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Month: May 2018

Pruitt kicks journalists out of a public meeting

Published by digby on May 22, 2018

Pruitt kicks journalists out of a public meeting

by digby


I guess this is normal now?

The Environmental Protection Agency is barring The Associated Press, CNN and the environmental-focused news organization E&E from a national summit on harmful water contaminants.

The EPA blocked the news organizations from attending Tuesday’s Washington meeting, convened by EPA chief Scott Pruitt.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox told the barred organizations they were not invited and there was no space for them, but gave no indication of why they specifically were barred.

Pruitt told about 200 people at the meeting that dealing with the contaminants is a “national priority.”

Guards barred an AP reporter from passing through a security checkpoint inside the building. When the reporter asked to speak to an EPA public-affairs person, the security guards grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building

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Other reporters on the scene apparently said there was plenty of room. But they didn’t walk out of the meeting as they should have done.

Pruitt, by the way, is a real piece of work — paranoid with delusions of grandeur.A sick cookie.

Trump sounds tired and confused talking about North Korea

Published by digby on May 22, 2018

Trump sounds tired and confused talking about North Korea

by digby

He’s very angry about the Mueller investigation and he’s totally confused about the North Korea situation. But he was very loquacious, obviously wanting to pontificate but speaking nonsense as usual.

Some highlights:

I read that he’s focusing on the pageantry of the summit not the details.

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Is this big summit actually going to happen?

Published by digby on May 22, 2018

Is this big summit actually going to happen?

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Donald Trump is meeting with South Korean president Moon Jae-in in Washington today, in anticipation of the big summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un next month in Singapore. That summit looks more and more precarious, however, since it turns out that dealing with North Korea is more complicated than doing a licensing deal with a Chinese factory for Trump’s cheap, ugly ties.

Last week, Time reported that Trump wasn’t doing much preparation for the summit anyway because, according to a senior administration official, “he doesn’t think he needs to.” Apparently, “aides plan to squeeze in time for Trump to learn more about Kim’s psychology and strategize on ways to respond to offers Kim may make in person,” but no plans had been set as of last Thursday.

National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared on ABC’s “This Week” a week ago and seemed unconcerned about the fact that the president was going into the negotiations completely clueless:

I think one advantage of having this meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un so soon, in effect, without months and months and months of preparation, is that President Trump will be able to size Kim Jong Un up and see whether the commitment [to denuclearization] is real.

Let’s just say that Bolton seemed frighteningly smug as he said it, suggesting that he knew very well that his statement was vacuous and he would be perfectly happy to have Trump come away disappointed and embarrassed. That would certainly make it easier to get Trump to embark on a serious regime-change strategy such as Bolton has been pushing for years. An angry Trump is what he needs to make his dream come true.

Trump wants the “win,” of course. But according to this New York Times report by David Sanger, the president has awakened to the fact that it might not go his way.

Mr. Trump was both surprised and angered by a statement issued on Wednesday by the North’s chief nuclear negotiator, who declared that the country would never trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid, administration officials said. The statement, while a highly familiar tactic by the North, represented a jarring shift in tone after weeks of conciliatory gestures.

Had Trump torn himself away from “Fox & Friends” long enough to listen to some actual briefings, he might have known that. Now he’s starting to get the feeling this whole thing might not be the slam dunk he’s been counting on.

Bolton is part of the problem. North Korea specifically lashed out at the administration over the national security adviser’s insistence that the U.S. wanted to use the “Libya model,” in which that country was persuaded to turn over its nuclear equipment in return for economic aid which wasn’t forthcoming. In 2011 its leader, Moammar Gadhafi, was overthrown and killed. You can see why the North Koreans wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about repeating that.

But then, as The New York Times points out, Trump made it even more confusing because he’s too busy tweeting to read a briefing paper:

When reporters asked Mr. Trump about Libya, he managed, in one stroke, to contradict Mr. Bolton and misconstrue the importance of the trade of the nuclear program for economic rewards.

“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all, when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat him.” That referred to Western military intervention in 2011, not to the nuclear disarmament that came eight years before.

Trump then said that if the parties don’t make a satisfactory deal, “that model would take place.” That clearly suggests a military intervention, which is exactly what the North Koreans had warned would blow up the talks.

According to Robert E. Kelly, a political analyst and professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, it appears that Moon, eager to keep Trump talking instead of tweeting and threatening, may have oversold the North’s new willingness to make a deal. Since Trump only listens to Fox News flatterers, he believed this was all due to his magnificent leadership and convinced himself he had the Nobel Peace Prize all locked up.

Kelly pointed out on Twitter that the smart thing now would be to postpone the summit until the three parties can do some real preparation and find some basis for consensus. He believes that Moon, not Kim, is the one who has been frightened by Trump’s bellicose tweets and that the South Korean president is afraid to let Bolton have any space to push Trump further and so will argue forcefully for the summit. According to CNN, Trump’s aides are now increasingly skeptical that it will happen at all.

Vice President Mike Pence tried out the rationale for abandoning the meeting Monday night on Fox News, saying that “it would be a great mistake for Kim Jong-un to think he could play Donald Trump” and stating unequivocally that the U.S. is willing to walk if the North Koreans refuse to give in to Trump’s demands. He’d have to forego the Nobel for the time being, but there’s always Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan.

In any case, Trump doesn’t have the time or the inclination to deal with possible nuclear war right now. He’s busy fighting an epic battle with his own FBI and the Justice Department over the investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian agents back in 2016. He is, by all accounts, obsessed with it. Unlike previous presidents Clinton and Reagan, both of whom faced serious investigations during their presidency, he is unable to “compartmentalize” and do the job of president at the same time. Grace under pressure is not his strong suit.

Trump probably would not be capable of handling a major summit of such monumental importance under any circumstances, since he won’t do the homework required of a president. That’s because he believes, as he told The Washington Post, that he reaches decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense.” Judging by his administration so far, he has very little of either.

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The resistance is moral by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 22, 2018

The resistance is moral
by Tom Sullivan


Photo via Poor People’s Campaign.

Moral Mondays have taken to the road with the renewal of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The nonviolent protests against harmful conservative legislation led by Rev William Barber that began in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2013 have morphed into a wider movement against systemic racism and the war on the poor. Police are still arresting protesters on Mondays in Raleigh. But the nearly 1,000 arrested in Moral Monday actions there have been matched by another 1,000 in protests in state capitols around the country.

In Boston.

In Albany.

In Harrisburg.

In Columbia.
In Tallahassee.

In Frankfort.

In Indianapolis.
In Lansing.

In Topeka.
In Jefferson City.

In Sacramento.

In Olympia.

There were others.

The Guardian reports:

The Poor People’s Campaign, a revival of Martin Luther King’s final effort to unite poor Americans across racial lines, last week brought together activists from several faiths, the Women’s March, the labor movement and other liberal organizations to launch 40 days of civil disobedience and protest against inequality, racism, ecological devastation and militarism. As many as 1,000 people were arrested during the first wave. More expect to be held in future.

Barber, a co-chair of the campaign, says some conservative faith leaders have “cynically” interpreted the Bible’s teachings to demonize homosexuality, abortion, scientific facts and other religions. They are guilty, he says, of “theological malpractice” and “modern-day heresy”.

They say so much about what God says so little and so little about what God says so much, Barber says often in challenging their theology.

The demands of the Poor People’s Campaign are as ambitious as they are progressive. They have called for a repeal of the Republican tax cuts, federal and state minimum wage laws and universal single-payer healthcare. Other proposals also mirror those of politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

“We are surely trying to impact politics,” said Liz Theoharis, a co-chair. “And we are surely trying to make sure that our elected officials take these issues seriously. But this goes far beyond any one election or election year.”

Barber and Theoharis imagine a new “southern strategy” that undoes racial divisions. For months they have barnstormed poor and working-class communities deep in Trump country, in an effort to build a multi-faith alliance.

“We visited homes where there was raw sewage in their yard,” Theoharis said. “In these communities, these issues are not seen as progressive or Democratic. They’re seen as human rights issues.”

Maybe it’s just me but raw sewage in the yard does not sound like the promised American greatness.

“Any doctrine of racism that prevents somebody from any access to any part of this democracy is not just against the American constitution, it’s against the way of God … It’s time for us to change the map, not so much from red to blue, but from wrong to right.”

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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.

It’s the corruption, stupid

Published by digby on May 21, 2018

It’s the corruption, stupid


by digby



This piece by Adam Serwer clarifies the big question about how to think about this gusher of Trump scandals:

The sheer volume of Trump scandals can seem difficult to keep track of.

There’s the ongoing special-counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign aided a Russian campaign to aid Trump’s candidacy and defeat his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton; there’s the associated inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey, whom he had asked not to investigate his former national-security adviser; there are the president’s hush-money payments to women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs, made through his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and facilitated by corporate cash paid to influence the White House; there is his ongoing effort to interfere with the Russia inquiry and politicize federal law enforcement; there are the foreign governments that seem to be utilizing the president’s properties as vehicles for influencing administration policy; there’s the emerging evidence that Trump campaign officials sought aid not only from Russia, but from other foreign countries, which may have affected Trump’s foreign policy; there are the ongoing revelations of the president’s Cabinet officials’ misusing taxpayer funds; there is the accumulating evidence that administration decisions are made at the behest of private industry, in particular those in which Republican donors have significant interests.

The preceding wall of text may appear to some as an abridged list of the Trump administration’s scandals, but this is an illusion created by the perception that these are all separate affairs. Viewed as such, the various Trump scandals can seem multifarious and overpowering, and difficult to fathom.

There are not many Trump scandals. There is one Trump scandal. Singular: the corruption of the American government by the president and his associates, who are using their official power for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people, and their attempts to shield that corruption from political consequences, public scrutiny, or legal accountability.

Take recent developments: There’s the president’s attempt to aid the Chinese telecom company ZTE, mere hours after the Chinese government approved funding for a project in the vicinity of a Trump property in Indonesia. There’s the millions of dollars corporations paid to Cohen after the election in an attempt to influence administration policy in their favor. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, also the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, urged banks to pay off politicians in an effort to weaken the CFPB’s powers legislatively—since taking the helm of CFPB, Mulvaney has dropped a number of cases against payday lenders who charge exorbitant interest rates, after taking thousands from the industry as a congressman. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s own mini-universe of scandals stems from his improper relationships with industry figures, his misuse of taxpayer funds, and his attempts to obscure the truth about both. Trump attempted to pressure the Postmaster General to increase fees on Amazon in order to punish The Washington Post, which has published many stories detailing wrongdoing and misbehavior on the part of the Trump administration, and the Trump campaign before that. Not long after The New York Times reported that Trump officials may have solicited campaign help not just from Russia, but also from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the president “demanded” that the Justice Department launch an inquiry into whether the FBI improperly investigated a campaign that was eagerly soliciting international aid to swing the election in its favor.

In each of these cases, the president or one of his associates was seeking to profit, personally or financially, from their official duties and powers. When that conduct has potentially run afoul of the law, Trump has sought to bend federal law enforcement to his whim, the better to protect himself and his associates from legal accountability. The president’s ongoing chastising of his own Justice Department, and his war of words with current and former FBI officials, stem less from any coherent ideological principle than from Trump’s desperate need to protect himself. An authoritarian model of law enforcement, where the president personally decides who is prosecuted and who is not based on his own political agenda, is simply the best way for Trump to shield himself and his inner circle from legal consequences.

The president’s opponents have yet to craft a coherent narrative about the Trump administration’s corruption, even though the only major legislative accomplishment Trump has to his name is cutting his own taxes. But his supporters have, ironically, crafted an overarching explanation to account for how the president they voted for, who came to office promising to eliminate official corruption, has come to embody it. The “Deep State” narrative is no more complicated than an attempt to explain the accumulating evidence of misbehavior on the part of the administration as a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame the president. The more evidence of wrongdoing that comes to light, the more certain they are that the conspiracy theory is true. In their own way, Trump supporters have recognized that Trump’s burgeoning list of scandals is made of branches from the same twisted tree.

The latest Trumptown fable, that the FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign was meant to aid Clinton’s campaign, is as incoherent as it is absurd. The FBI properly kept the Russia inquiry under wraps while high-ranking FBI officials defied Justice Department rules and made public statements about two inquiries into Clinton prior to election day. Neither of those inquiries led to indictments or guilty pleas; the special-counsel inquiry has led to more than 20 so far. Had the FBI been motivated by a political vendetta against Trump, leaking the fact of the inquiry on its own, even if it uncovered no malfeasance at all, would have been enough to damage his candidacy. The essential quality of pro-Trump punditry however, is that their perception of reality must be warped to conform to the latest Trump proclamation, even if it contradicts previous Trump pronouncements or established facts. Trump dictates reality, and his supporters rush to justify whatever has been decreed. In this way, Trump manages to corrupt not just those in his immediate orbit or inner circle, but even those who have never met him, who endeavor to reconcile the insurmountable gap between his words and the world as it exists.

There’s more in which he also discusses the difference between the corruption and other repugnant aspects of Trump’s administration, his xenophobic white nationalism in particular. I would also argue that his manifest unfitness in foreign policy is truly alarming on its own terms and I believe his authoritarian impulses extend beyond protecting himself from personal accountability to a truly malignant fascist bent as amply demonstrated as far back as the 1980s in his odious Central Park Five rant.

But certainly, at the center of all the scandals is Trump and company’s massive, overwhelming corruption which was obvious from the beginning. We can’t say he didn’t warn us:

Trump had inked a deal with Tony Robbins, the frighteningly upbeat motivational speaker, by which Robbins would pay Trump $1 million to give ten speeches at his seminars around the country. Crucially, Trump had timed his political stops to coincide with Robbins’ seminars, so that he was “making a lot of money” on those campaign stops. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” Trump said. …

Poor Michael

Published by digby on May 21, 2018

Poor Michael

by digby

Via The Daily Beast, we learn that Trumpworld is abandoning Michael Cohen:

In March, Michael Cohen’s lawyer went on NBC to declare with “100 percent” certainty that President Donald Trump had not reimbursed Cohen for a $130,000 payment to Trump’s alleged porn star mistress. The president has now officially confirmed that that was not the case.

The now-refuted claim by Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, illustrated the potential pitfalls for allies of Cohen and his one-time client, the president, in publicly defending Cohen in the face of a rapidly escalating scandal. What began as a controversy over a six-figure payment to silence the president’s alleged mistress during the 2016 campaign has ballooned into to a far larger scandal involving the sale of Trump administration access to corporate clients with business before the federal government, and even foreign state actors accused of seeking to bribe top White House officials.

Schwartz continues to serve as Cohen’s spokesman in addition to his attorney. But his TV appearances have receded since late March, leaving the task of defending Cohen to White House allies and surrogates who are increasingly wary of being forced to stick up for the man at the center of the biggest Trumpworld scandal since the Russia investigation.

Michael Cohen, in short, has become a Trumpworld pariah.

Senior White House officials habitually dodge questions on Cohen, his predicament, and its potential consequences for the president, instead referring related questions to attorneys representing Cohen and Trump. Officials privately wish that President Trump never talked or tweeted publicly about his personal lawyer—which, true to form, is a wish the president has refused to grant.

Two prominent allies of the president, who also know Cohen well, told The Daily Beast they’ve begun ignoring or declining requests from cable news bookers to discuss Cohen on-air. “It’s time to keep a distance,” one of these people said.

Numerous other Trump associates, veterans of the 2016 campaign or presidential transition, and White House surrogates said they’re avoiding any phone contact with Cohen out of concern that his line might be tapped, and that direct interaction could involve them in the scandal that has enveloped Cohen and the influence-peddling operation he set up in the wake of Trump’s election victory…

There’s more.

This does not seem very bright to me. I’m sure they don’t want to be exposed legally, but it’s important that Michael feels that he’s still warmly embraced by the president if they expect him to keep his trap shut. Cohen needs to be handled very carefully. This seems short-sighted.

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A little more confrontation and a little less caution

Published by digby on May 21, 2018

A little more confrontation and a little less caution

by digby

Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast for the win:

The Democrats Need to Get Much Tougher on These Trump Scandals or They Will Lose the Midterms

By trying a ‘clever’ midterm strategy that focuses on policy not scandal, the Democrats are failing to hold this White House to account. It will cost them the election.

Okay, Democrats. It’s time.

Sunday afternoon at 1:37 pm, the president of the United States tweeted that he is ordering an investigation of the investigation into him. His campaign, okay; but him. Think about that.

Imagine that Hillary Clinton were president and the Republicans were investigating the Clinton Foundation, and she ordered an investigation into that investigation, charging, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the FBI had improperly infiltrated the foundation. And no, this professor is not “proof” of “infiltration.” And anyway, if the FBI has credible reason to believe a crime may have been committed, isn’t infiltration of the enterprise suspected of criminality…their job?
[…]
In any of those cases, Washington would have exploded. But now this president—who, it is documented, has spent 40 years lying to and defrauding people in business, and who lies nearly every time he speaks—and his apologists have so corrupted our system that some people are discussing Trump’s move as if it’s legitimate. Just another interesting twist and turn in Donald Trump’s Washington, ha ha.

No. It’s not. It’s a scandal. It’s the biggest sign yet that Trump knows and respects no law and will use every tool he can to thwart an investigation that is obviously legitimate. We learned over the weekend from the Times that Russia may not be the half of it, a Gulf emissary reportedly offered to help Trump win the election. Again, the August 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Erik Prince, and people from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel (what a troika!) is not denied by Trump spokespeople; nor, so far, is the fact that Don Jr. “responded approvingly” to their offers of help. Boom. That alone is collusion and is illegal. As even Steve Bannon knows, if you’re part of a presidential campaign, you call the FBI the moment you even receive such an offer.

With each revelation, Trump becomes more unhinged and more accusatory and thinks up new ways to try to discredit the FBI and entire principle of independent investigations of the executive branch. He and his campaign almost certainly cheated, and all he does—this is the president of the United States—is lie and turn the tables, trying to delegitimize the entire Department of Justice.

Democrats: what say you? I looked Monday morning at Chuck Schumer’s Twitter feed. He retweeted a couple tweets from his Senate colleague Mark Warner about Republicans in Congress “who are trying to obstruct Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation and could be coming close to crossing a legal line.” But nothing about Trump. Nancy Pelosi sent out one tweet criticizing Trump’s Sunday afternoon tweet. Warner, who is the leading Democrat on the Senate intel committee, wrote a few tweets, less about Trump than about Congress. His House counterpart, Adam Schiff, was more direct:

This is all okay as far as it goes, but the country needs more from them. Lately there’s been some chatter about whether Democrats want to talk about Trump heading into the midterms. My colleagues Sam Stein and Gideon Resnick reported that congressional Democrats were refusing to go on cable shows because they want to talk about prescription drug prices but cable wants to talk about Trump. Then I reported that four leading Democratic presidential hopefuls seemed to go out of their way at a major liberal conference to avoid mentioning the president.

This is a guaranteed losing strategy. Candidates campaigning in districts can talk about prescription drugs and other matters all they want. This will happen well below the radar of cable news shows, but voters will hear them. Meanwhile, the national party has to talk about Trump. If a narrative develops between now and November that the Democrats want to be “careful” about how they speak of Trump, core Democratic voters will be demoralized and disgusted.

I can hear the answer back: We’re letting Mueller take care of that. If and when he issues a report before Election Day, we’ll pounce. That’s too cautious. It depends on the actions of someone else. It’s not enough. I’m sure they’d also say we don’t want to get sucked into the impeachment trap, seem like we’re too eager to impeach Trump. But that’s easily enough avoided. All they need to say is we’ll follow the evidence and see where it leads.

But the point they need to emphasize is that unlike the Republicans, they’ll look for the evidence. They’ll look into the Trump Hotel. They’ll haul Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke and Ben Carson up before Congress to explain things. They’ll focus on what’s been happening at the Veterans’ Administration. They’ll investigate policies and outcomes, from the environment to the tax bill (oversight can be “substantive” too, and thus seen as not just “political”). They’ll investigate this Jakarta thing, which has barely been discussed in the media but which alone would have floored this city in normal times. And yes, you bet they’ll investigate the campaign.

The president is lawless. His lawyer is lawless. Both of his lawyers. All they know is to lie, deny, distort, extort, and bully. The country is being governed by Mafiosi values. If the Democrats are unwilling to say that, they’ll let down millions of Americans who are counting on them to defend the law, and they’ll lose, and deserve to. History sometimes presents moments when caution is called for. This isn’t one of them.

I agree. The DC Democrats are acting frightened and cowardly in the face of this Trump onslaught and whether their focus groups admit it or not, it’s bound to make the public frightened too. Will no one stand up against this man other than a prosecutor who must act in secret and some leakers who tell the media certain details anonymously?

What’s going on here? Is this supposed to just fix itself?

I guess the bet is that once Trump is found out everything will just reverse itself and we’ll all be fine. Or maybe they aren’t bothered by any of this and just figure that if they talk about their ten point plans to raise the capital gains tax people will ignore that there is a criminal fascist in the White House and a party that’s supporting him to come out in droves.

If you’re looking for leadership in a time of crisis, keep looking. But if you’re looking for some earnest officials who have a nice list of things they’ll do some time in the distant future after Donald Trump has done his worst then you know where to find them.

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Doubling down on the dehumanization

Published by digby on May 21, 2018

Doubling down on the dehumanization

by digby

This is a headline on the official White House web site:

MS-13 is a violent, criminal gang. But they are not animals. Calling human beings animals has a long pedigree among genocidal maniacs.

Vox had a good explainer:

This type of language “justifies or even mandates violence,” Nour Kteily, who studies the psychology of dehumanization and its consequences at Northwestern, told me then (check out a feature on Kteily’s work here). He feared it also “communicates that message more broadly to the most fervent of the white supremacists who number among the president’s supporters.”

Just to be clear: Trump’s off-the-cuff remark won’t immediately lead to a worst-case scenario. But it’s worth remembering that dehumanization is already disturbingly prevalent in America. We don’t need anyone — especially Trump — stoking it further. And “dehumanization today [toward certain groups] has been anything but subtle,” Kteily said.

Dehumanization is a mental loophole that allows us to dismiss other people’s feelings and experiences

If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify those acts.

Look back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human traits. During the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be cleared out.

In the wake of World War II, psychologists wanted to understand how the genocide had happened. In the 1970s, Stanley Milgram’s infamous electroshock experiment showed how quickly people cave to authority. Also in that decade, there was Philip Zimbardo’s “prison experiment,” which showed how easily people in positions of power can abuse others.

At Stanford in 1975, Albert Bandura showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock.

From these experiments and others that followed, it became clear that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity,” Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University, told me in 2017.

Dehumanizing sentiment already exists in America. Encouraging it will likely make the country a more hostile place.

In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human.

And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.

You’d hope people would rate all groups at 100 — perfectly human, right?

They don’t. Mexican immigrants and Muslims are routinely dehumanized in these studies, scoring, on average, well below 90.

Last year, a psychological survey of the alt-right — an ideological group that supports white nationalism — found even higher levels of dehumanization for many of these groups. On average, the alt-righters in the survey rated Muslims at a 55.4 (again, out of 100), Democrats at 60.4, black people at 64.7, Mexicans at 67.7, journalists at 58.6, Jews at 73, and feminists at 57. These groups appear as subhumans to those taking the survey. And what about white people? They were scored at a noble 91.8.

This is concerning not only because you have one human rating another as “less than” but also because a willingness to dehumanize is correlated with anti-immigrant actions and behaviors.

“Individuals who dehumanized Mexican immigrants to a greater extent were more likely to cast them in threatening terms, withhold sympathy from them, and support measures designed to send and keep them out, such as surveillance, detention, expulsion, and building a wall between the United States and Mexico,” Kteily and a co-author wrote in a 2017 paper.

And that’s only part of the problem.

In his studies, Kteily also looked at what happens when people feel like they’re being dehumanized. And here, the research predicts a vicious cycle.

“Those who dehumanize are more likely to support hostile policies, and those who are dehumanized feel less integrated into society and are more likely to support exactly the type of aggressive responses … that may accentuate existing dehumanizing perceptions,” he wrote in the 2017 paper.

As the vicious cycle intensifies, the whole country becomes a more hostile, less safe place for everyone.

There’s more at the link.

I think we all know that there are plenty of Americans who think this way. But to have it institutionalized on the White House website in language that sounds like a throwback to he 19th century is a very bad sign.

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In the right’s alternate reality Trump lost the election

Published by digby on May 21, 2018
In the right’s alternate reality Trump lost the election
by digby

Last week we found out that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s now-notorious fixer, had been working on that Trump Tower Moscow deal much longer than was previously known. According to Yahoo News, congressional investigators and prosecutors have emails and text messages showing that Cohen was still working the deal with Trump associate and government informant Felix Sater well into 2016, even as Trump was sewing up the Republican nomination. Sater is the one who famously sent Cohen the email in 2015 that said “I will get Putin on this program, and we will get Donald elected.” Cohen had insisted that the deal was scrapped at the end of 2015, and that turns out to be a lie. Shocking, I know.

Then there was the byzantine story of Michael Cohen and some Qatari investors in a basketball league, who were offering bribes and who may be involved in one of the Steele dossier’s most intriguing rumors: the one about a quid pro quo involving the Trump campaign and the multibillion-dollar sale of one-fifth of the Russian fossil fuel giant Rosneft to the Swiss trading firm Glencore and Qatar’s sovereign investment fund. Did I mention that it was byzantine? You can read all about it in this Slate article by Jeremy Stahl.

On Saturday, The New York Times dropped a bombshell about yet another meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and some foreign agents offering to “help” with his dad’s presidential campaign, this one in August of 2016, three months before the election. The group that met at Trump Tower included George Nader, an emissary for two wealthy princes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Israeli social media specialist Joel Zamel and former Blackwater owner Erik Prince. (Nader and Prince also attended that suspicious Seychelles meeting with Russian and UAE officials a week before the inauguration)

The Times reported that Donald Jr. “responded approvingly,” and Nader became a Trump intimate who subsequently met frequently with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn, the future (if short-lived) national security adviser. After the election, a company associated with Zamel gave Nader an “elaborate” presentation about how important social media had been to Trump’s win and Nader, for unclear reasons, paid Zamel “a large sum of money, described by one associate as up to $2 million.”

Everyone denies there was anything untoward about any of it, of course. They’re all as innocent as newborn babes. But all these overlapping chess moves might lead one to take a second look at Trump’s astonishing decision last summer to take sides against Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally, in the dispute between that country and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Those were just three big new stories that hit last week, opening up a whole different line of inquiry about foreign interference in the 2016 election. And yet, despite all the guilty pleas, indictments, interviews and subpoenas, two (admittedly tainted) congressional investigations and mountains of press reports that indicate something extremely unusual happened in the Trump presidential campaign, the conservative media has embarked on a crusade from an alternate universe.

In the right wing’s alternative version of reality, none of these stories about Trump and his associates meeting with foreign actors eager to help him sabotage his rival’s campaign, or large sums of unaccounted-for foreign money being funneled to his personal fixer, or even the obvious conflicts of interest suggesting that flat-out corruption is the most reasonable explanation for Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy, even exist. In their reality, federal law enforcement intervened in the election to deny Donald Trump the presidency on behalf of Hillary Clinton. You may think they had a funny way of showing it, since they kept their investigation top secret while the FBI director went out of his way to sully Hillary Clinton’s reputation at the last minute. But that’s the conservative media’s story and they are sticking to it — at least for now.

The details in actual reality are pretty straightforward. The FBI had been keeping tabs on Paul Manafort and Carter Page for some time, well before they signed on to the 2016 Trump campaign, because of their suspicious ties to the Kremlin and other high-level politicians in Moscow’s orbit. In Page’s case, he had been approached by Russian agents some years back, while Manafort was known to be engaging in financial crimes involved with Ukrainian oligarchs. It is not surprising that law enforcement antennae went up when people such as that joined a presidential campaign.

Then there was the hacking, the social media manipulation and the hiring of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, formerly the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who had been fired by President Obama and had a huge ax to grind. Then a young foreign policy guy, George Papadopoulos, got drunk in London and spilled to an Australian diplomat that he’d been approached by Russians who told him they had all kinds of dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported over the weekend that all of this led the FBI in the summer of 2016 to engage a longtime Republican foreign policy expert who had operated as an informant in the past to approach Papadopoulos, Page and Flynn to see what he could find out. We don’t know whether this source turned up anything, but investigating the possibility that campaign officials were being set up by foreign actors for blackmail or undue influence would be a standard counter-intelligence operation. Having an informant check it out is more discreet than sending in some G-men to interrogate the officials and, as I mentioned, the fact that the FBI never breathed a word of any of this during the campaign makes the suggestion that they were trying to help Hillary Clinton entirely absurd.

You will recall that Rudy Giuliani blabbed a while back that Team Trump was planning to “make a fuss” on the one-year anniversary of the Mueller investigation. This seems to be part of their coordinated extravaganza, with the president himself leading the charge:

This has been percolating for some time on the right, courtesy of House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who has been demanding that the name of this informant be released to him, and even threatening Attorney General Jeff Sessions with a contempt citation. The FBI and the Justice Department have refused, citing the usual danger to “sources and methods,” but the name has been circulating in right-wing media for days anyway and is now public. The stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post are likely heavily sourced by this coordinated “fuss.”

I’m not sure what was accomplished by this, or by the weird insistence among Trump supporters that this somehow proves the Mueller investigation is tainted. This argument by law professor Jonathan Turley seems to rest on the premise that the FBI was being unfair to the Trump campaign because, in keeping the investigation secret, it didn’t give the campaign the opportunity to let the public know that it was under investigation for possible conspiracy with a foreign adversary. Does that make sense?

On Sunday, Trump made his next move:

The Justice Department responded obediently that it had asked the inspector general to “expand the ongoing review . . . to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation” launched in 2016. Trump must feel very powerful.

This tweet on Sunday night by HUD official Lynne Patton perfectly illustrates how reality is perceived in the Trumpian alternate universe:

Someone needs to remind these people that they won the election. They seem to have forgotten.

May 22 primary watch by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 21, 2018

May 22 primary watch
by Tom Sullivan


Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon / KUT News

FiveThirtyEight previews tomorrow’s primaries in Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, and runoffs in Texas. One of the most prominent is the Georgia governor’s race, but let’s begin, as FiveThirtyEight does, with the barn-burner in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District:

Jim Gray and Amy McGrath are two of the most impressive Democratic candidates for office anywhere in the country. It’s just Democrats’ luck that they happen to be running for the same seat. McGrath jumped into the race for Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District in August 2017 with a viral video that emphasized her barrier-breaking military career. But national Democrats reportedly still pushed Gray to run, and in December he kicked off a campaign that checked all of the national party’s preferred boxes: He is wealthy, so he can self-fund his campaign; he is well-liked locally as the mayor of Lexington, the 6th District’s largest city; and he has already won this district once before, as Democrats’ candidate for U.S. Senate in 2016 (he lost statewide but carried the 6th District 52 percent to 48 percent). That’s no easy feat in this district that’s 17 points more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole.

FiveThirtyEight describes state Sen. Reggie Thomas as the progressive alternative, but a long shot in a field of six. Projected turnout is 30 percent, the highest in nearly a decade.

Cook ranks the district itself “lean Republican.” Like some other races, the two front running Democrats are not far apart on issues and it has the hallmarks an establishment vs. outsider matchup. (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee urged Jim Gray to enter the race.) But it is the outsider, McGrath, who has raised more money. Maybe that video is why:

The runoff in Texas’s 7th Congressional District between Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, backed by the DCCC, and Laura Mozer, founder of Daily Action, is being called
a battle at the heart of the Democratic Party. Fletcher topped Moser in the primary 29-24. The winner will face Republican John Culberson in a solidly Republican district. FiveThirtyEight explains:

Fletcher-Moser race actually bears more than a passing resemblance to last week’s Democratic primary in Nebraska’s 2nd District: The two candidates agree on all issues except single-payer health care, but Moser speaks with the defiant tone of the #Resistance, while Fletcher is trying to appeal to both sides of the aisle.

The runoff contest is another proxy fight between progressives the party professionals. The DCCC’s meddling in the primary (by releasing opposition research on Moser ahead of the primary) has already boosted her fundraising. It will have backfired completely if Moser wins tomorrow.

Moser has the backing of Our Revolution, the organization spun off from the Bernie Sanders campaign. Politico observes its candidates have had no major wins in 2018. Party insiders are already gnashing their teeth over the snub in Nebraska. Even so:

“Republicans were at each others’ throats for years. All it got them was the House, the Senate and the presidency,” said Nathan Gonzales, who analyzes congressional races for Inside Elections, a nonpartisan campaign guide. “Democrats can be divided and still win because they have a common enemy in Donald J. Trump.”

In Georgia, all eyes are on the race for governor. Among Republicans, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle is favored. Competitors have taken to desperate measures to gain attention:

The campaign has consisted of the candidates tripping over themselves as they run rightward. Cagle made national news when he threatened to eliminate a tax break for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines in retaliation for Delta ending its relationship with the National Rifle Association. (Cagle’s threat may have backfired by scaring away some business-friendly Republicans.) Kemp has aired some explosive ads, including one where he implicitly threatens his daughter’s suitor with a shotgun. And Williams has campaigned across the state with his “deportation bus,” a gray school bus that reads “fill this bus with illegals” on the side.

By contrast, the Democratic contest will be decided one way or the other on Tuesday, and the two candidates couldn’t be taking more different approaches. Stacey Evans believes that the key to a Democrat winning Georgia is persuading moderate Republicans like those in the rural trailer parks she grew up in or the Atlanta suburb she later represented in the state House. Former state House minority leader Stacey Abrams thinks it’s time to try a new strategy: turning out the hundreds of thousands of black voters who stayed home in 2014 and 2016. Whichever candidate wins on Tuesday, Democrats will most likely need to use some combination of the two strategies if they hope to prevail in November. Georgia is still pretty red, with a partisan lean of R+8.

Abrams has the advantage of having hundreds of thousands of black Georgia voters she can court. That’s not the case in many places where Democrats struggle as much as they do in Georgia. Georgia is 31 percent black; Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District is 9 percent. Abrams is also favored to win tomorrow, with polls showing her with a 20-point lead over Evans.

Lastly in Arkansas’s 2nd Congressional District, Rep. Clarke Tucker, a DCCC “Red to Blue” candidate, appears poised to win the Democratic primary. He holds a 30-point lead in polling over three progressive candidates. It’s a start for Arkansas.

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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.