Month: May 2019

Mueller made it very clear that he was throwing the case to the congress

by digby

Mueller spoke today and he said this for a reason:

“First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now.

And second, the opinion says that the constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

For those of us who have read the report, this has been obvious. (And it’s obvious that Bill Barr was blatantly lying about that) But if you haven’t gotten around to it and have been listening to the commentary, this is what Bill Barr and the White House have been trying to cover up.

Here’s the whole statement:

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. Two years ago, the acting attorney general asked me to serve as special counsel and he created the special counsel’s office. The appointment order directed the office to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This included investigating any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign.

Now, I have not spoken publicly during our investigation. I am speaking out today because our investigation is complete. The attorney general has made the report on our investigation largely public. And we are formally closing the special counsel’s office and as well, I’m resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life.

I’ll make a few remarks about the results of our work. But beyond these few remarks, it is important that the office’s written work speak for itself.

Let me begin where the appointment order begins, and that is interference in the 2016 presidential election. As alleged by the grand jury in an indictment, Russian intelligence officers who are part of the Russian military launched a concerted attack on our political system.

The indictment alleges that they used sophisticated cyber techniques to hack into computers and networks used by the Clinton campaign. They stole private information and then released that information through fake online identities and through the organization Wikileaks. The releases were designed and timed to interfere with our election and to damage a presidential candidate. And at the same time as the grand jury alleged in a separate indictment, a private Russian entity engaged in a social media operation, where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to influence an election.

These indictments contain allegations and we are not commenting on the guilt or the innocence of any specific defendant. Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

The indictments allege and the other activities in our report describe efforts to interfere in our political system. They needed to be investigated and understood. And that is among the reasons why the Department of Justice established our office.

That is also a reason we investigated efforts to obstruct the investigation. The matters we investigated were of paramount importance. It was critical for us to obtain full and accurate information from every person we questioned. When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of their government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.

Let me say a word about the report. The report has two parts, addressing the two main issues we were asked to investigate.

The first volume of the report details numerous efforts emanating from Russia to influence the election. This volume includes a discussion of the Trump campaign’s response to this activity as well as our conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.

And in the second volume, the report describes the results and analysis of our obstruction of justice investigation involving the president. The order appointing me special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation and we kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of the progress of our work.

And as set forth in the report, after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

The introduction to the volume II of our report explains that decision. It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited.

A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report and I will describe two of them for you.

First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now.

And second, the opinion says that the constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.

And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.

So that was Justice Department policy. Those were the principles under which we operated. And from them, we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position and we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president.

We conducted an independent criminal investigation and reported the results to the attorney general, as required by department regulations. The attorney general then concluded that it was appropriate to provide our report to Congress and to the American people. At one point in time, I requested that certain portions of the report be released and the attorney general preferred to make — preferred to make the entire report public all at once and we appreciate that the attorney general made the report largely public. And I certainly do not question the attorney general’s good faith in that decision.

Now, I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner. I am making that decision myself. No one has told me whether I can or should testify or speak further about this matter.

There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress. Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony. I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.

In addition, access to our underlying work product is being decided in a process that does not involve our office.

So beyond what I’ve said here today and what is contained in our written work, I do not believe it is appropriate for me to speak further about the investigation or to comment on the actions of the Justice Department or Congress. And it’s for that reason I will not be taking questions today, as well.

Now, before I step away, I want to thank the attorneys, the FBI agents, the analysts, the professional staff who helped us conduct this investigation in a fair and independent manner.

These individuals who spent nearly two years with the special counsel’s office were of the highest integrity. And I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systemic efforts to interfere in our election.

And that allegation deserves the attention of every American. Thank you. Thank you for being here today.

It’s pretty clear that Mueller doesn’t think that idiotic “Spygate” investigation holds water because they found a boatload of Russian involvement in the election. I suspect that even if he doesn’t testify publicly in impeachment hearings, he will have to testify in the silly pageant the Republicans are planning in the Senate.

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All bets are off
by Tom Sullivan

Begin with Judge Merrick Garland. Begin with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denying hearings and a confirmation vote to President Obama’s last nominee to the Supreme Court. Try naming all the familiar norms of governance that no longer function as they once did.

Donald J. Trump staffed his White House with unqualified and unprincipled cronies — some pose/posed national security risks. Executive branch agencies are run by unconfirmed, acting secretaries. The attorney general misleads the public and acts as the president’s personal attorney. Trump lies the way others breathe, profits from his office, name-calls opponents like a 7-year-old, makes policy by tweet, spreads conspiracy theories, inspires right-wing extremism, demonizes immigrants and his own FBI, “pals around with” dictators, obstructs federal investigations, and encourages defiance of congressional subpoenas. That’s a short list.

Yet, throughout discussions of a possible Trump impeachment, people who should know better by now still assume a Trump impeachment will operate by traditional norms. Articles of impeachment passed by the House will trigger a trial and vote in the Senate.

Will they?

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) bolsters my theory that that norm is gone too. The Hill notes McConnell’s “broad authority to set the parameters of a trial,” reporting Republicans plan to quash any impeachment in the Senate:

“I think it would be disposed of very quickly,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“If it’s based on the Mueller report, or anything like that, it would be quickly disposed of,” he added.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to McConnell’s leadership team, said “nothing” would come of impeachment articles passed by the House.

Don’t expect Trump’s GOP to play by the rules. “Nothing” might include no trial at all, as I have suggested for weeks. Given how he used that broad authority to quash the nomination of Merrick Garland, McConnell could quash a Senate trial by simply refusing to allow an impeachment trial on the Calendar (from Senate standing rules):

Speaking on MSNBC’s AM Joy on Saturday, David Cay Johnston acknowledged, “Mitch McConnell doesn’t even have to allow a trial.” Johnston sees no constitutional requirement that McConnell do so. [timestamp 6:20]

McConnell said his decision to deny a confirmation vote to Garland in 2016 was “about a principle and not a person.” McConnell argued, “Let’s let the American people decide” via the presidential election. Then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) insisted “cooler heads will prevail.” Cooler heads did not.

No one — not even Special Counsel Robert Mueller — expected Trump’s attorney general to use the special counsel’s report in a disinformation campaign to protect the president. Do not assume the rest of this saga will play out as you’d expect it to. All bets are off.

Asked at a Paducah, KY Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Tuesday what he would do if another Supreme Court vacancy arose in 2020, the same McConnell said with a smile after a sip of iced tea, “Oh, we’d fill it.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash told a Grand Rapids town hall Tuesday, “Congress has a duty to keep the president in check … And I think we owe it to the American people to represent them, to ensure that the people we have in office are doing the right thing, are of good character, aren’t violating the public trust.”

Following up on his blistering May 18 tweet thread laying out why he believes impeachment is necessary, Amash unleashed another barrage of tweets against the administration, this time targeting Attorney General William Barr for directing a cover-up for the president.

On Tuesday, Amash received a standing ovation in Grand Rapids. Trump won the district by over nine points. What happened Tuesday night in Grand Rapids is sure to provoke an agitated tweet storm from the sitting president. If he was anxious before, he is more anxious now.

What's remarkable is that Justin Amash is the only sitting Republican elected official saying this… https://t.co/lhOf0MkKCC— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 29, 2019

McConnell may simply bum’s rush an impeachment trial through the Senate to minimize damage to the president. Or Trump could hate the idea of even more bad press after articles of impeachment pass the House. McConnell might have to promise Trump no GOP defections and blinding-fast acquittal. Or Trump could demand McConnell refuse to hold a trial the way he refused Garland a vote.

Trump would enjoy breaking that norm if only for the trolling value of rubbing Democrats’ noses in it.

For any of that to happen, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi first has to call Republicans’ bluff that she won’t move to impeach.

by digby

I doubt Trump cares. But this is a bit unusual. Apparently even some Republicans were unnerved by Trump trashing an American politician on an overseas trip, especially by being in agreement with a murderous dictator.

Fox News panel berates Trump for bashing Biden while abroad pic.twitter.com/5CBhwKlNky

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) May 28, 2019

TPM:

“You don’t attack political opponents from foreign soil, you’re supposed to be out there as America’s chief diplomat,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen. “And two, you don’t cite the murderous dictator of North Korea as evidence of why Biden is a bad candidate.” 

“Coming back to his comments in Japan, I do agree with Mark that it was shameful,” agreed the Washington Post’s Charles Lane. 

“It is a sign of the enormous place that Joe Biden is occupying in the President’s worldview at the moment,” added the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

I doubt it will make much of a difference in the long run. They didn’t care when he sucked up to Vladimir Putin so openly that the whole world looked away in embarrassment. But they did have a few qualms, at least for a moment over his outrageously inappropriate behavior in Japan. It’s a moment.

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Lindsey Graham is very pleased with Trump

by digby

He will do anything to be re-elected. Anything.

“The one thing I’m not going to worry about is pleasing Joe Scarborough, that’s not on my list,” Graham said during an interview with Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday, responding to criticism from the “Morning Joe” co-host. “What I am worried about is making sure that we have the right foreign policy during dangerous times. President Trump has rebuilt the military in a way like Ronald Reagan did. He destroyed ISIS, very pleased.”

During “Morning Joe” on Tuesday morning, Scarborough suggested that Graham, who went from Trump critic to ardent supporter in a matter of months, sold his “political soul” in an attempt to get reelected in South Carolina.

“He basically sold his soul, political soul, sold his political soul for, you know, 20 percentage points inside his own Republican Party,” Scarborough said. “Unlike John McCain, Lindsey Graham didn’t have the confidence and the assurance in his voters that he could speak truth to power and still get reelected in his state.”

Scarborough: Lindsey Graham “sold his political soul” to get reelected in 2020 pic.twitter.com/QR0fehD749

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) May 28, 2019

Several times throughout his interview with Kilmeade, Graham reiterated the importance of his friendship with the late-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who opposed Trump up until his passing in August and dismissed any notion that he should care what Scarborough — a former Republican lawmaker — thinks of him.

“John McCain was my dearest friend in the Senate, one of my dearest friends in the world. And the one thing I’ve learned from Sen. McCain is that you always put the country ahead of anything else,” he said. “I’m the senator from South Carolina; people want me to help this president. And we have disagreements and when we do I try to work through them. So, cable chatter is just cable chatter. And nothing’s going to change my relationship with Sen. McCain. He was a big influence on my life, taught me a lot bout foreign policy.”

“I don’t feel like I need to defend myself against a cable talk show host on MSNBC,” he continued. “I’m a United States senator representing the people of South Carolina who overwhelming support President Trump.”

McCain ran on “build the dang wall” in 2016 so he wasn’t above pandering. But I don’t think he would ever suck up quite this eagerly. Let’s face it. Graham is getting off on being Trump’s lap dog. He doesn’t have to go this far. He wants to.

“It’s the values, stupid”

by digby

Over the weekend there was quite a bit of handwringing over this piece by Steven Ratner that said the models are all showing a Trump victory, mostly because of the power of incumbency and the strong economy. (Apparently, they don’t place much weight on the popularity of the president which strikes me as totally daft.)

Anyway, forget all that. This piece by Ron Brownstein will be the smartest thing you’ll read all day. I’m posting it in its entirety because it’s that important:

The 2020 election may test as never before one of the most enduring rules of presidential politics, the straightforward four-word maxim coined by Democratic strategist James Carville in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Even amid record-low unemployment, robust economic growth and a roaring stock market, President Donald Trump has shown no signs of expanding his support beyond the roughly 46% of the vote that he carried in 2016.

National surveys now routinely find a huge falloff between the share of Americans satisfied with the economy and the percentage that approve of Trump’s performance as President. And new academic research has concluded that attitudes about the economy were much less powerful in driving voters’ decisions in 2016 and 2018 than their views about fundamental cultural and social changes, particularly race relations and shifting gender roles.

Each of these dynamics underscores how the economy’s role in politics may be shifting as the basis of each party’s political coalition has evolved. Increasingly, the parties are bound together less by class than by culture. As I’ve argued, the fundamental dividing line between the parties has become their contrasting attitudes toward the underlying demographic, cultural and economic changes remaking American society.

Democrats now rely primarily on what I’ve called the coalition of transformation, centered on the groups that mostly welcome these changes, particularly young people, minorities and college-educated white voters, all of them concentrated in major metropolitan areas. Republicans mobilize a competing coalition of restoration that revolves around the groups that are most uneasy about these changes: older, blue-collar, evangelical and rural whites.

Many political observers see clear evidence that attitudes toward these core questions of America’s identity are overshadowing assessments of the economy in driving voters’ decisions.

Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University political scientist, says a bad economy can still threaten a president and his party, as it did when the financial crash helped Barack Obama breeze to the presidency after President George W. Bush’s two terms in 2008. But a good economy, he believes, may no longer be enough to dislodge the entrenched battle lines over these underlying cultural preferences.

“One thing you see in the two most recent presidencies, the Obama and Trump presidencies, is neither of them get much credit for good economies,” Schaffner said in an interview. “They had different ceilings (of support), but they both had ceilings.”

The trend was clear in 2018 elections

The economy’s diminishing impact was apparent in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats made their biggest inroads in white-collar suburban areas in major metropolitan areas that were almost universally succeeding economically: A CNN analysis found that the median income exceeded the national average in 35 of the 43 previously Republican-held House seats that Democrats won last November.

Exit polls found that Republican House candidates still carried an overwhelming share of the roughly 1 in 8 voters who described the economy as excellent last year. But among the half of 2018 voters who called the economy “good,” GOP candidates eked out only a narrow 51% to 47% advantage, the exit polls found. In sharp contrast, Democrats carried almost exactly three-fourths of voters who described the economy as “good” in the 2014 midterms, while Obama held the White House.

On balance, any president, of course, would prefer to seek reelection with a stronger rather than weaker economy. Models from political scientists and academics that try to predict the outcome of presidential races typically place a heavy emphasis on measures of economic performance, such as growth in the overall domestic product or inflation-adjusted personal income. Most of those standard models now consistently identify Trump as a clear favorite for reelection.

But Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, says the effectiveness of models that stress economic performance to predict presidential elections may be eroding. “There’s a possibility here, just based on what the survey data seems to show, that the connection between perceptions of the economy and opinions about the president has gotten weaker,” he said in an interview.

Abramowitz’s own forecast model — which factors inflation-adjusted economic growth, incumbency and a president’s approval rating — puts Trump at about 50-50 odds for reelection. “There’s a chance the economy is not going to play as big a role here,” Abramowitz says.

Schaffner agrees. In a study of the 2016 election using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a large-scale pre- and post-election national survey, Schaffner and two co-authors found that economic satisfaction and dissatisfaction was much less important in predicting support for Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton than attitudes about race and gender relations. The more likely voters were to believe that racial discrimination is not a systemic problem and that women complaining about sexism were actually seeking unfair advantage over men, the more likely they were to support Trump. (That pattern was as powerful among women as it was among men.)

The relationship between those attitudes about fundamental cultural change — particularly views about racism — dwarfed assessments of the economy in predicting the vote, Schaffner said, even when accounting for the tendency of Democrats and Republicans alike to view the economy more positively when their party holds the White House.

Trump as force multiplier

In a paper published last month, Schaffner found these trends intensified in the 2018 election. 

Again using Cooperative Congressional Election Study data, Schaffner found that support for Republican and Democratic House candidates in 2018 correlated even more tightly than in 2016 with attitudes about the changing roles of women. A significant minority of Republican voters in 2016 who expressed sympathy for feminism, he found, switched to support Democrats last year. His research found that attitudes on whether racism is still a systemic problem also correlated even more closely with the House vote in 2018 than they had done two years earlier.

Those results partly reflect the long-term movement toward a political system that revolves more around cultural attitudes than class interests. But they also measure the extent to which Trump has thrust these questions of American identity to the forefront of political debate by identifying so unreservedly with the forces opposed to social change across a wide array of issues, from immigration to the protests of African American National Football League players to transgender rights and the appointment of socially conservative Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Schaffner says Trump’s emergence hasn’t significantly changed the share of Americans who express positive or negative views about changing race relations or gender roles. Instead, Schaffner believes, Trump’s impact has been to make those attitudes a more powerful force in determining which party voters identify with. Political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck reached the same conclusion in their acclaimed recent book on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis.”

The reconfiguration of political allegiances around those views means that Republicans, under Trump, have been losing support from culturally liberal white-collar suburban voters who are thriving economically, even as they maintain solid advantages among socially conservative blue-collar and rural voters whose economic situation, while generally improving, remains much more tenuous overall.
Those contrasting trends have produced a striking divergence between attitudes about the economy and attitudes toward Trump.

In the most recent Quinnipiac University national survey, for instance, 76% of college-educated white voters termed the economy excellent or good. But only 36% of them said they approved of Trump’s performance as President, and 59% said they definitely intended to vote against him for reelection.
Among younger adults, aged 18-34, 60% described the economy as excellent or good, but only 27% approved of Trump’s performance and 63% said they definitely planned to vote against him in 2020. Among independents, 71% gave the economy good marks, but only 34% did the same for Trump’s performance; just over half of them said they were committed to opposing him next time. Among Hispanics, two-thirds described the economy as strong, but less than a thirdapproved of Trump’s performance and almost two-thirds said they were committed to voting against him next year.

There was much less daylight between satisfaction with the economy and satisfaction with Trump among white voters without a college education, a group that has expressed more support for his cultural agenda. Among them, the falloff was much smaller between the share that said the economy was strong (77%) and the percentage that approved of his performance (55%); the share of those working-class whites who said they were committed to supporting Trump next year (46%) exceeded the share committed to opposing him (40%). The rest said they would consider voting for him.

Economy may just reinforce opinions on Trump

Quinnipiac discovered the same patterns in a recent poll in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania. Among college whites there, 81% described their personal financial situations as excellent or good and 73% said the same about the state economy. But only 35% of them said they approved of Trump’s job performance, and these college whites backed former Vice President Joe Biden over him by fully 2 to 1 in a putative 2020 match-up. Non-college whites in the state were almost exactly as positive about the economy, but 56% of them approved of Trump’s performance and they gave him a nearly 20-point advantage over Biden.

Polls offer conflicting signals on how much Americans credit Trump with the good economic news.
Surveys consistently find that most voters are cool to his major policy initiatives. Polls have found that most Americans opposed his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and that only a minority of Americans believe they have personally benefited from his tax plan; in the latest Quinnipiac survey, a plurality said his trade policies were bad for the economy.

But the share of Americans who say Trump deserves credit for the buoyant economy is rising in some surveys. Even that measure, though, seems influenced by the larger divide, with Republicans and the groups favorable to the GOP far more likely to credit Trump than those skeptical of him on other grounds.

For all these reasons, the strong economy seems more likely to reinforce than to recast the patterns of reaction to Trump’s tumultuous presidency.

In the predominantly white, mostly nonmetropolitan places where voters are already drawn to Trump’s confrontational cultural agenda, the economy may help him harden his support: Recent research by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution found that the counties Trump carried in 2016, most of them at the periphery of or beyond the major metropolitan areas, have added jobs at a much faster pace since he took office than they did under Obama.

But the diverse, younger, urbanized counties Clinton carried — including almost all of the largest metropolitan areas — are still adding jobs in larger absolute numbers than the Trump counties. And there’s no indication that those gains are softening hostility to his social agenda and personal style. 

“I would definitely think that who he’s likely to lose (in 2020) are people who are doing fine economically but are just turned off by Kavanaugh and the immigration stuff, etc.,” says Schaffner. 

Abramowitz has similar expectations. “I think that where people come down on those cultural issues — where they don’t like what Trump is doing — counts much more for them than the fact the economy is doing well,” he said. “It’s pretty easy to dismiss that or say that his policies are not responsible for it, that it’s just a continuation of the recovery” under Obama.

In his meteoric political career, Trump has upended a succession of political rules and truisms. The next one may be views about the economy’s primacy in determining the outcome of presidential elections. 

That assumption was already eroding before Trump emerged, but if next year’s election divides the country along the same lines that have shaped his presidency, political experts may settle on a new four-word maxim: “It’s the values, stupid.”

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The Dumbest Thing Said Today By a Very Serious Person 

by tristero

Ivan Krastev in the NY Times:

For the moment, supporters of the European Union don’t need to panic.

Bullshit. And he knows it. From the same essay:

Of the five individual political parties with the biggest representation in the new European Parliament, four are anti-European Union. 

…there is no choice but to admit that the populist far right is becoming a permanent feature of European politics.

I wasn’t born until long after the Holocaust. But I am quite aware of what happened the last time the populist far right became a permanent feature of European politics – 8 million people were slaughtered. Now is exactly the right time to panic.

Krastev also wins an award for The Second Dumbest Thing Said Today By a Very Serious Person. From the same article:

None of these [far right] parties seems any longer to support exiting the European Union or the eurozone. Instead, they want to change it from within.

Bullshit. They’re not interested in change, but destruction. Just wait.

Better yet, Europeans who care about the future of the world need to do whatever they can to get these people out of power fast.

Let McConnell show the country what a hack he really is

by digby

Mitch McConnell has announced that if the House impeaches the president the Senate will “dispose of it quickly.” This is mostly being seen as a terrible threat to Democrats who are afraid that Trump will seize upon it as a big victory and move on to bulldoze his way to a huge victory. Sigh.

I’m with Steve M at NMMNB on this one:

Many Democrats don’t want to impeach because they believe, correctly, that they can’t possibly get a conviction in the Senate. But they can highlight the heavy-handed behavior of Mitch McConnell and the rest of his crew of lackeys, among whom are potentially vulnerable incumbents who’ll have to run in a presidential election year in which the majority of Americans won’t want the incumbent Republican president reelected. So maybe it would be good for Democrats if the American public gets to watch McConnell & Co. run an outrageous kangaroo-court proceeding.

This assumes, of course, that Democrats can frame the issue correctly — they have to make the case that the charges against Trump require serious consideration, and that a procedure that’s a mockery of justice is an outrage. I’m not sure Democrats have the messaging skills to pull that off. But if they can do it — if they can highlight McConnell’s efforts to quash evidence and prevent witnesses from testifying, all while zipping through the process and, probably, conducting it in the middle of the night or over a holiday weekend — then maybe they can run on that injustice as much as on Trump’s unfitness for office in 2020.

If the Senate is going to act like Trump’s indentured servants then let them show the whole country what they are. Let them take those votes and let them defend them on the campaign trail. Maybe they will win anyway but they should have to put their votes and their reputations on the line for Donald Trump, out in the open, for the whole world to see.

We know what he’s done. Even aside from the Mueller Report, his dangerous behavior on the world stage, his obvious corruption, his chaotic management, all of it is impeachable and should be put on the table and those Republicans should be forced to defend it.

I wish I understood why the Democrats think it’s so obvious that the best way to win is to act like Trump is not on the ballot, but he is. They have to run against him whether they like it or not. So they might as well try to take Mitch McConnell and his gang of sycophantic traitors down too.

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Donald Trump: civil rights hero? Please.

by digby

Joe Biden’s going to have to answer for these votes. But not to Trump, who is a racist piece of work. He’ll have to answer to his own voters. Of course Trump is trying to sabotage Biden in the Democratic primary because he thinks he’s his toughest competition.

Still, let’s not forget who Trump is:

As you know the boys were innocent. But when the city settled the lawsuit years later Trump wrote an op-ed protesting the settlement.”My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it ‘the heist of the century,’” he wrote. “Settling doesn’t mean innocence.”

“Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts,” Trump wrote. “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

And don’t forget that Trump had lots of help in 2016 from certain overseas assistants in suppressing the African American vote.

This issue could hurt Biden in the primaries. He’s got to answer for his record. But African Americans aren’t going to buy into Trump’s bullshit in the General, no matter who gets the nomination. They are much too smart for that. They know what he is.

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Donald Trump does not want to be OJ

My Salon column this morning:

Life among the propagandists
by Tom Sullivan

Airmen onboard the USS WASP, via tweet from Vivian Salama, WSJ.

The coming months promise to provide future academics a wealth of dissertation-worthy material in political science, sociology, and psychology. Already awash in propaganda, Americans can expect a gusher of it during the 2020 election season. Just do not ignore it, warns Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, “Call it out. Laugh at it. Recognize it for what it is: a sign not of strength but of fear.”

That is why the president felt compelled to stage a press event last week after news reports he had angrily walked out of a White House meeting with Democratic leaders on infrastructure. To counter the bad press, his team
stepped forward one by one to give their testimonies. Robinson writes, “Oh yes, Mr. President, you were sooooo calm and collected, they told him. I was afraid one of them might call him ‘Dear Leader.’”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stood in for Lin Biao and the Gang of 13 Angry Democrats (now grown to 18).

Robinson refutes many of Trump’s lies. However, repeating lies in refuting them, messaging experts caution, more firmly roots untruths. But that will not interrupt our reflex for refutation.

Nor will it disrupt the press’ reflex for repeating Trump’s lies. Catherine Rampell observes that Democrats have, in fact, passed a great deal of kitchen table legislation since gaining control of the House. Nonetheless, Trump insists Democrats have done nothing, so focused are they on impeaching him. The press aids him in catapulting the propaganda, Rampell explains, by asking them about impeachment to the exclusion of all else:

The topic dominated Sunday morning political shows this past weekend. In one particularly frustrating exchange, NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to address criticisms that the Democratic Party is too myopically focused on subpoenas and impeachment rather than “kitchen table” issues. He did this, of course, while only asking myopic questions about subpoenas and impeachment, and none about any of those “kitchen table” issues.

We can expect more red-baiting during the 2020 campaign. On the right, red-baiting is a reflex that never goes away. It is now a standard element of Trump stump speeches, Peter Dreier writes at The Nation:

House Republicans have even formed an “Anti-Socialism Caucus,” chaired by Representative Chris Steward of Utah, to “defend individual liberty & free markets and highlight the dark history of socialism.”

The right-wing-media echo chamber has adopted the same tactic, painting all Democrats with the same red brush. “It’s time to rise up and defeat the socialist left,” radio reactionary Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in February, warning that “liberalism is what led to Nazism, that liberalism is what led to the Soviet Union, that liberalism is what led to Cuba.” After Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced in February that she was redistributing her office budget in order to raise the salaries of her lowest-level staffers to $52,000, Fox News host Pete Hegseth described her action as “communism and socialism.”

Fortunately, those not already in the grip of the propagandists are not biting. Americans under 50 tend to associate socialism more “with social equality than with government control over the means of production,” Dreier writes, and with the social democracies of western Europe. That is, with “universal health insurance, childcare, paid family leave and paid vacations, more equality for women, and more progressive taxes and promote less poverty, a higher standard of living for working families, better schools, free universities, a cleaner environment, higher voter turnout, stronger unions, and a much wider safety net.”

The horror.

That horror will not stop Trump and his revanchist followers from preferencing white, democratic socialists from northern Europe over darker-toned immigrants from points south and east, even if equally Christian.

The right is not a no-spin zone but an irony-free one. Early in my tenure here, I wrote about pass-it-on lies, smears , and distortions that circulated among conservatives before they moved into social media:

Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.

Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.