Month: August 2019

Trump and the Lion logo

by digby

During the 2016 campaign I wrote a bit about some of the right’s adoption of the white nationalist lion symbol for the Trump campaign. More recently, I joked about it.  Now Trump is retweeting it.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reports:

Oh boy, it’s time for another round of Let’s Pretend the President Isn’t Air-Kissing White Nationalists. This time, the instigating incident is the discovery that a fan video tweeted by Donald Trump featured a logo — a lion’s face built out of red stripes and blue stars — that was apparently, um, “borrowed” from a white supremacist group so unhinged that it managed to get banned from Twitter, a site that is always reluctant to boot fascists.

Mediaite has a detailed account of the internet sleuths, including Brooke Binknowski of Snopes, who pieced together the apparent source of this lion logo. It has been used by the white supremacist site VDare, which also happens to be the same site whose articles the Department of Justice recently forwarded to immigration court employees, launching a minor scandal. The logo has been traced back to a pro-Trump fascist group called the “Lion Guard.”

The group’s name, and apparent ethos comes from a quote from Benito Mussolini that Trump approvingly tweeted in 2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”

Back then, Trump claimed it was an accident born of ignorance that he approvingly quoted Mussolini, just as the DOJ claims it was an unfortunate accident that it mailed out links to white supremacist sites. That’s the strategy in play: Wink at the fascists, and whenever you get called out on it, play innocent.

“White Supremacists are a key constituency for Trump. His campaign has determined that they can’t win in 2020 without them,” Melissa Ryan, a digital strategist dedicated to fighting right-wing extremism, tweeted in response to Trump’s new lion logo. “Stuff like this is how the Trump campaign can show alignment but give themselves room to pretend it’s accidental if they’re called on it.”

We’ve also been assured it was an accident or miscommunication whenever Trump associates flash a hand gesture popular with white nationalists. And when Trump hosted a hornet’s nest worth of racists, right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists at the White House, that was because he supports “free speech” and not because he totally agrees with such people.

We were also told that Trump didn’t mean it when he repeatedly tweeted propaganda from white nationalist groups. It’s just an accident when he says overtly anti-Semitic things. We’re meant to believe, seemingly, that the president is repeatedly victimized by white nationalists, who exploiting his garden-variety racism to get him to signal-boost their ideology. Is that supposed to make us feel better?

We’re also meant to believe it’s just coincidence that Trump eagerly promotes the talking points offered by fascists that falsely blame the left for street fights that were actually instigated by hate groups. We’re meant to believe that Trump is merely a bumbling fool and not a deliberate promoter of fascism when he repeatedly echoes white nationalist claims that “both sides” do it and that “antifa” is the real problem, instead of facing the fact that actual white nationalists have been behind multiple terrorist attacks over the past four years.

The fan site that made the video is, of course, claiming innocence, saying that logo — lovingly animated in the video — was simply pulled off Google. That is fairly difficult to believe, since a search for “Trump logo” doesn’t have any lion iconography, except for those sites that are reporting on the video.

A whole lot of mistakes and coincidences are piling up to explain how often Trump’s aesthetics, beliefs, attitudes and talking points align so nicely with the stuff being churned out by all the formerly-fringe white nationalist groups out there. And we’re meant to believe that Trump’s policies, which sure do seem to be geared towards shipping out as many nonwhite people, have no relationship to the white nationalist mission of turning the U.S. into a white ethno-state.

I agree. My instinct has been to just assume that Trump is too stupid to know what he’s doing. I figured that he was just attracted to the lion symbol because it’s “royal.” After all, the fake coat of arms on the Trump brand logo features a crown.  But in light of what Marcotte writes above and this blockbuster report on the infiltration of straight-up Nazis in right wing media, I think that may be naive.

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We’ve got your deep state for you, right here. And it’s protecting Donald Trump.

by digby

I shamefully confess that I did not know this. I’ve certainly been aware of the Office of Legal Counsel from various news stories over the years. But I guess I never thought to question what the rulings are that we don’t know about. I guess I just assumed they were public on some level and the ones we hear about are the controversial ones.

Not true:

When the Supreme Court and lower courts interpret the Constitution and laws, their decrees are public, accessible and subject to debate. In some instances, if an interpretation of the law doesn’t sit well with the public, Congress can respond by amending the law, effectively nullifying a court’s decision. Or if a ruling on a constitutional question is especially egregious, a constitutional amendment, though unlikely, remains an option.

But it turns out there’s a whole category of American law that is above such checks and balances. The public knows nothing about it and there’s no way to challenge it in court, let alone debate it in the halls of Congress.

For decades, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has flexed its interpretive power as the ultimate arbiter of what the law is for the executive branch, building a whole body of secret law that remains shielded from public view. Very little is known about these opinions—which carry the force of law, resolve disputes between agencies, direct the conduct of federal officials and can even affect civil rights and liberties. In the view of one scholar, these opinions date “to the beginning of the Republic” and can even “rival the opinions of the Supreme Court.”

These decisions number in the thousands, and the few that become public see the light of day at the discretion of the Justice Department. But the vast majority stay secret—binding executive branch officials and activities across administrations. Because almost everyone who isn’t a lawyer in the office is kept in the dark about these legal conclusions, Congress and the public can’t debate them or seek amendments in the event of abuses. Courts are of no help either.

Indeed, without transparency to test these legal opinions in a court of law or the court of public opinion, it is often the case that the Justice Department has the final say on the actions of federal agencies and officers, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. From Robert Mueller’s decision to follow a 1973 Justice Department recommendationthat a president can’t be indicted while in office to numerouspronouncements shielding Donald Trump or officials in his administration from congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel makes law that holds tremendous sway over issues of public concern.

And yet despite the influence of the office’s opinions across the executive branch and their centrality to many of Trump’s controversies, all the public knows about them is the smattering of decisions that are made public from time to time. The Justice Department claims to have the last word over what gets released to the public, subject to a secretive “publication review committee” that calls the shots.

According to one former Justice Department official, in 1991, when Attorney General William Barr first led the Justice Department, the government only published 13 opinions out of an estimated 625 that the Office of Legal Counsel gave to other agencies—a paltry 2 percent that leaves Americans with little understanding of the law that guided the United States’ government at the time.

In 2016, Congress amended the Freedom of Information Act to place a 25-year cap on documents previously shielded by what the Justice Department calls “deliberative process privilege”—which the government has cited in the past to keep Office of Legal Counsel’s precedent-setting legal opinions secret. By law, then, that type of privilege should no longer cover such decisions older than 25 years—though some or portions of them may still be kept from disclosure if, for example, they contain classified information. And neither should the department be allowed to claim attorney-client privilege over these opinions, which aren’t legal advice but controlling decisions of law.

With this understanding of the law and with an eye toward greater transparency, a group of scholars last week filed a lawsuit in federal courtarguing that Office of Legal Counsel memoranda that are at least 25 years old should be disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. Among the plaintiffs are historians of presidential power, the civil rights movement, the laws of war, government surveillance and immigration—all areas where the government’s enormous discretion to enforce the law has been guided by legal judgments that our citizenry would be well served to understand and reckon with, even today. The Justice Department didn’t comply with an earlier administrative request for these opinions.

Understanding past overreach could help us better understand today’s. Barr, then and now, is the kind of attorney general whose expansive views of executive power deserve legal scrutiny—and the public is entitled to know to what extent the Office of Legal Counsel abetted or disregarded his maximalist impulses. More than 25 years ago, he was behind some of the Justice Department’s darkest hours: From a lawless surveillance programhe approved that long predated the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 excesses to his role in recommending pardons for officials implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, the American people deserve to know how much secret law he helped create for the presidents he’s served—and how much of it may still be good law for the rest of the executive branch today. For all we know, some of these decisions may have been overruled by later administrations, presidents or attorneys general; the enduring secrecy of these opinions makes it difficult to tell.

Right now, we see these opinions’ weight and opacity playing out. In December, the Trump administration is expected to resume executing federal prisoners on death row, ending a longstanding, de facto moratorium on the federal death penalty. Barr’s decision to reinstate the practice didn’t happen in a vacuum, but was preceded by the advice of the Office of Legal Counsel, which in May concluded in a 26-page memorandum that the Food and Drug Administration lacks the authority to regulate “drugs” and “devices” used in capital punishment.

That conclusion was squarely at odds with the agency’s prior disapproval of pentobarbital, the drug Barr now wants to use in the upcoming executions. Whatever regulatory roadblocks existed before have been removed. The Office of Legal Counsel has now declared what the law is—at least as far as the executive branch and the FDA are concerned. Unless a court steps in, these executions will move forward with Barr’s new lethal cocktail of choice.

The Office of Legal Counsel’s historical memoranda may not all concern issues of life and death, but they should concern all of us—and the Justice Department would be acting in the national interest if it disclosed them as the law requires.

The upcoming riveting public hearings on the Russia investigation are not the ones you probably had in mind

by digby

The highly anticipated Justice Department inspector general’s report on whether former FBI Director James Comey broke any laws when he shared some of his memoranda with the media was released yesterday. The report did not find that Comey had broken the law or released any classified information, which was certainly a terrible disappointment to the right-wing fever swamp which had hoped to see Comey hauled off in leg irons. It did, however, find that he had defied FBI policy after he had been fired by the president and was highly critical of the former director’s judgment, leading to much delight and excitement among his critics.

The president’s tweet following the news reflects the right’s general reaction:

Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019

Virtually all of the facts about this have been known since Comey famously testified before Congress in the summer of 2017. He made it clear at that time that his motivation was to trigger a special counsel to investigate election interference and he told the inspector general’s investigators that he didn’t pass his decision up the line at Justice because he didn’t want to make officials there involve themselves in what he believed to be a whistleblowing situation.

While the IG did not find that Comey had released classified information, the report reveals that some of the other players in this drama, such as former deputy director Andrew McCabe and special agent Peter Strzok, went over Comey’s memos after the fact and found that some of the information was classified at the lowest level of “confidential,” for which Comey was not held responsible.

The irony in all of this is thick. After all, it was Comey’s defiance of DOJ policy in the summer and fall of 2016 that arguably led to Donald Trump’s election victory. First Comey went to the press to ostensibly clear Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in the email case, while criticizing her for being reckless and irresponsible. Then he made the even more dubious decision to reopen the case in October, just days before the presidential election.

Clinton must have poured out a couple of stiff shots of Jameson when she read that report. As David A. Graham pointed out in The Atlantic:

Few of us can imagine how it felt for Clinton to be simultaneously cleared of criminal wrongdoing and also publicly savaged, but today, Comey probably has a pretty good sense of precisely how that feels.

It’s hard to refrain from saying “What goes around comes around,” but that would trivialize what is actually a very serious situation. Comey’s ill-conceived statements in 2016, which arguably tipped the election to Trump, are what one might term his original sin. The results have been catastrophic. That error in judgment then led directly to Comey’s firing, after he failed to show Trump the blind fealty the president demands of everyone in government.

Comey’s further refusal to help Trump cover up the series of questionable interactions between the Trump campaign and agents or proxies for the Russian government has now led to a very confusing policy by the Department of Justice. Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare puts it this way:

The Inspector General of the Justice Department has determined that it is misconduct for a law enforcement officer to publicly disclose an effort to shut down his investigation.

I would add that the effort, in this case, was by a person who was implicated in that investigation — and who also happens to be the most powerful person on earth — which adds up to obstruction of justice. Those facts were laid out clearly in the Mueller report. Essentially, this policy adds yet another layer of impunity to the presidency.

One might have assumed that the Republicans would be happy to let all these dangling pieces of the seemingly dying Russia investigation go, but they seem to be determined to keep it alive. As far as we know, Attorney General Bill Barr’s internal investigation of the Intelligence agencies continues apace. And the case of Andrew McCabe remains open as well, with reporting suggesting that the government plans to indict him for giving the press negative background information on Hillary Clinton and then lying to the FBI about it.

By all accounts, McCabe plans to fight this all the way and will produce all the tweets and comments by the president demanding his prosecution as evidence that his firing and the indictment were political. Since this is the sort of infraction that is normally handled by reprimand or firing — both of which have already happened — a prosecution indictment would certainly appear to be unusual. It looks as though the attorney general and his fellow Trumpists want a show trial.

They aren’t the only ones. Among the excited Republicans, no one is more aroused than the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. He appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program on Wednesday night to announce that he expects to start his own “investigation into the investigation” any day now. Graham has quite the list of witnesses he expects to call, including McCabe, Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But he believes the single most important question about the Russia investigation is what the president knew and when he knew it — the president in question being Barack Obama.

Graham told Hannity, “I can’t imagine an investigation of the Republican nominee for president — a counterintelligence investigation of his campaign — was not approved at the highest level. I cannot imagine it happening without somebody in the White House knowing about it.” Hannity asked if that would mean putting former president Obama under oath. Graham replied, “Absolutely.”

This week alone, Trump treated the G7 summit in France as an infomercial for his private Florida golf club and was reported to offer pardons to anyone who will illegally seize land on the border to build his wall — which he insists must be painted black and have spikes on the top. If that level of medieval fantasy, blatant corruption and abuse of power doesn’t merit an impeachment charge then literally nothing does. Yet the Republicans have the chutzpah to rend their garments and call for the smelling salts over James Comey’s DOJ policy infractions, and to launch a campaign to investigate Barack Obama.

Many people out there were hoping for riveting public hearings on the Russia investigation, but I don’t think that was what they had in mind. Right now it appears a Republican show trial may be all we get. The Democrats’ continued failure to understand the scope of the GOP’s shameless pursuit of power is stunning.

Now he’s blaming business

by digby

If the Fed would cut, we would have one of the biggest Stock Market increases in a long time. Badly run and weak companies are smartly blaming these small Tariffs instead of themselves for bad management…and who can really blame them for doing that? Excuses!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2019

Anyone business that blames the tariffs for their lost revenue is lying and making excuses for their own weakness and bad management. But who can blame them when the Fed refuses to temporarily juice the economy for the President’s personal political advantage?

Republicans in congress are all putting up with this, even encouraging it. They are either brainwashed or so thoroughly corrupt that they happily support a president who is even insulting the business community, their bedrock of support.

Sadly, I won’t be surprised to learn that the business community is still on board with Trump too. There is something very sick happening on the right.

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No place to hide
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Panic Room (2002)

Monmouth University’s poll earlier this week was an outlier, admitted polling director Patrick Murray. The poll released Monday showed a three-way tie in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination race between former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Subsequent polls released by others showed what has been true for months: Joe Biden ahead by double digits.

Trumpers want back the imagined 1950s, when America was great. Remember how it never was? They do. Democrats want normal back. A plurality think Joe Biden is the guy for the job.

Biden, meanwhile, had trouble recently remembering what state he was in. He’s put together from parts a moving, Reaganesque story of heroism in war that reporters found to be a mashup of events that actually did happen, just not as Biden tells it or by whom and when. The “librul” media numbed by exposure to President “Lie Me A River” will run with these stories for months, amplified by right-wing talk and Fox News. This morning, right-wing talkers are running with Biden momentarily forgetting Barack Obama’s name.

The Democrats’ base wants normal but will settle for familiar. It’s hardly a safe bet. In these times there are no safe bets. No matter the candidate, the Democrat will get this treatment, deserved or not. Decades of experience are no protection. There is no place to hide. Lacking a scandal du jour, the right will simply make up one. Ask war hero John Kerry. Ask Hillary Clinton. As Barack Obama, he of the infamous feet on desk and tan suit.

A conversation last night brought back this December 29, 2016 post about Democrats’ aversion to risk-taking in the face of peril. It is worth another look:

The Ring has to go to Mordor
by Tom Sullivan

The biggest challenge Democrats face is not Donald Trump, but constitution. Not the one in the National Archives, but their inner constitution.

The Democratic Party as an “establishment” organization is conservative by disposition. When shaken or defeated, or when facing the unknown, like now, such organizations by reflex seek safety in the comfortable and familiar. They shy from risk. Democrats fret about what Republicans might say about them at election time. Inner circles across the country worry about fundraising: regular donors might not support untested, young leaders. Democrats fret about how a new direction might induce “division in the party.” (Translation: chieftains might have less influence going forward). That is,

… they like to be the deciders of whose turn it is. There is a tendency to hang onto power and not to cultivate new leadership possessing skills they don’t understand. Old boys would rather turn over the reins to old chums — regardless of their skills — when they can’t chew the leather anymore.

Institutional reserve leaves Democrats as a party in a perpetual, defensive crouch, looking for all the world more like abused spouses than bold leaders. All defense, as if in the age of Trump they have something left to lose.

This plays out at the local, state, and national levels. You can see it in the race for DNC chair.

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez is (reportedly) the White House’s “safe” pick, someone who won’t rock the boat. Rep. Keith Ellison, the erstwhile Bernie Sanders primary supporter, is the “risky” pick. The election is perceived as a proxy battle between the Clinton and the Sanders factions. But that’s not where the split is. Those personalities are simply the loci.

The real split is between top-down leaders and bottom-up, grassroots activists expected to wait their turn. A top-down establishment holding onto the past with white knuckles is not going to grow the party out of the minority status in which it finds itself. The familiar and comfortable is not what the electorate is thirsting for. Years of service is not enough. Voters want bold, forward-looking leadership. Offer a new generation of activists something less and they’ll stay away. That’s not a promising vehicle for change to anyone under 40 years old.

Plus, all the navel-gazing, internal power struggles rob bandwidth from outward-looking, community-focused activity of the sort on which new activists are interested in spending their limited time and resources. It’s not a story they care to be part of.

Which leads to another obstacle Democrats face on their journey back.

After one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches last summer, my wife said, “She needs to tell stories.” Stories are relatable. A Hollywood writer friend wonders why Democrats cling to pet consultants rather than engaging professionals who craft stories in which people willingly lose themselves, and pay for the experience. Storytelling is the link that builds a connection with voters the way a custom-designed drug molecule binds with a cell’s receptors. Democrats can pull it off for a four-day convention, but as a workaday party Democrats suck at it. Independent progressives too.

I’m not talking about tricksy, Frank Luntz-style, focus-tested wordsmithery, or some messaging magic-bullet, but a compelling narrative in which voters can invest themselves. A monomyth, if you like. Because politics isn’t all policies and strategy and self-interest. It’s about trust and relationships. Wonkish Democrats need to relearn how to build those, to become heroes in their own stories. (Yes, I can hear the cynics now.)

So this week I saw Rogue One — Jyn Erso: will she fight? — just before having a beer with a local elected official. After confiding my concerns about Democrats playing it safe in the age of Trump, my friend summed up the situation in a single, powerful metaphor: “The Ring has to go to Mordor. It won’t help to carry it back to The Shire.”

Thank you. Now if only Democrats will reach inside and find some heroes.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Why is Trump moving against Ukraine?

by digby

Oh look. More Russia weirdness:

The Trump administration is slow-walking $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, annoying lawmakers and advocates who argue the funding is critical to keeping Russia at bay.

President Donald Trump asked his national security team to review the funding program, known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, in order to ensure the money is being used in the best interest of the United States, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Wednesday.

But the delays come amid questions over Trump’s approach to Russia, after a weekend in which the president repeatedly seemed to downplay Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine and pushed for Russia to be reinstated into the Group of Seven, an annual gathering of the world’s largest advanced economies. The review is also occurring amid a broader internal debate over whether to try and halt or cut billions of dollars in foreign aid.

United States military aid to Ukraine has long been seen as a litmus test for how strongly the American government is pushing back against Moscow.

The Trump administration in 2017 approved lethal arms sales to Ukraine, taking a step the Obama administration had never done. The move was seen as a sign that Trump’s government was taking a hard-line approach to a revanchist Vladimir Putin despite the president’s public rhetoric flattering the Russian leader. Scaling back that assistance could expose Trump to allegations that his policies are favoring Moscow.

He does seem to be stroking Putin even more vigorously than usual. Perhaps he senses he’s running out of time to deliver on his promises to him? I don’t know if we’ll ever know why he does this stuff.

But it could also be a shot across the bow to get them to be a bit more helpful with this, which is obviously a very important Trump campaign project:

Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that he had spoken with a Ukrainian official about Joe Biden’s possible role in that government’s dismissal of a prosecutor who investigated Biden’s son.

The move shows the former New York mayor is making a renewed push for the country to investigate President Donald Trump’s political enemies. Giuliani, who serves as Trump’s personal attorney, has long lobbied Ukraine to investigate the former vice president’s call in 2016 to remove the country’s top prosecutor, who at one point had been investigating a Ukrainian natural gas company connected to Biden’s son, Hunter. 

Other Western governments also called for that prosecutor’s dismissal, and no evidence has indicated Biden’s move was inappropriate. 

Ukraine’s prosecutor general told Bloomberg in May he had no proof of wrongdoing by Biden or his son.

Giuliani told CNN that the State Department informed him that Andriy Yermak, who he called the lawyer for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, wanted to meet with him. Yermak was appointed as an aide to Zelensky in May, according to local media reports. 

The two spoke twice over the phone, with Yermak offering to come to the US to meet with Giuliani before the two agreed to meet in Madrid last month, Giuliani said. 

Giuliani claims that Yermak asked him questions and that he didn’t ask the Ukrainian lawyer to do anything because he “didn’t need to.” The focus of their conversation was on Biden’s possible role as then-vice president in the prosecutor’s dismissal and how Ukraine may have tried to damage Trump’s campaign, Giuliani said. 

After several days of inquiry, the State Department confirmed Friday that it had assisted in connecting Yermak and Giuliani.

They think they can run a mirror Russia Investigation on Biden. And knowing the media’s desire to equalize the coverage, I suspect they’re right.

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Oh no. The Fox “News” department is uncomfortable

by digby

Maybe some of them are finally beginning to wonder if they have any kind of professional future if they have Fox on their resumes:

President Donald Trump whined on Twitter Wednesday that Fox News “isn’t working for us anymore” after the widely watched conservative network dared to interview a Democrat.

And it’s the kind of attack that Carl Cameron, who until 2017 was the network’s chief political correspondent, said is making his former colleagues in the news department “sick to their stomachs.”
[…]
On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Newsroom,” host Brooke Baldwin asked Cameron if he believed Trump’s tweets were the president “sort of indirectly acknowledging that he thought Fox was an arm of the Republican Party or even an arm of his own administration?”

“That’s the kind of thing that makes the news department at Fox News, where I worked for a number of years, sick to their stomachs,” Cameron replied.

“News people don’t like to hear that stuff,” he explained. “The entertainment side, on the other hand, is vastly different and it’s a threat to them. And Trump is basically challenging the Sean Hannitys of Fox News to beat up on the journalists. That’s not going to work either.”

Ok. But it’s not as if they don’t know they are Trump’s state TV outlet. Of course they do. They just don’t want to let go of the fiction that they are real journalists rather than propagandists.

LOL!

Kudos to Cameron for leaving and talking about what’s going on. I know it’s late in the game but it’s important to give these people a reason to leave. Fox is one of the most important reasons we are where we are in this country and it does us no good to have them hunkering down if they’re feeling any inclination to jump ship. History will be the final arbiter on their complicity. Right now we are in an emergency.

By the way, this is where the hardcore Trump cult is going:

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If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch that amateur high school AV club version of a news organization, give it a try. It’s just awesome.

Before 2016, there was a lot of talk about Trump starting his own news network if he lost. OANN was discussed as something he might be able to buy with the help of the late Roger Ailes to put together the money. Without Ailes is less likely that anyone legit would be interested but there’s always wingnut welfare money around to help out the propaganda machine, not to mention many foreign adversaries who see him as a wonderful ally.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that happen if he loses in 2020. The question will be whether there is an appetite for a channel devoted to whining, crying and insulting on behalf of Donald Trump once he’s out of office. (And you know that would be his directive as owner.) His act has gone very stale for a large majority. Once he’s revealed for the lose he is, I suspect his cult will grow bored with him too and look to a younger fascist to follow. 

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Why not call James Mattis to testify in public

by digby

He may not think it’s right to say anything negative about a sitting Commander in Chief, but will he lie under oath? Take the 5th? Refuse under some bogus “privilege”? Let’s find out.

Quinta Juracic in the New York Times on Mattis and his new book:

Jim Mattis resigned as defense secretary in December 2018. Since then, he has been publicly nearly silent, though his resignation letter pointed to stark differences between himself and the president on a range of foreign policy issues. Now he has spoken up — not with the force and clarity one might expect given his reputation, but with a mumbled essay that says nothing much at all.

Mr. Mattis’s re-entry into the public sphere takes the form of an excerpt from his forthcoming book, blandly titled “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” adapted into an essay for The Wall Street Journal. The excerpt, The Washington Post writes, “warns of the dangers of a leader who is not committed to working with allies.” NPR says that the book “sideswipes President Trump’s leadership skills.”

Based on the excerpt, even “sideswipe” may be too strong a verb for the criticism of the president Mr. Mattis doles out. His disapproval is so veiled that it is practically shrouded. Mr. Mattis’s essay touches briefly on his interactions with Mr. Trump when the president first asked him to take the post and explains his decision to return from retirement as one motivated by a sense of duty. As to why he resigned, he offers: “I did as well as I could for as long as I could. When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign … ”

Presumably this is a reference to his disagreements with Mr. Trump over the president’s denigration of our allies and coziness with Russia, which Mr. Mattis pointed to in his resignation letter. But in his first big appearance after his departure from the Pentagon, he still doesn’t say that outright. The closest Mr. Mattis comes to explicitly criticizing the president is declaring that “A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader. A leader must display strategic acumen that incorporates respect for those nations that have stood with us when trouble loomed.” But Mr. Mattis then immediately weakens that point with a vague gesture at how “tribalism must not be allowed to destroy” the American experiment. The hostility and “mutual disdain” of both “tribes” is the problem, he suggests — not the “disdain” of any one person in particular.

All this leads to the question: Whom, exactly, is Mr. Mattis’s essay for? Why write in language comprehensible only to readers who have trained themselves to parse a very particular kind of political code — and why unveil this gentlest of criticism now, when the president has done plenty of damage in the intervening months since Mr. Mattis’s resignation? Is this really something that needed to wait until it could be used to promote book sales? What is the point?

Mr. Mattis seems to be speaking from a place of deep conviction on the importance of alliances and of good leadership. The trouble is that, for such a famous iconoclast — someone who, as he writes, prioritizes “blunt” truths and the importance of duty — his essay falls into a bland and familiar genre: that of former Trump allies and appointees soft-pedaling their criticism and trying to convince themselves that their service was worth it. Mr. Mattis was praised during his time in office as the “last adult in the room” able to pull the country back from the brink of the president’s worst impulses. But when it comes to Mr. Trump, it’s hard to gauge how much the presence of those adults was really worth.

It may have had some use in the very beginning. But once Trump got the ok to start firing anyone who didn’t lick his boots, all bets were off. He does what he wants. It has taken all of these “adults” much too long to figure that out.

I don’t see why the Armed Services, Intelligence or Foreign relations committees shouldn’t call Mattis to testify in public. In fact, I can’t figure out why we haven’t seen a whole bunch of public hearings. Not everyone will claim executive privilege (or the made-up “White House immunity” and some might even be anxious to do it.

Mattis could be called for any number of reasons that are of extreme interest to the American people. Trump’s erratic behavior with North Korea, the Middle East, NATO are all pertinent issues that the nation has a right to pursue. They should, at least, try to do it.

So far, all we are seeing is a bunch of dry news reports about the congress being told they can “sue the president” (his favorite tactic to him get away with breaking contracts) and some intermittent handwringing by Democrats over “norms and rules” being broken. There has been no sustained effort for the last seven months to lay out the case against the president before the American people. It’s not just about Mueller. We are in a full-blown crisis of governance and it’s playing out as if we’re all just arguing over how much to cut the capital gains tax.

Maybe they plan to do it. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.

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Which family members did he tell in advance?

by digby

… that he was going to boost the market with happy talk lies?

On Monday morning, President Trump told reporters in Biarritz, France, that “China called last night” and said they want to resume trade talks, later elaborating that two “high-level” Chinese officials had called to try and restart stalled negotiations. He turned to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for backup, and Mnuchin said there had been “communication,” later amending it to “communications.”

Well, “aides privately conceded the phone calls Trump described didn’t happen the way he said they did,” CNN reported Wednesday. “Instead, two officials said Trump was eager to project optimism that might boost markets, and conflated comments from China’s vice premier with direct communication from the Chinese.”

Trump is agitated, CNN reports, because “the economy is flashing warning signs Trump didn’t expect, his trade war with China is dragging on months longer than expected yet he refuses to give in,” and he’s “spinning to find victories to sell to voters.” The voters may be fooled — China apparently isn’t.

Someone should really look into who is benefiting from Trump’s obvious market manipulations. Somebody is, you can bet on it. And considering his demonstrated corruption and greed, I’m going to guess that once he realized he could move the market with his lies, he’s been giving his family and close friends a heads up. Of course he is.

Kim Jong Un has a big, beautiful submarine

by digby

… and it’s just fine. Lots of people have submarines with nuclear weapons, amirite? It’s no big deal. Everyone needs to calm down. Kim really wants to build some Trump-branded condos at the beach and make some moola and that will take care of everything:

New satellite imagery seems to confirm North Korea‘s recent claim that it has built a new submarine capable of launching ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads. According to analysis by a Washington think tank the photos also indicate that North Korea may be preparing for a new test of a submarine launched ballistic missile.

On July 23 North Korean state media released photos of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspecting a “newly built submarine” and said that the new submarine’s “operational deployment is near at hand.”

New commercial satellite images of the Shinpo South Shipyard on Aug. 26 seem to provide confirmation of that claim as well as the readying of a new missile test.

I wonder if he mentions his beautiful sub in his beautiful letters?

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