Week One
by digby
Also had a huge temper tantrum over the size of his inauguration crowd, insisted he actually won the popular vote and ordered an investigation into non-existent voter fraud. His press people went to the press lied to their faces and called it “alternative facts.” Oh and re-instituted and expanded the global gag rule.
Hugh Hewitt said on Meet the Press this morning that he didn’t repeal DACA or the Russian sanctions in the first week so he’s really a moderate.
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A big beautiful basket of hate
by digby
Some lovely Real Americans lovin’ them some Trump:
The challenge Annette Cottrell pondered was how to grade President Trump’s stormy first full week on the job. A trade war bubbling up with Mexico. A divisive border wall. A ban on refugees from war-torn countries. Brawls with the news media and national parks.
“I’d give him an A-plus,” Ms. Cottrell, 38, said from her salon, Mane Attraction, on Main Street here in the seat of a conservative Ohio county of pastures and maple groves where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote. “He’s doing what he said he was going to be doing.”
So, about that head-spinning week. Mr. Trump drew a torrent of criticism after pressing a series of falsehoods about voter fraud, the size of the crowd at his inauguration and his attacks on the intelligence community. His rapid-fire executive actions reversing years of policy on immigration, abortion and the environment left his critics seething and fearful and liberal opponents preparing a volley of legal challenges to blunt them.
But in more than two dozen interviews this week, voters who helped hand Mr. Trump the presidency — die-hards and reluctant supporters alike — were cheering from their living rooms, offices and diners across America as they saw the outlines of a new conservative era in government fast taking shape, even if they were still a little uneasy about the man doing the shaping.
Yes, they said, Mr. Trump should tone down his tweets and rein in what they gently called his impulse toward “exaggeration.”
“Honestly, he sometimes needs to shut up,” said Joshua Wade, 24, of Ann Arbor, Mich., a state that had not supported a Republican for president since George Bush in 1988. “Just do what we elected you to do. We won. Drop the inauguration stuff. It’s fine.”
Gun rights top Mr. Wade’s wish list for the new administration. He wants Supreme Court nominees friendly to gun owners and laws that extend concealed-carry rights across state lines. He said he had been encouraged that Mr. Trump took swift action on some campaign promises during his early days in office.
“There’s no doubt: He’s good at showmanship,” said Mr. Wade, a registered Republican. “But I think this first week is proving he’s capable of following through on that with real action.”
But what appeals to supporters may be turning off independents. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday gave Mr. Trump only a 36 percent job approval rating and found that majorities of people surveyed said he was neither honest nor levelheaded.
Still, Trump voters interviewed said they cared little if the president spouted off on Twitter because he was issuing the kind of executive actions many had long craved — freezing federal grant money for environmental research, banning foreign aid for groups that give abortion counseling and cutting off immigration from several Muslim-majority nations.
“Trump’s done more in five days than Obama did in eight years,” said Doug Cooperrider, 58, who works in construction repairing bridges and roads around central Ohio.
The bar at Boondocks, where Mr. Cooperrider dug into a B.L.T. sandwich on a sleety morning, sits about 1,900 miles from the Arizona deserts where sections of the multibillion-dollar border wall may rise. The Hispanic population is tiny in this overwhelmingly white county of 35,000, and it has grown only 0.3 percent in the past five years.
Still, people here said they felt as if immigration had undercut wages for construction workers in the area. One man said he was uneasy about the longstanding Somali community in Columbus, about an hour’s drive south. Several embraced Mr. Trump’s directives that limited new refugees, ordered up the border wall and cut off federal grant money to cities labeled sanctuaries for immigrants.
“I’m 100 percent behind the wall,” said Ms. Cottrell, the salon owner. “If he asked me to lay the first brick, I’d sign up. I’m tired of them being here illegally and cutthroating the rest of us.”
There’s more but I couldn’t stomach it.
I know I am supposed to feel empathy for these people. But right now I really have to dig deeply to find it. But I will. I understand that it’s my fault that they hate everyone who isn’t exctly like them and I need to change my ways. Working on it …
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The full-time vote suppression zealots lining up to help Trump
by digby
I wrote about a couple of the bright lights who are going to help Trump’s push to deny voting rights in states that didn’t vote for him for Salon today:
Rumor has it that even though he seemed to be reacting in response to questions from the press this week, Donald Trump has wanted to launch his “voter fraud” investigation ever since he realized he lost the popular vote by a huge margin — and people inside the administration were desperately trying to talk him out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but Trump has made it clear since the election that he believes there was massive fraud in November:
For the record, there’s no evidence that systematic voter fraud exists. None. Nonetheless, Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was “rigged” during the campaign, eventually saying that he would accept the election results — if he won. He even lied about that. He won, but he still won’t accept the results.
It obvious that this obsession with voter fraud in the face of winning an election is another aspect of Trump’s bottomless narcissism. From what he said in his interview with David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem only exists in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton. But it’s important to recognize that Trump is felicitously playing into the hands of right-wing operatives who have been working to suppress the votes of Democratic constituencies for years. And they are very excited about this new “investigation.”
One of Trump’s advisers on immigration, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has reportedly been encouraging Trump to initiate this investigation. He told the Wichita Eagle on Wednesday:
I’ve advised [Trump] on the issue of voter fraud in multiple forms. I’m not the only one, but he’s been very interested in finding ways to reduce voter fraud.
I know that he is interested in investigating the issue on a national scale, but I also know that he would like to see the Justice Department launch specific investigations where there is real serious, specific evidence of voter fraud.
There seems to be a plan to focus this “voter fraud” investigation on the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote for Republicans. Indeed, this is something the right wing has been trying to do for years and it was that effort that led to one of the greatest political scandals of the George W. Bush administration: the U.S. attorney scandal. You may recall that this was all about trying to force federal prosecutors to pursue phony voter fraud cases in Democratic states, often against Democratic officials. When these prosecutors refused, they were fired and replaced.
I’ve written about Kobach for Salon before, both when he was a somewhat obscure figure in the conservative movement and again when he ascended to the highest levels of national politics. He has two missions in life, and they’re tied together. The first is to suppress the votes of Democrats and the second is to curb immigration. The Republicans see both of those goals as essential to their ability to win in the future since their base of white conservative voters is shrinking. Trump’s motives are simpler, as are his supporters’ — they believe immigrants and American-born people of color are cheating at the ballot box in order to gain “goodies” from the federal government, at the expense of hardworking Real Americans.
But Kobach is not the only person pushing these two interconnected issues. There is an entire political industry devoted to it, from sophisticated election attorney networks like the Republican National Lawyers Association to grassroots organizations like True the Vote. And there are certain “experts” who have been around for a long while, pushing the issue whenever the opportunity presents itself.
One of them is a man with the striking name of Hans von Spakovsky. Those who follow voting issues are very familiar with him from his time in the Bush administration’s Department of Justice Voting Section, where he worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act and played fast and loose with ethical rules, as amply documented in this piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Von Spakovsky was serving as a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission at the time, and up for consideration as a permanent member. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and not just because of his ethical lapses. He is a zealous activist for vote suppression all over the country.
He too has an attitude that often reveals his underlying motivations. He recently spoke with Breitbart News:
“Their attitude towards any voter fraud prosecutions has always been: if the defendants are black, well, you must be doing it for racist reasons,” he noted. “Remember, we saw that in the New Black Panther story out of Philly in 2008, when Eric Holder came in and immediately dismissed the voter intimidation case against them, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Black Panthers had been intimidating voters and poll watchers. It was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department because they didn’t believe that black defendants should be prosecuted. They don’t believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the voting and election law.”
The New Black Panther case was another cynical attempt by the right wing to turn the tables on Democrats and the Obama administration to show that African-Americans are the real racists. It was absurd but made for good copy, and continued to provide cover for conservatives who seem to see vote fraud in every urban neighborhood where black or brown people lived.
This week von Spakovsky wrote an op-ed for Fox News with fellow voter-fraud obsessive John Fund of the National Review, lauding President Trump for his decision to investigate. They re-litigated the tiresome Black Panther story and accused the Obama-Holder Justice Department of encouraging non-existent systematic voter fraud by refusing to force states to purge voters off of the rolls, quoting the same Pew study Donald Trump cites as his expert source on the subject. (The author of the study has repeatedly made it clear that he did not find evidence of voter fraud. They keep citing it anyway.) They particularly cited California as being a hive of fraudulent voter activity that requires federal intervention.
It’s unknown at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation,” or what form it’s likely to take. (It’s always possible that more rational White House aides can talk the president out of this foolhardy and wasteful boondoggle.) But Kobach is definitely advising him informally and you can be sure von Spakovsky stands ready to help in any way he can, along with dozens of others who have been working on this so-called issue for many years. Keeping people from voting is their calling, and Donald Trump has given them a new lease on life.
Not Silent Bystanders
by Batocchio
It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day (one of several such memorial days worldwide). Last year, I quoted a piece about remembering by Holocaust survivor Gene Klein. He wrote a timely piece about intervention last November that I wanted to feature this year:
In the time preceding our deportation from our home in Hungary, my family experienced many acts of anti-Semitism. A brick was thrown through our living room window. A man spoke at an assembly at my school, shouting that the Jews were responsible for all of the country’s troubles. My sister’s high school prom was ruined by a group of local hooligans who burst in shouting anti-Semitic slogans. The street became a gauntlet of threats and taunts.
All of our assailants felt empowered by the Nazi party influence in Hungary, but none of these actions were officially sanctioned by the government. They were the result of people inspired by racial rhetoric to take matters into their own hands.
I am reminded of these affronts to my family’s freedom and safety as I read the news about the dramatic increase in racial hate crimes since the election (as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups). Some people now feel empowered to insult immigrants, African Americans and Muslims the way people in our town felt empowered to say hateful things to us. It felt terrible to be the target of such hatred, having done nothing to bring it about. And most of all, it felt incredibly lonely. The abuse that we experienced before we were deported took place in public, often in front of many onlookers. The failure of others to intervene—those who watched silently and then carried on with the business of their day—was socially isolating, and their silence dramatically increased our sense of fear and vulnerability.
It is critical in today’s climate that we not be silent bystanders who simply witness the victimization of others. Social psychologists have studied for decades the circumstances under which people will intervene when others need help. They find that three factors are critical. First, when we feel empathy for the victim, we are more likely to help. Second, when we feel that we have the ability to help, we will feel more confident about stepping in. And third, when we recognize that it is our responsibility to help, we are more likely to do so. When there are many onlookers, this responsibility can be diffused in a crowd: everyone thinks that someone else will help, and so no one does, and since no one is helping, it seems like the appropriate thing to do is just to watch or walk by.
What this means for all of us is that if we witness someone who is abused because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation, there are three things we can do:
1. Feel their pain. Imagine what it would feel like to be in their place. Even if you see that person as very different from you, we can all remember—or at least imagine—what it is like to be threatened, shouted at, or physically harmed. Act as if the victim is a family member or a close friend.
2. Feel confident, because it is not that hard to help. All you need is a few kind words for the victim. Simply walking up to the target of the attack and asking if he or she is okay can mean the world to that person, and this will likely encourage others to follow your example. Research on bystander intervention tells us that once one person helps, others follow. That first courageous helper sets the tone, makes clear that intervention is called for, and leads the way for others to join.
3. Recognize your responsibility. If you think that you can remain quiet because others will step up, the victim is likely to go unaided. Imagine you are the only witness—that unless you help, you are condemning someone else to suffer.
Klein provides a vivid example of this:
When my two sisters and my mother were in a concentration camp, they were marched through a German town every evening on their way to work the night shift in a munitions factory. They were often taunted by people on the street. Children would stick out their tongues. Passing soldiers would curse at them. On one occasion, Hitler youth wearing neatly pressed uniforms and ugly smiles shouted at them, and the women were surprised when an elderly German man shouted back at their persecutors: “Don’t laugh at them! There is nothing for them to be ashamed of. It is not their shame; it is our shame!” The boys stopped and stared at the old man, uncertain of what to do next, then straggled off. My sisters always remembered that German gentleman who stood out in contrast to the malice all around them.
My hope is that if a woman is yelled at today on the street of your hometown for wearing a headscarf, she will find herself surrounded by others defending her right to dress as she pleases, and the perpetrator will stand alone, shamed. I hope that if you see an immigrant being told to go back to where he came from, you will stand with him in support of his right to be here. We must all be ready, always, to demonstrate what this country truly stands for.
I normally avoid getting too topical with Holocaust posts, but the relevance of these issues is unavoidable. The sobering reality is that ugly incidents are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. As Klein notes, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations have been tracking an increase in hate crimes. And the national news continues to be troubling.
Consider: President Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd (size insecurity) and then had two surrogates aggressively attack the press for fact-checking his obvious lie. Trump compared the CIA to Nazis and then blamed the media for depicting a “feud with the intelligence community” by Trump. These are bullying, authoritarian moves, amounting to ‘suck up to me, agreed with my lies or I’ll hurt you.’ Candidate Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, lied about seeing thousands of American Muslims cheer the 9/11 attacks and has otherwise lied to incite racial tensions and violence (as Josh Marshall points out, “authoritarian figures require violence and disorder”). Candidate Trump repeatedly referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and has vowed to go ahead with his crazy plan to build an expensive wall on the Mexican border. He’s ordered that a weekly list of crimes by undocumented workers be published, which is sure to stoke further racial tensions. Trump has claimed, without a shred of proof, that 3 to 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, has cited bizarre, illogical reasons for believing this and has announced he will investigate voter fraud, which is likely laying the groundwork for further conservative voter suppression efforts. Trump claims that he’ll defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo on the issue of torture (officially, they don’t endorse it), but he’s a strong proponent of it, even though a mountain of evidence shows that torture is notoriously unreliable for producing accurate intelligence. This means Trump has accused Americans of being Nazis… while endorsing torture techniques used by the Nazis (among others). In terms of lessons learned from World War II and the Holocaust, so far Trump has shown he’s learned all the wrong stuff. And Trump has only been president for a week. Things can get much, much worse.
Hatred and fear certainly don’t need to reach the level of genocide to destroy a country, and many lives before that. We know how these stories can go. The United States has plenty of ugly history but also some great accomplishments. Right now, we’re seeing shades of the same spiteful, hateful and fearful spirit that displaced and killed Native Americans, enslaved black people, held lynchings as public entertainment and perpetuated Jim Crow laws. We don’t need to and dare not wait for those impulses to grow further to oppose them. Luckily, we’re also seeing some of the same spirit that moved abolitionists, suffragettes and freedom riders and we can’t encourage or support those impulses enough. As Klein says, we can “demonstrate what this country truly stands for.” We don’t need to be silent bystanders. The lessons to be learned from World War II and the Holocaust are many, but they include: The nation that held the Nazis accountable to the rule of law at Nuremberg should not throw away those principles every time some insecure bully with a megaphone shits his pants. Bigotry must be challenged. And we can empathize, intervene and support one another.
I gotcher red meat for you right here
by digby
Well, I guess we know who in the White House is indulging Trump’s worst instincts:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call.
“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
I don’t think Bannon is crazy. He knows that Trump’s cult desperately needs enemies and they need to have their hatreds stoked. The press is an easy target. I doubt it will be enough for Trump’s crazies — their hatred run toward more powerless populations. But they desperately need to convince their people that all this bad press isn’t true. I’m sure this will get big play on Fox and talk radio.
The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him.
Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website he ran until last August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump this weekend, when the president said he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth.”
During a call to discuss Sean M. Spicer, the president’s press secretary, Mr. Bannon ratcheted up the criticism, offering a broad indictment of the news media as biased against Mr. Trump and out of touch with the American public. That’s an argument familiar to readers of Breitbart and followers of Trump-friendly personalities like Sean Hannity.
“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)
“That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”
Of all of Mr. Trump’s advisers in the White House, Mr. Bannon is the one tasked with implementing the nationalist vision that Mr. Trump channeled during the later months of the campaign, one that stemmed from Mr. Bannon himself. And in many ways Mr. Trump’s first week has put into action that vision — from the description of “American carnage’’ Mr. Trump laid out in his inauguration speech, to a series of executive actions outlining policy on trade agreements, immigration, the building of a border wall and the demands that Mexico pay for it.
He is one of the strongest forces in a White House with competing power centers. A savvy manipulator of the press, and a proud provocateur, Mr. Bannon was among the few advisers in Mr. Trump’s circle who was said to have urged on Mr. Spicer’s confrontational, emotional statement to a shocked White House briefing room on Saturday, when the White House disputed press reports on the inauguration crowd size. He mostly shares Mr. Trump’s view that the news media has misunderstood the movement that the president rode into office.
On the telephone, Mr. Bannon spoke in blunt but calm tones, peppered with a dose of profanities, and humorously referred to himself at one point as “Darth Vader.” He said, with ironic relish, that Mr. Trump was elected by a surge of support from “the working class hobbits and deplorables.”
The conversation was initiated by Mr. Bannon to offer praise for Mr. Spicer, who has been criticized this week for making false claims at the White House podium about the attendance of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd, for calling reporters dishonest and lecturing them about what stories to write and for failing to disavow Mr. Trump’s lie about widespread voter fraud in the election.
Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Spicer had lost credibility with the news media, Mr. Bannon chortled. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We think that’s a badge of honor. ‘Questioning his integrity’ — are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work.”
“You’re the opposition party,” Mr. Bannon said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.”
Mr. Bannon mostly referred to the “elite” or “mainstream” media, but he cited The New York Times and The Washington Post by name.
“The paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated,” Mr. Bannon said. “They got it 100 percent wrong.”
They did get it wrong in that they enabled James Comey’s hit job and worked diligently to bring Clinton down to Trump’s level and it worked. They were not wrong, however, in assuming that Trump was not overwhelmingly popular in this country. He is not. Here’s yet another new poll showing Trump at 36% approval. That means he’s lost ground since the election.
He’s also just straight up trying to intimidate them. It may work. They have not been known for their courage in speaking truth to power in recent times. And Bannon is one scary guy.
Update: This is interesting. It posits that in order to achieve Trump’s foreign policy aims, the media and the intelligence community both have to be thoroughly discredited. I’m guess that would be Bannon. He’s a self-proclaimed Leninist.
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Tiny meatballs and pigs in a blanket
by digby
Remember all the studies Spicer says Trump saw that persuaded him that he lost the popular vote due to millions of undocumented workers voting? Here’s the real reason he believes it:
On Monday, President Trump gathered House and Senate leaders in the State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you reception, served them tiny meatballs and pigs-in-a-blanket, and quickly launched into a story meant to illustrate what he believes to be rampant, unchecked voter fraud.
Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.
When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.
In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word.
The three witnesses recall the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.
Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.
Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, he said.
The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.
“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”
She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.
But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting.
Either way, the tale left its mark on Mr. Trump, who is known to act on anecdote, and on Wednesday redoubled his efforts to build a border wall and crack down on immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.
The story, the aide added, had made a big impression on Mr. Trump.
Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. That is, to use the technical term, “cray-cray.”
If every single Senator didn’t go home and look up the 25th Amendment after that then they are not doing their jobs. This man is a delusional imbecile.
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Illegal voter in chief
by digby
So the big controversy of the day about Trump believing that he had the biggest crowds in history and that he only lost the popular vote because “three to five million people voted illegally,” it’s worth recalling that Trump himself tried to vote illegally, on camera:
It’s HARD to vote illegally. Trump himself was turned away from 3 polling places in 2004 b/c he wasn’t on the rolls. https://t.co/tAW366jr7F— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) January 24, 2017
Now, I will grant that your average Mexican undocumented worker is a lot smarter and more resourceful than Donald Trump. But still, for three million votes to be illegal, this sort of thing would be pretty hard to hide.
Also, there have been numerous studies over many, many years and there is no systematic voter fraud. Period. This is an “alternate fact.”
Not that his followers haven’t gobbled it up whole:
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Grim Reaper
by digby
Here’s a story to send chills down your spine:
When Jeff Sessions was Alabama’s attorney general, he supported the death sentence for a Ku Klux Klan member convicted of lynching a black teenager. Mr. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings for attorney general begin on Tuesday, points to this to rebut the charges of racism that have followed him for decades.
Yet we learn more about Mr. Sessions’ legal mind-set from a look at the 40-plus death sentences he fought to uphold as Alabama’s attorney general from 1995 to 1997. He worked to execute insane, mentally ill and intellectually disabled people, among others, who were convicted in trials riddled with instances of prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination and grossly inadequate defense lawyering. Mr. Sessions’ eager participation in an unjust Alabama capital system makes him a frightening prospective civil rights enforcer for the nation.
Mr. Sessions secured the execution of Varnall Weeks, who believed he was God and would “reign in heaven as a tortoise” after his death. After the Supreme Court banned executions of insane people, Mr. Sessions persuaded a federal court to defer to an Alabama court’s findings that Mr. Weeks was competent enough to be killed even though he met “the dictionary generic definition of insanity.”
Mr. Sessions also pushed for the death penalty for Samuel Ivery, a black man convicted of decapitating a black woman. At his trial, Mr. Ivery claimed insanity and presented evidence that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and believed himself a “ninja of God.” The prosecutor countered during closing arguments that “this is not another case of ni**eritous,” that is, racism. Mr. Ivery later argued that the slur tainted his conviction with racial bias, but the appellate court sided with Mr. Sessions in upholding his death sentence.
By contrast, a state appellate court ruled against Mr. Sessions when it reversed the conviction and death sentence of Levi Pace, a black man. His trial was tainted with racial discrimination during the selection of the grand jury foreman, and the trial court failed to strike two prospective jurors who “felt it was their duty to recommend a sentence of death, regardless of the circumstances.”
Many of the people Mr. Sessions worked to execute had received abysmal representation at trial. Holly Wood and Eugene Clemons, two black men, were both classified as “educable mentally retarded.” Yet their lawyers failed to present any proof of their intellectual disabilities, even though mitigating evidence of this type can be crucial to avoiding death sentences. At the time of their trials, Mr. Wood’s lawyer had practiced law for less than a year and Mr. Clemons’s jury didn’t have a single black member. In 1996, Mr. Sessions rebuffed both of their initial appeals. Alabama executed Mr. Wood in 2010, even after a federal court found that his I.Q. met “the definition of mental retardation.”
This is a newspaper article from Sessions’ first hearings for the federal judgeship in the 1980s
A lot of people had parents who thought like that. They didn’t carry on the tradition.
He is also one of the primary proponents of draconian immigration laws, even proposing to close immigration altogether. He’s a white supremacist. We’re going to have a white supremacist for Attorney General of the United States. He’s not the first. But it’s a been quite a while.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick—who in 1985 worked on the defense team that represented three black civil rights leaders targeted by Sen. Jeff Sessions in the notorious voter fraud case from Alabama’s Perry County—has penned a scathing letter to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders urging them to reject his appointment as attorney general.
Describing the Perry County case as a “cautionary tale” when political objectives are favored over facts, Patrick wrote: “Thirty years ago, because it was widely understood and appreciated that his appointment to the bench would raise a questions about this Committee’s commitment to a just, fair and open justice system, Mr. Sessions’ nomination was withdrawn on a bi-partisan basis. I respectfully suggest to you that this moment requires similar consideration and a similar outcome.”
Patrick was among more than 1,100 practicing attorneys and legal scholars who wrote to Congress on Tuesday voicing similar opposition to Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. “At a time when our nation is so divided, when so many people feel so deeply that their lived experienced is unjust, Mr. Sessions is the wrong person to place in charge of our justice system,” his letter continued.
Separately, multiple NAACP leaders who were protesting Sessions’ nomination inside his Alabama office were arrested.
The powerful denunciation on Tuesday marks the third time in nearly three decades Patrick, now the managing director at Bain Capital, has formally challenged Sessions. He first argued against Sessions in the 1985 Perry County voter fraud case, in which three civil rights leaders were wrongly accused of tampering with absentee ballots. The following year Sessions was nominated to become a federal judge, and Patrick testified against the appointment. Sessions was rejected to serve on the federal branch in large part because of the Perry County ruling and charges of racism that sprung from the case.
Sessions’ nomination has caused widespread alarm among civil rights leaders, many of whom have pointed out that his work as US Attorney in Mobile and as Alabama’s senator involved efforts to dismantle voters’ rights, allegations of racism, and staunch opposition to immigration. His hearing is schedule for January 10th—the same day Trump has announced he would be holding a rare press conference for reporters.
They must be worried to use up the occasion of Trump’s first press conference since July as cover.
The press shouldn’t let them get away with it. They ought to put Sessions at the top of the cycle.
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The truth about lying
by digby
BRIAN STELTER (HOST): Let’s tell some truths about lying, because the way Donald Trump lies has people rethinking some of the basic premises of journalism, like the assumption that everything a president says is automatically news. When President-elect Trump lies so casually, so cynically, the news isn’t so much the false thing he said, it’s that he felt like he could just go ahead and say it, go ahead and lie to you. That’s the story. Why does he bend and flex and twist and warp and distort the truth? Personally I’m curious because I think Trump does it differently than past presidents. His lies are different and deserve scrutiny.
[…]
Court cases involving Trump have shown that he lies even when the truth is really easy to discern. And that’s what we’re seeing all again now. That’s why I think fact-checking is important, but the framing of these stories is even more important. Take Trump’s promotion of this voter fraud conspiracy idea. He said on Twitter “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” The journalistic impulse was to say something like “Trump claims he won the popular vote.” I would suggest to you that better framing is “Trump lies again, embracing a far-right-wing conspiracy theory.” See, focusing on the falsehood creates more confusion and gives the lie even more life. And that’s the wrong way to go. Focusing on Trump’s tendency to buy into BS gets to what’s really going on here. This calls for more reporting and for reporters to show our work, to show that we actually know the truth.
There’s a lot of data out there showing that when people are shown facts it only tends to reinforce their own biases. So what Stelter is saying is true. Journalism cannot rely on simply fact-checking, although it’s important to do it. It has to try to promote truth, not just facts, and that means they have to think hard about ways to talk about politics and government that successfully does that.
At least they’re talking about it. Whether they can actually do it, I don’t know. We are certainly seeing plenty of “if both sides criticize me it means I must be doing something right” defensiveness among journalists. And plenty of plain old “he said/she said” and “both sides do it” takes out there. For instance:
Progressives who insist racism is why Trump won are guilty of the same villainization they decry when others do it. https://t.co/Tgw3XpsAMd— Jeremy W. Peters (@jwpetersNYT) December 27, 2016
Still, it’s good news that media critics are tackling this seriously. We are in big trouble if we don’t figure out a way to govern from a common reality.
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
Happy Hollandaise everyone.
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You don’t know Jack
by Tom Sullivan
Many artistic luminaries passed away in 2016. Those who died during the heat of campaign season escaped my attention, however. Thankfully, Roy Edroso at the Village Voice led me (quite indirectly) to one who went to his reward in late October.
Edroso has been on safari in Rightbloggerland where veterans of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders are “fighting a rear guard action against various threats to the Republic, including Facebook’s fake news alerts, the new Star Wars movie, and basic math.” There was little reaction to Trump’s “unpresidented” tweet, Edroso found. However, when someone tagged Trump booster Mike Cernovich for misspelling “Gettysburg” on Twitter, Cernovich relpied, “Strategic Typos increase engagement as it makes you stop to look. Thus more views. As your reply proves.” Pee Wee would have stopped at, “I meant to do that.”
Edroso adds:
This may also have been the spur of a Twitter convo between the New York Post’s Seth Mandel and Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel about how that Obama guy isn’t so smart actually: “It’s Obama’s utter lack of intellectual curiosity that grates…” “Despite his intellectual pretense, I’ve never taken Obama as a big reader.” “he’s not (though he occasionally pretends to read, with hilarious results).” “Got to hand it to Dubya… he read A LOT,” etc. By 2014 they’ll be telling us it was Obama who couldn’t spell.
Rightbloggerland: space where everyday laws of nature no longer apply. Quantum conservatism we might call it. It is a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.
But it was this passage from Edroso led me to the death notice of the luminary in question (or is it gloominary?):
At Fox News, John R. Lott voiced another common complaint: “These fact checkers have their own biases — usually the same liberal biases that we see in the rest of the mainstream media.” For example, Lott wrote, fact-checker Politifact said Trump’s claims of “large scale voter fraud” were bullshit, but aha, “voter fraud in 2008 gave Al Franken the Senatorship in Minnesota.” That is, if you believe the evidence Lott was offering, namely another Fox News editorial written by… John R. Lott containing rock-solid proof points like “undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.”
Okay, my neurons fire funny, but this echoes the intellectual rigor of the age’s premier cartoonist-theologian, Los Angeles native Jack Chick. You know, the author of those darkly bizarre, sometimes violent, comic book gospel tracts found on the toilet tank in gas station restrooms. It seems the angels have carried Jack home for a visual replay of his life:
The New York Times marked Jack Chick’s passing on October 26:
“To some, Chick tracts are American folk art or even a form of religious pornography, titillating and somewhat dangerous,” Brill’s Content wrote in 1999. “Chick is the ultimate underground artist.”
[…]
Mr. Chick saw a long list of practices and beliefs as enemies of true Christianity. In addition to Islam, they included abortion, drugs, evolution, homosexuality, rock music, the Roman Catholic Church, Judaism, Mormonism and Freemasonry — but also Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, Halloween and updated translations of the Bible. He and the Christian Booksellers Association parted ways in 1981, partly because of his work’s anti-Catholic messages.
Jack Chick was 92.
I have a small bundle of Chick tracts collected over the years. One that passed through my hands into oblivion, sadly, was a comic book-sized, anti-Catholic expose in the style of Classics Illustrated (those of a certain age might remember). Priest have secret sex with nuns and sacrifice the babies to Satan — that sort of thing. Jack also had a thing for documenting his charges by footnoting his illustrated screeds with references to past screeds:
We can expect a lot of similarly scholarly work under the Trump administration, as Edroso illustrates:
… Accuracy in Media just dropped a scathing indictment of Ken Burns. Yes, they’re talking about the Civil War and baseball guy, who they say “hammers at left-wing mantras in his documentaries.” For example, in “his blatantly biased documentary Central Park Five,” Burns focused on the fact that the Five were exonerated by DNA evidence — or, as Accuracy in Media had it, “exonerated” in quotes, since “they would have to stand trial and be declared not guilty in order to be exonerated. Instead their sentences were simply vacated.” It looks as if the reign of The Leader will have a suitable intellectual complement.
Since he was dead before Election Day, one hopes Jack Chick voted his last ballot early or by mail. That would, of course, make the conservative icon one of Dear Leader’s loathsome dead voters.
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Happy Hollandaise everyone.
cheers — digby
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