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Month: June 2018

The great big gaping hole in the argument

Published by digby on June 27, 2018

The great big gaping hole in the argument

by digby

In fact they waved the NY Times off the story:

It’s ridiculous on its face. Imagine if they’d leaked what they knew at the time.

70,000 votes across 3 states.

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Trade war for dummies

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

Trade war for dummies

by digby

While we’re all extremely concerned about Sarah Sanders’ inalienable right to finish her cheese board, something else is happening. American companies are starting to accept that Trump’s trade war is actually happening. So they are reacting, on Wall Street and in their own boardrooms.

Trump doesn’t like it:

Krugman has some words:

The Trump administration appears to be headed for a trade war on three fronts. As far as anyone can tell, it is simultaneously going to take on China, the European Union and our partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. The economic fallout will be ugly.

But that’s probably not the whole story: There’s also likely to be ugly political fallout, not just abroad but here at home, too. In fact, I predict that as the downsides of hard-line trade policy become apparent, we’ll see a nasty search by President Trump and company for people to scapegoat. In fact, that search has already started.

To understand what’s coming, you need to understand two crucial points.

First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing. Its ideas on trade don’t seem to have evolved at all from those expressed in a white paper circulated by Wilbur Ross, now the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, now the trade czar, in 2016. That white paper was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks. So these people are completely unprepared for the coming blowback.

Second, this administration is infested — I use that word advisedly — with conspiracy theorists. In fact, it seems, literally, to treat belief in absurd conspiracy theories as a job qualification. You may remember the case of an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who was temporarily suspended after reports that she had worked for a conspiracy-theory website. Well, it turns out that she listed that connection on her résumé when she applied for government employment. She was hired not despite but because of her connection to paranoid politics.

So what will happen when cluelessness meets conspiracy theorizing?

About that trade blowback: Trump famously declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Never mind the goodness issue: It’s already becoming apparent that the “easy to win” part is delusional. Other countries won’t quickly give in to U.S. demands, in part because those demands are incoherent — Trump is demanding that Europe end the “horrific” tariffs it doesn’t actually impose, while the Chinese can’t even figure out what the Trump administration wants, with officials calling America “capricious.”

Add in the enormous amount of ill will Trump has generated around the world, and the idea that America is going to get major concessions anytime soon is deeply implausible. In fact, I’m finding it hard to see how we avoid a series of tit-for-tat retaliations that end up taking us well down the path toward full-blown trade war.

And while some import-competing industries might gain from such a trade war, there would be a lot of American losers. For one thing, a lot of American jobs — more than 10 million, according to the Commerce Department — are supported by exports. Agriculture, in particular, is a very export-centered sector, sending more than 20 percent of what it produces abroad. A trade war would eliminate many of these jobs; it would create new jobs in import-competing industries, but they wouldn’t be the same jobs for the same people, so there would be a lot of disruption.

And the damage wouldn’t be limited to export industries: More than half of U.S. imports, and 95 percent of the Chinese goods about to face Trump tariffs, are intermediate inputs or capital goods — that is, things that U.S. producers use to make themselves more efficient. So the coming trade war will raise costs and hurt prospects for many businesses, even if they aren’t exporters.

So how will this conspiracy-minded administration react when domestic victims of its trade policy start complaining? We’ve already had a preview.

To date we’ve only had some minor trade skirmishes; but even these have sent the price of soybeans, which we export to China, plunging, while the price of steel has soared. And farmers and steel-using businesses are unhappy.

So did the administration say, “Look, we’re taking a tough stand, and there will be some costs”? Why, no. Instead, Ross declared that the price changes were the work of “antisocial” speculators engaged in “profiteering,” and called for an investigation. See, we aren’t looking at the predictable effects of administration policy; we’re looking at an anti-Trump conspiracy.

By the way, this kind of accusation isn’t normal for a top government official. I follow these things, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

And remember, soybeans and steel offer just a minor preview of the disruptions ahead. How will the administration react to the blowback when the trade war really gets going? Will it admit that it misjudged the effects of its policies? Of course not.

What I predict, instead, is that it will start seeing villains under every bed. It will attribute the downsides of trade conflict not to its own actions, but to George Soros and the deep state. I’m not sure how they can work MS-13 into it, but they’ll surely try.

The point is that the politics of trade war will probably end up looking like Trump politics in general: a search for innocent people to demonize.

And I think we need to steel ourselves to the idea that tens of millions of people will believe him

He’s an effing moron.

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Trump’s little birdie sings a little song

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

Trump’s little birdie sings a little song

by digby

A new video from the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov who helped arrange the Trump Tower meeting, featuring, among other things

– Trump partying in a hotel room with bikini-clad pageant contestants
– Emin slipping Ivanka a briefcase
– Emin paying off Stormy Daniels in an elevator

He doesn’t go so far as to feature Vladimir Putin in the video, you’ll notice.

I don’t know what that’s all about but it’s — astonishing.

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Who gets to sit at the table?

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

Who gets to sit at the table?

by digby

I excerpted Michelle Goldberg’s great piece on the Red Hen controversy yesterday. This piece by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker makes a different but equally important point. He talks about the human meaning of sharing food and sitting with strangers at the table and how important that is to civilization. He acknowledges that liberals are especially torn by this since their values of toleration and inclusin are particularly challenged in this moment.

But then he gets to the nitty gritty:

[N]o, we don’t want to set a precedent in which politics are so personalized that even simple common coexistence becomes impossible. As a moral duty, we should share the pleasures and conversation of the table with as many people of as many views as we can—and, even when we can’t, we shouldn’t grumble too nastily under our breath at our kids when someone at a nearby table takes up the case for the Donald. (A self-directed moral rule, this.)

On the other hand, the Trump Administration is not a normal Presidential Administration. This is the essential and easily fudged fact of our historical moment. The Trump Administration is—in ways that are specific to incipient tyrannies—all about an assault on civility. To the degree that Trump has any ideology at all, it’s a hatred of civility—a belief that the normal decencies painfully evolved over centuries are signs of weakness which occlude the natural order of domination and submission. It’s why Trump admires dictators. Theirs are his values; that’s his feast. And, to end the normal discourse of democracy, the Trump Administration must make lies respectable—lying not tactically but all the time about everything, in a way that does not just degrade but destroys exactly the common table of democratic debate.

That’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s chosen role in life—to further those lies, treat lies as truth, and make lies acceptable. This is not just a question of protesting a particular policy; in the end there are no policies, only the infantile impulses of a man veering from one urge to another. The great threat to American democracy isn’t “policy” but the pretense of normalcy. That’s the danger, for with the lies come the appeasement of tyranny, the admiration of tyranny, and, as now seems increasingly likely, the secret alliance with tyranny. That’s what makes the Trump Administration intolerable, and, inasmuch as it is intolerable, public shaming and shunning of those who take part in it seems just. Never before in American politics has there been so plausible a reason for exclusion from the common meal as the act of working for Donald Trump.

And what about civility? Well, fundamental to, and governing the practice of, civility is the principle of reciprocity: your place at my table implies my place at yours. Conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers, Jews and Muslims and Christians and Socialists and round- and flat-Earthers—all should have a place at any table and be welcome to sit where they like. On the other hand, someone who has decided to make it her public role to extend, with a blizzard of falsehoods, the words of a pathological liar, and to support, with pretended piety, the acts of a public person of unparalleled personal cruelty—well, that person has asked us in advance to exclude her from our common meal. You cannot spit in the plates and then demand your dinner. The best way to receive civility at night is to not assault it all day long. It’s the simple wisdom of the table.

We can all be uncivil at times. And my own tribe is not innocent in that. But something different isw unfolding right now. It’s beyond my previous experience in politics. Certainly in the past there has been more violence, more physical conflict and extremely sharp rheotirc on all sides. We’ve had wars.

But this assault on reason, reality and truth itself is something new. That the man in charge is a psychologically unfit, imbecilic demagogue with a media that is brainwashing tens of millions of his followers is also new. This is a dangerous, authoritarian cult of personality in the making, with powerful people enabling it.

Look at this and tell me that we don’t have a more serious problem that “civility” on our hands:

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Look what you made me do

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

Look what you made me do

by digby

This is weird:

CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, recalled finding himself in a “twilight zone” as he was targeted with boos and jeers from people who attended a campaign rally held Monday by President Donald Trump in West Columbia, South Carolina.

“When I was at this rally tonight, people were coming up to me and saying: ‘Why are you mean to President Trump? Why are you mean to Sarah Sanders?'” Acosta told the CNN anchor Don Lemon on Monday night.

Acosta is no stranger to Trump’s ire and has frequently butted heads with the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in daily press briefings.

According to the CNN correspondent, Trump supporters, including a woman who he said whipped the crowd “into a frenzy,” accosted him by shouting and taunting.

“An elderly woman came up to me and said that I needed to get the ‘eff’ out,” Acosta said. “And then she turned to the crowd and whipped them all into a frenzy and they were saying, ‘Go home Jim, CNN sucks, fake news,’ and so on. And to me, it’s sort of like, really? This is civility?”
Video footage on social media captured the scene:

“It’s sort of like being beamed into the twilight zone, Don, covering a political rally where your fellow Americans —you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, you do the national anthem, and then they all turn on you and start screaming at you like this. It’s just unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and it’s quite startling.”

But it seems to be some kind of game of ritual humiliation for some of them rather than anything serious. They get to act like bullies and then force the victim to say “thank you sir, may I have another.”

At one point, however, rally goers approached Acosta and asked for autographs and selfies, according to BuzzFeed News. Acosta reportedly obliged and signed campaign memorabilia including a hat with Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

“I think it helps calm them down,” Acosta said, according to BuzzFeed News. “If I were to say no, it could make it more venomous.”

Another act of civility appeared to bridge the divide between Acosta and the crowd. After an elderly woman at the rally was in need of a chair, Acosta reportedly gave up his seat:

Acosta has a big important TV career so I don’t exactly feel sorry for him.

But this is sick, nonetheless. In fact, it’s grotesque. Trump basically puts the press in a cage and uses them as a target for his deplorable followers to aim their overwhelming hatred without being called bigots. And the targets must smile and pretend that it’s all just a game in order to keep them from exploding.

This is what abusers do.

Just don’t deny a Republican a side salad.

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What’s got Trump so panicked all of a sudden?

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

What’s got Trump so panicked all of a sudden?

by digby


My Salon column this morning is a pale, wan ray of hope:

I’ve written before about the fact that Senator Mark Warner, Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on intelligence,is not a bomb-throwing partisan and yet at last December he very ostentatiously gave a big speech on the floor of the Senate that caused more than a few ripples across the political media by drawing a “red line” at the firing of Robert Mueller. The timing was weird coming right around Christmas and nobody knew of any reason why he would do this out of the blue.

It was later reported in the New York Times that right around that time Trump had gone ballistic and was threatening to fire the Special Prosecutor over a report that he had demanded Trump Organization bank records from Deutche Bank. It turned out that report was erroneous and the lawyers were able to talk him out of it, but news of his tantrum must have reached beyond the White House since Warner felt the necessity to go to the floor and warn him off.

So, Warner knows things. Politico reported a little nugget of political gossip on Sunday that made Russia investigation watchers sit up and take notice:

SEN. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) hosted a dinner Friday night for more than 100 guests at his house on Martha’s Vineyard as part of the DSCC’S annual Majority Trust retreat. OVERHEARD: Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joking to the crowd: “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”

Obviously, nobody knows exactly what he was hinting at (and he says he was just joking)  but there have been a number of clues in the last couple of weeks that the investigation is picking up speed.

Mueller has called in some new prosecutors reportedly to spin off the part of the investigation pertaining to the Russian firms he previously indicted. It’s unknown why he decided to do that although informed speculation says he’s either punting on that case since there’s no hope of extraditing the accused or he’s simply freeing up some of his more seasoned prosecutors to concentrate on the more important cases.

Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort is now sitting in jail contemplating his future while his lawyers present a flurry of different arguments to spring him, none of which have been successful so far. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is reportedly getting ready to cooperate with the feds in his case in New York and Mueller is still said to be eyeing his involvement very closely. Erik Prince, the former Blackwater CEO who seems to have turned up in numerous meetings with Russians and Middle eastern potentates offering “back channels” told the press that he’s “cooperating” with the Mueller probe and has turned over his phone and computer to the investigators. (Most of the legal analysts seem to be skeptical of Prince’s sincerity, which isn’t surprising.)

Trump’s old friend Roger Stone is reportedly in the Mueller crosshairs and is considered most likely to be the next person to be indicted. (This piece by Marcy Wheeler explains just how much trouble Stone may be in and how his case is a likely template for others.)

Then there are the spicy rumors like Warner’s and this little number by BBC journalist Paul Wood late last week:

An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton campaign emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.

Again, this could just be idle gossip but it might explain why the CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix approached Wikileaks out of the blue in June of 2016 offering to help them “catalog” emails that hadn’t been released yet. If this is true it’s a very big deal that could implicate Brad Parscale, the man who ran Trump’s digital operation in 2016 and has already been tapped as his campaign manager for 2020.

Those are just a few examples of recent reports of activity in the investigation. Perhaps they don’t add up to much individually but when you combine them with the behavior of the president, it starts to look as though the pressure really is increasing. For instance:

And this, in response to the Warner story:

Trump’s rally in South Carolina last night was downright unhinged:

Trump also did his usual schtick and bragged incessantly about his fantasy accomplishments and whined and blamed others in that disjointed address but he was clearly distracted and unable to keep one train of thought going. He isn’t himself.

The signs of panic are showing among the Trump loyalists as well. CNN reported that the president’s most dedicated lieutenants in the House are pushing feverishly for the various investigating committees to work faster and take action against the DOJ as quickly as possible. Meanwhile they’ve accelerating their smear campaign against the Special Prosecutors office and are continuing to harass the Department of Justice to provide evidence in the ongoing case for the obvious purpose of sharing it, exposing it or discrediting it in advance of any legal proceeding. The DOJ is providing some documents in what appears more and more to be a strategy to buy time.

The Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand reported on their parallel strategy to build on the discredited “Spygate” non-scandal by pushing the idea that anyone in the Trump campaign shown to have interacted or conspired with Russian agents was actually the victim of an FBI frame-up. Giuliani has used that exact language in the press.

This all seems to be aimed at public opinion, which Giuliani helpfully explained some time back is in service of preventing the required two thirds vote to convict in the Senate in an impeachment trial.  That is a remarkably honest and yet pessimistic view on the part of the president’s lawyer of where this is headed.

It’s all speculation, of course. The Mueller investigation is sealed up tight as a drum. But there does seem to be agitation among people who are associated with various piece of the puzzle. As Warner said, “buckle up.”

Update: This Bloomberg piece gives a little recap of what’s known about some of the potential collusion cases.

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Not so Blue Monday by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 26, 2018

Not so Blue Monday
by Tom Sullivan

Not to dampen your enthusiasm for your local congressional races (I have a few favorites), but if you live in a red state odds are the Democratic challenger in your GOP-held district is running that marathon wearing ankle weights. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sent back to a lower court a suit over GOP gerrymandering in my state of North Carolina. The Washington Post reports:

The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case.

The Supreme Court recently considered the question of partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. The court has never found a map so infected by politics that it violated the constitutional rights of voters.

But the justices did not rule on the merits of the issue. The court said plaintiffs in Wisconsin did not have the proper legal standing and that the Maryland case was in too preliminary a stage.

North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature has implemented a map under which Republicans hold 10 of the 13 congressional seats. The GOP’s domination of the congressional delegation belies North Carolina’s recent history as a battleground state. It has a Democratic governor and attorney general, who have declined to defend the maps.

If there is a form of election rigging North Carolina Republicans haven’t tried since taking over legislative control in 2011, they either haven’t found the time or it hasn’t been invented yet. The voter ID law targeting African American voters “with almost surgical precision” struck down by a lower court failed to win review by SCOTUS last year.

Rep. David Lewis explained the GOP congressional maps he helped draw, saying, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.”

Statewide in 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in North Carolina 49.8 percent to 46.2 percent. But the GOP controls over three-quarters of NC’s congressional districts.

If the GOP controlled your state’s 2011 redistricting, even with a Trump backlash/blue wave/mid-term advantage, Democrats running for Congress in Republican-held districts are running wearing ankle weights. Some will win even so. But this structural tilt is not fixable in Congress. You need to get involved NOW in retaking control of your state legislature’s House and Senate. That’s where the real fight is heading into 2018 and 2020. You may loathe the occupant of the Oval Office, but while you are howling into the Trumpish wind, the GOP is stealing power from under your nose. Democrats won’t regain control of redistricting and the U.S. House of Representatives without it.

Keep fighting.

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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.

Action Reaction

Published by digby on June 26, 2018

Action Reaction

by digby

A great op-ed by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times. An excerpt:

Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.

But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.

Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.

Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.

There’s more. But I thought that point was important. People are upset. They are overwhelmed by the horror of this administration and the depraved cretinous president its staff and supporters energetically defend. It just keeps going on and on and on and it feels as though it will never end.

It’s too much to ask that average Americans with a heart be silent and carry on as if everything is just business as usual. It isn’t.

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Gee, I wonder if this could work in America?

Published by digby on June 25, 2018

Gee, I wonder if this could work in America?

by digby

Or would the entire Village have a fit and do everything in their power to shut down the criticism:

Angela Merkel is lucky to have Trump as an enemy.

While the president has criticized regime-change foreign policies carried out by his predecessors, Trump himself isn’t above trying to unseat a hostile government. Last Thursday, The Huffington Post gathered evidencesuggesting that Trump and his ideological allies in Washington had a concerted effort to use the current German political crisis to drive German Chancellor Angela Merkel from power.

“President Donald Trump’s attacks on Twitter against German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week provided the clearest evidence yet of a sprawling American campaign to undermine her,” The Huffington Post argued. “Merkel now has to contend with not only local opponents but also a network of influential anti-immigrant Americans and other international activists inspired by Trump and similar illiberal leaders, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” America’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, has been particularly active in this effort to, in his own words, “empower” populist forces.

Working to defeat the government of a democratically elected country is not without precedent, particularly in the Cold War era. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy worked hard to oust the Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, seen as too resistant to America’s hawkish foreign policy. Still, Kennedy worked covertly, while Trump, as his his tendency, is bluntly obvious about his goal.

Trump is so unpopular in Germany that his opposition to Merkel is strengthening her. “Chancellor Merkel still has an approval rating of 64 percent; she is by far Germany’s most respected politician,” novelist Jagoda Marinicnotes in The New York Times. “And she’s on an upswing: People here love the idea of her standing up to Mr. Trump — she got a boost after a photo of her towering over him at the G-7 summit went viral.” This parallels the recent rise in popularity of another politician who sparred with Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

One might look at Trump’s disapproval rating and note that he (barely) won the office with some very dubious help from a foreign power and daft decisions by the FBI director and question this conventional wisdom that popular opposition to Trump would be equally successful in the US.

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