Month: April 2019

The Party of Lincoln thinks Abe was a loser

by digby

“What a pussy” — a Trump official

I knew Trump was illiterate, but I didn’t realize that all of his officials were just as ignorant. This piece in Axios discusses all the new hardline policies Trump and Stephen “Little Himmler” Miller are planning. They quote one official saying this:

The White House is frustrated by the granting of work permits to asylum seekers so soon after entering the country, describing the practice as “a major draw.”

The official described previous U.S. practice as “charity toward all, malice toward none.”

The person who said this is either a nasty piece of work trolling the tattered remains of the GOP establishment or is so dumb he doesn’t know what he’s saying. In Trump’s White House, it could be either one.

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Trump is talking in circles on immigration

by digby

He seems to be trying to say here that Obama was a bad man for doing child separations but it was a really effective policy that we need. So he ended it.

Or something:

Trump: Obama started children separation. I’m the one who stopped it. Also child separation is awesome. pic.twitter.com/H9le3TZMQh

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 9, 2019

This from last summer explains:

Though the photos are nearly identical to those from 2014, there is one key difference between them: the 2014 photos showed only children who arrived at the border unaccompanied. The 2018 photos also show families that have been separated from one another.

In this photo provided by US Customs and Border Protection, migrants sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas on June 17, 2018. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via Associated Press

That difference is significant — while unaccompanied children in 2014 knew what to expect when they arrived at the border and were taken to the holding facilities, the children who have been separated from their parents are often much younger, and had not expected to be taken away from their families.

It’s true that they separated kids from parents who were caught with drugs, but that’s a different situation because the parents were arrested for a real crime as opposed to applying for asylum in a legal fashion. The Obama administration kept the families together and were forced by the court to release them because they could not by law be kept longer than 20 days.

Of course, Trump is lying and it’s so convoluted now that he’s not making any sense. He’s the one who initiated the child separation policy and the reason he fired Nielsen (among other things) is that she refused to re-start it because it’s illegal. But he knows it’s unpopular so he’s blaming Obama and taking credit for stopping it even though he wants to do it again.

He’s crispy.

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The Border is the American Reichstag 

by tristero

Just so it’s clear, Trump’s reason for purging DHS and going beyond incarcerating babies in cages is to provoke such outrage that there will be widespread riots at the border. This will enable Trump to point to what he (and the media) will declare an unequivocally real emergency. This will will allow him to crack down violently and close the border, accomplishing two immediately desirable (to him) goals: (1)provide red meat to his base; and (2) keep America as white as possible for as long as possible. More generally, it will enable him to consolidate his authoritarian power.

This kind of strategy — in which an incident is manufactured in order to justify a violent state crackdown — is a well-known authoritarian tactic known as the Reichstag Fire strategy. It comes from, you guessed it:

The Reichstag Fire was a dramatic arson attack occurring on February 27, 1933, which razed the building that housed the Reichstag (German parliament) in Berlin. Claiming the fire was part of a Communist attempt to overthrow the government, the newly named Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler used the fire as an excuse to seize absolute power in Germany, paving the way for the rise of his Nazi regime.

 Yep, Trump’s learning from the worst.

Yes, there are more activist Democrats on twitter. So?

by digby

Bonus twitter content: my best guess is the figures in the piece grossly understate how unrepresentative political Twitter really is, based on a few unscientific Twitter polls from yesterday pic.twitter.com/FVAQmfKCB8— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 9, 2019

Here’s Nate Cohn’s unscientific twitter poll:

Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.

Even these results might understate the leftward lean of the most politically active, Democratic Twitter users, who often engage with political journalists and can have a powerful effect in shaping the conventional wisdom. In an informal poll of Democrats on one of our Twitter accounts on Monday, about 80 percent said they were liberal, and a similar percentage said they had a college degree. Only 20 percent said political correctness was a problem, and only 2 percent said they were black.

The relative moderation of Democrats who are not sharing their political thoughts on social media, and therefore of Democrats as a whole, makes it less surprising that Virginia Democrats tolerated Mr. Northam’s yearbook page. It makes it easier to imagine how Joe Biden might not merely survive questions about whether he touched women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, but might even emerge essentially unscathed.

It also helps explain why recent polls show that a majority of Democrats would rather see the party become more moderate than move leftward, even as progressives clamor for a Green New Deal or Medicare for all.

As I said, this strikes me as a realistic view of the party as a whole. Vast numbers of Democrats just don’t follow all the day-to-day intricacies of a changing political culture and on some level they don’t trust rapid change they don’t fully understand. That’s normal.

However, the left of the party, perhaps overrepresented on twitter, is the vanguard, breaking new ground and moving the party forward. It has always done this. Sometimes it overreaches or is outmaneuvered by the opposition. But it’s the duty of the vanguard to press forward, knowing that it is not a majority and accepting that progress is almost always two steps forward one step back at best. That combination of idealism and pragmatism is what cements lasting change. It’s not their job to be the voice for moderation. That’s what moderates do. It’s the job of everyone in the coalition to respect others and treat the outcome as legitimate.

Of course, twitter amplifies the voices of left-wing activists. It’s pretty obvious. Journalists should be aware of that too. It’s a legitimate voice of the Democratic left and it should not be dismissed. It’s influential with politicians and the public. But isn’t representative of the entire Democratic coalition and never has been.

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The online right strikes again

by digby

This says it all. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the rise of White Supremacy and this happened:

Hate speech has no place on YouTube. We’ve invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments / videos. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) April 9, 2019

The president thinks there are a few bad apples among all the nice anti-immigrant, islamophobe racists who love him.

There are many more. And he clearly does not want to offend even one of them by condemning their behavior. He knows he can’t spare even one vote. And who knows? He may have to call on them for some … action. Just in case.

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Trump gets the benefit of Comey’s reckless actions yet again

by digby

I wrote this for Salon two months ago. Barr’s testimony today proves that it was prescient. He brought up Comey and made it clear that he is going to use that as an excuse to redact information about anyone who isn’t charged, including the president.

It would be depressingly ironic if Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated report were kept tightly under wraps as a result of James Comey’s decision to break long-standing Department of Justice rules in the Hillary Clinton email case. Comey’s announcement that Clinton showed “bad judgment,” even as the FBI recommended that no criminal charges be brought, has been rightly excoriated for changing the course of history in a deeply destructive fashion. In his confirmation hearings last month, Attorney General William Barr implied several times that he would not make that mistake again — which may very well redound to the benefit of his boss, Donald Trump.

It’s not that Barr is wrong on the merits of that policy. The government has tremendous power to dig into every aspect of a citizen’s life, on what are often thin pretexts. If investigators find evidence of a crime, they are tasked with bringing it to court, where it is subject to the judicial process to determine guilt or innocence. If there is not enough evidence to prosecute a crime, investigators are supposed to close the case and move on without comment. If they don’t indict, it’s not their job to offer their own opinions about whether or not the person’s behavior was up to their standards. That’s what Comey did and then — oops, he did it again! — compounded the error just 10 days before the 2016 election.

One imagines that any federal prosecutor would be especially vigilant about not breaking that rule again, and a partisan attorney general hoping to protect his president from political damage is very likely to see Comey’s precedent as a godsend. But it really isn’t that simple.

If the reporting is correct that Mueller is preparing to turn over his report to the Department of Justice as early as next week, it’s highly unlikely that he will include an indictment of President Trump regardless of the evidence against him. Relying on a 1973 finding from their Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the DOJ has determined that a sitting president is the one person in the whole country who cannot be indicted. So if Barr strictly adheres to the policy of not publicly discussing any evidence regarding a person who is not indicted, we may learn nothing about what Mueller uncovered about the president. That is a classic Catch-22.

That finding by the OLC, we should note, is not written in stone. Rachel Maddow reported on her show on Thursday night that it was originally conceived as a sort of cover to allow the attorney general at the time to threaten corrupt Vice President Spiro Agnew with indictment in order to force him to resign:

"It would be timely and appropriate for the Justice Department and Robert Mueller to reconsider the shaky policy regarding indictability of a sitting president first formulated 45 years ago." pic.twitter.com/lSRzaL6Cij— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 22, 2019

It seems unlikely, however, that Barr will go so far as to change this policy. Considering that Trump has wriggled out of every jam he’s ever been in by the skin of his teeth, using an egregious loophole in this case would certainly fit his history. But this is no ordinary case, and that’s simply unacceptable.

If we were dealing with the investigations in the Southern District of New York pertaining to Trump’s alleged hush money payments or tax fraud or some other ordinary crime, one could make a case for requiring a president to waive the statute of limitations and waiting to prosecute until he or she is out of office. I don’t agree with the premise that the president cannot be a criminal suspect, but one might be able to rationalize it as the best way to uphold the concept that no one is above the law while preserving the prerogative of the Congress and the people to determine whether a president should be removed from office through impeachment.

But this case is unique and the stakes are much higher. Unlike Richard Nixon, who was overwhelmingly corrupt and abused his power for political gain, this president is also suspected of conspiring with a foreign government to sabotage the election in his favor, and then using the power of his office to cover it up while tilting America’s policy toward that country as president.

If there is evidence that Trump did this knowingly, he will have betrayed the country and compromised national security. Even if he was an unwitting dupe, so naive and inept that he didn’t realize that he was betraying his country, and is so intellectually and psychologically unfit that he can’t understand why his subsequent actions were unethical, he is still compromising national security.

None of that is contemplated by the Justice Department policy that says a president can’t be indicted, nor of the corollary position that if he is investigated by law enforcement none of the details can be revealed. That is perverse and nonsensical.

I think that’s where we are. Barr made it pretty clear that he’s going to do everything he can to protect the president. Not that we didn’t know that. But there was always the chance that he would turn out to be someone with a conscience.

He doesn’t have one.

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I thought he preferred people who weren’t captured, ok?

by digby

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What they can get away with
by Tom Sullivan

Key features of creeping whatever-ism are the creeps and the creeping.

While all eyes are focused on the sitting president’s authoritarian purge in Washington, D.C. and on his creepy, “vampiric,” shadow chief of staff, Stephen Miller, there is more creeping going on just out of the spotlight in Real America™.

“Frankly, this is the kind of proposal one would expect to surface in a banana republic, not the Peach State,” said Richard Griffiths, president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. A legislative proposal filed April 2 seeks to establish a Journalism Ethics Board in Georgia. Griffiths first thought it was an April Fools’ joke.

House Bill 734, a contrivance of Rep. Andy Welch, R-McDonough, would create an “independent” board appointed by the chancellor of the University of Georgia. It would mandate that reporters make copies of their notes, recordings, and photographs from interviews available free of charge upon request of interviewees. Violators would face fines and possible lawsuits. The board might also “investigate and sanction accredited journalists or news organizations” it felt behaved badly.

James Salzer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes that Welch “expressed frustration with what he saw as bias from a TV reporter who asked him questions about legislation recently.” Just the sort of frustration one might hear in red-hatted political rallies creeping across American TV screens.

Salzer adds:

In calling for subjects of interviews to get access to photographs, audio and video recordings, Welch is setting a higher standard than he and other members of the General Assembly are under. The General Assembly long ago exempted itself from the Georgia Open Records Act, which applies to all other governmental entities in the state.

Not to be out-authoritarianed, Florida’s state legislature moved to prevent citizens from amending the state constitution via citizen initiative when lawmakers refuse to address public concerns.

The Orlando Sun-Sentinal’s Editorial Board explains how lawmakers plan to protect the power they habitually abuse:

Smaller class sizes, medical marijuana and dedicated funding for environmental lands are some of the changes citizen initiatives have made happen. Underway are petition drives to create a $15 minimum wage, allow recreational marijuana, open the energy market to competition, ban assault-style weapons and open primary elections in a way that would send the top two candidates regardless of party to the general election ballot.

Florida’s legislative body feels violated when citizen initiatives result in lawmaking, and lawmakers have ways to try to shut the whole thing down. Anti-initiative bills backed by Republicans and business lobbies would eliminate the Constitution Revision Commission, the Board writes, thus making the Legislature “the only avenue to reform state government, which means there wouldn’t be any.”

If it is not abundantly clear by now, the political divide in this country is not simply “between Democrats and Republicans, or Conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms.” Nor even between jittery white nationalists threatened by growing diversity and those who embrace it.
It is between those committed to representative democracy and those, both patrician and peasant, whose fundamental impulses are for rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry, updated somewhat for the digital age.

They exploit a system of government in which they do not believe and, while pledging fealty to it, only tolerate it so long as it maintains their power with a minimum of social and especially economic disruption. Their governing philosophy, as is the sitting president’s, is what they can get away with. Find the line. Step over it, and dare anyone to push them back. If the pushback never comes or if it fails, they’ve established a more authoritarian new normal.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thus creeps creeping authoritarianism. In Georgia, where voting rights are under attack. In Florida, where the GOP slow-walks implementation of an amendment reinstating voting rights for convicted felons. And in Washington, D.C., where the rule of law itself is under attack.

Commenting on Donald Trump’s (and white-nationalist Miller’s) purge of Kirstjen Nielsen, Greg Sargent writes that one of the “indelible moral stains” Nielsen will carry into private life (in think tanks and green rooms, no doubt) is her implementation of Donald Trump’s repugnant family separations policy. She will argue in her defense she remained in his employ to prevent worse.

“But one thing we can be reasonably certain of,” Sargent writes, “is that if Trump could get away with it, he’d do far worse things.” Stay tuned.

Is his lunacy reaching a flashpoint?

by digby

This is very bad:

Last Friday, the President visited Calexico, California, where he said, “We’re full, our system’s full, our country’s full — can’t come in! Our country is full, what can you do? We can’t handle any more, our country is full. Can’t come in, I’m sorry. It’s very simple.”

Behind the scenes, two sources told CNN, the President told border agents to not let migrants in. Tell them we don’t have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, “Sorry, judge, I can’t do it. We don’t have the room.”

After the President left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the President said they would take on personal liability. You have to follow the law, they were told.

What if some of them try to follow the president’s orders anyway? Do they have a defense? He is the president of the United States, after all. The big boss. I don’t know that the war crimes statutes about “following orders” would necessarily apply here. So far, nobody seems to be as far gone as he is. But who knows what might happen?

His lunacy does seem to be escalating. This exchange between Nichole Wallace and Frank Figluzzi today was instructive about how professionals might be looking at this latest:

Nichole Wallace: A week or so ago you talked about alarming signs when you as a profiler from your law enforcement and counterintelligence background … describe some worries about compulsive conduct. Is this what you were talking about?

Former FBI Counterintelligence chief Figluzzi: What we talked about was a possible analogy between what we’re seeing in the president and studies of violence, particularly workplace violence.

We talked about the journey and pathway to violence when we see people using language of despondency, lashing out, demeaning others, obsessive-compulsive attachment to one issue and an inability to get off of it. In this case it would be security on the border and immigration. In this case we have to ask ourselves in a behavioral sense are we watching a president on his way to what we call a flashpoint.

And are we beginning to see him act out in the form of purging and mass firing and completely not listening to any logic. When people say to him, the law or policy is such and such and it would be violating the institution or the law and he simply dismisses it and fires people and keeps doing it.

Are we essentially watching a workplace violence incident play out at the highest level of our government and is he acting out now? And where does this go if I’m right about that?

In fairness, he is also obsessed with the Mueller Report. But one probably plays into another. People who go crazy in the workplace are also often obsessed with a belief they’ve been treated unfairly. Donald Trump would be the first to say that’s true of him. He never stops whining about it.

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No room in the country

by digby

boom

There’s a lot of room in a lot of those red states too:

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