Month: October 2018

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Mood: Fierce

Tierpark Berlin’s four Sumatran Tiger cubs are now eight-weeks-old, and the quad had their first big veterinarian checkup on October 2.

Although they aren’t even the size of a domestic house cat, the cubs can already “hiss” like full-grown big cats! Veterinarian, Dr. Günter Strauß, was also introduced to the future proficiency of their claws and teeth during the examination.

“Natural breeding of young animals also means that the offspring does not always make it easy and convenient for the vet,” explained Veterinarian, Dr. Ing. Günter Strauss. “A wild animal defends itself when a human gets too close to it and that’s a good thing.”

Andreas Knieriem, Zoo and Animal Park Director, added, “The Tiger quadruplets survived their first investigation well. They are well fed, yet we now want to start feeding some meat to the young. We hope that they will soon be strong enough to follow the tiger mum, Mayang (age 7) on the large rock formation, so that also the Tierpark visitors can see the Tiger quad.”

The two females and two males were born on August 4 to parents, Mayang and Harfan. The Zoo expects the cubs to be spending most of their time with mom for the present, but keepers anticipate the new family will be on exhibit in late October.

Civility 101

by digby

You’ve heard all the right wing caterwauling about that awful Eric Holder declaring “instead of when they go low we go high, I say when they go low, we kick them” and Hillary Clinton saying you can’t be civil with a party like the Republicans and I’m sure you are properly chagrined. We simply must not succumb to such a mob mentality

Get a load of this from the GOP candidate for Pennsylvania Governor:

Well, Gov. Wolf, let me tell you what, between now and Nov. 6, you better put a catcher’s mask on your face, because I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes,” Wagner said. “Because I’m going to win this for the state of Pennsylvania. And we’re throwing you out of office. Because I’m sick and tired of your negative ads. Gov. Wolf, I am bound and determined, I am going to vote you out of office.”

A violent threat against a specific person is certainly not nearly as bad as a black man and a woman suggesting that Democrats need to fight the GOP. That is going too far, for sure. And anyway he didn’t mean it literally the way Holder and Clinton do:

Andrew Romeo, Wagner’s communications director, told Penn Live that the comments were not to be “taken literally.”

“He wanted them to be a metaphor for how he will approach the final stretch of the campaign,” Romeo said. “Tom Wolf has spent the entire race hiding behind false and negative attack ads like a coward instead of debating in front of the people of Pennsylvania and Scott will spend the last month of the race making it clear to voters why they should not give him a second term.”

Only the liberals are violent psychos who mean to literally kick Republicans — when they go low which presumably means when they bend over to pick up a napkin off the floor. They are very, very uncivil.

Here’s Tucker Carlson modeling appropriate behavior:

.@TuckerCarlson on Dems: "They are loyal little robots, they are lemmings. It's a mindless hoard of sad insecure dumb people hoping to become powerful by glomming on to a bigger structure." pic.twitter.com/ILL3sZ4ONF— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 12, 2018

Mueller’s art of war

by digby

The other day I mentioned how much we would all give to see Robert Mueller’s big white board where he is connecting all the dots in this sprawling Russia investigation. His office has been speaking through its indictments so it’s hard to know exactly what they see as the end game. For those of you wanting some educated analysis of what might be Robert Mueller’s overall strategic vision, I recommend reading this piece by Ryan Casey, which looks at how he might see it as a General plotting a military campaign:

“He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.” –– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Will Robert Mueller indict Trump? Speculation has been rampant, though insiders don’t expect the special counsel to contravene a DOJ legal opinion that seems to preclude indictment of a sitting president. But the will-he-or-won’t-he dichotomy asks the wrong question. Using strategies of warfare, Mueller has likely already conceived an endgame, setting the stage for Trump’s downfall.

Strategic warfare developed as a means to fight and win wars effectively and efficiently as human societies grew in size and began to operate within a political system. In primitive times, war was not strategic; tribes fought each other in brutal battles that amounted to primal, ritualized violence geared as much toward displaying dominance and masculinity as to actually accomplishing a military objective. Since then, from ancient China to medieval Europe to the modern world, the greatest strategists like Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi, Carl von Clausewitz, and T.E. Lawrence have produced writings that capture their strategic philosophies. Likewise, history’s greatest generals, such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel, and Vo Nguyen Giap have demonstrated these strategies in action. Author Robert Greene has assembled and organized this collective wisdom of strategic warfare in his excellent book, The 33 Strategies of War.

The essence of strategic warfare is thinking ahead toward long-term goals, deciding when to expend resources or take risks, and when to be patient, or even retreat. A strategist must master his or her emotions, constantly striving to view the world with detached objectivity. Fear, anger, and overconfidence are just a few of the most dangerous emotions; by the same token, a cunning strategist can exploit a less composed enemy. Greene sums up Sun Tzu’s philosophy: “By playing on the psychological weaknesses of the opponent, by maneuvering him into precarious positions, by inducing feelings of frustration and confusion, a strategist can get the other side to break down mentally before surrendering physically.”

Mueller’s investigation can be seen as an extended battle against both a hostile foreign power and a lawless, belligerent president. “War is not some separate realm divorced from the rest of society,” Greene contends. It brings out the best and the worst in human nature, and reflects society’s trends. As institutions and norms unravel periodically, human competition in its various forms mirrors this evolution, as in the case of guerilla warfare, terrorism, industrial espionage, cybercrime, and the kind of slash-and-burn politics that Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and now Donald Trump have used to great effect.

Those who know Mueller say he’s about the last person you’d expect to go rogue. And yet, it is hard to imagine an ambitious, career lawman like Mueller, who fought and bled for his country as a combat Marine in Vietnam, would take Trump’s shocking corruption and treason lying down. He must have realized at the outset this situation demanded the utmost in strategic thinking.

Mueller’s strategy turns Trump’s impulsive aggression against him. In jujitsu, a weaker fighter can defeat a more powerful opponent by manipulating the enemy’s force and energy. Already we are seeing how Mueller, operating in the background, remains several steps ahead of Trump using subtle, indirect moves. Meanwhile, Trump’s arrogance has led him to underestimate the threat of his own legal exposure. Instead of hiring top-flight defense attorneys and heeding their advice, he has opted for a chaotic carousel of mediocre lawyers and frequently ignored them. The following five strategies of war, as described by Greene, help explain how Mueller will outmaneuver and ultimately defeat Trump — even without indicting the president.

Read on for Casey’s analysis of how Mueller might be looking at this following The Art of War.

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Remember when Kanye said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”?

by digby

That was a shocking comment in the context of that telethon for Katrina but it was true. Kanye is like a child who babbles incessantly but every once in a while blurts something out in public that the grown-ups are all saying behind closed doors.

Yesterday, he did it again:

“I love Hillary, I love everyone, right? But the campaign, ‘I’m with her,’ just didn’t make me feel as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. There was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman… You made a Superman cape for me.”

Kanye, in the Oval Office, unwittingly detailing how misogyny played a role in the 2016 election:

“I love Hillary, but the campaign ‘I’m with her’ just didn’t make me feel — as a guy … it was something about this hat that made me feel like Superman,” pic.twitter.com/T1dGX1G79V— Holly Fιɢυeroα O'Reιlly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 11, 2018

Trump said, “He gets it.”

Out of the mouths of sexist men …

There have been dozens of theories floated about why Trump won from the vaunted “economic anxiety” to white backlash to regional shifts, to Trump’s celebrity, to Comey, all of which probably had some effect. But for some reason, the idea that this pig won mainly because he was running against the first woman candidate who was challenging male dominance is always shifted to the bottom of the list. Yet it was obviously a major factor.

Kanye blurted out the truth.

*And yes, standard disclaimer agreeing that because only 47% of white women voted for Clinton it means that a majority of white women were complicit in their own repression and the subjugation of people everywhere. Yes they were. Although there has been a substantial gender gap among white men and women voters for a long time, the sad fact is that most white women have always been Republicans, just like white men. There have just been more white male Republicans than white female Republicans.

From the looks of current polling, however, it may be that a fair number of them have learned their lesson. (Some white men have moved in the right direction too, although it’s hard to know if it’s for the same reasons.)

This piece from Politico this week looks into the phenomenon:

But what about Republican women? Is it possible that Trump—and the Republican politicians who enable him—are not just alienating left-leaning women, but are permanently damaging the GOP’s female ranks, driving some splintering portion of women away for good?

Republican women still overwhelmingly support the president—84 percent of them, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week. But that statistic overlooks a broader trend: Fewer and fewer American women identify as Republicans, and that slow migration is speeding up under Trump. My conversations with pollsters, political scientists and a number of women across the country who have recently rejected their lifelong Republicans identities suggested the same—and illuminate why this moment in American politics might prove a breaking point for women in the GOP. According to pollsters on both sides of the aisle, that doesn’t bode well for the Republican Party either in this fall’s midterms—which are likely to bring a record gap between how men and women vote—or for the party’s long-term future.

The gender gap began with white men leaving the Democratic Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the civil rights and women’s movements, Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg explains. Only more recently did women start actively leaving the GOP. For two decades now, they have been leaking away from the Republican Party, very slowly becoming independents, while independents have been drifting toward the Democrats. In 1994, according to Pew, 42 percent of women identified as or leaned Republican, as did 52 percent of men. By 2017, only 37 percent of women and 48 percent of men still did. In 1994, 48 percent of women and 39 percent of men identified as or leaned toward the Democrats. By 2017, those numbers were 56 percent of women and 44 percent of men.

Trump’s election put this gender shift “on steroids,” Greenberg says. According to Pew, the share of American women voters who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party has dropped 3 percentage points since 2015—from 40 percent to 37 percent—after having been essentially unchanged from 2010 through 2014. By 2017, just 25 percent of American women fully identified as Republicans. That means that when, say, 84 percent of Republican women say they approve of Trump and his actions, or 69 percent of Republican women say they support Kavanaugh, or 64 percent say they, like Trump, don’t find Ford very “credible,” those percentages represent a small and shrinking slice of American women.

These shifts in party allegiance might seem mild, but they matter. As Rutgers political scientist Kelly Dittmar recently wrote, women have voted in higher numbers and at higher rates than men for decades. In 2016, according to Dittmar, 9.9 million more women than men voted, and about 63 percent of eligible females voted, compared with 59 percent of eligible males. If more women than men vote in November, women’s shift toward the Democrats is likely to be over-represented on Election Day—especially in an election like this one, in which women are highly mobilized and motivated. The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter recently noted: “The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that [white college-educated women] support a Democrat for Congress by 22 points—58 percent to 36 percent. In 2014, they preferred a Democratic Congress by just 2 points.”

This should be good news for the Democratic party. It’s a shame that it took some moron in a MAGA hat to make it obvious to those women that the Republicans don’t have their best interests at heart. But if Democrats want to win they need to win much bigger that the Republicans do to overcome the cheating and of all the potential apostates in the GOP, this faction of college-educated white women are probably the best bet to back progressive policies.

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Trump’s open book test isn’t an automatic “A”

by digby

Emptywheel had the same reaction to the news that Mueller had agreed to a “written interview” with Trump regarding the conspiracy charges in the Russia investigation as I did. It doesn’t mean he’s not going to perjure himself. First of all, it would depend on whether he’s lying to his lawyers, whether his lawyers are competent and what Mueller alredy knows from the growing list of cooperating witnesses. She writes:

In spite of a great deal of encouragement to do so on Twitter, I can’t muster a victory lap from the news that the Mueller team has agreed that Trump’s first round of open book test will focus only on conspiracy with Russia.

President Donald Trump’s legal team is preparing answers to written questions provided by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The move represents a major development after months of negotiations and signals that the Mueller investigation could be entering a final phase with regard to the President.

The questions are focused on matters related to the investigation of possible collusion between Trump associates and Russians seeking to meddle in the 2016 election, the sources said. Trump’s lawyers are preparing written responses, in part relying on documents previously provided to the special counsel, the sources said.

[snip]

Negotiations for Trump’s testimony lasted for the better part of a year. The two sides nearly reached a deal in January for Trump to be questioned at the presidential retreat in rural Maryland, Camp David, only for talks to break down at the last minute. What followed was a series of letters and meetings — some hostile — in which Trump’s lawyers raised objections and sought to limit any potential testimony.

For months, Mueller told Trump’s lawyers that he needed to hear from the President to determine his intent on key events in the obstruction inquiry.

[…]

While CNN has not said anything about timing — that is, how long Trump’s lawyers will stall over an open book test that they claim they’ve already written many of the answers to — this agreement may have as much to do with preparation for the post-election period in which Mueller can roll out any indictments he has been working on and Trump can start firing people. That is, before he makes any big moves in the case in chief, he has to get Trump on the record in some form or other. Better to get him on the record in sworn written statements than launch a subpoena fight that will last past that post-election period.

So I don’t think this says much about the relative legal exposure Mueller thinks Trump has for obstruction versus conspiracy (though, again, if you’ve got the conspiracy charges, the obstruction charges will be minor by comparison). It says that Mueller has decided it’s time to get Trump committed to one story, under penalty of perjury.

That said, consider two details about obstruction.

First, Mueller has gotten both of the men Trump reportedly dangled pardons to, Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort, to enter cooperation agreements. That means he’s got both men — possibly along with the non-felon lawyers who passed on the offer — describing that they were offered pardons if they protected the President. That, to my mind, is the most slam dunk instance of obstruction even considered. So by obtaining Manafort’s cooperation, Mueller may have already obtained the most compelling evidence of obstruction possible.

Also, it’s not at all clear that Trump can avoid perjury exposure even on an open book test. We’ve already seen that some of the written responses the Trump team has provided Mueller — such as the two versions of their explanation for the Flynn firing — obscure key details (including Trump’s own role in ordering Flynn to tell Russia not to worry about sanctions). Plus, Trump’s lawyers have recently come to realize they not only don’t know as much as they thought they did about what other “friendly” witnesses had to say (Bill Burck seems to have reconfirmed last week that his clients — which include, at a minimum, Don McGahn, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus — don’t have Joint Defense Agreements with Trump), but that they don’t actually know everything they need to know from Trump. Trump is unmanageable as a client, so it’s likely he continues to lie to his own lawyers.

Most importantly, on all of the key conspiracy questions Mueller posed to Trump last March (the first two were also in his first set of questions in January), Mueller has at least one and sometimes several cooperating witnesses.

[…]

Between Trump’s lawyers’ incomplete grasp of what their client did and the witnesses and other evidence regarding these activities, Mueller has a much better idea of what happened than Trump’s lawyers do. Which means they may not be able to help their client avoid lying.

More at the link including a long list of questions Mueller might ask which can be corroborated by the cooperating witnesses. Remember, Trump is a pathological liar.

About that enthusiasm gap

by digby

… over Kavanaugh, here’s the latest from the Washington Post:

Asked how the Kavanaugh debate would affect their midterm vote, slightly more say it makes them more inclined to support Democrats for Congress than Republicans. Women say the episode draws them toward Democrats over Republicans by a 16-point margin, while men are more evenly split.

While many of the results in the poll fall along familiar partisan lines, it also found that political independents are more suspicious than supportive of the new justice. According to the survey, 55 percent of independents say there should be further investigation of Kavanaugh, while 40 percent are opposed.

The stakes were high, and the party-line fight over Kavanaugh was brutal. It was marked by allegations of excessive drinking in high school and college and of a teenage sexual assault and other misconduct. Democrats at his confirmation hearing further accused Kavanaugh of dishonesty over his answers to questions regarding his work in the George W. Bush White House.

Republican senators said the allegations of sexual misconduct were uncorroborated and vicious, the result of desperate attempts from Democrats and liberal groups to keep Kavanaugh — for 12 years a respected conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — off the high court.

At a White House ceremony Monday night, Trump apologized to the new justice for “the terrible pain and suffering” he and his family were “forced to endure.” He said Kavanaugh had been found “innocent” of the charges against him, even though the senators came to no such determination.

The poll suggests disagreement with Trump’s view that Kavanaugh had been exonerated and does not support the notion of a national backlash against the attacks on Kavanaugh, as some Republicans have suggested.

Rather, the results show the political consequences may be more mixed.

Slightly more registered voters say the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings make them more likely to support Democrats for Congress than Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, though a 39 percent plurality say it doesn’t make a difference.

There is a gender gap: by 40 percent to 24 percent, women say the debate makes them more likely to back Democratic than Republican candidates. Men are more evenly split, with 30 percent more likely to back Republicans, while 25 percent are more likely to back Democrats.

Among independents, women by a 37 percent to 12 percent margin say the confirmation process has made them more likely to support Democrats than Republicans. Independent men are near evenly split, 22 percent saying it made them more apt to support Democrats vs. 24 percent for Republicans.

Partisans appear more dug-in after the Kavanaugh debate, with 65 percent of Republicans saying it motivates them more to support the GOP and 66 percent of Democrats saying they are more motivated to back their own party. There are no significant gender differences among Democrats and Republicans on the issue.

Looking back at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, half of Americans do not think the Senate did enough to investigate allegations that Kavanaugh committed sexual misconduct in high school and college, 41 percent say it did do enough. Significantly more women think the committee’s actions were deficient, 56 percent vs. 43 percent.

They’ve basically given up on the women’s vote.

Dave Weigel wrote about the pearl clutching over “enthusiasm” a few days ago:

Democrats, who wander in perpetual search of something to panic about, found it Wednesday. According to the NPR-Marist poll, Republicans had cut into the Democrats’ generic ballot lead since the summer. The pollsters highlighted one possible reason: a mere two-point edge in Democratic enthusiasm. “Democratic enthusiasm edge evaporates,” read the headline that inspired countless liberals to spill coffee on the dashboards of their hybrids.

Republican pollsters, even those who don’t go on TV to wave pompoms, say the trend is real. July and August were terrible months for the party. The last week, since the Kavanaugh hearing, has been pretty good in tracking. In particular, male independents, who have wavered between the parties all year, have been a bit more supportive of Republicans this week.

The “enthusiasm” discussion, however, is about the base, not independents. The going theory is that Democrats woke up a sleeping Republican electorate and that the new number to watch, because Democratic enthusiasm has maxed out, is the Republican enthusiasm.

That might be right, but it’s been wrong before. Several Republicans made this point: At this moment six years ago, President Barack Obama held a small lead in polling but Republicans seemed to be building a lead among the most enthusiastic voters. In the first week of October 2012, NBC News polls had 79 percent of Republicans “excited” to vote in the election, compared with just 73 percent of Democrats.

“Republican enthusiasm, up, senior enthusiasm, up,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said. “It’s a huge problem [for Obama].”

In 2010 and 2014, the enthusiasm gap was a fairly solid predictor of how each party would be able to turn out their votes. In 2012, it wasn’t. We honestly don’t know which year this will resemble or how badly it will shatter the mold.

But the commentary about how the Kavanaugh hearings have affected Republicans carries some echoes of the commentary before the 2012 election. There’s little talk of how Kavanaugh has inspired nonvoters or independents; it’s mostly about how he has energized and united Republicans. That sounds a lot like what we heard six years ago, when Mitt Romney’s dominant first debate with Obama quieted a lot of conservative grumbling about his campaign. At the time, it obscured how Romney trailed Obama in overall favorability, and right now, the talk about Kavanaugh obscures how Republicans are still heading into an election with a president whose favorable numbers resemble Obama’s before his midterm routs.

Everyone needs to just put their head down and try to get the vote out, donate and at the very least vote. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

One thing we really all should do is tune out the horserace. It will just make you crazy.

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This week in weird


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star has the unenviable task of tracking President Trump’s lies. Last week he had the second-most-dishonest week since becoming president, with 129 false claims, almost beating his record of 133 set in August. Dale’s weekly tallies show that Trump’s lying has escalated rapidly since June of this year raising a lot of questions about what may be precipitating it. It’s possible that he’s just found that there is no price to be paid for his lies so he’s just letting his freak flag fly. It’s also possible that the stress is getting to him and he just can’t stop. This week’s events certainly lend some evidence that his agitation is growing.

We started off with the truly unnecessary spectacle of our new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a White House ceremony thanking Republican supporters by name while he promised to be a fair, impartial judge. Trump then took a big handful of salt and rubbed it in the nation’s wounds, telling the most unpopular new Justice in history:

“On behalf of our nation I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain and suffering you have been forced to endure…you sir, under historic scrutiny, were proven innocent.”

Needless to say, he was not “proven innocent.” Sadly, that may have been the most normal thing to happen all week. On Tuesday morning, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley abruptly resigned reportedly to the total surprise of the White House. (Trump said he’d known about it for six months but nobody believed him because he lies a lot.) They held a little love fest in the White House where Haley promised not to primary the president in 2020 and then bizarrely gave tribute to Ivanka and Jared Kushner, calling him a “hidden genius” and her a “great friend.”

Trump’s manic rally schedule continued, with two events this week featuring the president imitating Senator Dianne Feinstein as a confused, old, lady, reminiscent of his odious impression of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski during the campaign. His crowd loved it of course, and at the second rally broke out into a rousing “lock her up” chant, much to the president’s delight. The focus in both gatherings showed a slight shift away from Trump bragging incessantly about his personal greatness to a very sharp attack on the Democrats:

TRUMP smears Democrats: “Democrats. You see it happening right now. [Crowd boos] They are determined to take back power by using any means necessary. You see the meanness, the nastiness – they do not care who they hurt, who they have to run over in order to get power and control” pic.twitter.com/JF3C7s21MR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2018

As Peter Baker of the New York Times put it:

From the pot-and-kettle department of politics, the president is trying to turn the tables on his opponents this fall. A master of divide-and-conquer campaigning who gives critics belittling nicknames, calls his foes “evil people” and has encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, Mr. Trump hopes to convince the public that his opponents are the ones who are “totally unhinged.”

This strategy is not his alone. All the Republicans are repeating the words “angry mob” like a bunch of parrots, obviously trying to psych out the Democrats and get them to distance themselves from their energized base and suppress their own vote. But there’s a febrile quality to Trump’s approach that’s manifested itself in other ways this week.

New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi had a very odd experience at the White House this week, in which the president unexpectedly pulled her in for a one on one chat. She provided the transcript of their conversation which consisted of Trump doing his usual incoherent sales pitch but also seeming to have set up some sort of phony tableau consisting of Kelly, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Deputy Chief of staff Nick Ayers wandering in to try to convince her that Ayers was not being groomed to take Kelly’s place. The end of the interview had Ayers and Kelly hugging one another proclaiming themselves to be best friends. It could not be weirder.

Meanwhile, the horrifying probability of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi being murdered and dismembered by a Saudi Arabian hit team seems not have bothered the president all that much. At first he said he really didn’t know any details but on Thursday unconvincingly asserted that he doesn’t “like it at all” and mentioned twice that Khashoggi isn’t an American citizen, clearly vexed that he has to worry about such a ridiculous thing. He bridled at the suggestion that the US might put sanctions on Saudi Arabia because he doesn’t “like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country,” clearly signaling that he won’t lift a finger.

The man who surely ordered the attack, Jared Kushner’s good bud Prince Mohammed bin Salman, probably never doubted it. After all, Trump had very famously defended Vladimir Putin’s assassinations of journalists during the campaign, telling Joe Scarborough:

I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know, there’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is.

You can’t blame Trump’s pals for thinking he wouldn’t care if they killed a critical journalist or two.

As all this was going on,  what they are calling the third strongest hurricane to ever hit the United States slammed into the Florida panhandle leaving whole towns in a pile of rubble in its wake. The president held one photo op on Wednesday morning and then took off for his rally in Pennsylvania claiming he didn’t want to disappoint all the people who had been waiting for days to get in. (There were no people waiting for days.)

The split screen of a grinning president and his ecstatic followers holding signs and cheering on one side with 150 mile an hour winds tearing through Florida towns was surreal. But it wasn’t nearly as surreal as the split screen the next day when we saw miles and miles of the devastation in the daylight juxtaposed with President Trump in the oval office sitting across the resolute desk from Kanye West as West held court wearing his MAGA hat and rambling incoherently on a number of topics. A sample:

Kanye decries “trap door of the 13th amendment” and how his sleep disorder was diagnosed as bipolar disorder. pic.twitter.com/PNwtSkVdSb

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 11, 2018

There have been many bizarre moments since Trump took office but this one will go into the pantheon.

As I surveyed this week in Trumpland I wondered why Trump seems more disordered and frantic than usual. The midterms are almost upon us so maybe that has him spooked. The pressure coming from various investigations and betrayals could be taking its toll. But then I read something that explains why he’s more nervous than usual. A Politico headline blared the bad news: “Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News.” They aren’t showing his rallies in full anymore. He’s having to call in to get on the air, which he did several times this week. Apparently, even his most fervent followers are finally getting tired of his schtick.  Somehow, I don’t think having Kanye West hug him in the oval is going to help with that.

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A woman’s place is in the voting booth
by Tom Sullivan

As if women need further proof GOP men have no use for them and their concerns….

“Absolutely most insulting conversation I have ever had with anyone,” John Kelly wrote in a private email of his telephone conversation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Still secretary at the Department of Homeland Security on Feb. 8, 2017, Kelly wrote to a top aide after a conversation with Warren about the Trump administration’s travel ban.

“What an impolite arrogant woman. She immediately began insulting our people accusing them of not following the court order, insulting and abusive behavior towards those covered by the pause, blah blah blah,” Kelly wrote in the letter obtained by BuzzFeed through a FOIA request.

“Too bad Senate Majority Leader McConnell couldn’t order her to be quiet again!” the aide replied in another email released late Thursday.

The little lady just doesn’t know her place.

Warren’s call came after protesters flooded Logan International Airport in Boston in response to the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban, BussFeed reports, adding:

A congressional source familiar with Warren’s phone call with Kelly told BuzzFeed News that the senator’s staff first tried to obtain information from the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 29, 2017 about her constituents who were stuck abroad and prohibited from boarding airplanes to fly into Logan. But the staffers were unsuccessful. Warren then reached out to Kelly, who didn’t respond to her for a week. When Kelly finally called Warren, she told him she had been trying to reach him, which Kelly denied. Warren described her staff’s numerous email exchanges with Kelly and their conversation then became heated.

“Impolite arrogant woman” ( #ImpoliteArrogantWoman ) overnight became the new “nevertheless she persisted.” There is already a tee shirt.

Retweet if you’re proud to be an impolite, arrogant woman. #BlahBlahBlah https://t.co/7IXQH9adaG— Shannon Fx Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 11, 2018

Heading into the November 6 election, voters express concern that a “byzantine array of voter restrictions” and voter roll purges devised by Republican-male-led legislatures will impact turnout, particularly among black voters. In Georgia, notably. Republican men will defend the merits of requiring photo identity cards to vote. Yet, arguing the merits is a red herring. ID card laws are not about merits. They are about suppressing the vote of segments of the population who tend to vote for Democrats. But more than that.

GOP-imposed voting restrictions are aimed not just at black voters, but women. All women. African Americans, students and seniors are the trees. Women are the forest.

Exit polls in 2016 found 54 percent of women — all women — voted for Hillary Clinton. When it comes to Republicans shrinking the voting pool, all women are targets.

As North Carolina drafted its infamous 2013 omnibus voter law, the state Board of Elections examined the potential impact of the voter ID portion. By cross-referencing the state DMV database against voter rolls, it estimated over half of registered and 2012 voters without NCDMV IDs were black in a state not even a quarter African American. The Board estimated 67,639 registered Republicans had no photo identity cards, nearly two-thirds women (43,721). But 176,091 Democrats, also two-thirds women (116,424).

The Board estimated of the 138,425 voters with no NCDMV ID match who actually cast ballots in 2012, 30,114 were Republicans, 60 percent women. There were 81,008 Democrats, 66 percent women.

The state Board of Elections produced that amended report in March 2013. Pat McCrory, NC’s Republican governor, signed the omnibus voting bill in August. Republicans knew exactly what they were doing, and whom they were willing to sacrifice to win.

The Republicans’ argument is since voting restrictions in their majestic equality prevent rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike from participating as full citizens without presenting IDs, nothing is amiss in passing and enforcing them.

But in professing concern for “election integrity,” fearful, white Republican politicians are playing percentages, displaying scorn not just for their opponents but their own supporters. They are willing to sacrifice the franchise of thousands, potentially, as acceptable casualties in elections, if that is what it takes to win, including their own sisters, wives, and daughters.

Impolite, arrogant women might want to register their opinions about that on November 6.

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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.

Trump doesn’t care about dead reporters

by digby

It appears that Saudi Arabian journalist and Washington Post op-ed writerJamal Khashoogi was killed in the Saudi embassy in Turkey last week. It also apears that the US knew there was a plot to kidnap him and it’s unclear if they warned him which they are required to do by law.

Trump obviously doesn’t really give a damn. He pretends to be “concerned” but makes one excuse after another as to why he has no intention of doing anything about it, saying that he doesn’t want to endanger the sale of lethal military equipment to the country and suggesting because he isn’t an American citizen and it happened in another country it isn’t any of our business.

Think Progress reports:

Earlier during the press availability, Trump was unable to describe what exactly the U.S. is doing to investigate the apparent death of Khashoggi inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, beyond saying, “we are looking at it, we are looking at it very strongly.” He characterized Khashoggi’s potential murder as “a terrible thing, assuming it happened.”

Asked about the possibility of punishing Saudi Arabia, Trump made clear that he prioritizes doing business with the country more than he does basic human rights.

His unctuous toady Lindsey Graham is a bit more overwrought:

That’s nice. But I think his Dear Leader has other ideas about this sort of thing:

“Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?” Scarborough asked.

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”

“But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said.

The Republican presidential front-runner said there was “a lot of killing going on” around the world and then suggested that Scarborough had asked him a different question.

“I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me [that] question, you asked me a different question. So that’s fine.”

They knew he was an authoritarian reptile before they let him in.

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Orange Julius Caesar’s Praetorian Guard

by digby

Mitch McConnell was asked about whether it’s legitimate for the Democrats to exercise their constitutional duty to oversee the executive:

Question: Democrats have made clear that if they do win back the House, they plan to launch many, many investigations into the president and the administration. They’ve made clear that one of their lines of inquiry is going to be the president’s tax returns, the president’s businesses, the president’s hotel contract. . . . Do you think that’s a legitimate line of inquiry for Democrats to be talking about?

McConnell: I think it’ll help the president get reelected. I remember the price we paid — actually, we did impeach Bill Clinton. I remember all the enthusiasm, lots of Republicans in the House and Senate — “boy, this is the ticket, this is gonna make us have a great year.” . . . It worked exactly the opposite. The public got mad at us. . . . This business of presidential harassment may or may not quite be the winner they think it is.

Wishful thinking and trolling to get Dems to think twice before they conduct any meaningful oversight of Donald Trump. Sadly, it will probably work with some who insist that Democrats need to pass a lot of legislation that will go nowhere and ignore the criminal traitor in the White House. Luckily, most of those people are cable news pundits not people with actual political power.

Greg Sargent nails it with this observation:

McConnell was asked directly whether President Trump’s tax returns and self-dealing constitute a legitimate topic for congressional oversight. He didn’t directly answer, but he did dismissively characterize such an inquiry as “presidential harassment.”

Then AP reporter Julie Pace sought to clarify the majority leader’s position:

Question: Is there anything, though, that you think would be a legitimate investigation into this president or this administration?

McConnell: Well, look, it’ll be up to them to decide what they want to investigate. . . . I do think as a matter of political tactics . . . it would not be smart. But, frequently, they aren’t. Which is helpful.

Again, no answer. Remarkably, this comes just after the New York Times released a major expose revealing that Trump has scooped in hundreds of millions of dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it via extensive “dubious” tax schemes — including instances of outright tax fraud. In some cases, Trump himself was directly involved. This has renewed the urgency of getting a look at Trump’s own tax returns, to see if he has since employed similar schemes.

Democrats have vowed to do all they can to access those tax returns if they regain the majority in either the House or the Senate. They have also signaled that they will try to get them in order to examine Trump’s global business dealings, to determine whether there are any conflicts of interest or other questionable foreign entanglements (*cough* Russia *cough*). But, again, McConnell brushed off any such efforts as mere “harassment.”

Trump family reportedly built wealth through tax schemes, fraud
The White House fired back at a New York Times report that President Trump built his wealth by shielding millions from taxes. (Reuters)

Congressional Republicans keep cheerfully and openly presenting themselves as the alternative to the party that actually does want to exercise congressional oversight. Indeed, in some cases, they have explicitly argued that voters should keep them in charge of Congress to prevent such oversight from ever happening at all.

That’s what they are. They are Trump’s Praetorian Guard. And they are proud of it.

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