Month: May 2018

Trump’s spoils system is rotten to the core

by digby

My Salon column today:

I will Make Our Government Honest Again — believe me. But first, I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp in DC. https://t.co/m1lMAQPnIb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2016

His “ethics reform” plan was:

First: I am going to re-institute a 5-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for 5 years after they leave government service. I am going to ask Congress to pass this ban into law so that it cannot be lifted by executive order.

Second: I am going to ask Congress to institute its own 5-year ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and their staffs.

Third: I am going to expand the definition of lobbyist so we close all the loopholes that former government officials use by labeling themselves consultants and advisors when we all know they are lobbyists.

Fourth: I am going to issue a lifetime ban against senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

Fifth: I am going to ask Congress to pass a campaign finance reform that prevents registered foreign lobbyists from raising money in American elections.

His personal lawyer Michael Cohen obviously didn’t read the third item on that memo. And it’s interesting that someone in Trump’s campaign thought it was important to pretend they cred about foreigners raising money in elections.

That tweet came on the heels of the first time Trump used the phrase “drain the swamp” in the 2016 campaign which was very late in the game, just three weeks from election day. Although he had said earlier that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it” he didn’t really run explicitly as a political reformer.

But as Newsweek reported, in October his message changed:

Trump promised to “drain the swamp” at a rally that day [October 17, 2016] in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the first time he did so during the campaign. He did it the next day, October 18, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In Fletcher, North Carolina, he called Clinton “the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the Presidency.”

One week later, former FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI had found emails from Clinton on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop and Trump ran with it:

Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” he said in New Hampshire. Later, in Maine, he said Clinton’s use of a private email server—which Comey had already decreed did not merit criminal charges—was the “biggest scandal since Watergate.”

The reason to bring this up isn’t to point out Trump’s hypocrisy which is shooting fish in a barrel. The fact is that despite his tiresome repetition of the slogan “drain the swamp” since the election it wasn’t one of Trump’s signature chants like “lock her up” or “build that wall.” It was something of an afterthought, a sort of extension of his claims that the system was “rigged” against him to steal the election. As the various investigations into his nefarious doings unfold it is obvious that it was another projection of his own foibles on to his opponents.

Nonetheless, it is an article off faith among many of the chattering classes that he ran as a reformer of the system who promised to clean up Washington. But the Trump administration’s approach to dealing with the institutions of government is much more old fashioned. They are simply governing by way of personal loyalty and fealty to the president rather than expertise, experience or seniority. It’s a spoils system, and it’s not a very efficient one.

This article by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker about the way the razing of the federal workforce at all levels is an eye opener:

Across the government, more than half of the six hundred and fifty-six most critical positions are still unfilled. “We’ve never seen vacancies at this scale,” Max Stier, the president and C.E.O. of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that works to make the government more effective, said. “Not anything close.”

Some of the vacancies are deliberate. As a candidate, Trump promised to “cut so much your head will spin.” Amid a strong economy, large numbers of employees are opting to leave the government rather than serve it. In Trump’s first nine months, more than seventy-nine thousand full-time workers quit or retired—a forty-two-per-cent increase over that period in Obama’s Presidency. To Trump and his allies, the departures have been liberating, a purge of obstructionists. “The President now has people around him who aren’t trying to subvert him,” Michael Caputo, a senior campaign adviser, told me. “The more real Trump supporters who pop up in the White House phone book, the better off our nation will be.”

If they cannot find a Trump loyalist to fill a position they simply leave it empty.

Trump’s definition of “populism” is unique. Osnos writes:

In the 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré presents the “deep state” as a moneyed, cultured élite—the “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry, and commerce” whose access to information allows them to rule in secret. Trump’s conception is quite different. A real-estate baron, with the wealthiest Cabinet in U.S. history, Trump is at peace with the plutocracy but at war with the clerks—the apparatchiks who, he claims, are seeking to nullify the election by denying the prerogatives of his Administration.

And by “bureaucracy” he means law enforcement, the state department, intelligence community and common bureaucrats who enforce regulations and monitor compliance with the law along with anyone else Trump and his henchmen see as enemies of the state. Even the usual suspects at the conservative think tanks who usually have the inside track on jobs in a new Republican administration (or, as with Iraq, a new occupied country) have been mainly shut out because so many candidates were on record being critical of Trump, which meant hiring them was out of the question.

Many people claim that underneath the bluster, Donald Trump is just another Republican who happens to have a big mouth and likes to use twitter. But while he was made possible by the modern conservative movement and a political system that enabled such a man to become president, he is, nonetheless, sui generis. This razing of federal government institutions nothing we’ve ever seen before.

The story Osnos tells about the elimination of experts and the deliberate erasure of institutional memory in department after department is chilling. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to replace these people even after Trump is gone. His lasting legacy may be the destruction of the federal government as we know it.

I got a name, and I got a number, I got a line on you
by Tom Sullivan

If you are not already concerned by the spread of electronic surveillance technology, you should be. The only saving grace of the Trump administration is that it is so incompetent, the likelihood of it availing itself of the gadgetry to suppress its enemies is marginal at the moment. Plus, the technology itself has not matured.

Big Brother Watch issues a report today on London’s use of facial recognition technology. The Guardian reports that so far, it’s a failure:

It says the technology, whereby computer databases of faces are linked to CCTV and other cameras, was used by the Metropolitan police to spot people on a mental health watch list at the 2017 Remembrance Sunday event in London. It was also used by South Wales police at protests against an arms fair. Police plan to use it at music festivals and other events.

Some in policing see facial recognition as the next big leap in law enforcement, akin to the revolution brought about by advances in DNA analysis. Privacy campaigners see it as the next big battleground for civil liberties, as the state effectively asks for a degree of privacy to be surrendered in return for a promise of greater security.

The goal is to turn your face into a walking ID card in real time. For now, tests of the technology show it delivering false positives in over 90 percent of cases.

Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said: “Real-time facial recognition is a dangerously authoritarian surveillance tool that could fundamentally change policing in the UK. Members of the public could be tracked, located and identified – or misidentified – everywhere they go.

“We’re seeing ordinary people being asked to produce ID to prove their innocence as police are wrongly identifying thousands of innocent citizens as criminals.

“It is deeply disturbing and undemocratic that police are using a technology that is almost entirely inaccurate, that they have no legal power for and that poses a major risk to our freedoms.

National Public Radio reports that the technology promises to allow its masters to track residents of an entire city — or country. Police departments have been early adopters of the still crude technology, largely without oversight. But vendors are pushing hard, and the incremental advances mean the capabilities may be widespread before the public is really aware of it:

Jonathan Turley, a civil libertarian and law professor at George Washington University, worries that this kind of incrementalism will eventually lead to a “fishbowl society,” in which it will be impossible to walk down the street without being identified.

“Unfortunately, it could happen in the United States. There’s not a lot standing between instantaneous facial recognition technology and its ubiquitous use by police departments or cities,” Turley says.

He says people shouldn’t assume the courts will limit police use of facial recognition, especially if the real-time ID systems are first “normalized” in private settings. (NEC says it has already sold real-time facial recognition to private customers in the U.S., though it won’t name them.)

“Policymaking by procurement”

As with surplus military hardware being disbursed to police departments post-September 11, there will be a strong impulse to use up all the cop equipment they have hanging around the police officer station. Cities such as Oakland finally are taking first steps to rein in technological advancement run amuck, Slate reports:

After Sept. 11, thanks in part to massive federal grants with few strings attached, local law enforcement agencies all over the United States began steadily acquiring and deploying powerful new policing tech. These surveillance technologies, often acquired and deployed unbeknownst to residents or city councils and usually without court approval or oversight, include cell-site simulators for tracking cellphone–call details (often referred to as stingrays), automatic license plate readers for tracking cars, drones for conducting aerial surveillance, gunshot-location technology that relies on citywide networks of high-powered microphones, and predictive policing algorithms that tend to push police to focus even more on already overpoliced communities. This trend of unrestrained acquisition and use of surveillance tools has been dubbed by some critics as “policymaking by procurement,” with important decisions being made about police power based simply on the fact that the feds were willing to cut a check for the tech, rather than being based on careful consideration by local elected officials.

As communities catch up with what is happening, cities and civil rights groups are supporting local ordinances requiring transparency and accountability. For all the good they will do to slow the spread of the tech.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking to develop higher-tech tools for distinguishing in an urban setting between innocent civilians and hostiles deserving to have a Predator shove a HARM missile up their asses. Thus, the Urban Reconnaissance and Security with Supervised Autonomy (URSA) program which it describes like this:

The URSA program will explore situations and behaviors that will enable identification and discrimination between innocent civilians and individuals with hostile intent. Although the development of these probing behaviors will be an output of the program, a simple example of an URSA engagement may help clarify the program’s intended end-state and related technical challenges. For example: a static sensor located near an overseas military installation detects an individual moving across an urban intersection and towards the installation outside of normal
pedestrian pathways. An unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with a loudspeaker delivers a warning message. The person is then observed running into a neighboring building. Later, URSA detects an individual emerging from a different door at the opposite end of the building, but confirms it is the same person and sends a different UAS to investigate. This second UAS determines that the individual has resumed movement toward a restricted area. It releases a nonlethal flash-bang device at a safe distance to ensure the individual attends to the second message
and delivers a sterner warning. This second UAS takes video of the subject and determines that the person’s gait and direction are unchanged even when a third UAS flies directly in front of the person and illuminates him with an eye-safe laser dot. URSA then alerts the human supervisor and provides a summary of these observations, warning actions, and the person’s responses and current location.

Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a cameo in there somewhere.

Will URSA be wrong at distinguishing between a cell phone and a handgun 98% of the time? Will it crash into fire trucks at high speed? And how long before your local constabulary is deploying the civilian version overhead beside the Certifiable Predator B?

[h/t Barry Summers]

* * * * * * * *

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

About assimilation

by digby

General Kelly made an ignorant remark about undocumented immigrants from Latin America being uneducated and unable to assimilate the other day. I know this isn’t true because I live in a place where Latinos — citizens, tourists, undocumented workers etc — are just another part of the cultural landscape.

If there’s a problem for undocumented workers assimilating it’s just because they are …. undocumented. Via NPR:

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do we know about the way in which Latinos assimilate?

JIMENEZ: So immigrant assimilation is a bit of a misnomer. Assimilation is actually something that happens over the course of generations. And our history certainly bears that out. The immigrants who came overwhelmingly from Europe to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century didn’t assimilate themselves. But their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren ultimately wrote the story of the nation of immigrants. And they did that through getting more education than their parents, getting more income, learning to speak English and ultimately intermarrying in large numbers. And by all accounts, that pattern is repeating itself among today’s immigrants. Their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren are assimilating just as fast, if not faster, than past waves of immigrants.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are they any more rural than any other group that comes to this country?

JIMENEZ: It’s a real mix. There are populations that are very rural. There are populations that are coming more from the urban areas. Much the same can be said of the immigrants who are now coming mostly from Central America. But the fact is also that immigrants who came from Ireland, like General Kelly’s ancestors, immigrants who came from Italy, like some of my ancestors – they came from rural areas, too. And they ended up, many of them, in large, urban centers.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is the biggest impediment, in your view, to immigrants becoming successful in this country?

JIMENEZ: The fact that we have so many people in the United States who are undocumented is a huge impediment to the assimilation of those individuals but also to subsequent generations. The closest thing that we’ve had in recent years to a mass legalization program is DACA. For those who got DACA, their education went up. On average, they got more income. They became more likely to buy homes. If the White House is really concerned about assimilation, they should not only leave DACA alone but push for a greater legalization program for the DREAMers and even for other immigrants. That’s the one thing that would speed up assimilation more than anything that we could do on the policy front.

A man who has secrets

by digby

… is freaking out:

The president vents to associates about the FBI raids on his personal attorney Michael Cohen — as often as “20 times a day,” in the estimation of one confidant — and they frequently listen in silence, knowing little they say will soothe him. Trump gripes that he needs better “TV lawyers” to defend him on cable news and is impatient to halt the “witch hunt” that he says undermines his legitimacy as president.

Trump’s paranoia about his “legitimacy” is a red herring. Electoral college victories are not unprecedented and Americans accept the result, however reluctantly. The issue with the Russia investigation isn’t so much that there is a suspicion that Trump is illegitimate because of the interference but that he’s compromised, potentially being blackmailed, by a foreign government. The fact that he’s also obviously corrupt in virtually every way plays into that suspicion.

This “legitimacy” question is something he cooked up to excuse his obstruction of the investigation and way too many reporters parrot the excuse as if it’s a fact. He’s just defending his presidency. God bless America. But he doesn’t really care about that. He’s freaked out because he’s afraid of what the investigation is going to turn up about him, whether Russian kompromat, money laundering, corruption, cheating on his taxes, whatever. He has secrets. Big secrets. Only a man with an ego the size of Jupiter would have ever thought of running for president with that much baggage.

.

Corrupt to the core

by digby

Hey, remember when Trump said that his company would do no foreign deals while he was president?

I know this will shock you, but he lied:

Asked about Chinese government’s involvement in a Trump Organization project in Indonesia and if that violates the emoluments clause, Raj Shah says, “I’ll have to refer you to the Trump Organization… you’re asking about a private organization’s dealings.” pic.twitter.com/3R2vjEHe32

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2018

Meanwhile, for some weird reason Trump is doing stuff like this:

President Trump is on the brink of a costly trade war with China in large part because he says China has stolen American jobs by cheating on trade rules.

But on Sunday, Trump announced his newest trade initiative: saving Chinese jobs.

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost,” Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon.

Trump’s tweet wasn’t just a case of strange optics for a man who painted China as the US economy’s most menacing threat on the campaign trail. It was also a head-spinning policy reversal: Just last month, his Commerce Department banned US companies from selling parts or providing services to ZTE, a telecoms giant, because it shipped equipment to Iran and North Korea in defiance of US sanctions.

ZTE, which makes inexpensive smartphones, relies so much on components shipped from the US that the company immediately looked like it might go out of business.

Now it appears Trump is trying to save it from that fate.

Experts say Trump is changing his administration’s position on ZTE as part of his bid to come to a sweeping trade agreement with China designed to balance the trade deficit between the two countries.

Earlier in May, several of Trump’s top economic officials met with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing for two days to try to come to a deal, but they agreed on little except to keep talking. Chinese officials are headed to Washington this week for the next round of talks, and the stakes are high.

If the US and China can’t come to an agreement soon, Trump has threatened to put tariffs on up to $150 billion worth of Chinese goods, and China has threatened to respond with sweeping tariffs of its own. A full-blown trade war between the two countries could cause the price of goods and unemployment to surge in both countries.

There’s nothing unusual about making a concession to another country to come to a deal. But experts say that Trump’s offer to save ZTE is worrying both as a total policy reversal and because it absolves ZTE for actions that undermined US national security interests.

“It’s a troubling precedent, because whatever you think about the [Commerce Department’s ban] against ZTE, it was done in response to clear and repeated violations of US law by the company,” Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “It means that essentially that every US action is now up for negotiation in some way or other in the future.”
[…]
But Trump has created expectations among the Chinese. The Global Times, a hawkish Communist Party-backed Chinese publication, tweeted on Sunday that “the situation with ZTE is about credibility and nothing more.”

If Trump does in fact end up saving ZTE, Beijing will definitely see it as a win. It will also open up Trump to a once-inconceivable point of criticism: being weak on China.

Whatever. He does what he wants for any reason at all.

Maybe it will all work out by accident.

.

Delivering to the deserving (white) poor

by digby

We are experiencing yet an other spate of tiresome hand-wringing over the sad, desperate state of the white working class Trump voters who are angry that liberals aren’t giving them the deference, respect, courtesy and honor to which they are entitled. They are so upset that people disagree with them — and dislike them as much as they dislike the liberal snowflakes — that they felt the need to vote for an unfit, racist criminal to lead the country and prove that they really aren’t the racist hypocrites they are accused of being. Or something.

Anyway, that criminal and his party are working overtime to make sure these poor forgotten people who have front page stories every other day in all the major newspapers are getting the attention they deserve while making sure that the undeserving are punished for their unwillingness to bow down to them:

As the Trump administration moves aggressively to allow more states to impose mandatory work requirements on their Medicaid programs, several states have come under fire for crafting policies that would in practice shield many rural, white residents from the impact of the new rules.

In the GOP-controlled states of Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, waiver proposals would subject hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees to work requirements, threatening to cut off their health insurance if they can’t meet an hours-per-week threshold.

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold.

“This is sort of a version of racial redlining where they’re identifying communities where the work requirements will be in full effect and others where they will be left out,” George Washington University health law professor Sara Rosenbaum told TPM. “When that starts to result in racially identifiable areas, that’s where the concern increases.”

Rosenbaum and other health law experts say the waivers — already approved for Kentucky, pending for Ohio, and advancing in Michigan’s legislature — may run afoul of Title 6 of Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race-based discrimination in federal assistance programs. Under that statute, even policies that are racially neutral on their face but have a disparate impact on a particular group could be illegal.

The waiver in Kentucky, the first state to win federal approval for a Medicaid work requirement, will have the effect of exempting eight southeastern counties where the percentage of white residents is over 90 percent. The work requirements will be imposed first in Northern Kentucky, which includes Jefferson, the county with the highest concentration of black residents in the state. The rules are set be enforced first in that area this July, but a federal court challenge in June could decide the fate of the program.

It’s a trend!

Michigan Republicans’ plan to require some recipients of government health insurance to work would disproportionately affect black people, a Washington Post analysis of new data from state health officials reveals.

State Republicans are moving a proposal through the legislature that would impose work requirements on some Medicaid recipients, arguing new rules are necessary to push people into jobs and off taxpayer-subsidized health plans.

The proposal would exempt people living in counties where the unemployment rate tops 8.5 percent, a provision GOP lawmakers say is aimed at protecting those living in areas where job opportunities are scarce.

Medicaid enrollment data provided to The Washington Post by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services shows that this exemption would overwhelmingly benefit white people while leaving the work requirements in place for all but a sliver of the affected African American population.

Without the exemption, the work requirements are projected to apply primarily to approximately 700,000 Michigan residents enrolled in Medicaid under broader eligibility rules passed under Gov. Rick Snyder (R).

African Americans make up about 23 percent of that population, but they would make up only 1.2 percent of the people eligible for the unemployment exemption. White people make up 57 percent of the total potential affected population, but they make up 85 percent of the group eligible for the unemployment exemption, according to an analysis of the state’s data.

Michigan’s health department provided The Post with Medicaid enrollment data by racial and ethnic group for every county in the state. This analysis was based on the population enrolled via the state’s Medicaid expansion, which health experts say is the group expected to be subject to the work requirements, because enrollees on “traditional” Medicaid are likely to be exempted. While it’s possible, some experts say, that a small portion of the traditional Medicaid population would be affected by the work requirements, including that population in the analysis would not change the racial composition of the exempt group by more than about one percentage point.

Ohio too:

Ohio’s Medicaid work requirement proposal — recently submitted for federal approval — is of a similar design, and would have the same disparities between urban residents of color in Cleveland and Columbus and rural white residents in the rest of the state.

John Corlett, Ohio’s former Medicaid director and the president of Cleveland’s Center for Community Solutions, studied the 26 counties that qualify for an exemption from the proposed Medicaid work requirements and found they are, on average, 94 percent white. Meanwhile, his research found, “most of these non-exempted Ohio communities have either majority or significant African-American populations.”

“The communities most at risk under this scenario are African American, and those communities already have significantly higher rates of infant mortality, lower life expectancy, and a number of other serious health disparities,” he told TPM.

That will surely make the Trump voters happy. 

.

Horror in Gaza

by digby

More than 50 people have been killed. So far.

• At least 1,700 Palestinian demonstrators were also wounded on Monday along the border fence with Gaza, the Health Ministry reported, as the mass protests that began on March 30 and that had already left dozens dead erupted anew.

• The protests took place as the United States Embassy was formally relocated to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, on the 70th anniversary of the formation of Israel, amid formality and celebration that created an almost surreal contrast to the violence raging barely 40 miles away.

Protesters along Israel’s border with Gaza, left. Also on Monday, President Trump’s daughter Ivanka, pictured with the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, attended the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem. Mahmud Hams, Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A mass attempt by Palestinians to cross the border fence separating Israel from Gaza quickly turned violent, as Israeli soldiers responded with rifle fire. Monday became the bloodiest single day since the campaign of demonstrations began seven weeks ago, to protest Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians took part in the Gaza protests, which spread on Monday to the West Bank, where the focus was on opposition to the embassy move.

By 7 p.m., 52 Palestinians, including several teenagers, were dead and at least 1,700 were injured in Gaza, the Health Ministry said. Israeli soldiers and snipers used barrages of tear gas as well as live gunfire to keep protesters from entering Israeli territory.

The Israeli military said that some in the crowds were planting or hurling explosives, and that many were flying flaming kites into Israel; at least one kite outside the Nahal Oz kibbutz, near Gaza City, ignited a wildfire.

By midafternoon, the protest nearest to Gaza City had turned into a pitched battle — a chaotic panorama of smoke, sirens and tear gas that stretched along the fence. Emergency workers with stretchers carried off a stream of injured protesters, many with leg wounds but some having been shot in the abdomen. A number were teenagers.

Hamas called people back from the fence at 6 p.m., signaling that the protests might be over for the day.

Demonstrations coincide with U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, spoke during the ceremony to open the embassy. Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Even as Palestinians’ anger erupted, American and Israeli officials celebrated President Trump’s move of the embassy to Jerusalem. Previous administrations in Washington, like the governments of most American allies, had been unwilling to make the transfer, insisting that the status of Jerusalem needed to be resolved in a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

In a recorded video message played to some 800 people gathered at the new embassy, Mr. Trump said the United States “remains fully committed to facilitating a lasting peace agreement.”

In a speech at the ceremony, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, also spoke of a resolution to generations of conflict. “When there is peace in this region, we will look back upon this day and will remember that the journey to peace started with a strong America recognizing the truth,” he said.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel sounded more triumphant and defiant than conciliatory.

“What a glorious day,” Mr. Netanyahu exulted. “Remember this moment! This is history! President Trump, by recognizing history, you have made history.”

“We are in Jerusalem and we are here to stay,” he said. “We are here in Jerusalem protected by the great soldiers of the army of Israel and our brave soldiers are protecting the border of Israel as we speak today.”

The image of Kusher and Ivanka with people being shot and killed at the protests is sickening. The Red Cross says that the hospitals are overflowing. I’m sure Trump is enjoying the festivities.

Protests against America’s move are spreading to other countries by the way.

.

Rudy and Don go on offense


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Rudy did it again. Last Friday, Giuliani gave an interview to the Huffington Post, and the subject of Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s recently revealed arrangement with AT&T about the pending merger with Time Warner came up. In his usual thoughtless, arrogant fashion Giuliani explained that AT&T didn’t get anything for their money because “the president denied the merger.”

The president is not supposed to interfere in such decisions, and the White House has repeatedly denied that he did. But ever since the Department of Justice unexpectedly moved to block the merger, unless (among other things) the company agreed to spin off CNN, Donald Trump’s nemesis, it had seemed likely Trump was behind the move. He had said on the campaign trail that he was opposed to the merger, but blocking it was considered an unusual decision by a Republican DOJ, and the stated rationale seemed thin. Considering Trump’s repeated threats to take the Justice Department in hand and muzzle the press, it’s not surprising people would wonder about all this.

The resulting lawsuit has been in court for some time, and the judge has not allowed AT&T’s attorneys to pursue this line of inquiry, so the suspicions quieted down until Giuliani stuck his foot in it again. He later walked it back, of course, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that the president had nothing to do with the decision after all. But it was yet another example of Giuliani creating more problems than he solves.

Not that he’s shutting up, mind you. In fact, he telegraphed the Trump team’s plans to “make a little fuss” this coming week over the length of the Mueller investigation as it approaches the one-year mark. They had already trotted out the talking point last week when Vice President Mike Pence sat down for an interview with Andrea Mitchell and put on his patented pained expression and sanctimoniously declared it was time to wrap it up, reminding everyone of another sanctimonious phony who served as veep and later president:

Morning Joe put together clip of Pence using Nixon’s old talking points to call for end of Mueller investigation 👀 pic.twitter.com/u343CweV4e

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 10, 2018

Nixon resigned seven months later.

Shameless as they are, or perhaps just historically illiterate, even after that embarrassing allusion, Trump and his henchmen are apparently going with this new P.R. push to try to force Mueller to close up shop. After all, he’s only indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 19 people. If the man can’t finish an investigation that runs from New York to Moscow into a possible criminal conspiracy to upend American democracy in a year, there’s obviously nothing there.

According to The Washington Post, the administration is going on a “war footing” or, as Giuliani put it, “We’ve gone from defense to offense.” What that evidently means is a new push in the campaign of character assassination against Mueller himself. Trump’s angry denunciations of the FBI, the DOJ and the special counsel have already had an effect.

According to a new Economist/YouGov poll, 75 percent of Republicans now agree that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt.” Only 13 percent of the GOP believe it’s legitimate. An alarming 61 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents believe the FBI is framing Donald Trump. Only 17 percent of GOP voters disagree with that. This is a testament to the efficacy of Trump’s constant repetition on Twitter and television of mantras like “Witch hunt!” and “No collusion.” Those have had their effect, particularly as they are echoed by Fox News and talk radio:

NEW BOOK – A MUST READ! “The Russia Hoax – The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump” by the brilliant Fox News Legal Analyst Gregg Jarrett. A sad chapter for law enforcement. A rigged system!

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

The president of the United States has managed to convince tens of millions of Republicans that he’s being set up by his own Justice Department. That would seem to run counter to everything they have previously believed — until you realize that his victimization at the hands of Big Government fits neatly into the well-worn grooves of the conservative movement’s narrative about itself. Nobody knows the troubles they’ve seen.

Only 34 percent of Republicans believe that Trump should fire Mueller, while another 34 percent say he shouldn’t, with the rest unsure. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it suggests that Trump still has some work to do if he’s planning to take steps to end the investigation.

It has become an article of faith among the political class that the country doesn’t care about any of this and that Trump and his problems are just a fetish inside the Beltway and among the political media. Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to a group in Wisconsin over the weekend and insisted that nobody cares about the Trump scandals:

Whether I’m running around southern Wisconsin or America, nobody is talking about Stormy Daniels. Nobody is talking about Russia. They’re talking about their lives and their problems. They’re talking about their communities, they’re talking about jobs, they’re talking about the economy, they’re talking about national security.

This refrain is picking up speed on both sides of the aisle as the midterms approach. You would think that would motivate the White House and people around President Trump to try to calm the waters and tout their alleged accomplishments, rather than going on a war footing over the Russia investigation. After all they seem to have convinced their base that the whole thing is a hoax. But The Washington Post quoted former Trump legal adviser Mark Corallo saying, “I don’t see any downside at this point for the president and his team to make a full-throated public defense of their situation. There are very few outside the Beltway who are in the we-need-to-prosecute-and-impeach-this-guy camp.”

That sounds like wishful thinking. If the turnout in special elections over the past few months is any indication, Trump “fighting back” does have a galvanizing effect — on the Democrats. In this polarized political world, for every member of the base he thrills with his tweeted war cries, there’s a member of the Democratic base having exactly the opposite reaction. Trump’s new “war footing” will likely raise their already high enthusiasm for winning back the Congress.

Donald Trump has an instinct for what his voters want to hear from him, and he knows how to deliver it the way they want it. His weakness is that he thinks everyone else agrees with him and it’s just that the system is rigged and the media is dishonest. He believes the whole country, not just his base, deep down loves him. That’s a very big blind spot.
.

Keep out. This means you.
by Tom Sullivan

Tevye the milkman? Golde? Go back to Russia. Tomi doesn’t want you here.

If it’s not prion disease eating away at them, the reactionary right must have lidocaine drips directly into their brain cases. The numbness towards immigrants on display in the land of “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses …” is so bereft of self-awareness it is difficult to explain away as anything less.

.@TomiLahren: "You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on." @WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/Dux0cABHar— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 13, 2018

When, see, that’s exactly what this country is based on. Lahren was piling on in solidarity with comments White House chief of staff John Kelly made to NPR last week:

Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. Some of them are not. But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from – fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills.

Journalist and “passionate genealogist” Jennifer Mendelsohn has, as a public service, established Resistance Genealogy to provide thumbnail background checks of the families of Kelly and others on the right’s immigrant-bashing squad. As for Kelly, Mendelsohn found:

Kelly’s paternal great-grandparents were both of Irish extraction. One paternal great-grandfather was a blacksmith, the other a railroad worker. His maternal great-grandparents were of Italian extraction. One maternal great-grandfather, John DeMarco, is listed in 1900 U.S. Census records as a day laborer who still did not speak English 18 years after coming to America. He did speak English by the time of the 1930 census, which recorded him as working as a fruit peddler in his late seventies, but not yet a citizen. His wife, Crescenza DeMarco, still had a “No” in the “Speaks English” category 37 years after her arrival.

Mendelsohn told CNN in January:

“I think the first person I worked on was Steve King,” Mendelsohn says of the Iowa congressman who in March 2017 said “you cannot rebuild civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

“I kept thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,” she told CNN. “How do these people think they have a leg to stand on, looking down on immigrants when so many American people have an immigration story in their history?”

Sure enough, her research pointed her toward King’s own immigrant history: His 4-year-old grandmother and her two young siblings arrived at Ellis Island in 1894.

Thanks to digitized census and newspaper records, a little time and some detective skills mean we all ought to think twice before lobbing stones, Tomi Lahren. Mendelsohn showed how it’s done in having a peek into South Dakotan Lahren’s glass house last September:

Tomi Lahren’s great-great-grandfather was indicted on two separate counts, for “willfully, unlawfully and knowingly” making a false affidavit in connection with a naturalization proceeding, and for forging a naturalization document, in violation of the Naturalization Act of June 29, 1906. The grand jurors accused him of swearing falsely to the date of his declaration, and of altering the original papers (“with a knife or steel eraser or other instrument unknown to the Grand Jurors”) to make it look like his declaration of intention to become a citizen had been executed in 1911 rather than 1909, apparently because he’d let too much time elapse before completing the naturalization process.

But – lucky for Tomi – despite the evidence, the trial jury apparently had sympathy for Mr. Dietrich and acquitted him of the charges. He went on to successfully become a citizen in 1926, ensuring that 90-odd years later, his great-great-grandaughter would be here to compare the Black Lives Matter movement to the KKK and to inadvertently admit that the right keeps hammering on Hillary’s emails to distract from the Russia investigation.

CNN asked Lahren for comment on that bit of family history but received none after running the story in January. In May, her views have not softened. Mendelsohn had more after Lahren’s comments to Fox’s Jesse Watters:

Except the 1930 census says Tomi's 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German.

Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English.

Her great-grandfather's 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian.#resistancegenealogy #receipts pic.twitter.com/rIySFu6fvL— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 13, 2018

Correction: Henry Lahren was born and baptized in 1884.— Jennifer Mendelsohn (@CleverTitleTK) May 13, 2018

And Mike Pence and Stephen Miller.

“So, obviously, we all have stories like this in our families,” says Mendelsohn, “It’s quite common for immigrants to come and not be able speak English. But all of us speak English as their descendants, and that’s the point.” One slow learners and pot stirrers never seem to learn.

Philosopher (talk about an unmarketable skill) George Santayana emigrated here from Madrid in 1872 and is most famous for the saying rendered colloquially as “Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Tomi? Meet Jorge.

Family lore says one of my ancestors stowed away aboard a lake freighter in Canada and got off in Milwaukee. He and his sons later captained ore boats on the Great Lakes and owned a steamship company in Chicago, filthy, no-good Irishmen.

* * * * * * * *

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

Yep, We’re Definitely Doing Something Right 

by tristero

Following up on a previous post in which one couldn’t fail to notice that nearly every article that mentioned Democrats in yesterday’s op-ed section of the New York Times urged them to move to the center, I noticed this headline at the bottom of Page One of today’s print version of the Times:

Yessirree, liberals and progressives got ’em worried. Let’s keep it up.