A couple of interesting stats o’ the day
by digby
The top two reasons American believe their president withdrew security clearances is because he’s a vengeful, impulsive thin-skinned jerk.
We’re talking about security clearances.
Oh, and a majority of Americans are finally recognizing that the special prosecutor is proving that the president’s circle is full of criminals.
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Crazy foreign policy cuckoo
by digby
Our isolationist president who is totally not a warmonger:
President Donald Trump said the U.S. is looking “very seriously” at establishing a permanent military base in Poland.
Trump said at an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Polish President Andrzej Duda that the two would discuss the possibility and “we’re looking at it very seriously.”
“Poland is willing to make a very major contribution to the United States to come in and have a presence in Poland,” Trump added. “If they’re willing to do that, it’s something we will certainly talk about.”
The Polish leader has sought additional military support from the U.S., citing the risk posed by an emboldened and expansionist Russia. Duda has asked for a permanent U.S. military base in Poland to serve as a deterrent, and his government has said it would contribute financially to the establishment of such a facility.
After Russia seized Crimea during President Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S. and NATO allies established a constant, but fluctuating, rotation of troops in Poland under the European Reassurance Initiative. Poland has argued for a permanent, costlier plan, including a headquarters.
The construction of a base would risk upsetting Russian President Vladimir Putin even as Trump has gone to lengths to warm relations with the Kremlin.
The plan may meet opposition among European allies chagrined by Poland’s turn toward autocracy, including a revamping of the judiciary that critics say will remove judges who won’t take orders from politicians.
Trump’s fine with it as long as they “pay” the US to do it. In fact, he went on and on and on and on about how much money he wants people to “pay the US.”
The Polish president says he wants to call the new permanent base “Fort Trump”.
His bff Vlad may not be so happy….
Also:
The first question Trump fields during his joint presser with the president of Poland is from an OAN reporter and about "the possibility of a war in Syria."
Trump responds by bragging about "eradicating ISIS." pic.twitter.com/SVwrkfvzE0— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2018
God help us…
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The far-right in Germany
by digby
I’m just putting this out there as a marker. When the German head of domestic intelligence turns out to be passing confidential information to a far-right party, it’s time to pay attention:
The German government decided to remove Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of the domestic intelligence agency, from his post Tuesday after he faced criticism for his reaction to anti-immigrant protests in the city of Chemnitz.
[…]
Merkel’s government faced growing pressure to dismiss Maaßen after he questioned the authenticity of video footage from the anti-immigrant riots in Chemnitz, claiming there was “no evidence” of a “manhunt” against foreigners. The chancellor had already condemned such a “manhunt” in the city, which came amid protests sparked by the killing of a German man, allegedly at the hands of at least two refugees.German media also reported last week that Maaßen, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, shared confidential information with the far-right Alternative for Germany party, weeks before the information was released publicly.
Seehofer, leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union party, had previously voiced confidence in Maaßen’s leadership and claimed he did not “see any reason for staff changes.” But the Social Democrats, partners in Merkel’s coalition government, and the opposition Greens called for his dismissal.
He’s keeping a job as interior minister. I assume this is because he has political support that requires such a concession.
What could go wrong?
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No witnesses
by digby
So the Republicans are going to limit the hearing to a professinal lawyer and character assassin who’s been before a Senate hearing dozens of times and a woman who has no such experience for one big moment and then … nothing? They aren’t going to call any of the witnesses, including the alleged “character witness” who the victim claims took part in the assault and has confessed to being a blackout drunk?
How about the victim’s therapist or the many people she told before Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court nominee? No?
If the Republicans think they can railroad this woman by hauling her before their tribunal of old white men and then confirm Kavanaugh anyway on the basis of he said-she said, they must have decided they are losing the Senate anyway so they might as well go out in a blaze of misogynist glory.
I guess they have also decided that they only need white, conservative men to vote for them ever again. There are a lot of those guys, to be sure. But there aren’t enough. And their numbers are suffering tremendous shrinkage….
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Dear Michael Bloomberg
by tristero
I want to sincerely thank you for all the many things you’re doing to help Democrats win this November. I especially want to thank you for the enormous donations you’re giving to the party and its candidates, especially for the Southern California races. It is all very much appreciated and I’m not the only one who says so.
I believe the party owes you a great deal for your generosity and passion. So, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clinches the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, I will urge her to consider you as her Vice Presidential running mate.
Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t think you should be her VP. I can’t forget how shamefully you treated protestors during the NY Republican Convention, your elitism, and all your sops to Big Biz. More generally, this country does not need more rich men in high office. Nevertheless, I do think, given all you’re doing this year, you deserve to be considered.
Please keep those donations coming!
Much love,
tristero
Un-gerrymandering starts in 2018
by Tom Sullivan
Chart via NCSL.
You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. It’s a message both for party muckety-mucks and armchair activists whose focus is always on D.C. A pair of stories in Politico address that this morning.
In California’s Central Valley, Democrat Andrew Janz is running to unseat Trump-toadie Rep. Devin Nunes. Janz raised over $1 million online in July, exceeding the totals of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that month. But that won’t get the moderate Democrat much attention from a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that usually warms up to moderates. Janz is pretty much on his own.
That’s not so surprising. Funds and manpower are limited. The DCCC has to triage. Even still, rural areas get no respect.
Meanwhile, a handful of Democratic senators are getting behind Sister District in promoting down-ballot races and flipping state legislatures:
“Getting involved in a state race is one of the best ways you can spend your time between now and Nov. 6,” says Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in one of the videos.
Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who this past weekend was in New Hampshire as part of his ongoing exploration of a presidential run, is also part of the effort, as are Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who are sometimes mentioned as possible 2020 contenders.
“There are going to be hundreds, if not thousands of state legislative races all across this country that are going to be decided by 100 votes, 200 votes,” Murphy says.
This is the first time that U.S. senators have so directly jumped into the fight for statehouses.
Somebody’s gotten religion and pushing back against ALEC and REDMAP. Republicans control about two-thirds of the legislative chambers in the country that will draw new federal and state districts in 2021.
The Sister District Project’s focus this year is flipping legislatures in Arizona, Colorado and New Hampshire, plus holding the majority in Washington. Where that’s not possible this year, gains this year in other state can make majorities achievable in 2020. Part of the strategy is for Democrat-heavy areas to lend manpower and expertise to redder districts. Nice to see they’ve recruited some stars to promote the effort.
* * * * * * * * *
For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
These men are playing with fire
by digby
Women are getting really sick of this shit.
This piece by Rebecca Traister about the current political #METOO moment, where it’s been and where its going is a must read:
[T]the reason these men are getting so upset is that the force of female protest right now feels like it has the potential to shake our power structure to its core.
Twenty-seven years ago this fall, Anita Hill, came forward, not of her own volition, with claims that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas was confirmed to the Court nonetheless, but a wave of angry women ran for office in the wake of Hill’s treatment by the committee, and her story was crucial to establishing “sexual harassment” as a form of gender discrimination. The seeds sown during the Hill hearings have come into full flower in the past two years, as the #MeToo movement erupted following the election of a multiple accused sexual harasser, and angry women jumped into electoral contests around the country.
It’s those women who’ve been winning primaries, toppling men who’ve occupied seats of power since God was a boy. The partisan gender gap has become a chasm, a fault line splitting open under the pressure of so much rage. Based on polls going into the midterms, the gap has grown to 33 points, largely because white women — a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and have supported Republicans in all but two elections since 1952 — have shifted toward backing Democrats over Republicans, 52-38; among millennials, 55 points separates women who favor Democrats and men who prefer Republicans. It’s angry women who’ve staged teachers’ strikes, who’ve knocked powerful men off their perches at television networks and in the Senate; it’s often female elected officials who’ve linked arms with the angry masses. It was Kamala Harris, whose place on the Judiciary Committee, along with Cory Booker’s, opened up after the resignation of Al Franken and the loss of Roy Moore — both sidelined by the agitations of women — who first interrupted the Kavanaugh hearings and called for an adjournment.
Harris was told that she was “out of order.”But the challenges deemed by ideological foes to be “out of order” may be so discomfiting in part because they suggest a yearning for a new order.
The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.Women’s vehement objections have been typically treated as irrational theater.
This is the anger of white men, of course. Their anger is revered, respected as the stimulus for necessary political change. Because they’ve always been the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions are assumed to be grounded in reason — not the emotional muck of femininity.
(This isn’t just in the past. Think about how the anger of white men in the Rust Belt is often treated as politically diagnostic, as a guide to their understandable frustrations: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, the scourge of drugs. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives, a response to police killings of African Americans initiated by women activists, is considered by the FBI to pose a threat of “retaliatory violence” and discussed as a “hate group” by Meghan McCain.)
As nobly enraged as the Founders were at being taxed and policed by a government in which they had no voice or vote, they failed, we know, to establish a true representative democracy. Their government was one in which a minority ruled. The few cleared the field of competition by subjugating the many — the enslaved, women — and then built their economic and political power on the labor of those they’d deprived of any say in civic or social life.
But to keep minority rule in place, order must be maintained, as the honorable senator from California was peremptorily instructed. It is order, after all, that throughout our history has worked to suppress the anger of women, to discourage us from speaking it or even feeling it. And when women have gotten mad, they’ve been ignored or marginalized, laughed or blanched at, their vehement objections treated as irrational theater, inconsequential to the important matter of governing the nation. This has always been an error. Look to the start, the germinating seeds, of nearly every major social and political movement that has shaped this nation — from abolition to suffrage to labor to civil rights and LGBTQ rights to, yes, feminism — and you will find near its start the passionate dissent of women.
Read on. It’s quite enlightening. She goes on to name women, one after the other after the other, who led the charge for equal rights for … everyone. And she notes that they weren’t always progressive. (I wrote about that too, some time back.) But she notes that the power of women’s anger is potent, regardless of its ideology. Yet it is still disrespected:
[T]he point is not that the anger is always righteous; rather, that it is often potent — the stuff of eruptive social movements and thwarted ones — and yet to this day, it continues to be written off as loudmouthed hysteria, or the dubious ravings of pussy-hatted suburbanites with itchy Etsy trigger fingers.
In January 2017, the morning after millions crowded streets around the country (and the world) for the largest single-day political demonstration in US history, George Stephanopoulos didn’t even bring up the Women’s March on his Sunday-morning show. During a 17-minute interview with Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway, he lingered on the details of the president’s inaugural-crowd size, until Conway herself addressed the giant rally against her boss. Even then, Conway had to mention the Women’s March twice before drawing a direct question from her host, who asked, 13 minutes in: “What did the president think of that march?” In Stephanopoulos’s next segment, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer noted that he’d participated in the Women’s March in his home state of New York the day before, and Stephanopoulos responded with only one question, in reference to the profanity in Madonna’s speech: “Were you comfortable with everything you heard?”
And it wasn’t just Stephanopoulos who shrugged off the political significance of this mass outpouring of female rage. On the Monday after, speaking on Morning Joe to Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who, in discussion with Mika Brzezinski, had just detailed the marchers’ stated commitments to equal pay, women’s health care, defending Obamacare, environmental activism, and their plans to run for office and volunteer for campaigns leading to the midterms, MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin — a man who’d reported extensively on the tea party’s “huge impact on America” — asked her, with suppurating condescension, “Senator, [can I] just ask you to be a notch more specific” about how the marchers might “impact what’s going on in Washington [this week], not running for [the] school board down the road?”
The next week, protesters and public-interest lawyers, the majority of them female, flooded airports to lambaste and subvert Trump’s travel ban; women judges and a female acting attorney general obstructed his path. In the coming months, women flooded congressional phone lines and filled their representatives’ mailboxes with postcards, applying pressure that eventually helped persuade a few key Republicans to vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Female candidates signed up to run not just for school boards — though yeah, those too — but for all kinds of elected positions. So far this year, record numbers of women have secured nominations in state legislative, congressional, gubernatorial, and senate races, including more than a hundred teachers who entered primaries from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona, states where teachers, many female, led strikes this spring.
Meanwhile, high-school students, women prominent among them, started a widespread movement for gun control, calling powerful people out on their BS and promising a revolt against a gun lobby that has held America in its grip for too long. On the opening day of the Kavanaugh hearings, it was a Women’s March leader, Linda Sarsour, who was the first to stand and yell — and she and a co-leader, Bob Bland, were among those arrested.
As for Halperin, he no longer works at MSNBC, after some of his former subordinates, joining the angry female crusade against workplace sexual harassment, accused him of pressing his penis against them.
That is an excerpt of Traister’s new book called Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger
Grrrrrr!
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I don’t think Ferris Bueller ever drunkenly assaulted anyone
by digby
Watch Kavanaugh’s reaction:
WATCH: Complete exchange complete between @SenJohnKennedy & Judge Brett #Kavanaugh on high school. Senator Kennedy asks: "Did you ever get in trouble? Were you more of John Boy Walton type or a Ferris Bueller type?" pic.twitter.com/1BaM5LiDvI— CSPAN (@cspan) September 17, 2018
He knows what he was — a spoiled, privileged, drunken, frat-boy all the way through high school and college.
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A primer on right-wing character assassination
by digby
David Brock talks about how the Republicans are likely circling the wagons right now in light of what they did with Anita Hill:
Watching the news of allegations by Christine Blasey Ford of attempted rape against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh play out on cable television, millions of Americans probably feel like they’ve seen this movie before — but few feel that way more than me.
It was 27 years ago that law professor Anita Hill came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. What unfolded during the Thomas confirmation was ugly and, after a brutal attack on Hill’s motives and credibility by the Republicans, Thomas was confirmed by the Senate on a narrow 52-48 vote.
Based on my own role inside the Republican attack machine at that time, I can predict that similarly hard-knuckled tactics will be used against Ford, even though the times have thankfully changed. The stakes for the organized right are just as high now as they were then: Like Thomas, Kavanaugh is a cause célèbre for the conservative movement as they seek to cement a majority on the Supreme Court for a generation.
They will defend him at any cost.
The pending Republican smear campaign cannot be tolerated. The only way to prevent it is for confirmation process to come to a halt immediately until these allegations are fully investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Nothing short of that is acceptable.
If my experience during the Thomas nomination was any indication, the lengths to which Republicans will go in order to discredit Ford know no bounds, and the Anita Hill saga provides a disturbing roadmap.
Shortly after the confirmation vote, for instance, a donor approached The American Spectator — a right-wing magazine to which I was then a contributor — to underwrite an “investigation” of Hill’s charges. The idea was to cleanse Clarence Thomas’s tarnished reputation for the history books by destroying Anita Hill. I took on the assignment with relish, but things didn’t quite work out as planned.
In my article and in a subsequent best-selling book “The Real Anita Hill,” I lifted the Republican playbook against Hill (the same playbook Ford should now expect to be used against her) but I went further than Republicans were then willing to go in public.
Mine is a tawdry and cautionary tale for what the nation will now endure as Ford’s allegations are fully aired in the media.
In a reference to the “nuts and sluts” defense commonly deployed by the accused in such cases, I portrayed Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” — a vicious and wholly unfounded smear I regret to this day having written.
But I didn’t stop with Hill. There was another woman in the wings — Angela Wright — with similar allegations to Hill’s that would have established a pattern of harassing behavior by Thomas. But then-Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden ruled that Wright’s testimony, and that of two other corroborating witnesses, be suppressed.
In defending Thomas to the hilt, I used Wright’s FBI file, which had been illegally leaked to me by Republican Senate staff, to depict Wright as both emotionally unstable and sexually promiscuous.
Two years later, in 1994, I was asked to review Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer’s book, “Strange Justice,” which reported additional credible evidence for Hill’s allegations. Then on the Supreme Court, an angry and vindictive Justice Thomas leaked to me private details from a divorce proceeding of yet another accuser, Kaye Savage, to help me discredit the book.
Yet after reading the convincing account of “Strange Justice,” once-stalwart defenders of Thomas who had been the trusted sources for “The Real Anita Hill” admitted to me that they always knew Thomas was guilty as charged, and that the attacks on Hill were pure naked politics.
I then realized that I had been complicit in a campaign of character assassination — and I understood that Clarence Thomas almost certainly perjured himself to gain his seat. (Years later, I wrote a private memo to Sen. Hillary Clinton laying out all this and more in a case for Thomas’s impeachment).
Mine is a tawdry and cautionary tale for what the nation will now endure as Ford’s allegations are fully aired in the media.
So when you hear from Republicans crying foul that this is nothing but an eleventh-hour political hit job by Democrats — as Senators Hatch and Cornyn (twice) have already begun to do — don’t believe them for a minute. Both Hill and Ford demonstrated incredible fortitude and bravery in coming forward to tell their stories; neither had a prior history in party politics or an obviously political motive. And, if anything in Ford’s case, the lead Democrat on the committee, Dianne Feinstein, slow-walked the allegations as Ford debated the wisdom of coming forward at all, in order to protect her.
Kavanaugh’s categorical denial of Ford’s account is not credible. Until these charges are fully and fairly investigated, people need to see through all the Republican smoke and take his protestations with a heavy grain of salt. America can’t afford another perjurer on the highest court in the land.
I recall my boss at the time, a super Clinton hater, threw Brock’s book “The Real Anita Hill” on my desk and sort of leaned down and whispered in my ear “she’s nothing but a crazy bitch…” (Brock apologized over 5 years ago for that book …)
Kavanaugh is in the White House today huddling with Don McGahn. But Kavanaugh himself is likely leading his own strategy to assassinate Dr. Ford’s character and ensure that she is dragged through the mud in the ugliest way possible. That’s his specialty after all. He was in there with Brock’s crowd of rightwing hitmen. He knows all about how it’s done.
The question is whether or not we’ve come any farther than we were in 1994. If we get yet another one of these guys on the highest court in the land it will be yet more depressing evidence that we haven’t come as far as we think…
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Character witnesses
by digby
In the wake of the accusation of attempted rape against Brett Kavanaugh, the Republicans very quickly circulated a letter from 65 women who went to local all-girls high schools at the same time Kavanaugh attended his all-boys high school to testify that he never tried to rape them.
The alleged victim’s classmates have now stepped up:
A group of women who went to Christine Blasey Ford’s high school are circulating a letter to show support for the woman who has alleged that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to sexually assault her while they were in high school.
“We believe Dr. Blasey Ford and are grateful that she came forward to tell her story,” says a draft letter from alumnae of Holton-Arms, a private girls school in Bethesda, Maryland. “It demands a thorough and independent investigation before the Senate can reasonably vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court.”
The women also say that what Ford is alleging “is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.”
The letter is a boost of support for Ford, who has been thrust into the political spotlight and had her credibility questioned by going up against Kavanaugh and the White House. The signatories span decades at the school, both before, during and after Ford attended.
More than 200 women had signed the letter as of late Monday morning, said Sarah Burgess, a member of the class of 2005. Burgess said she and some of her schoolmates wrote the letter because hearing Ford’s story felt “personal.”
“I know that in the coming days, her story will be scrutinized, and she will be accused of lying,” Burgess said in an email. “However, I grew up hearing stories like hers, and believe her completely.”
Susanna Jones, the Holton-Arms head of school, put out a statement Sunday night in support of Ford.
“In these cases, it is imperative that all voices are heard,” Jones said. “As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers.”
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh’s “character witness” Mark Judge, who wrote a tell-all book about his alcoholism and, apparently, blaming it on his father, had his own credibility challenged by his brother Michael when the book came out. Michael Judge pretty much said his brother is full of shit:
My family has had its arguments and its crises, its tragedies and its embarrassments. It has also been, thanks in no small degree to my father, a marvelously gifted and joyful family, full of laughter and imagination. Both realities exist together.
I was content to live with that truth until now, until my brother wrote his memoir. For the painful secret of Mark’s book and subsequent magazine article, the real truth that “someone who, no matter what, is responsible for,” is a very simple one. The great, insoluble problem of my family has never really been my father.
Mark claims in his book that we all lived in terror of my father’s drunken outbursts. I can only say that he is right in one thing; my family did come to fear one of its members. As another member of our family commented during one of many meetings about Mark’s behavior, “Mark went to Markland a long time ago.” He still lives there. Sadly for my mother, that still means home.
And that’s it, that’s the real problem—not alcoholism or a lousy childhood or an abusive father. Mark is a solipsist: spoiled as a child, gazing always inward, unable to recognize any pain but his own. That is why he could not come to understand or forgive my father, in the way that all adult sons must eventually understand and forgive. Mark never left home long enough to see my father not as the ogre snoring in the other room but as a human being.
It’s hard to believe that such a great guy could drunkenly assault a girl in high school, isn’t it?
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