Hullabaloo

Thursday, May 04, 2017

 
They did it

by digby

The House voted to take away health insurance from 24 million of their fellow Americans. This is who they are.

Cases upon cases of beer just rolled into the Capitol on a cart covered in a sheet. Spotted Bud Light peeking out from the sheet

— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) May 4, 2017

David Leonhardt of the NY Times spelled out what this means for real people:

When Massachusetts expanded health insurance a decade ago, state officials unknowingly created an experiment. It’s turned out to be an experiment that offers real-world evidence of what would happen if the House Republicans’ health bill were to become law.

The findings from Massachusetts come from an academic paper being released Thursday, and the timing is good. Until now, the main analysis of the Republican health bill has come from the Congressional Budget Office, and some Republicans have criticized that analysis as speculative. The Massachusetts data is more concrete.

Unfortunately for those Republicans, the new data makes their health care bill look even worse than the C.B.O. report did. The bill could cause more people to lose insurance than previously predicted and do more damage to insurance markets. The $8 billion sweetener that Republicans added to the bill on Wednesday would do nothing to change this reality. President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan are continuing to push a policy that would harm millions of Americans.

Here are the basics of the new study, and why it matters:

The Massachusetts law subsidizes health insurance for lower-income households, and does so via four different income categories. Everyone in a category — for example, a family of four earning between $44,700 and $55,875 a year — would pay the same price for insurance. A family earning less would pay less, and a family earning more would pay more.

This system creates what economists call a “discontinuity.” People who have only slightly different incomes pay very different prices for an insurance plan. A family earning $44,701 could pay a couple of hundred dollars more per year than a family making $44,699.

Discontinuities are a social scientist’s friend, because they set up natural experiments. The price difference faced by the similar families I just described allows researchers to analyze how much the cost of insurance affects people’s willingness to sign up.

And price ends up mattering a lot. When plans become even slightly more expensive, far fewer lower-income families sign up. “Most low-income people aren’t willing or able to pay much for health insurance,” says Mark Shepard, a Harvard economist and an author of the new study.

Why? Partly because people know that they have an alternative. They can instead rely on last-minute emergency-room care, in which hospitals typically treat them even if they lack insurance. Such care is problematic: It tends to be expensive, raising costs for other patients, and it’s often not as good as preventive care. But many poorer familie

The Republican health bill is simply a bad bill. It’s been blasted by conservative and liberal health experts, as well as groups representing patients, doctors, nurses and hospitals. Above all, the bill cuts health benefits for the poor, the middle class, the elderly and the sick, and it funnels the savings to tax cuts for the rich.

In the name of a political victory for themselves and Trump, House Republicans may now be on the verge of passing the bill anyway. The only things that can keep it from becoming law — and harming millions of Americans — is the United States Senate.s choose E.R. care over taking money from their stretched budgets for health insurance.

The Republican health bill wouldn’t raise people’s costs by only a small amount, either. It would force many low-income families to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars more for insurance — and most of them would likely respond by not buying insurance. The people who still buy plans would disproportionately be sick people, which would then cause costs to rise even higher. “When premiums go up, it’s the healthier enrollees who drop out,” said Amy Finkelstein of M.I.T., another author of the study.

The authors didn’t specifically compare their data to the estimates by the C.B.O. But the magnitude of the new results suggests the C.B.O. estimates of insurance losses were conservative. Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard, the paper’s third author, said that the Republican proposal would effectively end enrollment in the insurance markets for families that make less than $75,000 a year.

It’s important to note that the study’s three authors aren’t political animals. Finkelstein has won the John Bates Clark Medal, an award for the top academic economist under the age of 40, and her research on Medicare is frequently cited by conservatives.

The celebration is going to be unbearable, particularly from Trump who I am quite sure has no idea that it isn't going to become law today.

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digby 5/04/2017 01:00:00 PM

 
As long as he hates us so well, they will love him

by digby

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times spoke with some analysts about Trump's appeal:

Trump's goal [at his Pennsylvania rally], of course, was not only to ally himself with the crowd against the black-tie-wearing media celebrating at the Washington Hilton, but to goad and troll his opponents.

Many liberal Democrats think that Trump’s taunting rhetoric will soon wear thin. According to this view, as decent jobs increasingly demand college degrees, as automation continues to decimate manufacturing employment and as voters lose key benefits of the liberal welfare state (pared down health coverage under a new Republican program, for example), support for Trump will fade away.

“Trump campaigned as a champion of rural America and small and midsize Rust Belt cities, but — much like his proposed Obamacare repeal — his budget brings the hammer down on the very people who put him in office,” Tim Murphy wrote on March 16 in Mother Jones.

Murphy may be proven prescient. But there are a number of ways for Trump to maintain support among his voters without delivering the tangible economic or social benefits he promised.

First of all, the bulk of Trump’s supporters have nowhere else to go, nor do they want to go anywhere. They experience themselves as living in a different world from liberals and Democrats.

Their animosity toward the left, and the left’s animosity toward them, is entrenched.

Trump’s basic approach — speaking the unspeakable — is expressive, not substantive. His inflammatory, aggressive language captures and channels the grievances of red America, but the specific grievances often feel less important than the primordial, mocking incivility with which they are expressed. In this way, Trump does not necessarily need to deliver concrete goods because he is saying with electric intensity what his supporters have long wanted to say themselves...

“President Trump reminds distrustful citizens of liberal institutions’ disinterest in, and disrespect for, challenges in their own lives,” Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, wrote in response to my inquiry about Trump’s appeal.

In a paper that was published last month, Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, political scientists at Emory, describe just how much ideological enmity is driving the mutual dislike of Republicans and Democrats for each other.

Instead of the type of conflict “largely based off of tribal affiliations,” Abramowitz and Webster find that

The rise of negative affect and incivility in American politics is closely connected with the rise of ideological polarization among the public as well as among political elites. Democrats and Republicans dislike each other today because they disagree with each other about many issues and especially about the fundamental question of the role of government in American society. It is very hard to disagree without being disagreeable when there are so many issues on which we disagree and the disagreements on many of these issues are so deep.

More succinctly, they write,

Rational dislike of the other party may be more difficult to overcome than irrational dislike.

In a recent paper, “Voter Decision-Making with Polarized Choices,” Jon C. Rogowski, a political scientist at Harvard, found that the extremity of Trump’s language and stances effectively helps insure continued support from Republican voters.

When the candidates are relatively divergent, there is virtually no chance that partisans will cross party lines and vote for the candidate of the opposite party.

The near certainty that partisans will not switch to the opposition gives Trump an unexpected level of freedom in his policy choices. As Rogowski put it:

High levels of ideological conflict lead partisan voters to make decisions that place increased emphasis on their partisan ties, and less emphasis on the relative degree of congruence between their policy views and the candidates’ platforms.

In an email, Rogowski elaborated:

Most Americans are sorted into one of the two major-party camps, and their party membership is an important part of their identities. For Americans who identify as Republicans, voting for a Democratic candidate would be inconsistent with their identity — and the same goes for Democratic-identifiers considering a vote for a Republican candidate.

In this environment, Rogowski continued,

Trump can more or less count on continued support from Republican identifiers and has some freedom of choice on policy issues.

In other words, Trump can go either left or right as he betrays his campaign promises — as long as his followers believe that he is standing with them and is against what they’re against.

Voting for Democratic presidential candidates, Lesthaeghe and Neidert found, correlates with a number of key demographic variables: an increase in the percentage of white, non-Hispanic women between the ages of 25 to 34 who have never married; abortions per 1000 live births; older mothers (age at first birth of 28 or over); and the percentage of households with same or different sex cohabitants.
Democratic states and counties are farther along in the “second demographic transition (SDT)” described in an earlier paper by Lesthaeghe, which I have cited before.


The SDT starts in the 1960s with a series of multifaceted revolutions. First, there was the contraceptive revolution, with the introduction of hormonal contraception and far more efficient IUDs; second, there was the sexual revolution, with declining ages at first sexual intercourse; and third, there was the sex revolution, questioning the sole breadwinner household model and the gendered division of labor that accompanied it. These three "revolutions" fit within the framework of an overall rejection of authority, the assertion of individual freedom of choice (autonomy), and an overhaul of the normative structure. The overall outcome of these shifts with respect to fertility was the postponement of childbearing: mean ages at first parenthood rise again, opportunities for childbearing are lost due to higher divorce rates, the share of childless ever-partnered women increases, and higher parity births (four or more) become rare.

The demographic constituency described by Lesthaeghe is the liberal, urban, cosmopolitan, well-educated elite, embodied, in many respects, not only by Hillary Clinton but by much of official Washington — the attendees at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner so conspicuously shunned by Trump.

Over the past 50 years, overarching and underlying conflicts about morality, family, autonomy, religious conviction, fairness and even patriotism have been forced into two relatively weak vessels, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The political system is not equipped to resolve these social and cultural conflicts, which produce a gamut of emotions, often outside our conscious awareness. Threatening issues — conflicts over race, immigration, sexuality and many other questions that cut to the core of how we see ourselves and the people around us — cannot be contained in ordinary political speech, even as these issues dominate our political decision-making.

It is Trump’s willingness to violate the boundaries of conventional discourse that has granted him immunity to mainstream criticism. Pretty much everything he does that goes overboard helps him. He is given a free hand by those who feel in their gut that he is fighting their fight — that he is their leader and their defender. As the enemy of their enemies, President Trump is their friend.

And here I thought it was all about economic anxiety. Who knew?And it looks like the uppity women seem to bother these people quite a bit.

He doesn't discuss the perennial "but what about those people who voted for Obama and switched?!!" riposte but I would guess that when the economy is blowing up even these people who hate African Americans, immigrants, liberals, feminists and well --- everyone who isn't exactly like them --- are willing to jettison their "beliefs" in order to survive. After all, they are wiling to jettison their "beliefs" about morality and government spending and debt easily enough. They voted for a three time married con-man who routinely assaults women and brags about it.

As long as he hates who they hate they will stick with him.

This has seemed obvious to me from the beginning and it fuels my frustration with the notion that we can "win back" these people with economic policies. It's not that I'm against those economic policies. The opposite, in fact. I've always been for redistributionist government, public services, and a strong welfare state. But the idea that this is the key to appealing to these voters seems ... wrong.

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that abandoning the commitment to social justice, women's rights and racial equality, while clearly tempting to many people these days from all sides of the political spectrum, ignores the fact that this is a numbers game and these are constituencies that are easily disillusioned and demobilized when they are used as scapegoats in order to appease the people who hate them. For every Republican who votes Democratic because of a crackdown on immigrants or a retreat on abortion rights or renewal of the drug war there will be two Democrats who will feel betrayed and decide not to vote. It's not identity politics that's making all these Real Americans hate us. It's our identities.

Blessed be the fruit ...


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digby 5/04/2017 11:00:00 AM

 
The swamp is rising

by digby

I know it's very hard to believe but it turns out that Trump wasn't serious about draining it:

Donald Trump promised last year to “drain the swamp” of Washington, starting with barring people who worked on his presidential transition from lobbying for six months afterward.

But three months after Trump moved into the White House, at least nine people who worked on his transition have registered as lobbyists, highlighting holes in the president’s pledge to keep people from cashing in on government service.

Many are registered to lobby the same agencies or on the same issues they worked on during the transition, a POLITICO review of lobbying disclosures found. A former "sherpa" who helped to guide Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos through the Senate confirmation process is now registered to lobby her department. The former head of the transition's tax policy team has returned to his old company to lobby Congress on tax reform. One ex-member of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative team is now registered as part of a team lobbying on behalf of a major steelmaker.

Because of the way the transition’s six-month lobbying ban was worded, the former staffers may not be violating it. Regardless, their trips from lobbying to government service and back run counter to Trump's campaign promise to close Washington’s revolving door.

They also raise questions about how rigorously the White House will enforce a separate five-year lobbying ban that applies to those serving in the administration. At least two officials who briefly served in the Trump administration and then left — Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Robert Wasinger, who worked in the State Department and is now a lobbyist — have said they did not sign a five-year ban.

“This is more evidence of the ethical vacuum in the Trump White House,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit government ethics watchdog. “These revolving-door-esque actions mock everything candidate Trump said about draining the swamp and ending corporate corruption and inside dealing in Washington, D.C.”

Transition officials had presented the lobbying ban as an essential part of Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp. "The key thing for this administration is going to be that people going out of government won't be able to use that service to enrich themselves," Sean Spicer, now the White House press secretary, said when he announced the ban in November. But it hasn’t prevented former transition staffers from going to K Street within weeks of leaving.

SCOOP: Corey Lewandowski's firm quietly agreed to lobby for @CITGO, which is on verge of being taken over by Russia. https://t.co/0pv66vYIRr

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 4, 2017

I'm sure that means nothing. Carry on.
digby 5/04/2017 09:00:00 AM

 

Due negligence

by Tom Sullivan

They hate Obamacare almost as much as they love tax cuts for wealthy donors. Repealing the first swiftly and without care for the impacts to provide cover for the second is the Republicans' game. They plan a vote today.

Stunned that the bill will go to a vote without scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, Sarah Kliff wrote yesterday at Vox, "Republicans will vote tomorrow for a health care bill without knowing how many people it covers or how much it would cost."

It's perfectly clear why they aren't demanding one. They don't want the public to know what they're voting for. https://t.co/Pw3ZT6UtAs

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 3, 2017

To clear up some of the mist, Jonathan Chait details some of the known features of TrumpCare. It sounds as if Republicans plan to repeal the ACA and replace it with what we had before:

The heart of the bill is the same one that was polling at under 20 percent and failed two months ago: a near-trillion dollar tax cut for wealthy investors, financed by cuts to insurance subsidies for the poor and middle class. They have added a series of hazily defined changes: waivers for states to allow insurers to charge higher rates to people with preexisting conditions and to avoid covering essential health benefits, and a pitifully small amount of money to finance high-risk pools for sick patients. The implications of these changes are vast. The Brookings Institution notes that, if a single state eliminated the cap on lifetime benefits for a single employee, then employers in every state could actually follow suit, thus bringing back a horrid feature of the pre-Obamacare system, in which people who get hit with expensive treatment suddenly discover that their insurer will no longer pay for their care. This would affect not only those getting insurance through Medicaid or the state exchanges, but also through their job.

The reason for that is this: Because the president insists on insurers having the flexibility to sell plans across state lines, large insurers could base their coverage on the state rules most favorable to their bottom lines. States can obtain waivers on what they include as part of the ACA's “essential health benefit,” that is, what plans must cover. Thus, Brookings' Matthew Fiedler explains:

In particular, a single state’s decision to weaken or eliminate its essential health benefit standards could weaken or effectively eliminate the ACA’s guarantee of protection against catastrophic costs for people with coverage through large employer plans in every state. The two affected protections are the ACA’s ban on annual and lifetime limits, as well as the ACA’s requirement that insurance plans cap enrollees’ annual out-of-pocket spending. Both of these provisions aim to ensure that seriously ill people can access needed health care services while continuing to meet their other financial needs.

[...]

Thus, the most likely outcome is that any state’s waiver of essential health benefits under the MacArthur Amendment would weaken the ACA’s guarantee of protection against catastrophic costs for people working for large employers in every state.

Chait continues:

They are rushing through a chamber of Congress a bill reorganizing one-fifth of the economy, without even cursory attempts to gauge its impact. Its budgetary impact is as yet unknown. The same is true of its social impact, though the broad strokes are clear enough: Millions of Americans will lose access to medical care, and tens of thousands of them will die, and Congress is understandably eager to hasten these results without knowing them more precisely. Their haste and secrecy are a way of distancing the House Republicans from the immorality of their actions.

The less you know, the less resistance they face.

TrumpCare 2.0 is getting the bum's rush through the House with the expectation that corrections will be made later. A potential No vote from Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) got turned around after an amendment added $8 billion over five years to cover expenses of people shoved into a high-risk pool in states that obtain waivers. Upton tells reporters:

“Is it enough money? I don’t know. That’s the question that I asked,” Upton told reporters. “I was led to believe that $5 billion would be enough, which is why it’s $8 billion, to make sure that in fact it’s more than enough.”

“If it’s not,” he said, and CBO comes back with a report that shows that, “then a number of us, including me, will seek more money.”

1st: vote for a bad bill
2nd: learn about the impact of the bad bill
3rd: scramble to maybe mitigate damage
This isn't how grown-ups govern https://t.co/WBG6dBfLjG

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) May 3, 2017

Undercover Blue 5/04/2017 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

 
Pussy grabbing president to protect religious liberty

by digby

He was caught on tape saying he "tried to fuck" Nancy Gibbs and was "on her like a bitch" (meaning he was a dog and she was a bitch) and admitted to grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with it because he's a "star." He refuses to ever ask God for forgiveness because he's never done anything wrong.

But they loved him anyway, voted for him in vast numbers and now he's paying them back:

President Donald Trump has invited conservative leaders to the White House on Thursday for what they expect will be the ceremonial signing of a long-awaited—and highly controversial—executive order on religious liberty, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

Two senior administration officials confirmed the plan, though one cautioned that it hasn’t yet been finalized, and noted that lawyers are currently reviewing and fine-tuning the draft language. Thursday is the National Day of Prayer, and the White House was already planning to celebrate the occasion with faith leaders.

The signing would represent a major triumph for Vice President Mike Pence—whose push for religious-freedom legislation backfired mightily when he served as governor of Indiana—and his allies in the conservative movement.

The original draft order, which would have established broad exemptions for people and groups to claim religious objections under virtually any circumstance, was leaked to The Nation on Feb. 1—the handiwork, many conservatives believed, of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who have sought to project themselves as friendly to the LGBT community. Liberals blasted the draft order as government-licensed discrimination, and the White House distanced itself from the leaked document in a public statement.

Pence and a small team of conservative allies quickly began working behind the scenes to revise the language, and in recent weeks have ratcheted up the pressure on Trump to sign it. The new draft is being tightly held, but one influential conservative who saw the text said it hasn’t been dialed back much—if at all—since the February leak. “The language is very, very strong,” the source said.

The president, who has thrilled social conservatives by delivering on numerous campaign promises to that constituency early in his first term, has been reluctant to wade into this particular issue, people close to him say. But the timing now appears advantageous: Thursday is not only the National Day of Prayer, it’s also the annual Canterbury Medal Gala hosted by the Becket Fund, a group that advocates for religious freedom. This year’s recipient is conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, who has played a key role in advising Trump on his selection for the Supreme Court and has pushed for the executive order in meetings with the president.

Signing it this week could also lessen the sting Trump’s religious backers are feeling over the newly-approved omnibus spending bill, which keeps federal funding in place for Planned Parenthood. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List holds its own annual gala on Wednesday, one night before the Becket Fund’s, and the news of Planned Parenthood’s continued funding has dampened some of the enthusiasm surrounding Pence’s keynote address to the event.

This EO is likely to endorse discrimination against LGBT citizens and women, even to the extent that it could allow employers to discriminate against women who use birth control.   We'll see tomorrow how they've massaged it. If religious conservatives are already endorsing it, I think we can expect it to be pretty bad.

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digby 5/03/2017 05:00:00 PM

 
Comey and the media in full effect

by digby

I am not getting into all the nonsense that's going on right now about Hillary Clinton because it's just so tiresome. Other than the article I posted below I have nothing more to say about her interview yesterday except to note that the behavior of the media afterwards, demanding that she apologize (again and again and again) reminded me of the slavering, febrile hatred apparent in the "lock her up" chants at a Trump rally. It's more clear to me than ever that it was miracle she won the popular vote with the media's "lord of the flies" reaction to virtually anything she says. It is a very, very creepy reflexive response that the media has never, and as far as I can tell, will never question.

But there is a matter of history and what actually happened to make Donald Trump the president of the United States. The media seems to have decided that (notwithstanding the three million more votes she received) Hillary Clinton was such a catastrophically terrible candidate that it was inevitable Trump would win. They covered the race perfectly and they have no reason to even think about what they might have done differently.

However, there are some people who are looking at this, one of them being Nate Silver who has written a long postmortem on the Comey matter that shows the data proving that it was decisive:

The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
So why won’t the media admit as much?

Filed under The Real Story Of 2016

This is the tenth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

The letter isn’t the only reason that Clinton lost. It does not excuse every decision the Clinton campaign made. Other factors may have played a larger role in her defeat, and it’s up to Democrats to examine those as they choose their strategy for 2018 and 2020.

But the effect of those factors — say, Clinton’s decision to give paid speeches to investment banks, or her messaging on pocket-book issues, or the role that her gender played in the campaign — is hard to measure. The impact of Comey’s letter is comparatively easy to quantify, by contrast. At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter. The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or “FBI” even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway. Books on the campaign have treated Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile. And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter — including in comments she made at an event in New York on Tuesday — many pundits have preferred to change the conversation when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the merits of the case.

The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result. The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia). And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.

One can believe that the Comey letter cost Clinton the election without thinking that the media cost her the election — it was an urgent story that any newsroom had to cover. But if the Comey letter had a decisive effect and the story was mishandled by the press — given a disproportionate amount of attention relative to its substantive importance, often with coverage that jumped to conclusions before the facts of the case were clear — the media needs to grapple with how it approached the story. More sober coverage of the story might have yielded a milder voter reaction.

My focus in this series of articles has been on the media’s horse-race coverage rather than its editorial decisions overall, but when it comes to the Comey letter, these things are intertwined. Not only was the letter probably enough to swing the outcome of the horse race, but the reverse is also true: Perceptions of the horse race probably affected the way the story unfolded. Publications may have given hyperbolic coverage to the Comey letter in part because they misanalyzed the Electoral College and wrongly concluded that Clinton was a sure thing. And Comey himself may have released his letter in part because of his overconfidence in Clinton’s chances. It’s a mess — so let’s see what we can do to untangle it.

Clinton woke up on the morning of Oct. 28 as the likely — by no means certain — next president. Trump had come off a period of five weeks in which he’d had three erratic debates and numerous women accuse him of sexual assault after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public. Clinton led by approximately 6 percentage points in national polls and by 6 to 7 points in polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her leads in Florida and North Carolina were narrow, and she was only tied with Trump in Ohio and Iowa. But it was a pretty good overall position.

Her standing was not quite as safe as it might have appeared from a surface analysis, however. For one thing, there were still lots of undecided voters, especially in the Midwest. Although Trump had a paltry 37 percent to 38 percent of the vote in polls of Michigan, for instance, Clinton had only 43 percent to 44 percent. That left the door open for Trump to leapfrog her if late developments caused undecideds to break toward him. Furthermore, in the event that the race tightened, Clinton’s vote was inefficiently distributed in the Electoral College, concentrated in coastal states rather than swing states. While she had only an 11 percent chance of losing the popular vote according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast that morning, her chances of losing the Electoral College were a fair bit higher: 18 percent.

Another danger to Clinton was complacency. Several days earlier, the Times had written that she was on the verge of having an “unbreakable lead.” And there was a risk that people looking at statistical forecasts were misreading them and “rounding up” a probable Clinton win to a sure thing. (We’ll take up that topic up at more length in a future article in this series.) But Clinton had actually slipped by a percentage point or so in polls since the final debate on Oct. 19. And the news cycle had become somewhat listless; the most prevalent story that morning was about the trial in the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff. Clinton was in a danger zone: Her lead wasn’t quite large enough to be truly safe, but it was large enough to make people mistakenly think it was. 

The Comey letter almost immediately sank Clinton’s polls

News of the Comey letter broke just before 1 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 28, when Utah. Rep Jason Chaffetz tweeted about it, noting the existence of the letter and stating (incorrectly, it turned out2) that the case into Clinton’s private email server had been “reopened.” The story exploded onto the scene; Fox News was treating Chaffetz’s tweet as “breaking news” within 15 minutes, and the FBI story dominated headlines everywhere within roughly an hour. In an element of tabloid flair, it was soon reported that the emails in question were found on a computer owned by Anthony Weiner, the former congressman, as part of an investigation into whether he’d sent sexually explicit messages to teenage girls.

Few news organizations gave the story more velocity than The New York Times. On the morning of Oct. 29, Comey stories stretched across the print edition’s front page, accompanied by a photo showing Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife. Although some of these articles contained detailed reporting, the headlines focused on speculation about the implications for the horse race — “NEW EMAILS JOLT CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN RACE’S LAST DAYS.”

That Comey’s decision to issue the letter had been so unorthodox and that the contents of the letter were so ambiguous helped fuel the story. The Times’s print lead on Oct. 30 was about Clinton’s pushback against Comey, and a story it published two days later explained that Comey had broken with precedent in releasing the letter. It covered all sides of the controversy. But the controversy was an unwelcome one for Clinton, since it involved voters seeing words like “Clinton,” “email,” “FBI” and “investigation” together in headlines. Within a day of the Comey letter, Google searches for “Clinton FBI” had increased 50-fold and searches for “Clinton email” almost tenfold.

Clinton’s standing in the polls fell sharply. She’d led Trump by 5.9 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s popular vote projection at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 28. A week later — after polls had time to fully reflect the letter — her lead had declined to 2.9 percentage points. That is to say, there was a shift of about 3 percentage points against Clinton. And it was an especially pernicious shift for Clinton because (at least according to the FiveThirtyEight model) Clinton was underperforming in swing states as compared to the country overall. In the average swing state,3 Clinton’s lead declined from 4.5 percentage points at the start of Oct. 28 to just 1.7 percentage points on Nov. 4. If the polls were off even slightly, Trump could be headed to the White House. 

Is it possible this was all just a coincidence — that Clinton’s numbers went into decline for reasons other than Comey’s letter? I think there’s a decent case (which we’ll take up in a moment) that some of the decline in Clinton’s numbers reflected reversion to the mean and was bound to happen anyway.

But it’s not credible to claim that the Comey letter had no effect at all. It was the dominant story of the last 10 days of the campaign. According to the news aggregation site Memeorandum, which algorithmically tracks which stories are gaining the most traction in the mainstream media, the Comey letter was the lead story on six out of seven mornings from Oct. 29 to Nov. 4, pausing only for a half-day stretch when Mother Jones and Slate published stories alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

[...] 

It’s rare to see stories linger in headlines for more than two to three days given how quickly the news cycle moves during election campaigns. When one does, some effect on the polls is often expected. And that’s what we saw. The sharpness of the decline — with Clinton losing 3 points in a week4 — is consistent with a news-driven shift, rather than gradual reversion to the mean.

We also have a lot of other evidence of shifting preferences among voters in the waning days of the campaign. Exit polls showed that undecided and late-deciding voters broke toward Trump, especially in the Midwest. A panel survey conducted by FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins and other researchers also found shifts between mid-October and the end of the campaign — an effect that would amount to a swing of about 4 percentage points against Clinton.5 And we know that previous email-related stories had caused trouble for Clinton in the polls. In July, when Comey said he wouldn’t recommend charges against Clinton but rebuked her handling of classified information, she lost about 2 percentage points in the polls. Periods of intense coverage of her email server had also been associated with polling declines during the Democratic primary.

So while one can debate the magnitude of the effect, there’s a reasonably clear consensus of the evidence that the Comey letter mattered— probably by enough to swing the election. This ought not be one of the more controversial facts about the 2016 campaign; the data is pretty straightforward. Why the media covered the story as it did and how to weigh the Comey letter against the other causes for Clinton’s defeat are the more complicated parts of the story. 

The Times thought it was covering President-elect Clinton’s first scandal

Re-read one of those New York Times front-page stories from Oct. 29 — “This Changes Everything’: Donald Trump Exults as Hillary Clinton’s Team Scrambles” — and you’ll be surprised by how strange it is. It begins by describing the Comey letter in dramatic terms, as “the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race”:

Everything was looking up for Hillary Clinton. She was riding high in the polls, even seeing an improvement on trustworthiness. She was sitting on $153 million in cash. At 12:37 p.m. Friday, her aides announced that she planned to campaign in Arizona, a state that a Democratic presidential candidate has carried only once since 1948.
Twenty minutes later, October delivered its latest big surprise.
The F.B.I. director’s disclosure to Congress that agents would be reviewing a new trove of emails that appeared pertinent to its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s private email server — an investigation that had been declared closed — set off a frantic and alarmed scramble inside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and among her Democratic allies, while Republicans raced to seize the advantage.
In the kind of potential turnabout rarely if ever seen at this late stage of a presidential race, Donald J. Trump exulted in his good fortune.

And yet the same Times article told readers that this rarely-if-ever-seen turnabout wouldn’t cost Clinton the election. She had banked too much of a lead in early voting, the story said, and it came too late in the campaign. Instead, the Comey letter could “cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting":

With early voting well underway, and Mrs. Clinton already benefiting from Mr. Trump’s weekslong slide in the polls, Democrats’ concerns were tempered — more in the realm of apprehensiveness than panic.
[…]
Mrs. Clinton has an enormous cash advantage — $153 million in the bank for her campaign and joint fund-raising accounts as of last week, compared with $68 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign and joint accounts — which means Mr. Trump has limited means to use the F.B.I. inquiry to damage Mrs. Clinton with television ads. 

With more than six million Americans having already voted as of Monday, any efforts by Mr. Trump to claw his way back into contention could come too late. The Clinton campaign says its early voting turnout data points to a Democratic advantage in several swing states, including Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Iowa. 

But the specter of an F.B.I. inquiry could cast a cloud over a victorious Mrs. Clinton’s administration-in-waiting. News had hardly spread when exasperated Democrats and donors were ruefully dredging up painful memories of the seemingly constant tug of congressional investigations on Bill Clinton’s White House.

What the heck is going on here? Why was the Times giving Comey’s letter such blockbuster coverage and at the same time going out of its way to insist that it wouldn’t affect the outcome?

The evidence is consistent with the theory that the Times covered the Comey letter as it did because it saw Clinton as the almost-certain next president — and Trump as a historical footnote. By treating the letter as a huge deal, it could get a head start on covering the next administration and its imbroglios. It could also “prove” to its critics that it could provide tough coverage of Democrats, thereby countering accusations of liberal bias (a longstanding hang-up at the Times). So what if it wasn’t clear from the letter whether Clinton had done anything wrong? The Times could use the same weasel-worded language that it often does in such situations, speaking of the Comey letter as having “cast a cloud” over Clinton.

That is my emphasis. Considering their behavior for the last 20 years, during the campaign and even after, this seems obvious to me. They were getting a head start on the crucifixion.

There is a lot more at the link and this story is very, very important if you actually care about figuring out what got Donald Trump elected. 

Nobody's saying Clinton didn't make mistakes.  She said so herself although the media typically behaved as if she was whining by giving an analytical answer that included some of what Nate Silver is saying here.

Silver says the numbers show definitely that the Comey letter affected the race by enough points to have made the difference.

The Comey letter wasn’t necessarily the most important factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it’s probably the one we can be most certain about. To explain the distinction, consider Clinton’s decision to run a highly negative campaign that focused on branding Trump as an unacceptable choice. One can imagine this being a huge, election-losing mistake: Trump’s negatives didn’t need any reinforcing, whereas Clinton should have used her resources to improve her own image. But one could also argue that Clinton’s strategy worked, up to a point: Trump was exceptionally unpopular and needed a lot of things to break his way to win the election despite that. The range of possible impacts from this strategic choice is wide; perhaps it cost Clinton several percentage points, or perhaps it helped her instead. The range from the Comey letter is narrower, by contrast, and easier to measure. It was a discrete event that came late in the campaign and had a direct effect on the polls.

The standard way to dismiss the letter’s impact is to say that Clinton should never have let the race get that close to begin with. But the race wasn’t that close before the Comey letter; Clinton had led by about 6 percentage points and was poised to win with a map like this one, including states such as North Carolina and Arizona (but not Ohio or Iowa) My guess is that the same pundits who pilloried Clinton’s campaign after the Comey letter would have considered it an impressive showing and spoken highly of her tactics.

Thus, you have to assess the letter’s impact to do an honest accounting of the Clinton campaign. If you’re in the “Big Comey” camp and think Clinton would have won by 5 or 6 percentage points without the letter, it’s hard to fault Clinton all that much. Even given all of Trump’s deficiencies as a candidate, that’s a big margin for an election in which the “fundamentals” pointed toward a fairly close race. “Little Comey” believers have more room to assign blame to Clinton’s campaign, in addition to Comey (and the media’s coverage of him).

But campaign postmortems almost always involve a lot of results-oriented cherry-picking. It’s easy to single out things that Clinton did poorly — her handling of the email scandal, her inability to drive a positive message and her poor Electoral College tactics would have to rank highly among them (although those Electoral College choices probably didn’t swing the election). There are also some things the campaign did well, however. For instance, Clinton got a huge bounce after her convention, and she won all three debates according to polls of debate-watchers. She also made a fairly smart VP pick in Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. These aren’t minor things; in normal presidential campaigns, preparing for the debates, staging the conventions and picking a solid running mate are about as high-stakes as decisions get. Clinton did poorly in the unscripted portions of the campaign, however, and the campaign went off script in the final 10 days.

If I were advising a future candidate on what to learn from 2016, I’d tell him or her to mostly forget about the Comey letter and focus on the factors that were within the control of Clinton and Trump. That’s not my purpose here. Instead, it’s to get at the truth — to figure out the real story of the election. The real story is that the Comey letter had a fairly large and measurable impact, probably enough to cost Clinton the election. It wasn’t the only thing that mattered, and it might not have been the most important. But the media is still largely in denial about how much of an effect it had.

Comey said today that he wouldn't do anything differently because to do otherwise would have led to a disillusionment with the justice system. He's our hero who saved us. I'm so glad we all voted for him to lead us.

Oh wait. We didn't.

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digby 5/03/2017 03:00:00 PM

 
"He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling"

by digby

Dave Weigel posted a little note about how the media reflexively reacts to Clinton that illustrates the phenomenon quite well:

It was hardly the headline from Hillary Clinton's interview with Christiane Amanpour — it came near the end of a 35-minute session — but one comment from the 2016 Democratic nominee perfectly illustrated why liberals remain furious at how the campaign was covered. In a riff on how to create jobs, Clinton made the fairly ordinary point that “if you don't have access to high-speed affordable broadband, which large parts of America do not,” large employers will overlook your town. She continued:

If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles. And so, even in towns — so, the president was in Harrisburg. I was in Harrisburg during the campaign, and I met with people afterward. One of the things they said to me is that there are places in central Pennsylvania where we don't have access to affordable high-speed Internet.


"You cannot get cell coverage for mile," Clinton says of the places that voted against her.

And the floodgates opened. From a CNN reporter, expressing some befuddlement as to why Clinton was talking about a state that broke against her.

"Clinton NOW talking about Pennsylvania, rural cell service. Uhhh."

From a regional National Republican Senatorial Committee director, asking whether Clinton was making excuses for her loss.

Is @HillaryClinton adding cell coverage to "List of reasons not including myself why I lost" list? 

 From a Silicon Valley start-up:

This anti-rural snootiness doesn't help Dems. I'm from deep-red, no-cell-coverage MO; Clinton fans there (my folks) wouldn't appreciate. https://t.co/AKHxywYJo9

The point: Elliott's tweet fed a quick, afternoon round of mockery for Clinton, who as ever had been out of touch. But anyone who's covered politics — certainly, anyone who's done a reporting trip to rural West Virginia or Iowa or New Hampshire — could recognize what Clinton was talking about. She campaigned on a quarter-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, which, in the unappealing campaign-speak of her news release, included “giving all American households access to world-class broadband and creating connected ‘smart cities’ with infrastructure that’s part of tomorrow’s Internet of Things.”

Now, the press corps of 2016 was under no obligation to regurgitate campaign news releases. But it's 2017, and a president who was opaque about many of his policy plans during the campaign is now being asked to fund rural broadband projects. This is exactly the sort of issue policy reporters are familiar with, and it's the sort of issue you typically see litigated during a campaign. Candidate X has this plan for wiring rural America; candidate Y, on the other hand, has that plan. This was how the eventual Trump float of a child-care plan was covered.

But narrative can overwhelm that. And the firmly established narrative of Clinton and Trump is that she couldn't connect to rural voters, whereas he was a “blue-collar billionaire” who made surprising emotional connections. Trump may be the first president whose plunge to 40 percent approval was marked by stories about the voters who still loved him. And Clinton may be the only politician who can talk about the need for rural broadband — at this point, an almost banal priority of rural politicians — and be accused of snobbery.

That's how they rolled. And continue to roll.

Good on Weigel and some of the other younger reporters for seeing this weird phenomenon and pointing it out. It gives me hope.


Here's some typical click bait of the moment. It's enough to make you sick.


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digby 5/03/2017 01:00:00 PM

 

We Are All Freddy

By Dennis Hartley

It is often pointed out that the presidency provides a “bully pulpit” for whomever holds office at the time. But generally, that is a figure of speech; not every POTUS necessarily abuses that “privilege”. And yes, “they’ve all done it” at one time or another, regardless of party affiliation. However, I think I can safely say that (in my lifetime, at least) we’ve never seen a bigger bully in the White House than Donald J. Trump. And as we all remember from grade school, bullies are empowered by submission. Which is why this was so cathartic:

Of course, due to certain restrictions imposed upon a network TV host, Stephen couldn’t say what we are all really thinking. Freddy?

digby 5/03/2017 11:00:00 AM

 
The right's new love affair with Russia

by digby

Back during the campaign, I wrote about the right's love affair with the he-man Vladimir Putin. I thought it was a strongman personality thing. Turns out it was something bigger than that.

They relate on the issue of guns, God and gays:

Growing up in the 1980s, Brian Brown was taught to think of the communist Soviet Union as a dark and evil place.

But Brown, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, said that in the past few years he has started meeting Russians at conferences on family issues and finding many kindred spirits.

Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has visited Moscow four times in four years, including a 2013 trip during which he testified before the Duma as Russia adopted a series of anti-gay laws.

“What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” he said. “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.”

A significant shift has been underway in recent years across the Republican right.

On issues including gun rights, terrorism and same-sex marriage, many leading advocates on the right who grew frustrated with their country’s leftward tilt under President Barack Obama have forged ties with well-connected Russians and come to see that country’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, as a potential ally.

The attitude adjustment among many conservative activists helps explain one of the most curious aspects of the 2016 presidential race: a softening among many conservatives of their historically hard-line views of Russia. To the alarm of some in the GOP’s national security establishment, support in the party base for then-candidate Donald Trump did not wane even after he rejected the tough tone of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who called Russia America’s No. 1 foe, and repeatedly praised Putin.

The burgeoning alliance between Russians and U.S. conservatives was apparent in several events in late 2015, as the Republican nomination battle intensified.

You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you," Trump said to cheers. (The Washington Post)
Top officials from the National Rifle Association, whose annual meeting Friday featured an address by Trump for the third time in three years, traveled to Moscow to visit a Russian gun manufacturer and meet government officials.

About the same time in December 2015, evangelist Franklin Graham met privately with Putin for 45 minutes, securing from the Russian president an offer to help with an upcoming conference on the persecution of Christians. Graham was impressed, telling The Washington Post that Putin “answers questions very directly and doesn’t dodge them like a lot of our politicians do.”

The growing dialogue between Russians and U.S. conservatives came at the same time experts say the Russian government stepped up efforts to cultivate and influence far-right groups in Europe and on the eve of Russia’s unprecedented intrusion into the U.S. campaign, which intelligence officials have concluded was intended to elect Trump.

Russians and Americans involved in developing new ties say they are not part of a Kremlin effort to influence U.S. politics. “We know nothing about that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said. Brown said activists in both countries are simply “uniting together under the values we share.”

It is not clear what effect closer ties will have on relations between the two countries, which have gotten frostier with the opening of congressional and FBI investigations into Russia’s intrusion into the election and rising tensions over the civil war in Syria.

But the apparent increase in contacts in recent years, as well as the participation of officials from the Russian government and the influential Russian Orthodox church, leads some analysts to conclude that the Russian government probably promoted the efforts in an attempt to expand Putin’s power.

Falwell declared Trump a "dream president for evangelicals."

There's more at the link. It's interesting because it tracks with the rightward lurch around the world, although the "alt-right" here in the US and Europe is a pretty decadent movement. These folks are hardcore conservative in the more traditional way.

It explains why some members of the right wing are so complacent about a foreign government infiltrating the presidential campaign. They see them as allies in a transnational movement. But it will be very interesting to see how they react if there is a conflict with Russia --- the nationalism Trump ran on explicitly would run straight into conflict with any sense of solidarity with Russian conservatives.

It's quite a turn of events, I'll say that. It certainly signals the end of the Reagan epoch on the right. I wonder if Trump will supplant him as the right's true north?

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digby 5/03/2017 09:00:00 AM

 

The truth in your gut

by Tom Sullivan

Stephen Colbert's blowhard character made "truthiness" a thing when he promised "to feel the news at you." As much as us liberal elitists hate to admit it, that is how an awful lot of people (no baskets here) make key decisions. With their guts.

Responding to Jimmy Kimmel's tearful, on-air explanation of his newborn son's emergency heart surgery and defense of Obamacare, former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) checked in with his gut yesterday and tweeted this response:

Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn't obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else's health care.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 2, 2017

No doubt Walsh knows on an intellectual level that he pays for a lot of other somebodys' defense — trillions cumulatively — in other countries that pay no U.S. tax. But we're talking gut here, not head. Shedding our sons' and daughters' blood for foreigners is one thing, but sharing the cost of health care for fellow Americans? Hell, no.

Now, sure, we could logically debate fiscal conservatism, libertarian philosophy, and the value of social Darwinism for culling the herd, but your gut already tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Walsh's pre-existing condition. Many in his party share it, Mo Brooks. Sadly, the only treatment for it seems to be an eye-opening personal tragedy. Even that is experimental.

Barring a caucus-wide road-to-Damascus experience, Republicans in Congress still want to repeal Obamacare care and replace it with something more Darwinian if not Dickensian. The Republican health care plan was hanging by a thread before Kimmel spoke out. But Kimmel's moving statement puts sitting Republicans' plan for repealing Obamacare in a tougher bind, the Washington Post reports:

On Capitol Hill, influential Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) came out against the plan, dealing a major blow to proponents trying to secure enough votes to pass it in the House. Across the country, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional story about his newborn son’s heart condition reverberated on television and the Internet. And former president Barack Obama, who signed the bill Republicans are trying to dismantle, took to Twitter to defend it.

All three voiced concerns about losing a core protection in the Affordable Care Act for people with preexisting conditions, as is possible under the latest GOP plan. Such growing worries threatened to derail the revamped attempt to revise key parts of the ACA — or at least send Republicans back to the drawing board.

The Republican whip count is shaky:

“I told the leadership I cannot support the bill with this provision in it,” Upton said. “I don’t know how it all will play out, but I know there are a good number of us that have raised real red flags.”

A Washington Post analysis shows 21 House Republicans either opposed to or leaning against the bill, and 22 more either undecided or unclear in their positions. If no Democrats support the bill, the Republicans can lose no more than 22 GOP votes to pass it in the House.

Kimmel urged the congress to get past the partisan squabbles, but it is not partisanship that is the problem, writes Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

It’s an ideologically deranged party and its know-nothing leader in the White House. The fact that approximately half the voters in this country support that party is a much less comforting thought than the one about America coming together to care for kids like Billy. Until we face up to that pre-existing reality, we don’t have any chance of ensuring that we live in a society that truly cares for its most vulnerable citizens.

The Kimmel video went viral on Tuesday:


Congress is feeling the heat. You bring the fire. If you haven't already, now is your chance.


Undercover Blue 5/03/2017 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

 
What he said

by digby

The New York Times' Charles Blow, that is:

Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.

America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.

[...]

Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.


As New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson noted about one of Trump’s speeches in his 2016 book, “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?”: “The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination, build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It’s a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside.”

Thompson also notes that “Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,” warning that:

We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.

[...]
In January, Vanity Fair attempted to answer the question: “Exactly How Much TV Does Donald Trump Watch in a Day?” They did so by producing this utterly frightening roundup:

Early on in the campaign, Trump told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he gets military advice from TV pundits. He couldn’t get through a 50-minute Washington Post interview without repeatedly looking at the TV and commenting about what was on it. In November, during the transition, The Post noted that, based on his biography, ‘He watches enormous amounts of television all through the night.’ And just this week, a source told Politico that Trump’s aides are being forced to try and curb some of his ‘worst impulses’ — including TV-watching, apparently: ‘He gets bored and likes to watch TV … so it is important to minimize that."

Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.

At no time is this more devastatingly obvious than when he grants interviews to print reporters, when he is not protected by the comfort of a script and is not animated by the dazzling glare of television lights. In these moments, all he has is language, and his absolute ineptitude and possibly even lack of comprehension is enormously obvious.

In the last month, Trump has given interviews to print reporters at The Times, The Associated Press, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. Read together, the transcripts paint a terrifying portrait of a man who is simultaneously unintelligible in his delivery, self-assured in his ignorance and consciously bathing in his narcissism.

In Trump world, facts don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, language doesn’t matter. Passionate performance is the only ideal. A lie forcefully told and often repeated is better than truth — it is accepted as an act of faith, which is better than a point of fact.

It's Orwellian, but I think we are having a hard time grappling with that because we assumed that an Orwellian world would spring from someone or a group of someones who planned it with ruthless efficiency. I don't think it ever occurred to us that it would come about because our institutions would bend to a perceived necessity of propping up a celebrity imbecile and we'd all be sitting at home watching it happen on TV.

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digby 5/02/2017 05:30:00 PM

 
"It's just pop..."

by digby

I know that people don't like being told what to eat. I try to stay out of the food wars. But Michelle Obama's program for kids was a really positive, upbeat, fun way to try to get kids to eat healthy foods, which is something all adults should be for. If that's some kind of "liberal" plot then this culture is well and truly fucked and we might as well just pack it in.

Ok. We might as well just pack it in:

Michelle Obama had a strikingly successful record of fighting the obesity epidemic and improving nutrition — both symbolically and through advocacy for legislation. But many Obama-era efforts to push the food industry in a healthier direction are now under threat.

Over the past couple of weeks, a number of reports have surfaced suggesting that the food industry is trying to capitalize on Trump’s anti-regulation agenda and push back on reforms aimed at making our food supply healthier. The food lobbyists, emboldened by the current White House, are pushing back on recent healthy food and transparency mandates that would hurt their bottom line.

Some of the key battlegrounds — school lunches, food and menu labels — are familiar terrain for anybody who has been observing the efforts to clean up the US food supply. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s been happening, and the top three areas to watch.

1) School lunch standards are under siege — again

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 centered on cleaning up school food. Getting the act passed became a key focus of Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to fight childhood obesity.

But the new US Department of Agriculture chief, Sonny Perdue, put announced steps on Monday that’ll give schools more flexibility in meeting federal nutrition standards for school lunches.

To understand what’s changing, we need to grasp what the Obama administration pushed for: It required the federal government to use recommendations from the Institute of Medicine to make the National School Lunch Program more nutritious, with more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and less sodium, full-fat milk, and meat.

The law also mandated that schools stop marketing the fat-, sugar-, and salt-laden snacks — like sugary beverages and chocolate bars — in cafeterias and vending machines and replace those offerings with lower-calorie and more nutritious alternatives like fruit cups and granola bars. Finally, it made it possible for schools whose students have high poverty rates to provide free breakfasts in addition to lunches, without requiring paperwork on whether individual students meet certain poverty criteria.

Under Perdue’s USDA, schools will have more wiggle room for interpreting the standards around milk, whole grains, and sodium. Schools can now push back targets to further reduce sodium in lunches for at least three years, serve 1 percent flavored milk again, and get exemptions from having to move to whole-grain products, the Hill reported.

“This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals,” Perdue said in a USDA statement.

It’s still unclear what this loosening of standards will mean in practice and how schools will interpret them. But health advocates were hopeful that easing up on regulation won’t completely undo the Obama-era reforms.

American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown pointed out that nearly all US schools are already meeting the new school nutrition standards. The majority of parents also support the legislation. “Improving children’s health should be a top priority for the USDA, and serving more nutritious foods in schools is a clear-cut way to accomplish this goal,” she said in a public statement.

They are also going to delay or completely reverse the new requirements for food labeling. Because what you don't know wont hurt you, amirite???

Michelle Obama's legacy lives on, however. Gardening has spiked and her growing the White House kitchen garden is given some credit for it. And some other initiatives do too:

Obama championed healthy living and exercise on venues as diverse as Ellen and Elmo. She also worked with the food industry to remove calories from the food supply, increase transparency in labeling, and create and market healthier food choices for families — efforts that have already had an impact and will continue after the Obama White House.

The Partnership for a Healthier America, which launched in conjunction with (but independently from) the Let’s Move campaign, helped get food companies — such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and General Mills — to commit to cutting calories from their foods. At the latest count in April, the initiative had already removed 6.4 trillion calories (or 78 calories per person) by reformulating products and shrinking serving sizes.

Another milestone came in June 2015, when the FDA banned trans fats from the food supply within three years. The policy brought the US in line with other countries that have already banned these processed unsaturated fats, which increase the risk for heart attacks and strokes, including Denmark, Austria, Iceland, and Switzerland.

It’s difficult to imagine food companies packing calories and trans fat back into their products at a time when American consumers are demanding healthier options. And that's momentum that won't die."

I don't know. I feel as if all momentum has died and we're either spinning our wheels or going backwards. But yes, companies have no good reason to go back to transfats and hopefully the public will hold its ground and demand food labeling whether Donald Trump and his wrecking crew are president or not.

And who knows? Maybe Melania will take up the cause. It would be great if she would if only to get those right wingers to embrace the cause. Their kids needs to eat healthy foods too.

Update: This too

Ivanka's got the girl beat.

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digby 5/02/2017 03:30:00 PM

 
Their monsters are turning on them

by digby

Even the wingnuttiest wingnuts aren't wingnutty enough. This op-ed is written by a serious wingnut, who worked for both wingnut DeMint and wingnut Tom Coburn btw:

The story of DeMint’s ouster begins in 2010 with then-Heritage President Ed Feulner’s ill-conceived decision to create a version of the Heritage Foundation with “fangs.” As Feulner and Needham wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

The Heritage Foundation has been called "the beast" of all think tanks. Last week our beast added new fangs with the creation of a new advocacy organization. This institution—Heritage Action for America—will be able to spend money to push legislation we think the country needs without the obstacles faced by a nonprofit like the Heritage Foundation.

DeMint succeeded Feulner in 2013. In the fall of that year Heritage proper under DeMint and Heritage Action under Needham worked in tandem to back a disastrous plan to force President Obama to “defund” Obamacare through a government shutdown. The argument was absurd. If members would only “stand firm” we could win 60 votes in the Senate and persuade Barack Obama to sign a bill undoing his signature achievement using a shutdown as leverage. In reality, Needham took conservatives hostage and begged Obama to not shoot.

Coburn rightly described the effort as “not intellectually honest” and exploitive of the base while DeMint, Needham, Senator Ted Cruz and Cruz’s undisciplined staff derided dissenters as being in a “surrender caucus” that secretly liked Obamacare (never mind that Coburn, a doctor, had offered dozens of amendments to Obamacare and had offered a leading Obamacare replacement plan). The split was personally and professionally disappointing because two mentors and allies were at odds. In the Senate, DeMint was Coburn’s most reliable partner on a host of fights, including Coburn’s campaign to end earmarks that Coburn started in earnest as a member of the House in 1998.

After the shutdown debacle Heritage’s influence waned considerably. Many Heritage scholars left and other thinks tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Mercatus Center and new institutions like The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) rose in prominence.

By the time DeMint realized the “beast with fangs” was out of control it was too late. The beast fought back and won. According to a report by Philip Wegmann at the Washington Examiner, DeMint specifically suggested Heritage Action should be scaled back or disbanded.

he narrative presented in a recent Politico story was scoffed at by my sources inside Heritage (who requested anonymity) as a transparent effort to blame DeMint for Needham’s flaws. It was Needham, one Heritage staffer explained, not DeMint, who made the operation too political.

It goes on and on and on with recriminations flying in every direction. The fact is that every single person mentioned in the article is a right wing loon. It's a circular firing squad with bullets dipped in poison.

Enjoy!

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digby 5/02/2017 01:30:00 PM