Month: August 2019

The world is now treating Trump like the dotty old aunt in the attic

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Over the past week President Trump has seemed to come progressively unglued. He dramatically escalated the trade war with China, declared the whole world to be in recession — except the United States — wondered publicly whether the chairman of the Federal Reserve (whom he appointed) was a bigger enemy than the Chinese president, and “ordered” American companies to stop doing business with China. Oh, and he called American Jews who vote for Democrats either stupid or disloyal and canceled a state visit to Denmark after the Danish prime minister said that his proposal to buy Greenland was absurd.

But it was Trump’s bizarre “chopper talk” press-avail on Wednesday, described by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson as veering “from topic to topic with utter confidence, alarming ignorance, minimal coherence and relentless duplicity” that had even his own staff alarmed, according to the New York Times.

Trump had appreciatively tweeted out a quote from a right-wing fringe character who claimed that Israelis call our president “the King of Israel” and “love him like he is the second coming of God” earlier in the day. Then, in front of the press, he referred to himself as “the chosen one” while once more “joking” about being in office “10 or 14 years from now.”

That was honestly the least of it. Trump also threatened to release ISIS fighters into France and Germany if they don’t agree to take them (whatever that means) and claimed that Vladimir Putin “made a living off of outsmarting Obama” while nearly begging that Russia be allowed to rejoin the G7, clearly feeling bereft that his buddy wouldn’t be in France for their annual gathering. When asked about his visit to El Paso and Dayton in the wake of mass shootings in those cities, he replied, “the love for me and my love for them was unparalleled.” Also, he assured everyone once again that he is the least racist person to ever hold office.

Trump says he’s “very seriously” looking at trying to change the Constitution by executive order.

“We’re looking at that very seriously — birthright citizenship. Where you have a baby on our land … ‘congratulations the baby is now a US citizen’ … it’s, frankly, ridiculous.” pic.twitter.com/5IBNOcMXE9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2019

Makes Sense To Me 

by tristero

Makes good sense to me:

I was a top organizer in [Obama’s] 2008 campaign and trained thousands of the campaign’s staff members. I and the book’s authors fear that the wealthy elites on the left have less respect than ever before for the strategies that got Mr. Obama elected. If Democrats want to win in 2020, they must get back to investing in the power of everyday people through organizing. 

Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods. 

This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people.

Back in the Oughts, I went to a Renaissance Weekend and met Howard Dean. He yakked a lot about this very strategy, about how important it was to get people excited and GOTV everywhere, even where there was quote very little chance unquote of Democrats winning. I thought he was 100% right.

But no, the Dem leadership didn’t listen. And Bush remained in the Oval Office for 8 awful years during which his administration murdered 100,000 Iraqis in a senseless war in which thousands of American soldiers died. And Bush totally crashed the American economy and…don’t get me started.

Going into 2020, Democrats cannot fall into the trap of being overly seduced by shiny tech-only tricks. They must get back to the hard work of pounding the pavement to organize the people who already want to vote for them. That’s how we’ll create the power to build a movement that attracts others. In fact, data from 2016 and 2018 show that organizing increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.

Yep.

…after the [2008] election, I came bright-eyed into a project where I interviewed senior Democratic consultants to help train campaign managers for the midterms. Here’s what they told me: We’re going to have an extraordinary backlash to President Obama’s victories, so we have to double down on likely white voters. After two cycles of terrible midterm losses, this was, again, the narrative after the 2014 elections. 

In the winter of 2015, I sat in a room of about 400 political operatives where Stan Greenberg, a pollster for Bill Clinton, made that very argument from the main stage. His polling data sliced and diced white people in myriad ways: rural/urban/exurban, married/unmarried, college educated/non-college educated, seeking the magic formula that would deliver victory in 2016. But a single spreadsheet column — “People of Color” — had lumped together black, Latinx, Asian-American, Pacific Islander and Native American voters. 

This problematic love affair between the analytics masterminds and those on the left focused almost exclusively on white voters is suffocating the Democrats’ base from the top down. As we get closer to the 2020 election, this is the mantra of many progressive political elites and labor groups, epitomized most by Third Way, a centrist think tank, and by Catalist, the dominant data provider for the Democrats and the left’s independent sector. 

We’re so afraid of the leadership required to shape a new future that we’re turning on our own base. This retreat is augmented by a hunger for technocratic control that has only delivered further failure. The programs that organize data have come to control the programs that organize people as we eke out marginal returns and obsess over “votes per $1,000 spent.” But remember that Donald Trump won with only a fraction of the resources of Hillary Clinton. He knew he had to animate his own base and was good at doing it. 

We will keep losing elections if we continue to campaign this way.  

Yep.

We’re in a world of missiles folks

by digby

I’m just so glad we don’t have a warmonger in the White House:

“We’re in the world of missiles, folks, whether you like it or not.” Here’s the transcript of the Trump-Abe-media exchange on North Korea’s missile launches: pic.twitter.com/9AQeyLoktU

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 25, 2019

Recall this from the 2016 campaign:

COOPER: You said you worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons…

TRUMP: Right.

COOPER: … the most. You also said, though, that you might support Japan and South Korea developing nuclear weapons of their own. Isn’t that completely contradictory?

TRUMP: No, not at all. Look, you have North Korea has nuclear weapons. And he doesn’t have a carrier yet but he has got nuclear weapons. He soon will have. We don’t want to pull the trigger. We’re just — you know, we have a president, frankly, that doesn’t — nobody is afraid of our president. Nobody respects our president.

You take a look at what’s going on throughout the world. It’s not the country that it was.

COOPER: But if you’re concerned about proliferation, letting other countries get nuclear weapons, isn’t that proliferation?

TRUMP: No, no. We owe $19 $trillion, we have another $2 trillion because of the very, very bad omnibus budget that was just signed. It’s a disgrace, which gives everything that Obama wanted. We get nothing. They get everything.

So that’s going to be $21 trillion. We are supporting nations now, militarily, we are supporting nations like Saudi Arabia which was making during the good oil days which was a year ago, now they’re making less but still a lot, $1 billion a day.

We are supporting them, militarily, and pay us a fraction, a fraction of what they should be paying us and of the cost. We are supporting Japan. Most people didn’t even know that. Most people didn’t know that we are taking care of Japan’s military needs. We’re supporting…

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Excuse me, excuse me, we’re supporting Germany. We’re supporting South Korea. I order thousands of television sets because I am in the real estate business, you know, in my other life, OK.

COOPER: It has been a U.S. policy for decades to prevent Japan from getting a nuclear weapon.

TRUMP: That might be policy, but maybe…

COOPER: South Korea as well.

TRUMP: Can I be honest are you? Maybe it’s going to have to be time to change, because so many people, you have Pakistan has it, you have China has it. You have so many other countries are now having it…

COOPER: So some proliferation is OK?

TRUMP: No, no, not proliferation. I hate nuclear more than any. My uncle was a professor was at MIT, used to (AUDIO GAP) nuclear, he used to tell me about the problem.

COOPER: But that’s contradictory about Japan and South Korea.

TRUMP: (AUDIO GAP) Iran is going to have it very — within…

COOPER: But that’s proliferation.

TRUMP: Excuse me, one of the dumbest I’ve ever seen signed ever, ever, ever by anybody, Iran is going to have it within 10 years. Iran is going to have it. I thought it was a very good interview in The New York Times.

COOPER: So you have no problem with Japan and South Korea having…

TRUMP: I thought…

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: … nuclear weapons.

TRUMP: At some point we have to say, you know what, we’re better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea, we’re better off, frankly, if South Korea is going to start to protect itself, we have…

COOPER: Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?

TRUMP: Saudi Arabia, absolutely.

COOPER: You would be fine with them having nuclear weapons?

TRUMP: No, not nuclear weapons, but they have to protect themselves or they have to pay us.

Here’s the thing, with Japan, they have to pay us or we have to let them protect themselves.

COOPER: So if you said, Japan, yes, it’s fine, you get nuclear weapons, South Korea, you as well, and Saudi Arabia says we want them, too?

TRUMP: Can I be honest with you? It’s going to happen, anyway. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time. They’re going to start having them or we have to get rid of them entirely.

But you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them.

Now, wouldn’t you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons? And they do have them. They absolutely have them. They can’t — they have no carrier system yet but they will very soon.

Wouldn’t you rather have Japan, perhaps, they’re over there, they’re very close, they’re very fearful of North Korea, and we’re supposed to protect.

COOPER: So you’re saying you don’t want more nuclear weapons in the world but you’re OK with Japan and South Korea having nuclear weapons?

TRUMP: I don’t want more nuclear weapons. I think that — you know, when I hear Obama get up and say the biggest threat to the world today is global warming, I say, is this guy kidding?

The only global warming — the only global warming I’m worried about is nuclear global warming because that’s the single biggest threat. So it’s not that I’m a fan — we can’t afford it anymore. We’re sitting on a tremendous bubble. We’re going to be — again, $21 trillion. We don’t have money.

COOPER: So you have no security concerns…

TRUMP: We’re using all of the money…

COOPER: … about Japan or South Korea getting nuclear weapons?

TRUMP: Anderson, when you see all of the money that our country is spending on military, we’re not spending it for ourselves; we’re protecting all of these nations all over the world. We can’t afford to do it anymore.

COOPER: But isn’t there benefit for the United States in having a secure Europe. Isn’t there benefit for the United States in having a secure Asia.

TRUMP: There’s a benefit, but not big enough to bankrupt and destroy the United States, because that’s what’s happening. We can’t afford it. It’s very simple.

Now, I would rather see Japan having some form of defense, and maybe even offense, against North Korea. Because we’re not pulling the trigger. The bottom line on North Korea is China, if they wanted to, they’re a tremendous supplier of North Korea. They have tremendous power over North Korea. If they wanted to, if they weren’t toying with us, Anderson, China would be the one that would get in and could make a deal in one day, okay…

And yet this imbecile became president of the United States anyway.

In light of all that, I don’t think you can possibly find this all that surprising:

President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.

During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks.

Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
Trump also raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it does not contain the word “nuclear”; it just says the president talked about bombing hurricanes.

The source added that this NSC memo captured “multiple topics, not just hurricanes. … It wasn’t that somebody was so terrified of the bombing idea that they wrote it down. They just captured the president’s comments.”

The sources said that Trump’s “bomb the hurricanes” idea — which he floated early in the first year and a bit of his presidency before John Bolton took over as national security adviser — went nowhere and never entered a formal policy process.
White House response: A senior administration official said, “We don’t comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team.”

A different senior administration official, who has been briefed on the president’s hurricane bombing suggestion, defended Trump’s idea and said it was no cause for alarm. “His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad,” the official said. “His objective is not bad.”

“What people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the president is crazy’ narrative.”

That’s because the president is crazy. And monumentally ignorant.

.

#DebateFAIL
by Tom Sullivan

“Abjectly terrible” is how The American Prospect’s David Dayen describes the Democratic presidential debates held so far. As any channel surfer could see, the format (premise?) is not so different from professional wrestling only without the pyrotechnics and with less yelling. The Democrats’ candidate list resembles a Marvel credits scroll.

Jay Inslee withdrew last week, as did John Hicklenlooper and Seth Moulton, joining Richard Ojeda, Mike Gravel and Eric Swalwell before them. Only Inslee has added something to the contest, Dayen believes. Washington state’s governor entered the race to raise the profile of addressing the climate crisis and he did. Even so, at its summer meeting in San Francisco last week, the Democratic National Committee voted down demands by climate activists to allow candidates “to participate in multi-candidate issue-specific forums with the candidates appearing on the same stage, engaging one another in discussion.” Thus ends Inslee’s and the Sunrise movement’s effort to hold a debate focused solely on the climate crisis, something 15 of the candidates were willing to have.

There was not always such an emphasis on debates, Dayen observes, with the inordinate focus on “who will make the debates, what will happen in the debates, and what did happen in the debates.” Obama’s 2008 Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa and John McCain’s comeback performance in South Carolina changed the race. Mitt Romney never shined in 2012 debates, yet won anyway. But today, debates are “the front door for presidential politics.”

The shame of it is the debate structure gives few candidates a chance to spotlight what might be interesting ideas they bring to the race. Those stationed stage right or left have not been exciting enough to make more than a blip in the polls. For them, running for president has proved to be a vanity project, or a fundraising one. The debate format leaves them with little chance to make an impression outside opening and closing statements and little time for presenting a complete idea.

So Andrew Yang’s speech at the San Francisco meeting made an impression fielding debate questions from reporters could not. Delivered from a DNC podium, his presentation was not much of a campaign speech. But it was a helluva a TED talk without the round, red carpet.

Stores are closing around the country, Yang began. Amazon is “soaking up” $20 billion a year and paying zero in taxes. Retail clerks, call centers, truck drivers and the restaurants and truck stops that service them are about to be replaced by technology. It is the “fourth industrial revolution.” Immigrants are being scapegoated for it, wrongly, but it is coming, Yang insists.

What state provides its citizens between $1,000-2,000 per year, no questions asked?

Alaska, the audience replied.

“And how do they fund it?” Oil, the audience shouted.

“And what is the oil of the 21st century?” Technology. A recent study shows data is now worth more than oil.

“How many of you received your data check in the mail?” The audience laughs. Yang has his own version of Universal Basic Income, an idea that dates back at least to Thomas Paine.

What to do with the millions headed for replacement by technology is a topic David Atkins raised often during his Hullabaloo tenure. What are Democrats going to do about it? It is a topic more immediate to threatened workers than melting ice in Greenland. But neither will get much airing in these game-show debates.

Yang has no shot at the presidency, but it is a shame he doesn’t simply get 7-8 minutes for his pitch before a national audience. Heads would nod across the country.

Make this deal, Trumpie

by digby

Mr President – Greenland is not for sale. But Denmark has a much better deal for you! Watch this. #dkgreen #dkpol pic.twitter.com/mlRwAVzVFg— Ida Auken (@IdaAuken) August 20, 2019

If only…

.

What would you say if you saw this in another country?

by digby

Sure, there’s nothing at all fascistic about this:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation is Arthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”

I think it’s the intimidation factor at work more than anything.

One of the enduring internet memes during the Trump era is “what would you say if you saw this in another country?” Well:

Since coming to power in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has undermined key democratic institutions in his country. He’s attacked foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations, worked to tighten his control over courts and forced a leading private university out of the country.

But Orban has rarely done the things typically associated with autocracy. His government hasn’t banned any opposition candidates, and few have been attacked. Hungary holds no political prisoners. No journalists have been arrested. The country continues to hold relatively clean multiparty elections with virtually no outright fraud.

According to standard conceptions of democracy — which focus on violations of civil liberties, including freedom of speech, assembly and the press — Hungary’s status as an autocracy is ambiguous. The two most widely used indexes of democracy — conducted by Freedom House and Polity — continue to code Hungary as democratic.

Clearly, Hungary is not a democracy. But understanding why requires a nuanced understanding of the line between democracy and autocracy.

Democracy requires a level playing field

In our work on hybrid or what we call competitive authoritarian regimes, we show how democracy can be fundamentally compromised even without obvious civil liberties violations or electoral fraud. Leaders can create an “uneven playing field” by using administrative powers to strengthen their party and systematically deny the opposition access to crucial resources, media or state institutions. These autocrats submit to meaningful multiparty elections — but engage in serious democratic abuse.

In any democracy, elected officials have advantages over their challengers, including an easier time attracting media coverage and business support, because the government can deliver resources and policy benefits. But an uneven playing field means leaders use those advantages in ways that profoundly impair the opposition’s ability to compete. Let’s look at how that works.

First, leaders may systematically prevent opposition parties from gaining financial resources. Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, for example, regularly ordered tax authorities in the 1990s and 2000s to audit businesses that financed the opposition. Governing parties may also create a biased news media. In Malaysia, all major private newspapers and private television stations were controlled by individuals or firms linked to the governing party.

Governing parties may also manipulate the rules to disadvantage the opposition. The most common example is gerrymandering — drawing election districts where the governing party is far more likely to win. A country is not a democracy when gerrymandering makes it all but impossible for the opposition to win national power.

Finally, ruling parties may pack judiciaries, electoral commissions and other nominally independent bodies to ensure that the incumbent will win critical electoral, legal or other disputes.

Authoritarianism, Hungarian style

Orban’s Hungary is a prime example of a competitive autocracy with an uneven playing field. In 2010, Orban’s Fidesz party won 53 percent of the vote and 68 percent of parliamentary seats. Since then, the party has increasingly denied opposition access to resources necessary to compete for power.

First, Fidesz infiltrated much of the state bureaucracy. By 2012, Fidesz loyalists were already entrenched in every corner of the state, as Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai and Kim Lane Scheppele documented — including in the constitutional court, budget council, electoral commission, national judicial office, state audit office, public prosecutor’s office and national bank. That brings significant advantages. For example, in the 2014 elections, the electoral commission rejected a wide range of complaints on inconsistent and formalistic grounds.

Next, Fidesz now controls most of the news media, dominating the staffing of major state media outlets — and driving away most international media groups. For example, in 2014, a pro-government media company borrowed from two banks with government ties to buy Origo.hu, a leading news website that had been highly critical of the government. Orban’s allies now control more than 500 media outlets, making it increasingly difficult for critical voices to reach large audiences.

The government has been able to influence news coverage by selectively distributing government advertising. Meanwhile, independent media have trouble attracting advertisers, because companies fear government repercussions. For example, after Fidesz’s election in 2010, many companies stopped advertising on the opposition broadcaster Klubradio, fearing political consequences. Many opposition and independent news outlets have had to shut down. The dearth of visible coercion has allowed the government to portray such closures as the outgrowth of objective market forces rather than autocratic pressure.

Finally, Fidesz has changed the electoral rules in ways that make it easier for the party to dominate. That includes significant gerrymandering — splitting off constituencies with a leftist majority to dilute the opposition vote.

Fidesz’s opposition is weak for many reasons having nothing to do with Orban’s abuse of power — including scandals and economic problems from the 2000s, when opposition leaders last held power. But the uneven playing field creates a daunting obstacle to opposition victory at the ballot box.

The advantages of an uneven playing field

Killing a journalist or firing on crowds of protesters can easily rally international opinion and turn an autocrat into a pariah. But few notice or care if party supporters infiltrate the electoral commission or a pro-government entrepreneur uses government funds to take control over an opposition website. And using the legal system to force out independent voices enables the government to argue that it has not abused power. For example, after forcing a leading independent university out of Hungary, the government argued that this was the result of a “perfectly reasonable requirement under Hungary’s legislation.”

Fidesz’s ambiguous tactics have succeeded. Most importantly, the European Union has, with a few exceptions, failed to confront Orban’s government about its democratic backsliding. As long as Orban is able to maintain such ambiguity, he is unlikely to face serious consequences for his country’s democratic failures.

meanwhile: pic.twitter.com/69tVYLwKa1— Josh McCrain (@joshmccrain) August 25, 2019

People need to wake up to the modern forms of fascism. It’s not Hitler. It’ a man in a business suit, boldly defying all norms and rules, using money and influence to intimidate the media and disenfranchise the opposition.

.

Joe Walsh, the heartburn candidate

by digby

After making his case for why Trump is “completely unfit to be president” and he could be the “alternative” more traditional Republican voters have been craving, Walsh was forced to reckon with his own controversial record on This Week.

“You said you want to make the case against the president. The question is, are you the best messenger?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“I helped create Trump,” the right-wing radio host replied. “And George, that’s not an easy thing to say.” As part of the “Tea Party class” in Congress, Walsh said he “wanted to shake Washington up” and sometimes “went beyond the policy and the idea differences, and I got personal, and I got hateful.”

“I said some ugly things about President Obama that I regret,” he added. “And it’s difficult, but I think that helped create Trump. And I feel responsible for that.”

For much of the Obama administration, Walsh repeatedly pushed the same “birther” conspiracies that Trump did and, as the host pointed out, was calling Obama a Muslim as recently as December 2016. “Did you really believe he’s a Muslim?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“God no. And I have apologized for that,” Walsh answered. “And that’s not an easy thing to do, not at all.” He did not offer an apology for tweeting that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “can say dumb things” and get away with it because she’s a black woman, comments Stephanlopoulos called “textbook racism and sexism.”

Stephanopoulos neglected to ask if Walsh was sorry for endorsing arming toddlers on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Showtime series Who Is America?

“But think about the contrast, George,” Walsh added. “Again, I’m baring my soul with you right now on national TV. We have a guy in the White House who’s never apologized for anything he’s done or said. I think it’s a weakness not to apologize. I helped create Trump. There’s no doubt about that, the personal, ugly politics. I regret that. And I’m sorry for that.”

Joe Walsh is a far-right talk show host who once served as a congressman. He obviously cannot win. But he’s got what it takes to cause Trump some heartburn:

Agree w this. No chance of winning obvs. But to cause static for trump you need someone hard right, transgressive and aggressive. And Walsh is those things.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 25, 2019

I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen more wingnut fringe types take this tack. There must be a small market for “true believers against Trump” out there — people who claim they are keeping the flame of the conservative movement alive. The conservative movement as it once was is dead, of course. It turns out the alleged intellectuals were always full of shit and the rank and file were nothing more than the existing racist American underbelly. Still, there are probably a few lonely libertarians and Reagan lovers left who would like to think it wasn’t all the massive scam it obviously was.

Walsh isn’t one of them, of course. He was a birther from the get. Bu he may have the talent (as Scaramucci obviously does) to drive Trump nuts.

.

Will they hurt their own voters?

by digby

It’s hard to imagine at this point that the GOP would try to cut social security and Medicare at this point. They would be attacking their own voters. But with deficits exploding under Trump it’s not hard to see the hardcore wingnuts believing that their time has come to get rid of those pesky “entitlements” once and for all. And despite his promises, if Trump wins re-election he won’t have to run again. So, who knows how he will see his own self-interest in a second term? (And we know it’s all about his self-interest.)

Donald Trump won’t say it, but Republicans in the Senate will: Social Security and Medicare would be on the chopping block in a second Trump term. Pointing to rising deficits, Republican senators have all but promised to gut entitlements if Trump gets four more years.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the second-ranking Senate Republican, expressed hope to the New York Times that Trump would be “interested” in reforming Social Security and Medicare. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) was even more optimistic. “We’ve brought it up with President Trump, who has talked about it being a second-term project,” Barrasso said. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has made no secret of wanting to cut Social Security.

In using deficit fears to target entitlement programs, many Republicans are hoping to use Trump’s second term to cut Medicare and Social Security. First, expand deficits through tax cuts, then declare that spending must be slashed. The chief target of these proposed cuts is Social Security, which historians have noted the mainstream Republican party has long sought to diminish, privatize, or both.

That’s what they do. So far, we’ve managed to save the old age retirement and disability programs, but the way things are going I don’t think we can take anything for granted. We’ve always managed to keep fringe clowns from becoming president before too.

Senate Republicans’ talk of entitlement cuts come in the context of new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which predicts the deficit will climb to $1 trillion in 2020. By 2029, the deficit relative to GDP is slated to reach the highest levels since World War II—an unprecedented deficit level for an economic expansion, when deficits tend to shrink.

Since past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, and many Republicans are signaling they want to, Republicans will likely argue for cuts to Social Security and Medicare when a recession inevitably hits. This can be seen as a reprise of the tactic known as “starve the beast.”

“Starve the beast” is a political two-step that first generates deficits through tax cuts and, second, points to the alarmingly high deficits to attack government spending and reduce entitlements. Credited to an unnamed Reagan administration official in 1985 and long associated with Reagan economic guru David Stockman, the notion of “starve the beast” emerged from around the time of Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which were not paired with simultaneous spending reductions.

Reagan held that higher deficits would naturally lead to budget reductions: “We can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.”

Today, you can see the “starve the beast” tactic clearly in the 2017 tax cuts—the main cause of the projected record deficits—to future spending cuts. Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow, a veteran of the Reagan administration, has made this argument himself. He explicitly invoked “starve the beast” in a 1996 Wall Street Journal op ed:

“Tax cuts impose a restraint on the size of government. Tax cuts will starve the beast… Specifically, tax cuts provide a policy incentive to search for market solutions to the problems of Social Security, health care, education and the environment.”

It would be no surprise to learn that Kudlow, who now heads Trump’s National Economic Council, is pursuing the same course today.

This is interesting:

Among those urging caution is longtime Republican strategist Grover Norquist, famous for his libertarian credo, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” After the 2017 tax bill passed, Norquist cautioned Trump that Social Security and Medicare should be “off the table” in future spending reductions.

Apparently Grover thinks holding power is more important than drowning the government in the bathtub. Another conservative “idealist” bites the dust.

Cutting Social Security benefits in the face of severe shortfalls in retirement income would hurt most Americans. As my colleague Tony Webb recently pointed out in an episode of my podcast Reset Retirement, one-third of retirees are dependent on Social Security for 90% or more of their income, and over 60% depend on the program for more than half of their income.

As Social Security expert Nancy Altman recently testified, Social Security is essential to the American retirement system. It is the base on which we all secure our retirement incomes. As Altman pointed out, “Social Security made independent retirement a reality. Prior to its enactment, the verb ‘retire’ did not mean what it means today.”

Preserving and expanding Social Security isn’t just an economic issue—it’s a civil rights issue, as Maya Rockeymoore Cummings and Meizhu Lui have argued. Due to the racial wealth gap, as well as the fact that minority workers have worse jobs and relatively lower employer pension coverage, non-white workers have a unique reliance on their Social Security benefits in retirement.

Given the dimming outlook for many American retirees, we must expand Social Security, not cut or privatize it—no matter what the deficit is. The greatest irony in Republican’s “starve the beast” mentality is that Social Security does not even affect the deficit. So perhaps it’s not really about the deficit after all.

I have heard some ostensible progressives suggest that the greedy baby boomers deserve to lose social security because every last one of us has gleefully destroyed the world without a thought for anything but ourselves our whole lives. It would certainly cull the herd. And if that’s the ahistorical way Americans think nowadays,  I’m happy to volunteer for Soylent Green treatment.

It would be surprising to see Democrats become the party that destroys social security but you never know. The world is upside down. But I still believe it will be the right that makes that happen. Too many vulnerable black, brown and female citizens benefit from those programs for Republicans not to take deep satisfying pleasure in seeing them suffer.

.

Trump’s obsession with interest rates? Check his loan portfolio…

by digby

If you are wondering why Trump is so obsessed with interest rates, you can bet this is contributing to it. The Washington Post reported Saturday, that Trump’s businesses could save millions of dollar in interest payments if rates fall:

In the five years before he became president, Trump borrowed more than $360 million via four loans from Deutsche Bank for his hotels in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, as well his 643-room Doral golf resort in South Florida.

The payments on all four properties vary with interest rate changes, according to Trump’s official financial disclosures. That means he has already benefited from falling interest rates that were spurred in part by a cut the Federal Reserve announced in July, the first in more than a decade—and his payments could drop by millions of dollars more annually if the central bank grants Trump’s wish and further lowers short-term rates, experts said.
[…]
The central bank’s benchmark rate is one factor in determining interest owed on variable-rate loans, the kind the president has on his properties. Mortgage rates have also been driven down because of the trade war with China and anxieties about global growth.

Mother Jones: When Trump became president, he refused to divest from his vast array of business ventures—despite the obvious conflicts of interest they pose. His hotels and clubs have continued raking in money from foreign officials (though the Trump Organization says it donates these profits), and he’s threatened to impose tariffs on wine imports that compete with his winery. Now he stands to benefit from bullying the Federal Reserve.

Trump never divested his holdings for a reason. He’s obsessed with money and never leaves a dime on the table. Of course he’s aware of how his policies will affect his bottom line and certainly makes economic decisions that will favor them.

Recall that the 1920s law that allows the congress to access any tax returns was instituted to determine if Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was self-dealing with tax policy. The same concerns should determine the issue in terms of Trump. He didn’t divest, which means the argument for getting his returns is almost exactly the same. His hotels and clubs are making money hand over fist as wealthy people seeking access to the president from all over the world put money directly into his pockets. He owns a winery and threatens to put tariffs on his competition. His sons are overseas selling access to the most powerful man in the world. Now he’s trying to manipulate interest rates which could greatly benefit his bottom line.

These are impeachable offenses but it appears the congress is afraid to do anything but sweep all this lawbreaking and grotesquely unethical behavior under the rug so they can pretend it isn’t happening. I guess we just have to just hope that Republicans will wake up one morning to see the errors of their ways and spontaneously decide to act in good faith going forward.

.

“A deep and boiling anger”

by digby

New polling analysis from NBC/WSJ says there is a “deep and boiling anger” in America:

The political and cultural upheaval of the last four years has divided the country on ever-hardening partisan and generational lines, but one feeling unites Americans as much as it did before the 2016 election.

They’re still angry. And still unsettled about the future.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that — despite Americans’ overall satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy and their own personal finances — a majority say they are angry at the nation’s political and financial establishment, anxious about its economic future, and pessimistic about the country they’re leaving for the next generation.

“Four years ago, we uncovered a deep and boiling anger across the country engulfing our political system,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which conducted this survey in partnership with the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. “Four years later, with a very different political leader in place, that anger remains at the same level.”

The poll finds that 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington.” Forty-three percent say that statement describes them “very well.”

That’s almost exactly the percentage that agreed with the same statement in October 2015, when the presidential election was being upended by the anti-establishment message of then-candidate Donald Trump.

Republicans report feeling somewhat less angry than they were almost four years ago, but that optimism has been offset by an uptick in anger from other groups typically more aligned with the Democratic Party.

In 2015, 39 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats said a feeling of anger at the political establishment defined them “very well.” Now, it’s 29 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats — a ten point swing for each party, in opposite directions.

Those who are more likely to say feelings of anger describe them “very well” since 2015 include women under 50 (48 percent, up 10 points since 2015), African-Americans (46 percent, up five points) and Hispanics (49 percent, up 11 points.)

“The question that decides the 2020 election may no longer be ‘are you better or worse off than you were four years ago?’ but instead ‘are you as angry as you were four years ago?’” said Horwitt. “And if that’s the question, the answer is a deafening yes.”

I don’t know if Democrats and independents are as angry as the Republicans but you can bet that Trump and his accomplices will do everything they can to stoke the anger of their voters. They’re already shooting people so I’d say they’ve worked up quite a head of steam.

People are anxious but they also like the fact that the political system is “shaken up.”

While 69 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their overall financial situation today, a majority — 56 percent — also say they feel “anxious and uncertain because the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable.” That’s down slightly from 61 percent in 2015.

And just 27 percent of those surveyed say they’re confident that their children’s generation will be better off than them, down from 35 percent in August 2017.

That pessimism is reflected among all groups, regardless of age, race, income and party identification.

Majorities of adults who are under 35 (68 percent), seniors (64 percent), poor and working class (71 percent), high-income (64 percent), white (67 percent), black (73 percent) and Hispanic (64 percent) all say they are not confident that their children’s generation will be better off.

Among Republicans, 54 percent say they’re not confident, while 64 percent of independents and 78 percent of Democrats agree.

About half of Americans — 52 percent — say they do feel satisfied that the political system is being shaken up, although only one in five said they feel that “very” strongly.

I don’t know what that means and I wonder if the respondents did as well. Meanwhyile, people are also anxious about “change” apparently:

Americans also express some ambivalence about “changes in American society and the country becoming more diverse and tolerant of different lifestyles, languages, cultures and races.”

Forty percent call those changes a step forward, while 14 percent call them a step backward. The remainder — 43 percent — say those changes are “some of both.”

Sixty-one percent of Republicans, 44 percent of independents, and 27 percent of Democrats expressed those mixed feelings.

“I think it’s a step forward in the way that people are becoming more aware of the differences between them, but I think it’s a step back when you bend over so much and become politically correct that you take away a person’s right to think or say how they feel,” said one suburban man from Hawaii who supported Trump in 2016.

“Immigration has brought richness and a better quality of life to our people. But I think that it is often difficult for all of us to understand one another and to become a community, as new people come into society,” said a female Clinton voter from New York. “It is a difficult and sometimes fraught process that sometimes takes time.”

Six-in-ten describe either a lot or some tension between people of different races in their state.

The same share — 60 percent — say that race relations in the United States are bad, although that’s down from 70 percent in 2017 and a high of 74 percent in summer 2016.

And more than half — 56 percent — say that race relations have gotten worse since Trump became president. Another 33 percent say race relations have stayed about the same, while 10 percent say they have improved.

The poll finds some significant shifts over the last 20 years regarding the values that most Americans identify as most important to them.

Nearly nine-in-ten Americans (89 percent) identify “hard work” as a very important value, even higher than the 83 percent who said the same in a 1998 NBC/WSJ poll.

But those who say that “patriotism” is very important slid from 70 percent two decades ago to 61 percent now.

The share citing religion decreased even more, from 62 percent in 1998 to 48 percent now.

Those changes come amid a stark generational divide over which values are seen as most important.

Among those who are either Millennials or Generation Z (ages 18-38), only 42 percent rate patriotism as a “very important” value, while 79 percent of those over 55 say the same.

Just 30 percent of the younger group cite religion or belief in God as very important, while 67 percent of the older group does.

And just 32 percent of those under 38 years old call having children very important, while 54 percent of those over 55 agree.

“There is an emerging America where issues like children, religion, and patriotism are far less important,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. “And in America, it’s the emerging generation that calls the shots about where the country’s headed.”

FWIW: I’m old and I agree with the kids about children, religion and patriotism. Always have …

Trump’s America is an ugly, hateful place ith people at each others’ throats with everyone worried and anxious about the future. Why wouldn’t it be? Our politics have been very polarized for quite a while, especially since the Democrats had the temerity to elect a black man. Trump and his cronies have taken it to a level not seen since the 1850s.

And I don’t think we’re going to see “healing” any time soon. Until the Republicans are thoroughly repudiated and the Democrats can gain the trust of a large majority of the people, this fight is going to continue.

.