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Month: April 2018

Trump Illustrated by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 12, 2018

Trump Illustrated
by Tom Sullivan

Sean Hannity last night borrowed a bulletin board from Glenn Beck to outline the “criminal” roots of the Mueller investigation.

Daily Beast reports:

Throughout the lengthy, rambling monologue, Hannity accused Mueller, currently Trump’s main foe, of prosecutorial impropriety—from “looking the other way,” as a federal prosecutor in Boston, at serial killer and gangster James “Whitey” Bulger’s crimes to prosecuting the wrong man for a post-9/11 anthrax attack. Along the way, he made mention of Democratic donors, connections to the Clinton family, and FBI agents who texted anti-Trump messages after the election. Ultimately, Hannity concluded, there are three connected “Deep State crime families” actively “trying to take down the president.”

Trump Illustrated (Fox News) couldn’t possibly have been trying to get ahead of the story teased in this ABC promo released earlier in the day, now could it?

ABC plans to air an interview with former FBI director James Comey Sunday night. The promo spot above teases pretty hard what we might hear, including that Comey believes our sitting president operates like a mob boss (although George Stephanopoulos may be putting those words into Comey’s mouth). Axios claims a source present at the taping:

According to the source:

  • The Comey interview left people in the room stunned — he told George things that he’s never said before.
  • Some described the experience as surreal. The question will be how to fit it all into a one-hour show.
  • Comey answered every question.
  • If anyone wonders if Comey will go there, he goes there.

“There” being the question of whether Trump should be impeached, presumably. Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” arrives in stores on Tuesday.

Trump tweeted in advance about Hannity’s “big” show to make sure his believers would not miss it.

Nicholas Kristof acknowledges the mob boss comment in his latest New York Times column:

Sadly, that’s an apt comparison. Trump’s ethos, ever since he was first sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in 1973, has been about cutting corners. He got away with it when he was a businessman buying $100,000 worth of pianos and stiffing the seller.

Now his pattern of behavior may finally be catching up with him; he and those around him may rue the day he was elected president. Trump himself is probably protected from indictment under Justice Department guidelines, and people like Paul Manafort may be counting on a pardon, but the political price of pardons will be increasingly costly — and they won’t provide protection from state prosecutions.

Trump says he’s the victim of a “witch hunt,” but it’s actually a “criminal hunt” — one presided over by Republicans, most of whom he has appointed. He claims persecution, but it’s just embarrassing for a billionaire who is the most powerful person in the world to exhibit a victim complex.

But it is a victim complex his base shares, which is why followers identify with him so (in Trumpish) strongly. The world is a “so unfair” place, occupied territory held by the Devil and his minions, and just waiting to be reclaimed from the Others by oppressed members of God’s dominant majority faith.

Appearing on “Fox and Friends” this week, David Brody and Jenna Browder of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “Faith Nation” claimed evangelical support for Trump remains strong because his Oval Office remains “for the most part” scandal-free. “We’re not hearing about scandals coming out of the Oval Office,” she said. (Translation from Old Cultish: No reports of BJs in the anteroom.)

Hemant Mehta writes at Patheos:

If you’re willing to ignore his open racism, outright hypocrisy, and policy positions designed to make life worse [for] the people who can least afford it, I guess it’s easy to think he’s the man evangelicals have been waiting for.

Browder tells Fox with a broad smile, “Evangelicals, they will tell you that they believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen candidate. And for so many people that just doesn’t make sense.”

For those of you who reside in Newtonian space, we will as they say on TV, leave it right there.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Seriously, What’s Wrong With These People? by tristero

Published by digby on April 12, 2018

Seriously, What’s Wrong With These People? 

by tristero

Sinclair chairman broke restraining order and allegedly threatened a neighbor. 

The executive chairman of the Sinclair television group has run into trouble at courts in two states for his alleged conduct during disputes with neighbours. 

David D Smith was temporarily barred from contacting a tenant on land that he owns in Maryland after he was accused of making threats, which he denies. He was separately found in contempt of court by a judge in Maine for breaching a restraining order. 

Smith, 67, chairs the board of Sinclair Broadcasting, whose ownership of local television stations around the US has this week come under renewed scrutiny after many of its presenters read from identical scripts echoing Donald Trump’s attacks on the news media.

I really don’t know how people can tolerate living like this, in constant conflict with the world. It seems such a deeply bleak and limited and depressing existence.

But I guess Smith likes it.

Impeachment is on the table. Nunes wants to impeach Rosenstein and Wray

Published by digby on April 12, 2018

Impeachment is on the table. Nunes wants to impeach Rosenstein and Wray

by digby

There’s been a lot of talk that the Republicans are going to run against Democrats by accusing them of planning to impeach Trump. The fact is that Democrats are not running on impeachment and are pretty much avoiding the topic as much as possible.

I don’t know how I feel about that. If they think that’s a good way to win, I won’t second guess them. But I do hope they don’t decide that it would be better not to hold public hearings if they take over the congress in order that nobody in the country thinks they care about anything but some 10 point plan to raise taxes. The “appease Trump voters at all costs” strategy has serious limits. Indeed, I can’t think of anything more self-defeating.

Meanwhile, there’s this:

That’s what’s happening in Fox world. And they also still spend a huge portion of their time talking about locking up Hillary Clinton.

We may be about to see if we can actually have a country in which half the people live in a world in which Donald Trump is not the president and we are just having anodyne policy debates about taxes and banking regulations while the other half lives in a world in which they back President Donald Trump’s power struggle with the DOJ, FBI and intelligence services to cover up his criminal corruption so they can enact white nationalist policies.

Which side would be the one living in reality?

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QOTD: that nameless Republican

Published by digby on April 11, 2018

QOTD: that nameless Republican

by digby

Erick Erickson shares a private conversation:

“If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherf**ker,” said the congressman as we roamed the aisles of a Safeway grocery store together. I haven’t been in a Safeway since my family moved home from Dubai in 1990. The congressman did not want to be seen with me on Capitol Hill. He needed to get some stuff anyway and decided he’d let me walk with him through the cereal and dairy selections at the Safeway near my hotel. He is not happy with President Trump. He was never a die hard Trump supporter. He supported him in the general and never expected him to win. But he did. So the congressman, whose district Trump won, has been a regular supporter on Fox News and elsewhere defending the President. He is happy to be quoted, so long as I don’t name him. He says he just needs to vent. I suggest what we’re doing is one of the reason’s Trump won — a congressman says nice things in public and bad things in private.

“Everybody does this sh*t,” he says. It’s his turn. We have known each other for years and have been promising to connect this week while I’m passing through DC. So this is it. I’m passing along his comments, not endorsing them.

“I read you writing about this, about wanting to say nice things when you can and criticize when you need to. He may be an idiot, but he’s still the President and leader of my party and he is capable of doing some things right,” he says before conceding it’s usually other people doing the right things in the President’s name. “But dammit he’s taking us all down with him. We are well and truly f**ked in November. Kevin [McCarthy] is already circling like a green fly circling sh*t trying to take Paul’s [Ryan] job because nobody thinks he’s sticking around for Nancy [Pelosi]. She’s going to f**k up the cafeteria again too. [Lord’s name in vain], at least I’ll probably lose too and won’t have to put up with that sh*t.” He won’t lose. His district is very Republican.

What’s the problem, though? Well, get ready…

“It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really f*cking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a f**king idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are b*tching about him. He really does see the world as ratings and attention. I hate Forrest Gump. I listen to your podcast and heard you hate it too. What an overrated piece of sh*t movie. Can you believe it beat the Shawshank Redemption?”

We deviated to Stephen Speilberg for a moment and I had to remind him Robert Zemeckis, not Speilberg, directed it. Then I had to point out his taste in coffee sucks and suggested better. Moving right along…

“Judiciary is stacked with a bunch of people who can win re-election so long as they don’t piss off Trump voters in the primary. But if we get to summer and most of the primaries are over, they just might pull the trigger if the President fires Mueller. The sh*t will hit the fan if that happens and I’d vote to impeach him myself. Most of us would, I think. Hell, all the Democrats would and you only need a majority in the House. If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherf**ker. Take him out with us and let Mike [Pence] take over. At least then we could sleep well at night,” he said before going off on a tangent about how the situations with Russia and China scare him. Then, “You know having Mike as President would really piss off all the right people, too. They think they hate Trump. Mike is competent,” at which point he sighs and laments that there were, in his mind, more than a dozen competent choices in 2016.

So the implication is they wouldn’t vote for impeachment if they might be opposed in primaries, I asked. He confirmed he does not think the votes are there to impeach the President if any of the Judiciary Committee members are facing primary opponents. But get through that and, if Mueller is fired, he thinks so and thinks a majority of the House would vote to impeach President Trump.

“I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this. But honestly, I wish the motherf*cker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, sh*ts all over Twitter, sh*ts all over us, sh*ts all over his staff, then hits golf balls. F*ck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.”

The congressman’s base loves the President. And we’re done. He feels better having let it all out. It was a funny conversation with a few additional remarks about the President’s personal life I dare not print.

And yes, I agree, it is bad form to say all this in private while publicly praising the President. Welcome to Donald Trump’s Washington. Everybody does this sh*t here.

It’s not “bad form.” It’s a betrayal of their country and an abdication of the oath they take to the constitution.

I have long called GOP officials the “Eunuch caucus” because they will never, ever face down their own leadership. There are no profiles in courage in the Republican congress.

Click over to Wonkette to see who this most likely was. Samantha Bee came to the same conclusion.

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Paul Ryan’s cowardice

Published by digby on April 11, 2018

Paul Ryan’s cowardice

by digby

Ron Brownstein assesses Paul Ryan’s pathetic legacy:

No one in the GOP was better equipped, by position and disposition alike, to resist Trump’s racially infused, insular nationalism, or to define a more inclusive competing vision for the party. Instead, Ryan chose to tolerate both Trump’s personal excesses and his racially polarizing words and deeds as the price worth paying to advance Ryan’s own top priorities: cutting spending; regulations; and above all, taxes. The result was that Ryan, more than any other prominent Republican, personified the devil’s bargain the GOP has signed with Trump. And his departure crystallizes the difficult choices Republicans face as Trump redefines the party in his belligerent image.

From the exhaustive reporting of Politico’s Tim Alberta, who was first to telegraph that Ryan was likely to retire, we know that the speaker, expecting a Trump defeat, planned to deliver a speech on Election Night in 2016. He intended to denounce Trump’s racially polarizing agenda as a political dead end and a betrayal of conservatism’s ideals. Instead, when Trump won, Ryan folded the speech back into his jacket pocket—where it has receded deeper ever since.

Throughout his career, Ryan has presented himself as a disciple of Kemp, the ebullient former pro-football player and Reagan-era Republican congressman who sought to expand the party’s appeal to non-white communities. Ryan idolized Kemp and even worked for him: The future speaker was a young staffer at Kemp’s think tank, Empower America, in the early 1990s.

But after Trump took office, Ryan blinked at confronting the president’s appeals to white racial resentments. Pressed for reaction to comments like Trump’s reported description of African nations as “shithole” countries, Ryan managed to mumble the bare minimum of plausible criticism: “The first thing that came to my mind was very unfortunate, unhelpful.” For most people genuinely distressed by Trump’s remarks, “unfortunate” and “unhelpful” were probably not the first words that came to mind; “racist” and “xenophobic” were.

Even more consequential was Ryan’s refusal to challenge Trump on behalf of the young undocumented immigrants included in former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Though the speaker repeatedly promised the “Dreamers” that Congress would protect them, he has allowed the legislation that would have preserved their legal status to wither, after Trump and House Republican hardliners insisted on linking it to poison-pill provisions that would slash legal immigration.

“I worked with him back in his days of working for Jack Kemp at Empower America,” Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, told me Wednesday. “He was one of the most committed pro-immigrant, pro-immigration libertarians I’ve encountered in my three decades in D.C. Then, after ascending to one of the most powerful positions in the nation, he talked a good game and did nothing—except front for Trump’s nativism.”

On Trump’s excesses, Ryan followed a similar pattern of denial. Those who imagined he would defend the law-enforcement institutions that Trump has subjected to unprecedented attacks were invariably disappointed. At a critical moment in the standoff between the Justice Department and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes—over access to highly classified surveillance warrants—Ryan intervened to support Nunes. He was, by extension, supporting Trump, whom Nunes was hoping to assist by raising doubts about the initial justification for the investigation into Russian election interference. On Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation itself, Ryan has mouthed the right sentiments about allowing the inquiry to proceed without intervention. But he’s resolutely refused to consider legislation to ensure that it could.

Month after month, Ryan signaled that as long as Trump provided a vehicle for advancing the speaker’s own goals of retrenching government—especially by cutting taxes—he would be willing to defend (or at least minimize) almost any presidential outrage. Ryan was hardly alone in broadcasting that message—every other major Republican congressional leader did, too. But it was especially powerful coming from a speaker who had fashioned himself as both a champion of inclusion and a policy wonk motivated more by ideas than partisan maneuvering.

The result of all this inaction has been the transformation of the GOP majorities into the see-no-evil Congress, with rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders repeating the same mantra: Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.

Ryan may be one of the best illustrations of just how supine the GOP has become in the face of a demagogic white nationalist the voters they’ve primed to respond to racist appeals love.  Some of them, like Ryan, may have been a tad uncomfortable with it. But not enough to try to save the country.

And he got his tax cuts so it’s not a total loss, amirite?

There’s more at the link. Brownstein nails it.

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Ryan and Guccifer sittin’ in a tree

Published by digby on April 11, 2018
Ryan and Guccifer sittin’ in a tree

by digby
It seems like a good day to re-run this piece I wrote last year for Salon:

How much did Russian hacking affect congressional races? And how deeply was the GOP involved? Why is the speaker so blasé about Russian meddling? Maybe because he knows it helped the GOP win close races:


If there’s one thing you can say about the Donald Trump presidency so far, it isn’t boring. From horror stories at the border to Trump’s semi-triumphant teleprompter speech and Attorney General Jeff Sessions being personally connected to the growing Russia scandal, this week has been a doozy.

I was not surprised that Sessions finally recused himself from the campaign scandal. It was absurd that he was not required to do so before he was confirmed. What finally forced him to take the step was the report that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the summer and fall, after having told the Judiciary Committee that he had not had contact with any Russian officials during the campaign. Top Democrats are now calling for Sessions’ resignation, and the story of his contacts with the Russian ambassador is still unfolding with new details about whether he discussed the Trump campaign.

The upshot is that at the very least Sessions showed appalling judgment in agreeing to meet the Russian ambassador the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that the director of national intelligence had declared that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. It’s very hard to believe that this didn’t come up in the conversation. Even if the two men were unaware of that comment, they must have been aware of the discussion the previous night in a presidential town hall forum with Matt Lauer, in which Trump praised Vladimir Putin in such florid terms that The New York Times story that morning began this way:

Donald J. Trump’s campaign on Thursday reaffirmed its extraordinary embrace of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, signaling a preference for the leadership of an authoritarian adversary over that of America’s own president, despite a cascade of criticism from Democrats and expressions of discomfort among Republicans.

One of those discomfited was House Speaker Paul Ryan who was quoted in the article saying, “Vladimir Putin is an aggressor who does not share our interests,” and accusing the Russian leader of “conducting state-sponsored cyberattacks” on our political system.

This was just one of the many times Ryan zigged and zagged during the campaign, constantly calibrating how far he could go in criticizing Trump while keeping Trump’s passionate voters off his back. This particular issue was a tough one, since until quite recently the Republicans had been inveterate Russia hawks and the abrupt switch to dovish goodwill was undeniably disorienting.

Prior to Sessions’ recusal on Thursday morning, Ryan held a press conference in which he blamed the Democrats for “setting their hair on fire” to prompt the press to cover the story. That was ridiculous. The press needs no prodding to cover this scandal; it’s as juicy as they get. Ryan also pooh-poohed the idea that Sessions had any obligation to remove himself from the investigation unless he was personally implicated and robotically repeated the contention that nobody had seen any evidence that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

That may be true, and presumably we’ll find out sooner or later. But it’s important to remember that DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, were not the only targets of hacking. Russian agents also allegedly hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That story has been scandalously undercovered, something for which Paul Ryan is no doubt very grateful.

On Dec. 13 The New York Times published an article that laid out how the hacked material was used in various House races. At first the hackers just released a lot of personal information, which was used by hostile individuals to harass and threaten the candidates. Then the hacks and dumps by the person or group known as Guccifer 2.0 became more sophisticated and targeted certain close races, releasing politically valuable tactical information:


The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country. In [Annette] Taddeo’s district [in Florida], the House seat is held by a Republican, even though the district leans Democratic and Mrs. Clinton won it this year by a large majority.

To prepare for the race, the D.C.C.C. had done candid evaluations of the two candidates vying in the primary for the nomination. Those inside documents, bluntly describing each candidate’s weaknesses, are considered routine research inside political campaigns. But suddenly they were being aired in public.

Taddeo lost her primary race to another Democrat named Joe Garcia who used the hacked material against her. And then this happened:

After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms. Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.

In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents.

By September, the hacker had released documents in close House races in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina, working with Republican bloggers who disseminated the information for them. They also posted information on Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, even though he was effectively running unopposed.

Both Luján and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote letters to Ryan asking him not to use the material and received no response. His spokeswoman told the Times that Ryan had no control over how the stolen information was used. Nonetheless, there were some Republicans who refused to do so, saying it was inappropriate. They were rare.

I don’t think anyone believes it’s likely that Paul Ryan personally colluded with the Russians in this operation. The fact that many Republicans, some affiliated with the National Republican Congressional Committee and a group closely affiliated with Ryan, eagerly used it to win their campaigns is not surprising. But it is highly unlikely that Republican strategists or party officials with strong knowledge of the House campaigns didn’t collude with the hackers at some point, because it’s difficult to believe that Russians would have which House races to target without some help from people with expertise concerning the 2016 map.

Republican congressional leaders must be thanking their lucky stars daily that the Trump administration is such a scandal-ridden Dumpster fire. If things ever calm down in the White House, somebody might just turn his or her attention to the question of what Paul Ryan knew and when.


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Ding Dong

Published by digby on April 11, 2018

Ding Dong


by digby

The zombie-eyed granny-starver’s political career is dead.  At least for now. He has zombie eyes, after all, which means he may be an actual zombie.

He failed to achieve his most cherished dream of destroying the social safety net and putting millions of elderly and sick people into the streets to suffer and die. But he did manage to deliver the goods for the 1% so now that he’s leaving to spend more time with his donors, he should be able to cash out and make zillions.

It looks like it’s going to be a fight between Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy and Steve “David Duke’s mailing list” Scalise to replace Ryan for speaker. But who knows? They may end up with a nutcase like Mark Meadows of the Freedom Caucus. Trump would be happy with any of them but I’d guess he would prefer McCarthy, whom he calls “my Kevin.”

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Trump tweets to big rocket man

Published by digby on April 11, 2018

Trump tweets to big rocket man

by digby

It never fails:

The rest of this ridiculous rant is worth looking at too:

As you can see he’s blaming this confrontation with Russia in Syria on the DOJ, the special counsel, the press and the Democrats and says it’s worse than the Cold War because of it. Talk about blame America first …

But think for a moment about the puerile, sophomoric comments about how Russia “needs” us to help with their economy and how they could do something “easy” like the “arms race” which is just bizarre.

I think Bolton is going to get Trump wound up and it’s going to be very bad …

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Michael Cohen looking out for number one?

Published by digby on April 11, 2018

Michael Cohen looking out for number one?


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s latest for Salon this morning:

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia isn’t known to be a bomb thrower. In fact,  he’s more of a milquetoast kind of guy. So it was weird when he took to the floor of the Senate last December to deliver a strong admonition to the president of the United States, seemingly out of the blue. He said:

I believe it is up to every member of this institution, Republican or Democrat, to make a clear and unambiguous statement that any attempt by this president to remove special counsel Mueller from his position or to pardon key witnesses in an effort to shield them from accountability… would be a gross abuse of power. These are red lines, and we simply cannot allow them to be crossed.

It was just a few days before Christmas and everyone sort of shook their heads wondering what bee was under his saddle and then moved on. On Tuesday, we found out what it was all about:

That tweet is from Warner’s communications director, and she’s referring to an article in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Mark Schmidt. It reported that Trump went ballistic in December after reading that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed bank records from Deutsche Bank pertaining to Trump Organization business and that Trump wanted to fire Mueller. Evidently word got to Warner that Trump was talking about dismissing the special counsel, and Warner tried to head him off at the pass.

As it turned out, that report about Deutsche Bank records was erroneous, and Trump’s lawyers were able to talk him down — but of course that wasn’t the first time Trump had stomped around demanding that Mueller be fired. He had ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn do the deed back in June of last year and was only dissuaded when McGahn threatened to quit.

It’s also worth wondering just what it was about Deutsche Bank that got Trump so agitated. I would imagine that if the special counsel’s office hadn’t been interested in Trump-related accounts there already, word of the president’s tantrum must have piqued some interest.

In the wake of the raid on Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on Monday, the idea of Trump shutting down the Mueller investigation — by whatever means at his disposal — has become a live issue once again. Reports coming out of the White House have the president, in the words of one confidant, “sitting there bitching and moaning.” Others say he’s actively considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and paving the way for someone more malleable to rein in the Mueller probe. He is, by all accounts, very upset.

Trump has canceled his scheduled trip to South America, sending Vice President Mike Pence in his place, ostensibly because John Bolton, his new national security adviser, told him he needed to stay in Washington to handle the Syria matter. This, of course, implies that he’s going to be doing something “kinetic” in modern military parlance, commonly known as violence. It’s entirely possible he will have done so by the time you read this.


It’s also clear that Trump feels overwhelmed by this week’s actions by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The federal search warrants served on Trump’s personal lawyer, like that earlier report about the search of Deutsche Bank records, seems to have pushed him over the edge. Whenever investigators get too close to Trump’s business, he starts talking about firing the investigators.

The possible crimes listed in the search warrants that have been leaked to the press are those pertaining to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal and also Cohen’s lucrative and shady New York taxi business. It’s reasonable to assume all this has been leaked by Cohen’s lawyers, which means that it may be an incomplete list. It’s possible that there is evidence of Cohen’s involvement in other domestic crimes unrelated to Russia and that Mueller’s probe is focused on Cohen’s international activity on behalf of the Trump Organization. Certainly Trump is concerned about the former, but it’s the overseas affairs that present the greatest danger to his presidency.

Cohen has been quoted saying he would “take a bullet” for Trump, and it seems to be a matter of faith among the press corps that he means it. But that may be overstated, according to one of MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace’s sources, who claims that Cohen not only won’t take a bullet for the president, he’s unlikely to go to jail for him either. Cohen’s reaction to the raid lends some credibility to the idea that he won’t be as defiant as one might have expected. He told CNN’s Don Lemon:

I am unhappy to have my personal residence and office raided. But I will tell you that members of the FBI that conducted the search and seizure were all extremely professional, courteous and respectful. And I thanked them at the conclusion.

Lemon asked Cohen if he was worried about the search, and he said he’d “be lying” if he said he wasn’t. He added, “Do I need this in my life? No. Do I want to be involved in this? No.” He stood by his claim that the payment to Daniels was perfectly legal but said he would “rethink how he handled the payments” because of the impact on his family.

That does not sound like a man who is prepared to go down with the ship. Indeed, the president’s closest allies are already calling him a wimp:

The fact that Cohen went on the hated CNN to plead his case is telling. Legal pundits on TV have all said that Cohen could be pressured to testify against Trump in return for leniency on charges that are unrelated to his relationship to the president. That seems to be what’s happening in the Manafort and Gates cases, and that could well be how it goes with Cohen.

Cohen may not be as stalwart and loyal as everyone thinks. It’s possible that he’s just like the boss — a bully and a bigmouth, but when it comes down to it, he’ll always look out for No. 1.
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Expand Medicaid, expand the electorate by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 11, 2018

Expand Medicaid, expand the electorate
by Tom Sullivan


Status of State Action on the Medicaid Expansion Decision, via Kaiser Family Foundation.

Expanding Medicaid where it has been denied might be good motivation for voters going to the polls in the mid-term elections this fall.

Progressives hoping to win back state legislatures and the U.S. Congress will not get there by winning only in places they are accustomed to competing. Aversion to the sitting president mounts and energy seems to be on the side of Democrats, but they still need more than “not Trump” to win in the mid-term elections. Health care costs are on everyone’s mind and will be a central issue.

Some activists in rural America are working to put health care itself on the 2018 ballot. Luke Mayville and Garrett Strizich are driving around Idaho in a bright green camper with “Medicaid for Idaho” painted across the side (via Mic):

Like many red-state progressives, Mayville and Strizich have been emboldened in the Trump era to channel the recent wave of grassroots organizing into progressive electoral victories in conservative territories. They believe Medicaid may be the key to turning deeply conservative states like Idaho into hotbeds for progressive politics.

In July, Mayville, Strizich and his wife, Emily Strizich, co-founded a group called Reclaim Idaho, an organization devoted to pushing Idaho’s politics left. In the fall, they launched their Medicaid for Idaho ballot initiative, driving a bright green “Medicaid Mobile” van across Idaho to spread their message and gain support.

“We think that ultimately, the politics of Idaho will only change if a lot of new people come into the process — especially younger voters and working people of all different backgrounds who have tended to sit out of midterm elections, and only vote for big presidential elections,” Mayville said in an interview with Mic. “Medicaid expansion is exactly the kind of policy that will really draw them out. So much is at stake in whether or not they vote, and we intend to make that very clear.”

The effort has imitators in Utah and Nebraska and echoes a successful ballot initiative in Maine last November to expand Medicaid in a state where Gov. Paul LePage (R) led the opposition. Question 2 passed in Maine by 59 to 41 percent.


States with initiative or referendum, via Ballotpedia.

But only half the states allow ballot initiatives. Of the 18 states that have withheld Medicaid expansion, half have no process similar to Maine’s. Progressive activists hoping to expand Medicaid in states like Texas, North Carolina or Wisconsin will have to retake their state legislatures from Republican control and remove recalcitrant governors like LePage. (North Carolinians replaced theirs in 2016.)

What better reason to get out and vote this fall?

Mic reported in February that expanding Medicaid has widespread support even in most red states:

Polling and surveys consistently show strong support for Medicaid expansion across the country, even in some of the most conservative states. An analysis of survey data provided exclusively to Mic by the progressive data science group Data for Progress found that support for Medicaid expansion exceeds opposition in all but one state — Wyoming.

“Our model fits well with state-level surveys, which show strong support for Medicaid expansion, even in deep-red states such as Kansas, South Dakota and Georgia, where support for rejecting expansion is at 41%, 42% and 43% respectively,” Data for Progress co-founder Colin McAuliffe said in a statement. “For reference, Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) successfully ran a pro Medicaid expansion campaign in Virginia, where public opposition to expansion (42%) is comparable to these redder states,” he added.

Evidence suggests putting Medicaid expansion on the ballot has the potential to drive turnout and alter the electorate. For example, after Maine voters put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in 2017, officials across the state reported higher-than-expected turnout for an election that did not include any statewide or national races.

There will be much discussion of the president’s multitudinous foibles this summer, but what voters want are direct improvements to their lives. While the Affordable Care Act has worked well for many, Americans in states that have stonewalled fully adopting it remain vulnerable.

Organizers of the renewed Poor People’s Campaign have made Medicaid expansion central to their effort to address poverty and injustice in America. Rev. William Barber II told Huffington Post, “When you look at all the states that denied Medicaid expansion, the majority of those people who got hurt were white — mostly in the South and in the Rust Belt.”

Just don’t label them poor. It’s not how they wish to identify.

In Wheeling, West Virginia, Amy Jo Hutchinson feels vulnerable every day:

Hutchison, 46, is the single mother of two daughters, ages 14 and 11. She’s on Medicaid, and her daughters are enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides low-cost coverage. She has a full-time job and a bachelor’s degree. And she’s white.

“People perceive me as solidly middle class,” said Hutchinson, who lives in Wheeling and is one of the campaign’s leaders in West Virginia. But she describes herself as living on the “high end of poverty.”

“There’s never a month when two flat tires wouldn’t cripple me,” she said in a phone interview Monday.

Health Care costs are a significant contributor. Across a wide swath of America, people feel government doesn’t work for them any more. The source of that feeling is not just in D.C., but in state capitols. Mayville and Strizich are literally driving home that point in Idaho and giving voters there a reason to engage and vote in November. Perhaps progressive candidates elsewhere will give voters a better reason to turn out this fall than #NeverTrump.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.