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Month: September 2019

His “who me?” tell

Published by digby on September 5, 2019

His “who me?” tell

by digby

He drew the sharpie line. How do we know? His tell:

Remember this?

And this:

If that doesn’t look like a five-year-old with chocolate smeared all over his face denying that he ate the Hershey bar I don’t know what does.

In case you don’t know what this is all about, this spells the whole stupid thing out. Long story short: Trump tweeted out that Alabama was in Hurricane Dorian’s path over the weekend and he was wrong. Instead of admitting it he has doubled down and offered this ridiculous “proof” with a crude sharpie pen line extending the hurricane path.

You can’t make this shit up.

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

by digby

Ed Kilgore riffs on a disturbing new column by Thomas Edsall and it won’t make you feel any less anxious than you already are:

Millions of words have been spilled in efforts to understand Donald J. Trump’s appeal, much of them involving discontent with the alternatives in both parties offered to voters in 2016. But now, 32 months into his presidency, the more pressing question is how Trump maintains such steady support despite his erratic behavior, his incessant lying, his outbursts of racist malevolence, and his many broken promises.

Is it simply a matter of a booming economy anesthetizing people who really only care about their own pocketbooks, and if so, could the steadily increasing economic jitters — many of them directly attributable to Trump’s policies — finally send his approval ratings into a downward spiral? Is the whole MAGA movement purely and simply an effort by demographic “losers” — particularly white men on the margins of the economy and society — to turn back the clock? Or is Trump just an especially lurid product of extreme ideological and partisan polarization — proof that literally anyone can command one of the two major political parties with no serious erosion of support?

To these much-discussed possibilities — each with its own implications for 2020 and American political life generally — you can add an especially alarming alternative explanation highlighted in a column by the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall: Trump is tapping into a hunger for chaos that he is uniquely qualified to feed. According to an award-winning paper by three political scientists (two from Denmark and one from Temple University), there is a sort of toxic synergy at work between this “populist” pol, chaos-seeking voters, and social media that has placed Trumpism in the mainstream of American politics:

It argues that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.

How do Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux measure this “need for chaos”? They conducted six surveys, four in the United States, in which they interviewed 5157 participants, and two in Denmark, with 1336. They identified those who are “drawn to chaos” through their affirmative responses to the following statements:

I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.

I think society should be burned to the ground.

When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking “just let them all burn.”

We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.

Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.

In an email, Petersen wrote that preliminary examination of the data shows “that the ‘need for chaos’ correlates positively with sympathy for Trump but also — although less strongly — with sympathy for Sanders. It correlates negatively with sympathy for Hillary Clinton.”

More terrifyingly, they found sizable numbers of people agreeing with three of the five “chaos” statements:

The responses to three of the statements in particular were “staggering,” the paper says: 24 percent agreed that society should be burned to the ground; 40 percent concurred with the thought that “When it comes to our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’ ”; and 40 percent also agreed that “we cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over.”

If you ever wondered to whom Trump was addressing his dark vision of “this American carnage” in his inaugural address, this could be your answer. More importantly, perhaps, these chaos-seekers don’t seem to care about empirical data or even truthfulness:

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a “need for chaos” express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to “mobilize others against politicians in general.” These disrupters do not “share rumors because they believe them to be true. For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.”

To put it another way, when Trump says and does outrageous things, he’s just “owning the libs,” or defying “political correctness,” which is a more important goal than truth-telling to people driven by fury. This could well be the reality underlying Salena Zito’s famous maxim that MAGA folk “take Trump seriously, but not literally.” What are a few thousand lies among comrades-in-arms?

Ho boy.

This reminds me of this little budding psychopath:

There was one young white supremacist marching in Charlottesville last year who, when things got scary, stripped off his white polo shirt uniform and tried to blend in with the crowd. When he was asked by a journalist why he was doing what he’d been doing, he said:

It’s kind of a fun idea. Just being able to say, like, “Hey man, white power!” You know? To be quite honest, I love to be offensive. It’s fun.

One of his cohorts thought it might be fun to mow down a bunch of people with his car that day. It was “fun.” 

The media is finally starting to notice the grift

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

The media is finally starting to notice the grift

by digby

Politico also reports:

Secret Service veterans are grumbling about the Trump administration’s repeated insistence that it’s logistically easier for law enforcement to secure Trump resorts when the president and vice president travel.

The issue popped up again Tuesday, when Vice President Mike Pence was pressed about his decision to stay at Trump’s property in Doonbeg, Ireland, despite its location farther away from meeting locations than other hotels.

“I understand political attacks by Democrats, but if you have a chance to get to Doonbeg, you’ll find it’s a fairly small place,” Pence told reporters, “and the opportunity to stay at the Trump National in Doonbeg, to accommodate the unique footprint that comes with our security detail and other personnel, made it logical.”

The explanation prompted some eye rolling in the Secret Service community. Ex-officials noted that location often has little, if anything, to do with protection. Instead, they said, agents make plans based on the surrounding context and situation, like potential violence, protests or weather events.

“Although it can be helpful to have protected a location before, even recurring locations of protection, like the U.S. Capitol, go through the same methodology each time due to situational changes,” said Donald Mihalek, who served in the Secret Service for 20 years.

Any familiarity the Secret Service has with a protected location, he added, “is the result of extensive planning” by the agents, “which isn’t necessarily location-centric but based on a proven protective methodology.”

But President Donald Trump and his top aides have repeatedly used the logistics argument to defend his administration against accusations that it is merely lining the president’s pockets with its hotel choices.

Whether Trump’s properties are unfairly profiting off of his administration has dogged the president since entering office. Ethics officials and lawmakers have also raised concerns about the fact that foreign officials often stay at Trump hotels, and that Trump supporters and industry groups regularly throw bashes at Trump-owned locations. Trump is also considering hosting next year’s Group of Seven gathering of world leaders at his Doral resort in Florida, a potential financial boon for the property.

Trump has chafed at the suggestion that he is profiting off of his presidency, even arguing that he stands to lose billions by serving in the White House. And he and his team regularly rebuff accusations of favoritism with arguments that logistics are dictating their decisions.

Pence took that approach on Tuesday, insisting that his stay at a Trump resort during a trip to Ireland this week provides a “logical” accommodation for his visit to his mother’s ancestral homeland.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, made a similar argument, telling reporters that the Doonbeg resort has “the size that … we think can accommodate us, and Secret Service can protect us.” He went on to describe Trump’s Doonbeg property as “a facility that could accommodate the team,” with logistics already familiar to the Secret Service.

Trump made a similar argument in favor of bringing the G-7 summit to Doral next year, even telling reporters that the Secret Service had expressed a preference for the G7 to be hosted at his resort in Florida next year.

“When my people came back…They went to places all over the country. And they came back and they said, ‘This is where we would like to be,’” Trump told reporters. “Now we had military people doing it. We had Secret Service people doing it.”

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That doesn’t ring true to veteran agents, however.

“The Secret Service is capable of providing protection anywhere and anytime as it has over its history including under arduous circumstances like combat zones,” said Mihalek, now the Executive Director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

That method remains largely the same regardless of where the president or vice president stay, Jonathan Wackrow, a 13-year Secret Service veteran who coordinated travel and advance operations for President Barack Obama.

“Preferably I’d like the president or vice president to be in a secure bunker,” Wackrow joked, “but that’s not feasible.”

Wackrow explained that the Secret Service “does not typically have a preference” for where the president or vice president stay when they travel. “If we started to operate under that model, we’d not be following our protective paradigm,” he said, which involves “a very comprehensive advance process to build a security plan” for each location.

He also cautioned that just because the Secret Service has been to a location in the past doesn’t make it easier to secure again. “In fact, it can make it harder because complacency kills,” he said. “The moment you become complacent, the potential for someone to get harmed is much greater.”

Pence has been the subject of criticism from Democratic lawmakers for his decision to spend Monday night at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Doonbeg while in Ireland. From Doonbeg, Pence embarked on an hour-long flight Tuesday morning to Dublin to meet Irish President Michael Higgins and Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

Short told reporters that the vice president was invited, not instructed, by Trump to stay at his resort and that taxpayers will foot the bill for the lodging.

Maybe the Democrats could start looking into this? Maybe? I mean, the president is corruptly using his office to promote and enrich his private business. It’s been going on since he took office. He clearly has no intention of stopping. In fact, it’s escalating with that Doral infomercial at the G7. He’s roped the VP into it now. I think it might just be impeachable.

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This must make the Trump family very proud

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

This must make the Trump family very proud

by digby



From the AP:

Migrant children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border last year suffered post-traumatic stress and other serious mental health problems, according to a government watchdog report Wednesday. The chaotic reunification process only added to their ordeal.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report in advance of the official release.

The children, many already distressed in their home countries or by their journey, showed more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who were not separated, according to a report from the inspector general’s office in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Some cried inconsolably. Others believed their parents had abandoned them and were angry and confused. “Other children expressed feelings of fear or guilt and became concerned for their parents’ welfare,” according to the report.

Maybe that will show the parents that they should just let their kids be traumatized by gangs and criminals in their own shithole country, eh? Nobody’s going to give them any breaks in this shithole, that’s for sure.

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Conservatives with principles? They exist! In the UK.

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

Conservatives with principles? They exist! In the UK.

by digby

There was a time when American conservatives weren’t all bootlicking sycophants but it’s been a while. There are still a few patriots in Britain:

Among them are two former chancellors of the exchequer, an array of former cabinet ministers, and many old and familiar stalwarts of Conservative party conferences and Conservative think tanks. One of them, Nicholas Soames, is Winston Churchill’s grandson. Another, Kenneth Clarke, is the longest-serving member of the House of Commons. All of them were told that if they voted against the Conservative government Tuesday night — paving the way for the British Parliament to block a damaging, “no-deal” Brexit — they would be expelled from the Conservative party.

Not only that, but they also would be prevented from standing as parliamentary candidates at the next election. They would be out of politics. Finished. Yet all of them, all 21 of them, did it anyway. Why?

Firstly, they did it because — of course — it’s an idiotic idea for Britain to sever, from one day to the next, all of its relationships with all of its closest and most important neighbors: not just trade but also security arrangements, scientific agreements, legal pacts, diplomatic deals, everything. During the Brexit referendum campaign, nobody ever said this kind of total break was a possibility, nobody voted for it and only a minority of the public say they support it now. The 21 Tory rebels know that the diplomatic and economic consequences of a break like this, without transitional treaties and negotiated arrangements, will last for decades. Just about everybody else knows this, too, including the prime minister, Boris Johnson. But only 21 members of the party were willing to act.

Secondly, they did it because a few days earlier, Johnson had announced a suspension of Parliament that will begin next week. This unprecedented abuse of power was accompanied by a series of open lies, bullying language and threats of a kind that Conservative governments don’t, historically, use toward their members. The 21 Tory rebels aren’t just standing against an ugly legal and economic mess; they also are standing up in favor of constitutional, behavioral and legal norms that they see being broken. They are standing up for a set of parliamentary traditions and customs that they fear will be destroyed forever.

Thirdly, they did it because they know — everybody knows — that members of the current Tory leadership have chosen this destructive path not for the sake of the country, not for the well-being of the British, not for the future of their children, but because they are afraid that, having promised Brexit and failed to deliver, they will lose the next election. They are putting party over country. By contrast, the 21 Tory rebels have decided to put country over party, indeed country over career, in defiance of their leaders.

These 21 rebels, in other words, stood up against a national leader from their own party in order to prevent him from harming the country, undermining the constitution and damaging democracy. Imagine how different American politics would be if we could find 21 Republican senators to do the same.

I do think this is a good example of why a parliamentary system is better than ours. There is more room to maneuver within it. Still, when faced with a political disaster like Trump you’d think that some of them would put country before party or their seats in the congress. So far, no dice.

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Trump and the Murdochs: failing up

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

Trump and the Murdochs: failing up

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

I wrote on Tuesday about Trump’s allegedly “innovative” strategy to attack the media, pointing out that conservatives have been doing this for decades. They’ve been “working the refs” of the mainstream media since before Richard Nixon’s day. Trump even has an enemies list, although his wrinkle on that authoritarian impulse is to tweet out the names of the people he considers enemies while Nixon had the good grace to keep it secret.

Trump has recently seemed a bit confused about all this. Perhaps the stress is getting to him. But lately he’s been “working the refs” at Fox News, apparently upset that they have had the temerity to interview people, at least once in a while, who express views opposed to Trump’s. He’s been exploding about this on his Twitter feed:

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Fox News has always allowed Democrats to come on the air from time to time in order to keep up the pretense that it’s a legitimate news organization. They even used to feature some liberal-leaning pundits just so they could say they were “fair and balanced.”

This was always nonsense, of course. The whole point of the network was to provide a right-wing media outlet to benefit the Republican Party. As Russell Crowe, playing Roger Ailes in the recent Showtime “The Loudest Voice,” put it:

Cable is about one thing: niche. The loyalty of a passionate few. We need to program directly to the viewer who is predisposed to buying what we’re trying to sell. In politics it’s called “turning out the base. “If we can do that, then they will never change the channel. And what is that niche? Well, I think it is conservatives. It’s roughly half the damn country.

The show is based on the book of the same name by Gabriel Sherman about Ailes and Fox News. I don’t know if that quote is taken from that research, but it certainly conveys Ailes’ vision. After years of pummeling the mainstream media for being liberal, conservatives had prepared the ground for a right-wing news network posing as an objective news organization. In order to maintain that fiction, it was important that they at least pay lip service to some objectivity in the news side even as their bombastic opinion stars like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity fed the audience the red meat that Ailes knew would keep them coming back for more.

Ailes supported the Trump campaign — after resisting it at first —but he was in the middle of his own horrific sexual harassment scandal and in failing health. He was forced out of the network before Trump was elected and was relegated to helping the candidate prep for the debates against Hillary Clinton. (That reportedly didn’t go well, although the parties involved didn’t agree on why. ) But prior to that falling out, there had been talk that Ailes and Trump were planning to start a new TV network if Trump lost the election. Obviously that didn’t happen although if Trump is defeated in 2020 there’s a good chance that plan will be revived in some form. It’s impossible to believe that Trump will be able to let go of the media spotlight. He would certainly have a built-in audience, potentially poached from Fox News.

Trump has openly shared his supposed reasons for being hostile to his favorite network. He is angry at recent Fox News poll which show, as do all the other reputable polls, that a large majority of Americans disapprove of him personally and are opposed to his policies. After a recent survey showing that the top five Democratic candidates would beat him handily if the election were held today, he told reporters:

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Every place I go we have lines outside. Fox has changed. And my worst polls have always been from Fox. There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out that other polling shows that among those who “strongly approve” of Trump, a vast majority trust Fox News more than any other network. He knows that many of his voters see the poll numbers and may wonder why he’s always talking about how successful he is. So he needs to discredit Fox — forcing his fans to take sides and choose who to believe.

But it isn’t just the poll that has him fuming:

That even got Trump fanboy Brit Hume’s hackles up and he replied, “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.” Trump can be forgiven for making that mistake. Fox has been slavishly devoted to him since Ailes first set the wheels in motion during the 2016 campaign. Neil Cavuto ranted for some minutes about “integrity” and the like. But others began fawning to the point of outright delusion:

Rupert Murdoch turned over the running of Fox Corp. to his eldest son, Lachlan, just before the sale of the company’s entertainment division to Disney. It hasn’t gone all that well. Fox News had already lost a step since Ailes departed and it’s been getting worse. It isn’t the slick production it once was, largely abandoning its pretense at being a major network and pretty much simply adopting the crude Breitbart-Trump line. There has been nonstop controversy over the network’s turn to overt white nationalism, with advertisers leaving in droves. Reporters and pundits are at each other’s throats, with the channel’s biggest star, Sean Hannity, in open revolt.

Meanwhile, the younger, supposedly more liberal son, James Murdoch, who was responsible for the embarrassing phone hacking scandal in Britain, is said to be increasingly “troubled” by the direction of the network and is thinking of taking some of his billions and buying a rival network (as well, perhaps, as a comic book publisher.) There have been reports of Rupert possibly coming back to right the ship, despite his age and his health problems.

As in the HBO drama “Succession,” which is clearly based on the Murdoch clan, the saga of Trump and Fox News is really about the extreme ineptitude and weakness of second-generation heirs to great fortunes. As Lucy Prebble, a writer and executive producer of the show, told the BBC, “Everybody is a coward, everybody is an idiot and everybody is trying to cover their back almost all of the time.” That sure does sound familiar.

The writer Hugh Montgomery observed that “Succession” is “part of a reckoning with the particular strain of rich white men who continue to have a grip on the Western political and media establishment — and have, arguably, or very clearly, abused that power to monstrous effect.” I’m afraid that reckoning still has a way to go.

NC gerrymandering: Here we go again by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 4, 2019

NC gerrymandering: Here we go again
by Tom Sullivan

In a 357-page decision, a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday ordered drawing of new legislative maps in North Carolina, ruling in Common Cause v. Lewis that the current maps constitute “extreme partisan gerrymandering” and violate three separate provisions of the state constitution.

“The 2017 Enacted Maps, as drawn, do not permit voters to freely choose their representative, but rather representatives are choosing voters based upon sophisticated partisan sorting,” the panel wrote. The two Democrats and one Republican declared the results reflect not the will of the people but the “will of the map drawer” in violation of the North Carolina constitution’s free elections and equal protection clauses, as well as its guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly.

Republicans drew their maps without Democratic input, but with the aid of Thomas B. Hofeller, the godfather of Republican gerrymandering efforts. Hofeller died in 2018.

Courts hearing challenges to both state and federal districts have grown exasperated with North Carolina Republicans’ evasiveness and delaying tactics. Since taking control of the legislature in 2011, Republicans have been forced repeatedly to defend their maps in court. Losing, they redrew them just narrowly enough pass muster. This time, they face court supervision.

Old partisans never die

The Charlotte Observer reports:

In Tuesday’s ruling, judges gave the legislature just two weeks, until Sept. 18, to draw new maps. Judges ruled the new lines can be drawn to protect incumbents from being pitted against one another but can’t use any other political data.

The judges also told lawmakers they might simply reschedule the elections in 2020 if the legislature can’t come up with new maps in time. “The Court retains jurisdiction to move the primary date for the General Assembly elections, or all of the State’s 2020 primaries, including for offices other than the General Assembly, should doing so become necessary to provide effective relief in this case,” the ruling says.

In the 5-4 Rucho v. Common Cause Supreme Court decision this summer, justices ruled federal courts could not invalidate maps based on partisan gerrymandering, although states might still do so. Wake County Superior Court judges did just that in this case where state law formed the basis for the judgment.

Republican Senate leader Phil Berger said he would not appeal, the ruling but would begin drawing new maps. But he found a way to blame the loss on former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting PAC:

“This case is the next step in Eric Holder’s drive to use judges to create a Democratic majority,” states the release from Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger’s Office. “Thwarted at the U.S. Supreme Court, Holder has turned to state courts with Democratic majorities to, in his own words, ‘favorably position Democrats’ to game the redistricting process.”

The rain falls on the just and the unjust

Since Republicans took control of the legislature in 2011, perhaps the most harm has been to North Carolina voters unrepresented in illegally drawn districts and whipsawed by shifting district lines and mercurial changes to voting rules.

The current state-district maps were redrawn in 2017 after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that they constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. This will be the third time the state’s voters will see new state maps since 2011. Congressional maps in this decade have a similar history. (Without moving, this writer voted in NC-10 in the 2016 primary and in NC-11 in the general election.)

Appealing their latest loss to the North Carolina Supreme Court is a long shot for Republicans. Six Democrats and one Republican hold seats there. Plus, filing for 2020 races begins December 2, with the primary scheduled for March 3. Any delay will harm both Republican and Democratic candidates.

Stephen Wolf writes at Daily Kos:

While this case only concerns the maps in one state, every state constitution has provisions similar to North Carolina’s that could be used to challenge partisan gerrymanders so long as there’s a receptive and fair-minded state Supreme Court majority to hear such a case. This ruling therefore underscores the importance of supreme court elections in key swing states next year, including Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Progressive victories in these races would go a long way toward blocking the GOP’s lopsided control over redistricting as we head into the next round of redistricting following the 2020 census.

Take note: The population data Republicans will use to redraw districts — again — is nearly 10 years old.

Trump’s congressional claque looked at their toes

Published by digby on September 4, 2019

Trump’s congressional claque looked at their toes

by digby

TPM reports on Justin Amash’s journey from Freedom Caucus member to lone wolf:

New details have emerged on what led to Rep. Justin Amash’s (I-MI) formal withdrawal from the Republican Party in July.

According to a Washington Post report out Tuesday, the spat between President Donald Trump and Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), a fellow House Freedom Caucus member and unapologetic Trump critic, forced Amash to reconsider what it meant to be part of the party.

During a meeting with Republican congressmen in late June, the President had sarcastically congratulated Sanford — who wasn’t in attendance — “on running a great race” after losing his primary to a Trump-aligned GOP candidate. That same night, Sanford found out what Trump had said and learned that Amash had his back during a dinner with fellow Freedom Caucus members.

“Justin said, ‘We have to defend Mark, because if he goes after him, he could go after any of us,’” Sanford told the Post. “Everyone else there, well, they just kinda stared at their toenails.”

As the Post noted, Freedom Caucus founding member Mick Mulvaney is now Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director, and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) have become some of the President’s most vehement defenders.

Amash left that dinner frustrated as he realized that the Freedom Caucus was just another group of Trump cheerleaders, the Post reported. Up until then, Amash had felt that the Caucus had more of a backbone, especially when its members would criticize Barack Obama on spending and what they felt was executive overreach.

It took that long? Hmmm. I’m not sure I buy that. I think he just thought he could live with this:

He told the Post that it’s all basically “performance art” and that he was not shocked that his fellow Caucus members turned toward Trump as a way to “survive until the next season.” Amash added that most would be surprised by what these same people say about the President off-camera.

The cowardly sycophants throwing one of their own overboard was the straw that broke the camel’s back:

Amash decided that “he’d had enough of the show” shortly after the dust-up over Sanford. The next day, Amash tweeted that Trump’s visit was a “dazzling display of pettiness and insecurity,” and took time away from the Freedom Caucus.

“He ghosted them,” Corrie Whalen, Amash’s former communications director, told the Post.

After Trump had mocked Amash’s departure from the GOP in July, the Freedom Caucus refused to come to his defense.

The Freedom Caucus sycophants are banking on the fact that if Trump wins their power will be uncontested and if he loses, everyone will be anxious to “get back to normal” and they can start shrieking about the deficit and entitlements again as if nothing ever happened. Either way, it’s win-win for them.

I am terrified that they are right. If the first happens, we are hopelessly screwed on every level. As for the second, I see very little appetite among the Democrats for putting an end to this charade once and for all. Trump didn’t invent it. He is just the grotesque mutation of what the right wing has been all along.

Democratic officials, like all of us, are exhausted with this non-stop GOP assault on reality. But their destructive behavior is killing us,  literally in some cases with guns, climate change and the re-emergence of fascist nationalism. They need to fight.

But I honestly don’t have a lot of faith that they will do it. I can see us simply moving on to the usual economic arguments about debt and programs and entitlements and this anti-democratic, fascist movement will continue to fester and grow until it finally empowers someone who really knows what to do with it.

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“Congratulations on the invasion!”

Published by digby on September 3, 2019

“Congratulations on the invasion!”

by digby

I’m sure they were thrilled to hear it:

Polish leaders hoped to use Sunday’s ceremony to highlight Poland’s role as victim in both the war, and in the peace that followed. The main commemorations were moved to Warsaw from Westerplatte, where the first volleys of artillery from the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein on Sept. 1, 1939, signified the outbreak of World War II.

“The experience of Poland in the Second World War greatly differed from Western European countries,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote in a paid article published on Friday by the German newspaper Die Welt. “The occupation of France and Poland was incomparable.”

Polish officials had hoped that Mr. Trump would bolster that theme, but he scrapped his trip on Thursday, saying he needed to monitor Hurricane Dorian, which was barreling toward the East Coast and was declared a Category 5 on Sunday.

Mike Pence spoke some gibberish about faith in God which is probably better than whatever stale speech they had planned for the ignoramus in chief. Still, it’s hard to see how anything he said would have been any worse than “congratulations” on the anniversary of the German invasion in 1939.

Honestly, I doubt he had any idea what he was going over there to do.

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The scandals they should be investigating. Just because they’re out in the open doesn’t mean people are seeing them.

Published by digby on September 3, 2019

The scandals they should be investigating

by digby

Trump at a MAGA themed wedding ay his Bedminster Golf Club in July

I hear that the Democrats are going to investigate the Stormy Daniels hush money payments. I know that it’s a real scandal but I can’t help but feel that it trivializes Trump’s crimes. The man blatantly obstructed justice into an investigation into elections sabotage by a foreign adversary on his behalf. He’s used his office as president to line his own pockets. He has told aides t break the law with the promise of pardons, one of the most egregious abuses of presidential power in history. Making a spectacle out of campaign finance violations and an affair that ended ten years ago just seems like a mistake.

On the other hand, maybe they know something we dont…

Anyway, Matt Yglesias had some good ideas about how to go after Trump’s ongoing egregious corruption while in office:

While Trump spread misinformation and panic between rounds of golf, Vice President Mike Pence went to Poland in Trump’s stead. His team decided that it would make sense for him to stop over in Ireland on his way back, stay two nights, and do a day of meetings in Ireland between. The meetings are, of course, in Dublin, which is both the capital of Ireland and by far its largest city.

But Pence, curiously, is not staying in Dublin. Instead, his two nights will be spent at a Trump-owned luxury resort that’s about a three-hour drive away from the capital city — the plan is to commute cross-country by air to make the meetings work.

In distance terms, this is like staying at a hotel in Baltimore for your business trip to New York.

Except, of course, that the scandal here is not bad transportation logistics but the theft of public funds. The true analogy to what Pence is doing would be something like stealing money from the office expense account and using it to bribe your boss to give you a good performance review. Then to make it three, this week we also learned the news that Attorney General Bill Barr is paying $30,000 for the privilege of hosting a party at the Trump hotel in DC.

But I’m hung up on the Pence story and on Trump’s habit of staying at his own clubs at taxpayer expense because in comparison to the bribery side of Trump’s corruption, the outright theft is just so straightforward. There is no holder of any office in America who would be allowed to steer public funds directly to entities he controls. It’s not that this kind of corruption is unheard of by any means. What’s so shocking about it is that it’s common enough that we have tons of precedent for the idea that it’s unacceptable. The Pugh case happened to be recent and relatively high profile, but the IRS’s list of public corruption prosecutions is littered with examples of relatively minor officials going down for this sort of thing. But in Trump’s Washington it’s become kind of routine.

Democrats could use some creativity

Looking back on the Robert Mueller era, one of the oddities of the special counsel’s investigation was the allure of secrecy. We didn’t know whether there was some explicit quid pro quo between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, so uncovering one would have been big news. By the same token, if an investigator discovered that a president had been secretly steering thousands of dollars into companies he secretly owned that would be a major scandal.

But Trump has been stealing public funds out in the open from the beginning of his presidency which has tended to somewhat diminish the impact of the story relative to potentially secret scandals. There’s nothing secret about his push to host the next G7 summit at his own luxury resort in Florida, for example, but it’s extraordinarily scandalous.

There have been some worthy attempts in the media at tracking this abuse. NBC calculated that Trump spent 295 days of his first 956 days in office at his own hotels. HuffPost put the overall tab on the president’s golf outings at $102 million as of May, with a majority of that seemingly going directly to clubs he owns.

Yet public officials are not stepping up. Any other official at any other level of government would be fired if not prosecuted. It’s so obviously worthy of impeachment — the president can’t just grab public money and stuff it into his pockets — that there’s barely anything to investigate.

As I have written many times, shamelessness is a powerful political tool. But that should not stop the Democrats from hammering Trump for this. Most people are not as shameless and crooked as Trump and the GOP officials are. They would benefit from seeing just how much money this grift is costing them.

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