Month: July 2018

Shameless is as shameless does
by Tom Sullivan

North Carolina State Legislative Office Building (Photo: W Edward Callis III)

If you think the Trump White House is shameless, you haven’t sniffed around the North Carolina state legislature lately. If there’s an election-rigging scheme state Republicans haven’t tried, they haven’t thought of it yet. This week they are back in special session to rewrite the law that governs who writes the ballot header language for constitutional amendments. “What the … huh?” you ask.

Fearing a “blue wave,” Republicans have drafted six, count ’em, six constitutional amendments for the fall ballot. They hope to drive their people to the polls with such vital issues as codifying a right to hunt and fish in the state constitution.

“I would say that this is the largest number of controversial amendments ever to be on the ballot since 1971,” said Gerry Cohen, former Director of Legislative Drafting at the General Assembly.

Republican legislators have called this special session to prevent “an outbreak of democracy,” chides the Raleigh News & Observer Editorial Board:

The point of the sudden session will be to take legislative control of writing the ballot language for six constitutional amendments. Under state law, that responsibility belongs to a three-member commission, but legislative leaders are worried that following that law could undermine their aims in proposing the amendments.

The problem for Republicans is that it includes two statewide-elected Democrats, Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and Attorney General Josh Stein. The third member is Legislative Services Officer Paul Coble, a Republican.

Guess it’s time to rewrite that law.

That makeup gave the jitters to House Rules Committee Chairman David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican. On Saturday he wrote to House Speaker Tim Moore and asked for the special session to get the writing switched to Republican control. Under state statute, the commission must prepare “an explanation of the amendment, revision, or new Constitution in simple and commonly used language” no later than 75 days before the election. The Nov. 6 election will be 106 days away on Tuesday.

Lewis doesn’t want his amendments getting, you know, politicized by allowing the majority-Democrat commission to write descriptions that might clue in the voters to what they actually do. Not to mention that enabling language for five of the six will only be written later, so how they will actually work if passed is unclear. Minor detail.

The amendments themselves are an NCGOP Christmas list. Besides enshrining hunting and fishing as a constitutionally protected right, they also further weaken the powers of the governor to appoint judges and state board members (Gov. Roy Cooper is a Democrat), and to lower the cap on the state income tax. But this maneuver is like the plot of Jack Reacher, in which a sniper kills five random people to mask the fact that the real target was only one of them.

Sure, they want to stick it to the governor and turn out their base. Hunting and fishing? Whatevs. But what they really hope to do is pass voter ID as a constitutional amendment since in passing it as a law Republicans ran afoul of federal courts. The Fourth Circuit court found that the 2013 voting reform package that included a strict voter-ID requirement plus restrictions on early voting and same-day registration was “enacted with racially discriminatory intent.” The U.S. Supreme Court let stand the appeals court decision.

The News & Observer adds:

The hallmark of this Republican-led legislature is that its actions are both heavy handed and ham handed. Legislative leaders are not only shameless about bending the law to partisan purposes, but often incompetent in doing so. Republicans have spent millions of public dollars defending these laws, often unsuccessfully, from challenges to their constitutionality.

The proposed ID amendment doesn’t specify what forms of ID would be valid, naturally. That would be left up to the NCGOP to sort out if the amendment passes, assuming Republicans still hold a veto-proof margin in the legislature after November. Then the NAACP and ACLU will take them back to court once again, this time with Republicans hoping to find a friendlier reception in a Trump-modified Supreme Court.

Yes, of course, there’s more. Judicial races were nonpartisan contests in North Carolina for years. But after an African-American Democrat, Mike Morgan, won a Republican-held seat on the state Supreme Court in 2016 and gave the majority to Democrats, the NCGOP decided it might need to add party affiliation back to the ballot, as it had already for Court of Appeals races. Well, along comes Chris Anglin:

Republicans and Democrats lit into each other Tuesday night over legislation that will strip the Republican ballot designation from a longtime Democrat who switched parties shortly before running this year for the state Supreme Court.

[…]

The Republican majority has tinkered repeatedly with North Carolina’s judicial elections in recent years, returning them to partisan affairs and, last year, canceling this year’s primaries. That had an apparently unintended consequence, doing away with the longstanding rule that no one could be on the ballot as a Republican, Democrat or member of any other political party unless they’d been registered with the party at least 90 days.

A group run by Republican operatives sent out mailers at one point, asking Democrats to run in statewide judicial races. But in the end, it was Anglin, a Democrat-turned-Republican, who jumped into the state’s highest-profile judicial race: the lone Supreme Court seat up for re-election this year.

Hoisted, petards, and all that. So, the NCGOP had hoped to dilute the Democratic vote by recruiting Democrats to run for the Supreme Court. Instead, a Democrat switched parties to dilute votes on the Republican side.

Guess it’s time to rewrite that law.

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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.

Dearest Paul Ryan

by tristero

Dearest Paul Ryan,

At a news conference today, in regards to the Stable Genius’s threat to revoke the security clearances of former national security officials who dared to criticize him, you said,  “I think he’s trolling people honestly.”

Bullshit.

Most of what Trump says seems to be taken from the playbook of  El Presidente from Bananas, but this isn’t funny at all and it’s certainly not “trolling.” Even if Trump doesn’t follow through, the intent is to shut down genuine experts on national security who have concluded that the current Republican president’s behavior vis a vis Russia borders on the treasonous.

Paul, you should be denouncing this intimidation as despicable, and in no uncertain terms. History will not be kind to you for trying to pass the buck.

Love,

tristero

Going around the principle

by digby

It’s hard to believe that it’s come to this but the US government is having to rely on the Kremlin for information about the president’s meeting with Putin. On the other hand, since the president is a pathological liar maybe it’s the best way to find out the truth anyway:

President Donald Trump’s insistence on holding a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin hobbled U.S. intelligence agencies that would usually get an intimate look at such a sit-down, but American spies still have extraordinary capabilities to piece together what was discussed.

That’s in large part due to the existence of a top-secret U.S. collection service that specializes in tapping adversaries’ communications on the fly, including those of Putin’s entourage at last week’s summit in Helsinki.

Privately, sources familiar with U.S. intelligence capabilities expressed confidence that the so-called Special Collection Service scooped up not only Putin’s readout of the two-hour meeting, but what the Kremlin’s top spymasters really think about it — and how they’re spinning it to their foreign counterparts.

That means the National Security Agency and CIA are at less of a strategic disadvantage than U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged publicly. But because they likely are missing the one critical piece of intelligence they need the most — a word-by-word account of what Trump and Putin said during the meeting — those officials appear to be flying somewhat blind when it comes to fulfilling their most important mission of helping U.S. policymakers figure out what comes next.

“Most of the questions about what happened in Helsinki — and about the risks the president created there — are skipping over a more fundamental concern: How can intel officers effectively support policy, at any level, when only the president knows what the policy is?” asks David Priess, a former CIA officer and daily White House intelligence briefer. “If, one-on-one with Putin, the president made or changed policy, and he refuses to tell anyone exactly what happened, how can the national security bureaucracy prepare the memos and talking points for future meetings to be held about those very policies?”

Factoid o’ the day

by digby

California has been “majority minority” for at least two decades.

Contains 1/8th of US population, about 1/7th of GDP, huge share of most creative and productive companies.

No detectable panic about “majority minority” status. https://t.co/TKy8f7WLFk— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 24, 2018

Republicans … oy.

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Someone intruded into his safe space

by digby

TPM: 

“Fox & Friends First” thought they had an interview lined up Monday morning with Ann Kirkpatrick, a former congresswoman and returning Democratic candidate for Congress who, at a candidates’ forum on Thursday, had raised her hand in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and in condemnation of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). 

Instead, apparently due to a producer’s mix-up, they booked Massachusetts State Rep. Barbara L’Italien, also a congressional candidate, whose website advertises her support for abolishing ICE. L’Italien wasted no time Monday morning condemning President Donald Trump’s family separations on Fox News.

“Joining us now, that candidate, the only Democrat on stage to support ICE, Ann Kirkpatrick, we appreciate it,” host Jillian Mele began. “Tell us why you do support ICE?” 

“Good morning,” L’Italien responded. “I’m actually here to speak directly to Donald Trump. I feel that what’s happening at the border is wrong. I’m a mother of four, and I believe that separating kids from their parents is illegal and inhumane.” 

She continued, revealing herself: “I’m actually Barbara L’Italien. I’m a state senator representing a large immigrant community. I’m running for Congress in Massachusetts. I keep thinking about what we’re putting parents through, imagining how terrifying that must be for those families, imagining how it would feel not knowing if I’d ever see my kids again. We have to stop abducting children and ripping them from their parents’ arms, and stop putting kids in cages, and stop making 3-year-olds defend themselves in court.” 

“That practice has stopped at this point, Ms. Kirkpatrick, right?” host Rob Schmitt interjected. 

“Kids have been reunited with their families,” Mele attempted.

L’Italien continued: “Again, my name is Barbara L’Italien, and I refuse to believe that our only options are open borders or traumatizing—“ 

The Massachusetts candidate’s video feed cut off. 

“Okay,” Smidt said. “Who is this?”

lulz…

Oops. Trump’s tax cuts don’t seem to be helping working Americans

by digby

Noah Smith at Bloomberg writes:

Wages were supposed to rise after Trump’s tax cuts. Instead, they’ve fallen https://t.co/LactYzTE7a via @bopinion pic.twitter.com/qUdfYQK1En

— Bloomberg (@business) July 21, 2018

A few months ago, I cautioned that Americans should be patient before deciding what effect President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have had on the economy. It takes a while for companies to make investment decisions, more time for those decisions to be implemented and even more time for the resulting changes in labor demand to bid up workers’ wages. It therefore takes months or even years before the full impact of the tax bill will be known.

But it’s also important to evaluate policies like Trump’s tax reform as quickly as possible. Not only is this critical for deciding whether to change course, but as more time goes on, the effects of a policy can become harder to assess. Two years from now, plenty of other things will have had time to affect the economy, including Trump’s trade war and natural economic forces. And now that the tax cut has been in effect for a half-year, the results are starting to trickle in.

First, the tax reform hasn’t yet resulted in appreciably higher wages for American workers. Real average hourly compensation actually fell in the first quarter after the tax reform was passed.

Official data for the second quarter isn’t available yet, but private data isn’t looking encouraging. PayScale’s index of real wages shows a dramatic deterioration in the period.

But perhaps two quarters is too early to expect results in this area. A better gauge might be business investment — if the tax reform is spurring businesses to increase capital expenditure, as it was supposed to do, then wage increases will probably follow in due course.

Some have expressed dismay that stock buybacks seem to have taken precedence over boosting capital investment. Since the tax cuts passed, companies have been using buybacks to return record amounts of cash to shareholders — more than $700 billion in the first two quarters. That naturally raises the possibility that companies don’t have good projects to invest in. If companies pass their tax windfall on to shareholders, those investors can choose to react by increasing consumption — meaning more of society’s resources go to the wealthy. They can also choose to invest the money in other companies with better growth prospects — but if those companies are also reacting by returning the money to their shareholders, rather than making capital expenditures, not much is getting accomplished.

Ivanka’s doing well I’m sure.

By the way, Trump keeps filing extensions for his 2017 tax return. Why, I wonder?

Not that it makes any difference:

Trump said he couldn’t release his own returns because the IRS was conducting an audit of his finances. IRS officials said any person can release the documents, whether they’re being audited or not.

Since the president’s tax returns are automatically audited by the IRS, Trump could use the same excuse for the duration of his term, The New York Times reported.

“Did they think I was just going to roll over and die?”

by digby

I don’t know what’s on the 12 Cohen-Trump tapes but I do know that Trump’s insanity has grown in intensity in the last month. Perhaps it’s a coincidence:

[P]eople familiar with Cohen’s thinking are confident that his value as a potential cooperating witness is undiminished. “It’s not the recording that is valuable,” one person said. “It’s the backstory.” Another person close to Cohen said that he was privy to information that could be valuable to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election. “When Michael says that he wants the truth out there, and that the truth is not the president’s friend, he is not talking about marginal issues. He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe,” this person continued. Three people familiar with the situation believe that Cohen has discussed information about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, during which Don Jr., Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to provide them with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. (Cohen declined to comment.)

As the newfound silence between Trump and Cohen turns into a potential cold war, Cohen has told friends that one of his biggest regrets is the embarrassment heaped upon First Lady Melania Trump. This weekend, the First Lady’s spokeswoman said that she was “focused on her role as a mother and as First Lady” and would have no further comment regarding the tapes. Cohen has said he hopes to apologize to her someday. Meanwhile, his feelings toward her husband, and towards those he believes are part of the strategy to discredit him, are chillier. “If they think for a second that the efforts to discredit me aren’t known to me, they are sadly mistaken,” he has told friends. “Did they think I was just going to roll over and die?”

Guess not …

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Roe is mainstream

by digby

Those saying Roe v. Wade should *NOT* be overturned:

88 percent of Democrats
76 percent of independents
52 percent of Republicans

That won’t stop them from overturning it. It’s their holy grail.

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Trump’s enemies list should include himself

by digby

My Salon column today:

On June 27, 1973 former Nixon White House counsel John Dean mentioned that he had turned over a pile of documents to the Senate Watergate Committee and among them was a set of papers called “Opponents List and Political Enemies Project.” In a 1971 memo included in the papers Dean described the purpose of the list:

This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.

The “available machinery” included plans to deny them federal grants and contracts and use the IRS and the Justice Department to harass them. This was the infamous “Enemies List” and it included the names of journalists, Senators, House members, certain businessmen and labor leaders, entertainers and Democratic Party donors.

CBS newsman Daniel Schorr, obtained a copy later that day and read it live for the CBS News with Walter Cronkite only realizing he was on the list when he got to his name.  This first list only included 20 names but as the Watergate scandal unfolded over the next few months, more evidence emerged that there were more than one list which included over 200 names. In the end, the attempts to use the IRS to harass his critics and violate their constitutional rights became named among Nixon’s abuse of power that made up the second article of impeachment.

Fast forward to 2018 and we have President Trump tweeting this yesterday morning:

The Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court two months ago. Next up is the U.S. Post Office which they use, at a fraction of real cost, as their “delivery boy” for a BIG percentage of their packages….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

….In my opinion the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive (the paper loses a fortune) lobbyist for Amazon. Is it used as protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon at least had the sense to abuse his power in secret.

Trump has hinted broadly in the past that he would like to order the government to hurt Amazon but he used thin excuses about the Post Office being taken advantage of and the tax base being cheated. Everyone knew he was really angry at the Post but he didn’t make it explicit. Yesterday he did. And by mentioning the antitrust issue he also lends credence to those who have suspected that his Department of Justice’s objection to the AT&T Time Warner merger had a lot more to do with trying to damage CNN than any concern for media monopolies. (The Justice Department surprised observers when they decided to appeal the lower court’s decisive ruling in favor of the merger.)

It appears that Trump is taking a page from the Nixon playbook and wants the government to harass and prosecute his enemies in the media. Nixon didn’t get much cooperation when he tried it and it’s likely Trump won’t either. But the abuse of power is very much in the same vein.

And so is the bombshell his press secretary dropped in the White House briefing yesterday. When asked about a tweet by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)in which he claimed former CIA director John Brennan was “monetizing” his security clearance and should therefore be stripped of it, she replied:

Not only is the President looking to take away Brennan’s security clearance, he’s also looking into the clearances of Comey, Clapper, Hayden, Rice, and McCabe. The President is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearance because they’ve politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service and security clearances.

Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the President is extremely inappropriate. And the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.

That’s quite a list of enemies, no?

First there is no evidence that any of those people have exposed classified material, which would certainly be cause for taking away their clearance. Neither are any of them reported to have repeatedly failed to fully fill out their clearance forms and are otherwise suspected of some sort of nefarious activity as is Trump’s son-in-law and Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, which would also be reason to strip them of security clearances. They aren’t accused of domestic violence as was Trump’s former staff secretary Rob Porter or any other violations as were the 30 Trump staffers who had their clearances downgraded or revoked last winter. If their clearances are revoked it would be purely as punishment for criticizing the president.

Rand Paul styles himself as the one true principled civil libertarian which raises the question about why he would be against these people exercising their first amendment right to free speech. It’s true that this is a confusing set of circumstances since they were all previously powerful members of the Intelligence Community, but it’s worth considering that from some perspectives some might even consider them whistleblowers and that Paul, the high-minded, small government libertarian, is taking Donald Trump’s side against the “deep state” by suggesting that he abuse the power of the presidency to punish citizens who are speaking out against him. We do live in very strange times.

The charge that they are “monetizing” their clearances has to be an inside joke between Paul and Trump. The idea seems to be that their clearances are what give them credibility with the public but nobody knew until yesterday that they still had them so that’s absurd.  For better or worse, their former jobs are what give them credibility and there’s nothing Trump can do about that. The media are allowed to hire former government workers to give expert commentary on government and politics. At least they were up until now.

Moreover, the mere idea of anyone in Trump world objecting to someone “monetizing” their government service is hilarious. The president never divested of his businesses or provided his tax returns as every other president has done for decades. He spends nearly every week-end making personal appearances at his commercial properties and personally pockets the money the government spends to protect him there. His family is pretty much running their businesses out of the oval office and the cabinet is so overwhelmingly unethical that he’s already had to fire two cabinet members for outrageous self-dealing with a couple more hanging by a thread. This flat-out corruption is one area where Nixon was a piker by comparison.

Finally, the man who tweets “Witch Hunt!” on a daily basis getting on his high horse complaining that people are making “baseless accusations of improper conduct”  is so absurd that you just have to laugh. If there is someone on this planet who is less self-aware I’ve never met him.

Good thing he’s not a warmonger

by digby

He’s just the leader of the world’s only super power with a nasty temper and a simple mind. There’s not a thing in the world to worry about:

As the presidential tweets ricochet from one world hot spot to another, a Trump Doctrine has emerged: Claim matchless strength, suffer no slight and counter-punch harder than you are hit — at least verbally.

President Donald Trump’s searing ALL CAPS response to a relatively routine Iran provocation is the latest example of Trump’s refusal to show weakness, continuing a pattern that includes showdowns with North Korea, China and even NATO allies, with Russia the notable exception. Trump’s tough-guy rhetoric has become a defining characteristic of his overseas affairs, as have the relatively modest results.

His late Sunday tweet warning of “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE” caught Trump’s staff by surprise, sparked a fresh day of foreign policy confusion, and triggered fears of a potential nuclear showdown in the Middle East. The tweet was reminiscent of Trump’s brash warning of “fire and fury” for North Korea last year, part of an exchange of bravado in which he and Kim Jong Un’s government compared the relative size of their nuclear buttons.

White House officials now cast those exchanges with Kim as a negotiating tactic to bring the mercurial autocrat to the negotiating table, culminating in last month’s Singapore summit. But despite Trump’s pronouncements that he is “very happy” with the results of the summit, the North has yet to take concrete steps toward denuclearizing, nor has it returned the remains of some U.S. service members, as was promised as part of the two-page agreement signed in Singapore.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t rule out that the latest tweet about Iran was a similar negotiating gambit. “I’m not going to get into the president’s strategy,” she said Monday. “But I think he’s very clear about what he’s not going to allow to take place.”

The Iran tweet, responding to the latest threat from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, came on the heels of a frustrating week for a White House reeling from denunciations of Trump’s treatment of Russia’s Vladimir Putin during their summit in Helsinki. The president initially refused to say whether he believed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, instead giving equal weight to Putin’s denials.

Critics were quick to seize upon his Iran threat as an attempt to change the subject. Sanders retorted: “I think the president has the ability, unlike a lot of those in the media, to actually focus on more than one issue at a time.”

But the broadside to Tehran fit a pattern for Trump, a commander in chief who responds to the slightest provocation with punishment. The all-caps shot across Iran’s bow appeared to be prompted by a speech by Rouhani, who told diplomats Sunday in Tehran that Americans “must understand that war with Iran is the mother of all wars and peace with Iran is the mother of all peace,” state television reported.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., tweeted that Trump has a “dangerous habit” of attacking world leaders online. She said his “obsession with looking tough on Twitter is weakening our standing on the world stage and seriously jeopardizing our national security.”

Beyond his monthslong rhetorical volleys with Kim, Trump has unleashed verbal attacks against friend and foe alike when he felt disrespected. After last month’s Group of Seven meeting of industrialized nations in Canada, that nation’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, delivered a mild rebuke to Trump by suggesting that Canada may have to levy retaliatory tariffs against the United States.

“Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau said.

Seeing the news coverage while on Air Force One, Trump unleashed a furious series of tweets against arguably the United States’ closest ally, calling Trudeau “very dishonest & weak” and threatening to escalate tensions further.

During this month’s NATO summit in Brussels, Trump deployed similarly incendiary language, accusing Germany of being controlled by Russia and repeatedly casting doubt on the cornerstone of the NATO alliance, a commitment to mutual defense. Trump claimed his rhetoric secured concessions from NATO allies to boost their spending on defense closer to the previously agreed-upon target of 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2024, but the increases he claimed were already in the works. As the U.S. leader reveled in a celebratory media tour, allies denied they had given Trump anything of substance.

During the tariff standoff with China, Trump has repeatedly escalated his fiery language — and boasted that trade wars are “easy to win” — only to see Beijing retaliate and levy tariffs that could cripple some American workers, including farmers, who have trended toward supporting the president.

They point out that he doesn’t seem to do this to Russia for some reason. But everyone else is fair game.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that it doesn’t matter what the president of the United States says or what policies he unilaterally imposes because … well, I’m not sure. It certainly seems like a dangerous situation to me. Wars happen for all kinds of dumb reasons.

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