Month: May 2018

The con is working. Bigly.

by digby

I find this profoundly depressing if it’s true.

I don’t know how these people come back to earth after this. They are willfully supporting the president of the United States who is credibly suspected of being a puppet of a foreign government and is clearly criminally corrupt. It’s totally obvious that he’s unfit for office. And yet:

Only 13 percent of Republicans say that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is a “legitimate investigation.” Fully three-quarters of Republicans agree with President Donald Trump that it’s a “witch hunt.”

Meanwhile, 76 percent of Democrats consider it a legitimate investigation. That’s according to a new Economist/YouGov survey of 1,500 adults between May 6 and 8 about the investigation.

What’s more, 61 percent of Republicans believe the FBI is framing Trump. Just 17 percent of Republicans say the nation’s federal law enforcement agency isn’t after the president, and about a fifth — 21 percent — weren’t sure.

Twenty-five percent of independents think Trump is being framed, with 39 percent saying he is not. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats say Trump isn’t being framed, 7 percent of Democrats think he is, and 15 percent aren’t sure.

The responses to questions about Trump in this Economist/YouGov survey are an example of the country’s political polarization and reflect recent trends of Republicans losing confidence in the FBI. It’s also another sign of the effectiveness of Trump’s messaging with the GOP that Republicans are now so deeply skeptical of federal law enforcement.

Just last week, for example, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani referred to FBI agents who raided attorney Michael Cohen’s home and office as “stormtroopers,” and Trump tweeted about a book that claims he is being framed, saying: “A sad chapter for law enforcement. A rigged system!”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Republican Party is shifting toward Trump’s worldview. When Trump blasted professional football players who kneeled during the national anthem, Republicans’ approval of the NFL also dropped.

But Republicans’ newfound suspicion of law enforcement is far more troubling. Mueller’s investigation has indicted 19 people so far, but it’s now headed toward confrontation as Mueller’s team presses for an interview with Trump. Trump has cleaned house on his legal team and brought in new lawyers, including Giuliani and Emmet T. Flood, a skilled attorney who worked on Bill Clinton’s team during his impeachment. It signals a more aggressive approach to Mueller’s investigation, one that might force the special counsel to subpoena the president. A protracted court battle could follow, and if this recent poll is any indication, the country will remain bitterly divided over that fight.

There is one reassuring — if somewhat contradictory — finding in the poll, however. When respondents are asked whether the president should fire Mueller, only 34 percent of Republicans said he should. The exact same amount (34 percent) say he should not fire the special counsel. Another third are unsure.

Democrats, at 66 percent, overwhelmingly favor Mueller keeping his job, and 36 of independents agree Mueller should stay put.

This guy isn’t just another politician. He’s uniquely destructive of the very concept of reality. Through constant repetition he has millions of believing that up is down and black is white.

And you have to give him credit. In one year he’s managed to turn the previously most protective of the federal institutions of intelligence and law enforcement against them solely to protect himself. It’s quite a feat.

If they really believe the FBI set Trump up we are way further down the rabbit hole than I thought.

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Oh Rudy, you crazy guy

by digby

He did it again. The following is from CNN media reporter Brian Stelter’s newsletter:

Rudy says “the president denied the merger”

AT&aT was on the defensive all week. But then HuffPost published this interview with Trump’s new lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Man, oh man.

Giuliani said “the president denied the merger,” which flies in the face of everything the W.H. and the DOJ have said for months. All along, the government has said Trump was NOT involved in blocking the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Lawyers and P.R. people have tried to shut down all of the speculation about improper political interference. DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim denied it in a sworn affidavit. Now, all of a sudden, Giuliani says Trump was behind it?!

What Rudy was trying to do 

He was trying to defend the president against any suggestion that Cohen improperly influenced the administration. “Whatever lobbying was done didn’t reach the president,” Giuliani said. But then he went further, telling HuffPost’s S.V. Date that “he did drain the swamp… The president denied the merger. They didn’t get the result they wanted.”

What’s next?

Caveats: It is possible that Giuliani misspoke, or that he simply does not know what he’s talking about. He was not working for Trump at the time the DOJ was reviewing the deal. Since he began representing Trump, he has had to change the story he has been telling in public about Stormy Daniels and what Trump knew or didn’t know and when about the payment Cohen made to her. And he may simply have meant “the president” as a stand-in for “the administration.”

So: Maybe he’ll try to walk this back. But if he does, the questions about political interference have already been reignited, and he’ll have further damaged his credibility in speaking for the president. Here’s my full story…

Has there ever been a worse lawyer?

Ok, you’re right. There’s Michael Cohen. The problem is the client.

Basically John Kelly thinks that undocumented immigrants are all primitives from shithole countries

by digby

And they bring nothing valuable to the United States:

The vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. … 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 integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. … The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.

He’s also said that many of the DREAM kids are “lazy” because they chose not to reveal themselves to a government that never keeps its promises.

Most of the immigrants to this country weren’t highly educated people with advanced skills. They were people looking for a better life and they built the modern democracy we have today. And, by the way, I live in a city full of undocumented immigrants and they are all completely assimilated into this multicultural megalopolis.

People have been migrating over the southern border since long before there was a border. Many of the streets, towns and states of the southwest US have Spanish names, including all the major cities of California. The idea that these are “suddenly” undesirable people is ridiculous.

Sadly, this bigotry has a long pedigree:

Kelly says undocumented immigrants “don’t integrate well” into US society. This was same reasoning used to ban Italian, Greek, Polish,Jewish, Middle Eastern & Asian immigrants from the US 100 years ago. It was wrong then & it’s wrong now. History matters.https://t.co/rLto42xhyY

— Robert Chao Romero (@ProfeChaoRomero) May 11, 2018

1924
“The character of immigration has changed and the newcomers are imbued with lawless, restless sentiments of anarchy and collectivism. They arrive to find their hopes too high, the land almost gone and themselves driven to drown into the cities and struggle for a living. Then anarchy becomes rife among them.”- Rep. Albert Johnson, one of the architects of the act that placed national origins quotas on immigration

“I would build a wall of steel, a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.”
– Georgia Gov. Clifford Walker at a Ku Klux Klan rally
1914

“Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit’s mouth or mill gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. You are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent, are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
– Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Old World in the New”

1896
“While the people who for 250 years have been migrating to America have continued to furnish large numbers of immigrants to the United States, other races of totally different race origin, with whom the English-speaking people have never hitherto been assimilated or brought in contact, have suddenly begun to immigrate to the United States in large numbers. Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Greeks, and even Asiatics, whose immigration to America was almost unknown twenty years ago, have during the last twenty years poured in in steadily increasing numbers, until now they nearly equal the immigration of those races kindred in blood or speech, or both, by whom the United States has hitherto been built up and the American people formed. This momentous fact is the one which confronts us today, and if continued, it carries with it future consequences far deeper than any other event of our times. It involves, in a word, nothing less than the possibility of a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race.”
– Henry Cabot Lodge speaking before Congress

This is what they mean when they say they’re making American Great Again.

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News of the weird

by digby

Via Vox:

This sure seems suspicious of something but who knows what it is?

All we do know is that Schneiderman is a monster and that Donald Trump knew about it years ago because his mobbed up “fixer” got the word.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

“Voting while black” is next
by Tom Sullivan

Edward C. Lawson. Photo by Edward C. Lawson, 2006.

Charlie Pierce begins one of his Friday posts thusly:

Jesus H. Christ on Wonder Bread, white people in this country done gone crazy. If we’re not siccing the police on our African-American fellow citizens for a) not waving, b) sleeping, or c) showing up to the Waffle House in formal dress, we’re letting people like Pat McCrory, the former governor of the newly insane state of North Carolina, and one of America’s most enthusiastic vote-suppressors, out in public without his minders again.

McCrory expressed concerns about “a small group of individuals” (i.e., the local Black Political Caucus) having outsized influence on who gets elected in Charlotte. (White billionaires with that kind of influence is just fine.) Read the rest at the link.

As Chris Rock has documented, “driving while black” is also highly suspect. What’s new about these encounters is video documentation. Police harassment of black people for being black is older than dirt … and cell phones.

For younger readers, walking while black has been terribly suspicious going back to, oh, 1975. This Supreme Court ruling is from 1983:

The Supreme Court ruled today that a state cannot give a police officer the discretion to arrest a person who fails to identify himself to the officer’s satisfaction.

Voting 7 to 2, the Court struck down a California vagrancy law that required a person to ”identify himself and to account for his presence” to a police officer. The California courts had interpreted the law to require the person to provide ”credible and reliable” identification that was detailed enough to permit the officer to check its authenticity.

The law was challenged by a man who was arrested 15 times and convicted once for refusing to identify himself. The man, Edward Lawson, liked to walk, and was often stopped late at night in residential areas. He has no criminal record and has only been arrested under the identification law.

Lawson kept being stopped while minding his own business on public sidewalks. He finally took police to court for not minding theirs. The NYU Law Review provides a tad more detail on Edward Lawson:

San Diego police repeatedly stopped Edward Lawson, an African American disc jockey and concert promoter who lived in the city and who would periodically take walks in predominately white neighborhoods. Consistent with their training, the San Diego police would stop him and ask him to produce identification. The police arrested Lawson fifteen times between March of 1975 and January of 1977, prompting him to bring suit against the department. The police testified that they stopped him because he was in a neighborhood close to a high-crime area. Other officers explained that his presence in an isolated area aroused suspicion. Yet according to the record, Lawson never engaged in any criminal activity. It appears that he simply was attempting to enjoy an evening walk. But because the locale of his strolls was a predominately white neighborhood, his race alone caused police to regard him as “out of place” and therefore inherently suspicious.

Ten. Years. And a favorable Supreme Court ruling later, Lawson was arrested again (1993):

BEVERLY HILLS — For Edward Lawson, it was the same old story.

On Monday, as Los Angeles counted down toward the Oscars, Lawson went to visit a business associate in Beverly Hills. A few hours later, the tall African-American was in police custody, charged with a trio of misdemeanors, including failure to produce a driver’s license on command.

Ironically, it was just a decade ago that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person, even one like Lawson who wears his hair in dreadlocks, has the right to walk peacefully through any neighborhood he or she chooses, without having to produce identification or explain his or her presence to police. That landmark case bears the name of Edward Lawson, the same man who was arrested last week on a similar charge.

Lawson, 46, who lives in Venice and still has dreadlocks, believes he was arrested by Beverly Hills police simply because he is black. “There are always doubts in an intelligent mind,” he says, “but it’s not like this hasn’t happened to me before.”

Is “voting while black” next, Jeff Sessions?

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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.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Via Washington Post:

Watch the video of the wobbly legged, cinnamon-tufted, brand-new-to-the-world bison calf and then just try to remember what was stressing you out. The grass-nibbling newborn, awkwardly standing in the mountain-rimmed plains, is visual diazepam, not to mention the firstborn of the season at Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. More than 400 other baby bison are expected to follow by mid-May, bringing the park’s bison population to about 1,300.

Since the March 22 birth was announced, Mark Hendrix, Custer’s resource program manager, says he’s seen an increase in visitors seeking a dose of baby animal cuteness. Animal viewing is the No. 1 reason that visitors go to the park, and odds are good they’ll catch a glimpse of the bison herd when driving Wildlife Loop Road, an 18-mile paved path that circles through wide-open prairie and rolling hills. There, spotting bison isn’t generally a matter of luck, Hendrix says. Rather, “It’s more your unlucky day if you don’t see one,” he says.

That’s not the only animal population that will be growing this spring at the park. In addition, Hendrix says that into summer, visitors will be able to spot be newly minted white-tailed deer and mule deer, baby pronghorn antelope, elk calves and bighorn lambs. “As far as the little ones go, it should be a great year,” Hendrix says. “We’ve been really wet this spring, a lot of moisture, so we should have a lot of green grass for all the wildlife that’ll be born in the park this year.”

Springtime means the baby animal “awws” are on overload. Here are just a few of the parks, zoos and farms where you might be able to get a glimpse of all the adorability. (From a significant distance, that is; you should never approach wildlife in the wild, no matter what age).

Yellowstone National Park

The lodges begin opening the last weekend of April, and tourists slowly stream into the park, which is located in Wyoming as well as Montana and Idaho, and is home to the most free-roaming wildlife of any of the Lower 48 states. This year, visitors can be on the lookout for bison calves (born April to May), elk calves (born May to June) and bighorn lambs (born in May); and black bears and grizzly bears born in the winter will finally peek out of the den with their mothers around April or May. To up your odds of spotting some babies, head to the Northern Range of Yellowstone, including Lamar Valley, which has one of the largest concentrations of wildlife in the park. A number of park tours are available, including the Wake Up to Wildlife tour, starting in late May, which features a guide driving visitors by bus to the animal action.

The Everglades

“Super colonies” of wading birds are forming in Everglades National Park for the first time since the 1940s. A super colony refers to tens of thousands of nesting birds, and at this wetlands preserve in Florida, those include egrets, herons, Roseate spoonbills, wood storks and more. Officials expect the birds will have many mouths to feed this spring. Visitors can view the birds with binoculars from the Shark Valley Tower and at the Anhinga Trail. While in the park, keep your eye out for baby river otters. Sightings have been reported, but the animals tend to be pretty reclusive. Also, be on the lookout for young alligators plodding around. Visitors, including babies, are cautioned to remain a safe distance of at least 15 feet from any wildlife in the park.

Denali National Park

In the Alaskan wilderness, winter tends to take its time, and so baby animals frequently arrive later at Denali National Park than in the Lower 48. Many young animals experience their first breath as the busy summer season begins picking up. Bus tours (from $90 for adults and from $40 for children), which begin May 9, are the best way to safely spot wildlife in the summer, because private vehicles are prohibited in much of the park. If you go, look for moose and caribou calves, Dall lambs and gray wolf pups, all of which are born in May or June; and grizzly and black-bears cubs, which are born in January or February.

Zoos around the country

It’s babies everywhere at the nation’s zoos. In late March, the Denver Zoo welcomed a bright-eyed Sumatran orangutan, which is a critically endangered species. Her name is Cerah, which means “bright” in Indonesian. Also new to Denver Zoo: four bouncing, bounding African wild dogs. The endangered pups were born in November, and only recently entered their habitat for viewing. And a Linne’s two-toed sloth, born in late January (named Baby Ruth), has been a huge hit with visitors. The Indianapolis Zoo is home to three new critically endangered babies: two are ring-tailed lemurs, born March 14. And then there’s Carina, a sweet-looking addra gazelle calf that zookeepers have bottle-fed and cared for because her mom didn’t show any of interest. At the Chicago Zoological Society’s Brookfield Zoo, visitors can peep at a tiny chocolate-colored reindeer. The fawn was just 12 pounds when she was born April 2, and is growing quickly. A downy African penguin chick hatched in February at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. It’s the first of the endangered species to hatch and be reared at the zoo. After 13 weeks in the den at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, twin sloth bear cubs — which, true to their name, look like a bear crossed with a sloth — moved out on exhibit, so now the public can peek in on their antics.

To keep tabs on what animals are born where, visit ZooBorns.com, which shares baby animal news from zoos and aquariums across the world.

“Nobel, Nobel, Nobel!!!!”

by digby

President Trump used an Indiana rally Thursday to soothe conservative fears that he’s going to make too many concessions to the North Koreans.

“I think it’s going to be a very big success,” Trump said of the June 12summit in Singapore with Kim Jong Un. “But my attitude is: If it isn’t, it isn’t. Okay? If it isn’t, it isn’t. … You have to (say) that, because you don’t know.”

Everyone is excited about the homecoming of the three American prisoners, but there’s growing anxiety in the national security firmament that the president might be too hungry for a big win. Trump has appeared intoxicated at times by the possibility he could win the Nobel Peace Prize and relishes the chants of “Nobel” that have become standard fare at his rallies. He’s also been ratcheting up expectations that history will be made at his summit. Announcing the time and place of his meeting with Kim, the president tweeted: “We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!”

At the gymnasium in Elkhart, Ind., he returned to this theme, which was prominent in “The Art of the Deal.” “We’re not going to be walked into an Iran deal where the negotiator, John Kerry, refused to leave the table,” the president said, referring to the secretary of state who negotiated the multilateral Iran nuclear deal that he pulled the U.S. out of earlier this week.

— Some hawkish thought leaders on the right have begun to say publicly over the past week what many more are saying privately during Washington cocktail parties: that the neophyte commander in chief could get suckered into taking a bad deal because he so badly wants to claim a diplomatic triumph.

You don’t have to be “hawkish” to worry that Trump is going to screw the pooch. This isn’t some negotiation over a licensing deal to manufacture cheap ugly ties in China. It isn’t even a deal to put your name on some hideous sky-scraper in Azerbaijan. This is about nuclear war.

The problem is not that he’s going to “walk” if it doesn’t go well or if he succumbs to flattery and pretends that some worthless “agreement” has brought world peace. The problem is that the man has no idea what he’s talking about and has absolutely no business personally involving himself in something this delicate and dangerous. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he is incapable of learning because he won’t listen. The stakes are too high to put an imbecile in charge of nuclear negotiations.

The South Koreans are in a better position to do this and it’s possible they will be able to broker some kind of agreement and let the Big Baby take credit. That’s probably the best we can hope for.

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From the columns I wish I’d written file

by digby

This one from Michael Tomasky tops the list. Discussing the latest right wing handwringing over Russiagate going on way too long he draws the logical comparison between Mueller’s probe and Ken Starr’s:

For starters, Mueller, unlike Starr, is a member of the president’s own party. If judges had tried to appoint a Democratic independent counsel to investigate Bill Clinton, can you imagine the conservative howling? It would never even have happened. The right would have demanded that person’s immediate resignation. And The New York Times and The Washington Postwould have said, well, hmmm, they have a point.

Which brings us to another key difference, the manner in which both men were appointed. Mueller was appointed by a member of the president’s own party, Rod Rosenstein. Starr was appointed by a three-judge panel of the circuit court for the District of Columbia, two of whose members were well-known activist conservatives. One of them had called liberals “leftist heretics” (Heretics! From what?!) in a journal article.

And yet, he was permitted to take part in firing the previous special counsel, a reasonable man—but let the record note, yet another Republican—and replace him with Starr. Again, reverse it, and imagine that in 1994 that three-judge panel had been dominated by two liberals, one of whom had called conservatives “reactionary heretics,” and they appointed a Democrat.

Or imagine that Barack Obama had needed to be investigated by a special counsel, and a Democratic deputy to Eric Holder appointed a Democrat. Again, the right-wing outrage machine would never have allowed it to happen. Democrats would never have dared to even try something like this anyway. Yet Mueller’s appointment was greeted with universal approval from elected Democrats.
[…]
Mueller was appointed just under a year ago (next week brings the one-year mark, which will bring another round of cable-news segments asking whether this has gone on too long). Starr was appointed in August 1994. Do you remember when he dropped his famous report on Congress’ doorstep? September—of 1998. Four years later.

When Starr was at the same point Mueller is now, a year in, I sure don’t remember any conservatives agreeing that he had gone on too long. Indeed, all they did for the next three years was egg him on. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page was cooking up crackpot conspiracy theories by the week about the circumstances of Vince Foster’s “murder.” William Safire was doing the same with his little acre on the Times op-ed page, predicting Hillary Clinton’s imminent indictment.

And Starr pushed forward, provoked by these propagandists. In fact, it was two years in, in August 1996, that Starr lost a big case in Arkansas against two state bankers and Clinton supporters he was hoping to convict and flip. The next month, having failed catastrophically on this case, Starr sent Susan McDougal to jail, trying to force her to spill the beans on Clinton, which a) she refused to do and b) she had no beans to spill anyway since Clinton did nothing wrong.

Then, in February 1997, Starr basically admitted he had nothing and announced he was quitting and going to be dean of Pepperdine Law. And did conservatives accept this outcome? Never! Safire, the Journal, and others browbeat him into reneging on the announcement and staying in the job. He still kept turning up nothing until 11 months later, when Kellyanne Conway’s future husband told Starr’s investigators about this woman named Monica.

In other words, Starr ran a four-year campaign—and yes, that one was indeed a witch hunt—during which no one found any credible evidence that Bill Clinton did any of the many nefarious things the right wing accused him of. Yes, he lied under oath. But he did not suborn perjury. They just made that up.

Now, with Donald Trump, we have a man whom we have every reason to believe has spent the last 40 years running a business that’s been one or two steps short of a criminal enterprise. Who may very well be compromised and susceptible to blackmail by a foreign power. And we’re not supposed to investigate that?

Finally, these attacks on the probe’s integrity. No investigation run by human beings is perfect, and Mueller has surely made some mistakes. But some of these criticisms are horribly dishonest. I was surprised to see Mark Penn, Bill Clinton’s pollster, join this parade last week with a column listing some questions for Mueller. I don’t have space for all of them, but here’s one: “When you picked your team, what was going through your mind when you picked zero donors to the Trump campaign and hired many Democratic donors, supporters of the defiant actions of Sally Yates, who at the time was deputy attorney general, and prosecutors who had been overturned for misconduct?” We hear this question all the time.

I can’t speak for Mueller, but I bet I know precisely what was going through his mind: It’s unethical and illegal to in the Justice Department ask lawyers questions about their political leanings. I would guess that most of Mueller’s lawyers are in fact Democrats, because guess what? Most lawyers are Democrats! And I’d reckon that most of his investigators are Republicans, because guess what? Right. Now you’re catching on. And I note by the bye that Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, whose name you don’t know because he never says anything but “no comment,” used to work in a Senate office. Kamala Harris’? Bernie Sanders’? Nope. Orrin Hatch’s. This, somehow, is almost never mentioned in the press.

The Mueller team consists of members of both parties who are trained to be above politics and who strive to maintain that. This is of course unimaginable to people for whom everything is about political power—they can’t believe everyone doesn’t operate from the same base motives they do.

But some people actually do. And they’re doing an important job. We have credible reason to suspect that the president of the United States and/or his people and immediate family members colluded with Russia during the election campaign; laundered money to hide the president’s liaison with an adult-film star and possibly other women (and God bless Stormy Daniels; it’s so fitting, isn’t it, that the Patrick Henry of the Trump era would turn out to be a porn star); owes millions or billions of dollars to Russian oligarchs, who thus to some degree own him (as may the Kremlin itself); and has lied and obstructed justice to hide all these things from the American people.

There is ample evidence to suggest that all these matters warrant a thorough look. They’re a lot more important than lying about sex. If you want to believe this is a witch hunt, well, I’m here to tell you that sometimes, there are witches.

More at the link.

I would also point out that Ken Starr was brought in after the original probe led by another Republican Robert Fisk failed to nail the president and he then started all over again. And talk about extending the mandate! They were investigating Vince Foster’s suicide (twice!), Whitwater, cattle future trades from the 70s, sexual affairs, you name it. This wasn’t even really commented on at the time because there used to be an understanding that if prosecutors came across evidence of a crime they would logically pursue it and the assumption was that they had some probable cause for doing it.

Starr went to the DOJ and got permission for these expansions which were pretty much routinely granted by the Democratic Attorney General Janet Reno. And, by the way, the congress was simultaneously holding public hearing after public hearing the whole time!

Sometimes there are witches and sometimes there are manipulative witch hunters too. Indeed, it seems clear that they are often witches themselves.  In fact, they are running around in congress right now self-righteously pointing their gnarled, bony fingers at Mueller and the Department of Justice.

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Trumpism around the world

by digby

“Christian Democracy” is on the march? Maybe they should resurrect the Knights Templar:

In his victorious campaign to secure a third consecutive term as prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban had a clear, urgent message: The nation was at risk from an international cabal looking to undermine its sovereignty, and it would be overrun with migrants if he was not elected.

With his party firmly in control of this Central European country, Mr. Orban says it is time to take that campaign continental. On Thursday, in his first address to Parliament in his new term, he styled himself as the leader of a movement to reform the European Union and as defender of the sovereign rights of its member nations.

“Now we will be hunting for big game,” said Mr. Orban. He presented a vision for Europe that stood in stark contrast to the one embraced by Western leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, with their acceptance of political and ethnic pluralism, dissent and fairly high levels of migration from Asia and Africa and the Middle East.

“We need to say it out loud because you can’t reform a nation in secrecy: The era of liberal democracy is over,” Mr. Orban said. “Rather than try to fix a liberal democracy that has run aground, we will build a 21st-century Christian democracy.”

He made no mention of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros, whom he demonized nearly daily during the campaign, or of legislation aimed squarely at institutions connected to Mr. Soros. The laws are still likely to be enacted in some form, according to analysts, but there is no rush, as Mr. Orban made clear in his remarks.

In power since 2010, he confidently suggested that he planned to lead the country until at least 2030.

As lawmakers filed into the majestic Parliament building beside the Danube for their first gathering since last month’s election, passing the Holy Crown of Hungary, worn by monarchs for more than eight centuries, as a string quartet played, the event felt more like a coronation than an inauguration.

While populist leaders in other nations look to Mr. Orban’s political success as inspiration — success that critics say was built on undermining the traditional checks and balances essential to a healthy democracy — worried European Union leaders in Brussels have moved closer to tying the distribution of bloc funds to issues surrounding the basic rule of law.

Mr. Orban contended in a local radio interview that Hungary has a “moral duty” to refuse to take in refugees or asylum seekers as part of any European quota system — setting the stage for yet another bruising battle with Brussels.

“In Brussels now, thousands of paid activists, bureaucrats and politicians work in the direction that migration should be considered a human right,” Mr. Orban said. “That’s why they want to take away from us the right to decide with whom we want to live. It’s my personal conviction that migration leads in the end to the destruction of nations and states.”

Trump doesn’t have the power to implement all these ideas unilaterally. But in his heart, he agrees with everything Orban is saying. He’s said “without borders you don’t have a country” over and over again. He jokes about “extending” his presidency. He ran on mass deportations and is in the process of implementing it by singing orders to force hundreds of thousands of central Americans and Haitians to leave the country.

This is a global phenomenon. Maybe it will flame out. But it’s important to stay alert. This isn’t just about us.

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Just how many Nazis in Trump’s orbit are there?

by digby

Trump’s youth and Hispanic outreach is just awesome:

Last December, in a Florida hotel room just three miles from President Donald Trump’s “Winter White House,” a policy advisor for the Trump-tied nonprofit America First Policies praised Nazis and expressed disappointment that they didn’t “keep fucking going.”

Juan Pablo Andrade voiced his love for the Third Reich — in a video obtained by Mediaite— while attending a Turning Point USA conference, which is a youth conservative organization, endorsed by everyone from Trump to Senator Marco Rubio, known as much for racism as it is for diaper-wearing.

The organization — founded by Charlie Kirkand in the news recently because one of its members received Twitter shoutouts from Kanye West and Trump – held its 2017 annual activism summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, a stone’s throw from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. It was attended by more than a thousand young conservatives, and featured speeches from first-son Donald Trump Jr., Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Fox News personality Tomi Lahren, right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, ex-White House official Seb Gorka, and a slew of other personalities inhabiting the MAGA-sphere.

Andrade, aside from his work for the pro-Trump America First group, has quite the resume. Per his LinkedIn account, he worked on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council, Trump’s National Diversity Coalition and the Trump campaign as a surrogate. He writes for The Hill as an opinion contributor and has shared his political opinions on NewsmaxTV, CNN Latino, and Univision. Additionally, he worked for TPUSA as the group’s Florida field director in 2015 and led the group’s informal Latino caucus in 2016, according to sources with direct knowledge of his involvement in the nonprofit.

He was even featured on the 2017 30 under 30s of Newsmax and Red Alert Politics, which are power lists compiling prominent young conservatives in America. Andrade made RAP‘s list in November 2017 — one month before he was recorded praising Nazis.

While it may seem odd that a political figure tied so closely to the Trump administration felt the freedom to endorse Nazi genocide on-camera, Andrade did so in distinctive company. Also in the hotel room was a close friend of Andrade’s, Cesar Subervi, an alt-right activist who participated in the Charlottesville white supremacist march and has been filmedwith Richard Spencer.

Cæsar Subervi and America First advisor Juan Pablo Andrade in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep fucking going!” Andrade exclaimed to Subervi and several other fellow conference attendees in a hotel room that Mediaite learned was paid for by TPUSA.

This clip was uploaded to Subervi’s Snapchat “Story,” which is a feature of the app that allows users to post content for all their followers to see for 24 hours.

Another disturbing video posted to his Snapchat during TPUSA’s summit shows Subervi, who was also a student activist at Coastal Carolina University, saying it was “awesome” that someone who he thought was protesting the conference got run over by a car.

“This is the car that hit the fucking protester,” Subervi said while filming a vehicle with a destroyed hood. “She smashed that bitch, that is awesome!”

You can watch the video here.