Month: June 2018

Not dead yet
by Tom Sullivan

Writing for Medium, Donnie Fowler pushed back on a Los Angeles Times article on the supposed apathy of the Trump Resistance in California. The Times piece was the usual man-on-the-street, after-action report about people who did not vote in the primary (and some who did):

What happened to the emerging Latino vote?

The angry and energized youth vote?

To a top-two primary system that was supposed to jazz candidates and voters from all political parties?

And to the hand-over-heart sense of civic duty?

Was the weather just too nice Tuesday for anyone to be bothered?

But contrary to seeing the primary vote as a fizzle for the Resistance, Fowler explains why voters didn’t swarm the polls (emphasis mine):

Here’s why: Trump was not on the ballot. California’s Republicans, now a third party in our progressive enclave, are also really motivated to vote. And there is no functioning Democratic Party in the vast majority of counties.

First, Trump was not actually on the ballot on Tuesday in California. Most voters don’t vote only for symbolism or for some strategic reason. (“We’ll prove that Trump is a scourge on America by turning out for Gavin Newsom!”) Further, everyone knows that Democrats run and will run the state, so there’s no threat to vote against in state government. So that leaves only 7 congressional districts (of California’s 53 total districts) where Californians can actually make a direct anti-Trump statement by voting against a Republican incumbent congressman to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House again.

The lesson: don’t confuse the time and energy that the tiny percentage of us activists devote to politics with the limited time and energy that most regular voters give to it. We are not normal. We are nerds.

Guilty as charged. Non-nerds are not stupid, they’re busy. With two jobs and bills to pay errands to run and soccer practice and dance classes and the book club and church on Wednesday nights (for those in the South).

Secondly, Fowler writes, Republicans feel under siege and are thus more motivated in solid blue California. (Except it’s not.)

Third, there is no functioning Democratic Party in California that is capable of talking to and driving voters at the local level. For sure, a lot has has popped up here in the 18 months since Trump’s election — but a lot of that is extra-Party Resistance groups and independent expenditure campaign committees. (Why didn’t they join the state Democratic Party instead of doing their own thing?) Winning elections requires very hard, very detailed, very un-sexy work over many years. Sure, there are official county Democratic parties in California, but how many of them have been truly organized, even professionalized, over several years? Almost none. God bless the very few worthy Party stalwarts who meet with each other a few times a year to debate rules and pick candidates, but that’s not all a political party should be. What exists year-round beyond some clever political consultants who are selling polls and TV ads? Almost nothing.

That’s what I’ve found across the country. State parties from one coast to the other (and beyond) have neither the budgets nor the bandwidth to teach locals. Each year, after raising the operating funds, filing the reports, paying the bills, fulfilling their statutory obligations, and organizing the annual meetings, they have just enough time left to teach locals how to log into VoteBuilder and organize a precinct meeting before a year is gone and it’s time to start over again.

Rural counties even in blue states don’t do more because they don’t know what more looks like. The governor’s race doesn’t go out there, nor the Senate race, nor presidential campaigns. Noobs don’t learn how to run professionalized operations because they are never exposed to any.

Still, contrary to what the reporter picked up in L.A., it’s been interesting to get requests for my GOTV primer from multiple red counties in the Sierra foothills. One struggling Resistance activist complained she had “1,700 uneducated, ill-focused members of a Progressive group.” But novices. She ended with a request for help, “PLEASE.”

It is the same in many places across the country. Members of the Resistance want to do more. They are still learning how. Rumors of the Resistance fading are greatly exaggerated.

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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.

Rudy forgot about Trump’s history of acting in porno movies

by digby

I look forward to hearing Rudy explain that soft core porn is just fine and totally different than Stormy Daniels career:

When Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that Stormy Daniels has no credibility because she is is a porn star, he neglected to mention that his client, President Donald Trump, has appeared in three Playboy videos that feature nudity and softcore pornographic content.

“So yes, I respect all human beings,” Giuliani said at a conference in Tel Aviv, talking about Daniels, who alleges that she had an affair with Trump, which he denies. “I even have to respect, you know, criminals. But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman or a woman of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.”

The former Republican New York mayor went on to say, “So Stormy, you want to bring a case, let me cross-examine you. Because the business you’re in entitles you to no degree of giving your credibility any weight. And secondly, explain to me how she could be damaged. I mean, she has no reputation. If you’re going to sell your body for money, you just don’t have a reputation. Maybe old-fashioned, I don’t know.”

CNN and BuzzFeed reported in 2016 that Trump appeared in Playboy films in 1994, 2000, and 2001. In the first appearance, Trump is seen photographing clothed models with a Polaroid camera and interviewing a Playmate. In the second, he opens a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limousine as visiting Playmates cheer. In the third, he appears backstage at a fashion show with two Playmates along with the future first lady, then Melania Knauss, his girlfriend at the time.

In all three appearances, Trump appears briefly and he, as well as the models on camera alongside him, are fully clothed. Other scenes in the films contain nudity and sexually explicit content, such as women touching themselves seductively.

The VHS cover of the 2000 “Playboy Centerfold” film contains the following description of its contents: “From luxuriating in a warm, soapy tub, to reveling at an exclusive night club, Carol and Darlene bare their sex appeal and lead you on a sensual journey of discovery.”
“Beauty is beauty, and let’s see what happens with New York,” Trump says in that video, wherein Playmates travel to different cities in the country.

Bridget Marks, one of the models Trump interviewed for the 1994 tape, told CNN in 2016 that he was “thoughtful” and “respectful” to her.

Another former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, alleges that she had an affair with Trump between 2006 and 2007, around the same time as Daniels, who alleges her affair occurred in 2006. Trump also has denied McDougal’s claims. Giuliani did not mention McDougal in his comments in Tel Aviv.

He stood by those comments on Thursday, saying to CNN, “If you’re involved in a sort of slimy business, (that) says something about you — says something about how far you’ll go to make money,” he said.

Later:

“If you’re a (feminist) and you support the porn industry, you should turn in your credentials,” Giuliani told CNN Thursday.

“If you’re involved in a sort of slimy business, (that) says something about you — says something about how far you’ll go to make money.”

Again, Giuliani seems to think that selling images of your body is somehow less respectable than selling your soul to a corrupt cretin who brags that he likes to grab women by the pussy against their will. Oh, and also doesn’t care about foreign adversaries helping him win elections (at best — at worst he solicited their help.)

I’m so sick of these misogynist assholes I could scream.

By the way, Melania may not be all that happy with Rudy’s comments about respecting women who sell their body. After all, she did nude modeling herself:

She is a very beautiful woman who made an honest living as a model, sometimes as a nude model. Does Giuliani this she isn’t respectable either?

Giuliani is a pig. That is all.

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Some Good, In Fact Wonderful, News

by tristero

And we could really use it. Sorry, it’s not politics, it’s a long lost John Coltrane album from 1963.

And if there’s anything the world cannot get enough of, it’s Trane. Like every other musician with a gram of sensitivity, Coltrane is the gold standard for sheer beauty, musical and spiritual depth (music and spirit are synonyms for Coltrane), and seriousness of purpose. I don’t have anything original to say, just very moved and grateful that a little bit more of his great music-making will soon be available.

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Blast from the past

by digby

I ran across this today and thought I’d share it:

HIATT: Just back to the campaign. You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of private …

TRUMP: No …

HIATT: … your private parts.

TRUMP: No, no. No, no. I am not doing that.

HIATT: Do you regret having engaged in that?

TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.

MARCUS: You’re on the cover.

TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it …

TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.

MARUS: You chose to respond.

TRUMP: I had no choice.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it during a debate. Can you explain why you had no choice?

TRUMP: I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”

MARCUS: You told us in the debate ….

TRUMP: And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.

MARCUS: You told us in the debate that you guaranteed there was not another problem. Was that presidential? And why did you decide to do that?

TRUMP: I don’t know if it was presidential, honestly, whether it is or not. He said, ‘Donald Trump has small hands and therefore he has small something else.’ I didn’t say that. And all I did is when he failed, when he was failing, when he was, when Christie made him look bad, I gave him the– a little recap and I said, and I said, and I had this big strong powerful hand ready to grab him, because I thought he was going to faint. And everybody took it fine. Whether it was presidential or not I can’t tell you. I can just say that what he said was a lie. And everybody, they wanted to do stories on my hands; after I said that, they never did. And then I held up the hand, I showed people the hand. You know, when I’ve got a big audience. So yeah, I think it’s not a question of presidential …

That was March 2016.

This was May 8th of this year:

TRUMP: "We put our large beautiful hands (?) on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance." pic.twitter.com/njEguHauLY— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2018

This was last week:

Trump brags about the size of his hands.

"We'll build new strength into our country, new hope into our communities, and we'll do it all with these big, beautiful hands. Look at these hands." pic.twitter.com/AcNEh8KgWU— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2018

Tens of million of people support this dotard.

Oh heck, you mean people are actually concerned about Trump after all?

by digby

Say it ain’t so:

By a whopping 25-point margin, voters say they’re more likely to back a congressional candidate who promises to serve as a check on President Donald Trump, according to a new national poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.

And by a similar margin, they say they’re less likely to vote for someone who has supported the president on most issues.

At the same time, six-in-10 are satisfied with the U.S. economy, and a plurality of voters give Trump credit for the economic improvement.

Despite that economic optimism, however, the poll shows that Democrats enjoy a 10-point advantage on congressional preference, with 50 percent of registered voters wanting a Democratic-controlled Congress, versus 40 percent who want a GOP-controlled one.

Democrats held a 7-point edge on this question back in April, 47 percent to 40 percent.

What’s more, Democrats are more enthusiastic about the upcoming midterms, with 63 percent of them registering either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale of interest, while just 47 percent of Republicans signal the same level of enthusiasm.

And 48 percent of voters indicate they’re more likely to support a congressional candidate who promises to provide a check on President Trump, compared with 23 percent who say they’re less likely to support such a candidate.

By contrast, a majority — 53 percent — say they’re less likely to vote for a candidate who supports the president on most issues.

The margins are even more pronounced among voters living in competitive states and congressional districts, with more than 50 percent of them signaling their support for a candidate who serves as a check on Trump.

“The polling data points to a repudiation of Donald Trump and to the benefit of Democrats,” says Democratic pollster Fred Yang, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “I think this is becoming a traditional midterm where the party controlling the White House is going to lose seats.”

Then there’s this:

Check out these numbers: In the merged NBC/WSJ polling of 2017, white women with college degrees preferred a Dem-controlled Congress by 17 points (55 percent to 38 percent). In the merged NBC/WSJ polling from January to April, it was 26 points (60 percent to 34 percent). And in this latest poll, the margin is now 30 points (60 percent to 30 percent).

By contrast, men without college degrees have become more GOP – from R+26 in 2017 (58 percent to 32 percent) to R+37 now (64 percent to 27 percent).

(I understand such women are known as the “middle aged hysterics of the Resistance” in certain left-wing circles. Still, it’s probably a plus for the Democratic party to have more people in the coalition even if they are unpleasant to have around. There are a lot of them.)

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating has ticked up to 44%, but it’s because the deplorable base loves him more than ever:

Trump’s support is deeper with key Trump/GOP groups, but it’s not broader, especially when it comes to support for his own party.

For instance, Trump’s job rating inched up among Trump voters, Republicans, rural voters and whites. But on the generic ballot, groups that have been opposed to Trump — white women, whites with college degrees and African Americans — have become more pro-Democrat.

In other words, Trump’s base loves him more than ever. But that base love isn’t translating to better midterm prospects for the GOP.

This was interesting too and I think it reflects that Trump true hardcore base remains at about 5%. (The rest are just happy the economy is rolling and don’t want to rock the boat even if the president of the United States is a racist moron who may be being blackmailed by a foreign power because the only thing in the world that matter to them is money.)

Finally, 37 percent of voters say that — based on what they’ve seen, read or heard — Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign did collude or work secretly with Russia, while 34 percent disagree; 28 percent didn’t know enough to say.

Those findings are essentially unchanged from the December 2017 NBC/WSJ poll.

Additionally, a combined 53 percent of voters say they either had “some” or a “great deal” of confidence in special counsel Robert Mueller conducting a fair and impartial investigation, versus a combined 40 percent who have little to no confidence.

And 46 percent believe that Mueller’s investigation should continue, while 36 percent think it should be ended.

I keep seeing doom and gloom for the Democrats because they aren’t “offering a positive vision” but I’m going to guess that the most positive vision anyone could offer right now would be that the opposition party would act as a check on this miscreant. That would the best news in the world.

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Petulant President doesn’t want to be lectured to his face

by digby

The Washington Post reports:

President Trump is planning to fly to Canada on Friday. He is not exactly happy about it.

The president has vented privately about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as their trade tensions have spilled into public view. He has mused about finding new ways to punish the United States’ northern neighbor in recent days, frustrated with the country’s retaliatory trade moves.

And Trump has complained to aides about spending two days in Canada for a summit of world leaders, believing the trip is a distraction from his upcoming Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to three people familiar with Trump’s views.

In particular, the president said Tuesday to several advisers that he fears attending the Group of Seven summit in rural Charlevoix, Quebec, may not be a good use of his time because he is diametrically opposed on many key issues with his counterparts — and does not want to be lectured by them.

Here’s how he spent his valuable time today:

And this:

This is the same man who said he'd only need 1.5 hours of preparation to negotiate a nuclear disarmament agreement with the USSR in 1984. https://t.co/dbRgfSnQg2— Gennady Rudkevich (@grudkev) June 7, 2018

God help us.

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My Salon column today is about the Rudy’s looney “talk” yesterday in Tel Aviv:

McConnell just made a commercial for the Democrats

by digby

If they have the guts to use it:

“I don’t think we need to be trying to rein in the president…”

I think that says it all.

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Foundation and Trumpire
by Tom Sullivan

A tweet thread last week from Matthew Chapman of ShareBlue media distilled the essence of Donald Trump’s worldview. It bears reprising.

We already know the sitting president thinks there are only two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. But one telltale of what I call the Midas cult (everything that can be turned into gold should be) is the need to reduce every human interaction to a transaction. Chapman believes in Trump’s mutated version, every transaction is essentially a con.

Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you're not ripping someone off, you're getting ripped off.— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) June 1, 2018

No human interaction, no deal is worth making unless he sees himself as the winner and you as the loser. If he cannot twist the arrangement to fit that frame, it means he’s being ripped off.

It's not simply that Trump *doesn't* think the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran nuclear deal, TPP, NAFTA, or luxury cars from Germany are a good deal for America. It's that he *can't* think that.

It's an alien concept to him that a deal other people want with us could also help us.— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) June 1, 2018

To Trump's mind, the mere fact other countries sought out these deals with us, and that their own economies benefit, is unassailable proof we got ripped off.

He can't see the evidence they helped us too. His mind will only cherry-pick potential ways it could be bad for us.— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) June 1, 2018

This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn't believe in mutual benefit.

The second anyone tells him "this is your end of the deal" he'll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn't be him.— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) June 1, 2018

For this reason, Trump will overturn the western alliance and a half century of international treaties. He will will forego billions and billions in trade. He will spike bipartisan DACA deals he asked for because Democrats signed on. If they wanted it, they somehow must be ripping him off. Chapman concludes, “He is not just bad at being president, he has a defective way of seeing the world that is not compatible with being president.”

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, psychohistorian Hari Selden uses a blend of mathematics and sociology to predict human developments over vast time frames. Selden foresees the coming collapse of the Galactic Empire and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before another empire arises. He formulates a plan for shortening the intervening period of chaos and decline to one thousand years. Selden even leaves recorded instructions for helping the Foundation navigate the crises his predictions show (in general terms) will inevitably arise. Members of his Foundation will be the new order’s midwives, dedicated to preserving “humanity’s light against an inexorable tide of darkness and violence.”

But in Foundation and Empire, a mutant known as the Mule begins conquering the planets of the Foundation. Selden’s mathematics could not predict the appearance of a single individual capable of disrupting his plan. Wikipedia describes the Mule as a “mentallic,” having the ability to “change the emotions of others, a power he used to first instill fear in the inhabitants of his conquered planets, then to make his enemies devoutly loyal to him.”

Our own Mule may be such a person our founders, men of the Enlightenment, could not have foreseen two and a half centuries into the American experiment. Now, as the Foundation did, the task is to render him harmless.

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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.

The 2018 strategy to make us all lose our minds


by digby

Democrats are betting that nice staid ordinary campaign about economics is just what the doctor ordered to get their voters to the polls. I think the rationale is that everyone already knows that Trump is icky so there’s no need to mention it and anyway, it just riles up the other side which they would prefer to stay home. Just go out and tell people what you’d like to do in a world with a president who will sign your legislation and people will be very excited even though there’s absolutely no prospect of any of that happening in the near future.

The GOP is taking a slightly different tack. Greg Sargent reports that the culture war has been officially declared:

Meanwhile, this morning, the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker reports that Republicans are increasingly planning to rely on Trump’s culture-war attacks — particularly those involving MS-13 and football players kneeling during the national anthem — to goose the base in the midterms:

Trump’s habit of ignoring the economic message preferred by House and Senate Republicans in favor of the culture war tropes that propelled him to the White House is increasingly seen as an asset. Though provocative, the president’s rhetoric resonates with the base, offering Republicans a vehicle for matching the Democrats’ critical voter enthusiasm edge.

The Examiner notes that Republicans are privately cheering Trump for claiming that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) loves MS-13. And as GOP consultant Brad Todd put it, Republicans believe that “cultural cudgels” like Trump’s attacks on African American football players as anti-American and anti-military are “all upside for him.”

There are multiple reasons why this may intensify. Republicans have already shown that they don’t think messaging on the tax cut works, having cycled out of it during their loss in Pennsylvania’s 18th District. Trump himself appears persuaded that the race baiting of kneeling football players will work: Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that Trump plans to periodically “revive” these attacks, because he believes doing so “revs up his political base.”

Meanwhile, various circumstances may bring immigration to the fore. Centrist House Republicans are pushing a discharge petition to force a vote to protect the “dreamers,” and GOP leaders are trying to find a compromise that Trump might sign — protecting the dreamers, plus cuts to legal immigration — to avert that outcome. It’s unlikely that Republicans will find this compromise, and if the discharge strategy does force a House vote protecting the dreamers, Trump will insist that Senate Republicans block it. Whatever is to be in this debate, as it comes to a head, Trump’s demagoguery about immigrants will veer headlong into his usual modes of xenophobia and hate.
[…] 

On another front, Robert S. Mueller III’s probe may hit a climax of sorts soon, as he is expected to produce a report on whether Trump obstructed justice. As it is, Trump — with his claims of absolute power to pardon people associated with the probe, himself included, and his legal team’s insistence that he cannot obstruct justice by definition — is already descending into new authoritarian depths. Trump’s attacks on Mueller are dramatically eroding Mueller’s credibility with Republican voters, and we’ve already seen some GOP candidates start mimicking Trump’s authoritarianism, aping his calls for locking up Hillary Clinton and ending the Mueller investigation. If we learn more about Mueller’s findings, setting off Trump, all this could get louder.

As Ron Brownstein reported for the Atlantic, Republicans are basically betting their majorities on the idea that such racial and cultural provocations will boost turnout just enough among aging, blue-collar and rural white voters unhappy with the evolution of the country to enable them to prevail…

This should be a lot of fun …

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