted by security off the premises.

After a backlash that included criticism from awards show co-host Brad Paisley, the CMA issued an apology and removed the restrictions ahead of the show.

The Dixie Chicks are still waiting for their apology….

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Wingnut dispatch “Death Wish” edition

by digby

I’m sure you remember this:

Trump reminisced about Bronson’s Death Wish and got people in the crowd to shout out the title of the 1974 film in unison. In the movie, an affluent, liberal architect embarks on a vigilante mission after his life is shattered by thugs who kill his wife and rape his daughter.

“Today you can’t make that movie because it’s not politically correct,” Trump said.

Actually they did. And here’s a “review” from a site that advertises itself as a Hollywood site with a right wing slant:

This gut punch of a remake will drive SJWs crazy. That’s just one of many reasons to see Eli Roth’s latest.

How can a remake of the 1974 vigilante classic be so bold? It’s simple. The remake doesn’t tinker with the vigilante formula beyond concessions to our digital age. No hand wringing, no attempts to bring social justice to the classic tale.

The very last word you’d use to describe the new “Death Wish” is “woke.”

The film goes much further, though. It gives a long, wet raspberry to the scourge that is political correctness.

That’s just one more piece of evidence that Trumpism is just a club for shallow, childish little bully boys. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

I don’t think “toxic masculinity” is the problem in our culture. It’s a problem with immaturity. What has happened that’s made so many people fail to grow up?

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Trump just wants to campaign and collect money

by digby

He’s starting his campaign already because he wants to do a greatest hits tour. But he also wants to collect as much money as he possibly can this time. It will be his last chance to really cash in on the donation front. (I’m sure he’ll be cashing in in other ways.)

This week-end he’s tapping the grateful wealthy fools to whom he handed out those tax cuts goodies for a little payback:

Donald Trump is wrapping up the most chaotic week of his presidency by rolling out a major new donor push — one of his most serious steps yet to prepare for a 2020 reelection campaign.

Trump will appear before big GOP givers at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday for the launch of a fundraising initiative that mimics the famed George W. Bush “Pioneer” program, according to three senior Republicans familiar with the plans. As with Bush, the president will reward donors who’ve bundled thousands of dollars in contributions, giving them an entree to exclusive dinners, political briefings, and future retreats.

Under the plan, which is intended to provide a fundraising infrastructure that was lacking from Trump’s 2016 campaign, donors who raise $25,000 will join the “Trump Train” and those who bundle $45,000 will be part of the “45 Club.” The program, which will jointly benefit Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, will introduce higher class levels for larger dollar amounts in the future. Funds raised will also go toward the party’s 2018 efforts.

The fundraiser, one of several big donor events Trump will host this weekend at Mar-a-Lago, shows how Trump is slowly building a 2020 campaign apparatus even as he endures the most tumultuous stretch of his presidency. While top advisers bolt the White House and a special counsel zeroes in on the president’s ties to Russia, Trump is tapping a new campaign manager, taking steps to fend off would-be primary challengers, and lining up travel to critical 2020 states.

He has told friends privately that he wants to raise a massive amount of money in the months to come. Plans for the bundling program have been in the works for weeks.

Question: If he is turned out of office or decides not to run, does he get to keep all the money?

I think he does …

Chaos v. Parkland
by Tom Sullivan

Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. Screen cap from CNN.

For conspiracy theorists who see George Soros behind every headline, perhaps he was behind Donald Trump’s surprise presidential win. Why not?

Damon Linker writes at The Week:

If you were an all-powerful Democratic strategist out to subvert the Republican Party from the inside, you would be hard pressed to devise a more effective plan than the remarkable scene that unfolded on Wednesday afternoon in a televised meeting at the White House between the president and congressional leaders.

The champion of conservatives who for years warned that Obama’s jack-booted thugs would kick in gun-owners’ doors and confiscate their weapons advocated something eerily similar, at least for “crazy” people. “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump told the stunned room.

Trump as president is vindicating everything about which Jeb Bush warned us. He was a “chaos candidate” who would be a “chaos president.” The end result might be a good November for Democrats, Linker writes, “But Americans who care about the longer-term good of the nation should also find it supremely disconcerting to see one of the country’s two main parties (and the country itself) led by a man who actively spreads ideological disarray and institutional dysfunction to everything he touches.”

The NBC News story behind Trump’s announcement of aluminum and steel tariffs drives home that narrative:

On Wednesday evening, the president became “unglued,” in the words of one official familiar with the president’s state of mind.

A trifecta of events had set him off in a way that two officials said they had not seen before: Hope Hicks’ testimony to lawmakers investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, conduct by his embattled attorney general and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff.

Trump, the two officials said, was angry and gunning for a fight, and he chose a trade war, spurred on by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the White House director for trade — and against longstanding advice from his economic chair Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

There was no vetting of industry officials invited to the White House to discuss trade. White House chief of staff John Kelly did not know their names.

There were no prepared, approved remarks for the president to give at the planned meeting, there was no diplomatic strategy for how to alert foreign trade partners, there was no legislative strategy in place for informing Congress and no agreed upon communications plan beyond an email cobbled together by Ross’s team at the Commerce Department late Wednesday that had not been approved by the White House.

No one at the State Department, the Treasury Department or the Defense Department had been told that a new policy was about to be announced or given an opportunity to weigh in in advance.

Chaos.

Contrast the Trump White House with New York magazine’s story behind the Parkland students who galvanized their grief over the shooting of their friends. Two days after the tragedy, Cameron Kasky pulled together a core group including Jaclyn Corin, junior-class president, and Alex Wind, a musical-theater buff, to plan a movement in his living room.

David Hogg listens to NPR and streams Vox, Philip DeFranco, and Al Jazeera. Delaney Tarr, a senior, “loves John Oliver and Jordan Klepper and binges on One Day at a Time.” Emma González who made headlines at a Fort Lauderdale anti-gun violence rally is president of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance. They were “theater geeks and drama nerds and journalism fanatics“:

The kids agreed that if they were going to launch a media assault, they needed to present a unified front. They couldn’t seem to be contradicting each other or going off in different directions at once. So they set about establishing “what we needed to say, the things we shouldn’t be saying,” says Delaney. David says he drew ­criticism — even from his friends — for that first interview on Fox, in which he failed to acknowledge the enormity of the loss for so many of his neighbors. “I still do feel like kind of an asshole for going on there and not being sensitive about the situation and the grieving families, but I knew that I had to because the news cycle moves so fast that if I didn’t get out there, this would be just another mass shooting,” he says.

The most important thing, the group agreed, was to sidestep partisanship, “to avoid straight-out blaming the GOP,” Delaney says, “because this is an issue, a nonpartisan issue, an issue of the NRA and not of ‘Republican.’ We were trying to work that out so that we wouldn’t isolate this entire group of people.”

The kids also understood that the media would soon tire of the same three or four faces and that they had to have a deep enough bench to offer up “a couple handfuls” of students who were good on-camera, says Jaclyn. That night, “we established splitting up the media. It was very organic. We knew our places.” They agreed to limit their group to about 20 — large enough to appear on many different media outlets at once. Within the group, each person has taken on a particular role. “David focuses on the hard facts. Cameron is sarcastic and witty. ­Emma’s strong. I’m more of an organizer,” Jaclyn says. “Alex is the emotional remembrance of it all. Alfonso”— Calderon, comparatively conservative — “does all the Spanish interviews.”

The group worked on words to use and those to avoid. They gamed out responses to critics. They missed meals and lost sleep. They planned a national rally in D.C. for March 24 — soon enough “to keep the media on the hook.” They enlisted help from a mother with a PR background, and Deena Katz, an organizer of the Women’s March, helped in obtaining permits for March for Our Lives. The Michael Bloomberg-sponsored Everytown for Gun Safety will fund marches in other cities.

Trump has Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The Trump White House cannot organize a two-man parade. In two weeks, Parkland high-schoolers organized a movement to take down the NRA and a march on Washington for 500,000.

The former is running the executive branch and has control of nuclear-tipped missiles.

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

Friday Night Soother: yes we can get along

by digby

A sweet kitty and a baby hippo for you on this Friday night. Enjoy!

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He’s taking matters completely into his own hands

by digby

Oh good, time to start drinking:

President Trump has long mused about doing what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. He wanted tariffs on steel and aluminum — big ones — now. He wanted to negotiate with Congress — in public, on his court, surprise and shock, all for the cameras. He wanted to ditch any P.C. pretenses and consider Singapore-style death for all drug dealers. He wanted to play by his rules alone.

Why it matters: His staff at times managed to talk him off the ledge. No more. Tired of the restraints, tired of his staff, Trump is reveling in ticking off just about every person who serves him.

He tried to play by Kelly’s rules. Now we all have to learn to play by POTUS’ rules.
— A source close to President Trump

Trump hates rigidity and rules. He has grown to especially hate Kelly’s rigid rules, so he purposely blew off Kelly’s process and announced planned tariffs in a haphazard way.
There are signs Trump has also had it with his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who he complains is long-winded and inflexible. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace reported Trump is ready to bounce him.

The tariffs call was also a big middle finger to economic adviser Gary Cohn, who has fought for more than one year to kill tariffs that would provoke a trade war or higher prices for consumers, a de facto tax increase. Cohn, who stuck around to fight tariffs, now seems more likely to leave.

You can’t accuse him of springing a tariffs surprise on the American people — this is what he campaigned on, day in and day out:

Senior officials and staff kept slow-walking him. Trump wanted what he wanted. And when they didn’t give it to him, he finally exploded.

Bottom line: Staff can try to impose their views on Trump. But when it comes to trade — the one thing he’s believed consistently for 30 years — they will inevitably fail.
Trump’s trade actions yesterday raise an important question:

What happens now with NAFTA and KORUS (United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement), both of which Trump has threatened to scuttle?

The conventional wisdom in Washington has recently become that Trump has softened on these deals and won’t really terminate them — he’ll just tweak them.

But how confident do all the best and the brightest feel about their prognostications now?
Even those of us who have been covering the White House trade fights for 13 months are humble enough to say that we have no earthly idea what Trump will do.

One last thought before I pack it in:

If he decided to start a trade war all on his own is it unreasonable to think he would start a shooting war? He doesn’t want to listen to anyone …

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