Month: April 2019

Once again we’re the Villagers are saying “get over it”

by digby

All over my TV I’m being told that once the report drops tomorrow, “everyone” wants the politicians to move on and start talking about things “Americans really care about.” After the first flurry of reporting, unless there’s a bombshell of epic proportions, get ready for the media to follow Trump’s messaging that this is an old story. They seem to believe that’s what the people believe.

Except it’s not true. The new AP poll:

Many Americans aren’t ready to clear President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation, with a new poll showing slightly more want Congress to keep investigating than to set aside its probes after a special counsel’s report left open the question of whether he broke the law.

About 6 in 10 continue to believe the president obstructed justice.

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds greater GOP confidence in the investigation after Attorney General William Barr in late March released his letter saying special counsel Robert Mueller found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but didn’t make a judgment on the obstruction question.

At the same time, the poll indicates that Americans are mostly unhappy with the amount of information that has been released so far. They’ll get more Thursday, when Barr is expected to release a redacted version of the nearly 400-page report .

Trump has repeatedly claimed “total exoneration,” after Barr asserted in his memo that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction prosecution.

“It’s a total phony,” Trump said of all allegations to Minneapolis TV station KSTP this week. “Any aspect of that report, I hope it does come out because there was no collusion, whatsoever, no collusion. There was no obstruction, because that was ruled by the attorney general.”

Overall, 39% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, roughly unchanged from mid-March, before Mueller completed his two-year investigation.

But many Americans still have questions.

“It’s kind of hard to believe what the president says as far as exoneration,” said James Brown, 77, of Philadelphia, who doesn’t affiliate with either party but says his political views lean conservative. “And in my mind the attorney general is a Trump person, so he’s not going to do anything against Trump.”

The poll shows 35% of Americans think that Trump did something illegal related to Russia — largely unchanged since the earlier poll. An additional 34% think he’s done something unethical.

Brown says he remains extremely concerned about possible inappropriate contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, citing Trump’s past interest in building a Trump Tower in Moscow, and believes the president committed crimes of obstruction to cover up financial interests. “He’s not going to jeopardize his pocketbook for anything,” he said.

Still, the poll suggests Barr’s summary helped allay some lingering doubts within the GOP. Among Republicans, more now say Trump did nothing wrong at all (65% vs. 55% a month ago) and fewer say he did something unethical (27%, down from 37.
[…]
Even as Trump blasts the Mueller probe as a Democratic witch hunt, poll respondents expressed more confidence that the investigation was impartial. The growing confidence since March was driven by Republicans: Three-quarters now say they are at least moderately confident in the probe, and 38% are very or extremely confident, up from 46% and 18%, respectively, in March. Among Democrats, about 70% are at least moderately confident, down slightly from a month ago, and 45% are very or extremely confident.

Still, majorities of Americans say they believe the Justice Department has shared too few details so far with both the public (61 and Congress (55%). About a third think the department has shared too little with the White House, which has argued that portions of the report should be kept confidential if they involve private conversations of the president subject to executive privilege.

Democrats have been calling for Mueller himself to testify before Congress and have expressed concern that Barr will order unnecessary censoring of the report to protect Trump. The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, is poised to try to compel Barr to turn over an unredacted copy as well as the report’s underlying investigative files.

The poll shows that even with the Mueller probe complete, 53% say Congress should continue to investigate Trump’s ties with Russia, while 45% say Congress should not. A similar percentage, 53%, say Congress should take steps to impeach Trump if he is found to have obstructed justice, even if he did not have inappropriate contacts with Russia.

“We don’t even know what we found yet in the probe. Until we do, Congress should definitely continue to push this issue,” said Tina Perales, a 35-year old small business owner in Norton, Ohio, who describes herself as Republican. “That little letter Barr sent out summarizing the report I think was completely BS. This Mueller thing is hundreds of pages, and he just sums it up like this? These things just don’t add up.”

Democrats can read the polls:

Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to believe Trump had done something improper and to support continued investigations that could lead to his removal from office. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has downplayed the likelihood of impeachment proceedings but isn’t closing the door entirely if there are significant findings of Trump misconduct.

On investigations, 84% of Democrats believe lawmakers shouldn’t let up in scrutinizing Trump’s ties to Russia, but the same share of Republicans disagrees. Similarly, 83% of Democrats say Congress should take steps to impeach Trump if he is found to have obstructed justice, even if he did not have inappropriate contacts with Russia, while 82% of Republicans say Congress should not.

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Trump has “sympathy for the Russian government’s going after someone viewed as a traitor”

by digby

I don’t think I could ever have imagined a Repubican president ever saying something like this in the past. Imagine any one of them thinking that Russian assasinations of double agents or dissdents is understandable, much less on foreign soil:

Donald Trump was reluctant to expel suspected Russian spies after the novichok chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, viewing the poisoning of a defector as “part of legitimate spy games”, according to a new report.

According to the New York Times, Trump reacted sceptically to a British request in March 2018 for a strong punitive response to the use of the nerve agent against the former spy, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. A local resident, Dawn Sturgess, was killed three months later when she came in contact with the chemical.

It marked the first chemical weapon attack on European soil since the first world war.

Trump is reported to have written off the attack as business as usual among spies – “distasteful but within the bounds of espionage”.

“Some officials said they thought that Mr. Trump, who has frequently criticized ‘rats’ and other turncoats, had some sympathy for the Russian government’s going after someone viewed as a traitor,” the New York Times report said.

The incident is cited as an example of the persuasive skills of the then deputy CIA director (now director), Gina Haspel.

She is said to have presented the expulsion of 60 accredited Russian diplomats – the course eventually taken – as the “strong option”.

She also showed the president pictures of young children who had been hospitalised as a result of the Salisbury attack, as well as photographs of ducks that had been killed because of the carelessness in handling the deadly nerve agent on the part of the two Russian intelligence operatives alleged to have carried out the attack.

“Mr Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option,” the report said.

Of the 60 Russians expelled by the US, 48 were from the Russian embassy in Washington and 12 were based at the United Nations in New York. The US also ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.

Trump has separately been reported as having been furious when he found out that the US had expelled far more Russians than Germany or France, who each ordered four Russian officials to leave.

According to a report last April in the Washington post, Trump had told his officials that the US would match the European response, but his aides interpreted that to total European expulsions, not individual countries.

“I don’t care about the total!” an administration official cited in the Washington Post report recalled Trump screaming.

“Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words”. 

And the Russia skeptics wonder why people think Trump’s behavior has been so suspicious as to warrant an investigation about his relationship with the Kremlin.

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Fox News Bizarroworld

by digby

This is awesome:

If Fox News Covered Trump like the did Obama.

This is awesome!pic.twitter.com/D1utV3izvj

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) April 17, 2019

Too funny.

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“I’m so loyal that if somebody is slightly disloyal to me I look upon it as a great act of horror”

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Immediately after Attorney General William Barr’s now-infamous four-page letter was released, I noted that Donald Trump’s victory dance was tempered by his sour declaration of vengeance against his political enemies and those who had conducted the alleged “witch hunt.” I quoted his odd advice to the students at Liberty University back in 2012:

“I always say don’t let people take advantage — this goes for a country, too, by the way — don’t let people take advantage,” Trump said. “Get even. And you know, if nothing else, others will see that and they’re going to say, ‘You know, I’m going to let Jim Smith or Sarah Malone, I’m going to let them alone because they’re tough customers.'”

In the last week we’ve seen Barr tell the Congress that he intended to look into alleged “spying” on the Trump campaign and the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, promising to follow up on the Clinton email case again. Since those things have already been investigated and reported, it’s obvious that they are following the Trump edict to send a message to his political opponents and any law enforcement agencies that attempt to scrutinize the president.

Now we are on the cusp of receiving Barr’s redacted version of the Mueller report. From what we know, he will have removed classified information, grand jury testimony, and information that might compromise an ongoing investigation or anything that impacts a “peripheral” third party. We have no idea how much of the 400 pages will even be readable at this point. But since Barr has promised to color-code the redactions by those four categories, it may not be difficult to figure out who has given the special counsel embarrassing information about the president and his family. And according to NBC News, this has former and current White House staffers scared to death:

Of particular concern is how Trump — and his allies — will react if it appears to be clear precisely who shared information with Mueller, these people said. “They got asked questions and told the truth, and now they’re worried the wrath will follow,” one former White House official said.

They should be. You see, Trump doesn’t just threaten revenge against his enemies. He is even more adamant about exacting revenge against allies and friends he thinks have been disloyal. Back in 1992, he appeared on Charlie Rose’s show and explained his philosophy:

Trump: Some of the people who have been the most loyal to me are the people I didn’t think would be. The people are the most disloyal to me are the people, I think I would have treated them differently. I would have wiped the floor with the guys that weren’t loyal, which I will now do, which is great. I love getting even with people.

Charlie Rose: Hold up. You love getting even with people?

Trump: Oh absolutely. You don’t believe in the eye for an eye? Yeah you do, I know you well enough, I think you do.

Rose: No. … So tell me. You’re going to get even with some people because of …

Trump: If given the opportunity, I will get even with some people who were disloyal to me. I mean, I had a group of people that were disloyal …

Rose: How do you define disloyal?

Trump: They didn’t come to my aid and do small things …

Rose: Did they turn their back on you?

Trump: No, but they didn’t do small things that would have helped … you see, I’m so loyal to people, maybe I’m loyal to a fault. But I’m so loyal that if somebody is slightly disloyal to me I look upon it as a great act of horror.

Trump would have expected his staff to lie for him — “a small thing that would have helped.” If it is possible for him to decipher who may have given the Mueller team unpleasant information, you can imagine how he will react.”

This is the leakiest White House in history, so we probably already know most of what’s in the report about obstruction of justice. But we have little idea about who specifically was leaking. There have been many rumors that Kellyanne Conway is the “number one leaker” in the White House. And there have been too many stories about a “heroic” Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, saving the country from yet another of Trump’s harebrained schemes not to conclude that he was another major leaker. Having been on the scene for most of Trump’s possible obstructive behavior, McGahn is in the most danger of being outed in the Mueller report.

McGahn seems to know that as well. He went up to Capitol Hill last week to give 40 or so GOP Senate staffers a heads up. Axios reported he told them they would likely be reading about some of the “spirited debates” he had with the president. Trump loyalists may have been surprised, but McGahn went on to describe his true mission within the White House: to dismantle the “administrative state” and pack the courts with far-right judges who would revisit any laws giving deference to the executive branch agencies. He said that “Trump’s judges will spend 30–40 years unwinding the power of executive agencies.”

“Mission accomplished,” apparently.

It’s doubtful that McGahn will care if Trump rants about him. He has carefully cultivated an image of the devoted Republican operative who went about his assignment with ruthless efficiency. He’s betting that he’ll be left standing when Trump is finally defeated. Kellyanne Conway and her husband George, a prominent Trump antagonist, are probably doing something similar. The pros have played both sides effectively and they will land on their feet, secure in the bosom of the Republican establishment,

Other nervous staffers should probably reflect on the fact that Trump getting angry or firing them is a whole lot better than going to jail and having a record for the rest of your life. Not invoking executive privilege and instructing them to tell the truth was the biggest favor Trump’s former lawyers, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, did for all of them.

Taking a job in this White House was likely a very bad decision. But failing to “come to the aid” of Donald Trump may be the best one those people ever made.

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These Democrat vs. those Democrats
by Tom Sullivan

Now branded the progressive wing vs. the establishment wing, the reboot of the Democrats’ 2016 Hillary vs. Bernie squabbles is already irritating and tiresome. But it won’t go away because the underlying issues won’t go away.

Barbara Boxer, the former California senator, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night Democrats need to avoid self-inflicted wounds. “If you don’t like Bernie, pick a candidate and go,” Boxer said [timestamp 37:15]:

And also this attack on the so-called establishment? I don’t get that either. Who’s the establishment, Nancy Pelosi? She’s as progressive as they come. The head of the DNC, Tom Perez? He’s as progressive. And the leadership in Congress. So, all of this is ridiculous. It’s a self-inflicted wound if it continues. People should knock it off.

Boxer, a self-described 40-year veteran, doesn’t really understand the “establishment” issue. She just wants people to stop. Fine. Let me explain it.

The issue is and has been with Democrats who fear democracy breaking out inside the Democratic Party. Talent takes a back seat to tenure. Established leaders feel entitled to decide for voters who the party’s candidates will be. (Some of that comes down to candidate recruitment, but locking out opponents should be off limits.) There is also a legacy issue, similar to college admission, in which insiders get to preposition their successors. No input from voters wanted.

Sarah Jones details a case-in-point. Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski is a pro-life Democrat who, by Planned Parenthood’s analysis, has sponsored 54 pieces of anti-abortion legislation. “He voted against the Affordable Care Act, and the DREAM Act, which would have created a path to permanent citizenship for undocumented youth brought to the United States as children,” Jones writes.

Lipinski held on against a 2018 primary challenge by Marie Newman, a pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights Democrat. The 2,145 vote margin (2 percent) was not exactly “rousing support” for the conservative Democrat in the suburban Chicago district. Lipinski holds the seat, Jones argues, not because he reflects voters’ views, but because his father, Bill Lipinski, had held it for 12 years before him and “essentially bequeathed the seat to his son.”

That establishment, Ms. Boxer.

In announcing she would run again for Lipinski’s seat in 2020, Newman said his views put Lipinski out of step with his district (Chicago Sun Times):

“It’s time for a real Democrat to represent us in Washington, not the conservative son of a ward boss. Those days are over,” concluded Newman, who noted that the landslide election of Lori Lightfoot as Chicago mayor and the recent losses of longtime aldermen and political bosses show Chicagoans are hungry for progressive change.

Led by fellow Illinoisan Rep. Cheri Bustos, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is using its financial clout to suppress opposition to its members. Even to those like Lipinski. No surprise there. Collecting dues that sustain the insider organ would be that much harder if it did not use them to defend members’ seats no matter the voters’ wishes.

That establishment, Ms. Boxer.

Jones continues:

A second Newman campaign threatens to expose the anti-democratic implications of the party’s strategy. There is a thin sliver logic underneath the DCCC’s unwavering support for incumbents; the party needs to keep control of the House, and it believes left-wing candidates could jeopardize that goal if they run in conservative districts. But this logic doesn’t even apply to Lipinski or his district. Much like Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas, another Blue Dog Democrat who may face a primary from his left, Lipinski represents a thoroughly Democratic district. Democrats there voted for Bernie Sanders in the party’s primary, and the district itself voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a comfortable margin. There’s no reason to think the district would suddenly turn Republican if the more left-wing Newman defeated Lipinski in the primary. In fact, the local GOP is in such disarray that it couldn’t marshal an alternative to Art Jones, an unrepentant neo-Nazi who ran unchallenged in the party’s primary before losing badly to Lipinski in the general.

The party establishment is not only electeds, but unofficial clubs like the DCCC and DSCC that prefer incumbents with a “D” behind their names to aspirants with views more in line with their own districts. Best not to risk the business model.

So long as that culture pertains, there will be conflict between upstarts and those defending turf over principle.
Pick a candidate and go.

But Sanders stoking the insider-outsider conflict for fundraising isn’t helping either. Nor will it endear him to Democrats already inclined to vote for Democrats in a Democratic primary over a candidate who is not a Democrat (as if that needed explaining). Self-inflicted wounds, indeed.

A loner his whole life, an old friend once said if he ever found himself on the inside of a social group, he’d have to create a new outside for himself, just to feel normal. He and Bernie should trade notes.

When Trump tweeted out a Riefenstahl-esque video

by digby

This piece by Todd Gitlin about that now notorious 2020 campaign video that Trump tweeted out last week is chilling:

No sooner had Attorney General William Barr scraped 101 words out of the Mueller Report and inserted them into his letter of exculpation than Steve Bannon predicted that President Trump was now “going to go full animal” against his enemies. Trump would “come off the chains,” he told Yahoo News in Rome, where he was furthering his alliance with Italy’s government and launching a Europe-wide training center for rightists in a rented monastery.

Some days later, on YouTube, a Trump fan posted a two-minute video that the president fancied so much he proceeded to tweet it out on April 9. Described as “President Trump 2020 trailer. A sneak peek of the upcoming 2020 election,” the video begins in full moan and rumble. Its menace has, as they say, “high production value.” Washington’s white marble monuments gleam. But all has not gone well in the city of Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the Capitol and the White House. The first human face to appear belongs to Barack Obama. “FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU,” appears on the screen.

THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU
THEN THEY CALL YOU RACIST
DONALD J. TRUMP

Cut to the face of Hillary Clinton. Cut to a lot of hundred-dollar bills. Cut to Bill Clinton. Cut to Trump striding authoritatively through a factory. Crowds. Air Force One on the tarmac. Flags. Fans. Brett Kavanaugh. Lindsey Graham. And so on. At the end, against a dramatic sky, Trump fills the screen and raises his fist. Crowds cheer.

YOUR VOTE
PROVED THEM ALL WRONG
TRUMP: THE GREAT VICTORY 2020

Life is a rally.

But not so fast. As some YouTube commenters noticed, the nonstop soundtrack had been cribbed from Warner Brothers’ 2012 Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. The company promptly declared that it was “working through the appropriate legal channels to have [the video] removed,” whereupon Trump’s handlers deleted his tweet. (The video has also been taken down from YouTube.) Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale accused Warner Brothers’ owner, AT&T, of “positioning themselves as a weapon of the left” by virtue of the company’s insistence on property rights. An unnamed Trump 2020 “campaign aide” told CNN: “The video was made by a supporter. We like to share content from diehard supporters, and this is just another example of how hard Trump supporters fight for the president.”

How hard? Riefenstahl hard. “Trump 2020” suggests the mood of Trump’s base: the 36–43 percent who, according to opinion polling, approve of their fearless leader come hell, high water, or Robert Mueller. Despite the bright colors instead of black and white, “Trump 2020” is less “Morning in America” and more Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary paean to the Nazis’ 1934 Nuremberg rally. What it lacks in Riefenstahl’s legato rhythm, her lyrical talents, mobile camera virtuosity, and unity-of-action day-long time frame, not to mention the Wagnerian soundtrack, it gains in compression.

If there were a Nobel Prize for propaganda, Riefenstahl would have won it several times over. The year Triumph of the Will hit German screens, Walter Benjamin saw clearly what it meant:

Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves.

Writing about Riefenstahl in the Review some forty years later (“Fascinating Fascism”), Susan Sontag called Triumph of the Will “the most successfully, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the film maker’s having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda.” Faces in the crowd appeared stripped of individual characteristics, illustrating the idea of the individual rather than actual individuality. The aesthetic was Make Germany Great Again, aiming to achieve paralysis of the mind, a rehearsal for Götterdämmerungs to come. Following Benjamin, Sontag rightly identified the Riefenstahl aesthetic’s “characteristic pageantry,” expressed as:

… the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.

“Trump 2020,” too, celebrates mighty forces overpowering fate; crowds hailing the almighty leader; surrender and mindless momentum; a Super Bowl style of awesomeness, though brisker and less orgiastic than Riefenstahl’s rapturous celebration of what she saw as the Nazis’ epochal grandeur. Trump’s enemies are not as feral as those of 1934 Germany’s “Aryans”; they’re personified in clips of celebrated limousine-liberal types, representatives of the “THEY” who “LAUGH AT YOU”: Rosie O’Donnell, Bryan Cranston, and Amy Schumer. (Somehow, George Soros doesn’t make the cut.)

There are other differences. Propaganda was more stately and slow-moving eighty-some years ago. Riefenstahl’s montage moved more liquidly, less staccato. She did not have to contend with today’s attention deficit-disordered culture. With Hitler’s endorsement (“Produced by Order of the Führer”), she went romantic, sweeping, and soaring, opening with an above-the-clouds panorama as Hitler descended to Nuremberg; followed by crowds, crowds, and vaster, more delirious crowds, with hordes of enraptured faces. Riefenstahl had the advantage of an event orchestrated for her camera; the anonymous auteur of “Trump 2020” has only stock footage for spectacle. It is all aura. But for a short-form workshop product, it is a good indication of what we can expect from more official channels.

Whoever manufactured and distributed this video knew what they were doing. “Trump 2020” is the Triumphant Will jump-cut at microchip processor speed. It aims to overwhelm in the fidgety style of the twenty-first century. It proclaims adoration, it rewards the faithful. If you like the idea of an America of more rallies, more flags, more fists, you’ll love this commercial.

Before YouTube stopped taking comments, diehard Trump supporters had duly stepped up to applaud. Mystikal 36 went full apocalypse in this comment:

The Battle between the Dark Forces Vs. The Light Forces. Alliance we are with you in your stand against evil. Opponents are writing this is a weird video nothing weird about it. Wake up it’s reality… The spark has been lit the call is out to all Patriots this is our world stand together not divided… The spark that will light the flame to eternity… Trump the enabler removed the shackles that has forced their hand… WINING [sic]…

Larry Feebak had a few doubts:

think this is good for us people that already support Trump, but honestly I think it would just be a turn off for getting votes from people who are on the fence and those are the people we need to vote for Trump.

But Dustman50 Rocks went full exclamation point:

I have never ever been into politics until our last election. Thank the good Lord above, that we got what we needed!!! Trump for life here!!! Love how he does shit, and he does not care what others think!!! No special interest from other countries, and uses his own money to get elected, and do great things for our broken country!!! AMEN!!!

Of course, Trump is not Hitler. MAGA rallies are not Nuremberg rallies. There is bombast but Trump’s threats, even his shouts of “treason,” are rhetorical—incitements that can be disowned should less inhibited enthusiasts take up arms against enemies of the people. Trump cannot padlock Warner Brothers, though next time his epigones can order up pompous but uncopyrighted soundtracks composed by anonymous wannabe Hollywood musicians, or even by algorithm.

Other such spectacles are surely in the pipeline. PACs will no doubt pony up to provide higher production values. “Independent expenditures” will flourish. And who knows what the presidential TV channel Fox News has planned, all but produced at the pleasure, if not the order, of the Führer? Reality-show America has metastasized, spawning a Trumpian circus of spectacular lies and mini-Lenis.

“Gave me goose bumps,” wrote a YouTube commenter named Doxie Mom. Me, too, though for other reasons.

Me too. In fact, I tweeted out “Triumph des Willen” when Trump posted it.

Here it is without the Batman score. If you want to imagine what it was like, you can mute the sound on that and turn the Youtibe on the bottom up. It’s very creepy…

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Alabama Republicans still love Judge Roy Moore

by digby

Nothing gets the liberals more upset than an extremist Christian conservative hypocrite who stalks underage girls so naturally he’s their man:

Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore leads the field of potential Republicans vying for the chance to challenge Sen. Doug Jones (D), a year and a half after Moore lost what was supposed to be an easy election in a deep-red state.

A new poll shows Moore leading a still-evolving field of Alabama Republicans competing for the nomination. He is the top choice of 27 percent of Alabama Republican voters, according to the Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy Inc. survey.

The state’s three Republican members of Congress finish well behind Moore: Rep. Mo Brooks would take 18 percent, Rep. Bradley Byrne clocks in at 13 percent and Rep. Gary Palmer would take 11 percent.

State Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh would take 4 percent, and businessman Tim Jones finishes with just 2 percent of the vote.

So far, Byrne is the only Republican candidate among those tested to have formally entered the race. Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, and state Auditor Jim Zeigler have also said they will run, though they were not tested in the survey.

Moore, who captured the Republican nomination in 2017 by appealing to the state’s most conservative evangelical voters, came undone amid multiple allegations that he harassed or pursued women who were in their teens when he was in his 30s.

Jones, a former U.S. attorney, won the December special election by 1.7 percentage points, or about 22,000 votes. He became the first Democrat in more than a generation — since Sen. Richard Shelby, who has since changed his party affiliation — to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate.

Moore has not formally said he will run again, though he has said he is thinking about jumping in again.

“I’m seriously considering it,” Moore told a Christian radio host last month. “I think that it [the 2017 Senate race] was stolen.”

Whoever wins the Republican nomination will have a strong chance to unseat Jones in a state that favored President Trump by 28 percentage points in 2016. Just 45 percent of Alabamians say they approve of the job Jones is doing in the Senate, and only 40 percent say they would vote to reelect the freshman Democrat. Fifty percent of Alabama voters say they would vote to replace him.

They have time to find a better Republican, of course. But plenty of them still seem to love old Roy. There could be a replay of that special election that put Doug Jones into office if there’s a runoff.

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The gender gap is growing to the size of the grand Canyon. Are Democratic professionals paying attention?

by digby

That’s a pretty startling gap in attitudes.

At the moment only 32% of women in this country approve of Trump compared to 47% of men. And yet I don’t get the feeling that the campaign that’s shaping up is attuned to that. The women who are running are more focused on framing issues in ways that women can relate to them but they have to be very careful not to talk too much about it or the press will start to portray them as “niche” candidates, even though the vast majority of Democrats happen to be women.

Anyway, here’s the latest date from Pew. It seems important but it doesn’t seem as though the people who are strategizing or reporting on the race think it is:

Gender differences about the size and scope of government have been evident for more than a decade, but they have widened in recent years.

Widening gender gap on size and scope of government
And while the gender gap in presidential job approval also is not new, it is wider for Donald Trump than for his predecessors.

In a new Pew Research Center survey, nearly six-in-ten women (58%) say they prefer a bigger government providing more services to a smaller government providing fewer services (36%). Among men, the balance of opinion is nearly the reverse: 59% of men prefer a smaller government (37% prefer bigger).

The gender differences on this measure are as wide as at any point in more than a decade. The change is largely attributable to an increase in the share of women expressing a preference for bigger government, while men’s attitudes on this question are little changed.

During most of Barack Obama’s presidency, women were roughly divided on this question: As recently as September 2016, 44% of women preferred a smaller government providing fewer services, while 48% preferred a bigger government providing more services. Today, the percentage of women who prefer bigger government has risen to 58%. In September 2016, just prior to the 2016 election, 56% of men said they would rather have a smaller government. Today, 59% say they would rather have a smaller government.

Trump’s job approval rating has been more deeply divided along partisan lines – and across generations – than for other recent presidents. This also is the case when it comes to gender: There are wider differences between men and women in views of Trump’s job performance than for any president dating to George H.W. Bush.

Currently, 47% of men say they approve of how Trump is handling his job as president, with an equal share saying they disapprove (47%). By contrast, 32% of women say they approve of how Trump is handling his job as president; 63% say they disapprove.

Looking more broadly, over his first two years in office, Trump’s average approval rating was much higher among men (44%) than among women (31%). This 13-percentage-point gender gap is wider than for any of his recent predecessors, dating back to George H.W. Bush.

I know the plight of the white working class male is a problem for everyone and Democrats have an obligation to address their needs whether they vote for Democrats or not. But the majority of the Democratic Party is women of all races and classes and they hate Donald Trump and desperately want him out of office. The party needs to remember to keep that in focus.

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Bach at the Border 

by tristero

A long time ago, I had the great privilege of producing Yo-Yo Ma’s first recording of the Bach Cello Suites. Musically, technically, and most of all personally, it was an unforgettably profound experience, a high point in my life. Yo-Yo was clearly a brilliant musician and a warm, humorous, and utterly charming person. Every once in a while I still run into him and marvel at his extraordinary ability to be both humble and confident, serious and informal at the same time. And of course, his performances are the stuff of legend.

Many major artists, believe their work transcends any political moment. But there are limits, and now, Yo-Yo Ma has made it quite clear where he stands:

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma brought his Bach Project to the sister cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on Saturday. The “Day of Action” featured performances in both cities to celebrate the relationship between the two communities. 

Ma played the opening notes of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello in a park next to the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge, one of the crossings that connect the U.S. and Mexican cities. 

The Laredo performance took place on an elevated stage before an audience of officials and onlookers. Concerns over possible rain disappeared as Ma began to play in the morning sunshine.

It was part of his Bach Project, which uses the composer’s 300-year-old music to explore connections between cultures. The project has taken Ma all over the world. On Friday it brought him to Laurie Auditorium at Trinity University in San Antonio, and on Saturday it brought him to Laredo, within a few feet of the Rio Grande. 

“As you all know, as you did and do and will do, in culture, we build bridges, not walls,” he said. After his performance, he gestured to the bridge to his right. “I’ve lived my life at the borders. Between cultures. Between disciplines. Between musics. Between generations.” 

Mateo Bailey, 16, lives in San Antonio. He grew up in El Paso, plays the cello and is the son of Grammy Award-winning cellist Zuill Bailey.
He felt Ma’s performance had special significance “because this event is on the border. And I’m half-Mexican as well as half-American … and for him to connect cello with what’s happening in the world is like, it’s a cultural bridge that was just built, and it’s amazing.” 

Yes, it is.

Be sure to watch the video and listen to Yo-Yo’s beautiful playing and his remarks: “A country is not a hotel. And it’s not full.“

Thanks, my friend.

How Tea Partyer Mick Mulvaney wrecked the CFPB

by digby

The White House chief of staff made his bones in the Trump administration by knee-capping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

One rainy afternoon early in February 2018, a procession of consumer experts and activists made their way to the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington to meet Mick Mulvaney, then the bureau’s acting director. The building — an aging Brutalist layer cake, selected by the bureau’s founders for the aspirational symbolism of its proximity to the White House, one block away — was under renovation, and so each visitor in turn trudged around to a side entrance. Inside the building, Mulvaney had begun another kind of reconstruction, one that would shift the balance of power between the politically influential industries that lend money and the hundreds of millions of Americans who borrow it.

Three months earlier, President Trump installed Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, as the C.F.P.B.’s acting director. Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, envisioned it as a kind of economic equalizer for American consumers, a counter to the country’s rising structural inequality. Republicans had come to view her creation as a “rogue agency” with “dictatorial powers unique in the American republic,” as the party’s 2016 platform put it. In Congress, Mulvaney had established himself as an outspoken enemy of the bureau, describing it, memorably, as a “joke” in “a sick, sad kind of way” and sponsoring legislation to abolish it.

Some of those invited to the meeting in February had picketed outside the bureau’s headquarters on Mulvaney’s first day at work. Their unease had only grown as Mulvaney ordered a hiring freeze, put new enforcement cases on hold and sent the Federal Reserve, which funds the C.F.P.B., a budget request for zero dollars, saying the bureau could make do with the money it had on hand. Within weeks, Mulvaney announced that he would reconsider one of the bureau’s major long-term initiatives: rules to restrict payday loans, products that are marketed to the working poor as an emergency lifeline but frequently leave them buried in debt. “Anybody who thinks that a Trump-administration C.F.P.B. would be the same as an Obama-administration C.F.P.B. is simply being naïve,” Mulvaney told reporters. “Elections have consequences at every agency.”

Mulvaney was also aware that appearances have consequences. For agency heads, it is important to appear open to all points of view about their regulatory decisions, especially if they end up having to defend them in court. In February, he agreed to meet with his critics in person. Thirty or so people gathered around a conference table as rain lashed the windows. Mulvaney, who is 51, has close-cropped hair and a bulldog countenance that befits his manner. A founder of the House’s hard-line Freedom Caucus, he can be sarcastic, even withering, in hearings and speeches. But Mulvaney struck a placating tone with his guests. He kept his opening remarks brief, according to six people who attended the meeting. Important things at the bureau would not change, he reassured them. “I’m not here to burn the place down,” he insisted. Mulvaney said he did not intend to discuss his plans for the payday-loan rule with them but encouraged everyone to share their views.

Many of Mulvaney’s guests came from advocacy groups, like Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending, that often did battle with Washington’s powerful financial-industry lobby. But the meeting also included a dozen religious leaders, among them officials from national evangelical and Baptist organizations, whose members tend to be among Trump’s most loyal supporters. These leaders viewed payday lending as not only unfair but also sinful, and they had fought against it across Trump country — in deep-red South Dakota, on the same day Trump won the presidency, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure effectively banning payday loans. The ministers had planned carefully for their moment with Mulvaney, and for 20 minutes they took turns detailing the harm that payday lending had inflicted on their neighborhoods and congregations. Eventually they gave the floor to the Rev. Amiri B. Hooker, who led an African-American church near Mulvaney’s old congressional district.

“I told him I was from Kershaw County,” Hooker told me recently, recalling his exchange with Mulvaney. “He smiled and asked how were the good folks from Kershaw.” When Hooker pastored in Lake City, an hour away from Kershaw, a quarter of his congregation either had taken out payday loans themselves or knew someone who had. He told Mulvaney about an 84-year-old congregant in Lake City whom, during a week that she was so sick that she missed services, he saw hobbling toward him down the street. “She said, ‘I had to go pay my bill,’ ” Hooker recalled. The woman had taken out a $250 loan almost three years earlier to cover her granddaughter’s heating bill. She was still paying it off, Hooker told Mulvaney, at a cost of $75 a month, rolling over the loan into a new one each time.

Despite his earlier reticence, Mulvaney seemed eager to offer his own view of how the bureau ought to operate. It wasn’t up to the federal government to stop people from taking the kind of credit that suited them, he suggested: “There’s no reason people should be taking these loans — but they do.” He pointed out that there wasn’t anyone in the room from North Carolina, where payday lending was illegal. They should plead their case to state officials. “You have a place to go to address payday loans, and it’s not me,” he said, according to multiple attendees. As the C.F.P.B.’s acting director, he wouldn’t stop enforcing the law as written. He only wanted a more efficient bureau, he explained, one steeped in evidence-based decision-making, one that educated consumers to make good decisions on their own. Mulvaney provided few details about how it would all look, but he promised the pastors he would follow up to let them know which way he decided to go on payday-loan regulation. “I’ve never heard from him,” Hooker says.

In the months that followed, Mulvaney’s vision for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would become clearer. This account of Mulvaney’s tenure is based on interviews with more than 60 current or former bureau employees, current and former Mulvaney aides, consumer advocates and financial-industry executives and lobbyists, as well as hundreds of pages of internal bureau documents obtained by The New York Times and others. When Mulvaney took over, the fledgling C.F.P.B. was perhaps Washington’s most feared financial regulator: It announced dozens of cases annually against abusive debt collectors, sloppy credit agencies and predatory lenders, and it was poised to force sweeping changes on the $30 billion payday-loan industry, one of the few corners of the financial world that operates free of federal regulation. What he left behind is an agency whose very mission is now a matter of bitter dispute. “The bureau was constructed really deliberately to protect ordinary people,” says Lisa Donner, the head of Americans for Financial Reform. “He’s taken it apart — dismantled it, piece by piece, brick by brick.”

Mulvaney’s careful campaign of deconstruction offers a case study in the Trump administration’s approach to transforming Washington, one in which strategic neglect and bureaucratic self-sabotage create versions of agencies that seem to run contrary to their basic premises. According to one person who speaks with Mulvaney often, his smooth subdual of the C.F.P.B. was part of his pitch to Trump for his promotion to White House chief of staff — long one of the most powerful jobs in Washington. Mulvaney’s slow-rolling attack on the bureau’s enforcement and regulatory powers wasn’t just one of the Trump era’s most emblematic assaults on the so-called administrative state. It was also, in part, an audition.

Mulvaney was put in the job to destroy the bureau and he showed the Trumpies that he could get ‘er done. Consumer protection is the last thing these rightwingers want. Trump most certainly believes that there’s a sucker born every minute and the smart move is to take as much advantage of them as possible. When you get down to it, that’s been the GOP ideology all along.

Ask yourself what Trump and his malevolent extremists like Mulvaney will do if they get another term.

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