Hullabaloo

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

 
So is every white judge is on notice that they can't fairly judge minority defendants?

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter on Tuesday likened the federal judge overseeing the civil fraud case against Trump University to an Iraqi-American presiding over a case involving “American Sniper” Chris Kyle.

The California congressman told Sean Hannity on his radio program that he thought it was a mistake for Trump to bring up Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s “Mexican heritage,” arguing that Trump should keep his business matters separate from his presidential campaign. Hunter said it was “bigger deal” that the law firm in the class action case paid the Clintons to give a speech in 2009. Still, Hunter decided to try out a thought experiment.

“What I like to do is take these arguments out to there logical extremes,” Hunter said on Sean Hannity’s radio program. “So let’s say that Chris Kyle, the American sniper, is still alive and he was on trial for something, and his judge was a Muslim-American of Iraqi descent. Here you have Chris Kyle, who’s killed a whole bunch of bad guys in Iraq. Would that be a fair trial for Chris Kyle? If you had that judge there? Probably not. And Chris Kyle could probably say, ‘this guy’s not gonna like me.’”

“You could look at the O.J. trial too, was that fair?” asked Hunter.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to take this fatuous, racist nonsense for another six months. (I don't even know what he's talking about with the OJ trial ... black jurors, maybe?)

This is what it comes to. An American Muslim of Iraqi descent  cannot be impartial when judging a soldier who killed Iraqis in the war? He must not be aware that we have actual Muslims in the armed services, many of whom killed Iraqis during the war or his tiny little brains would burst out of his thick head.

But I will note that he's out there blabbering the Trump talking points about the law firm who brought the case being contributors to Clinton. I would suggest that everyone put them at the top of their list if they ever get into legal trouble because they are clearly clairvoyant --- they must have known Trump was going to run for president back in 2010 when they took the case.

Trump is working very hard to make these cases look like some kind of political hack jobs, but they aren't. He's obviously very worried his phony "business" success (as opposed to inherited fortune) is going to be exposed. We'll see if the press has enough fortitude to resist the he said/she said he's offering them.

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digby 6/08/2016 04:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Joe and Mika

by digby

“Donald, guess what, I’m not going to support you until you get your act together. You’re acting like a bush-league loser, you’re acting like a racist, you’re acting like a bigot,” Scarborough said during the first hour of “Morning Joe.” “This is called art of the deal. I’m taking my deal off the table. Until you come to the table and get on the other side of the table and prove to me you’re not a bigot and you don’t take my party down in the ditch, you don’t have my endorsement.”

Scarborough continued, telling the presumptive GOP presidential nominee that he and other Republicans “can’t use Hillary Clinton as a gun against my head” to march him into supporting his campaign for the general election.

“I’m taking the gun away from my head, I’m putting it on the table, and now it is in your hands on whether you are going to prove to the Republican Party and me personally that you’re not a bigot,” he said. “So don’t use Hillary Clinton as a threat against me. Don’t use Hillary Clinton as an excuse, as your blank check to say racist things about people born in Indiana. No, Donald, you don’t get to play it that way. I’m not scared of you and I’m not scared of the base, because they are just as pissed off as me. Walk away. It’s called the art of the deal. It’s what Donald Trump has been preaching all his life. They are — I can’t say the word they are. They’re, they’re weak.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in, noting that Trump might have used the word Scarborough was looking for at a February rally in New Hampshire, when a woman in the crowd called Ted Cruz “a pussy” and Trump repeated the remark.

“Paul Ryan, you can’t use Hillary Clinton, either,” Brzezinski said, “in your pathetic, weak kind of meandering around this problem, because [panelist] Willie Geist, you know what we have here with these Republican leaders who are like, ‘Can’t have Hillary Clinton.’ Really? You hate her that much you’ll take a racist. You hate her that much we’re going to have eight more years of the Republicans we had who said from the get-go with Obama, we just want him to fail. You’re going to have more of the same. You are more of the same.”

Joe? Mika? If it walks like an orange pompadoured racist and talks like an orange pompadoured racist, it's Donald Trump. If it equivocates like cowardly bigot and dissembles like a cowardly bigot, it's Paul Ryan.

This is the Republican party.

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digby 6/08/2016 02:30:00 PM

 
Conservatism is no longer the point

by digby

So Donald Trump endorsed an incumbent Republican House candidate --- and she lost. Amanda Marcotte unpacks what this means:

So what happened? Ellmers has become, in the past year, a favorite target for conservative groups looking for a scapegoat for the Republican party’s supposed failure to be conservative enough. She became the symbol for conservatives who charge Republicans with catering to “political correctness,” not because she was especially liberal or cooperative — she is a rock ridge conservative just like most of the party — buy because someone needed to be the conduit for conservative rage and she drew the short straw.

It’s also no coincidence that the punching bag for conservative rage happened to be a woman. Add to it the fact that the lines of her district were redrawn, making her easier to beat. For those who wanted a sacrifice to the gods of right wing purity, Ellmers was an attractive target.

The specific charges against Ellmers of insufficient right-wing purity are incredibly minor. Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity ran ads condemning Ellmers for voting with Republican leadership on the spending bill, the Export-Import Bank, and things like the wind energy subsidy. On their own, these are issues far too esoteric or wonky to really move voters against someone. But symbolically, these votes were framed as Ellmers being a classic example of a Republican who supposedly sins by cooperating with the dread President Obama.

Another big issue was Ellmers supposedly being too soft on rape victims. Last year, when Republicans went on their annual spree of passing go-nowhere anti-choice bills, Ellmers raised objections to one bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, on the grounds that there was no exception for rape victims.

To be clear, she wasn’t overcome with pity for women who might be forced to carry rape-caused pregnancies to term. Nor was she opposed to forcing women to give birth even if their fetuses had terrible abnormalities or the pregnancies would cause disability or blindness. She just worried that a male-d0minated party being so hostile to rape victims might be bad optics, saying that the anti-victim stuff was not being “smart about how we’re moving forward”.

They took her down for the same reason they like Donald Trump. They hate "political correctness" and anyone who practices it, no matter what their actual policies or who endorses them, is on their list.

This is a very dangerous path for Republicans. It's no longer about being conservative. It's just straight up about being as asshole.

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digby 6/08/2016 01:00:00 PM

 
Jeffrey Lord represents

by digby

Last night featured one of the most bizarrely disturbing election night spectacles I've ever seen on cable news. And I've seen a few.  John Amato at Crook and Liars caught the action:

Cable news has been flooded with coverage of Donald Trump's racist attacks on Judge Curiel, the judge in the civil lawsuit against Trump University. Many Republican leaders have spoken out against Trump's racism, from Speaker Paul Ryan to Newt Gingrich to Karl Rove to the women of Outnumbered. Surfing the cable news dial, you couldn't find anyone that believed Donald Trump was justified in claiming that the judge wouldn't "treat him fairly" because of his Mexican heritage.

But last night during CNN's Super Tuesday coverage, Trump supporter and frequent CNN analyst Jeffrey Lord took over a segment about the criticisms Trump faced.
It began with an innocent enough question from Michael Smerconish who said,
"..there's a question that Donald Trump can't answer which is, if he believes that this gentleman (Judge Curiel) is biased against him, why hasn't his legal team gone to court, followed the process and filed a recusal motion? The lawyers won't touch it and he has no response to that question." 

That's as straightforward a question on Trump's bias claims that anyone could make. If he is so unhappy and feels unfairly victimized by a biased judge, then why don't Trump's lawyers make a trial motion to remove him? 

Jeffrey Lord ignored the question entirely and started dreaming aloud about how Trump would put his stamp on the Republican party like Ronald Reagan did. No, he really did.
And then he veered deeper into crazy town by claiming that many conservatives and the Republican party have... 

"sold out on race. They have bought into this whole notion of identity politics. It's bad."
So it's not Trump who is bad for smearing a judge, who was born in America, for being unfit to try his case because of his Mexican heritage, but it's the entire Republican establishment and grassroots for acknowledging his racism.

That's a standard right wing line. But it's the kind of thing you usually just see on your twitter feed or in newspaper comment sections. This guy is one of Trump's top surrogates on CNN.

He represents.


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digby 6/08/2016 11:00:00 AM

 
A different kind of politics

by digby

I wrote about Clinton's big win for Salon this morning:

Everyone said yesterday was historic. But if you tuned into the cable news networks all day and most of the early evening you would have assumed it was historic because Donald Trump had said something racist. This would be confusing if you've followed the campaign since Donald Trump says racist things virtually every day.  But he said something unusually racist recently which had the networks chasing Republican officials and operatives all day long asking them to disavow the racism.
But lo and behold despite the non-stop coverage of this exciting development, the historic moment was something else entirely. It turns out that for the first time in American history,  a woman was about to become the presumptive nominee for president. That Trump is a wily one. He managed to dominate the news cycle even on such a red-letter day.

The networks could be somewhat excused by the fact that the AP had already reported that Hillary Clinton had exceeded the number of delegates required to win the nomination the night before. They had been surveying super-delegates, the members of congress, ex-presidents and and local party officials who make up 20% of the delegates and are free to vote for whomever they choose, and found that she had gone over the top.  It was a case of premature electoral projection. But still, the real clinching number was understood to be when Clinton reached the magic number of a majority of pledged delegates, reflecting the will of the voters. And barring some very substantial polling errors, it was clear this was going to happen on the last big day of primaries when six states would cast their votes. For the most part the TV networks shrugged.

As it turns out however, after Trump gave his perfunctory teleprompter speech in which he said exactly what he always says but without the color and excitement, a strange thing began to happen. The pundits and the reporters all seemed to notice at the same time that Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination. And it seemed to dawn on them that it was an important moment worth noting. After all, it had never happened before. Ever.

For those of us of the female persuasion especially, this carries some emotional freight. Walking around in the world as a member of half the population with only 20% of the representation in government and 5% in the top jobs in business and a thousand other statistics that prove just how unequal you are in your own society feels ... strange.  Indeed, it's mind-boggling. So it means something to a lot of women that a democratic process can produce a woman president. It's bigger than just getting a job. It's getting a job by a vote of a majority of the people --- that's the kind of validation that has teeth.

But the truth is that voting women into office has a number of positive effects on our system that go beyond the symbolic.  According to this article by Matt Yglesias, when women are elected it tends to have a multiplying effect on other offices. Just the fact of having them there seems to inspire other women and perhaps more importantly, normalize the idea of it for everyone.  Apparently takes people actually seeing a woman perform a job traditionally held by men to prove they can do it.

But as important as that is, more women in high office has a direct impact on policy. According to the Washington Post:

For one, women are more likely than men to advocate for issues often associated with women’s interests — child care, women’s health, abortion, pay equity and the like. There are many studies, but see Michele Swers’s two books to start with. This shows up, for example, in in floor speeches and legislative debates, where women are more likely to discuss issues in terms of women’s interests. (Women are also more likely than men to give floor speeches, period.) [...]

Other research suggests that women may be more effective legislators than men. Craig Volden, Alan Wiseman and Dana Wittmer find that, within the minority party, women are able to get their sponsored bills further through the legislative process. Sarah Anzia and Christopher Berry have shown that women sponsor and co-sponsor more bills than men do, and deliver about 9 percent more funding to their districts.

It also happens that the more successful they are at getting their agenda passed, the more they are able to get men on board as well. Given the chance women are actually pretty good at politics.  And they are particularly effective at progressive governance. This would seem to be a good thing for the Democratic party.

And this brings us to Hillary Clinton herself. She has been a controversial figure since she first came on the national scene and offended everyone by using her maiden name and saying she could have baked cookies and had teas but decided to pursue her profession. During her stint as first lady she was considered by many, and not just Republicans, to be a far-left feminist whose radical ideas were leading poor Bubba astray.  It's must be somewhat jarring for her to now be considered a right wing hawk by many Democrats, but that's more a reflection of the pendulum swinging to the left than any change on her part. The truth is that she's always been a mainstream Democrat, little philosophically different than the dozens of mainstream male Democrats most of us have voted for for decades. 

Now she's the first woman presumptive nominee of the Democratic party and she's proved she's pretty good at politics too as this piece by Ezra Klein at Vox points out:

She has achieved something no one else in the history of American politics has even come close to doing, yet she is widely considered an inept, flawed candidate.

These two things are not unrelated.

Twice now we have thought that it should have been easy for Clinton to do what no one has ever done before. Twice now we have dismissed her as a weak candidate and a flawed leader for struggling to break a barrier that no one else has ever come near breaking.

America has hosted 56 presidential elections — 33 of them before women received the right to vote. Exactly zero of those elections featured a female nominee from one of the two major political parties.

Until Hillary Clinton.

There is something about Clinton that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement. Or perhaps there is something about us that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement.

Perhaps, in ways we still do not fully appreciate, the reason no one has ever broken the glass ceiling in American politics is because it's really fucking hard to break. Before Clinton, no one even came close.

Whether you like Clinton or hate her — and plenty of Americans hate her — it's time to admit that the reason Clinton was the one to break it is because Clinton is actually really good at politics.

She's just good at politics in a way we haven't learned to appreciate.

Klein goes on to observe that politics inherently favors male traits  because well, it's always been a man's game! And Clinton doesn't do particularly well at the big rally, strutting around, ginning up the crowd kind of politics. In fact, many people can't understand how she can possibly be winning unless she's cheating somehow. 

But she's winning too big for that. Before last night her winning margin in the popular vote was bigger than any Democratic presidential primary candidate in the last 30 years: 

How Clinton's popular vote margin compares to past winners... pic.twitter.com/eMZWAVZbEA

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) June 7, 2016

And after last night that margin grew even bigger.  

So, what gives? How can someone who is supposedly so bad at all the things we think politicians have to be good at be winning like that? 

Klein proposes that she's using a different kind of politics. And she's very, very good at it:

[A]nother way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 523 governors of members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; 13 have endorsed Sanders.

This work is a grind — it's not big speeches, it doesn't come with wide applause, and it requires an emotional toughness most human beings can't summon.

But Clinton is arguably better at that than anyone in American politics today. In 2000, she won a Senate seat that meant serving amidst Republicans who had destroyed her health care bill and sought to impeach her husband. And she kept her head down, found common ground, and won them over...

And Clinton isn't just better — she's relentless. After losing to Barack Obama, she rebuilt those relationships, campaigning hard for him in the general, serving as his secretary of state, reaching out to longtime allies who had crushed her campaign by endorsing him over her.

That's not as sexy as Donald Trump landing in his gold plated 767, but it'll get 'er done. 

None of this is to say that Clinton is necessarily going to be a great president. We simply don't know that. She is, after all, a mainstream Democrat very similar to President Obama with all that that implies. She'll be under the same constraints and probably even more pressure from her left from people who were much more inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. You never really know how someone is going to perform in that job until they do it. 

But as Klein says, it's time to show some respect for Clinton's political skills. Nobody gets where she is without them. It's just that her skills are different than the men who came before and we simply don't recognize them as skills. And maybe that's the only way a woman could have done it.

One thing is for sure, the Democrats need someone with political skill to ensure they beat Donald Trump. And maybe it's just lucky it's Clinton going up against him. He is a wild man who doesn't play by the rules but in her own way, neither does she. I'd bet on her skills over his animal instincts any day. 

digby 6/08/2016 09:30:00 AM

 

Diplomat v. dictator

by Tom Sullivan

Citing the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and women's rights pioneers, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanked supporters last night for helping her become the first woman in American history to secure the presidential nomination of a major party. She described Senator Bernie Sanders' rival campaign as "extraordinary," saying "the vigorous debate that we've had about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase upward mobility, have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America."

In one of several pointed references to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, Clinton cited her mother's influence, "She taught me never to back down from a bully which it turns out was pretty good advice." Clinton said:

To be great, we can't be small. We have to be as big as the values that define America. And we are a big hearted, fair minded country. We teach our children that is one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Not just for people who look a certain way or worship a certain way or love a certain way. For all, indivisible. This election is not, however, about about the same old fights between Republicans and Democrats. This election is different.

It really is about who we are as a nation. It's about millions of Americans coming together so take we are better than this. We won't let this happen in America. And if you agree, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, I hope you will join us in just a few weeks, we will meet in Philadelphia which gave birth to our nation back in that hot summer of 1776. Those early patriots knew they would all rise or fall together. Well, to day that is more true than ever. Our campaign will take the message to every corner of our country. We're stronger when our economy works for everyone, not just those at the top.

After a day of being pounded by members of his own party for racist comments, Trump was on a teleprompter last night giving a speech written by writers trying hard to make him sound like a president not a dictator. He insisted the country is a wreck, broke. He decried economic and foreign policy issues "bigly" destroying the nation. But the would-be president with no legislative experience and no idea what Brexit means also has no earthly idea how to accomplish any of what he says he's going to do. Last night Trump referred to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as PPP. His comments this week on judges and justice in this country suggest he is just as clueless about what the limitations of his powers as president would be. He holds a constitutional worldview that legal scholars believe "shows contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law."

It recalls the new president of San Marcos from Woody Allen's Bananas:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old!

Digby no doubt will have more later from the People's Republic of Santa Monica on the California primary results still being tallied.


Undercover Blue 6/08/2016 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

 

History Made

by digby

I wrote this back in November, 2014 for The Nation:



Even though lively primary campaigns often feel like bloody civil wars, they are among the few times that voters get a chance to express their wishes to party elites. Unfortunately, it looks as if that memorably tumultuous primary campaign of 2008 between Senators Clinton and Obama also determined the Democratic nominee through 2016, possibly 2020. This is regrettable. The voters deserve to have big national issues fully aired and argued before the campaign degenerates into the sickening partisan slime fest it’s destined to be. 

Many on the left end of the party would be happy to see Senator Bernie Sanders join the fray, and they’d be positively giddy if Senator Elizabeth Warren decided to give Clinton a run for her money. The more the merrier, in my book. 

With or without an energetic challenge, many liberals doubt that Hillary Clinton will be able to reassemble the Obama coalition if she is nominated, and they worry that she won’t turn out Democratic voters. I have to disagree: Clinton victories in deep-red states like Arkansas or Georgia may be a pipe dream, but there’s little reason to doubt that she will be able to kindle excitement among the Democratic faithful. Lest we forget, she would be the first woman nominated for president by a major political party in the United States. Half the population has never seen a president who looks like them—half 

On the night Clinton spoke to the Democratic convention in 2008, exhorting her followers to get behind Barack Obama, I found myself watching with a group of young African-American women who were strong Obama supporters. They were not exactly Hillary fans in that moment, but I felt a shift in the room’s mood as she started to speak eloquently and passionately about the long struggle for women’s rights. When she said, “My mother was born before women could vote—but in this election, my daughter got to vote for her mother for president,” those young Obama-supporting women next to me all spontaneously stood and cheered, one of them exclaiming, “There’s the Hillary I know! There she is!” I was reminded that both Clintons were always more popular among the rank and file than they were among the liberal cognoscenti. 

Democratic women will be excited to vote for Clinton in 2016, and I think the rest of the Obama coalition will be as well. All other considerations aside, the first woman president is a big deal. I plan to criticize her without restraint when she takes positions with which I disagree. I fully expect to be frustrated and often angry—as I have been with every president in my lifetime—and I’ll call it like I see it. But if she wins, I will also allow myself at least a few moments to feel the pleasure and pride of finally seeing a woman elected to the top job. It’s been a long time coming.
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digby 6/07/2016 06:05:00 PM

 
Trump on American Exceptionalism

by digby


I have my issues with the term as well, but not for these reasons. Apparently, Trump thinks we should "take back" all the things we've "given" the rest of the world.

“I don’t like the term. I’ll be honest with you. People say, ‘Oh he’s not patriotic.’ Look, if I’m a Russian, or I’m a German, or I’m a person we do business with, why, you know, I don’t think it’s a very nice term. We’re exceptional; you’re not. First of all, Germany is eating our lunch. So they say, ‘Why are you exceptional? We’re doing a lot better than you.’ I never liked the term.

“And perhaps that’s because I don’t have a very big ego and I don’t need terms like that. Honestly. When you’re doing business — I watch Obama every once in a while saying ‘American exceptionalism,’ it’s [Trump makes a face]. I don’t like the term. Because we’re dealing — first of all, I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, ‘We’re exceptional. we’re more exceptional.’ Because essentially we’re saying, ‘We’re more outstanding than you. By the way, you’ve been eating our lunch for the last 20 years, but we’re more exceptional than you.’ I don’t like the term. I never liked it.

“When I see these politicians get up [and say], ‘the American exceptionalism’ — we’re dying. We owe 18 trillion in debt. I’d like to make us exceptional. And I’d like to talk later instead of now. Does that make any sense? Because I think you’re insulting the world. And you, know, if you’re German, or you’re from Japan, or you’re from China, you don’t want to have people saying that. I never liked the expression. And I see a lot of good patriots get up and talk about Amer — you can think it, but I don’t think we should say it. We may have a chance to say it in the not-too-distant future. But even then, I wouldn’t say it because when I take back the jobs, and when I take back all that money and we get all our stuff, I’m not going to rub it in. Let’s not rub it in. Let’s not rub it in. But I never liked that term.”

What a fucking idiot.

The problem with "American exceptionalism" isn't that saying it hurts the feelings of other countries --- something Trump isn't really shy about so that's just nonsense. The problem with American Exceptionalism is that it's used to excuse American global hegemony in the name of being God's anointed "shining city on a hill."

But whatever. The point here is that Trump says he "wants to take everything back that we've given the world" which is just ... crazy. Not to mention the fact that he also wants to take other country's oil because well, we need oil.

He's a paranoid moron who truly believes the country has been screwed by the rest of the world and we are weak and fragile because of it. He insists the rest of the world is "laughing at us".  The opposite is true. The US is the most powerful nation on earth.

And he's been saying this for 30 years like it's stuck in his head on a loop. Here's the op-ed Trump published back in 1987 that Clinton mentioned in her speech in San Diego:

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digby 6/07/2016 03:30:00 PM

 
Sure, he's a racist but he's our racist

by digby

Chris Christie shows fealty to his liege Lord:

Calling the controversy over Trump’s claims a media-driven “kerfuffle,” Christie said he would not respond to questions regarding whether Trump was being racist. He framed Trump’s claims as not atypical: “There are always going to be conflicts regarding civil lawsuits. People are always going to express their opinions,” he said. “Those are Donald's opinions and he has the right to express them—the same way anybody else has a right to express any of their views regarding how they are treated in the civil or criminal courts in this country. That’s part of what free speech is all about.”

He's a real profile in courage isn't he?

Others, like Orin Hatch say that people should be nicer to Trump because he's a first time candidate. Paul Ryan is twisting himself into a pretzel saying Trump is not a racist but he says racist things. Lindsay Graham says Trump's given people an off-ramp al though he hasn't said he's on it.

Most of the Republicans calling out Trump for racism today are still endorsing him. But you can bet that the one's in tight races are starting to think about defecting.

Here's one:

Let's see how many follow ...

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digby 6/07/2016 01:30:00 PM

 
False equivalency for dummies

by digby

This is an absurdity of a campaign. We shouldn't fool ourselves here we shouldn't fall into the trap of a false equivalency that somehow Trump and Clinton are playing on the same playing field or are at the same level. They are not. This is a joke and an absurdity and it would be an embarrassment and a tragedy for this country if Donald trump would somehow be elected. It's the shame of the Republican party that he is the party's nominee. --- Ron Reagan

I wrote about this for Salon this morning:


One of the most vexing challenges of the Trump phenomenon is how the press should deal with it. There's never been anything quite like it and journalism is having to try to navigate this campaign as the rules are being rewritten on the fly. Back in the beginning the The Huffington Post had tried to keep the whole thing in perspective by relegating the campaign to their entertainment pages but eventually had to move it back to politics when it became clear that Republican voters were actually taking Trump seriously. Today they cover him like a normal politician but append a standard disclaimer at the end of their articles about him pointing out that he's an extremist with noxious views.

Trump has brought the tabloids into the race already, with his good friend David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, helpfully providing smears of his rival Ted Cruz during the primary. Now Pecker has hired notorious Clinton hater Dick Morris as the Enquirer's chief political correspondent so it's likely Trump will be fed a steady diet of tabloid tid-bits which he will undoubtedly share with his adoring fans. So far, the mainstream media has resisted the temptation to run with Clinton gossip stories mainly because there's so much coming over the transom about Trump. But they are out there and are likely to seep into the coverage as the Hillary smear industry gets up and running. There's nothing new in that but Trump is a master of tabloid media so we can probably expect this to play a different role than it has in the past.

TV news organizations, meanwhile, have been notorious for allowing Trump to flout their rules. They happily let him call in rather than appear on camera and give him hours of airtime in the hope that he'll say something news worthy which, to be honest, he often does. His lies and reversals are so constant and so blatant that reporters seem to be almost paralyzed as he slithers and slides out of their grasp. He is sui generis and nobody knows quite what to do about it.

Media critics have been weighing in recently as the situation has become acute. NPR's "On the Media" correspondent Bob Garfield has been particularly vociferous lately imploring the media to recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses to America. In this column he takes them to task for covering the Trump candidacy "like a bemused recap of House of Cards." He wrote:

The rapacious CBS Chairman Les Moonves and the cable-newslike channels are delighted at the spectacle; disaster is always great for ratings. But this is not a show, to be consumed and titillated by and parsed. It is a conflagration of hatred and authoritarianism on its way to consuming us, or at least that which makes us us. Trumpism is raging out of control and the Fourth Estate responds how?

By going through the motions.

The usual false balance. The usual staged cable bickering. The usual dry contextual analysis. The usual intermittent truth-squading to garnish our careless daily servings of uncontested hate speech, incitement and manifest lies. The usual reluctance to “be part of the story” -- which, in fact, we are inextricably part of because we in large measure created it by giving oxygen to his every incendiary outrage and being our soundbitten, compulsively enabling selves...[the]reflexive focus on the latest development, the political ebb and flow and the architecture of the coming election simply buries the lede -- that the man is monstrously unfit and un-American -- and normalizes the grossly, tragically abnormal.

And then he tells them what he really thinks which is that they are falling into the trap of false equivalence between the parties, fear of right wing pressure and a reluctance to call a fascist a fascist.

Margaret Sullivan, former NY Times ombudsman and current media columnist for the Washington Post has similar concerns, particularly the notion that the media is pursuing a "false equivalence" rather than simple truth-telling:

[T]his perceived need to push for “fairness” for Trump — as if he has been mistreated or put at a disadvantage — baffles me. Trump gets far more media attention than other candidates, if only because he says such outrageous things, commanding the daily news cycle over and over.
[...]
Wayne Barrett, the investigative reporter who has been covering Trump for 40 years (and whose reporting brought about Trump’s first federal grand jury investigation) told me in an interview: “The great failing is not in print media. But the campaigns occur on the screen.”... Many hard-hitting stories from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Daily Beast and elsewhere have received little follow-up on TV — “not one minute of air time that I’ve seen” — but the slightest hint of a new angle on Hillary Clinton’s email practices can occupy most of a news cycle. (An exception was TV’s attention, last week, to complaints about Trump University.)

Jay Rosen, the New York University professor and author of the PressThink blog, is concerned about how this concept of fairness might play out. “Does it mean ‘we can’t take sides,’ or does it mean ‘let’s treat unequal things equally’?” The latter, which he called “distortion toward the middle,” ought to be prevented, he said.

The Nation's Eric Alterman wrote about the print media's propensity for false equivalence as well, focusing particularly on the New York Times:

 From the earliest days of this campaign, Times reporters have been transparently eager to blame “both sides,” often regardless of circumstance. Last November, Times reporter Michael Barbaro devoted a lengthy article to the GOP candidates’ most brazen lies, albeit one filled with euphemisms for the word “lie.” Carly Fiorina “refused” to back down from a story about Planned Parenthood that was “roundly disputed,” he wrote. Ben Carson “harshly turned the questions” about inconsistencies in his life story “back on the reporters who asked them.” Donald Trump “utters plenty of refutable claims” and “set the tone for the embroidery” by creating “an entirely new category of overstatement in American politics.” But guess what? “The tendency to bend facts is bipartisan.” How do we know? Well, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton chose not to confess their infidelities to the nation during election cycles that took place a generation ago. And apparently Hillary Clinton once mistakenly described herself as being the granddaughter of four immigrants when, in fact, her paternal grandmother was born shortly after her family arrived in the United States—an error she quickly corrected. Barbaro also found Clinton’s explanations about her personal and State Department e-mail accounts to be unsatisfactory. He wrote that she had “used multiple devices, like an iPad, to read and send e-mail,” even though she’d said she “preferred” to read them all on a single device. He failed to note that the iPad didn’t even exist when Clinton set up her e-mail account, nor did he explain why expressing a preference counts as bending the truth

Here is an example of false equivalence from just this week. Nobody has done more to probe Donald Trump's noxious views than CNN's Jake Tapper. His grilling of the candidate over his bigoted comments about the federal judge overseeing his Trump University lawsuit in California was as good as it gets and he received many kudos for his aggressive journalism.

He continued to report on Trump on his show yesterday but also featured this harsh criticism of Hillary Clinton in which he lambasted the State Department's stated inability to release emails pertaining to her work on the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal to reporter David Sirota until after the election. He took on a very aggressive tone, editorializing about the importance of releasing this important information when people are deciding whether to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. However, he notes that while Clinton was President Obama's Secretary of State she openly advocated for the deal in glowing terms, even calling it the "gold standard", facts which have been known for years and have been well hashed out on the campaign trail and in the debates with Bernie Sanders. Now she says she has changed her mind and is against the deal. Politifact called it a flip-flop.

So what exactly do they think they will learn about her position that they don't already know? Maybe she was more involved than she says she was, which would be interesting, but somewhat meaningless since we know she advocated strongly for it all over the world. In the end you either believe she's really changed her mind or you don't and these documents from years ago will not shed any new light on that.

I don't mean to pick on Tapper. He's a great journalist, one of the best on cable news. The temptation to try to "even things out" with this sort of coverage has to be overwhelming when a personality like Trump dominates the coverage the way he does. It must feel to a straight mainstream journalist as if they're piling on him every day and it looks like they're being partisan and unfair. Certainly the right wing is accusing them of that non-stop --- as they have been for more than 30 years.

But the result of this "distortion toward the middle"  as Jay Rosen calls it, has the perverse affect of normalizing Trump and pathologizing Clinton in a way that equalizes them to Trump's advantage. He is an unqualified, unfit, unhinged authoritarian demagogue and she is a mainstream Democratic party politician. There is no equivalence between them. Let's hope the press listens to some of these critics and does a serious gut check whenever they are tempted to "balance" the coverage in this election.

digby 6/07/2016 12:00:00 PM

 
"The musky whiff of Trump pheromones"

by digby

“The media have already pivoted toward the general,” Bee said. “Well, toward the general direction of anything emanating the musky whiff of Trump pheromones.”

“Short of shooting an endangered gorilla or writing her economic policy on her tits, there’s only one way to grab the media’s attention,” she continued, referring to Clinton’s foreign policy roast of Donald Trump.

Herself pivoting to a segment she called “How the F*ck Did We Get Here?,” Bee explained the Republican party’s reluctant embrace of now-nominee Trump, capped off by Paul Ryan’s recent endorsement.

“One-by-one, Republicans turned up their collars and did the scuttle of shame into Trump’s limo until finally, predictably, the last domino fell.”

Now they find the doors are locked and they can't get out.

And the stench of Trump's fetid "Empire" cologne is choking them.


.

digby 6/07/2016 10:30:00 AM

 
QOTD: Republican angst edition 

by digby

On CNN just a few minutes ago:

Jim Geraghty, National Review: This is only going to get worse for Republicans.There is no better Trump behind the curtain waiting to be unveiled sometime. He's not going to get more sensible or more constructive with his words. This is who he is. He has the impulse control of a toddler. And there's no reason to think "oh, by November he'll pull his act together" he'll stop making controversial statements.  This is the Trump brand. White nationalism! Why would the Republican party ever want to be associated with this because they'll lose every swing state and every swing district 

Congressman Lee Zeldin NY: What about the Supreme Court?

Because what you want is a White Nationalist appointing Supreme Court justices. Natch.

Paul Ryan said Trump's remarks were racist so there's that.

Doug Heye GOP strategist: Paul Ryan is trying to talk about issues because Republicans can win on issues. But Donald Trump won't talk about issues. And if you're on the Hillary Clinton campaign this is the exact script that you want to write. Hillary Clinton is going to try to unify her party tonight and tomorrow. Republicans are fighting about whether or not their candidate is racist. And he sure is saying racist things.

Kate Bolduan: Steve is Hillary Clinton a better option?

Steve Lonegan former Cruz state chairman: I'm not voting for Hillary Clinton. I'm also not voting for Donald Trump. But what's ironic Kate is that the Courageous Conservative Pac we're focused down-ballot because we can't do anything about the White House which is turning out to be a debacle. I would jut remind everybody that there's a primary today in New Jersey and California. I'd watch what kind of numbers Donald Trump gets. If he gets less than 80% and he's running unopposed he's got a big problem and so does the whole Republican party.

Man ...


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digby 6/07/2016 09:00:00 AM

 

How the righteous have fallen

by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Sascha Wenninger via Creative Commons.

While most eyes are focused on today's Democratic presidential primary in California, other presidential contests are going on in New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico. But the down-ticket races have their own drama. Roll Call highlights congressional primaries in New Jersey, Iowa, California, and North Carolina.

North Carolina held its presidential primary on March 15, but because a federal court threw out the 2011 Republican congressional redistricting map in February, the state's congressional primaries using newly redrawn districts were postponed until today. (The district I voted in in March is not the same one I vote in today.) There is a primary today for candidates for the state supreme court as well. Because in February, a three-judge superior court panel disallowed the state's new retention election process for supreme court races, re-opening that contest, which will be held today. State legislative redistricting is still being reviewed in the courts.

One casualty of the congressional redraw in North Carolina is Republican U.S. congresswoman and former T-party darling Renee Elmers:

North Carolina Rep. Renee Ellmers, a Republican elected in 2010 with tea party support, has been pummeled by outside groups on the right upset with some of her legislative actions on spending, immigration and abortion.

In a stroke of political bad luck, redistricting pitted her in a member-on-member primary against Rep. George Holding, the son of a wealthy banking family with plenty of resources at his disposal.

Holding currently represents the 13th District. But because the new district was shifted across the state, he decided to challenge Ellmers in the newly redrawn 2nd District, which includes territory he currently represents. (He actually lives in the nearby 4th District).

Ellmers got a late boost over the weekend with an endorsement from Donald Trump, who recorded a robocall on her behalf. Ellmers is the first congressional candidate the presumptive GOP nominee has endorsed.

We'll find out later if Trump knows how to pick winners as he says he does.

At Slate, Jamelle Bouie writes:

Unfortunately for Ellmers, her right flank is fully mobilized against her—in a Republican primary, that’s enough to lose. And if she does, it will reverberate throughout the GOP landscape, a warning to any conservative lawmaker who decides they were elected to accomplish something and serve their constituents, not act as a mindless vote for ideology. Which makes this relatively low-key primary in North Carolina extremely relevant to national politics.

More than most, Ellmers’ fight for re-election is illustrative of major trends in the Republican Party; trends that led to a succession of needless standoffs over routine government funding; trends that sacrificed conservative policy victories for affective rage against Obama; and trends that have culminated in the most dysfunctional and ill-prepared nominee to ever grace the presidential stage.

The problem with ideological purity is you can never be pure enough.


Undercover Blue 6/07/2016 06:00:00 AM

Monday, June 06, 2016

 
More clueless blubbering

by digby

Please:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump reversed his position on U.S. intervention in Libya on Sunday, saying in an interview that he would have approved of a "surgical" strike to take out former Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi after telling voters the world would be better with the leader still in power.

“I didn't mind surgical. And I said surgical. You do a surgical shot and you take him out,” Trump said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation" aired Sunday.
But Trump has said before that U.S. involvement in Libya was a mistake.

“We would be so much better off if Gaddafi would be in charge right now," Trump said at a Texas debate in February.

But in the interview aired Sunday, Trump flipped that stance.

"I was for something, but I wasn't for what we have right now," Trump said. “I wasn't for what happened. Look at the way — I mean look at with Benghazi and all of the problems that we've had. It was handled horribly. … I was never for strong intervention. I could have seen surgical where you take out Gaddafi and his group.”

Future leader of the free world, people. This is what they voted for.

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digby 6/06/2016 06:00:00 PM

 
Take a little bow, progressives. You did good.

by digby

Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that I was an early and vociferous critic of the Obama administration's Grand Bargain.I first wrote about it in January of 2009, before Obama was inaugurated. And I didn't let up for more than four years, until it was well and truly dead and buried. If zombie Grand Bargain comes back under the next president you can be sure I'll go right for the head. It was always a fatuously stupid notion that it was worth cutting Social Security to "get it off the table" on the assumption that they would get something even better in return. You can't make old people eat cat food as a bargaining chip.

The good news is that virtually every high level Democrat, including President Obama, Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton, is now talking about expanding the program rather than cutting it. It's completely turned around. And according to this fantastic article, it happened because of good old fashioned progressive activism.

I should just note that those of us who opposed Obama's position did not demonize him or call him names. We assumed he was making a political calculation and that calculation was a mistake, not that he was corrupt or that he truly wanted old people to suffer. We were harsh in our criticism of the policy but it wasn't personal and we didn't indict his character --- at least I didn't and I can't think of any people who worked on this problem who did. I do not agree with the proposition that the only thing politicians ever respond to is pain. People who believe that have a very cramped view of human nature. It sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't but it's no guarantee of success. Indeed, enduring change requires changing hearts and minds

Progressives have done something real and important here. They moved the Democratic Party toward a more progressive position on a vital issue by banding together and persistently fighting for it. They should be proud of it.

The PCCC Bold Progressives has a petition going to include this in the DNC platform:


Tell the Democratic Platform drafting committee to make sure it reflects big progressive ideas like this.

---

Elizabeth Warren: “I’m proud that President Obama spoke out this week about protecting and expanding Social Security...Both Democratic Presidential candidates support expanding Social Security.” Now, tell the platform committee to put big progressive ideas like expanding Social Security in the 2016 Democratic Platform!

On Wednesday, President Obama made huge news by saying for the first time that we must expand Social Security benefits -- not cut them. This represents a sea change from 2012 when the White House was pushing to cut benefits as part of a “grand bargain” with Republicans.
THIS IS A GIANT WIN FOR PROGRESSIVES.
And it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Three years of activism by PCCC members and progressive allies led to 7 senators, then nearly all Democratic senators, then the majority of House Democrats, and then both Democratic candidates for president supporting expanding -- not cutting -- Social Security. And now, a sitting president. Activism matters. Together, we made history.
In 2 weeks, we have an opportunity to etch this victory in stone. That’s when a small committee of 15 Democrats will start writing the 2016 Democratic Platform.

Sign the petition to the platform drafting committee. Tell them to make sure it reflects big progressive ideas that have risen to the forefront in recent years -- starting with expanding Social Security, and also including debt-free college, breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and monopolies, paid family leave, a $15 min wage, banning for-profit prisons, ending fracking, a carbon tax to fight climate change, restoring voting rights, grand jury reform, public financing of congressional elections, overturning Citizens United, massive infrastructure investment, and ending the revolving door between Wall Street and government.

This can totally happen. The committee drafting the Democratic Platform includes progressive members of Congress like Barbara Lee, Elijah Cummings, and Keith Ellison and environmental hero Bill McKibben. This is potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity.Sign the petition today.

In 2013, Stephanie and I met with Elizabeth Warren shortly after her victory. In the course of a wide ranging conversation, we brought up how hard PCCC members and progressive allies had been fighting against proposed Social Security cuts.

Elizabeth Warren informed us for the first time that two of her colleagues had bills to expand Social Security benefits. Stephanie and I stared at each other in disbelief.

This idea had been written about by progressive thinkers, ranging from Duncan Black to Heather Parton. But now, with legislation from a red-state senator and a senator from the first presidential state of Iowa, there was an opportunity to fundamentally shift the debate.

A few months later, a group of progressive leaders met in a side room at the Netroots Nation conference in San Jose. We made a joint decision to shift our advocacy from merely fighting cuts to calling for expanding Social Security benefits to meet seniors’ true needs.

Represented in that room were the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Social Security Works, Democracy for America, MoveOn, Progressives United, CREDO Action, Daily Kos, Netroots Nation, Color of Change, the AFL-CIO, and the Working Families Party. Dozens of other organizations, ranging from the National Organization for Women to Latinos for a Secure Retirement, would later mobilize on this issue.

The following month, thanks to donations from people like you, the PCCC joined with allies to poll states such as Iowa, Texas, Kentucky, Colorado, and Hawaii. Expanding Social Security was popular by 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 margins everywhere, while cuts were supported by no more than 15% of voters anywhere.

A progressive platform is popular with the public. Sign the petition to the platform drafting committee telling them to ensure it reflects big progressive ideas that have risen to the forefront in recent years -- starting with expanding Social Security.

In late 2013, corporate-funded think tank Third Way attacked Elizabeth Warren on the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for her endorsement of expanding Social Security. PCCC members fought back, leading to many of Third Way’s own co-chairs resigning!

In 2014, our momentum continued. PCCC members were the #1 grassroots supporters of Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii) as he fended off a conservative primary challenge by running on expanding Social Security. Congressman Mike Honda (California) and now-Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (New Jersey) also won competitive primaries after running on this issue.

In January 2015, the Progressive Change Institute’s “Big Ideas” polling showed that likely 2016 voters supported expanding Social Security benefits by 70% to 15% -- a landslide. It also showed other big ideas like debt-free college and massive infrastructure investment enormously popular.

In March 2013, as we and our grassroots allies kept the volume high, Elizabeth Warren’s leadership got us from 7 senators to 42 senators in support of expansion. (It’s now 43 of 46 Democrats.) Our allies in the Congressional Progressive Caucus got a majority of House Democrats on the record supporting expansion.

In the past year, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both said they will not cut Social Security -- and each have plans to expand benefits. And we’ve come full circle with President Obama now saying, “It is time we finally made Social Security more generous and increase the benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they have earned."

Sign the petition to the platform drafting committee. Tell them the platform needs to be written BOLDLY and embrace big progressive ideas like expanding Social Security.

After signing, you can Tweet at the members of the platform committee, and we will deliver this petition to them before they start work on June 17.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- Adam Green, PCCC co-founder

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digby 6/06/2016 04:30:00 PM

 
He's handling it all himself now

by digby

This is getting embarrassing:

An embattled Donald Trump urgently rallied his most visible supporters to defend his attacks on a federal judge's Mexican ancestry during a conference call on Monday in which he ordered them to question the judge's credibility and impugn reporters as racists.

"We will overcome," Trump said, according to two supporters who were on the call and requested anonymity to share their notes with Bloomberg Politics. "And I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is."

There was no mention of apologizing or backing away from his widely criticized remarks about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing cases against the Trump University real-estate program.

When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff.
"Take that order and throw it the hell out," Trump said.

Told the memo was sent by Erica Freeman, a staffer who circulates information to surrogates, Trump said he didn't know her. He openly questioned how the campaign could defend itself if supporters weren't allowed to talk.

"Are there any other stupid letters that were sent to you folks?" Trump said. "That's one of the reasons I want to have this call, because you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren't so smart."

Brewer, who was on the call with prominent Republicans like Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, interjected again. "You all better get on the page," she told him.

In response, Trump said that he aspired to hold regular calls with surrogates in order to coordinate the campaign's message, a role usually reserved for lower ranking staffers than the nominee himself.

Read on ... oy.

I will be very curious to see if there is any movement in the polls this week. That may be the only thing that would make Trump sober up.

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digby 6/06/2016 03:00:00 PM

 

"You are the cause, I am the effect"

by digby

You may have heard about the rape case in Palo Alto in which a young man was sentenced to nly six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster outside a party.  The judge felt it would be wrong to sentence him for a longer time because it would have a negative impact on his life.

CNN's Ashleigh Banfield read aloud the victim's statement about the negative effect on her life from the assault a factor in this which didn't seem to be of much concern to the judge. It's devastating:



Salon's Sophia Tefaye:

“I fully respected his right to a trial, but even after twelve jurors unanimously convicted him guilty of three felonies, all he has admitted to doing is ingesting alcohol,” Banfield said, reciting the survivor’s words.

“The night the news came out I sat my parents down and told them that I had been assaulted, to not look at the news because it’s upsetting, just know that I’m okay, I’m right here, and I’m okay. But halfway through telling them, my mom had to hold me because I could no longer stand up,” Banfield read, choking up. 

Over the course of 23 minutes, Banfield got emotional at multiple times while reading the letter. 

“Lastly you said, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin a life,” Turner’s victim recalled of his defense. 

“A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine,” Banfield read. 

“Let me rephrase for you, I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me. You are the cause, I am the effect”

This is what people are talking about when they talk about rape culture.

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digby 6/06/2016 01:30:00 PM

 
High alert

by digby

Here's a media critic telling it like it is ...

It’s normal for Bob Garfield to critique the press — he does it every week as co-host of public radio program “On the Media.”

But now, he’s upping the ante exponentially, delivering strong rebukes to reporters over the airwaves and in a column for losing sight of Donald Trump’s intrinsic flaws as the presumptive Republican nominee. You know — that pattern of xenophobia, racism and misogyny that should have put Trump’s candidacy on life support months ago, according to Garfield.

“It’s about slapping a somnolent media into realizing that the stakes are extremely high,” Garfield said this week. “It’s a rare moment in American history where someone so fundamentally anti-democracy is in position to vie for the presidency.”

Comments like that show how Garfield, at least on the subject of Trump, has leaped from press criticism to advocacy, or “agitation,” as he called it.

Trump’s list of pros and cons tips heavily toward the negative in Garfield’s eyes. That’s why’s he’s so upset that the media have largely stopped challenging Trump’s divisive, hateful record while instead engaging him about his tax returns and possible picks for vice president.

To Garfield, Trump’s ascendancy represents a national emergency, and journalists are asleep at the switch.

“Why has there been no media crusade to deny him the presidency? The press jumps to warn America about missing children, tainted meat and approaching dustings of snow?” Garfield wrote this week in Mediapost. “Why are we not on high fucking alert?”

The worm is turning a bit right now although I wouldn't place a bet on it staying that way. The press isn't comfortable doing what Garfield prescribes because they are conditioned to believe that both sides are equivalent. If Trump manages to lower the temperature even a little bit, they'll happily turn their attention to Clinton to help them achieve a more comfortable equilibrium. The problem is that Trump is an undisciplined amateur who is incapable of being a "normal politician" so it won't last.

The big question then is whether the press will cover him realistically or if they will instead pathologize Clinton in order to achieve "balance." I wouldn't place a bet on it at this point.

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digby 6/06/2016 12:00:00 PM

 
"A hell of a wake-up call"

by digby

Oh my:

.@realdonaldtrump's bigoted comments about a Latino judge are so disgusting, even other Republicans are offended.https://t.co/3CEBq2jsDh

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 6, 2016

Meanwhile, Trump's tweeting stuff bout Ivanka's new business ventures.

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digby 6/06/2016 10:30:00 AM

 
Why the meltdown?

by digby

I wrote about Trump's crazy behavior for Salon today:

Why is Donald Trump so out of sorts?  Against all odds he managed to win the Republican nomination against the best and brightest stars from all factions of the Republican party. He did it without spending nearly as much money as the rest and without any study or preparation. He dominated the media which reportedly gave him a couple of billion dollars worth of free airtime. He came out of the primary five weeks ago on top of the world, ready to take on the Democrats who were still skirmishing in their primary, divided and at each others' throats.  It was the perfect time to make that presidential "pivot" from the primary to the general and start to show non-Republican Americans that he could be their president too. That didn't happen.

Instead we've seen Donald Trump do nothing but air his endless grievances, whine about the press, complain that he's being cheated, and double down on his dyspeptic racism, sexism and xenophobia. The more people tell him to cool it the more he explodes in public. He is the most ungracious winner in American politics. What gives?

If one had to guess it's that he thought that he'd already gotten the hardest hits he was going to have to take. It seems he believed that because he faced a large group of GOP heavyweights and had the rapt attention of the press for six months that he'd passed the crucible and he'd get unquestioning adoration from here on in. Unfortunately, this is where political inexperience and an unwillingness to listen to anyone but sycophants and the voices in your head creates a problem. The primary was  a cakewalk compared to the general election for a number of reasons, the most important being that his rivals were all walking on eggshells trying not to offend his voters.  Most of them were also Republican office holders and professional politicians who have a responsibility to their party and they generally try not to destroy their own members just in case they become the nominee. By the time they realized that it might actually be Donald Trump it was too late.

The press meanwhile was stuck in a different kind of spin cycle. They mostly just gawked at the spectacle like they were reporting on a 200 car pile-up on the interstate. They didn't dig very deeply because, like the Republicans, they simply could not fathom that he would actually become the nominee. And frankly, they never really devote a ton of resources to each primary candidate. They do some perfunctory digging and check out oppo from the various rivals but they never go very deeply into the candidates until they get the nomination.  But once the nomination is in hand, it's no hold barred and he press is going to delve into the nominee's business, personal life and history in every way. Apparently, Trump didn't know this.

And he's not handling it well. There are ominous signs that his campaign is imploding, mostly due to his micromanaging and inability to cut loose his fawning primary operatives in favor of serious professionals who know how to wage a general election campaign. He is more undisciplined than ever from his embarrassing tweets to obtuse comments on the stump like "look at my African-American! Look at him!" (It turns out the man wasn't actually a supporter.)  He has dodged and prevaricated about why he won't release his tax returns, using excuses that only a child could believe, raising questions about whether he's actually as rich as he says he is.

When the Washington Post published an expose on the Veterans fundraiser he held last winter and revealed that he had not written his own pledged million dollar check, he went ballistic on the media at a wild press conference, even calling a reporter a "sleaze" to his face. It was angry enough for reporters to be taken aback despite the fact that he commonly calls them disgusting, despicable liars at his rallies.

And when Hillary Clinton hit him very hard with a tough speech last week in which she used his own words against him to make the case that he's dangerously unfit for the job, his response was first unusually tepid --- he complained in a tweet that she wasn't "presidential" in a tweet --- and then recklessly authoritarian.  At a rally in San Jose, he let fly (13:55) with a long tirade about how she is President Obama's lapdog who is doing his bidding so he won't throw her in jail ("it's "yessir, Mr President Sir! Yessir! What would you like?! What would you like me to say here sir?!")Then he said this:

I used to say, leave it up to the lawyers. I have watched so many lawyers on so many different networks. I have read so much about the emails. Folks, honestly, she's guilty as hell. She's guilty as hell. And the fact that they even allow her to participate in this race is a disgrace to the United States, it's a disgrace to our nation. It's a disgrace.

So we'll see what happens, I don't know. I've always had great confidence in the FBI, I have great respect, I know some FBI folks, I've always had great confidence in them. I can't believe that they would let this go... I'm telling you, it's a great system we have, we have a great country, we're going to make it a lot greater by the war, we love our country, but look, we love our country and I don't believe our country can let her get away with this crime, I don't believe it. So we'll see. And you know what? If they do let her get away with it, it will be a big topic of conversation on the campaign trail, I can tell you that.

And then if I win? (pauses, shrugs dramatically, shakes his head) It's called a five year statue of limitations. If I win ... everything's going to be fair but I'm sure the Attorney General will take a very good look at it from a fair standpoint, ok? I'm sure. I think it's disgraceful.

In interviews with CNN's Jake Tapper and CBS's John Dickerson, he repeated this threat to have her criminally charged  ("very fairly" of course) by his own Justice Department if they fail to jail her before the election. When Dickerson asked what crime it was she was supposed to have committed he said, "she's guilty of the server, she's guilty of - you look at confidential information, I mean, all of the information that probably has gotten out all over the world. And then you know what else she's also guilty of? Stupidity and bad judgment."

If stupidity and bad judgment are federal crimes, Donald Trump would be serving a hundred consecutive life sentences.

He evidently does not understand that a president does not have the power to have someone thrown in federal prison if they fail to do his bidding nor is it permissible for a presidential candidate to threaten to sic his future Attorney General on his political opponents.  It's called abuse of power and it's a very serious business. (He keeps making this "mistake" about presidential power in various contexts and maybe it's time that people took him at his word.)

But Trump was clearly rattled by more than just criticism by Clinton and the press about his comments and his fundraiser. He's edgy and he's agitated in a way we haven't seen before and it seems to mostly be centered around the questions about his business practices.

There has been some talk about Trump University for a while now simply because there have been a bunch of lawsuits brought against it all over the country. Back in 2013, the New York Attorney General brought suit against Trump for running a bait and switch operation and calling it a "university" which is illegal. The press has been digging into this scam more seriously now that Trump is the presumptive nominee and it clearly makes him nervous.

That may be why at his San Diego rally last week he launched into a bizarre 15 minute tirade against the judge overseeing one of his lawsuits. And what he said was shocking:

“I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this.The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican…I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump.”

The judge is American, born in Indiana. But that didn't stop Trump. In successive interviews over the past few days he has reiterated his view that the judge was giving him unfair rulings because of his "Mexican heritage". Trump said over and over again "I'm building a wall! It's an inherent conflict of interest" as if that explained it perfectly. On Face the Nation when John Dickerson asked if he believed a Muslim judge would treat him unfairly because of his proposal to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the U.S., Trump replied: "It's possible, yes. Yeah. That would be possible, absolutely."

He claimed it is simple common sense and blamed the controversy on political correctness. No matter what any of his interviewers said he was obstinate in his insistence that Judge Curiel was biased against him because he's "building a wall."

This is a truly ugly charge and one that goes way beyond anything we've seen in a presidential race before. It's one thing to criticize a federal judge. People do that all the time although presidential candidates generally understand that it's important to show respect for the system and leave that sort of thing to others. But to say that judges of Mexican ethnicity or Muslim religion are presume to be biased due to their backgrounds if they rule against him in a legal proceeding is beyond the pale.

Trump probably believes this. One can guess that he thinks a woman judge could only rule against him out of similar bias. And he would likewise find it absurd if the plaintiffs in one of his lawsuits said the same thing about a white male judge. He is a racist, sexist bigot. But his behavior points to something else as well. He's throwing up whatever distractions he can to muddy the waters about this Trump University issue. And he's fraying around the edges as people begin to look more closely at all of his business ventures, many of which seem to be similar scams, like Trump Mortgage and this multi-level marketing scheme, ACN.

It appears that Donald Trump agreed to sell his name to just about anyone who asked him, no matter how cheap or fraudulent. Why would he do that? Perhaps the question he really doesn't want to have to answer is, "does it make any sense that a billionaire would be involved with a series of tawdry, snakeoil con games?"  Why would he need money that badly? It looks like he'll say anything to misdirect the press and keep them from asking it.

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digby 6/06/2016 09:00:00 AM