Month: May 2018

Stats on women leaders in America

by digby

… are not as encouraging as we might hope:

The number of women leading the largest companies has always been small. This year, it got 25 percent smaller.

The reversal is leading to a search beyond the usual explanations for why women don’t become chief executives — things like not being competitive enough, failing to chase opportunities for promotion and choosing work-life balance over high-powered jobs.

That’s because evidence shows that the obstacles for female executives aren’t just because of their individual choices. There are larger forces at work, experts say, rooted in biases against women in power, mothers who work or leaders who don’t fit the mold of the people who led before them.

For many years, it seemed like the share of women at the top of corporate America would slowly increase over time. The number of women leading companies in the Fortune 500 had grown to 6.4 percent last year, an all-time high, from 2.6 percent a decade earlier.

But this year, the number of female chief executives declined 25 percent, according toFortune’s 2018 list, which was published Monday. There are now 24 women, down from 32. Twelve left their jobs — most recently, Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup Company, who abruptly announced her retirement Friday — and four joined the list.

Women in business start out equal to men in terms of jobs and pay. But at each level, they disappear. Only 22 percent of women are senior vice presidents, according to the annual Women in the Workplace study by Lean In and McKinsey. The drop-off starts with the first promotion to management: Women are 18 percent less likely to be promoted to manager than their male peers.[…]

here don’t appear to be gender differences in leadership ability, either. A recent analysis of 2,600 executives found that men and women did not differ on multiple areas that were assessed, including interpersonal, analytical and managerial skills and general ability. Yet comparing women and men with similar skills and talents, women were much less likely to become chief executives.

One reason, other studies have shown, is that we unconsciously assume good leaders are male, and we have mixed feelings about women who have successful careers.

The typical chief executive is six feet tall with a deep voice — a typical woman doesn’t match the image. In an experiment, respondents said someone named Eric who offered new ideas was a natural leader, while someone named Erica who offered the same ideas was not.

Female business school students who were single reported that they wanted lower salaries and shorter work hours when they expected classmates, particularly single men, to see their answers, according to a study last fall in the American Economic Review.
These biases against ambitious women affect how managers treat women at work.

Men are seen as having leadership qualities like gravitas, while women are seen as having supporting-role qualities like dependability. When women ask for promotions or raises, they’re more likely to be called bossy or aggressive, found Lean In and McKinsey. Men are more likely to get them without asking.

“It’s all about the culture of organizations and the broader cultural attitudes toward women, and the difficulty all of us have, research would suggest, really respecting a woman in a position of authority,” Ms. Ely said.

It also notes that #MeToo is likely having a backlash effect of making the men who still run things less likely to want to hire and mentor younger women which is undoubtedly an effect, at least in the short term, until they realize that if they don’t act like assholes, it will all be fine.

I have had the discussion many times int he past year and a half about whether this country is going to elect a woman president any time soon. Virtually everyone I know insists that it’s not just possible it’s a shoe-in, probably in 2020.

I always think of these statistics about female CEOs and wonder if that’s actually true. I think I’m more pessimistic than most, although I sincerely hope I’m wrong. I confess I didn’t see a reduction in their numbers coming, though.

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The making of Spyghazi

by digby

GQ unraveled how the latest stupid BizarroWorld “scandal” unfolded:

The plot goes like this: During the summer of 2016, on the clandestine orders of then-President Obama, the FBI and CIA hatched an ambitious plan to topple the Trump campaign from the inside. In a scandal of unprecedented scope, Democratic politicians commandeered American counterintelligence resources to spy on their primary political opponent and boost Hillary Clinton’s chances at winning the election. The Russia investigation that has dominated headlines for nearly two years is, in fact, a desperate smokescreen conjured up by terrified Deep State actors to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing, and to frame the president for heinous crimes he didn’t commit.

On May 8, the Washington Post reported on the White House’s decision to back the Justice Department’s withholding of information from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, on the grounds that disclosure would expose the identity of “a U.S. citizen who has provided information to the FBI and CIA.” The authors added, though, that the individual had been a source of information used by the special counsel’s office—and that it was unclear whether Trump knew this “key fact” when his administration chose to side with law enforcement.

It didn’t take long for him to find out. Almost immediately, the right-wing media ecosystem began laundering and repackaging this news item, weaving its constituent elements together with Trumpian talking points until a full-blown conspiracy theory worthy of the president’s tweets emerged on the other side. This metamorphosis is what would happen if a word cloud sourced from a Trump rally were used in a giant game of telephone—but one in which the gibberish end result were then broadcast as news to hundreds of millions of recipients.

How did this happen?

May 10

Two days after the initial report, citing to “the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers,” the Wall Street Journal publishes an analysis by conservative commentator Kim Strassel. “[W]e might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.” Such a development, she writes, “would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting.” Strassel continues (all emphasis mine):

[W]hen precisely was this human source operating? Because if it was prior to that infamous Papadopoulos tip, then the FBI isn’t being straight. It would mean the bureau was spying on the Trump campaign prior to that moment. And that in turn would mean that the FBI had been spurred to act on the basis of something other than a junior campaign aide’s loose lips.

This is at once cautious and bold, introducing the salacious vocabulary of espionage to a detail about an intelligence source—but only, she clarifies, if the allegations are true. Strassel does not offer a reason for entertaining her hypothetical, other than her characterization of the players’ accounts of the investigation as “suspiciously vague.” She is, in the classic style of well-compensated public intellectuals filling up column inches, just asking questions.

That night, other journalists are happy to offer answers. On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, conservative journalist Sara Carter, citing Strassel, tells listeners of “concern that the FBI actually had a spy within the Trump campaign.” Hannity is dumbfounded: “What? What?” he splutters. “Yes,” says Carter. Blogs like Gateway Pundit kick off the breathless hyperbole category. “Now we know why the Deep State has been working so hard to take down President Trump and the republic,” said the post, linking to and block-quoting Strassel. “OBAMA DEEP STATE HAD A SPY INSIDE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN!”

May 11

The baton is passed to Fox News, which syndicates Strassel’s article and changes the headline from “About that FBI ‘Source’” to “Did the FBI place a mole inside the 2016 Trump campaign?” On Fox & Friends, the president’s morning program of choice, Peter Hegseth weighs in, hesitantly at first. “Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign? Just asking the question. There’s an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about it.” Ainsley Earhart quotes at length from the column before positing that it means the FBI and DOJ had someone “paid to go and spy on President Trump.”

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picks up the thread, encouraging the conflation of the FBI and President Obama. Strassel’s article mentions Obama only once, and only in passing. But this is Rush Limbaugh, not a major newspaper; he can say things like this without fear of repercussions.

When I say “the FBI,” I mean the Obama administration. They infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy, and while they had that spy implanted, they were unmasking and leaking and obtaining FISA spying warrants and conducting criminal investigations of Trump advisers. This is a big deal…For our purposes, folks, the important thing is that the Obama administration infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy.

The buzz grows louder online. “Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign?” asksAndrew McCarthy, praising Strassel’s column as “essential reporting,” in a National Review article that published early the next morning. Right-wing blog ZeroHedgemakes an affirmative statement—“WSJ: The FBI Hid A Mole In The Trump Campaign”—out of his question. Also citing Strassel, Tucker Carlson refers to a “government spy” and a “mole” sent by “the Obama administration.” His guest, NRATV personality Dan Bongino, reveals that he believes there to have been more than one spy, referring to “reporting.” He does not elaborate on-air.

May 14

The week begins with lawmakers joining the fray. On Fox & Friends, GOP congressman Ron DeSantis calls for a follow-up investigation into the matter. “I know that we’re actively trying to get the underlying documents that would tell us: Did they spy on the Trump campaign or not?” he asks, implicitly treating the premises of that query as if they were beyond dispute. To Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Network, Matt Gaetz expresses unease with “reports” he’d heard “about potential human intelligence being collected on a rival presidential campaign.”

These men are egged on by, among others, Rush Limbaugh, who asserts he knows the identity of the spy that the FBI “put in the Trump campaign,” and Hannity, whose radio guest David Limbaugh—Rush’s younger brother—opines that “an official policy inserting a confidential source into a presidential campaign” would be “unprecedented” and “worse than Watergate.” Like DeSantis, he includes a soft qualifier, though: “If it happened! We have to get to the bottom of it.”

May 15

Nunes appears on the Fox & Friends set, hinting that the campaign might have been “set up” by the FBI. “I believe they never should have opened a counterintelligence investigation into a political party,” he explains. And although he at first avoids using the word “spy,” his hosts are happy to put it in his mouth. Steve Doocey suggests that Nunes’ narrative implies that Trump was “framed,” while Earhart adds that “it makes it sound like there was a spy.”

There’s more at the link, leading to this crazy bullshit from the president himself:

@foxandfriends “New Bombshell in the Obama Spying Scandal. Did other Agencies SPY on Trump Campaign?” Even Clapper, worlds dumbest former Intelligence Head, who has the problem of lying a lot, used the word SPY when describing the illegal activities!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

…Follow the money! The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported Collusion with Russia, because there was no Collusion. He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win – just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

WITCH HUNT!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

Trumpworld on acid

by digby

It must be in the diet cokes.

This post by Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair is mind blowing:

Trump’s scorched-earth strategy has been in place since Rudy Giuliani replaced Trump’s long-suffering lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb. At first, it looked as if it were careening off course, as Giuliani gave off a series of erratic and combative interviews. Some speculated that Trump might be unhappy with his performance, but sources I spoke to say Trump is pleased. This is the plan. “Rudy doesn’t do anything without Trump’s permission,” said one Republican close to the White House. The strategy grew out of conversations Trump has held in recent weeks with a group of outside advisers that include Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows, House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, Sean Hannity, Dave Bossieand Corey Lewandowski, among others. “People think Trump is angry, but he likes the direction this is going,” an outside White House adviser said.

According to people familiar with Trump’s thinking, his team is attempting to build the case that anti-Trump forces in the F.B.I. entrapped his advisers using informants to plant evidence about Russian collusion. The theory goes that the F.B.I. later used these contacts with the Russians to delegitimize his presidency. Trump’s advisers say the intelligence community believed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, but in case she didn’t, they concocted this elaborate plot to remove Trump from office. 

“Just when you think it can’t get stranger, it does,” a Trump adviser told me. Stone claims the anti-Trump conspiracy includes senior intelligence officials from the Barack Obama administration. “The guy who will end up burning in all this is [former C.I.A. director] John Brennan,” Stone told me. “If I were him I’d break the capsule and swallow it now. That psychopath is going down.”

(Nick Shapiro, who served as Brennan’s deputy chief of staff at the C.I.A., described Stone’s comment as “contemptible” and said his words should be condemned. “We’re seeing a growing chorus of former national security leaders speaking out to warn us about Trump,” he added. “Instead of attacking these dedicated patriots, we should be concerned about why they all feel the need to speak out.”)

As loopy as this theory can sound, the notion that there’s been a conspiracy among the Obama administration and the so-called Deep State to bring Trump down is more than a legal stalking horse—it’s now a dominant narrative in Trumpworld. The president himself is convinced that the secret F.B.I. informant who reportedly met with several Trump campaign advisers in 2016 was not merely an informant, but an Obama political operative. One administration official told me the theory has become so widely accepted that people in the West Wing are paranoid that the F.B.I. has multiple informants working to take down Trump. “There’s a paranoia about who else is one,” the official said.
[…]
Trumpworld’s current mind-set makes continued extra-legal conflict with Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein inevitable, and the well-dissected dangers of firing one or both have not served to take this nuclear option off the table. Trump has been bonding over how corrupt Mueller’s investigation is. “Rudy is telling him what he wants to hear,” said a Trump ally. But “it would be catastrophic if he fires Mueller.” In the past, many Republicans shared this view. Now, they might not be so opposed.

Nixon was paranoid but he wasn’t a fucking moron. I don’t know if that makes Trump better or worse.

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About that other spy in the Trump campaign…

by digby

Yesterday I wrote about the Freedom Caucus’ cheerleader Matt Gaetz going all over TV saying that there had been another “spy” implanted in the Trump campaign but it was all hush-hush classified and they couldn’t say who it was.

This explains what he was talking about:

Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo suggested on Monday during an interview on Fox News that there may have been a second informant that approached the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. In light of these claims, The Daily Wire interviewed Caputo and the man that he claimed may have been another government informant sent to target the Trump campaign.

“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact,” Caputo said on “The Ingraham Angle,” with host Laura Ingraham. “This informant, this person they tried to plant into the campaign … he’s not the only person that came at the campaign. And the FBI is not the only Obama agency that came at the campaign. I know because they came at me.”

Caputo’s comments were in response to the recent revelation that the FBI allegedly used a secret FBI informant to meet with Trump campaign associates and for the purpose of gathering information about any interactions they may have had with Russian officials.

On Tuesday, The Daily Wire interviewed Caputo, the alleged second informant who does contracting work with the U.S. government, and one of Caputo’s friends who was an intermediary between the two men.

On May 7, 2016, Caputo’s friend, Kirk Bell, attended a DC-area Kentucky Derby event at the house of his friend Nick Ikeda, a military staffer for US Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI).

At the event, Bell spoke with a government contractor, who asked not to be named in this report; this is the person Caputo told The Daily Wire he thought may have been another informant in light of the recent revelations about the FBI’s alleged secret informant. At the event, the government contractor mentioned to Bell that he had heard about some of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and said that the campaign should see if they could obtain them.

The government contractor told The Daily Wire that the information he had heard about some of Clinton’s missing emails came from a business meeting that he had while he was trying to drum up business for a private sector tech company. The missing emails came up in casual conversation with another man, in which the subject of the 2016 election was briefly mentioned. The man that the contractor met with suggested that Clinton’s missing emails could contain more damaging information in them than people realized.

It was that conversation that inspired the government contractor to mention Clinton’s emails to Bell.

Two days later, on May 9, 2016, Bell texted Caputo about the information the government contractor relayed to him about Clinton’s missing emails.

Caputo told The Daily Wire that he never spoke to the government contractor. The government contractor also said he does not remember explicitly speaking with Caputo, although he does say that someone reached out to him but he doesn’t remember who it was.

Caputo says that he did not reach out to the government contractor because he was fearful of possibly taking possession of any material that he might have which could have contained classified information.

The government contractor reached back out to Bell on July 31, 2016, and informed Bell of a Breitbart report that claimed that NSA had Clinton’s emails, and suggested that the Trump campaign should look into it.

By this time Bell was reportedly a part of the Trump campaign in North Carolina and Caputo says he had departed the Trump campaign.

When asked by The Daily Wire if he was working for anyone to gather information about the Trump campaign or if anyone had approached him about gathering information on the Trump campaign, the government contractor responded: “No, absolutely not.”

“I have done no work with the [Independent Special Counsel], none,” the government contractor continued. “I have no contracts, not even ancillary contracts with the intelligence community. I am not connected there at all. Zero.”

When asked about who the third party was that contacted him, the government contractor responded, “I don’t remember who it was because it just wasn’t that important to me,” saying that he told whomever called him “good luck because this isn’t what I do for a living.”

After the interview with the government contractor, The Daily Wire interviewed Caputo and informed him of the interview with the government contractor. In discussing what the government contractor said, Caputo said, “This also could be a great big misunderstanding.”

Caputo also clarified the comments that he made on Ingraham’s show last night, saying that it was not his intention to suggest that the government contractor was involved in some sort of government spying like the alleged FBI source outed last week.

Caputo said that he did not understand the approach that he thought the government contractor made towards him so he informed different government committees that are conducting investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections of his contacts with the government contractor.

“[The committees] didn’t check on it,” Caputo said. “So I gave it to the media.”

Caputo asked The Daily Wire to review text messages between Bell and the government contractor and between Bell and himself.

All three men agreed that the core details in the timeline of events were correct. The government contractor and Caputo also agreed on most of the major details in each other’s stories and it appears as though there was a misunderstanding between the two men.

Caputo thought that the government contractor was coming to him with an offer but messages reviewed by The Daily Wire appear to show that the government contractor was making suggestions for the campaign rather than offering the campaign anything specific.

Jesus H. Christ. They’re all as dumb as Trump.

Blue woman group
by Tom Sullivan

Stacey Abrams

What jumps off the page from Amy McGrath’s win last night Kentucky’s Sixth District is the rural vote. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki noticed:

*Huge* Dem turnout jump in rural KY-6 counties from Clinton/Sanders race in '16:

Nicholas County
Votes cast in '16: 835
Tonight: 1,622

Robertson
'16: 295
Tonight: 699

Bath
'16: 1,369
Tonight: 2,608— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) May 22, 2018

Those results will bolster Democrats looking for evidence of a fall blue wave. McGrath is “cleaning up where Dems usually get buried,” Kornacki observed.

McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, won everywhere except Lexington where her opponent is mayor. Her viral video helped her campaign catch fire and raise money, but in a year when women are running and winning, her moxey and compelling biography blasted her past Mayor Jim Gray, the national party’s Rolodex candidate.

McGrath faces Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) in November.

Stacey Abrams did more than win her Georgia primary for governor. She made history as the first black woman to be the nominee of a major party for governor. The former state House minority leader handily defeated Stacey Evans, another former legislator who put nearly $2 million in her own money behind her campaign.

Abrams drew compliments from even conservative commentator Eric Erickson of Macon, GA after an interview in February (from The New Yorker):

“I’d been strongly critical of her in the past, and she was still willing to come on air with me,” Erickson said of Abrams on Monday. “We actually found a lot of common ground, even though we disagreed on stuff,” he added. “I came away really liking her.” Abrams, Erickson told me, “gave a better answer on keeping the income tax than Casey Cagle,” the state’s lieutenant governor, who won the Republican primary on Tuesday—but who received less than fifty per cent of the vote, meaning that he now faces a runoff in July. “It was an easy to understand answer,” Erickson said. “Everyone in the crowd, including the Republicans, nodded along with it.” After the interview, Erickson wrote on Twitter that he found Abrams to be, “Super sharp, very witty, and self-deprecating. She’ll be formidable as a candidate.”

That did not endear him to conservative readers, but might indicate where she might make inroads in rural Georgia where Republicans dominate.

Indeed, Abrams’s powerful “fight for the future” victory speech had reach. To struggling Georgians, Abrams even alluded to her own financial problems, saying, “I’m with you because I’ve been there. I’m still there.”

If you don't think Stacey Abrams can win the general, it's because you doubt that everyone who would vote for her will. Ask yourself why that is, and then ask yourself what can be done about it. Politics is freeform. Anyone can win if enough people vote. Tick tock.— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 23, 2018

Still looking for analysis, but it will be interesting to see whether Abrams’s rural vote numbers compare to McGrath’s.

A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows Democrats with a 9-point lead among female voters on the generic congressional ballot, compared to a 1-point advantage among male voters.

Update:

Too much news to pack into one very early morning.

One advantage Abrams has going into the fall is Republican candidates for Georgia governor, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kempwill, go to a July runoff, leaving Abrams weeks to gather steam behind her race while the two Republicans work hard to out-fringe each other.

The DCCC survived its own toe-stubbing when in TX-07 its pick, Lizzie Fletcher, handily defeated Laura Moser in the runoff yesterday.

But Stacey Abrams was not the only woman last night to make history by winning her party’s nomination:

AUSTIN — Lupe Valdez defeated Andrew White in Tuesday’s Democratic runoff for governor, making political history in a couple of ways.

Valdez, the former Dallas County sheriff, became the first Hispanic female and first openly gay person to win a major party’s gubernatorial nomination in Texas.

She now faces incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in November. Abbot has $41 million stockpiled for his reelection, so it will be a tough pull, Valdez acknowledges, but she’s used to those:

“I am constantly hearing this is going to be such an uphill battle,” Valdez told her supporters in Dallas after she won the nomination. “Please, tell me when I didn’t have an uphill battle. … I am getting darned good at uphill battles.”

Turnout for the Texas runoff was down from the March primary.

In one notable race in Kentucky, a Republican school teacher in Kentucky turned out the House majority floor leader:

As upset teachers across Kentucky Tuesday tried to flex their political muscle, Rockcastle County High School math teacher R. Travis Brenda narrowly defeated House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell of Garrard County in one of the most-watched races for the state House, according to unofficial results.

Brenda tried in the Republican primary election for the 71st House District seat to capitalize on teacher anger against legislators who backed a controversial pension bill in this year’s law-making session. It was Brenda’s first bid for public office.

But it might be Shell’s last. He had been thinking of running for House speaker next year. Teachers are not happy, even Republican ones.

* * * * * * * *

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

Trey and Devin’s private peep show

by digby

I don’t honestly understand how this can be happening but I guess that’s just the way it is:

Just two Republican lawmakers will be allowed to review classified information about a confidential FBI source who aided the investigation into the Trump campaign at a meeting Thursday with Justice Department and intelligence officials, the White House said Tuesday.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced at a White House press briefing that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) would be the only two lawmakers at the meeting, which would also include FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed O’Callaghan.

Sanders said no White House officials would attend, even though Chief of Staff John F. Kelly brokered the gathering. She said Democrats were cut out because they had not requested the same materials that their Republican colleagues had.

“To my knowledge, the Democrats have not requested that information, so I would refer you back to them on why they would consider themselves randomly invited to see something they’ve never asked to,” Sanders said.

The move stoked some consternation in Congress. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said previously that he expected to be invited and said Democrats being shut out was “another serious abuse of power.”

Democrats aren’t even part of the government anymore apparently. Good to know.

By the way, this is just round one:

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said that the White House is “not yet fully informed” on the extent of intelligence collection on the Trump campaign on Fox News Monday.

“I will say, Harris, The White House is not yet fully informed regarding the extent to which intelligence was collected on the Trump campaign,” he said.

“There is additional information that House investigators have collected, and we need to make sure the White House gets appropriately informed about that, because it will not be enough to have Rod Rosenstein and others at the Department of Justice investigate themselves. We got enough investigations where the Justice Department is investigating themselves.”

Gaetz has previously blasted the Mueller investigation for its “tremendous bias.”

That smug little twit was on Jake Tapper’s show this afternoon saying there were more informants involved hinting broadly that the Intelligence Committee has some information that a different “spy” was implanted in the campaign. I guess they forgot to mention that in their report that closed out the investigation.

This is BS, of course. But it’s part of their “I know you are but what am I” strategy.

QOTD: The Prez

by digby

It turns out that sometimes he does tell the truth:

Lesley Stahl asked Trump in semi-private meeting why he’s always attacking the press. His answer: “I want to demean you and discredit you so that when you do negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” @deadlineclub #deadlineawards— vanessa gezari (@vanessagezari) May 22, 2018

So far he’s only been about 40% successful. But his ratings are going up. And the media is starting to chase Nunes’ shiny objects. If he keeps at it over the next three years, he could get a majority. People are getting used to this bullshit.

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Why this isn’t like Watergate

by digby

For those of you interested in the Watergate precedents to this current crisis, this podcast is illuminating.

Bob Bauer, Jack Goldsmith and David Kris join Benjamin Wittes to discuss the sequence of events between the Justice Department, the FBI, the House intelligence committee and the White House over the last few days and the resolution arranged at the White House on Monday afternoon.

Marty Lederman answers one of the major questions about the differences between the two scandals in a tweetstorm (which I’ve translated below):

In this excellent podcast, all the participants agree that the POTUS is egregiously breaching many important norms. Jack wonders, however, how much we should worry about the danger of a longterm breakdown of those norms, rightly citing the example of Nixon’s misdeeds, which only served to entrench the norms still further in the fallout. The huge difference here, as I believe Bob B. alluded to, is that in 1973/74, as soon as it became clear that Nixon had probably sinned, a significant part of the GOP caucus in Congress turned on him–and did so decisively once he moved to breach norms of prosecutorial independence, so much so that, less than two weeks after the SN Massacre, *everyone* concurred that the new special counsel (Jaworski) would have far *greater* independence than Cox ever had. There wasn’t even a debate, not only among GOP in Congress, but even w/the new AG nominee (Saxbe) and Bob Bork. (The Saxbe confirmation hearing, w/Jaworski at his side, is amazing, and instructive.)

And that was in a case where the POTUS had, just *months* earlier, garnered 61% of the popular vote and in which he won by more than 8% in all but three states! Here, by contrast, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the POTUS was a popular vote loser, he is not only supported by his party in Congress, but virtually none of them–or other members of the GOP establishment who once held office–have condemned him, and he’s even working hand-in-glove with Congress to destroy DOJ/FBI norms! *That* is the huge sea-change from 1973, without which I would share Jack’s tentative sanguinity, but because of which I am deeply concerned for the future health of the Republic–or, at a minimum, of the norms that were once respected by virtually all. For the modern GOP, *everything* is secondary to retention of power, which means not only that the norms are worthless, but that breaching them is celebrated as a virtue, not a bug (it was, after all, the centerpiece of Trump’s victory).

Why the differences from 1973? In large part, it might be that the alt-right and “new right,” which were always out there and which never cared much for the institutional norms, not to mention science, facts, and the demographic changes in the U.S., had relatively little influence on mainstream attitudes–and certainly not on the establishment figures who were once elected by the GOP. With the advent of FoxNews, however (and to a lesser extent, I suppose, Limbaugh/talk radio), they now have a forum, and they thus have now become the bellwether of the GOP proper. See Fishkin/Pozen at 952-959. Meanwhile, the establishment types within the Federalist Society are silent–word is that Trump’s pathologies are barely even mentioned at FedSoc conferencesI assume because of the “But Gorsuch” phenomenon. In other words, appears that they’ve sold their souls for the (perhaps understandable) aim of securing SCOTUS dominance for the *next* 50 years.

One other thing, simply as a matter of electoral calculus: In late ’73, Nixon had approx. the same level of popular support that Trump does now. But then, GOP political success depended on securing the voters from 39-61%, which they had done for the presidency just months earlier. Today, the GOP depends on the 39%, who are (for various reasons)sufficient, or at least necessary, to sustain GOP control of Congress (and on rare occasions the WH, too). So they have to play to the 39% voter, not the next 20-25% in the middle, who they’ve already lost.

I’ve said for a while that I think people overestimate the degree to which Nixon era Republicans actually turned on him, but we do seem to have hit one of those moments where some did and we’re seeing no sign of it yet. Trump is a different animal than Nixon, who cared about his place in history and understood the stakes. Trump only cares about getting through the day and his party is thoroughly corrupt and extreme. There is no guarantee that this will end well all on its own.

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With friends like these…

by digby

Trump, last night:

“Your vote in 2018 is every bit as important as your vote in 2016. I don’t know if I believe that. Who the hell wrote that line?”

And yet they love him and support him and can’t wait to walk over the cliff behind him.

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