Month: March 2019

It’s the leverage and improper influence, stupid

by digby

Adam Schiff is refocusing the House investigation into what is happening with Trump right now rather than the 2016 election, a subject which I imagine he assumes will be addressed by the Special Counsel.

Nearly two years into his investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller has not accused any member of the Trump campaign of conspiring with the 2016 election interference effort — and it’s not clear whether he will.

But legal experts, along with the congressman leading the House Russia investigation, tell NBC News that the most important question investigators must answer is one that may never have been suitable for the criminal courts: Whether President Trump or anyone around him is under the influence of a foreign government.

“It’s more important to know what Trump is NOW than to know what he did in 2016,” said Martin Lederman, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Obama administration. “It’s more important to know whether he has been compromised as president than whether his conduct during the campaign constituted a crime.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., then ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, leaves a secure area where the panel meets at the Capitol, on Feb. 5, 2018J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Whether Mueller will answer that question in the absence of criminal charges is unclear. But in an interview with NBC News, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said he is steering his investigation in a new direction to focus on it — and he will demand any relevant evidence compiled by the FBI or Mueller’s team.

The California Democrat also expressed concern that Mueller hasn’t fully investigated Trump’s possible financial history with Russia.

“From what we can see either publicly or otherwise, it’s very much an open question whether this is something the special counsel has looked at,” Schiff told NBC News.

Schiff said the public testimony from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that in 2016 Trump stood to earn hundreds of millions of dollars from a secret Moscow real estate project is a staggering conflict of interest that must be fully explored.

“I certainly agree that the counterintelligence investigation may be more important than the criminal investigation because it goes to a present threat to our national security — whether the president and anybody around him are compromised by a foreign power,” Schiff said. “That’s not necessarily an issue that can be covered in indictments.”

In fact, most FBI counterintelligence investigations don’t result in criminal charges, experts say, because they tend to involve secret intelligence that either can’t be used in court or doesn’t add up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If the FBI assesses that a government official is compromised by a foreign adversary, officials often will quietly remove that person from a sensitive role or wall him or her off from classified information.

Obviously, none of that is an option for the president of the United States.

No official action was taken after Trump was accused of giving highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office in 2017. As the president, he has the legal right to spill secrets to whomever he wants.

The White House has long insisted that the notion of a president in thrall to the Kremlin is ridiculous, pointing to the sanctions the Trump administration has levied on Russia in response to cyber attacks, election interference, and its actions in Ukraine.

Trump defenders complain that those who are now focusing on foreign influence have “moved the goalposts” — shifting emphasis to the issue of foreign compromise now that criminal charges involving “Russian collusion” seem less likely.

Trump has criticized Schiff’s approach, saying in a Feb. 7 tweet, “So now Congressman Adam Schiff announces, after having found zero Russian Collusion, that he is going to be looking at every aspect of my life, both financial and personal, even though there is no reason to be doing so. Never happened before! Unlimited Presidential Harassment.”

But the question of Trump’s motives regarding Russia has always been front and center for the FBI, as former Acting Director Andrew McCabe made clear in a recent round of media appearances. Neither Trump nor any of his supporters has been able to quell questions about the president’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin, including Trump’s seeming unwillingness to criticize the Russian autocrat.Robert Mueller, then director of the FBI, testifies on Capitol Hill in 2011.Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images file

McCabe, who was fired for lack of candor in an unrelated matter, alleged that the president disputed intelligence that a North Korean missile could hit the United States, saying, “I don’t care. I believe Putin.”

That allegedly happened behind closed doors, but few will forget the public spectacle of Trump siding with Putin over his intelligence community on the question of U.S. election interference at last year’s Helsinki summit, telling the world: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

McCabe said he could not rule out that the president was, in essence, a Russian asset. Trump has called McCabe a liar and “a disgrace to the FBI.”

“What Americans should be concerned about is whether the president’s Russia policy is not dictated by our national interest but is dictated by his desire to make hundreds of millions of dollars off a tower in Moscow,” Schiff said.

There’s more at the link.

Trump’s behavior at Helsinki had to make the hair of every Russia counterintelligence agent in the government stand up on end. Whatever happened in the campaign, there is something terribly off about Trump’s relationship with Putin as president. And the fact that “as the president, he has the legal right to spill secrets to whomever he wants” is a very, very big problem for this country and the world.

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I don’t know what game they are playing but it’s one of the weirdest sub-plots in the Trump Reality Show

by digby

I have long been of the opinion that the Conways are doing some kind of good cop-bad cop routine to somehow stay on the right side of the Trump era, however it comes out. But it seems to be going so far that it seems to be coming to a crescendo.

This story in the Washington Post indicates that husband George is really pushing the envelope:

President Trump on Tuesday ratcheted up a remarkable public spat with the husband of one of his top advisers, attacking Kellyanne Conway’s husband as a “total loser” on Twitter in response to the lawyer’s persistent questions about his mental health and competence.

“A total loser!” Trump wrote in the tweet targeting Conway’s husband, a prominent conservative attorney. The president’s tweet also included a dubious assertion from Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, that the president “doesn’t even know” his senior adviser’s husband.

But George Conway said in an interview Tuesday that he has had a number of notable interactions with Trump over the past decade, often concerning legal representation and sensitive legal matters since Trump became president. He described the president as “mendacious” and “incompetent” and predicted he would not win reelection.

Conway also suggested his own tweets questioning the president’s mental health were aimed in part at avoiding conflicts with his wife.

“It’s so maddening to watch,” said Conway, a longtime Washington attorney who is well-known in conservative circles. “The mendacity, the incompetence, it’s just maddening to watch. The tweeting is just the way to get it out of the way, so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day. That’s basically it. Frankly, it’s so I don’t end up screaming at her about it.”

Conway has been a persistent critic of Trump’s policies and actions, frequently going on Twitter to question whether the president is operating within the Constitution and other accepted boundaries. But the criticism recently has become more personal, and he has often attacked Trump just after his wife defends the president on television.

Conway’s tweets Monday included images from the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” including pages with diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder” and “antisocial personality disorder.”

Although Conway had previously posted similar concerns on Twitter, “it stuck this time because of the utter bizarreness this weekend, his own conduct. It was so illustrative,” he said, referring to a two-day span in which Trump sent out 52 tweets with a broad variety of attacks.

Kellyanne Conway did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but she said on Monday that she did not share her husband’s concerns about Trump. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has wanted to attack George Conway on Twitter before but has been talked out of it by aides, who argued it would embolden Conway and cause unnecessary drama, according to several current and former White House aides.

The president’s change of approach was apparently prompted by a tweet sent Monday night by Parscale, who wrote about Conway: “We all know that @realDonaldTrump turned down Mr. Kellyanne Conway for a job he desperately wanted. He barely worked @TheJusticeDept and was either fired/quit, didn’t want the scrutiny? Now he hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success. POTUS doesn’t even know him!”

George Conway said that contrary to Parscale’s tweet, he opted against working at the Justice Department after Trump offered him a position heading the civil division because he watched Trump attack the department’s leaders and then fire James B. Comey, the FBI director, in early 2017. Conway said he remembered riding down the West Side Highway in Manhattan and hearing on the radio that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had been appointed to lead an investigation of possible connections between Russian election interference and the Trump campaign.

“I’m thinking to myself, this guy is going to be at war with the Justice Department for the next two years,” Conway said. “I’m not doing this.”

In a conversation with Trump at the wedding of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in June 2017, Conway said, Trump approached him and complimented him for not taking a job under then-attorney general Jeff Sessions.

“He said to me, I remember it clearly, you were smart not to work for that guy,” Conway said. “He is so weak.”

Trump then ranted for several minutes that Sessions should have never recused himself from the Mueller investigation. “I told him, I’d heard the recusal issue was pretty clear, that Sessions had to recuse himself,” Conway said. “He took great affront at that.”

A person close to Parscale said the campaign manager was told by Trump that he did not have any recollections of being in a room with George Conway and that the president only met Kellyanne Conway during the election.

George Conway outlined a number of interactions with Trump that date back more than a decade — and said his wife had known him for that long.

Shortly after they were married in 2001, Kellyanne and George Conway moved into an apartment in Manhattan’s Trump World Tower. A few years later, George Conway made an impression on the future president at a condominium board meeting where he argued against removing Trump’s name from the building. The speech earned him an offer to join the condo board, which he declined but passed on to his wife, who accepted.

In a 2006 letter shared with The Washington Post, Trump praised Conway for helping him keep control of the building.

“What I was most impressed with was how quickly you were able to comprehend a very bad situation,” Trump wrote, praising Conway for “ridding Trump World Tower of some very bad people.” In a postscript, Trump said Conway had “a truly great voice, certainly not a bad asset for a top trial lawyer!”

Conway said Trump also called him to thank him, and he told the president he was glad his name stayed on the building.

The two later met at a fundraiser in Alpine, N.J., where the Conway family owns a home, he said. After Trump won the election in 2016, Conway said that he flew with Trump to Washington for an inaugural dinner with his wife as they moved their belongings, which were on the plane.

During that flight, Trump quizzed Conway if he should fire Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Conway said. “I said in general, it’s better to have your people in terms of important positions than others,” Conway said. He said the president did not appear motivated by anything other than political machinations. Trump eventually fired Bharara in the spring of 2017.

During the transition, Conway said he also rode in a black SUV with Trump, his wife and Stephen K. Bannon to a costume party at the home of GOP megadonor Rebekah Mercer. Trump had heard about the party and wanted to attend. During the car ride, Conway said the president was fixated on John Bolton’s prominent mustache — and that it was a reason not to pick him as secretary of state. Since then, Trump picked Bolton as his national security adviser.

“He didn’t like the mustache,” Conway said. “He just went on and on about the mustache.”

Conway later said he was surprised to get a call from Trump around the time he took office, when Trump was seeking legal advice about a lawsuit alleging that he was benefiting financially from the presidency in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. The call, Conway said, was arranged by his wife. “He wanted to know what I thought about the judge and what I thought about the case,” Conway said.

In spring 2017, Conway said his wife arranged a call with himself, the president, Vice President Pence and senior adviser Jared Kushner to evaluate lawyers for the Mueller investigation. A speakerphone was used, Conway said.

“He wanted to know my opinions on a variety of lawyers who were being considered to be his outside counsel. He asked me for my opinions on each of them,” Conway said, adding that there were “all these people in the room making it a nonprivileged conversation.”

Some in the White House say Conway is selfish for posting so many tweets, making it difficult for his wife to work there and attacking her boss. “Now he hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success,” campaign manager Brad Parscale posted Monday night on Twitter.

Kellyanne Conway went on a lengthy rant about her husband to several guests at a British Embassy party for members of Congress last month, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and former Post journalist Sally Quinn, according to two attendees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Conway told the group that she and the president think her husband is jealous of her, and that the president has kept her at a prominent place in the administration because he trusts her and wants to “protect her,” the attendees said.

Kellyanne Conway also said that George Conway preferred to spend his time in front of his computer, while she preferred to socialize, the attendees said. Kellyanne Conway also said it was the fault of the news media for giving her husband such a platform, and that some of George Conway’s close friends had asked him to stop.

She told the guests that they would not like it if their marriages or personal lives were in the spotlight, these people said.

Asked for comment, Quinn said Conway was upset about the media giving her husband so much attention.

“She said women should be respectful of other women, and his comments had nothing to do with her job,” Quinn said. “I told her it’s a story, it’s a very good story.”

George Conway declined to comment on the state of his marriage — answering only that he wished his wife did not work for the White House.

He said he remained proud of his wife and was not “jealous.”

“No one was prouder than I was that she was able to elect this man president despite his obvious flaws,” said Conway, who was spotted crying tears of joy on election night in 2016 at Trump Tower. “She took a campaign that the candidate had run into the gutter.”

Asked about White House complaints that he is trading off her fame, he added: “I made it possible for her to be where she is today. So there’s that. It’s not about jealousy. It’s about reality. Who this man is, and whether he’s fit for public office. Which, as I’ve said, he isn’t.”

Many of Conway’s friends in the legal community say he should focus instead on the president’s success in appointing conservative judges and that he is too fixated on the president’s personal style.

But Conway said Trump was damaging conservatism for decades to come and that it was not worth the bargain for judges and conservative policies. He also shrugged off Trump calling him “a total loser” on Twitter.

“I thought it was a perfect example of the point I was making,” Conway said. “He can’t concern himself with affairs of state. He’s more concerned about what people say about him and waging little battles with everyone and everything.”

Is it possible that Kellyanne is looking for a way out and wants Trump tell her to divorce her husband or he’ll fire her? I could see that. She could play the family values card and then tell everyone later that she did her best to moderate Trump’s worst excesses but then had to get out hen he threatened her marriage.

Or maybe she’ll pick Trump over George. God knows Trump would be happy (for a little while anyway…)

I don’t know. It’s just weird.

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Stonewall Strategy

by digby

Politico reports:

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler wrote to the White House last month demanding information about President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to fund the construction of a southern border wall.

Yet Nadler’s Feb. 22 deadline came and went with no response. Not only did the Democratic congressman not receive the documents he wanted, he didn’t even receive a customary letter back from the White House acknowledging his request.

It was just one example of the Trump White House’s unusually hostile — or in this case, non-existent — response to congressional investigators.

In their early response to an onslaught of Democratic requests, Trump officials are breaking from norms set by previous administrations of both parties, according to people who worked in the White House or Capitol Hill during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Over the last two months, Trump’s intent has become clear: He doesn’t plan to negotiate with Congress over their demands for information and witnesses the way his predecessors did. Instead, House Democrats are going to have to fight him for everything.

POLITICO contacted the 17 House committees that unsuccessfully requested records or witnesses from the Trump administration over the last two months. In most cases involving the White House itself, as opposed to agencies and departments, the request was ignored altogether. In at least one instance, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone responded with an aggressive letter questioning the committee’s authority to even ask for information. (In contrast to the White House, departments and agencies often delivered requested information politely.)

Another deadline came and went on Monday. The White House ignored Nadler’s latest request for a slew of documents about fired administration officials, Russian nationals and Trump businesses, according to a person familiar with the situation. The White House and Committee declined to comment.

As a result — despite high hopes among Democrats that they would quickly be in possession of troves of internal Trump administration documents, and grilling a succession of administration witnesses — a long and frustrating fight with Trump lawyers lies ahead, a fight that could end up in court. Splashy demands of the White House made in the early days of the new House Democratic majority, could take many months, possibly stretching well into 2020, to produce results.

Democrats are already furious over what they call the brazen stonewalling. But David Bossie, a Trump confidant and adviser who served as the House GOP’s lead investigator into the Clinton White House in the 1990s, predicted that Trump officials will face no serious legal consequences for ignoring the requests — and said they are justified in doing so because Democrats are waging what they call nakedly partisan inquiries.

“The White House is taking the exact right tactic to ignore the requests and see what comes of it,” he said. “I wouldn’t respect [the Democrats’] process.”

The White House failed to provide information about the national emergency to the Intelligence and Judiciary committees by their January and February deadlines, according to information obtained by POLITICO. It didn’t send documents about Trump’s communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees by last Friday’s deadline. And the House Oversight Committee did not receive information about possible breaches of the security clearance system before its March 4 deadline. Cipollone argued that the committee “has failed to point to any authority establishing a legitimate legislative purpose for [its] unprecedented and extraordinarily intrusive demands.”

I doubt that the House chairmen are surprised by this. Stonewalling isn’t unprecedented, although it appears they aren’t going to even pretend to cooperate. And it’s possible that the Democrats are depending on the Mueller investigation to provide a lot of this information, which the White House did cooperate in providing. Since we have no idea whether the Mueller report will provide any details, that’s a big risk.

Mostly, I think they’re running out the clock, hoping to get to the election before anything substantial is revealed. It makes sense. Trump knows he’s going to get substantial help and he’ll have masses of money to help him destroy his “socialist” opponents. If he can make it to a second term this whole thing will likely be dropped under the assumption that “the people” have spoken and they didn’t care about any of it. It’s Trump’s best get-out-of-jail card.

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He just loves him a fascist

by digby

During Oval Office event with Bolsonaro, Trump says he's "looking very strongly" at granting Brazil NATO privileges.

"We have a great alliance with Brazil — better than we've ever had before," Trump adds. pic.twitter.com/E5yZUOJZhY— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 19, 2019

Keep in mind, however, that the Democrats are far worse. Or, at least, that’s what I hear.

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Not ready for bovine time
by Tom Sullivan

Image from “Devin Nunes’ cow” Twitter page @DevinCow

California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes claims to have sued Twitter, Republican political consultant Liz Mair, and two anonymous twitter accounts belonging to “Devin Nunes’ Mom” (@DevinNunesMom) and “Devin Nunes’ cow” (@DevinCow) for defamation of character (if that is even possible).

In what observers believe is a publicity stunt, the thin-skinned congressman allegedly filed a $250 million lawsuit in Virginia on Monday that also seeks $350,000 in punitive damages. Nunes accuses the sitting president’s favorite social media platform of anti-conservative bias, of trying to “intimidate” him and “interfere with his important investigation of corruption by the Clinton campaign and alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

Nunes further accuses the defendants, jointly and severally, of “negligence, defamation per se, insulting words, and civil conspiracy” over such tweets as this:

Devin’s boots are full of manure. He’s udder-ly worthless and it’s pasture time to mooove him to prison. The herd supports @JanzforCongress: Valley resident, anti-crime prosecutor. #CA22 needs a representative who works for us, full time 🐄 https://t.co/SizKWRN9kx— Devin Nunes’ cow (@DevinCow) October 12, 2018

Describing itself as “Hanging out on the dairy in Iowa looking for the lil’ treasonous cowpoke,” the site throws shade at political lore about Nunes’ California dairy farming roots — the farm is “long gone,” the cows are in Iowa. Since “Devin Nunes’ cow” has been live for over a year, and since the Washington Post finds no record of the actual filing, this may indeed be a stunt by Nunes:

“This was an orchestrated effort,” Nunes said during an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity on Monday. “People were targeting me.”

Nunes promised Hannity this suit would be “the first of many,” etc., etc.

One worries, however, that Nunes and his favorite president might be influenced by a recent law signed by the president’s favorite autocrat:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a controversial set of bills that make it a crime to “disrespect” the state and spread “fake news” online, Russian media reported on Monday.

The bills amending existing information laws overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Russian parliament in less than two months. Observers and some lawmakers have criticized the legislation for its vague language and potential to stifle free speech.

The legislation will establish punishments for spreading information that “exhibits blatant disrespect for the society, government, official government symbols, constitution or governmental bodies of Russia.”

The Russian law bypasses the courts and allows prosecutors to block news sources directly, Maria Snegovaya, an adjunct fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the Washington Post in an email:

“In other words, it significantly expands the repressive power of Russia’s repressive apparatus. This may be compared to the Stalin’s Troika, a commission of three for express judgment in the Soviet Union during the time of Joseph Stalin who issued sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public and fair trial,” she added.

At this stage of the Putin-Trump bromance, it is unclear who inspired whom in promoting “fake news” as any information dictators and autocrats dislike. But Putin’s shiny, new attack on free speech is the stuff of Donald Trump’s wet dreams.

Trump has called for a loosening of American libel and defamation law before, and as recently as last weekend called for a federal investigation into Saturday Night Live for telling jokes at his expense. In that context, the Nunes stunt on Monday may be another attempt by Nunes to curry favor with his cult leader.

California Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell Jr., is on alert, and so should you be:

I will do everything physically possible — march with my feet, shout from my lungs, and out-maneuver with my mind — to stop this from happening in America. But you better believe @realDonaldTrump will try. And I know you’re with me. Not on our watch. https://t.co/OVfKdVGQXc— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) March 18, 2019

The president of (some of) the United States

by digby

Our prayers are with the great people of South Dakota. We are staying in close contact with @GovKristiNoem and all the State and Local leaders during and after these devastating floods. Everyone be safe! https://t.co/9CNcPJZ3qi— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2019

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 10, 2018

Have you ever seen anything like this?

“There is something very wrong here”

by digby

… and here is the guy who shot New York crime boss Francesco “Frank” Cali — repping QAnon (thanks @lib_crusher) pic.twitter.com/S8gwV9t1IP

— The QAnon Anonymous Pod🌹 (@QanonAnonymous) March 18, 2019

What the hell?

The man charged with killing the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family wrote pro-Donald Trump slogans on his hand and flashed them to journalists before a court hearing Monday.

Anthony Comello, 24, was arrested Saturday in New Jersey in the death of Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali last week in front of his Staten Island home.

While waiting for a court hearing to begin in Toms River, N.J., in which he agreed to be extradited to New York, Comello held up his left hand.

On it were scrawled pro-Trump slogans including “MAGA Forever,” an abbreviation of Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” It also read “United We Stand MAGA” and “Patriots In Charge.” In the center of his palm he had drawn a large circle. It was not immediately clear why he had done so.

Comello’s lawyer, Brian Neary, would not discuss the writing on his client’s hand, nor would he say whether Comello maintains his innocence. Asked by reporters after the hearing what was on Comello’s hand, Neary replied, “Handcuffs.”

He referred all other questions to Comello’s Manhattan lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, who said in an emailed statement his client has been placed in protective custody due to “serious threats” that had been made against him, but gave no details of them. Ocean County officials could not immediately be reached after hours on Monday.

“Mr. Comello’s family and friends simply cannot believe what they have been told,” Gottlieb said. “There is something very wrong here and we will get to the truth about what happened as quickly as possible.”

The statement did not address the writing on Comello’s hand, and a lawyer from Gottlieb’s firm declined to comment further Monday evening.

Comello sat with a slight smile in the jury box of the courtroom Monday afternoon as dozens of reporters and photographers filed into the room. When they were in place, Comello held up his left hand to display the writings as the click and whir of camera lenses filled the room with sound.

During the hearing, Comello did not speak other than to say, “Yes, sir,” to the judge to several procedural questions.

The 53-year-old Cali, a native of Sicily, was shot to death last Wednesday by a gunman who may have crashed his truck into Cali’s car to lure him outside. Police said Cali was shot 10 times.

Federal prosecutors referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Mafia’s Gambino family, once one of the most powerful crime organizations in the country. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot.

Cali’s only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when he pleaded guilty in an extortion scheme involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months behind bars and was released in 2009.

Police have not yet said whether they believe Cali’s murder was a mob hit or whether he was killed for some other motive.

I don’t know whether that circle is a QAnon sign or not. Whatever. The guy is obviously a RWNJ — who assassinated a major crime boss?

Huh????

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Health care will be job one

by digby

A new Kaiser Foundation poll shows a large majority for the progressive health care positions:

This month’s KFF Health Tracking Poll continues to find majority support (driven by Democrats and independents) for the federal government doing more to help provide health insurance for more Americans. One way for lawmakers to expand coverage is by broadening the role of public programs. Nearly six in ten (56 percent) favor a national Medicare-for-all plan, but overall net favorability towards such a plan ranges as high as +45 and as low as -44 after people hear common arguments about this proposal.

Larger majorities of the public favor more incremental changes to the health care system such as a Medicare buy-in plan for adults between the ages of 50 and 64 (77 percent), a Medicaid buy-in plan for individuals who don’t receive health coverage through their employer (75 percent), and an optional program similar to Medicare for those who want it (74 percent). Both the Medicare buy-in plan and Medicaid buy-in plan also garner majority support from Republicans (69 percent and 64 percent­).
Moving forward, half of Democrats would rather see the new Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives focus their efforts on improving and protecting the ACA (51 percent), while about four in ten want them to focus on passing a national Medicare-for-all plan (38 percent).

Democrats and their Independent leaners want this problem dealt with once and for all. If Democrats win in 2020, they will have a mandate to do it.

I will just say that I think the Obamacare program was probably a necessary step in the evolution of this issue. Changing this huge sector of our society in such a fundamental way, partiularly with a vicious opposition, often takes several steps. But it will happen one way or the other. It has to.

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Leave the puerile nicknames to Trump

by digby

insecure much?

Fox host offers Trump a nickname for Beto O’Rourke: “He can use the name I gave him, Beta O’Dork. Beta. He’s a beta male. Seriously.” pic.twitter.com/RKpFfJqf3A

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 18, 2019

This “beta male” schtick also comes out of the fetid fever swamp of the internet wingnut right. They talk like this all the time.

As Trump would say: “Sad!”

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Let’s talk about Trump’s white nationalist authoritarianism

by digby

A whole lot of people have written columns today about Trump’s white supremacy including me. David Leonhardt at the New York Times frames it in light of Trump’s comments last week about “his people” getting tough:

The president of the United States suggested last week that his political supporters might resort to violence if they didn’t get their way.

The statement didn’t even get that much attention. I’m guessing you heard a lot more about the college-admissions scandal than about the president’s threat of extralegal violence. So let me tell you a little more about the threat.

In an Oval Office interview with writers from the right-wing news site Breitbart, President Trump began complaining about Paul Ryan. As speaker of the House, Ryan blocked efforts by other House Republicans to subpoena and investigate people on the political left. Trump’s loyal allies in the House “wanted to go tougher,” Trump said, “but they weren’t allowed to by leadership.”

To Trump, the incident was part of a larger problem: “You know, the left plays a tougher game. It’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. O.K.? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump had mused about violence, of course. He has talked about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges. He’s encouraged police officers to bang suspects’ heads against car roofs. He has suggested his supporters “knock the hell” out of hecklers. At a rally shortly before 2018 Election Day, he went on a similar riff about Bikers for Trump and the military.

I’m well aware of the various see-no-evil attempts to excuse this behavior: That’s just how he talks. Don’t take him literally. Other Republicans are keeping him in check. His speeches and tweets don’t really matter.

But they do matter. The president’s continued encouragement of violence — and of white nationalism — is part of the reason that white-nationalist violence is increasing. Funny how that works.

After Trump’s latest threat, I reached out to several experts in democracy and authoritarianism to ask what they made of it. Their answers were consistent: No, the United States does not appear at risk of widespread political violence anytime soon. But Trump’s words are still corroding democracy and public safety.

His latest incitement fit a historical pattern, and one with “scary echoes,” as Daniel Ziblatt, who co-wrote the recent book “How Democracies Die,” told me. Trump combined lies about his political opponents — Democrats who need to be investigated (for made-up scandals) — with allusions to a patriotic, violent response by ordinary citizens. Latin American autocrats, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, have used this combination. So did European fascists in the 1930s.

The United States, thank goodness, does not have armed citizen militias carrying out regular attacks, as those other countries did. But our situation is still worrisome. “Violent talk can, at minimum, encourage lone-wolf violence,” Steven Levitsky, Ziblatt’s co-author and a Harvard political scientist, said. “It can also slowly normalize political violence, turning discourse and ideas that were once unsayable and even unthinkable into things that are sayable and thinkable.”
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It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

Greg Sargent looks at the question from a different angle:

Trump regularly engages in both veiled incitement of violence and anti-Muslim bigotry with a kind of casual regularity that almost seems designed to lull us into desensitization. That this is losing the power to shock is bad enough. But that’s producing another terrible result: This desensitization leads us to spend too little time focused on the actual consequences these verbal degradations could be having.

This is what the White House wants. That reality comes through clearly in an important appearance that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made on “Fox News Sunday,” which opens a window on these matters in a particularly illuminating way.

Fox’s Chris Wallace pointed out that before allegedly massacring 50 people at two mosques, the New Zealand shooter declared that he supports Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Wallace asked Mulvaney: “What does the president think of that?”

Mulvaney replied that it is not “fair” to cast the shooter as a “supporter of Donald Trump.” Wallace pressed Mulvaney on Trump’s history of anti-Muslim remarks — which is long and ugly — and noted that just after the shooting, Trump described immigrants as an “invasion,” just as the alleged shooter did. He asked why Trump won’t state clearly that “there is no place in America for this kind of hatred.”

Mulvaney repeatedly brushed off Wallace’s questions, bridled at the suggestion that the violence was Trump’s “fault,” and whined: “I’m not sure what more you want the president to do.”

What’s particularly reprehensible about this performance is what’s hiding in plain sight: There are no signs that Trump is troubled by the fact that the man who allegedly murdered dozens of people because of their Muslim faith sees him as a symbol of the devotion to protecting white identity that drove this act.

“What does the president think of that?” Wallace asked Mulvaney, who treated this question as not worthy of a response. Mulvaney cynically cast the core issue as: Is Trump directly responsible for this act? In fact, it’s this: Are Trump’s words helping produce conditions that are emboldening and encouraging the type of white-nationalist and white-supremacist group activity that is leading disturbed proponents into violence and murder?

There are no signs that either Trump or the administration sees this as a question that should preoccupy them. Why not? Why aren’t Trump and his advisers asking themselves this question?

It’s all about that base. And that base is largely in sympathy with the white-nationalists.

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