Month: September 2019

No more front-runner?
by Tom Sullivan

It was jarring during last night’s Democratic debate in Houston when former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro attacked Joe Biden early on for being … old? Castro challenged Biden’s statements about his health care plan, claiming before a shocked crowd that Biden had forgotten statements made two minutes earlier.

It was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night. It won’t help Castro.

In opening remarks, businessman Andrew Yang promised, Oprah-style, to give 10 American families “watching this at home right now” $1,000 a month for an entire year. The proposal left a stunned Pete Buttigieg gaping for a moment before he was able to speak.

“It’s original, I’ll give you that,” Buttigieg said finally.

The rest of the debate was not the expected center-stage face-off between the top-tier candidates, Sanders, Biden, and Warren. While disagreeing with Biden on modifications to health care, Sanders and Warren disagreed without being disagreeable. New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker had another good night, delivering a balanced combination of passion and policy, clearly presented with too little camera time.

It was not, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz writes, the kind of performance Biden supporters were waiting for:

Biden did not dominate from start to finish and did not make it through the evening mistake free. But on balance this was the kind of evening he needed, after two previous debates in which he drew mixed to negative reviews, and after uneven performances at Democratic gatherings and along the campaign trail.

Not exactly. Biden tried to be combative when it was called for, but still wandered. Asked late in the debate about racial inequality in schools and dealing with the legacy of slavery, Biden launched into a disjointed recitation of his proposals for school funding, teacher pay, and addressing “problems that come from home“:

The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have — make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School. We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.

It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

At the watch party I attended, audience members shook their heads and mouthed, “What?!“

Writing at Politico, Sean McElwee (Data for Progress co-founder) declared after last night, “there is no longer a front-runner. The question is when, not if, polls will match this reality.”

But a couple of the oddest bits from last night’s Democratic debate happened offstage.

At the bottom of hour (10:30 p.m. EDT), BBC radio reported the former vice president, Joe Biden, had defended his health care plan from those of senators Sanders and Warren, plans the reporter described as “more radical and more costly.”

Excuse me? More radical how? More costly to whom? Having just watched the exchanges, the description was jarring. But it fit with the framing of candidates who focus first on what upgrades to our overwrought health care system cost before considering whom they help.

I swear, pundits are literally the only people who think that paying a dollar in taxes is somehow more expensive than paying two dollars to an insurance company.— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) September 13, 2019

There were signals earlier Thursday that Biden would attack Sen. Elizabeth Warren whose steady climb in the polls is a more proximate threat to his nomination than Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Politico published a story, ‘Why Are You Pissing In Our Face?’: Inside Warren’s War With the Obama Team that described her sometimes fraught relationship with Obama insiders. With Biden’s standing among African-American voters, a story about her challenging his economic team even while fighting to keep people from losing their homes could send undermine her with Obama’s base.

Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania and former DNC chair, published a clumsy hit piece in the Washington Post Thursday morning challenging Warren’s fundraising just in time to prompt a question in the evening’s debate. It did not. But he’s taken to calling her supporters “Elizabeth Elites.”

Democratic establishment players are sweating and it shows.

More camps

by digby

This is par for the course, unfortunately:

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona.

On Tuesday, ICE published an acquisition form for the procurement of “hyper-realistic training devices” for a new training facility for its expanding Special Response Team (SRT) program on the Federal Business Opportunities website.

The immigration agency had sought to redact the location of the new training facility, but failed to do so properly. The agency, which has made this kind of mistake previously, appears to have a systemic information-security problem.

In this case, Newsweek was able to simply copy and paste the document’s contents into a word processor and quickly establish that the facility would be built at the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs’ (OFTP) Tactical Operations Complex (TOC) at Fort Benning, Georgia, a U.S. Army post used to prepare soldiers for combat.

In addition to revealing Fort Benning as the location of the training site, ICE also failed to properly redact information indicating that the Army post would be getting an expansion, with up to 50 buildings expected to be added to the site.

“A Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) vehicle will be competed among GSA Federal Supply Schedule holders for additional training buildings and interior/exterior outfitting in the first quarter of Fiscal Year 20,” ICE states in a portion it did not attempt to redact from the document.

In a following partially redacted line, it states: “OFTP plans to expand the Training Site at Ft. Benning to include up to 50 additional buildings and add additional U.S. city layouts and designs.”

Throughout the document, areas that were meant to be withheld were not redacted properly, including signature lines at the bottom of the document. Instead of names, these would-be redacted lines contain what appears to be placeholders, such as “ijunynyhhjhjhjjjjjjj,” “hnjumgfrdddfffffff” and “BHMKKOOOOOO.”

ICE’s new training facility is expected to include,”at a minimum,” a “multitude of basic, intermediate and hyper-realistic training devices, a tactical training warehouse, classroom facilities and vehicle assault training area.”

Among those training devices will be a “hyper-realistic props/design” that simulates “residential houses, apartments, hotels, government facilities and commercial buildings,” along with other training configurations.

ICE is specifically interested in acquiring a “Chicago” style replica, as well as an “Arizona” style replica, with the agency expecting to dedicate a total estimated value of $961,347.75 to the effort.

I wonder what they think they might need such training for?

Apparently, there is an endless supply of money for these people to enact their Robocop fantasies. Too bad we don’t have any checks and balances anymore. Looking back they were kind of nice.

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The trouble with Q

by digby

I find this phenomenon to be just … fascinating. It’s the lunatic fringe and they just love Donald Trump. I wonder how many of them there are?

In late August 2018, Lisa and John Welch weren’t feeling great about the future of QAnon, the ludicrous conspiracy theory that posits that Donald Trump is engaged in a secret battle with pedophilic elites in Hollywood, big banks, and the Democratic Party.

Lisa had bought into the theory first, then convinced her husband to sign on. But none of the mysterious Q’s predictions in anonymous internet forums had come to pass nearly a year after it started in October 2017, and QAnon believers were starting to lose faith. After yet another Q prediction failed to materialize in 2018, an armed, crazed QAnon fan allegedly shut down a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an improvised armored truck.

The Welches decided they needed some way to show how many Trump supporters believed in the mega-conspiracy theory, which has pulled in Pizzagate and a wide range of other conspiracy theories. They printed up T-shirts and signs that said “We Are Q” and passed them out at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida.

“We took ’em to the rally and handed ’em out, and the rest is history,” Lisa Welch told a crowd of roughly 100 QAnon believers who gathered to rally across the street from the White House on Wednesday.

The Welches’ signs and T-shirts, along with other QAnon-related signs and “Q” cut-outs, were unavoidable in cable news coverage of the rally. Suddenly, people all over the country were asking what why a segment of Trump fans adored the letter Q, and QAnon believers were invigorated.

“By the time the rally was over, they didn’t have any choice but to put us on [TV],” said John Welch.

The Tampa rally wasn’t the first time QAnon believers had appeared among Trump’s faithful, but it did show QAnon fans that showing up to the rallies with Q signs and clothes could have a real world effect.

Now QAnon believers eager to appear at Trump rallies are posing a challenge to the president’s reelection. As Trump faces a tough campaign, some of his most visible supporters come from QAnon-world, where various factions include 9/11 Truthers, anti-Semites, and people who think John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and will soon return to arrest Democrats.

But to QAnon supporters, Trump rallies are a great chance both to see the president and to get their message out without going through a media they claim is biased against them.

“It’s like Trump tweeting,” said Pennsylvania contractor Daniel Graham, who drove to Washington for Wednesday’s rally.

Apparently, some members of the Trum team are a little bit skittish:

To Team Trump, though, QAnon diehards who adore Trump and garner media coverage and camera shots at his 2020 rallies have been a longtime nuisance. One current senior Trump campaign official told The Daily Beast that the standard operating procedure among most staff has been to generally just “ignore them” and not “make a big deal out of” them, both to deprive them of as much press attention as possible and to avoid “pissing off the crazy” people.

They apparently don’t have a clue who they are dealing with:

“No non-Trump-related political messaging is permitted inside the venue. We do our best to ensure this rule is fully enforced,” Michael Glassner, chief operating officer of the 2020 Trump campaign, said in a brief statement.

Technically, QAnon is Trump-related political messaging, brought to a wacky, sometimes violent, and extremely online fringe. It’s Trump-related enough that some of the conspiracy theory’s top proponents have sought White House meetings with this president. Several have been successful.

Last year, a grinning Trump somehow ended up posing for an Oval Office photo op with YouTube conspiracy theorist Lionel Lebron, one of the leading promoters of the QAnon theory. In July, Trump invited several QAnon promoters to his White House Social Media Summit, where he praised the QAnon pushers and other “memesmiths” for their work on his behalf.

Trump’s invitees included pro-Trump internet personality Bill Mitchell, who has promoted QAnon on Twitter, and singer Joy Villa, who wore “Q” earrings to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Another QAnon-pushing invitee, cartoonist Ben Garrison, was kicked off the guest list at the last minute because of the furor over an anti-Semitic cartoon he had made.

They aren’t stopping there:

Some QAnon believers have even started running for office. Two GOP House candidates have said they believe in the conspiracy theory, which could tie Republicans further to the QAnon fringe if those candidates win their primaries.

And sometimes, the QAnon message actually comes from a speaker at the rally.

At an August event in Cincinnati, Brandon Straka, who’s become a personality on the right after founding the “#Walkaway” movement urging traditionally Democratic constituencies to leave the party, used his warm-up spot at the rally to tell the crowd “Where we go one, we go all.” That phrase is the most prominent QAnon slogan, and QAnon supporters cheered when Straka used it from the stage. Straka later insisted he didn’t mean to imply any QAnon connection.

The presence of Q believers at rallies also means Trump could accidentally endorse the theory, at least in the eyes of its believers. Nearly every Trump appearance produces footage that QAnon believers scrutinize in hopes of seeing Trump’s hand movements form what they believe to be a “Q.”

But at a July rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump called a baby wearing a QAnon symbol on the back of its onesie “beautiful.” The onesie appeared to have been altered, with a marker line added to make the printed “O” design into a “Q.”

QAnon believers were thrilled by what they saw as Trump’s confirmation, via the baby, that the theory was real. The child was soon dubbed “Q Baby,” and her parents—North Carolina Trump supporter Roman Riselvato and his girlfriend—made an Etsy page to sell clothing with a design similar to the onesie after requests from Q fans.

This is really happening.

Have I mentioned that the world has gone mad?

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What happens if the House doesn’t impeach … and he wins?


by digby

Greg Sargent catches us up on the depressing state of impeachment affairs:

Politico has a dispiriting new report on just how chaotic things have gotten inside the House Democratic caucus when it comes to the drive to impeach President Trump. It’s a real mess.

But when you get past all the internal machinations, what it really comes down to this: We still don’t know whether the House Democratic leadership is prepared to ever allow a full House vote on articles of impeachment, no matter what is learned about Trump.

Among the new revelations from the Politico report: Democrats can’t even agree on the question of whether an impeachment inquiry is, in fact, underway. Some interviewed said that there is one; others said there is not.

The answer to this is that the House Judiciary Committee is running an inquiry into whether to bring articles of impeachment. According to legal scholars — see this piece from The Post’s Joshua Matz — this means there actually is an impeachment inquiry underway, if you examine the question in the context of history and the law.

This much, at least, shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to get right: The Judiciary Committee is running an inquiry into whether to bring articles of impeachment. That’s not hard to “message,” flacks.

As it happens, this is a somewhat understandable compromise under the circumstances. Members from a number of moderate districts still don’t want to be associated with an impeachment inquiry; they are feeling little pressure from constituents and have decided they’d pay a political price for supporting one.

I think that position is irresponsible on its substance and probably wrong on the politics. But a compromise in which the Judiciary Committee runs the inquiry, developing the case for possible articles of impeachment, even as moderates continue to talk about health care, is not a wildly absurd solution for leadership to adopt.

For now, anyway. Because here’s the thing: This cannot be sustained forever.

The Politico report gets at why. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) just doesn’t seem to want this to get too far, and that’s creating absurdities such as these: 

In a talking-point document to colleagues Tuesday morning, Pelosi’s office described the House’s investigative activity in anodyne terms, characterizing them as typical House oversight of the executive branch. . . .  

Pelosi has at times adopted the harsh rhetoric of pro-impeachment lawmakers, most recently accusing Trump of violating the Constitution by allegedly steering government spending to his luxury resorts. She has also accused Trump of “self-impeaching” and privately told colleagues she preferred to see him in prison, rather than impeached. But Pelosi has also repeatedly emphasized the House’s slow, deliberative investigative and legal strategy when pressed on impeachment.

On other occasions, Pelosi has been clear that impeachment — a full House vote on articles of impeachment, should those emerge from Judiciary — cannot happen until it’s bipartisan, and that the public must be brought along.

The first of those will never happen, and setting that bar essentially gives Republicans in lockstep support of Trump veto power over what the House does with its institutional authority. The second looks increasingly as though it isn’t materializing, though one might argue that if the leadership forcefully supported the impeachment inquiry, it might help shift public sentiment toward the idea.

Regardless, what remains unanswered is this: Could anything substantive emerge about Trump that might move the Democratic leadership at this point?

As it debates bringing articles of impeachment, the Judiciary Committee is now looking not just at the special counsel’s findings, but also at other matters — such as the president’s corrupt effort to host the next Group of Seven summit at one of his Florida resorts; Vice President Pence’s stay at another Trump property; Trump’s dangling of pardons; and, possibly, any new information on Trump’s finances that might be gleaned from Deutsche Bank and other sources.

This scrutiny could uncover still more damning information, yet it is still not clear whether anything would be enough at this point.

To be clear, good things can happen from this, regardless. If the existing impeachment inquiry does strengthen Judiciary Democrats’ legal hand, and they win some court battles, forcing the administration to cooperate with their investigations, it could build a public case against Trump whether or not they impeach in the end.

But if Democrats lose these battles, and they end up with very little to show for these efforts — even as the leadership is still equivocating about an impeachment — there will be hell to pay.

Either way, looming in the background is this stark fact: As the Judiciary Committee develops those lines of inquiry, and especially if it ends up voting in favor of articles of impeachment, the case for holding a full House vote on them very well may become stronger. It’s still not clear how this tension will get resolved.

If the leadership has decided that no vote will ever happen no matter what, and is just running out the clock — while leaving the impression a vote could still take place under certain circumstances — that constitutes a very deep incoherence, one that only ensures that this tension will have to come to a head at some point.

If so, that incoherence is itself the problem festering at the core of this whole mess.

Sigh. Pelosi said today that she goes all around the country and the public says unanimously that they understand how divisive impeachment is and they are fine with “taking their time” with the investigations. I’m sure she is hearing that from people at her fundraising events, the people who listen to what she says and believe she is the final word. But the vast majority of Democrats are for impeachment! 

The pundits all say that he only responsibility is to maintain her majority and so she has to “protect” her vulnerable members who won in 2018.  First of all, that assumes her vulnerable members would lose if Trump were impeached but not convicted. I’m not sure that’s true at all. And second it is not truly the case that her only responsibility is to her majority. That’s how Trump looks at governing but traditionally our leaders at least pretended to care about the country at large and the constitution.

Simply wringing their hands over Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors and doing nothing about it is actually far riskier than if they impeach him. Hewould say the Democrats are feckless whiners who won the House in 2018 but didn’t even try to make a case against him because it was all a witch hunt.  A fair number of people are going to believe him because that’s not an unrealistic way to interpret these events.  If he wins, they will not have another chance.  In other words, it’s risky if they impeach him and it’s risky if they don’t. In a case like that, the best course of action is to do the right thing.

They think that losing because Mitch McConnell and Trump’s other cronies in the Senate refuse to convict would make them lose in 2020. But losing because their unwillingness to hold Trump accountable showed a lot of people that for all his craziness he really didn’t do anything wrong would be the worst of all possible outcomes. Their own voters will think they are cowards and the Trump cult will have been immeasurably strengthened.

Politics are a high wire act right now, obviously. But pretending that they can win by ignoring the ignorant, corrupt elephant in the White House is a recipe for a precipitous fall.

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“Historically, the Government has made this kind of request rarely; now it does so reflexively.”

by digby

The Supreme Court gave Stephen Miller and Donald Trump a tribute this week They managed to legalize the administration’s cruelty toward refugees and they broke judicial norms to do it. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent lays out what happened:

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a fierce dissent on Wednesday after a majority of her colleagues allowed President Donald Trump’s effort to ban most migrants from Central America from seeking asylum in the United States to go forward while legal challenges to the policy make their way through the court system.

“Once again the Executive Branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution,” wrote Sotomayor, who was joined in her dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Although this Nation has long kept its doors open to refugees — and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher — the Government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law.”

The nation’s highest court ruled that the Trump administration could go ahead with its restrictions on migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border as the case makes its way through the legal system. The court’s ruling was a political victory for the White House, which has sought to limit the tide of people from Central America seeking refuge in the United States after fleeing violence and poverty at home. It came two days after a federal judge reinstated a nationwide injunction barring the White House from enforcing the policy.

Under the new asylum policy, the Trump administration will be able to reject the applications of migrants who reach the U.S. border without first seeking asylum from any countries they journeyed through first. There are exceptions for those who were the victims of trafficking or for people who sought and were denied asylum in another country.

The measure is largely seen as an effort to discourage thousands of people who want to seek refuge in the United States, and Attorney General William Barr said in July the U.S. would clamp down on “forum shopping by economic migrants.”

“This Rule is a lawful exercise of authority provided by Congress to restrict eligibility for asylum,” Barr said at the time. “The United States is a generous country but is being completely overwhelmed by the burdens associated with apprehending and processing hundreds of thousands of aliens along the southern border.”

Trump has had several wins in his immigration battle in recent months. The Supreme Court in July allowed him to use $2.5 billion in Defense Department money to finance construction on his promised border wall, even after lawmakers largely rejected his efforts to re-appropriate the money and bypass congressional authority.

The White House said it was “pleased” by the Supreme Court’s decision. Spokesperson Hogan Gidley said in a statement that the ruling would allow officials to “implement important, needed fixes to the broken asylum system.”

But Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that her colleagues had taken an extraordinary step to allow the Trump administration’s asylum policies to go forward while the case was still under consideration in the federal court system.

“By granting a stay, the Court simultaneously lags behind and jumps ahead of the courts below,” she wrote. “And in doing so, the Court sidesteps the ordinary judicial process to allow the Government to implement a rule that bypassed the ordinary rulemaking process.

“Unfortunately, it appears the Government has treated this exceptional mechanism as a new normal. Historically, the Government has made this kind of request rarely; now it does so reflexively.”

I think it’s pretty clear by now that many of the Republicans in the US government at every level are members of Trump’s cult. I certainly don’t think we can count on the courts to fairly adjudicate Trump’s abuse of authority and radical white nationalism.

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This is a very interesting piece by Ron Brownstein about the question of electability. I don’t normally put much credence in the work of Third Way but this seems to be a legit study and my anecdotal experience suggests it’s conclusions are correct. Electability isn’t just about which white guy can get Republicans to vote for him. It’s more complicated:

In the 2020 Democratic primary, electability is like the end of The Sopranos: Everybody talks about it but nobody agrees what it means.

Third Way, a center-left think tank, offers important insights on the question of electability in an extensive new study of Democratic primary voters it is releasing this morning. The results, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, signal that primary voters may be judging electability on different grounds than most political insiders believe, and that the verdict on which candidates are most electable may be more malleable than many expect.

“So much of the Beltway chatter about electability is about race, gender, and ideology,” says Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president for social policy and politics. “That was not what people talked about.”

But the research also indicates that however voters assess electability, it looms as an overriding factor in the decision-making for most Democratic voters. That suggests former Vice President Joe Biden’s consistent lead in polls on the question of which Democrat is most likely to beat Trump could be a sturdier cushion under his candidacy than his opponents may think.

“If those numbers don’t change,” Erickson told me, “it is going to be very, very hard for someone to overtake [Biden], because this is the question on Democrats’ minds: How do we beat [Trump]? I don’t think those numbers are set in stone at all, but that’s the argument [other candidates] need to make.”

To better understand Democratic voters’ views on electability, Third Way worked with Avalanche Strategy, a Washington, D.C.-based research firm. Avalanche surveyed 1,600 likely Democratic primary voters through a technique that mixed typical poll questions with open-ended queries that allowed voters to express their priorities and perceptions in greater detail. The firm then used artificial intelligence to draw out patterns from the open-ended responses. The process essentially sought to combine the quantitative sweep of a traditional poll with the qualitative depth of a focus group.

The first major takeaway from the research wasn’t surprising: Democratic primary voters feel an overwhelming imperative to beat Trump. Ninety-seven percent of them called defeating him either “extremely” or “very important.” But only about half of the primary voters the group surveyed called it “extremely” or “very likely” that Democrats will in fact do so. “The tension between Democrats’ urgency to beat Trump and their uncertainty that it will happen is why electability is driving the primary process,” writes Ryan Pougiales, a senior political analyst at Third Way, in a memo releasing the study today. Over three-fifths of Democrats said they preferred a nominee with the best chance of beating Trump, even if they didn’t agree with him or her on most issues; only about one-fifth prioritized a candidate they agreed with most of the time.

“But how Democrats conceive of electability—specifically as it relates to the adoptable characteristics that they think make a candidate electable—is more complicated,” Pougiales argues.

Maybe the most striking pattern in how Democratic voters assessed electability was what they did not prominently mention. In open-ended questions, the race and gender of a candidate did not surface frequently as an important factor: In other words, at least in how people responded, electability was not just code for “old white man.” The research did not provide exact figures on how often voters raised those issues, but Erickson said, “People did not say race and gender—they didn’t volunteer that. Are they really thinking that in some way? Maybe, but they certainly didn’t volunteer that.”

Another consideration that surprisingly few primary voters raised in weighing electability was a candidate’s ideology. The share of respondents who thought an aggressively liberal path improved the Democrats’ odds against Trump was slightly larger than the share who favored centrist positioning. But these ideology-focused voters amounted to only 6 percent of respondents. These “are all tiny slices of the primary electorate,” writes Pougiales. “The bottom line is that Democratic primary voters generally don’t believe that ideology will be the key to beating Trump in 2020.”

Not many more voters said they believe the issues a candidate stresses will be critical to beating Trump. Those who did consider issues paramount cited health care, followed by both climate change and immigration, as the concerns they thought the nominee most needs to stress. But only about one in five cited a strong emphasis on any issue as central to victory.

If these Democratic voters didn’t measure electability primarily through ideology, issues, or identity, how did they measure it? By far, more voters—about two-thirds in all—picked a candidate’s personal qualities than any other choice. According to the analysis, the most common response was honesty and integrity, followed by compassion, strength, and then competence. Gender mattered here: Women were more likely to stress honesty and compassion, while men gravitated toward strength.

These responses in some ways can seem like Democratic voters are projecting their own views on the electorate’s: They basically responded that the qualities that would make a candidate most electable are the same ones they would like to see in a president. But those projections are far from proven. Trump, after all, won in 2016 even as voters held grave doubts about his honesty and compassion, and had mixed feelings about his competence.

The Trump precedent looms large over the final ingredient that Democratic primary voters picked as a key component of electability: campaign tactics. The research found that about three-in-10 primary voters thought that specific tactical choices the nominee pursues before Election Day would be critical in beating Trump.

This dimension, as clearly as any other, exposed the stark division among Democrats about how to respond to the norm-shattering president. The action that most of the Democratic voters surveyed thought would help beat Trump was taking the high road and uniting the country. But what ranked next was the exact opposite: fighting back and standing up for beliefs.

The same divergence was apparent when the survey asked Democrats head-on what traits would cause them the most concern in a nominee. “Too left” and “socialist” led the list, but combined for only about one-fifth of the primary voters. Slightly more voters said they worried about an alternative set of concerns that included “too old,” “too middle,” “man,” and “white.” Older voters worried more about “too left”; younger voters expressed more concern about “too middle,” “man,” and “white.”

In some ways, this detailed research reinforces what strategists working in the Democratic race already know: Different wings of the party are operating on very different theories about what it will take to oust Trump. Progressives insist that winning in 2020 requires a vanguard liberal agenda to mobilize young and minority voters; moderates say that the goal must be balanced against the need to hold white suburbanites moving away from Trump and to recapture working-class white women.

The major new insight in this research is that as Democrats assess electability, both of these tracks may be less consequential than whether they think a candidate demonstrates strength, integrity, and an ability to unite the party. 

Brownstein points out that so far, Biden has the inside track on that but other candidates have the opportunity to show they too have these personal characteristics and the ability to unite the party. I suspect that this is the main reason Warren has been doing well. She’s clearly competent, but she’s shown resilience (strength) and integrity. And her happy warrior persona may be interpreted as a possible “uniting” characteristic.

Obviously, I have no idea how most people think about any of them. But I do think that these perceptions of personal qualities are more important that a lot of pundits and analysts portray. Cerebral assumptions and issues and politics are part of it, of course. But a lot of our impressions of politicians happen on a heuristic level that we aren’t even conscious of. And it’s no surprise that Democrats would be yearning for someone who is honest and trustworthy after this atrocity we call the Trump administration.

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But her emails

by digby

Hillary Clinton spent an hour yesterday reading her emails at my exhibition of all 62,000 pages of them in Venice. She is pictured here at a replica of the Oval Office Resolute Desk, stacked with her emails. pic.twitter.com/V8T27klycr

— Kenneth Goldsmith (@kg_ubu) September 11, 2019

Hillary Clinton’s emails, long a political talking point, have become art — and the former secretary of state herself went to take a look.

The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee looked through printed copies of her emails and sat at a replica of the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk during a visit Tuesday to an art exhibit in Venice, Italy, titled “HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails,” according to the exhibit’s creator and curators.

“Hillary Clinton spent an hour yesterday reading her emails at my exhibition of all 62,000 pages of them in Venice,” American poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith tweeted Wednesday. “She is pictured here at a replica of the Oval Office Resolute Desk, stacked with her emails.”

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi — the collective name for two men who are working as the exhibit’s curatorial team — told CNN that Clinton came in for a private tour of the exhibit Tuesday morning.

“During the tour, the former US Secretary of State had the opportunity to confront to the 30,000 emails that were sent and received from her private email account while serving the government between 2009 and 2013 — and the same ones that cost her the 2016 presidential election,” the curators wrote in a statement. “Clinton proceeded to sit down at an exact replica of the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk and leaf through her emails for nearly an hour.”

NERO, the publisher that produced Goldsmith’s book accompanying the art exhibit, also posted photos of the visit.
[…]

During an interview with Italian news outlet TGR Veneto outside of the theater, Clinton slammed the controversy surrounding her emails as unnecessary.

“It was and is still one of the strangest, most absurd events in American political history,” she said at the beginning of the clip. “And anyone can go in and look at them — there’s nothing there.”

“It’s an artistic way of making the same point that I made in the book I wrote, ‘What Happened,’ ” Clinton continued. “And that is, there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that should have been so controversial.”

Clinton also warned European countries to be vigilant of Russian attacks on their elections similar to those experienced by the United States in 2016.

“Europeans should be very aware of the Russians (who) are involved in and trying to influence elections in all the democracies, and they conducted a sweeping and systematic attack on our elections,” she added. “So that was a big factor that had never been part of our system before.”

The exhibit opened in May at the Despar Teatro Italia, and will last until November, according to the curators.

Goldsmith, who was in New York during Clinton’s visit, said that the visit came about after a high school friend of Clinton’s viewed the exhibit.

I don’t blame her for wanting to see it if just to remind herself that it was bullshit.

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Behind the curtain with The Chosen One

by digby

Oy vey. Just read it:

The rupture between Trump and Bolton, as chronicled in public and in private accounts of administration officials, is a case study of the president’s sometimes Kafkaesque management style — an unusual set of demands and expectations he sets for those in his direct employ. 

The episode also illustrates the varied forces that propel advisers into the president’s inner circle — and often churn them out with similar velocity. 

“You’re there more as an annoyance to him because he has to fill some of these jobs, but you’re not there to do anything other than be backlighting,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director who is now critical of Trump. “He wants, like, a catatonic loyalty, and he wants you to be behind the backlights. There’s one spotlight on the stage, it’s shining on Trump, and you’re a prop in the back with dim lights.” 

Trump’s desires for his advisers range from the trivial — someone who looks the part — to the traditional — someone willing to vigorously support him and defend his policies in media appearances. But these demands can be grating and at times terminal for members of his staff — especially for those who, like the national security adviser, may find themselves at odds with the president on critical issues. 

“There is no person that is part of the daily Trump decision-making process that can survive long term,” said a former senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “The president doesn’t like people to get good press. He doesn’t like people to get bad press. Yet he expects everyone to be relevant and important and supportive at all times. Even if a person could do all those things, the president would grow tired of anyone in his immediate orbit.” 

Leon Panetta, who served as a defense secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff in past Democratic administrations, said Trump’s eclectic management style can be dangerous. 

“The presidency is an isolated position to begin with, and it is incredibly important to have people around you who will tell you when they think you’re wrong,” Panetta said. 

“Presidents need to appreciate that information and not then take it out on that individual.” 

“This president,” Panetta added of Trump, “has a real blind spot in that he does not want anybody around him who is critical.” 

Current and former White House officials stress that Trump brokers and even encourages disagreement, but only to a point and only on his terms. The president enjoys gladiator fights — pitting his aides against one another like so many ancient Romans — but only if he can play emperor, presiding over the melee and crowning the victor. 

“He has become more convinced than ever that he is the ‘chosen one,’ ” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump’s 1987 bestseller, “The Art of the Deal,” but has since become critical of the president. “The blend of the megalomania and the insecurity make him ultimately dismissive of anybody’s opinion that doesn’t match his own.”

One of Bolton’s fatal sins was believing he could outmaneuver the president and promote the hawkish worldview he has advocated for decades, according to Republicans familiar with the dynamic. 

“Anybody who thinks they’re smart enough to manipulate Trump, they’re very foolish, and that’s what happens in this city,” said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and Trump ally. “People mistake a willingness to eat cheeseburgers and drink Coke with being a buffoon, and he’s not a buffoon.” 

Oh bullshit. He most certainly is a buffoon and Gingrich knows it. Eating cheeseburgers and drinking Diet Coke was the “evidence” he and his idiot cronies used to describe Bill Clinton as a buffoon.

Honestly, as much as I have hated Gingrich for decades I never thought I’d see him turn into a groveling ass-kisser. It’s an amazing sight to see.

This is interesting:

He has no clue what he’s doing and he’s just dancing as fast as he can trying to get through each day. I think he’s led his entire life that way. Remember what he said during the 2018 campaign about what would happen inf the Democrats won the congress:

“My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’ Does that make sense? I’ll figure it out.”

Except he never figures anything out. He just survives. It’s the one thing he’s good at. 

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”We are the Corp. Resistance is futile.”
by Tom Sullivan

We should all dream of being entrepreneurs. Our own bosses. Randian visionaries unbound by convention. Free people, free markets. George W. Bush dreamed the “ownership society” would produce more than just more. It would produce more Americans who think conservative and vote Republican. Then 2008 happened.

That did not stop true believers, however. Gig-economy firms have made millions treating workers as independent contractors. No benefits. Lousy pay. But, hey, be your own boss! Set your own hours! Be a risk-taker!

Not so fast, say California lawmakers. The state Assembly on Wednesday passed AB5, a bill setting rules for when an independent contractor is actually an employee entitled to be treated and paid as one. The bill now goes to Gov. Gavin Newsome for his signature. Newsome told the Wall Street Journal he plans to sign the bill into law.

“Today the so-called gig companies present themselves as the innovative future of tomorrow, a future where companies don’t pay Social Security or Medicare,” said state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, co-authored AB5.

The San Francisco Chronicle explains its impact:

“Let’s be clear, there’s nothing innovative about underpaying someone for their labor and basing an entire business model on misclassifying workers,” Elena Durazo said.

The law’s impact could be even more far-reaching. Amid concerns over income inequality, the issue of employment status has become part of the national conversation — and California often sets the pace for the rest of United States. Democratic presidential candidates including Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and Pete Buttigieg support the bill. Buttigieg joined drivers last month at a pro-AB5 rally outside Uber’s Mid-Market headquarters. Sanders last year introduced similar legislation called the Workplace Democracy Act, with Warren and Harris among his co-sponsors, although it will not pass as long as the Senate remains under Republican control.

AB5 codifies and expands a groundbreaking California Supreme Court decision from last year known as Dynamex, which uses a simple three-part criteria, the ABC test, to determine employment status. It says a worker is an employee if the worker’s tasks are performed under a company’s control; those tasks are central to that company’s business; and the worker does not have an independent enterprise in that trade.

Uber refuses to comply. The firm says it will not reclassify its workers when the bill becomes law. Giving people rides is not central to its business. Uber merely serves “as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces.”

This is a good point by @Uber. Just last week as my wife and I were leaving a bar, I turned to her and asked “are you getting a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces or should I?” pic.twitter.com/8IlBL5q1Tm— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) September 11, 2019

The New York Times Editorial Board has little sympathy:

The real issue, of course, is that the new law would force Uber, Lyft and other companies with similar business models to share more of their revenues with their workers.

That could well result in higher prices for customers, too. But that would be nothing more than a necessary corrective. The companies and their customers have benefited at the expense of workers who lack the legal power to protect themselves: They have neither the minimum protections afforded to most workers nor the right to bargain collectively. The underpayment of unprotected workers is not a defensible business model.

Resistance is futile

Nobody knows more about defensible business models then our acting president. Maybe gig-economy companies can get an assist from him. He already finds California’s emissions deal with automakers an affront to his authority.

On their own, ride-hailing services Lyft and Uber plan to buy themselves an exemption and have set aside $90 million to fund a 2020 referendum to overturn the not-yet law.

They will add your individual and biological distinctiveness to their bottom lines. Your culture will adapt to service them. Resistance is futile.

Their inhumanity knows no bounds

by digby

If only they were Norweigians

Because they are malevolent monsters:

The U.S. will not grant temporary protected status to people from the Bahamas displaced by Hurricane Dorian, an administration official told NBC News.

The status would allow Bahamians to work and live in the U.S. until it is deemed safe to return home. The same status is currently granted to over 300,000 people living in the U.S. from 10 countries, including the victims of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake.

Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said on Monday that the Trump administration was considering whether to grant temporary protected status to people fleeing the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian devastated two major islands there.

Bahamians can still come to the U.S. temporarily, if they have the right travel documents, but will not be granted work permits.

As of Monday, 1,500 victims of Dorian had come to the U.S. after the hurricane swept through the Bahamas.

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