Month: December 2019

The projection strategy

I mean, it’s a least interesting color to a story in which Trump tried to savage an opponent for his son cashing in on his dad’s name that Trump is tweeting from a business that collects millions from anonymous influence seekers, a business that Trump claims is run by his… sons

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) December 26, 2019

Karl Rove was always exalted for his alleged genius in figuring out that you should attack your opponents on their perceived strengths. For instance they attacked John Kerry for his war record in an election in which that was considered to be his ace in the hole. But in reality they were always projecting their own weaknesses on to their opponents. Bush had taken the US into a useless war and was a draft-dodger. So they had to make Kerry into a coward and a liar.

Trump is doing that as well. Only in his case, his own weaknesses are criminal on a level only previously seen in banana republic dictatorship so you’d think the American people would be laughing at the absurdity. Unfortunately, I’m not sure they even see it.

If you are spending a nice holiday weekend with some free time to listen to podcasts, I can’t recommend Trump Inc, the WNYC and Pro Publica look at the Trump businesses highly enough. They are, and always have been, a totally corrupt operation.

That he became president at all is a terrible indictment of our system. That he might win re-election even as he has continued to line his pockets with taxpayer money and profit by selling access shows that all of our supposed barriers to official corruption are a joke. We have an Attorney General dedicated to insuring that all official criticism and concern about the president is muzzled and the law is rendered impotent to restrain his behavior in any way.

It is actually much worse than we realize. When he says he wants to reign for longer than his term, believe him. It’s not that hard for a powerful leader protected by the law and a “mandate” to engineer conditions that allow it. That’s what they always do.

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And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

Blue vs. gray? Meet blue vs. red.
by Tom Sullivan

“Trump is the first president since at least the Civil War to so directly kindle the nation’s political conflicts,” Ron Brownstein writes at The Atlantic. Aw, come on. Now he’ll think he’s the new Lincoln.

Brownstein’s larger point is battle lines are drawn. They have not budged much since 2016. Donald Trump is the president of red America (read: rural) and punisher of blue America (read: metropolitan). The 2020 elections will be a cage match between the future vs. the past, between the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and Republicans’ “coalition of restoration.”

Readers know that the latter’s shrinking demographic footprint is being inflated by anti-democratic structural advantages states with smaller populations possess in the Senate and the Electoral College. Not to mention by vigorous efforts among Republicans to suppress the votes of young people and nonwhites. Given those factors, a Republican coalition built on “small states that remain mostly white and Christian” may yet hang onto power for a few more election cycles. “[B]oth parties live in constant fear that even the tiniest of blunders will lead to victory for the other,” Brownstein writes:

That the parties are growing in their differences only compounds that fear. Election outcomes now produce whiplash-inducing reversals in policy outcomes, since the two sides represent coalitions with such divergent priorities and preferences. Polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute captured that separation: In an October survey, 92 percent of voters who approve of Trump say Republicans are working “to protect the American way of life against outside threats,” while 75 percent of voters who disapprove of him say the GOP has been taken over by racists. Conversely, three-fourths of Trump approvers say Democrats have been taken over by socialists, while three-fourths of those who disapprove of him say the Democratic Party is endeavoring to make capitalism work better for average Americans.

As much as social-cultural differences are widening the divide, like much of human conflict this is about relative power. Plus, an unrealistic understanding of humans — shaped by the botched economic models of the last half-century — as rational economic actors. (We’ll be looking more at that in this space soon enough.)

Danielle Allen argues this morning at the Washington Post:

[T]here are three fundamental blind spots in our most recent paradigms of political economy. The first is a description of human beings as “rational actors,” whose decisions rest on essentially utilitarian forms of calculation. The second is a depiction of society as consisting of millions of Robinson Crusoes, all wholly independent of one another. The third is a failure to recognize the value in forms of coordination achieved other than through the price mechanism.

One might argue those blind spots in economic theory have contributed to the red-blue divide as much as cultural differences. Generations have learned to see one another as competitors in a zero-sum game of power and money in a society that perceives money as power and a perverse measure of virtue. Our economic model for Man has eroded cooperation among communities as much as technological change. The resulting tension drives social and racial animus among those for whom community has shrunk to kin and church. Where healthy communities are welcoming, threatened ones become suspicious and insular.

More than red hats and racism is at work here. More than immigration, too.

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And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — digby

Roger’s Barbies

This NYT piece on the make-up for the movie “Bombshell” says a lot about Fox News. If you have read the various exposes or watched the Showtime movie with Russell Crowe playing Roger Ailes, you already know the Fox was basically Ailes’s personal brothel. This film apparently focuses more on the women and what it took to make them look the way they look is instructive:

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And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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Is Obamacare the new third rail?

Could be.

2018 was marked by the battle to preserve the ACA particularly the requirement that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions. Whether the Republican lawsuit that aims to overturn the entire program makes it to the Supreme Court or doesn’t it’s going to be a major issue:

A court ruling last week putting the Affordable Care Act further in jeopardy may provide the opening Democrats have been waiting for to regain the upper hand on health care against Republicans in 2020.
[…]

But Senate Democrats, Democratic candidates and outside groups backing them immediately jumped on the news of the federal appeals court ruling — blasting out ads and statements reminding voters of Republicans’ votes to repeal the 2010 health care law, support the lawsuit and confirm the judges who may bring about Obamacare’s demise.

“I think it’s an opportunity to reset with the new year to remind people that there’s a very real threat to tens of millions of Americans,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. “We Democrats are always striving to improve the system, but, at a minimum, the American people expect us to protect what they already have.”

In 2018, Democrats won the House majority and several governorships largely on a message of protecting Obamacare and its popular protections for preexisting conditions. This year continued the trend, with Kentucky’s staunchly anti-Obamacare governor, Matt Bevin, losing to Democratic now-Gov. Andy Beshear.

The landscape in 2020 may be more challenging for Democrats than it was in 2018, when Republicans had more recently voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans also say they now have more ammunition to push back on Democrats’ arguments with the party’s divisions over single-payer health care, which would replace Obamacare, shaping the presidential race.

For decades the Republicans have tried to find ways to eliminate or degrade Social Security and Medicare. It has always caused a backlash. Threatening to overturn the ACA whether in the legislature or the courts will likely meet a similar fate regardless of the debate within the Democratic Party over Medicare for All. Indeed, if anything that creates a cross-pressure to protect the program from the Republicans who clearly have no plan to replace it.

 People understand very well after all these years that simply telling insurance companies they have to cover pre-existing conditions without limiting how they can charge will be a disaster. Not that they really care about the pain and suffering it will cause to actual people. But they are concerned about the political pain and suffering it will cause their members.

2018 should have spooked them on this issue but they just keep pushing. They did the same with social security and Medicare. It rarely worked out well for them.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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The MSM belatedly discovers their own role in the right-wing political propaganda machine

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd is going to do a show about GOP disinformation. Seriously

He gave an interview with Rolling Stone in which he admitted to being “naive” because he didn’t really understand until recently that they were doing this.

Welcome to reality, better late than never, I guess. And it is very, very late.

Todd spent years appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s show and recommended him for a perch on MSNBC as late as 2016 and Hewitt has always been a right wing propagandist. Anyone who listened should have been able to see that. But like so many in the political media establishment seemingly did not recognize that Hewitt was a political operative not an honest broker. He always was. And by appearing with him and promoting him Todd was helping Hewitt pass along disinformation. It wasn’t just Todd, of course. There was a time not too long ago when Rush Limbaugh himself was touted as an honest political commentator not part of a political communications operation.

Anyway, Jay Rosen had some thoughts on this. Here’s an excerpt:

Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.

Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)

You cannot call that an oversight. It’s a strategic blindness that he superintended. By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.

In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.

That’s malpractice. Chuck Todd called it naiveté in order to minimize the error. This we cannot allow.

If you click over to Rosen’s piece, you’ll see that he takes Todd to task for each of his statements in the interview and shows why and how he missed all the signs. It’s not a pretty picture.

I’m reluctant to be too hard on Todd because baby steps are important. If he has belatedly recognized that he’s been played for years and years by a professional political operation that traffics in lies, disinformation and propaganda, that’s to the good. It’s an important step.

The question, of course, is if he and others are able to break out of the “both sides” “fair and balanced” pattern that has misled the public for years and brought us to this place.

The evidence is in that famous word cloud at the top of the page.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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All the president’s threats

“For decades, the GOP cast itself as the champion of the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other national security institutions. But over the past three years, Republicans have repeatedly turned on those agencies when necessary to protect Trump’s presidency.” https://t.co/77m0FO7bo6

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) December 25, 2019

This is how dictatorships happen. Having to assign bodyguards to protect a whistleblower who revealed to the congress that the president was using taxpayer money to bribe a foreign leader to smear his domestic political opponents is more than a little disturbing. That the danger escalates when the president himself makes public threats is downright terrifying. It’s banana republic time.

And you just don’t know which way the national security apparatus will go when push comes to shove, do you? After all, Attorney General Bill Barr and his henchman John Durham are investigating former CIA Director John Brennan, chiefly because he’s been a strong critic of the president since he left the government. The message couldn’t be clearer.

It’s pretty clear that most people who could step up are afraid of something. 300 former national security officials signed a letter in support of the whistleblower, but the real insiders like Mattis, McMaster, Tillerson, Bolton, Coates etc, have largely been silent. Maybe they are just political opportunists but it seems odd that none of them have been willing to step up publicly and say what they know considering the stakes. I would not be surprised if they have been cowed by the fact that the Trump followers are clearly violent toward anyone who is critical of their Dear Leader.

It is not about ideology or philosophy or religion. It’s about him. Il est l’État.

This is how authoritarian dictatorships are born. If he wins re-election do you think they won’t go all the way?

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

55% support Trump’s removal in a new poll. No wonder Mitch is getting wobbly.

When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support, but slowly move through don’t know or third-party. This polling is a clear sign that Republican policy of complete obstruction is not selling well to voting public.

— David Rothschild (@DavMicRot) December 25, 2019

Trump’s crude insults over the Christmas holiday don’t seem to have made him any more popular. Imagine that:

Fifty-five per cent of those asked said they were in favour of the US president’s conviction by the Senate, a figure which has shot up from 48 per cent the week before.

Meanwhile, the number of people against Mr Trump’s removal has dropped to an all-time low, according to the MSN poll.
On Christmas Day, 40 per cent were opposed to the Senate voting to convict the president, who has been impeached over his dealings with Ukraine and an alleged subsequent attempt to obstruct congress.

The gap between the two views has become much wider since last week, when there was little to divide them (48 per cent in favour of Mr Trump’s removal, 47 per cent against).

The percentage of respondents who neither supported nor opposed conviction also grew.

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, said the numbers of people shifting from opposition to removal to “don’t know” was significant. “When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support,” he said.

He was impeached because he bribed the Ukrainian president to smear his political rivals and exonerate Russia for 2016. But his ongoing juvenile tantrum ever since then probably hasn’t brought anyone who was undecided to his side.

Competent adults who have nothing to hide and are assured of their innocence don’t act this way:

…& overwhelming,” but this Scam Impeachment was neither. Also, very unfair with no Due Process, proper representation, or witnesses. Now Pelosi is demanding everything the Republicans weren’t allowed to have in the House. Dems want to run majority Republican Senate. Hypocrites!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019

The Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats said they wanted to RUSH everything through to the Senate because “President Trump is a threat to National Security” (they are vicious, will say anything!), but now they don’t want to go fast anymore, they want to go very slowly. Liars!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019

Nancy Pelosi’s District in California has rapidly become one of the worst anywhere in the U.S. when it come to the homeless & crime. It has gotten so bad, so fast – she has lost total control and, along with her equally incompetent governor, Gavin Newsom, it is a very sad sight!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019

“Nancy Pelosi has no leverage over the Senate. Mitch McConnell did not nose his way into the impeachment process in the House, and she has no standing in the Senate.” Brad Blakeman. Crazy Nancy should clean up her filthy dirty District & help the homeless there. A primary for N?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019

I don’t think that reassures very many people that this person has control of himself, do you? And that’s just today.  He’s been doing this non-stop since the day he was impeached.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

Comedy Gold from Karl Rove

I don’t think I have to remind you of how “dignified” the Clinton impeachment was. Clinton agreed to testify under oath for the Grand Jury via video. Ken Starr said they needed to record it because one of the jurors had to be absent and they would need to show it to her/him at a later time. He turned it over to the House Republicans. Then Newt Gingrich released it to the world.

No other Grand Jury testimony in any case has been released in this way. Here’s a little “dignified” tid-bit:

Q. If the person being deposed kissed the breast of another
person, would that be in the definition of sexual relations as
you understood it in the Jones case. 

A. Yes, that would constitute contact . . . 

Q. So, touching, in your view then and now–the person
being deposed touching or kissing the breast of another person
would fall within the definition? 

A. That’s correct sir. 

Q. And you testified that you didn’t have sexual relations
with Monica Lewinsky in the Jones deposition, under that
definition, correct? 

A. That’s correct, sir. 

Q. If the person being deposed touched the genitalia of
another person, would that be” and with the intent to arouse
the sexual desire, arouse or gratify, as defined in definition
(1), would that be, under your understanding then and now—- 

A. Yes, sir. 

Q [continuing]. Sexual relations?

A. Yes, sir. 

Q. Yes it would? 

A. Yes, it would. If you had direct contact with any of
these places in the body, if you had direct contact with intent
to arouse or gratify, that would fall within the definition. 

Q. So, you didn’t do any of those three things—- 

A. You—- 

Q [continuing]. With Monica Lewinsky? 

A. You are free to infer that my testimony is that I did
not have sexual relations, as I understood this term to be
defined.

In other words, they were demanding to know if he had tried to make Lewinsky orgasm. Lindsey Graham pursued that line of questioning in the hearings.

They based the impeachment of a president on the fact that he lied in a dismissed civil case about specifically where he had touched a woman he was having an improper but consensual affair with.

That’s what Karl Rove considers “dignified.”

The equivalent would be to depose Stormy Daniels.

Maybe the Democrats should give them the “dignified” process the Republicans gave to Clinton. Lord knows there’s plenty of that kind of material out there. He’s been accused of assaulting at least 20 women.

I doubt that Rove is this deluded. But you really have to wonder what’s in the water at the Trump hotels that all these people are talking about the Clinton Impeachment like it wasn’t a humiliating spectacle for everyone concerned, not the least of whom were Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton.

Not that they cared about any of that, of course.

Grrrrr.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

He just cares about corruption, that’s all

Donald Trump, the scourge of international corruption, seems to have a double standard. I know you are shocked:

The United States recalled its ambassador to Zambia on Monday after he criticized the government for sending a gay couple to prison and accused officials of stealing millions of dollars of public funds.

The ambassador, Daniel L. Foote had, described the treatment of the gay couple as “horrifying” — setting off outrage in Zambia, a conservative Christian country. But analysts said that the main reason for his departure was that he had repeatedly declared that ministry officials had misappropriated millions.

In an unusually combative public statement for a member of the diplomatic corps, Mr. Foote had said that the Zambian government “wants foreign diplomats to be compliant, with open pocketbooks and closed mouths.”

Mr. Foote’s comments set off recriminations in Zambia, a copper-producing, landlocked country in southern Africa. Zambia’s president, Edgar Lungu, said he did not want Mr. Foote in the country, even if Zambia risked losing its annual $500 million in American aid.

[…]
Despite all of the aid Zambia receives, the ambassador wrote, he had found it very difficult to get an audience with the president.

“Both the American taxpayers, and Zambian citizens, deserve a privileged, two-way partnership, not a one-way donation that works out to $200 million per meeting with the head of state,” Mr. Foote wrote.

I’m sure Trump has been working night and day on this and will be . He is obsessed with ending corruption around the world as you know.

Lol.

And by the way, the Trump administration has announced that it plans to withdraw US military presence from Africa.  He probably will end up withholding money for Zambia as well, not because of corruption, of course, but because he wants to stop all aid to shithole countries and spend it on walls and a gigantic military. I’m not sure where this military is going to be stationed but if I had to guess it will be in states that vote for Donald Trump.

We’re still running our Happy Hollandaise Year-End fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we go into what is going to be one of the most intense years in American political history, you can do so below.

Thanks very much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am very grateful. — d

The perverse logic of win-win-ism
by Tom Sullivan

I’ve written for a decade about the Midas cult possessed with turning every human interaction into a transaction (gold). The cult believes any product or service provided by “we the people” that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism.

I’ve described the modern corporate model for capitalism as another of those “invention gone wrong” tales common in fiction. In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) and in films since the early 20th century, those wayward human inventions are always technological or biological. In lived reality, they are legal: corporations, “artificial persons” conceived in law and born on paper (once, anyway).

In this Dutch mini-documentary, Anand Giridharadas (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World“) has the number of “market world” and those who benefit from it at the expense of everyone else.

May the 2010s be the final decade of the Age of Capital.

May 2020 usher in an Age of Reform.

Alternate tweet: Anand says things to the Dutch Parliament because his own wouldn’t invite him to say them. pic.twitter.com/oZtE8BMERC— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 25, 2019

Here is the full 30-min. documentary:

Giridharadas describes the plutocratic class behind the Second Gilded Age and the “win-win” ideology plutocrats use to promote it (and themselves) [timestamp 9:30]:

The idea of win-win has become a very crucial gospel of this market-world religion. And what win-win-ism says is that it is possible to fight for the least among us, it is possible to fight inequality, reduce poverty, without hurting those on top. In fact, in ways that enrich and create profit for those on top. Now, this is an amazing promise. I mean, what a notion, right? If you apply this to other domains, you say, Wow! We can empower women in ways that will increase men’s power? Wow! How do you do that? Wow! We can end slavery in ways that will make white plantation owners even richer than they were before? Wow! What a great promise. Sounds wonderful, right? Well, it’s a lie. It’s a lie.

The lie shows up when the one percent — the people who benefit most — burnish their self-images by trying to do good for the people harmed by the system they themselves created.

Giridharadas in essence extends Upton Sinclair’s 1934 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Rich people promote ideas that justify their elevated place in society, as they have since the age of kings [timestamp 24:10]:

Through their patronage of ideas festivals, things like TED, publications, etc., the plutocrats have fostered a kind of set of court thinkers within the palace who supply the justifications for their rule. And some of these people were never serious thinkers to begin with, but some of them were serious who got tempted into [being] the kind of thinkers who don’t challenge the fundamental dynamics and equations of a winners-take-all society.

Where Giridharadas’s analysis falls short is in emphasizing the players to the exclusion of the underlying legal structure that created and sustains the current plutocracy. That structure is fundamental to the modern corporate form humans created half a century after “Frankenstein” first appeared in print. As I’ve suggested, that system has since metastasized. It had help:

Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.

Whether it’s turning your child’s education from a shared public cost into a corporate profit center; or turning the principle of one-man, one-vote into one-dollar, one-vote; or carbon tax credits and accounting tricks for addressing rising sea levels; questioning the universal application of a business approach to any human need or problem prompts the challenge, “Do you have something against making a profit?” A more subtle form of red-baiting, this ploy is supposed to be a conversation stopper. Yes? You’re a commie. Game over.

“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser told Bill Moyers five years ago. Indeed, there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (Robert Nozick) since before Hammurabi. Capitalism in its present form is a new isotope toxic to those who fuel it with their labor. It is system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish.

We can imagine a better world, Giridharadas believes. We can end the age of capital and usher in the age of reform. Let’s hope we find the will to create it.

We’re still running our Happy Hollandaise Year-End fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we go into what is going to be one of the most intense years in American political history, you can do so below.

Thanks very much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am very grateful. — digby