Month: March 2019

Trump thinks he won last week.

This is how he acts when he wins.

Imagine 2021:

President Trump is cutting against historical and political norms on a trifecta of big issues at the heart of U.S. domestic, economic and security policy.

Driving the news:

Trump is seeking to kill “Obamacare” through the courts over the objection of his own attorney general and top GOP congressional leaders.

The White House is publicly pushing the Fed to cut interest rates, something prior administrations never contemplated doing. 

The president is again publicly threatening to close ports of entry on the U.S. southern border. “I’m not playing games,” Trump said Friday in Florida.

The State Department said the U.S. will cut off aid to the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the Northern Triangle. Trump said: “No money goes there anymore. … We stopped payment.” The WashPost reports that the escalation involves hundreds of millions of dollars.

A Trump administration official familiar with the situation told Axios that the president “is definitely serious about” closing the border and “has talked about it quite a few times and wanted to do it several times.”

The source said Trump’s idea would mean that day laborers could cross the border, but that it would otherwise be a “total no entry.”

But administration officials privately say it’s unlikely Trump will follow through on his threat, and they acknowledge that they’re nowhere near prepared to execute on such a radical plan on the president’s threatened timeline of this week.

The widespread view within the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s a terrible and unworkable idea.

Trump administration officials have been discussing the impracticalities, such as U.S. citizens coming and going across the border.

But Trump wants it. So “it’s being looked into, what it could and would look like,” the administration official said.

Who knows if he’ll accomplish it. But he did accomplish cutting off foreign aid to the three countries. That is inevitably going to make everything worse.

He gets angry when he thinks he’s won because he wants revenge for ever having been opposed in the first place. He believes it’s “unfair” for him to be questioned.

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“Pro-family” fascists tell women to shut up because they have it so good

by digby

And people wonder why evangelicals support Donald Trump. It’s all of a piece.

In a 17th century palazzo in the Italian city of love, an international alliance of far-right politicians, conservative activists and religious leaders have united in hate.

Over the past few years, the World Congress of Families, whose mission is to “defend the natural family,” was held in former Soviet states. This weekend, the conference’s 13th edition found a home in Verona, endorsed by the regional authority and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the anti-immigrant and xenophobic League party.

While Verona might be best known as the setting of the Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the picturesque northern city of just over 250,000 people has a long history connected to fascist and far-right groups. It was home to one of the headquarters of German Intelligence during the Nazi occupation and in the 1970s, a far-right terrorist network.

Today neo-fascist groups such as Casa Pound and Forza Nuova, whose leader held a press conference outside the venue on Saturday, have their headquarters in the city’s center. And most recently, Verona has become a flashpoint of far-right activity and a launching pad for some of the country’s most well-known — and controversial — politicians and ideas.

In October, Verona’s mayor Federico Sboarina declared the city “pro-life” after the town council passed a motion that would use public funds to finance anti-abortion programs, inspiring politicians in a few other cities, including Milan, Rome, Ferrara, Trieste and Sestri Levante to propose similar motions, although they did not pass.

Verona’s mayor, Federico Sboarina, declared the city “pro-life” last October.

Speaking to CNN from his office just steps away from the conference, Sboarina called Verona an “open city” where “everyone has the right to speak their minds.”

And Salvini, the conference’s keynote speaker, has never shied away from doing just that.

Inside the Gran Guardia Palace on Saturday, Salvini addressed several hundred attendees with a speech that spanned topics from population decline to illegal immigration and a critique of feminism.

“The feminists that speak of women’s rights and are the first to pretend to not see what is the first, only and major, real danger in 2019 for rights, social achievements, freedom to work, study, speak, study, dress as you like — and it’s not the World Family Congress — it’s Islamic extremism, a culture where the woman’s value is less than zero,” he said.

“The woman gets covered with a burka, the woman doesn’t have to leave the house, the woman shouldn’t wear a mini-skirt, and if she dresses too western, thinks too western or becomes too western, (they) beat her up. Not from the dangerous extremists of the Family Congress,” he added.

Come on ladies. Face it. It’s not as bad as living in Afghanistan so stop yer bellyaching. Be grateful they let you have an education and a job.

Now get yer biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.

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Of course he cheats at golf

by digby

He cheats at everything. And apparently, he cows virtually everyone he golfs with into letting him do it and keeping it quiet.

It says a lot about the people who keep coming back for more.

Sixteen of the last 19 US presidents have played golf — and now, in Donald John Trump, the nation can finally boast the very best of them all.

Well, that’s what he’d like you to believe.

“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,’” writes Rick Reilly in the new book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump” (Hachette Book Group), out Tuesday. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has played with Trump in the past, spoke to dozens of players — both amateur and professional — to recount some of the president’s worst cons on the course, starting with his declared handicap of 2.8.

In layman’s terms, the lower the handicap, the better the player. Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 major golf titles and generally considered the greatest golfer in the history of the game, has a handicap of 3.4.

Nicklaus’ handicap is listed on the same Golf Handicap and Information Network website used by Trump, where players post their scores.

“If Trump is a 2.8,” writes Reilly, “Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.”

Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.

On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.

“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.

The actor Samuel L. Jackson has also witnessed the underhanded methods Trump employs, according to Reilly.

“We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey],” he says, “and his caddy told him he found it!”

Donald Trump plays golf.
Getty Images
The boxer Oscar De La Hoya and rocker Alice Cooper have also seen the same shenanigans first hand, while LPGA player Suzann Pettersen, another victim, thinks it’s all down to his caddy “since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”

And Trump doesn’t just tamper with his own balls.

During a game with Mike Tirico before Trump was elected, the former ESPN football announcer hit the shot of his life, a 230-yard 3-wood towards an elevated green he couldn’t see. But he knew it was close.

When he got to the putting green, however, Tirico’s ball was nowhere to be seen. Instead, it was 50 feet left of the hole in a bunker.

It made no sense — until Trump’s caddy caught up with him after the round.

“Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5?’” Tirico says. “‘It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’”

Even Trump’s golf courses lie. As the owner of 14 golf clubs and with his name on another five, Trump has, according to Reilly, been known to wildly exaggerate their standing in course rankings, overvalue them and even play fast and loose with their locations.

At Trump Washington at Lowes Island, there’s a Civil War monument (bearing Trump’s name, obviously) between the 14th and 15th holes, reminding golfers of how many soldiers, from North and South, died at that very spot.

It’s a nice touch, even though several Civil War historians have confirmed that no battle took place anywhere near the memorial.

And what about his course at Bedminster? There’s a plaque there with a quote from the renowned course architect Tom Fazio.

It reads:

This is the best design I’ve ever done.

TOM FAZIO

Except that’s not true, either.

“I don’t believe I said it exactly like that,” Fazio told Reilly.

In a game where etiquette is everything, Reilly reports that Trump never takes his cap off for the end-of-round handshake, nor does he remove it in the clubhouse afterward, presumably for fear of what damage a sweaty round might have done to that hairstyle.

He’s even been known to drive his golf cart onto the putting green, an offense Reilly likens to “hanging your laundry in the Sistine Chapel.”

Quite why Trump cheats is another matter. He is, by all accounts, a very good golfer for his age (even Tiger Woods was impressed) but seems incapable of playing by the rules. Does he even care?

To that, Reilly offers a simple reply.

“Golf,” he writes, “is like bicycle shorts. It reveals a lot about a man.”

So Bolton got Trump to Use the Libya Model

This is the problem with a president with no principles is so far over his head that he literally has no idea what he is doing. He literally doesn’t understand what he’s doing but he’s so arrogant and narcissistic that he nonetheless thinks his “instincts” are so good that he doesn’t have to. He has said this out loud:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”

What this means is that he’s easily manipulated by advisers with competing agendas, lurching from one position to the other, all the while convinced that it makes sense simply because he’s the one doing it.

Maybe that was ok for a man making deals for the branding of cheap consumer goods or fraudulent development deals. For president, it is lethal.

He may escape a nuclear disaster simply by accident. We have to hope against hope that he will. But it will be a matter of luck.

They are all Mexico

by digby

This is where Republicans — and the president — get their news:

btw, there's no missing context. Here's the video of the segment. pic.twitter.com/5BKnEvaadx— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) March 31, 2019

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That creaky, old time religion
by Tom Sullivan

It’s not exactly “Springtime for Capitalism” lately. The old time religion is a bit creaky and tattered around the edges, as are the Americans with bad teeth living under overpasses.

The young stylist who cut my hair Friday explained she was moving this weekend to her boyfriend’s hometown of Bowling Green, KY. She was ready “to get on with my life,” she said, and was tired of living hand-to-mouth where lower-wage workers were barely able to make ends meet. Lower costs meant they could afford to buy a house in Bowling Green.

You know things are dicey when true believers feel obliged to draft paeans to the glories of the free market, when magazines like Bloomberg publish opinion pieces titled, “Capitalism Needs Reform, Not Revolution,” when reporters are asking if presidential candidates are socialists, and when even the business press is speaking finally of reigning in capitalism’s worst excesses.

Beside the threat climate change poses to bringing down the entire system anyway, Noah Smith offers at Bloomberg:

The second major challenge is to make Americans feel less materially insecure. Instead of looking at aggregate economic numbers — gross domestic product, or the share of wealth held by the 1 percent — we should look at the basic determinants of material comfort and security.

Welcome to the party, pal. FDR proposed that as his Third Freedom in 1941.

Nicholas Kristof reviews an effort by one business owner in Seattle to bring to heel the kind of cuthroat capitalism that crashed the economy in 2008. Four years ago, Dan Price of Gravity Payments announced to employees he would raise minimum salaries to $70,000, in part by slashing his own $1.1 million income to the same level.

Blasphemy! cried the business press. While the roll-out was rocky, Gravity Payments’ business is up and profits, Kristof writes, are “higher than ever.” But the model is probably not scaleable. Being first drew press and new customers followers might not see. But Price has shown what’s possible.

The problem is, followers of that old time religion who have done well for themselves — and not likely all by themselves — are not anxious to share their good fortune.

“Real Time” host Bill Maher echoes FDR in commenting on how countries with a higher socialism-to-capitalism mix rank as happier than the United States in the recent World Happiness Report. They have low-cost or no-cost education and universal health care.

“Happiness isn’t only about what you have. It’s also about what you don’t have to worry about,” Maher said. As FDR knew, piece of mind is freedom as well.

For the benefit of aging Cold Warriors, perhaps, Maher recommends we rebrand any reformulation of America’s capitalist and socialist elements “Capitalism Plus.” Because, “It’s a plus when you get sick and you can focus on getting better instead of not going broke” and ending up sleeping under an overpass.

Saturday Night at the Movies

‘Roids R Us: Screwball (***½)

By Dennis Hartley

Did you know there is now a popular aggregator website called Florida Man, created to keep track of a seemingly endless stream of bizarre news items from The Sunshine State?

There is a possibility that the site is satirical. That said…the stories seem plausible to me.

It is in this spirit that one must dive headfirst into Screwball, the newest “is he making this shit up?” documentary from film maker Billy Corben (perhaps best known for his Florida drug trade trilogy-Cocaine Cowboys, Cocaine Cowboys 2 and Square Grouper).

I had some trepidation going in. On the upside, the film involves one of my favorite things (drugs). On the downside, it also heavily involves my least favorite thing (sports).

The subject of the film is Anthony Bosch, a Florida man (heh) who gained notoriety from his involvement in the Biogenesis “performance-enhancing drug” scandal back in 2013. Biogenesis was the name of Bosch’s clinic, where he “consulted” (“dispensed”, mostly) for a wide-ranging variety of clientele, from parents looking to juice up their kids’ performance on the school team to some very high-profile names in professional sports.

Bosch’s clinic had a shaky start. From a 2013 Miami New Times expose by Tim Elfrink:

Biogenesis’s history really begins in 2009, when Bosch started a firm, called Colonial Services, based in Key Biscayne.

That same year, on May 7, Major League Baseball suspended L.A. Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez after he tested positive for HCG — a women’s fertility drug often used at the end of a steroid cycle to restart testosterone production. Ramirez, who lives in Weston, issued a statement that a “personal doctor” had prescribed a medication he didn’t realize would violate the drug code.

Reporters at ESPN quickly identified that doctor: Pedro Bosch, whose son, Anthony, was “well known in Latin American baseball circles,” the network reported. “His relationships with players date at least from the earlier part of the decade, when he was seen attending parties with players and known to procure tickets to big-league ballparks, especially in Boston and New York,” ESPN wrote.

The DEA was “probing” both Bosches for their role in getting Ramirez the medication, ESPN reported. MLB President Bob DuPuy also confirmed he was “aware” of the investigation and cooperating.

Tony Bosch never responded to the allegations, but in a letter to ESPN, Pedro lashed back two weeks later, claiming that Ramirez was never his patient, that he’d “never prescribed” anyone HCG, and that there was no federal investigation. No charges were ever filed.

(Pedro Bosch was a defendant in an unrelated federal civil case that same year. The U.S. attorney accused him, along with more than two dozen other doctors and a similar number of lab owners, of running a kickback scheme to inflate drug costs. The government withdrew the claims two months later.)

While father and son both dodged a bullet in 2009, it’s a telling prequel to where Corben picks up the story; it also gives you an idea of what types of characters are involved. It is quite the tale, told by Anthony Bosch himself (along with some of his former associates).

Corben employs an interesting variation on the usual docudrama tropes. He uses child “reenactors” throughout the film. At first, it was distracting; it felt “gimmicky” and borderline precious. However, as the story gets wilder, the reenactments accrue more entertainment value (it’s the same quotient that makes Drunk History so funny). Bosch is quite the entertaining raconteur himself (as most bullshit artists and con men tend to be).

In fact, I was so entertained I nearly forgot how little I care about sports. Joking aside, the film is not so much “about” sports, as it is about the business of sports. It’s also about that peculiar homo sapien obsession with “winning”. In my 2013 review of Rush, I wrote this:

I’ll admit up front that I don’t know from the sport of Formula One racing. In fact, I’ve never held any particular fascination for loud, fast cars (or any kind of sports, for that matter). If that makes me less than a manly man, well, I’ll just have to live with that fact.

However, I am fascinated by other people’s fascination with competitive sport; after all, (paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from Harold and Maude) they’re my species. There’s certainly an impressive amount of time, effort and money poured into this peculiarly human compulsion to be the “champion” or securing the best seats for cheering one on; even if in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean shit to a tree.

There is an interesting political sidebar to the story. Turns out, Anthony Bosch is related to Orlando Bosch. From my 2007 review of the documentary 638 Ways to Kill Castro:

The most chilling revelation concerns the downing of a commercial Cuban airliner off Barbados in 1976 (73 people were killed, none with any known direct associations with the Castro regime). One of the alleged masterminds was an anti-Castro Cuban exile living in Florida, named Orlando Bosch, who had participated in numerous CIA-backed actions in the past.

When Bosch was threatened with deportation in the late 80’s, a number of Republicans rallied to have him pardoned, including Florida congresswoman Ileana Ross, who used her involvement with the “Free Orlando Bosch” campaign as part of her running platform. Her campaign manager was a young up and coming politician named…Jeb Bush. Long story short? Then-president George Bush Sr. ended up granting Bosch a pardon in 1990. BTW, Bosch had once been publicly referred to as an “unrepentant terrorist” by the Attorney General. (Don’t get me started.)

Oh, what a tangled web you weave, Florida Man.

Previous posts with related themes:

638 Ways to Kill Castro

More reviews at Den of Cinema
On Facebook
On Twitter

–Dennis Hartley

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Trump has a tantrum and makes everything much, much worse

by digby

I guess he thinks these countries should start shooting their citizens if they try to leave the country? There’s a great example of that in the not too distant past. They had a big wall too.

The United States will no longer provide foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

A State Department spokesperson told The Hill in a statement Saturday that the agency was directed by President Trump to halt aid to the so-called Northern Triangle countries.

“At the Secretary’s instruction, we are carrying out the President’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” the statement said. “We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.”

The Hill has contacted the White House for comment.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement Friday that she signed a “historic” regional compact this week with representatives of the Northern Triangle countries. She said the countries agreed to “combat human smuggling and trafficking, crack down on transnational criminals fueling the crisis, and strengthen border security to prevent irregular migration.”

President Trump on Friday said that the countries “set up” migrant caravans, according to CNN.

“We were paying them tremendous amounts of money. And we’re not paying them anymore. Because they haven’t done a thing for us. They set up these caravans,” he reportedly said.

Trump previously threatened to cut off aid to the countries in December over alleged caravans, accusing them of “doing nothing for the United States but taking our money.”

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a statement denouncing the move.

“If carried out, President Trump’s irresponsible decision to cut off our assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras would undermine American interests and put our national security at risk,” he said.

“U.S. foreign assistance is not charity; it advances our strategic interests and funds initiatives that protect American citizens. This latest reported move shows the Administration still does not understand that the United States cuts foreign aid to Central America at our own peril,” he added.

Notice how he puts everything in terms of them “taking our money” and the US not getting its money’s worth over and over and eover again.

I’m so fucking sick of everything in this world being reduced to how the US is being financially screwed. It’s all he knows, his entire worldview.

Exonerated!

by digby

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Trump will have a real campaign this time

by digby

The New York Times reports on Trump’s wildly expensive presidential campaign. It’s a more professional campaign but they still have the same freak at the helm so I don’t know wht difference that will really make:

For now, the Trump campaign is focused on giving its candidate the infrastructure for success and, as the race is in its early stages, giving him the room he craves to dictate his own script.

Mr. Trump is focused on vengeance after the end of the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and his campaign aides are indulging him, attacking the Democrats who have sought to investigate him and the reporters who have written about it. Mr. Trump, whom critics have repeatedly described as “corrupt,” has tried to affix both terms to the news media.

Privately, some Trump advisers acknowledge those attacks may have a shelf life, and that they are deploying them in part to blunt questions about Mr. Trump’s own credibility.

But aides say that Mr. Trump always needs a foil, and without the Mueller investigation to swing at and no clear Democratic challenger likely to emerge for months, the press is his stand-in.

In addition to the challenges posed by Mr. Trump’s preference for fights and distractions, the campaign faces headwinds that he did not as a first-time candidate. Democrats and Republicans see an electoral map that will be far more challenging for Mr. Trump, whose support in three key states has sagged, and who faced an invigorated and organic level of Democratic turnout.

To staff the campaign, advisers have brought in a mix of new hires and veterans of the 2016 effort. Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager who speaks frequently with the president, has consulted extensively with veterans of past presidential runs, relying increasingly on Karl Rove, the architect of Mr. Bush’s re-election effort.

Karl Rove had a political theory that said “Politics is TV with the sound turned off.” By that he meant it was all about visuals not about what candidates say. Does that work with Trump? The big rallies and a sea of red hats is pretty familiar. He’s not exactly an attractive leader (meaning that he pulls faces and seems strange up close.) It’s what he says that excites his base.

Maybe Rove has ideas about how to appeal to the Bush voters, but I’d guess he’s probably a bit out of touch. The Bush coalition included a whole lot of white suburban women and many of them loathe trump with every fiber of their being.

On the other hand, Rove is very experienced at selling a relly dumb guy to the public. But Trump issomehting else again …

I wonder how the Bush’s feel about him helping Trump? (Of course, they’ll probably be stumping for him in September 2020…)

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