Hullabaloo

Friday, November 25, 2016

 
Ingraham for Deportation Czar?

by digby

It's her portfolio, after all:

The popular conservative radio talk show host is willing to accept the position of White House press secretary in Donald Trump’s administration, but she wants a bigger title, a role in policymaking and a seat at the decision-making table with the president, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
[...]
Ingraham has made no secret of her interest in the press secretary gig, a high-profile position that could put her in front of the White House press corps —and in front of the cameras —every day. Ingraham, a Fox News contributor and former Supreme Court clerk, is against same-sex marriage and was a supporter of Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. during the campaign – a ban he has softened on since clinching the Republican nomination last May.

“I would say it’s not broad enough,” Ingraham said on her radio show in December of 2015.

Ingraham has confirmed that her name is in the mix and hinted, in her public comments addressing the speculation, that she wants a role in shaping the Trump agenda. But she apparently wants a title that elevates her beyond just dominating the spin cycle.

I'd like to give a big shout-out to ABC for mainstreaming this odious bigot.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to call anyone an odious bigot. Let me re-phrase that: I'd like to give ABC a big shout-out for mainstreaming this person who is feeling anxious about a changing America and is hurt by the left's cruel and unjust characterization of her as someone who is less than empathetic toward ethnic and racial minorities.

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digby 11/25/2016 03:30:00 PM

 
Another nutter

by digby

Trump named a new member to his "national security" team. (I put that in scare quotes because his team is so scary.)

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday named K. T. McFarland, an aide to three Republican White Houses and a frequent Fox News commentator, to the position of deputy national security adviser, as he continues to fill his foreign policy staff with aides who have hard-line views on the fight against terrorism.

Ms. McFarland, like Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the president-elect’s choice for national security adviser, has been highly critical of President Obama’s approach to combating terrorism, saying he has not acknowledged the threat that global Islamism poses to Western civilization.
[...]
Ms. McFarland, who will not require Senate confirmation, worked for the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. From 1970 to 1976, she was an adviser to Henry A. Kissinger on the National Security Council. She also ran unsuccessfully in a 2006 Republican Senate primary race for the seat held by Hillary Clinton.

This is just the kind of person you want in the White House to keep Trump, Bannon and Flynn steady:

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

"Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

"She wasn't joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton's people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom," added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

She hasn't been in the White House for over 30 years and has spent the last few spouting lunacy on Fox News, but I guess this counts for "experience" in Trumpworld.

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digby 11/25/2016 02:00:00 PM

 
Dreaming of a white Christmas (IYKWIM)

by digby

Get 'em while they're hot:

President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign is holding a Black Friday sale at its online merchandise store.

Supporters can take advantage of extended discounts to buy memorabilia from the campaign, including foam fingers and t-shirts with slogans such as “History is watching us now.”

“President-elect Trump loves a great deal,” reads a Friday promotional email from the campaign. “And in honor of Black Friday, Mr. Trump is extending a 30%-OFF DEAL at the Official Store for Trump Gear.”

On Wednesday, the campaign unveiled a $149 Christmas ornament version of its famous "Make America Great Again" hats.

The most recent filing from the campaign, which shows the group’s financial standing up to October 19, shows that it had $16 million cash on hand and $2.1 million in debt going into the final weeks of the race.

They're also selling this hideous thing on Amazon. And the reviews are in:

I'm holding out for the "grab 'em by the pussy" mug to go on sale, myself.


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digby 11/25/2016 12:30:00 PM

 
Let the public humiliation rituals begin

by digby

I suspect that Romney may be considering taking the Secretary of State job because he feels a duty to try to moderate Trump's worst instincts and present a calm and reassuring face to the world. (I could be wrong. Maybe he's just another ambitious GOP suck-up.)

But if that's what he's doing, apologizing would be a terrible mistake. It would show the world that Trump expects everyone to bow down before him, show fealty, abase themselves. Giving the world a public display of such dominating, bullying behavior is not a good idea. If Trump wants Romney he and his virtual brownshirts need to treat him with respect. Otherwise, there's no earthly reason for him to do it.

Fox News is reporting that Donald Trump’s transition team wants Mitt Romney to publicly apologize for railing against the president-elect during the campaign.

A transition official told Fox’s Ed Henry that some in Trump’s inner circle want the former Massachusetts governor to apologize in order to be seriously considered for the secretary of State.

Trump is reportedly considering whether to pick Romney or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the coveted cabinet position.

Giuliani is the preferred choice of Trump’s loyalists and grassroots supporters, while Romney is a favorite of establishment conservatives.


“It’s not about that I don’t care for Mitt personally, but I’m still very unhappy that Mitt did everything he could to derail Donald Trump,” said Trump supporter Mike Huckabee in a Fox interview on Wednesday.

“There’s only one way that I think Mitt Romney could even be considered for a post like that and that is he goes to a microphone in a very public place and repudiates everything he said in that famous Salt Lake City speech, and everything he said after that,” Huckabee said, referring to a famous anti-Trump speech Romney gave in March.

Just say no Mitt. It won't just hurt you it will hurt the country to give in to this.

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digby 11/25/2016 11:00:00 AM

 
Trump's little helpers

by digby

I assume you've heard about Donald Trump Jr meeting with Russians in Paris last month. And you know how much Trump admires and respects Vladimir Putin. I guess all that's not completely beyond the norm. Perhaps he just has a different view of geopolitics and maybe it will all work out. I'm not crazy about authoritarian thugs wherever they are, but that's just me.

However, this is a brave new world and it's very, very concerning, regardless of who's doing it. I don't think we have any idea of just how pernicious this is:

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

During a Facebook live discussion, reporter Caitlin Dewey explained how fake news sites use Facebook as a vehicle to function and make money.(The Washington Post)

Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

I think we can be sure that the Trump administration isn't going to be interested in pursuing this, for obvious reasons.

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.

I am going to be generous and assume that Trump and his family of wealthy morons are among the useful idiots as well. But who knows? Trump is driven solely by his business opportunities and we know that he has exposure to Russian financial interests so it's possible that he had some "incentives" to sign on.

Here's just one example of how this worked. I watched it in real time, wrote about it, but had no idea about the fake news aspect of it. Drudge and his minions pushed it hard as well (and so did more than few anti-Clinton lefties.)

The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)

This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.

I get a lot of correspondence from right wingers because I write a daily column for Salon.  You can imagine how horrific it is. The "health" story was huge, and my email was full of people writing to me with gross stories about Clinton's catheter falling out (which is why she had to go to the bathroom during the debate) and tales of her having to travel with a doctor to quickly inject her with seizure medication while she was on stage. There were dozens of different conspiracy theories floating around.

I guess we can feel comforted by some idea that this election was decided because Clinton's ads didn't target the right people in the rust belt with messages about jobs and trade. I'm sure that had an effect and I'm sure that the Democrats will adjust their messages to appeal to those folks with an intensity we haven't seen since the Reagan era. (The argument about how to do that will rage on.)

But they might just be missing the forest for the trees. Many of those people may be hearing some other messages from their "trusted" friends on Facebook that supersede the normal political channels.

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digby 11/25/2016 09:30:00 AM

 

The Russians are coming

by Tom Sullivan

Among their weaponry are such diverse elements as....

Fake news distributed with a goal of "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy" came with an accent according to the Washington Post:

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

[...]

“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”

Researchers from the national security blog War on the Rocks published their report days before the election under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy”:

[M]ost observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.

The War on the Rocks account continues:

This “computational propaganda,” a term coined by Philip Howard, has the cumulative effect of creating Clayton A. Davis at Indiana University calls a “majority illusion, where many people appear to believe something ….which makes that thing more credible.” The net result is an American information environment where citizens and even subject-matter experts are hard-pressed to distinguish fact from fiction. They are unsure who to trust and thus more willing to believe anything that supports their personal biases and preferences.

Another research team from PropOrNot expects to release its findings today. Both teams have been examining digital fingerprints left by "Russia’s honeypots, hecklers, and hackers." PropOrNot's researchers believe stories planted or promoted on Facebook as part of the disinformation campaign were viewed over 213 million times:

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted the propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union.

You may even have had Thanksgiving dinner with some.

War on the Rocks detailed the objectives of the social media effort to "strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies":

• Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
• Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
• Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
• Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
• Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction

I'd like to know whether the Russians learned that last trick from Fox News or the other way around.

A Rand report, according to the Post, dubbed the Russian propaganda efforts "a 'firehose of falsehood' because of their speed, power and relentlessness." Whether a president elect who takes little interest in a daily intelligence briefing (no money in it?) and blows off the opinions of 17 national intelligence agencies regarding Russian involvement will only make the Russians' jobs easier. And they are not done yet:

There are many possible scenarios for the future direction of Russian active measures. Additional damaging information may have been withheld from documented hacks of U.S. political actors, and as-yet undisclosed information — perhaps from a hack of Republican Party emails already suggested by some media reports— may emerge after the election regardless of who wins. Should Russia conduct such data dumps through Wikileaks, for instance, it would create an appearance of balance while also damaging the Republican Party, which almost certainly has at least as much embarrassing material as the DNC. Regardless of who wins, Russian operators might save particularly damaging information for release after the inauguration, when talk of impeachment could further diminish his or her influence in Washington and abroad.

[...]

Meanwhile, the story continues. In late October 2016, Kremlin-linked accounts and bots once again began pushing a White House petition, this time to “remove George Soros-owned voting machines from 16 states.” Of course, no such machines exist, but that didn’t prevent the petition from racking up nearly 129,000 signatures.

That would be the same George Soros the Russian president Putin did not ... oh, what's the use?


Undercover Blue 11/25/2016 06:00:00 AM

Thursday, November 24, 2016

 
A cancer on the body politic

by digby

This piece by Columbia Journalism Review in which they interviewed various reporters about covering the Trump campaign is interesting.

This one struck me:

25 August 2015: Univision anchor and journalist Jorge Ramos is ejected from a Trump press conference in Iowa. Other media organizations are later banned from covering Trump events

Jorge Ramos, anchor, Univision and Fusion: In that press conference only two journalists defended me: Tom Llamas from ABC and Kasie Hunt from MSNBC. All the other journalists didn’t say anything. I think that the way we covered Trump at the beginning of his campaign was seriously flawed. The New York Times, the LA Times, Politico and the Washington Post [in September] called Donald Trump a liar. [But] it took 13 months for them to do that. At the beginning, it was seriously inappropriate.

This was when I knew something was up. I thought, if they don't take him seriously and he's just a joke, why aren't they defending one of their own on principle?

They didn't. And they let him grow like a cancer.

Read the whole thing. The press needs to have an autopsy. Something went very, very wrong.
digby 11/24/2016 05:00:00 PM

 
What kind of democracy is this anyway?

by digby

I have no idea if anything is wrong with the vote count that gave Donald Trump the electoral college victory. It was very close in a few states and Clinton is slated to win the popular vote by a large margin. In fact, she will have won more votes that any white male president ever won in American history including our president-elect. (That is another way of saying she won more votes than anyone but Barack Obama.)

There is also the matter of the hacking that took place throughout the election to benefit Trump. Whether it might have also happened in ways we don't know about seems remote, but not impossible. Clinton's large popular vote victory combined with the razor edge electoral vote victory in specific states is bound to raise questions in this environment. Hacking happened in 2016 and there are ways to hack without a machine being connected to he internet. Likely? Not really. But nothing seems impossible these days. After all, we have an unqualified, cretinous white nationalist demagogue as president now, and millions more people voted against him than for him. And there were warnings in the major papers prior to the election about just such possibilities.

Jill Stein is raising money for a recount and is evidently raising millions. I don't know if it will add up to anything but I can't see why recounting would hurt anything either. If, as everyone predicts, it will not change the outcome then Trump should probably welcome it.

This piece by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money takes a look at the bigger picture:

Hillary Clinton is going to win the popular vote by a margin greater than the total population of 40% of the states

A couple of days after the election I estimated that Clinton would end up winning the popular vote by about two million ballots. That now seems like a significant underestimate.

As of this morning, Clinton is already ahead by nearly 2.1 million votes, and that’s with nearly 1.5 million California ballots still to be counted. California, home to just under 40 million coastal elites, voted for Clinton by a nearly two to one margin, so the outstanding California vote alone is likely to bump Clinton’s lead by another 400,000+ votes.

Most of the rest of the uncounted votes comes from places like New York and Washington, collectively home to 27 million coastal elites. By the time all the ballots are counted, Clinton could well have THREE MILLION more votes than Trump. Note that 40% of the United States of America have total populations of less than three million. In 34 of the 50 states, Clinton’s projected vote margin is larger than all the votes cast in the presidential election in those states.

I’m old enough to remember (which is to say I can remember stuff before December 2000) when the prospect of a presidential candidate winning the electoral college but losing the popular vote was talked about as if it would constitute a potentially major political and even constitutional crisis. After all such a thing hadn’t happened since the 19th century, at a time when democratic norms were much weaker, given that most of the adult population couldn’t legally vote.

Now that the vote has been extended to women, blacks, and other coastal elites you would think it would be, to use what my political science colleagues tell me is the appropriate technical term, a huge fucking deal that the losing candidate is going to end up with many millions of more votes than the winner.

The arguments that it isn’t are all quite lame. The major ones, in ascending order of stupidity, are:

(1) No one knows if Clinton would have gotten more votes than Trump if we had an actual democracy, as opposed to a bunch of creaky nonsense left over from the 18th century aka The Wisdom of the Framers. Yes, this question is like asking what the square root of a million is — nobody will ever be able to solve it.

Srsly, what basis is there for thinking that the national popular vote total would be significantly different in a direct national election? Campaign resources would be deployed differently at the margin, but so what? If this election tells us anything it’s that campaign resources at the margin seem to end up having little effect on the actual vote.

Would turnout be higher overall? And even if you assume it would be, again so what? Some people are actually making the argument that since turnout would supposedly be higher in a national popular vote, and there are more white voters than non-white voters, and the majority of white voters voted for Trump, this means that Trump would have won a national popular vote, or at least that it would have been much closer, because after all more white people would have voted! (That more non-white people would also have voted, and that these people voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, is not being factored into this particular equation).

(2) Whining about the popular vote is like a football team claiming it should have won because it got more total yards even though it scored fewer points. This argument can be summed up as, the rules are the rules so shut up already. Also it’s a terrible analogy. The rules that define which team wins a football game are inherently arbitrary. By contrast, the principle that the person who gets the most votes should win isn’t arbitrary. Rather, it’s called “democracy.”

Speaking of which . . .

(3) America is a republic, not a democracy, derp.

Apparently millions of people don’t know what the words “republic” and “democracy” mean. If the Electoral College was actually an example of a republican form of government it would now vote to make Clinton president, on the grounds that Donald Trump is a ludicrously unqualified joke of a candidate, leaving aside the noxious character of his political beliefs, if any, and therefore it would be best to elect somebody who was vastly better qualified and got millions of more votes to boot.

But I more than suspect that the media are going to treat this increasingly embarrassing situation in the same way they treated the unpleasantness back in 2000,* i.e., we must no longer speak of this, because of the need to unite behind the People’s Choice, even though he actually wasn’t, but who’s counting anyway?

That's exactly what will happen. I'm waiting for the day that Wolf Blitzer looks at the camera and smirks that Democrats have to "get over it." That's how we do this. 2000 was a trial run for the way the nation would deal with this undemocratic bullshit.

This is not common. It happened three times in the first 100 years of the nation and didn't happen again for another 112:

1824: John Quincy Adams
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes
1888: Benjamin Harrison
2000: George W. Bush

Now it's happened twice in 16 years. And it's delivered two of the most ignorant, unfit men to lead the country in our history.

This is not working.

After 2000, I would go to activist gatherings and meetings and someone would ask me what I would change about the constitution if I could and I always said abolish the electoral college, that it was undemocratic, unnecessary and a disaster that was always waiting to happen. To me 2000 was a turning point in our democracy (well, the ridiculous impeachment that came before was the precursor) when the norms really started to fade away and the GOP decided they could win by any means necessary. But I was always scoffed at and laughed at for saying it with people rolling their eyes at me like I was obsessing over something trivial and silly.

But here we are. It's the most valuable vote suppression mechanism the right has going for it. Twice in sixteen years they have proved to Democratic voters that even if they vote and even if they win, they can still lose. It's very hard to argue that every vote counts at this point.

If we survive Trump it's important to get rid of this anachronism. You cannot call yourself a democracy and allow this to continue.



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digby 11/24/2016 03:00:00 PM

 
Happy T-Day everyone

by digby

My chihuahua friend Cheech

Here's hoping that we can all catch our breath on this long week-end, catch up on some sleep, eat some good food and give ourselves and chance to regroup and recharge. I know I need to.

Have a good one.

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digby 11/24/2016 01:00:00 PM

 
Survival advice for the new reality

by digby

I posted a piece the other day called "Him" by Timothy Snyder, a professor of History at Yale.  If you missed it, I urge you to read it.

Snyder has posted this on his Facebook page that is equally evocative and important:

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of "terrorism" and "extremism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "exception" and "emergency." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it.

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don't use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps "The Power of the Powerless" by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom. 

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

These are not things we want to think about. But we probably should.

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digby 11/24/2016 11:00:00 AM

 

Now more than ever: A Thanksgiving Prayer

By Dennis Hartley

I've always thought of this as an ironic prayer...



...but now it strikes me as more of a chilling prophecy:

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
Modicum of challenge and
danger.




Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and falsify until
the bare lies shine through





Thanks for the KKK.




…or decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.




Thanks for “Kill a Queer
for Christ” stickers.



Thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind their
own business.



Thanks for a nation of finks.



Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.


Happy holidays!

More at Den of Cinema



--Dennis Hartley

digby 11/24/2016 09:00:00 AM

 

The new hotness

by Tom Sullivan

Nothing like a good drubbing to motivate people. I suppose that's something to be thankful for this morning. The upside is it seems to be getting people off the couch for the first time ever. Activist friends around the country report that Democratic Party meetings are brimming with new faces. The answering machine at the local Democratic Party office this week stopped picking up messages after maxing out the memory. Callers are almost all women.

"Hello, my name is ____. My phone number is ____. I'd like to volunteer. I want to help organize." They don't even know what for. They just need to do something.

Political organizing is mostly long hours and grunt work. That's not obvious to people jumping in for the first time. People new to politics arrive with unrealistic expectations. (No, we don't have any paying positions available; we're all volunteers.) We're still cleaning up from the election after work and on weekends: shredding walk lists, recycling yard signs, preparing for a special election to fill a vacancy created when one of our candidates got elected to another office. Our governor's race is not yet settled. Noobs alarmed by the ascendancy of white nationalists may figure we're old and busted because we're not there to answer the phones 24/7/365 and waiting with a menu of exciting and meaningful things for them to do RIGHT NOW. So it goes. My job is open in April.

This is a good problem to have. A seriously good problem. But there will be a learning curve. For example, there is a call for a Women's March on Washington. People here are wondering who is organizing buses, but perhaps prematurely. "[A]fter the stunning upset of a candidate widely viewed as a fascist sexual predator over what might have been America’s first female president, a lot of women had the same idea," writes Christina Cauterucci:

Originally dubbed the Million Woman March, it’s now the Women’s March on Washington, it’s scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, and, as of this writing, 116,856 people from all over the country have said on Facebook that they are “going.” What they’re “going” to—and when, and where—nobody knows. Not even the people in charge.

The event is "still in its early planning stages." Planning and logistics for such an event are complex. The National Park Service has "seven permit applications from five organizations for the same sites at the same time" already in the queue. Cauterucci continues with a cautionary tale about looking before leaping:

Without any clear direction from major players in the field, a group of motivated women with no grasp of communications strategy or how busy the Lincoln Memorial might be on inauguration weekend stumbled into the vacuum. These white women basically wished a march on Washington out of the air—and thanks in large part to the sweat and know-how of the women of color who’ve helped them right the ship, some version of that wish looks likely to come true. Perez told me it’s easy to get overwhelmed when an event attracts more than 116,000 RSVPs before a solid plan is in place. “Then your initial next reaction is ‘let’s get organized,’ ” she said. “We’re doing the work. We’re doing the best that we can.”

A lot of this new surge in activism is still emergent.

I called a friend in Raleigh yesterday afternoon to see what she knew about new groups forming for women to address Trumpism, etc. She had to call me back, she said. She was in a six-hour meeting right then doing just that. They were forming the NC chapter of Emerge America:

Emerge America is the premier training program for Democratic women.
We inspire women to run, we hone their skills to win.
Our goal is clear: to increase the number of Democratic women in public office.

A broader problem is going to be installing new blood in a Democratic Party encrusted with old ideas and old habits and slow to make way for new talent still on that learning curve. Sen. Chuck Schumer may have rushed to embrace Rep. Keith Ellison's bid for DNC chair, but he's reading the wind, not suddenly embracing a fresh vision. There still is not an appetite at top levels for new leadership. The White House is exploring instead whether Joe Biden might be interested or "whether Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez and former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan would be willing to run for the post." Whatever their accomplishments and talents, that won't say "new hotness" to an emerging generation of activists hungry for a party overhaul. It will sound more like "old and busted." Now, if Michelle Obama wanted the job....



Will they hand over the keys or not?


Undercover Blue 11/24/2016 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

 

The last T-Day

by digby

“Of course, Thanksgiving is a family holiday as much as a national one,” Obama said at Wednesday’s ceremony, “so for the past seven years I’ve established another tradition: Embarrassing my daughters with a corny-copia of dad jokes about turkeys.”

But because 2016 is 2016, we were denied the girls’ facial expressions this year, with Obama telling reporters they had “a scheduling conflict.”

“Actually, they just couldn’t take my jokes anymore,” he conceded. “They were fed up.”

Obama instead brought two of his nephews, Austin and Aaron Robinson, who, he said, “unlike Malia and Sasha, have not yet been turned cynical by Washington.”

Sigh...

digby 11/23/2016 07:30:00 PM

 
QOTD: A cult member

by digby

A radio talk show host:

“You may be upset Trump has signaled he will not ‘persecute Hillary,’ but you will see in short the this was brilliant strategic positioning,” he wrote on Twitter. “When Trump looks at an apple, he doesn’t just see the apple, he sees the soil and the tree and the farmer and the rain. Trust him.”

You may remember this one from the Bush years:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile. 

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digby 11/23/2016 06:00:00 PM

 
The Man in the High Tower

by digby

Congressman Sean Duffy on the White Supremacists celebrating Trump's victory with Nazi salutes and chants of "Hail Trump!"

DUFFY: [Trump] did condemn them and that’s a good thing. Someone who says, ‘they maybe endorse me, but I don’t endorse their viewpoint of the world.’ Again, I think it’s important that a leader step forward and make the right move, which is what he did.

My concern is that Barack Obama, when he had a chance, didn’t condemn the riots across America that were in protest of Donald Trump’s victory in the election or didn’t condemn ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It might have taken him time in your viewpoint or in another’s viewpoint, but he did the right thing.

SCIUTTO: You’re equating Americans protesting a politician with outright hate and bigotry from a group that was using the Hitler salute to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory and are nothing more than white supremacists? I mean, that’s not a fair comparison.

DUFFY: No, no, no. Both are disgusting, for different ways.

SCIUTTO: You’re putting them on equal footing? You’re putting political protests on a footing with white supremacists?

DUFFY: Let me explain. I think this is a horrible group, don’t share their values or their viewpoint. But you have people taking to the streets and damaging property, pulling people out of cars and beating them up, little girls getting beaten up in schools for supporting Donald Trump. This was violence on American streets. So they’re different kind of activity by each group, but both groups need to be condemned.

It’s one thing if you stand on the sidewalk and hold a sign in protest. That’s the American 1st Amendment right to protest. But when you get violent and you damage property and you hurt people, that’s something completely different.

This is the right's bizarroworld alternate reality. Here is reality:

After Trump won the election in early November, “Black Lives Matters” and anti-Trump protesters did not riot to the extent that the Republican congressman suggested. There were mostly peaceful demonstrations across the country for several days. There were a few isolated instances of more destructive protests led by a “smaller segment” of “anarchist-types,” according to a police department official in Portland, Oregon.

Meanwhile, there have been hundreds of incidents of hate crimes committed against people of color, blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and women since Trump’s win.

There have been a couple of incidents of people beating up people who claim to be Trump supporters. Literally a handful. There have been hundreds of incidents reported of Trump supporters committing crimes against people of color, Muslims, Jews, immigrants and women. There are probably many more.


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digby 11/23/2016 04:30:00 PM

 

No, they didn't vote for him

by digby

I, for one, am shocked, I tell you, shocked:

Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency with less support from black and Hispanic voters than any president in at least 40 years, a Reuters review of polling data shows, highlighting deep national divisions that have fueled incidents of racial and political confrontation. 

Trump was elected with 8 percent of the black vote, 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll. 

Among black voters, his showing was comparable to the 9 percent captured by George W. Bush in 2000 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. But Bush and Reagan both did far better with Hispanic voters, capturing 35 percent and 34 percent, respectively, according to exit polling data compiled by the non-partisan Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. 

And Trump’s performance among Asian-Americans was the worst of any winning presidential candidate since tracking of that demographic began in 1992.

digby 11/23/2016 03:00:00 PM

 
No, Trump didn't really change his mind on torture

by digby

The recaps of Trump's NY Times interview yesterday indicated that general Mattis had made him rethink his commitment to torture which surprised me since I'm convinced that brutality and dominance are central to his view of how the world works.

It turns out he didn't. Here's the quote:

General Mattis is a strong, highly dignified man. I met with him at length and I asked him that question. I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, ‘I’ve never found it to be useful.’ He said, ‘I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.’ And I was very impressed by that answer. I was surprised, because he’s known as being like the toughest guy. And when he said that, I’m not saying it changed my mind. 

He was impressed and surprised because you'd think a guy called "Mad Dog" would be as tough as Donald Trump. But he's not.

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digby 11/23/2016 01:00:00 PM

 
Billionaires and Blackwater to drain the swamp?

by digby

The hits just keep on coming. Trump named wingnut extremist Betsy DeVos for Department of Education. She the Amway heiress (figures Trump would admire a successful "multi-level marketing" billionaire) who has devoted her life to privatizing the public education system.

There are also rumors that her brother Erik Prince is being considered for a role in the administration. He was the CEO of Blackwater, the ugly, criminal mercenary enterprise that was banned from Iraq for killing innocent civilians.

He's a big Trump supporter, touting Trump's sympatico approach to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, naturally.

Which brings me to this startling revelation:

Donald Trump’s eldest son, emerging as a potential envoy for the president-elect, held private discussions with diplomats, businessmen and politicians in Paris last month that focused in part on finding a way to cooperate with Russia to end the war in Syria, according to people who took part in the meetings.

Thirty people, including Donald Trump Jr., attended the Oct. 11 event at the Ritz Paris, which was hosted by a French think tank. The founder of the think tank, Fabien Baussart, and his wife, Randa Kassis, have worked closely with Russia to try to end the conflict.

Ms. Kassis, who was born in Syria, is a leader of a Syrian opposition group endorsed by the Kremlin. The group wants a political transition in Syria—but in cooperation with President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s close ally.

The disclosure of a meeting between the younger Mr. Trump and pro-Russia figures—even if not Russian government officials—poses new questions about contacts between the president-elect, his family and foreign powers. It is also likely to heighten focus on the elder Mr. Trump’s stated desire to cooperate with the Kremlin once in office.

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation engaged in self-dealing in 2015 and prior years, the foundation said in an Internal Revenue Service filing.

In an interview, Ms. Kassis said she pressed the younger Mr. Trump during the meeting on the importance of cooperating with the Russians in the Middle East.

“We have to be realistic. Who’s on the ground in Syria? Not the U.S., not France,” Ms. Kassis said from Moscow. “Without Russia, we can’t have any solution in Syria.”

Of the president-elect’s son, she said: “I think he’s very pragmatic and is flexible.”

No, he's not "pragmatic" and "flexible" he's a fucking moron just like his father. It's these other folks who have an agenda.



via GIPHY

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digby 11/23/2016 11:00:00 AM

 

Imperial life on the Potomac

by digby

I wrote about the Trump transition's staffing outsourcing for Salon this morning:

As we go into the long Thanksgiving weekend, shell-shocked by events surrounding the presidential transition getting more surreal by the day, it’s almost comforting to read a piece of news that sounds even slightly like familiar political activity. It’s the kind of thing that would have made for screaming headlines and much gnashing of teeth on the left just a few months ago, but now seems almost quaintly normal. I’m speaking of the news that Donald Trump’s transition team has outsourced much of the lower level government staffing to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which is in the hands of right wing extremist Jim DeMint. According to Politico:

Heritage is “absolutely the fulcrum, and essential to staffing the administration with people who reflect Trump’s commitments across the board,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent group that opposes abortion rights. “I can say it’s been a source of great confidence during the election to know that principled people were planning for a Trump administration.”

Three sources from different conservative groups said that Heritage employees have been soliciting, stockpiling and vetting résumés for months with an eye on stacking Trump’s administration with conservative appointees across the government. One source described the efforts as a “shadow transition team” and “an effort to have the right kind of people in there.”

Most members of Trump’s transition team have some affiliation with Heritage, it turns out. All the conservative talent in town knows this and have figured out how to funnel their CVs to the right places. It’s quite a stampede, according to the article, as one might expect. These are people who’ve been in the wilderness for eight long years and this is probably an unexpected opportunity.

It’s surprising in some respects, however, because throughout the Republican campaign the Heritage Foundation was sharply critical of Trump as an unreliable conservative who could not be trusted. DeMint, the former senator and keeper of the right wing flame met with Trump and decided to simply keep his distance rather than oppose him directly. But they did help with one important matter that according to the Politico article is considered to have been a defining issue for the campaign. It’s one that may have persuaded a number of those college-educated whites and evangelicals to stick with Trump rather than vote for Hillary or stay home: the Supreme Court.

Perhaps Heritage’s most significant involvement during the campaign was its experts’ shaping of Trump’s list of Supreme Court choices, ultimately resulting in a selection of conservative thinkers who oppose abortion rights. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that list, which was created in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Federalist Society.
Prior to Trump’s release of the list — the first installment came in May — many conservative activists and leaders were vehemently and vocally opposed to his candidacy …

But Trump’s list of potential judicial appointments gave movement leaders space to crystallize the contest into a binary choice between Hillary Clinton, who would certainly appoint liberal Supreme Court justices, and Trump, who promised to appoint only conservative, anti-abortion rights justices.

Trump won a higher percentage of evangelical voters than the born-again George W. Bush.

Now that Trump has won, Heritage has the kind of juice in D.C. it hasn’t had in almost a decade. DeMint and the foundation are the connection between the conservative movement establishment and the Trump transition and future administration. And the movement is thrilled with what they are seeing as a sign that they are going to be in the driver’s seat:

“We’re just thrilled with what we see from the transition; it gets better every day. To the extent Heritage is involved in it, hats off to Heritage,” said Richard Viguerie, a denizen of the conservative movement who has been involved in CNP for more than 30 years

This also signals a continuation of the war within the party, however. Heritage has been one of the movement organizations eviscerating establishment figures like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell over the past few years. And nobody knows how much influence they will have on the higher levels of the Trump administration. They may not end up being too keen on Steve Bannon’s big-spending ways, although if the reports of his infrastructure plans are true, the idea of privatizing our roads, bridges, water and transit system may win them over.

For those who worry about the Trump administration’s basic competence at running the government, this isn’t good news. You may remember that the last time these folks were asked to staff a government, during the Iraq war, it didn’t work out too well:

They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country’s $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.

Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars.[…]For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their résumés at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.

It was one of the most astonishing stories to come out of the early days of the Iraq war. The Bush administration had decided to make ideological commitment to “the cause” a litmus test for hires to staff the new CPA under Paul Bremer. The place they went was naturally the most ideological think tank in town.

The debacle of that project — the wasted money, the lack of expertise and total inefficiency — has been well documented, most evocatively in the book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. In Iraq, the Bush administration saw an opportunity to run a political experiment and didn’t understand that it takes actual proficiency and know-how to build something so complicated from the ground up.

Staffing their brave new white nationalist alt-right kleptocracy with Heritage Foundation résumés is a sign that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon may be making the same mistake.

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digby 11/23/2016 09:00:00 AM

 

By hook or by crook

by Tom Sullivan

Outgoing NC Gov. Pat McCrory, via NCDOT Communications.

North Carolina did not see a Karl Rove-like meltdown on election night when results showed Gov. Pat McCrory losing his reelection bid to Attorney General Roy Cooper by 5,000 votes. The meltdown has been more of a slow burn. McCrory as refused to concede, even as absentee and provisional vote tallies show the margin against him widening.

Civitas, the Art Pope-funded think tank, as filed suit in federal court to delay final certification of results while the state verifies the addresses of over 90,000 same-day registrants.

McCrory's team, meanwhile, is alleging widespread voting irregularities:

Rather than throwing in the towel, McCrory is instead throwing around wild and unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud across the state. The governor is claiming that results in half of North Carolina’s 100 counties were tainted by irregularities, but some of those claims have already been dismissed by county election boards. The result is close enough to trigger a recount, which McCrory officially requested today, but past recounts in close North Carolina elections have not produced any significant changes in vote tallies.

Nonetheless, McCrory’s team is accusing Cooper of winning by illicit means and trying to cover up evidence of a supposedly fraudulent victory. “Why is Roy Cooper so insistent on circumventing the electoral process and counting the votes of dead people and felons?” one McCrory flack said in a statement. “It may be because he needs those fraudulent votes to count in order to win.”

Salon's Simon Malloy notes that in the same election, Donald Trump won North Carolina by 4 points and Republican Sen. Richard Burr won reelection by 6 points. Being "champion of the country’s most notorious anti-LGBTQ law" had nothing to do with McCrory's loss, of course. But if Roy Cooper's team somehow managed to manipulate results to take out McCrory alone, now that's some targeting. I'd want to hire them.

McCroy's end game, rumor has it, may be to sow enough doubt long enough to create a legitimacy crisis that would trigger the involvement of the GOP-controlled legislature in settling the election. The News and Observer says it's not that simple:

Yes, N.C. lawmakers can declare a winner, a power given to them both by the N.C. Constitution, which says the General Assembly can settle “contested” state races, but also a 2005 law cited by the New York Times and Slate that says losers in Council of State races can appeal the results to the legislature.

[...]

As for whether such a decision now could be reviewed by courts, here’s what that 2005 N.C. statute actually says: “The decision of the General Assembly in determining the contest of the election pursuant to this section may not be reviewed by the General Court of Justice.” According to the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts, the “General Court of Justice” is the entire N.C. court system, which includes Appellate, Superior and District courts.

That wouldn't stop the federal courts from jumping in, says Rick Hasen (Election Law Blog):

If there is clear evidence both that Roy Cooper got more votes in North Carolina, with no plausible basis to claim that fraud infected the result (and by all indications so far, both of these facts are true), it could well be both a Due Process and Equal Protection Clause violation for the North Carolina legislature on a partisan basis to consider a “contest” and overturn the results and hand them to Pat McCrory. There are cases where federal courts have gotten involved in these kinds of ugly election disputes (think Roe v. Alabama, Bush v. Gore). But a brazen power grab without a plausible basis for overturning the results of a democratically conducted election? I expect the federal courts would take a very close look at such a thing.

McCrory doesn't have to be Catholic to throw a Hail Mary.

McCrory's first priority after installation will I guess be the No More Elections Act https://t.co/FNe12oXdQX

— David Dayen (@ddayen) November 21, 2016

Undercover Blue 11/23/2016 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

 

Our Pain, Moonves, Zucker, Mercer and Breitbart's Profits

by Spocko

I'm pissed off at the news media, because I think they failed their duty to the truth. But that's an old timey view of the news media. The metric for success in mainstream media is revenue for shareholders. Les Moonves is measured by how well he fulfilled his duty to shareholders.

Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, celebrated Donald Trump’s candidacy for the second time on Monday, calling it “good for us economically.” Moonves, speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference at the Park Hotel in San Francisco, described the “circus” of a presidential campaign and the flow of political advertising dollars, and stated that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”

“So what can I say? The money’s rolling in, this is fun,” Moonves continued, observing that the debates had attracted record audiences.
Feburary 29, 2016, -- Lee Fang , The Intercept

What if generating money was taken out of the equation? What if you didn't have to show shareholders you are making a profit, not even breaking even?

In the high tech venture capital world people get money to realize an idea. They don't have the instant demand to make money in the beginning. The money they spend during their early months and years with little or no revenue coming in is called the "burn rate" the goal is a successful product, service or company. The companies are looking towards a "liquidity event" an acquisition, an IPO or a profitable company. Things are different if you never even have to attempt to do any of those things. What if you have "money to burn" that keeps coming for as long as you do one specific thing? Like push an specific idea or point of view.

Last week on the Majority Report Sam Seder interviewed Matt Phelan, on his piece in Jacobin, The House of Breitbart & the New Fascism how Breitbart, Bannon and O'Keefe were funded and rose to power.Link  The article is excellent and answers some of the, "My god how did we get here?" questions about Bannon.

I really recommend people listen to the interview or read the whole Jacobin piece. Then if you want to see an example of how James O'Keefe's schtick works, read this piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker "James O'Keefe Stings himself."  They are both about issues of media, activism, political power and funding.

Rebekah, Robert, and Diana Mercer at the 2014 World Science Festival Gala on April 7, 2014. Rebekah is one of 16 on Trump's transition team executive committee. Her father Robert is among Trump’s top financial backers

One of the things that is clear is the power of a billionaire who is willing to fund you and your radical ideas. Phelan names some billionaires I wasn't aware of but one name sounded familiar,  Robert Mercer.

Last year, Breitbart News received substantial funding from Long Island–based hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who has donated upwards of $15 million to conservative groups since 2012. (It was happy, satisfied customer Mercer, and his daughter Rebekah, who reportedly pushed for Trump to hire Bannon as his new campaign chief.)

And there was something else about that name that rang a dog whistle.  Remember the planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan?
Guess who was behind the ad campaign attacking it?

Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the giant hedge fund manager Renaissance Technologies, appears to have financed the ad campaign entirely himself, through a $1 million contribution on July 26, 2011.  - Politico January 18, 2011

When a billionaire spends his money to push an idea, it doesn't have to have a monetary pay off.  A profit-making corporation needs to show how an investment adds to the health of the business.  If  Mercer wants to spend $10-15 million for a Muslim hating, money-losing media outlet, nobody is stopping him. And, if in the process he figures out how to use it to save money, to quote Donald Trump, "That's just smart business"

One thing to keep an eye on during the Trump administration: the resolution of a long-running tax dispute between Renaissance Technologies and the Internal Revenue Service. The tax agency is challenging a series of financial maneuvers that reduced Renaissance managers’ tax bills. Although the amount in dispute isn’t public, a Senate report in 2014 estimated that the moves may have saved $6 billion or more.
--November 11, 2016 Bloomberg Politics 

Phalen's piece shows how comparatively little money it took to prop up Breitbart and put the country on this ever more radical right-wing path.

Think about all the money that went to mainstream media in political ads this year. Was any of it earmarked for better journalism? Could the media moguls have rolled any of that out in the direction of investigation of Donald Trump pre-election?

In a recent interview with CNN's Jeff Zucker, he stressed how the revenues for 2017 are going to be lower than in 2016. He is giving his investors guidance so they don't punish him when there are lower revenues. This is his real concern, because they have the power to fire him. What is more likely to get a news media CEO, who sets the direction of the company  fired? Failure to do their duty to the public? Or failure to increase the bottom line?

So how do you punish Zucker and Moonves and the big media for their failure? Zucker has already said, revenues are going to go down.

Over a decade ago I developed the Spocko method to defund right-wing media. It was extremely effective and wildly successful. Today mainstream commercial advertisers don't want to associate their brand with sexism, bigotry and violent rhetoric on right-wing radio and TV. But like any strategy and tactic, the opposition adapts.

In the world of measuring media success by revenue, losing ad revenue is a massive blow to the distributors.  How to they stay afloat now? Several ways:

• Accepting the new low revenue from commercial advertisers as the new normal.
• Cutting payments to "talent"
• Going private to hide loses
• Constantly renegotiating debt to avoid bankruptcy
• Moving money losing right-wing talk radio shows to tiny stations
• Getting as much election ads money as possible this season
• Direct infusions of cash from billionaires who want to reach a specific audience
• Getting money laundered through groups like the Heritage Foundation

On the right sites like Breitbart don't have a duty to the public, the truth or their advertisers. Even the moderating influence of corporate advertisers can't be used on them. It's one thing for an unaccountable billionaire to support racism, bigotry and sexism, it's another thing for a brand to do that.

But they are still popular Spocko! They are still going! Yes, but beyond generating lower revenue than in the past, they lost Corporate America's acceptance. That's not going to come back because they still want to appeal to multiple audiences and avoid controversy.

#GivingTuesday

My understanding is that today is #GivingTuesday sooo if you are feeling the need for someone  to tell you the truth, to fight with you and for you, then look around for the people and groups that have done good work.

I know the right thinks George Soros pays all the activists and media on the left, but that's not the reality. Most left-wing activists, bloggers and media never see Soros money or Clinton machine money. (That said, if you ARE a left-wing billionaire, be advised I take multiple currencies, not just quatloos.

I and the people who run the sites I write for like Hullabaloo,  Crooks and Liars, The Smirking Trump (formally the Smirking Chimp) ShadowProof (Formerly Firedoglake) all need money to keep going.

My friends in radio don't have billionaire backing but still do amazing work, folks like  Angie Coiro with In Deep, Nicole Sandler from the Nicole Sandler Show R.J. Eskow of Zero Hour, Brad Friedman the Brad Blog and Sam Seder of The Majority Report.

There are groups I'm involved in, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the  Center for Media and Democracy and Nebraskans Against Gun Violence that all do amazing work.

For decades I worked with and for a group doing social justice work. One of the directors had a bumper sticker on her car. "Some of us give by going, others go by giving." It would be easier to get a few left-wing billionaires to write checks, and we could then sit back and watch billionaire surrogates fight it out. But when we have a sense of belonging to the groups doing this work, it helps both the people giving and the people going.

SPOCK: One man cannot summon the future.
KIRK: But one man can change the present.


Spocko 11/22/2016 06:30:00 PM