Month: May 2018

Trump n’ Rudy’s new legal strategy

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

As one might expect in the new Trump era, instead of a long Memorial week-end of somber presidential ceremonies honoring the nation’s fallen, we got a short wreath laying ceremony and days of either self-aggrandizing or angry Trump tweeting and incoherent Rudy Giuliani blathering. Obviously the president was watching too much TV again and his lawyer was currying favor by appearing on it and trying to tell him what he wanted to hear. But in the midst of all that craziness, we actually got a glimpse of the Trump legal strategy for dealing with the Russia investigation.

The biggest brouhaha on social media occurred around the following tweet which was quickly disproved by reporters who got the comment from a White House official in a background briefing and then quickly devolved into an argument among journalists and others over what the meaning of the word “lie” is.

The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official,” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

Apparently, some reporters think it isn’t a lie if the pathologically dishonest president has actually persuaded himself that it’s the truth. I’ll let others sort that out.

Trump also tweeted one of the more egregious “I know you are but what am I” comments in his tenure with a cynical attempt to deflect criticism for his unhumane border policy of separating kids from their parents at the border. He wrote:

Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. Catch and Release, Lottery and Chain must also go with it and we MUST continue building the WALL! DEMOCRATS ARE PROTECTING MS-13 THUGS.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

The horrible policy he speaks of is his own. Evidently, he thinks he can persuade Democrats to build his god-forsaken wall in exchange for allowing two month old babies to stay with their mothers rather than be forced into government detention. Essentially, he is holding infants and tiny children hostage to get what he wants and blaming the Democrats for refusing to give in to his demands. This is the logic of a thug, which is pretty much in keeping with how he operates in general.

Trump also pretending that he hadn’t sent that embarrassing 7th grade break-up note to Kim Jong Unlast week and tweeted in passing that the summit might be back on, writing, “Our United States team has arrived in North Korea to make arrangements for the Summit between Kim Jong Un and myself. I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!” As Trump would say, “we shall see.”

And he gave a moving tribute to the forgotten men and women of the Trump administration who gave their all for their country and now the nation turned its back on them:

Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt? They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation…They went back home in tatters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2018

It’s unknown exactly who he’s speaking about there. Perhaps that fresh-faced Republican Rob Porter, his former secretary who was forced out when it was revealed that he was a violent domestic abuser. Or maybe it was the youthful Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street fund manager who came to DC to serve his wealthy friend and mentor and flew too close to the sun. Poor ideolistic Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus just wanted to serve a GOP president no matter how unqualified and unfit he was and they ended up having to go back on the GOP Wingnut Welfare dole, their reputations fully intact. It truly is a tragedy.

But aside from that, Trump devoted most of his tweeting energy to slagging what he calls the “witch hunt” and “spygate” mostly turning his attention to Mueller’s team and blaming President Obama for failing to warn him about the Russian interference while at the same time insisting the whole story is a hoax. Here is a little amuse bouche, just to get the flavor of it :

With Spies, or “Informants” as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or “Justice” contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

They did, of course. He got national security briefings from the moment he secured the nomination. They also briefed other Republican leaders such as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the latter of whom famously refused to allow the government to go public about Russian interference and threatened to say it was all partisan if anyone tried. Obama also personally warned Trump about Michael Flynn and his response was to immediately hire him to be his National Security Adviser.

This whole Russia Probe is Rigged. Just an excuse as to why the Dems and Crooked Hillary lost the Election and States that haven’t been lost in decades. 13 Angry Democrats, and all Dems if you include the people who worked for Obama for 8 years. #SPYGATE & CONFLICTS OF INTEREST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

When will the 13 Angry Democrats (& those who worked for President O), reveal their disqualifying Conflicts of Interest? It’s been a long time now! Will they be indelibly written into the Report along with the fact that the only Collusion is with the Dems, Justice, FBI & Russia?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2018

You might be wondering what this new “13 Angry Democrats” meme he’s coined is all about. He’s speaking of the Mueller prosecutors, of course, and as absurd as it might sound, he seems to be referring to the movie “12 Angry Men”, in which a single man was able to turn around a racist jury determined to find a defendant guilty despite little evidence of the crime. But in Trump’s telling he, the man who demanded the execution of the innocent Central Park Five, is the persecuted minority kid and Mueller’s prosecutors are the “angry” racists determined to find him guilty. Indeed, in Trump’s inverse reality, the racist juror number 10 in the movie who declares “I’m sick and tired of facts!” must be Robert Mueller himself. This is too bonkers to be planned. It must be Trump hearing the echo of the title and vaguely recalling it being about a trial and unknowingly making the most ridiculously inapt allusion in history.No one could be that obtuse, not even Trump.

This fusillade of emotional tweets about the Russia investigation over the last week was helpfully explained by Rudy Giuliani who did a tour of the Sunday shows and laid out the strategy for all the world to see.  Salon’s Taylor Link wrote up the bizarre interview with Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union in which Bash said that Trump’s team seemed to be waging a campaign to undermine the Mueller investigation. Giuliani replied:

“Of course we have to do it to defend the president. It is for public opinion. Because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach. Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. And so our jury – and it should be – is the American people. 

“So Republicans largely, many independents, even some Democrats now question the legitimacy of [the Mueller investigation.] Democrats I would suggest for their own self-interest, this is not a good issue to go into the midterms.”

Basically, he’s saying they expect this to end up with a serious impeachment debate and since they cannot defend their client on the facts and the evidence they will taint the jury pool. So, now we know.

For all of Trump’s lies, the one thing you can count on is that Rudy will go on TV and spill the beans.

Update:

This is from today with a new twist. The “rigged” election theme re-emerges:

Something to vote for and against
by Tom Sullivan

The Propaganda President just apologized on Twitter. Really. (If it was the president. Apologies are for the weak.)

Sorry, he said, rather than spending the rest of his day propagandizing you, he was going to have to focus on the job of being president. Enterprising netizens could start a pool on how long that will last, but Donald Trump’s propaganda fast would be over before they could organize it.

Democrats themselves need to do better at focusing on two things as they head into the 2018 mid-term elections. They need to walk and chew gum at the same time. They need to keep up the heat on the Trump administration’s corruption and win public attention for their kitchen table agenda.

Paul Waldman addresses the problem for The Week:

There’s one more reason to focus on the kitchen table: It seems to have been working really well since Trump got elected. In off-year and special elections Democrats have been performing spectacularly well, and if you look at those races, you’ll see candidate after candidate talking about local issues and things like health care. They’ve benefited greatly from anti-Trump feelings driving Democratic voters to the polls, but their campaigns haven’t been about Trump.

The propagandist-in-chief commands attention in the center ring. Democrats have to put on a compelling show outside the Beltway that spotlights voters’ concerns. If they cannot draw attention to their proposals, they might as well not exit.

Bloomberg highlights the travails of an Ohio community hit by a power plant closing. Residents face leaving their communities for uncertain futures elsewhere or staying as their fortunes and middle-class lives slip away:

Lee Anderson, director of governmental affairs at the national Utility Workers Union, has spent years trying to get elected officials around the country to grapple with what’s happening in places such as Adams County. But there’s just no political will, he says. There’s support on the left for public investment in struggling areas, but less so, he says, when it comes to communities that are increasingly voting Republican—Adams County among them—and whose decline is linked to fossil fuels. On the right, he says, there’s no appetite for public investment, period. Not to mention that the scale of the challenge is so huge and the potential solutions so expensive.

Democrats should ask voters where people fit in this changing economy. Like a certain president, the economy serves itself. The rest of us are just fodder, and we feel it. People need to hear what Democrats plan to do about that, or else all voters will hear his who comfortable Republicans blame for it. That is, when GOP candidates are not insisting economic misfortunes result from voters’ moral failings.

Still, avoiding the corruption to avoid appearing all anti-Trump, all the time is to leave the country defenseless from Trumpish predations. Even as the country risks becoming numb to Trump fatigue, Democrats must defend our public institutions. Republican janissaries drank blood from the skull years ago and show no flickering inclination to.

As Waldman said, voters need “something to vote against and something to vote for.

Update: The Propaganda President focused on his job for 123 minutes (unless he spent it watching Fox News).

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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.

 Watch The Americanization of Emily, an anti-war movie written by Paddy Chayefsky


by Spocko
Do you want to watch an anti-war movie following Memorial Day? I recommend watching The Americanization of Emily. The screenplay is by Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote Network. As you know, I’m a huge fan of Network. It changed the way I looked at the news businesses. This movie stars Julie Andrews and James Garner.  It goes places you really don’t expect, and makes a case against war in a very different way. It was anti-war about WWII, the “good war” which people have an easier time justifying.

Here’s the set up:
In wartime London just before D-Day, Lieut. Comdr. Charlie Madison (James Garner), an aide to eccentric Rear Admiral Jessup (Melvyn Douglas), specializes in supplying the top Navy officers with luxuries such as party girls. Madison is a proponent of cowardice as a virtue because he believes reverence of heroism promotes war. He falls in love with Emily Barham (Julie Andrews), his British motor pool driver, a young woman who has lost her husband, brother and father in the war.

I’d love to share all the long quotes from the film to show just how interesting the views are and how brilliant the screenplay is. Here are three clips from the scene with James Garner’s character talking to Mrs. Barham, the mother of Julie Andrews’ character, Emily.
First he talks about how war gives a man a chance to do something redeeming. Next he talks about how he believes in cowardness.

In the final clip he talks about how we perpetuate war. The following quote is from this clip.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the general with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. It’s always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

Emily Barham: That was unkind, Charlie, and very rude.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow’s weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.

Trivia:  James Garner said it was his favorite movie. Julie Andrews made this film between Mary Poppins and Sound of Music. The movie is available to stream on Filmstruck.com. It’s a great quality transfer of the B&W print. They have lots of great movies and a free trial for new subscribers. I’m watching a bunch of musicals next.

Another interesting connection that I don’t think anyone has made is that James Garner’s character and his eventual involvement in the war is very much like Tom Cruise’s character in Edge of Tomorrow.

As many of us said after Charlottesville, fine people don’t walk with Nazis.

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The Dems are not in disarray? Say it ain’t so!

by digby

A nice hopeful piece by the NY Times David Leonhardt about the Democratic electoral strategy is just what the doctor ordered:

Stacey Abrams and Conor Lamb are supposed to represent opposite poles of the Trump-era Democratic Party. She is the new progressive heroine — the first black woman to win a major-party nomination for governor, who will need a surge of liberal turnout to win Georgia. He is the new centrist hero — the white former Marine who flipped a Western Pennsylvania congressional district with support from gun-loving, abortion-opposing Trump voters.

But when you spend a little time listening to both Abrams and Lamb, you notice something that doesn’t fit the storyline: They sound a lot alike.

They emphasize the same issues, and talk about them in similar ways. They don’t come across as avatars of some Bernie-vs.-Hillary battle for the party’s soul. They come across as ideological soul mates, both upbeat populists who focus on health care, education, upward mobility and the dignity of work.

During her victory speech in a hotel ballroom last week, Abrams recognized the hotel’s workers. In a television ad, Lamb said it always bothered him that teachers and construction workers didn’t get the public respect that he did as a Marine. When asked what one thing she would like to change about Georgia, Abrams named its failure to expand Medicaid. In his campaign, Lamb took on Paul Ryan for referring to Medicare and Social Security as an entitlement — “as if,” Lamb said, “it’s undeserved.”

I could keep going with these comparisons, and you’d have trouble keeping straight who said what. Which of the two did The Nation, that bible of leftism, praise for supporting labor unions more aggressively than most Democrats? Lamb, the purported centrist.

The lesson here isn’t just about these two candidates. Dozens of other Democratic candidates also sound like Abrams and Lamb. The lesson is that Democrats are more united than many people realize — and are running a pretty smart midterm campaign.

Yes, there are some tensions on the political left. But these tensions — over Obama-style incrementalism vs. Bernie-style purism, over the wisdom of talking about impeachment, over whether to woo or write off the white working class — are most intense among people who write and tweet about politics. Among Democrats running for office, the tensions are somewhere between mild and nonexistent.

Democratic candidates aren’t obsessed with President Trump, and they aren’t giving up on the white working class as irredeemably racist. They are running pocketbook campaigns that blast Republicans for trying to take health insurance from the middle class while bestowing tax cuts on the rich (charges that have the benefit of being true).

In West Virginia, Richard Ojeda, a former paratrooper running for the House, talks about taxing natural-gas companies to raise teacher pay. In Ohio, another candidate, Aftab Pureval, has challenged his Republican opponent to stop avoiding town halls and debate the tax law. In Kentucky, Amy McGrath became a sensation with a rousing introductory video about how she had overcome sexism to fly military jets. But why was McGrath running for Congress? Because, she explained in the video, Andy Barr, the incumbent, “said he would vote enthusiastically to take health care away from over a quarter-million Kentuckians.”

There’s more at the link. It would seem that the rumors of Democratic meltdown are overstated. As usual.

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Flake vs a Real Anti-Trumper

by tristero

Jeff Flake just loves to portray himself over and over and over again as a man courageously holding the dreadful Trump to account.

The truth is that Flake votes the dreadful Trump agenda 84.1% of the time, and not over trivial procedural matters. Flake voted for a torture apologist to head the CIA. He voted for Pompeo. He opposed reinstating net neutrality. He voted to roll back some of the Dodd-Frank regulations. He supported banning abortions after 20 weeks.

He… oh, man, do I really have to go on? Flake = Trump but with just a little bit less orange.

By contrast, Warren votes Trump 9.6% of the time. That’s how a real opponent of Trump and Trumpism votes.

And some, I’m sure, are good people

by digby

A West African migrant is being praised in France for scaling a building to save a boy hanging from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. The man, Mamoudou Gassama, will be made a French citizen, the Elysee Palace announced today.

Gassama’s act was caught on video and went viral on social media. The incident happened on Saturday night in the north of Paris, the Malian migrant told French media.

Gassama was in the neighborhood to watch a soccer match in a local restaurant when he heard people screaming and cars honking in the streets.

When he saw the young child dangling from a balcony, Gassama climbed up four floors of the apartment building and rescued the boy in less than one minute. When emergency services arrived at the scene, he had already pulled the child to safety.

The child was slightly injured, according to French authorities.

The 22-year-old Malian was invited to the Elysee presidential palace Monday morning where he met French President Emmanuel Macron.

“I did not really think, I started climbing directly,” he told Macron. “As I was climbing up, I felt more and more confident.”

“Bravo,” replied the French president.

Gassama also spoke to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. He told her he arrived from Mali a few months ago and wished to stay in France.

“I replied that his heroic gesture was an example for all citizens and that the city of Paris will obviously be keen to support him in his efforts to settle in France,” Hidalgo wrote on Twitter.

It took less than 48 hours for French authorities to respond to Gassama’s wish. The Elysee Palace announced Monday he will be made a French citizen and has been offered a job by the Paris fire brigade.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People by Blowing Things Up
By Batocchio

Today is Memorial Day, which is meant for remembering those who died in military service. It’s also a good day to reflect on war in general.

Back in May 2017, John Quiggin of Crooked Timber made a good observation about Trump bombing Syria and the pundits this impressed. Quiggin:

Blowing things and people up is seen as a demonstration of clarity and resolve, unless someone is doing it to us, in which case it’s correctly recognised as cowardly and evil. The most striking recent example (on “our” side) was the instant and near-universal approval of Trump’s bombing of an airfield in Syria, which had no effect at all on events there.

Last month, Quiggin wrote a follow-up about “another round of bombing from Trump, and yet more instant applause.” These dynamics aren’t limited to Trump, of course; they have a long history in the U.S. and other nations.

Some wars may be necessary. Others definitely aren’t. In theory, every pundit or government official and most citizens should have heard the saying that “war is hell” and should know the truth behind it, thanks to schooling, listening to veterans, and all the good documentaries, feature films and books on the subject. Anyone who wants a war is an idiot or a scoundrel. Yet even when military action is pretty clearly a bad idea or at least pointless, some people who should know better will still cheer it. They’ll hail it as a sign of leadership or being decisive or tough or manly, while virtues like wisdom and careful thought are ignored if not vilified. (And many in this crowd will try to claim patriotism while they do it.) Surely one of the points of Memorial Day is that we shouldn’t add to the numbers of the dead unnecessarily. But our national political discourse, on matters of war as with most everything else, is too heavily influenced by idiots and scoundrels.

It makes sense for Memorial Day to be a day of reflection or getting together with friends. But maybe it can also spur some civil engagement later in the year, whether it’s working for veterans or food banks or some other worthy cause, such as registering people to vote and getting them to the polls. It’s relatively easy to blow something up, and generally both harder and more worthwhile to build and sustain something positive with others.

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I’ve had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?…

My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn’t talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.
– WWII veteran E.B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge (1923–2001)

Preparing for the Summit

by digby

The president wished us all “Happy Memorial Day” and used it as an excuse to celebrate himself and his non-existent accomplishments.

Then he watched Fox News and this is what they were saying:

He tweeted a bunch of garbage about that too.

Meanwhile, the summit seems to be back on. It’s about nuclear war. He won’t

Uhm…. Happy Memorial Day???

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The NY Times Flacks for an Extreme Religious Right Politician

by tristero

It takes some 2000 words into one of the most tedious Times articles I’ve ever read for reporter Jonathan Martin Elizabeth Dias to get around to quoting someone with the slightest criticism of Franklin Graham, a  hate-filled far right politician whose act is so cruel and so obviously phony he makes Robert Mitchum’s demented preacher in The Night of the Hunter look like St. Francis. Finally, Martin Dias reports:

When a Graham organizer asked Daniel Balcombe, the pastor of Living Way Church near Escondido, to promote Mr. Graham’s rally, he said no. “He’s too politically toxic,” Mr. Balcombe, a registered Republican, said in an interview. “I told the organizer this, and he made excuses and insisted that he would not be political in his crusade. Still, I told him no thanks.” 

Mr. Balcombe cited the example of a Muslim refugee from Iran who became a Christian at his church last year, around the same time Mr. Trump banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries — a decision Mr. Graham defended. 

“I have a whole bunch of Trumpers in my church, who are supportive of the travel ban, and I’ve got this guy in my office, and we are praying and weeping, how can we get this guy’s family here,” he recalled. “I feel isolated, not by the political world but even within my own evangelical world.”

But then the article returns to breathlessly and uncritically flacking for Graham. So let’s be clear:

Franklin Graham is not Christian. Not in the sense that the far more typical worshippers at the Episcopal church near me are Christians. Unlike Graham, the real Christians I know are quite tolerant people and nobody’s fools. To bend over backwards and assume Graham’s beliefs are sincere, he is at best the leader of a single extremist sect that escapes criticism by many American mainstream Christian churches and institutions merely because they call themselves “Christian.” Sure, just like the Rajneeshees in the brilliant Wild Wild Country, Graham’s religious cult performs social works. But they’re obviously not doing that much compared to their income or they wouldn’t have much left over for politicking for sleazy cronies like Trump.  Besides, all the good they do is more than counter-balanced by the hate and fear Graham and his ilk spread.

A truly balanced article about Graham would have led with the phrase “too politically toxic” and not buried it A truly balanced article about Graham would have quoted numerous leaders from the numerous progressive Christian denominations about what real Christian charity is like. A truly balanced article would have never given Graham a virtually free pass or thought his soft, “almost sweet”voice was worth mentioning.

This is the NY Times pandering to the far right as they’ve done so many times. They never treat progressives this way, which are covered with nearly unrelenting negativity. Case in point: in the print edition of the Times the day before they promoted Graham, the Times ran — in exactly the same position on the front page — an article entitled, “Democrats Go All-Out to Avoid Disaster in California House Races.” The impression one took away was of a political party in a state of hysterical panic. Graham, by contrast, is portrayed as methodical and focused.

It’s been argued that the mainstream media learned their lesson since 2016 and are no longer giving a free ride to Trump. But even if that is so, it’s time they reported realistically on Trump’s exceedingly dangerous enablers.

Including Franklin Graham.

Update: The post has been updated.