Month: April 2019

The Trump White House has the nerve to say congress is stupid

by digby

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was on a roll today:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked Sanders whether Trump would “demand that the IRS not turn over his tax returns” or, rather, “live with whatever the IRS decides.”

Sanders responded by repeating an irrelevant line from Trump, saying that as long as the President’s taxes are supposedly under audit, he will not release his returns. (Trump has never shown proof that he is under audit, and even if he is, he can still release his tax returns.)

Wallace pressed: “Will he tell the IRS not to release them though?”

She added later: “Frankly, Chris, I don’t think Congress, particularly not this group of congressmen and -women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be.”

“My guess is most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the President has and determine anything.”

Chris asks @PressSec if the President will tell the IRS not to release his tax returns #FNS pic.twitter.com/RBaVniYMKj

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) April 14, 2019

I guess Sanders and Trump don’t know that congress writes the tax laws. They have experts on staff. I think they’ll be able to decipher Trump’s, no matter how convoluted they are.

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This is what happens when you help to put authoritarians in power

by digby

The Trumpies are starting to use this “joke” defense more and more. They said he was kidding when he told the border patrol to tell judges that “the country is full.” Now this, which is 100% prime bullshit:

.@PressSec claims Trump was just “making a joke” when he mentioned WikiLeaks *five times a day* during the closing weeks of 2016 campaign.

“Look, clearly the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign. Certainly we take this serious… the president was making a joke.” pic.twitter.com/KS0RJ0hqxl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2019

He wasn’t joking. He used Wikileaks as the oracle of Delphi during the last weeks of the campaign.

His son was personally corresponding with Assange about strategy and tweeting out links at their behest.

This article from Robert Mackay at The Intercept shows how Wikileaks became Trump’s opposition research arm:

Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. “This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election,” he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.

Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks — an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself,” Assange wrote. “Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us,” he added. “It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.”

The same morning, WikiLeaks tweeted an attack on Clinton for not having driven her own car during her decades of public service.

Clinton: out of touch, cronyistic, didn’t drive a car in 35 years, flew all over the world but accomplished nothing https://t.co/dc2OjdPIII pic.twitter.com/P8yiYkD6bO

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 8, 2016

For Brown, and others who have been critical of Assange for using the platform of WikiLeaks to fight his own political and personal battles, his secret communication with the Trump campaign was damning because it revealed that he had been functioning more like a freelance political operative, doling out strategy and advice, than a journalist interested in obtaining and publishing information, concerned only with its accuracy.

James Ball, a former WikiLeaks volunteer who has described the difficulty of working for someone who lies so much, was also appalled by one post-election message to Trump Jr., in which WikiLeaks suggested that, as a form of payback, it would be “helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.”

That request for payback, on December 16, 2016, came three weeks after Trump’s father had called on the British government to make his friend Nigel Farage its ambassador. “This should be it, game over, end of it, for anyone who tries to suggest Assange looks out for anyone except himself,” Ball observed on Twitter. “That’s his cause, and plenty of good people have been played, badly.”

There was also criticism from journalists like Chris Hayes of MSNBC, a network Assange accused of being, along with the New York Times, “the most biased source” in one note to Trump Jr. Pointing to a message from WikiLeaks sent on Election Day, advising Trump to refuse to concede and claim the election was rigged, Hayes asked how, exactly, offering that sort of political advice squared with the organization’s mission to promote transparency.

Still, many of Assange’s most vocal supporters stuck with him, calling even secret communication with the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton entirely consistent with his vision of WikiLeaks as a sort of opposition research group, dedicated to “crushing bastards” by finding dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

Unfortunately, Assange came to believe that outright authoritarians are somehow more “just” than a mainstream politician like Hillary Clinton, which is a sign that his own psychological issues were the real motivations.  The result of his malevolent crusade is that he helped put this monster Donald Trump, who calls the free press the “enemy of the people,  into the most powerful job on the planet. By empowering Trump and his most authoritarian minions he has put the free press in danger. Good job, Julian. Excellent.

Now Trump’s Department of Justice is trying to extradite Assange and Trump is saying he was just joking and that Wikileaks is “not his thing.” It’s poetic justice for the reckless egomaniac that Assange has become in recent years, but bad news for the First Amendment. What a cock-up.

But hey, it was all a “joke.” No big deal.

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The Trump White House and the Trump Organization are one

by digb

ERIC TRUMP: “The deep state does exist. It does exist and it did exist.”

LARA TRUMP: “Guess who the first person is that called them out? Donald Trump, way back when. He’s always right!” pic.twitter.com/383BNbxYpl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2019

That’s sweet. The family that reigns together gains together:

Days before his father was inaugurated as president of the United States in 2017, Eric Trump told ABC he would stay out of politics while running the family business.

“Listen, I think it’s important to keep separation of church and state,” he said.

Back in January 2017, this was the talking point the whole Trump family was using. Even though Eric’s father refused to do what other presidents have done and divest from his business interests, he made statements about the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest by keeping his children out of politics, and vice versa.

“What I’m going to be doing is my two sons, who are right here, Don and Eric, are going to be running the company,” Trump said during a January 2017 news conference. “They are not going to discuss it with me.”

But fast-forward 27 months and the Trumps are no longer even pretending that there’s a meaningful separation between business and politics.

In an Atlantic magazine profile of Ivanka Trump that was published on Friday morning, President Trump admits that his eldest sons — Eric and Don Jr., who are supposedly busy running the Trump Organization while he’s president — are “enjoying” and “very much into” politics.

From Elaina Plott’s interview of the president (emphasis mine):

In our conversation, the president wanted to be clear: He was very proud of all his children. “Barron is young, but he’s got wonderful potential,” he said. “And Tiffany’s doing extremely well. Don is, uh, he’s enjoying politics; actually, it’s very good. And Eric is running the business along with Don, and also very much into politics. I mean, the children—the children have been very, very good.”

Indeed, Eric and Don Jr. have emerged as two of their father’s most prominent public surrogates.

Don Jr. opens for his dad at political rallies, where he recently made headlines for attacking “loser teachers,” and is a regular guest on Fox News. He’s even publicly mused about running for president.

Eric keeps a slightly lower profile — though that’s not saying much. He’s also a fixture on Fox News. In fact, on the same morning that the Atlantic’s profile of Ivanka dropped, Eric was on Fox & Friends with his wife, Lara Trump, who now serves as a senior adviser to her father-in-law’s reelection campaign, repeating the president’s favorite talking points about the Russia investigation.

Trump’s presidency hasn’t been all good for the Trump Organization — his unpopularity in major population centers has led to his name being pried off buildings, and some of his properties have lost millions of dollars. But he frequently promotes the business he still owns and profits from by visiting his private clubs and hotels and has lined his own pockets through government agencies spending money at them.

The president is supposed to make decisions that are in the best interests of the American people. But by refusing not only to divest from his family business but also to erect any sort of meaningful firewall between it and his administration, President Trump has opened himself up to criticism that major policy decisions — such as the business tax cuts he successfully promoted in late 2017 — are possibly motivated by financial self-interest.

This is an unprecedented arrangement in American history — and one that the founders of our country sought to avoid by preventing presidents from receiving gifts. The Trumps seemed to have some self-awareness about this in early 2017. Now, however, they’re shameless.

I’m afraid this is the new normal. This is little different than Saddam Hussein’s arrangement. The family is both part of the ruling junta and is also engaged in money making activity that is inseparable from the white house.

Since the president won’t release his tax returns even as president, we hve no way of knowning how much money the family is making

Don McGahn got ‘er done

by digby

Everyone’s saying that the White House is concerned about whatever it was that Don McGahn told the Special Counsel. I’m not sure why they aren’t mentioning that McGahn telegraphed what was coming a week ago:

Don McGahn, who has kept his head down since leaving as White House counsel, shared some off-the-record thoughts on Thursday in a lunch with about 40 senior Republican Senate aides.

Details: “I spent the last couple of years getting yelled at,” he said, per two sources at the lunch, held in the Capitol’s Strom Thurmond room. “And you may soon read about some of the more spirited debates I had with the president.” McGahn didn’t explicitly mention Mueller’s report, but sources in the room said they understood him to be referring to it when he said this.

Why it matters: McGahn was part of key conversations Mueller’s team scrutinized when determining whether Trump obstructed justice — a decision Mueller declined to make.

McGahn was invited as part of a regular series of off-the-record lunches. Mitt Romney’s staff served Mexican food. And while McGahn mostly praised Trump, he also hinted at the brutality of his tenure, according to sources who were there.

McGahn said the president runs the White House with a “hub and spokes model,” often assigning the same task to multiple people. The point, per sources in the room, is that there is no chief of staff in the usual sense.

Trump doesn’t trust one person as a gatekeeper, per McGahn. He dislikes intermediaries. And no member of staff is empowered because Trump is the hub and he makes the decisions; all the senior aides are spokes…

McGahn marveled to the group about what Trump can get away with.

He said Trump could do something that’s “180 degrees opposite” of what McGahn advised — but it somehow works. “If it was 179 degrees, it wouldn’t work,” McGahn said, according to the sources.

He said Trump usually takes the conservative side of any given debate — but makes decisions so fast that it was important for McGahn to get to Trump quickly before he announced a decision potentially based on bad information.

If Trump says something publicly, he said, it’s hard to pull him back.

I suspect that his interviews were all designed to make clear that the president didn’t have the requisite intent to obstruct justice because he’s too stupid and incompetent to know he was doing it. If the president had the capacity for shame or embarrassment his testimony would be devastating. But as it is, his followers believe he’s a great president incapable of error, so they won’t care. And the press has been rimed to only see criminal behavior as being impeachable so …

Anyway, perhaps more important to the future of the Republic, McGahn explained to his fellow Republicans what the point of this whole ridiculous exercise in managing an imbecile was:

McGahn said a big part of his job as White House counsel was to deregulate and rein in the “administrative state.”

He said he did that by writing deregulatory executive orders and picking judicial nominees who wanted to limit the power of federal agencies.

He talked about Trump nominating judges who agree that the courts have given too much flexibility to federal agencies to interpret laws and enforce regulations.

McGahn said they looked for potential judges who wanted to reconsider the “Chevron deference,” which requires the courts to defer to federal agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of ambiguous laws.

McGahn said Trump’s judges will spend 30–40 years unwinding the power of executive agencies.

His job is done.

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Way when the IRS and the KGB were enemies of the right. In 2010.

by digby

I just came across this pic from the Obamacare wars of 2010. These were Tea Partyers:

Funny how times have changed.

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Germany has the same bug we do

by digby

Apparently, nobody anywhere really cares much if their leaders are corrupt, working with a foreign power for some kind of transnational fascist movement — or both. It’s an interesting take on nationalism I must say. Didn’t see that coming:

It’s not as though the relationship between the Russian government and the German far right, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has ever been a secret. Last year, when the government expelled a group of Russian spies, AfD leader Alexander Gauland protested: Germany could be letting “itself be drawn into a new Cold War by rabble rousers,” he declared. During Germany’s most recent election campaign, Russian state media campaigned openly for AfD. Pro-Russian and Russian-based social media accounts, some real and some automated, repeated AfD’s anti-immigration and anti-European messages, as well.

Nevertheless, there is something different about the investigation — recently produced by the BBC, a German television station, an Italian newspaper and Der Spiegel, a German magazine — into the Russian contacts of one AfD member. Like others in his party, Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the Bundestag (the German parliament), opposes European sanctions against Russia and makes frequent trips to Crimea. But a strategy document obtained by journalists, created before the German elections in 2017 and sent from a former Russian counterintelligence officer to a member of the Kremlin administration, tells an additional story. The document assesses Frohnmaier’s chances, recommends “support” and notes that if he wins, “we will have our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag.” Another document, apparently written on behalf of Frohnmaier’s campaign, openly asks for both “material support” and “media support” from the Kremlin. Frohnmaier claims the document is fake.

A cache of other emails, analyzed in Der Spiegel, places these exchanges in a broader context. They describe a broad range of Russian “foreign-policy activities” in Europe, ranging from the “organization of meetings, vigils and other protest actions in [European Union] countries to the successful support of resolutions in the national parliaments of the EU and to media campaigns.” Not everyone who participated would necessarily have been paid — though in light of the Frohnmaier revelations, it is worth asking whether the members of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, Italy’s nationalist League party and others who have traveled to Crimea or maintained links to mercenaries fighting in eastern Ukraine did so with the expectation of receiving something in exchange.

Some of Frohnmaier’s subsequent actions and connections now make more sense, including the strange story of Manuel Ochsenreiter, a far-right commentator who worked in Frohnmaier’s office and was recently named in connection with a firebombing attack on a Hungarian cultural center in western Ukraine. The attack was allegedly designed to exacerbate Hungarian-Ukrainian relations, just as the two countries were arguing over the language rights of the small Hungarian minority in the west of Ukraine. The story had been seized on by Viktor Orban, the authoritarian Hungarian leader who has deep Russian ties of his own, as an excuse to make difficulties for Ukraine in various NATO and E.U. councils. Even though a lot about the attack remains mysterious, it looks very much like a classic Russian foreign policy maneuver, dating back to Soviet times and beyond: create a fake incident, deepen an ethnic conflict, then sit back and watch as it plays in Russia’s favor.

Even more interesting is the question of how the rest of Germany grapples with the Frohnmaier story. Inside the Bundestag, one leading Social Democrat has called for a parliamentary investigation; the Christian Democrats have demanded that Frohnmaier resign. But Germany is still profoundly resistant to the idea of a Russian threat to German democracy, preferring to downplay it as some kind of Cold War throwback idea, and to suspect those who discuss it of warmongering. The belief that German business depends on a good relationship with Moscow runs very deep, even though Germany’s trade with Poland is now larger than its trade with Russia. One German friend laughingly described to me the “psychological battle” the Frohnmaier story must present to many mainstream Germans, who will have to decide whether their instinctive desire to downplay stories about Russian influence trumps their instinctive dislike of the AfD.

The fact that it’s always authoritarian, far-right, bigots is nothing to worry about I’m sure. It’s much more important that liberals and progressives the world over not appear to be hysterical. Because that’s just icky.

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Shame, shame, shame
by Tom Sullivan

Van Doren in the isolation booth on the quiz show “Twenty-One,” with host Jack Barry (1957). Public domain via Wikipedia.

You may be forgiven if, like me, you missed the passing this week of Charles Van Doren, the one-time “Quiz Show Whiz Who Wasn’t.” For a few weeks in the 1950s, the Columbia University English instructor from a literary family dazzled the country on a televised quiz show that turned out to have been rigged.

But that revelation came only after he had walked away with the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money, tens of thousands of fan letters and marriage proposals, and the cover of Time magazine. It was all a fraud.

In the 1950s, that fraud was a scandal. From his obituary on Wednesday:

“I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years,” he said. He said he had agonized in a moral and mental struggle to come to terms with his own betrayals.

He lost his job at Columbia, NBC canceled his contract, and, along with others who had lied to the grand jury about their quiz show roles, he pleaded guilty to second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor, and received a suspended sentence. Many contestants shared the guilt, but the publicity spotlighted Mr. Van Doren because of his family’s prominence.

Conservative tax foe Grover Norquist famously threatened to drown government in the bathtub. With their fealty to Donald Trump what conservatives drowned instead is shame itself, writes Brett Stephens. Today, Van Doren’s perfidy would be shrugged away, explained away, and monetized. Probably with Trumpish bluster and “without apparently triggering any kind of internal emotional crisis.”

The annihilation of shame in Trump might be explained away with psychological diagnoses. (Surely, there are a panoply.) But his cult followers get no such pass, especially given their vainglorious moralizing over the decades since Van Doren:

It was once the useful role of conservatives to resist these sorts of trends — to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling Stop. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump, not only acquiescing in the culture of shamelessness but also savoring its fruits. Among them: Never being beholden to what they said or wrote yesterday. Never holding themselves to the standards they demand of others. Never having to say they are sorry.

Trump-supporting conservatives — the self-aware ones, at least — justify this bargain as a price worth paying in order to wage ideological combat against the hypostatized evil left. In fact it only makes them enablers in the degraded culture they once deplored. What Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx is to Smollett, they are to Trump.

By coincidence, a talk here by Wendell Potter on Wednesday brought evidence that shame’s demise may be greatly exaggerated. Potter is the former Cigna insurance executive whose “road to Damascus” began with a visit to the Remote Area Medical free clinic in Wise, Virginia. His appearance on Bill Moyers Journal led me there as well. Witnessing the spectacle of thousands of Americans, neighbors maybe (Potter is from nearby east Tennessee), receiving medical care at a county fairground in animal stalls and under open tents left the corporate communications specialist shaken.

Health care advocate Wendell Potter speaking in Asheville, NC April 10.

But it was not the final straw that made Potter a corporate whistleblower. He writes about that experience at Tarbell:

I’ve been asked many times if there was one thing, one moment, that led me to leave my job at a big health insurance corporation. Yes, there was, and it occurred five days before Christmas in 2007. That was when a beautiful 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan passed away, days after the company I worked for refused to pay for a liver transplant that her doctors believed would save her life. A few days after Nataline’s death, I turned in my notice.

It had been Potter’s job to spin the company’s refusal to intervene to save the young woman’s life. By the time a wash of bad publicity forced the company to agree to the transplant, it was too late. Nataline Sarkisyan died hours after Potter watched on television as a Cigna representative told her mother it would cover the transplant.

Since then, Potter has done penance as a health care advocate and insurance industry critic.

Shame may not be dead. But its existence as a curb on debauchery, corruption, and worse hangs by a thread.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Often inclined to borrow somebody’s dreams: Wild Nights With Emily (***)

By Dennis Hartley

Do you like poetry? Do you like song mashups? Here’s an interesting mashup for you:

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

Just for one moment –
Hearing someone call
Looked beyond the day in hand
There’s nothing there at all

Two of those verses are taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson (circa 1861). The other two verses are lyrics from a Joy Division song (circa 1980). Can you tell which is which?

Well…if you are more cultured than I (which is highly likely) or know anything about poetry (which would be more than I know) it’s plain as the nose on your face that verses 1 and 3 are from a 19th-Century poem, and verses 2 and 4 come from a 20th-Century song.

I made this association while conducting extensive background research for my review of Madeline Olnek’s Wild Nights With Emily (OK, I Googled “Emily Dickinson poems”, and that was one of the first search results. Happy now?). I was struck by Ms. Dickinson’s magnificently dark and timeless…Goth-iness. I mean “Wrecked, solitary, here”? I could totally hear (the wrecked, solitary, and late) Ian Curtis crooning the words.

Who was this intriguing woman of letters who toiled in relative obscurity for the 55 years she strolled the planet (1830-1886), seeing only a dozen or so of her 1,800 poems published during her life, but is now revered and studied and mentioned in the same breath as Whitman, Frost and Eliot? Was she really (as legend has it) the brooding, agoraphobic spinster who wears a Mona Lisa expression in that lone Daguerreotype portrait-or did she feel life was a banquet, and most poor suckers were starving to death?

Luckily for those of us who flee in terror at the prospect of sitting through a scholarly cinematic treatise soaking in the mannered trappings of a genre that a longtime friend of mine dismisses with a snort as “hat movies”, Olnek concocts kind of a mashup herself by mixing material from Dickinson’s poems and private letters with a touch of spirited speculation regarding details of her private life (think of it as well-researched fan fiction).

This lighter tone is assured by casting SNL veteran and comic actor Molly Shannon, who tackles the lead role with much aplomb. Her performance suggests an Emily Dickinson who indeed may have spent most of her adult life house-bound and somewhat socially isolated, but perhaps not so completely bereft of passion and joy as historically portrayed.

Most of that passion and joy manifests itself in the scenes depicting Emily’s longtime “close friendship” with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler), the woman who some biographers and historians have theorized to be the key romantic figure in Dickinson’s life; confidant, mentor, muse, and (assumed) secret lover. This is complicated by the fact they live next door to each other (at least in the film), adding door-slamming “Oh no! Your husband/my brother is home early-get dressed!” bedroom farce to the proceedings.

There are echoes of Comedy Central’s costume drama parody Another Period throughout, exacerbated by an appearance from Brett Gelman-one of that show’s more recognizable cast members. Gelman does a nice turn as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an early advocate of women’s rights and prominent staff member of The Atlantic Monthly who was a mentor (of sorts) to Dickinson (oddly, even though they formed a long friendship and exchanged many letters-he never pushed her hard to get published while she was still alive; but he did co-edit the first two posthumous collections of her poems).

Another key figure in Emily’s orbit is Mabel Loomis Todd (well-played by Amy Seimetz). Mabel is an interesting character; the de facto heavy of the piece, she also serves as the film’s narrator. Mabel Todd was the longtime mistress of Emily’s brother Austin (Kevin Seal), who (if you’ve been paying attention) was married to Susan, Emily’s longtime secret lover. Todd was also an editor and writer, who ended up co-editing the aforementioned posthumous collections of Dickinson’s poems with Thomas Higginson (which is a bit weird considering that Emily and Mabel never met in person).

This is about as far from an Oscar-baiting prestige biopic one can get, but as movies about writers and poets are a hard-sell to begin with (not enough explosions, car chases, CGI characters or Marvel superheroes to capture the general movie-going public’s attention) Olnek made a wise choice to think outside the box. Wild Nights with Emily may not be the flashiest film in theaters now, but it’s the only one with poetry in its soul.

Previous posts with related themes:


Endless Poetry
Top 10 films about writers
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same

More reviews at Den of Cinema
On Facebook
On Twitter

Trump 2020: “yes, I may be crazy, but the other side is even crazier.”

by digby

It’s hard to imagine how Trump could be re-elected after this dumpster fire of a first term, but it’s important not to be complacent. Consider that 60 million people or so have had their brains rotted by Fox, Rush and Trump. And even more frightening, people are getting used to Trump’s antics. There will be kids who’ve come to political awareness thinking of Trump as a normal president.

There is every reason to believe that he will run for president with all the benefits of incumbency, billions of dollars at his disposal and a political opposition that was unable to make a case for removing him no matter what he did. He’s already a winner.

According to this article, their slogan is going o come down to “yes, we may be crazy, but the other side is even crazier.” I think they’ll paint the Democrats as far-left radical commie terrorists no matter what so I don’t think there’s much point in trimming their sails. But they should be aware of it and have an answer for the charge. It’s going to be a big fight:

Some Democratic strategists said they have been taken aback recently by how successful Mr. Trump and Republicans have been at setting the terms of the debate around liberal policy ideas. And they are encouraging their party to be more nimble and deliver a more concise and accessible message.

In a fight with Mr. Trump, they say, nuance is not usually the Democrats’ best weapon.

“What our side has to understand is that to fight Trump it’s a battle for definition,” said Celinda Lake, a top Democratic pollster who has been working with left-of-center groups on a strategy to counter the messaging campaign from the right.

“The Democrats will issue a 61-page white paper that nobody in their right mind will pass on to their friends,” she added. “He uses a one-sentence slogan, and his voters feel emboldened to share it, pass it on.”

Democrats say they expect an asymmetrical battle against an opponent who makes his own rules and possesses a singular ability to saturate the national conversation. This can cut both ways, especially on issues like immigration where his fitful threats to close the southern border may cast him as more of a crisis instigator than mitigator. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s alarmist warnings about the Central American migrant caravan and his exaggerated claims about immigrants and crime were divisive with many suburban voters and contributed to Democratic victories that helped the party win the House.

Still, the president’s purge of the Homeland Security Department this week signals his belief that strict immigration enforcement is a winning issue for him. And while the wall he promised in 2016 remains unbuilt, he will continue to look for new ways to hold a hard line on border security.

It is not clear whether any of the Republican messaging is having an impact on voters outside of the president’s so far unmovable base. But Ms. Lake said that as she surveyed likely 2020 swing voters, she was surprised to hear people in focus groups repeat false assertions made by the president and his allies — that Democrats would end air travel in the United States and shut down dairy farms and beef production because of greenhouse gas emissions from cows.

“It’s amazing the number of people who would volunteer that,” she said. The actual language in the proposal calls for cleaner transportation and agriculture “as much as is technologically feasible.” The misperception about cows and airplanes originated with a now-retracted fact sheet published by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office that contained an ironic aside about getting rid of “farting cows and airplanes.”

Republicans said they also saw “Medicare for all”-type proposals as a way to give their rallying cries on socialism more substance and potency. Some plans, like the one put forward by Mr. Sanders, would largely eliminate private insurance plans, which Republicans have found is overwhelmingly unpopular with the kinds of voters they need to win back.

“The debate that’s going to play out in suburbs across the country is a choice between capitalism versus socialism,” said Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. “When Democrats talk about abolishing private health insurance, for example, most of my friends are on private insurance plans through their jobs or their husbands’ jobs. They don’t want to lose that. They don’t want to wait in line to get to the pediatrician.”

“Whichever Democrat wins the nomination will have to own their party’s socialist agenda,” she added. “That’s a debate that President Trump is eager to have and knows he can win.”

The Republicans’ data on voters from the 2018 midterms showed that coverage of pre-existing medical conditions was the top issue of concern. But here they face a serious disadvantage: They have no health care plan of their own.

But they have been testing messaging on health care with likely voters in the 16 states they believe will be the most competitive in 2020. These include ones Mr. Trump narrowly won like Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, as well as those he won by larger margins but have tilted more Democratic lately, like Arizona and North Carolina. The R.N.C. found that when voters were told that “Medicare for all” would eliminate private insurance and create a government-run system paid for by higher taxes, independents, married women and union members disliked the idea by wide margins. Among married women alone, nearly 60 percent disapproved.

It’s going to be up to the Democrats to make their case. But they shouldn’t bullshit themselves into believing that this argument has no constituency.  If people think they’re choosing between crazy and crazy, some of them are going to pick the crazy they’re used to even if they don’t like it. 

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Right wing media organizations openly propagandize on behalf of right wing politicians. What else is new?

by digby

To my mind this piece from 2017 proves that Wikileaks behaved exactly like Breitbart and Fox News, advising their preferred candidate about strategy, running derogatory stories about his rival and covering for his crimes and corruption. Recall that Trump hired Steve Bannon directly from the Breitbart editor’s job to formally run his campaign.

The difference, of course, is that Breitbart and Fox don’t pretend to be a “radical transparency” organization devoted to exposing government power wherever they find it. They have no problem owning the fact that they are cheap, partisan whores who are working for the advancement of an authoritarian scumbag largely in order to own the libs. That’s what Julian Assange did during the 2016 election. He’s just less honest about it:

Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)

The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”

The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.
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Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.

WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in the presidential campaign. In July 2016, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s servers that spring. The emails showed DNC officials denigrating Bernie Sanders, renewing tensions on the eve of Clinton’s acceptance of the nomination. On October 7, less than an hour after the Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, Wikileaks released emails that hackers had pilfered from the personal email account of Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta.

On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,” WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

“Already did that earlier today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”

Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”

WikiLeaks didn’t respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications,” WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!”)

“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”

Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”

Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/,” he wrote.

After this point, Trump Jr. ceased to respond to WikiLeaks’s direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its requests.

“Hey Don. We have an unusual idea,” WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. “Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.” WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump’s tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time “through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC).”

It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”

Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.

WikiLeaks didn’t write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. “Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump’s rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. “The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.,” WikiLeaks wrote.

Shortly after midnight that day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: “Wow.”

Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. “Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well!” WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. “In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC.”

WikiLeaks even imagined how Trump might put it: “‘That’s a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!’ or something similar,” WikiLeaks wrote. “They won’t do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.” (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he had committed alleged sexual assault.)

In the winter and spring, WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11, 2017, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.

“Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today,” citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. “We think this is strongly in your interest,” WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father’s tax returns, including the argument that Trump’s enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. “Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding.”

The message was sent at 9:29 am on July 11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.

Some time after 2011 or so, Wikileaks morphed into plain old partisan yellow journalism worthy of no more respect as a journalistic organization than Newsmax or Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. It’s protected under the First Amendment but you can’t blame liberals for being reluctant to energetically take up the cause after what he did. The ACLU will do it, no doubt, as will other defenders of free speech. But you can bet the right wingers like Trump and Hannity will run as fast as they can now that Assange is in custody and can no longer help them out.No one should ever expect the right wing to defend free speech unless it directly benefits them.

This is a good rundown of the civil liberties and press freedom concerns about the Assange charges. Even miscreant yellow journalists have a right to publish and protect their sources.

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