Hullabaloo

Saturday, March 24, 2018

 
Enough is enough

by digby




It appears that the turnout is huge for the March For Our Lives today, all over the globe.

In New York, marchers bundled in bright orange — the official color of a gun control advocacy group — charged toward Central Park. In Washington, protesters held signs with the messages “Arms Are for Hugging” and “Never Again.” And in Parkland, Fla., less than a mile from where the shooting took place, one protester’s eyes brimmed with tears, surrounded by the echoing chant, “Enough is enough!”



By late morning, counterprotests were also gaining steam. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators carried pistols, flags and toddlers swaddled in blankets. One of their signs read: “What can we do to stop mass shootings? SHOOT BACK.” In Boston, opposing groups of protesters shouted at one another before the police intervened.

Here’s what we’re watching as protests unfurl around the globe:

• More than 800 protests are planned in every American state and on every continent except for Antarctica, according to a website set up by organizers. Check out photos from around the world, and a map of planned protests.

• The National Park Service has approved a permit for the Washington march that estimates 500,000 people could attend. Called March for Our Lives, the main event there kicks off around midday, and some of the most prominent student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a shooting left 17 dead last month, will speak.


• The student leaders who organized the day’s events, many of them sharp-tongued and defiant in the face of politicians and gun lobbyists, have kept attention on the issue in a time of renewed political activism on the left, as they helped lead a national school walkout and pushed state officials in Florida to enact gun legislation. The effectiveness of the students’ efforts will be measured, in part, on the success of the demonstrations.

• On Saturday, the White House said in a statement, “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today.” On Friday, the Justice Department proposed banning so-called bump stocks, but President Trump signed a spending bill that included only some background check and school safety measures.

• Counterprotests in support of gun rights were planned in cities including Salt Lake City, Greenville, S.C., and Helena, Mont.

The student organizers want action in a midterms year.

The student activists want to emphasize they are are a group that will soon have access to the ballot box, as they hope to build support for candidates who support universal background checks and bans on assault-style weapons.

Huge majorities of Americans say they support gun control measures like universal background checks. Yet when put directly to the people in a referendum in recent years, the results have been mixed. Here is a look at what polling, and recent referendums, reveal about the political challenges that face the student-led activists.

“What we’re doing is because we’re not scared of these adults,” said Jaclyn Corin, 17, a Stoneman Doulgas junior and lead organizer, “because we have nothing to lose, we don’t have an election to lose, we don’t have a job to lose — we just have our lives to lose.”

She compared the march to protests against the Vietnam War and rallies for civil rights. She recently spoke with Representative John Lewis, a key player during the civil rights era. “He said he saw himself and his friends and his movement in us, in our movement,” she said.

In Parkland on Saturday, Sari Kaufman, a Stoneman Douglas sophomore, urged everyone to “turn this moment into a movement” that would toss out of office any politician who took money from the National Rifle Association.

“They think we’re all talk and no action,” she said to loud applause and cheers, and urged the crowd to prove politicians wrong by voting in huge numbers.

“Remember that policy change is not nearly as difficult as losing a loved one,” she said. “Don’t just go out and vote: Get 17 other people to go out and vote.”

The Washington march also drew people like Dantrell Blake, 21, and his cousin Deshon Hannah, 20. Both were shot as teenagers in Chicago, and they said they hoped their visit to Washington would bring attention to the plight of their city’s many shooting victims.

“When something like that happens,” Mr. Blake said of Parkland, “it’s like, ‘It’s a massacre.’ But it’s a massacre in Chicago every day — and this definitely can be talked about.”

Jodi Klein, whose oldest daughter, Jessica, graduated from the high school in 2008, said she was “pumped” by the crowds.

Asked what was different about the Parkland shooting, Ms. KleinKlein, 58, of Coral Springs, Fla. said: “They went after educated kids that can fight back. My daughter was on the debate team. They taught these kids to speak out.”
[...]
Ms. Jacobs was a library clerk during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She barricaded herself in the school’s library, “in a closet hidden behind file cabinets” along with 18 fourth-graders.

“In the months after the shooting it took 100 percent of my personal focus to get up and go to work every day to take care of my surviving students,” she said. “One of the things that happens in our communities is that the survivors of gun violence have zero help.”

Mara Kleinberg, a high school senior at Churchill Center and School in Manhattan, wore an orange quilted parka and camouflage pants, and carried a sign asking why she should be protesting for her safety instead of learning.

Ms. Kleinberg, 17, said she was looking forward to voting so she could back elected officials who support gun control. “I’m happy that I can vote finally and I hope this movement brings a lot more voters into American politics,” she said.

She added that she had first become aware of the issue after Sandy Hook. As a voter, she said, “I’ll be looking for a lot more regulation: raising the age limit, making sure the kids can’t get guns. It’s kids’ brains that are still developing.”

Sayem Hussein, an 18-year-old high school senior at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, said that he had woken up at 2 a.m. and traveled an hour and a half by subway and Uber to get to East Harlem, where he was waiting on a street corner for his classmates and a bus that would drive them to Washington.

“I am a firm believer of constitutional rights,” said Mr. Hussein, who had a small copy of the Constitution in his jacket pocket. “I completely understand the Second Amendment and why people are so defensive about it, but gun regulation is totally different from taking away someone’s gun.”

There is another side which hasn't shown up today in most places which is nice. But they are out there and they did make themselves known in some places:

Tensions over guns seemed to converge in Salt Lake City, where a gun rights march kicked off just minutes before a gun control march.

The gun rights rally drew hundreds of people, many carrying signs — “AR-15s EMPOWER the people,” one said.

Brandon McKee was one of the many people with pistols on their hips. His daughter Kendall, 11, held a sign: “Criminals love gun control.” Mr. McKee said of the Washington marchers: “I believe it’s their goal to unarm America, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re not going to stand idly by and let them tell us what we can and cannot do.”

As the gun rights advocates set off toward the Capitol, some began to heckle a gun control advocate, Linda Peer, 67, who had infiltrated the march line.

“She’s not a true American!” one man yelled. “Shame on you!” the group chanted at her.

At the Capitol, a man in camouflage shouted at another woman who appeared to be part of the gun-restriction group. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Are you even from this country?”

In Boston, Second Amendment supporters gathered in front of the statehouse with signs that said, “Come and take it.”

“We believe in the Second Amendment,” said Paul Allen, 62, a retired construction worker who lives in Salisbury, Mass. “You people will interpret it the way you want and we’ll interpret it for what it is — that law-abiding citizens who are true patriots have the right to bear arms.”

Mr. Allen described supporters of gun control as “ignorant sheep who are being spoon-fed by liberal teachers.”

“They haven’t read the Constitution and they don’t know what it means,” he said.
Perhaps the most formidable political foe the students face? The N.R.A.

The leaders of the National Rifle Association have questioned whether the students were mature enough to lead a discussion about national policy, and representatives have also accused the movement of being backed by “radicals with a history of violent threats,” a claim that the fact-checking website PolitiFact deemed untrue.

And then you have the cretinous moron:

The president has grappled publicly with how to respond after the Parkland shooting.

A week after the Parkland shooting, President Trump emerged from an emotionally raw meeting with students, as well as parents of those who were killed, appearing moved. Days later, he declared: “We have to have action. We don’t have any action.”

But in March, he quickly abandoned a brief promise to work for gun control measures opposed by the N.R.A. He has also discussed measures such as arming teachers and reopening mental institutions to prevent school shootings.

On Friday, he criticized Mr. Obama over bump stocks, an accessory that can make a semiautomatic weapon fire more rapidly, in tweeting about the Justice Department’s move.

I think we may truly be seeing the first real signs that the mass movement on the left inspired by the horrific ascension of Donald Trump, gathering peacefully in the streets on a regular basis and organizing electorally as well, might just succeed. The Womens Marches and this demonstration show that a large cross section of the population, young and old, small towns and large cities, are actually leaving their couches and taking time out of their busy lives to make a political statement.

And they are not rejecting the idea of running for office and voting which means they aren't going to forget about one of the most powerful tools we still have available to us to make change --- the US government. Indeed, the Indivisible-style groups are campaigning for office all over the country and these young activists are all talking about voting and organizing.

This is a very good sign. Mass movement + government is very powerful. And that's what it's going to take to reset from our current horror.

The other side is not going to give up. They are very angry as you can see from some of the quotes above. Nobody should be sanguine that just because these large numbers of people are coming out to protest that there is no opposition. There's plenty. This is fight.


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digby 3/24/2018 11:00:00 AM

 
He's going to the mattresses

by digby

I wrote about the latest legal maneuverings for Salon this morning. One update. There are rumors that he had diGenova and Toensing in for a final audition and now he isn't sure about them. He's looking for bigger stars ...

The old saying that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client was uttered all day long on cable news late this week, and for good reason. President Trump's lead personal lawyer, John Dowd, announced his resignation on Thursday, and all the speculation among those with contacts in TrumpWorld is that the president is now taking his legal strategy into his own hands.

Trump has reportedly been unhappy with his legal team, largely because they repeatedly (and foolishly) promised him that special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of the 2016 Trump campaign, and ancillary matters, would be wound up by now. Of course, Trump also presumably assured his lawyers that he was innocent of all wrongdoing. Evidently Dowd was the man Trump depended on to negotiate with Mueller's office, and Trump wasn't happy to learn that Mueller wants to interview him about obstruction of justice, which the president likes to call "fighting back." Others with insights into Trump's inner circle have speculated that Dowd was to leave, either because his client won't listen to his advice or because Trump had hired political hitman and TV lawyer Joe diGenova, and Dowd wanted no part of whatever they have planned.

It appears that diGenova plans to concentrate on a PR campaign aimed at diverting attention onto some separate line of investigation into Hillary Clinton and the FBI, along with a full-court press aimed at muddying Robert Mueller's reputation. While diGenova certainly has experience in high-stakes partisan TV wrestling, he's likely way over his head when it comes to dealing with a complicated counterintelligence investigation. It's not clear how any of this is supposed to clear the president's name, but it's apparently what Trump considers "counterpunching."

It's his style to attack and divert. According to Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair, the president has been chomping at the bit ever since Mueller's office issued a subpoena for Trump Organization documents:

In the days since Mueller issued the subpoena, Trump has been on the attack. Last Saturday, Trump encouraged Dowd to call for an end to the Russia probe, a source told me. ... Trump’s new offensive is a sign that he’s unilaterally abandoning the go-along, get-along strategy advocated by Dowd and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the response to Mueller. ... “Trump is looking at this saying, I did it your way for months, now I’m fucking doing it my way,” a former West Wing official said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

In private, Trump friends and outside advisers have been stoking his desire to go on the offensive for months. Trump has heard that his lawyers are “idiots”; that Mueller’s probe is a “coup d’état”; and that Trump’s only crime is having “won the election.”

This account lends credence to the idea that Trump is no longer interested in playing by any of the rules, not even the rule of law.

After all, Dowd was in many ways the perfect lawyer for Trump in this matter. He has a ton of experience in Washington and knows his way around politics and the federal law enforcement bureaucracy. And he's got the kind of rough-and-tumble personality that Trump likes.


Reuters published a profile of Dowd when he was hired with the headline, "Tough-talking Trump defense lawyer says he's no 'snowflake' and he isn't." They characterized his style as a mirror of the president's -- "a no-holds-barred, hyperbolic style and a history of attacking prosecutors, congressional Democrats and the media." He told the news agency, “I fight hard, I believe that’s what I’m supposed to do." And he has done that.

This is a man who almost certainly lied when he took the blame for tweeting on the president's Twitter account that he had fired Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, which put the president in serious legal danger. (Remember that the stated original reason for firing Flynn was because he had lied to Mike Pence.) Just last weekend, Dowd went out on a limb with a statement to Betsy Woodruff of the Daily Beast saying he "prayed" that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would follow the "brilliant and courageous" example of Jeff Sessions and end the Russia investigation "manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier." (If that statement was not literally scripted by Trump, it's a brilliant imitation of his rhetorical style.)

According to Woodruff, Dowd specifically said that he was speaking on behalf of the president, only to later reverse course and claim he was only speaking for himself. It may be that Dowd belatedly realized that the statement strongly implied that Sessions' decision to fire former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe was connected to the Mueller probe, leading to a reasonable conclusion that Trump was admitting to collusion with the Department of Justice in the matter. Trump was reportedly infuriated that Dowd walked back the statement, apparently seeing that as a sign of weakness -- or, just as likely, he wanted everyone to understand that he was directing the whole thing from the White House.

However much of a crude scrapper Dowd might be, there is no evidence that he would knowingly break the law or violate the Constitution. So perhaps Trump and his new team are getting ready to "fight back" in ways that even the combative Dowd was unwilling to countenance. It's certainly possible that Dowd reflected on whether he wanted to be part of a "legal team" that included Christian activist Jay Sekulow and right-wing operative diGenova, both of whom are frequent bloviators on Fox News. Perhaps he doesn't think Sean Hannity's green room is the right environment for hatching a legal defense.

At this point Trump seems likely to fire Sessions, Rosenstein and/or Mueller sooner rather than later. It was reported late on Thursday that he had also hired diGenova's wife and law partner, Victoria Toensing, another professional right-wing TV character assassin. It's also rumored that Trump may bring back his longtime personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz, the man who had to resign early in the president's term for emailing a reporter, "Watch your back, bitch." Such sensitivities seem rather quaint now.

Trump is no longer negotiating or mounting a legal defense. It's all-out war.

digby 3/24/2018 09:30:00 AM

 

Trump and Cambridge Analytica - MFEO

by Tom Sullivan

Still from Goldeneye (1995).

We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy.

Maybe it's the Eton styling. Or maybe simply his confidence. But in the secret Channel 4 videos of suspended Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix hawking his company's "psychographic" services, his pitch bears a certain resemblance to Donald Trump's overselling of his own properties, steaks, and fraudulent university. Only Nix was boasting of the firm's alleged pivotal role in electing Donald Trump president of the United States.

"If it's what you say I love it," Don Jr. famously wrote Rob Goldstone, publicist for Russian pop star Emin Agalarovof. The prospect of the Trump campaign getting its mitts on a thick bundle of purloined Hillary Clinton emails was too delicious. Nix seems just as eager in discussing entrapping clients' political rivals in political bribes or in blackmailing them via Ukrainian sex workers. The Trumps and Cambridge Analytica were made for each other.

The biggest outrages over CA have been its use of 50 million stolen Facebook profiles to construct its voter-targeting algorithms and reports that Nix attempted to obtain hacked Democratic emails from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who in turn got them from hackers in Russian intelligence. Facebook's stock value has plummeted. CA faces multiple investigations.

Mother Jones, however, exposes CA itself as largely a vaporware outfit promoting a product it doesn't yet have to clients it hopes will pay them to build it. Steve Bannon, still a board member, seems to have hoped CA's Jedi mind tricks would help him hasten the revolution.

Accounts by CA's former clients — most notably the Sen. Ted Cruz campaign for president — suggest the firm that billed itself as a kind of James Bond villain capable of manipulating whole countries was as authentic as Trump University's syllabus. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that the Jakarta ops center of CA's predecessor, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), not only looked like the villain’s computer-filled lair from the Bond film Goldeneye (1995), but the same firm that built the Goldeneye set built one for SCL when it exhibited at the Defence and Security Equipment International show. An Indonesian source told the Independent in 2000, the Jakarta ops center's purpose seemed mostly cosmetic, "a movie set to impress the clients."


Vison 360 "ops center" built for Strategic Communication Laboratories' 2005 exhibit at Defence Systems & Equipment International show.

CA's business model resembles Trump's branding model: lots of hype with little to back it up. As much hot water as CA now finds itself in, their reputation among prospective clients was already in serious decline, writes Mother Jones' Andy Kroll:

In reality, Cambridge Analytica’s reputation for spotty work had circulated widely among Democratic and Republican operatives, who were also put off by Nix’s grandstanding and self-promotion. Mark Jablonowski, a partner at the firm DSPolitical, told me that there was “basically a de facto blacklist” of the firm and “a consensus Cambridge Analytica had overhyped their supposed accomplishments.”

Kroll's lengthy expose concludes:

By most accounts, Cambridge Analytica’s main feat of political persuasion was convincing a group of Republican donors, candidates, and organizations to hand over millions of dollars. (A company called Emerdata that lists Nix as a director recently added Rebekah Mercer and another Mercer daughter to its board, suggesting that Nix hasn’t fallen out with all his GOP patrons.) But Cambridge’s controversial foray into US politics spawned larger questions about how our social-media habits can be turned against us, and how companies such as Facebook hold more power over our lives—the ability to shape public conversation, even political outcomes—than many people are comfortable with.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.


Undercover Blue 3/24/2018 06:00:00 AM

Friday, March 23, 2018

 

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Polar bear cub!!!

Visitors to the Royal Zoological Society’s Highland Wildlife Park will now have the chance to see the first Polar Bear cub born in the UK in 25 years!

Born in December, the cub has taken its first steps into the park’s outdoor enclosure, which had previously been closed to the public to allow mum, Victoria, the privacy she needed.

Staff members at the park are advising visitors that the cub may only be visible for small periods of time to begin with. Una Richardson, head keeper, said, “Having spent four months in her maternity den, Victoria quickly took the chance to go outside. Understandably, her cub has been more cautious and is still getting used to new sights, smells and sounds.”

“While the cub will become more confident and start to explore the large enclosure with Victoria, this will take time and they will always have access to their den for peace and quiet. There is no guarantee all of our visitors will see the cub at this early age, but they may be lucky.”

“There is huge interest in the park and seeing a Polar Bear cub will be a once in a lifetime opportunity for many people, particularly those traveling from around the world.”

ouglas Richardson, the park’s head of living collections, said, “Our pioneering captive Polar Bear management programme closely mirrors what happens in the wild and this birth shows our approach is working. This is vital because a healthy and robust captive population may one day be needed to augment numbers in the wild, such are the threats to the species from climate change and human pressures.”

“The reintroduction of Polar Bears would be an enormous task, but we need to have the option. While our cub will never be in the wild, there is a chance its offspring may be in decades to come.”

Chief Executive Barbara Smith added, “The birth of the first Polar Bear in the UK for a quarter of a century is a huge achievement for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the team at our Highland Wildlife Park. We are hopeful our cub will help to raise awareness of the dangers to Polar Bears in the wild. Collectively, we must do all we can to protect this magnificent species.”

Staff at the park expects to be able to discover the cub’s sex in April or May, when health checks will be possible.

The Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) is a carnivorous bear whose native range lies within the Arctic Circle, encompassing the Arctic Ocean, its surrounding seas and surrounding landmasses.

The species is currently classified as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List. Risks include: climate change, pollution in the form of toxic contaminants, conflicts with shipping, oil and gas exploration and development, and human-bear interactions including harvesting and possible stresses from recreational watching.

digby 3/23/2018 06:30:00 PM

 
Turning the country into an armed camp

by digby

I had a feeling this would be the outcome. Ever since Newtown, the "solution" for gun violence from the NRA has been to arm more people, particularly teachers, and put all public building under lockdown conditions. They want to turn the whole country into a prison.

Down in Florida, it's already happening. Matthew Rosza at Salon writes:

David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who has since become an activist for the #NeverAgain movement supporting gun control, described his high school as "like a prison," to Axios' Mike Allen on Friday. Hogg also expressed concern that, because of the "racial disparity between black and white students," the increased number of school resource officers could make life even worse for students of color. Hogg also criticized the media for "not giving black students a voice . . . My school is about 25% black, but the way we're covered doesn't reflect that."

This wasn't the first time that the Parkland student activists drew attention to the racial disparity in how gun control is covered. They made that point as well during a rally at Thurgood Marshall Academy in Southeast Washington, D.C. on Thursday, according to The Washington Post. That event occurred prior to the March for Our Lives rally that is planned for this weekend, during which hundreds of thousands of students and their families are expected to convene on Washington to press Congress for stricter gun laws.

The March for Our Lives rally is merely the latest example of a major protest in reaction to outrage from "the mass shooting generation," as Hogg put it earlier this week. A number of the Parkland shooting survivors have made media appearances and appeared at protests in the month since the shooting, drawing the anger and ridicule of conservatives and even humiliating Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., during a highly publicized town hall event last month.

Yet the fact that the Parkland school has been turned into a prison-like environment, and meaningful gun control legislation is still verboten by the Republican Party (as most recently evidenced by the failure to include anything substantial on the issue in the new budget), reinforces an important point — namely, that opponents of gun control are willing to try just about anything they can think of to avoid even modest increases of gun regulations.

Perhaps the most controversial idea to come from the "anything but guns" crowd is the notion that we should arm teachers. It's an idea that has been supported by President Donald Trump and a number of other prominent conservatives, even though it wouldn't work and is likely to lead to racial profiling. There have even been two incidents this month in which personnel on school grounds accidentally discharged guns, underscoring the absurdity of that proposal.

It would be one thing if policymakers were proposing beefing up security at our schools in addition to strengthening gun control laws; while this could still be considered excessive and unfair to the students, at least no one would question that they're trying everything possible to protect America's children. The problem, though, is that ideas like spending more money on security guards, arming teachers and improving America's mental health care system (which has merit) aren't being offered by the anti-gun control movement in good faith. They're being suggested because that movement's primary objective is to prevent any legislation from passing that regulates guns.

The goal, then, isn't to protect children, but to see if any solution to the problem of mass shootings at schools exists which won't require conservatives to give an inch to gun control proponents.

This is correct. Sadly, the perverse result of the massive new gun control movement is to make school more like jails and the teachers more like prison guards. But that's what Wayne LaPierre said had to happen. I wrote about it for Salon after one of the earlier mass murders:

We can thank one man who runs one powerful lobbying group, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. According to the Frontline documentary "Gunned Down" it was clear that the NRA was thrown by the Newtown massacre and there was personal pressure on board members to accede to some kind of gun safety regulation to appease the national sense of horror over the event. At the very least, they thought it would be wise for the organization to keep a low profile in the aftermath. But without telling anyone LaPierre staged a press conference in Washington DC and came out swinging. He said in no uncertain terms that there would be no compromise, no negotiation. He doubled down on the vacuous, insincere NRA logic that the reason those tiny children were gunned down in their 1st grade classrooms was the fact that there weren't enough guns there. He infamously declared:

"The only way — the only way — to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun... What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security?

"Our children— we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it.

The best they can do is to say that if we had sharp-shooters stationed in classrooms all over the country we could maybe cut the death toll. There would still be dead kids, of course. Maybe even more would die. But it is simply inconceivable to them that we might seek ways to end this violence in the first place. They say the world is full of monsters and predators. But just as we cannot hold back the tides it is impossible to keep deadly weapons out of their hands.

...


digby 3/23/2018 04:30:00 PM

 
You might think this is good news but ...

by digby





Politico analysis of the omnibus spending bill:

President Donald Trump’s budget proposals have taken a hatchet to President Barack Obama’s top priorities. They’ve called for deep cuts in renewable energy, medical research and nonmilitary spending in general. They’ve eliminated TIGER, a grant program for innovative transportation projects created by Obama’s stimulus bill; ARPA-E, an energy research agency launched by the stimulus; and CDBG, a community development program many Republicans consider an urban slush fund.

Now the Republicans who control Congress have passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, and it not only protects Obama’s priorities, it expands them. It does far less for Trump’s stated priorities, and while his administration endorsed the bill Thursday, he tweeted a veto threat and expressed some apparent buyer’s remorse Friday after it passed.

The omnibus—Capitol Hill jargon for a single spending bill that funds most government functions—does not kill any of the programs or agencies Trump’s budget proposed to kill; it triples funding for TIGER, nearly doubles CDBG, and boosts ARPA-E’s budget by 16 percent. Trump wanted to slash the Energy Department’s renewables budget 65 percent; instead, Congress boosted it 14 percent. Trump proposed to keep nonmilitary spending $54 billion below the congressional budget cap; the omnibus spends right up to the cap, a $63 billion increase from last year.

This is why the conservative National Review denounced the omnibus as “the sort of legislation that would have been right at home in the Obama administration,” while Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer gloated in a statement that its “job-creating, life-saving investments stand in sharp contrast to the Trump budget.” It basically extends the fiscal status quo that has prevailed since the start of Obama’s second term—plus a sizable chunk of new deficit spending—even though Republicans now control the legislative and executive branches.

“Throughout the Obama presidency, the Republican Party at least gave lip service to the need to restore fiscal sanity in Washington,” says Michael Needham, head of the conservative policy group Heritage Action. “It is now clear just how many in the GOP are willing to engage in profligate spending when they control the levels of power.”

Republicans are pleased that the omnibus hikes defense spending 10 percent, even more than Trump requested, including a 2.6 percent military pay raise Trump has already bragged about on Twitter. The White House also got $1.6 billion for border security, although the bill specifies it cannot be spent on the concrete wall the president wants. There’s a 6 percent cut in foreign aid and other State Department programs, less than the 25 percent cut in the Trump budget written by Office of Management and Budget chief Mick Mulvaney but still a significant rollback. And the omnibus did not include a specific line item for the Gateway rail tunnel project in New York City that Trump had called a deal-breaker, although Democrats are confident that Gateway will still get plenty of cash from the bill.

This is good news for many people who depend upon the programs they have funded. But it is beyond cynical.

Republicans spend and spend when they have the power of the purse so the country is more prosperous when they are in power. Inevitably their laissez-faire regulatory program tanks the economy and they lose power. The Democrats come in and have to clean up their mess and the Republicans blame them for the misery they themselves brought about. Rinse, repeat.

Sure there are some Republicans wringing their hands about deficits but that will not cost them one single vote. It is a weapon that is only effective against Democrats.

So enjoy the funding while you can. Once Democrats take over the congress trump will turn into the most vociferous deficit hawk we've ever seen. He telegraphed his intentions today when he pretended he was going to veto a bill that his White House helped write.

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digby 3/23/2018 03:00:00 PM

 
Pray that moustache becomes just too much for Trump to bear

by digby




This article by someone who has worked with John Bolton is truly terrifying considering that Bolton is a monster who seeks world dominance:

Here are three things to know about what Bolton brings to this job.

First, he's a masterful bureaucratic tactician. Unlike his predecessors, Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Bolton is a very experienced and adept creature of Washington institutions. Similar to former Vice President Dick Cheney, he knows the levers and knobs of the vast national security and foreign policy machinery: how they work, who works them, and how to exert control over them. He’ll work to put loyalists in key vantage points and marginalize those he distrusts (both of which I watched him do as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security). In particular, he has the already-weakened State Department, now lacking a secretary, especially mapped out for further hostile takeover.

Second, he’s a crafty negotiator. I’ve never believed that Donald Trump is the artful dealmaker he pretends to be; he has a few plays that he just runs again and again. But Bolton is truly clever. He picks his battles much more carefully than Trump does. As U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Bolton is mostly remembered for his hostility to the institution and for his coarse bluntness. Yet in that multilateral diplomatic maze, he often delivered for the administration, including on North Korea at the U.N. Security Council.

Third, he's thorough and methodical. Most senior policymakers simply cannot keep up with the details across so many issues. I watched Bolton dominate ICC policy meetings with mastery of the minute particulars, preserving a strategy that was more hardline—and unnecessarily costly—than I think even the president would have wanted (though I’d note that Bolton’s early victories on this issue didn’t last into Bush’s second term). Expect the same diligent readiness from him on issues like Iran and North Korea, but with the added advantage that he'll face less pushback than he might otherwise because of the fact that so many senior diplomatic posts remain unfilled. His ability to be meticulous and bombastic will probably serve him very well in this White House.

It’s anyone's guess whether the relationship between Bolton and President Trump will last. The president is, of course, a wild card. My best guess is that Bolton will be effective at managing his relationship with Trump and will be far more influential than Flynn or McMaster ever could have been. But, maybe the president will quickly turn on him as well, or just decide he hates mustaches. What’s more, John Bolton doesn’t suffer fools gladly—and that's bad news for Trump.

For now, the key takeaway is that Bolton brings to the president's national security agenda a competence that this White House has lacked. I generally agree with Benjamin Wittes that some of the president's worst instincts have often been tempered by sheer ineptitude. What makes Bolton dangerous is his capacity to implement those instincts effectively.

I guess I'm going to have to root for Trump to do what he always does and for Bolton to be unable to set his own ego aside enough to give the King his required blow jobs on a regular basis.

It's not much but I think it's all we've got.
digby 3/23/2018 01:30:00 PM

 
Stormy has been a film director since 2004

by digby





I'm just going to throw this out there:

If “a picture is worth a thousand words,” how many words is this worth?????#60minutes #pleasedenyit #basta pic.twitter.com/eCkU0JBZaR

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) March 23, 2018

She has directed 78 films. She knows her way around a camera. Just saying.

digby 3/23/2018 12:30:00 PM

 
The Cambridge Analytica blueprint

by digby

The Guardian got a hold of the Cambridge Analytica sales pitch:

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

“This is the debrief of the data-driven digital campaign that was employed for Mr Trump,” said Brittany Kaiser, 30, who was Cambridge Analytica’s business development director until two weeks ago, when she left over a contractual dispute.

She is the second former employee to come forward in less than a week, talking exclusively to the Guardian about the inner workings of the firm, including the work she said it conducted on the UK’s EU membership referendum.

She said she had access to a copy of the same document now obtained by the Guardian, and had used it to showcase the campaign’s secret methods to potential clients of Cambridge Analytica.

“There was a huge demand internally for people to see how we did it,” Kaiser said of the 2016 race. “Everyone wanted to know: past clients, future clients. The whole world wanted to see it. This is what we were allowed to confidentially show people if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.”

It's interesting, but there is this as well:

Cambridge Analytica has a reputation among political operatives for exaggerating its role in campaigns. A senior Trump campaign official who said they saw the document about a year ago claimed it took credit for some work that was done by the Republican national committee and Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale.

I'm not sure that the RNC or Parscale deserve credit either. Trump "won" through TV, in my opinion, backed by the relentless negative messages about Clinton coming through the press and social media.

But what do I know? The fact remains that these people are assholes.

Check this out:

One of the most effective ads, according to Kaiser, was a piece of native advertising on the political news website Politico, which was also profiled in the presentation. The interactive graphic, which looked like a piece of journalism and purported to list “10 inconvenient truths about the Clinton Foundation”, appeared for several weeks to people from a list of key swing states when they visited the site. It was produced by the in-house Politico team that creates sponsored content.

The Cambridge Analytica presentation dedicates an entire slide to the ad, which is described as having achieved “an average engagement time of four minutes”. Kaiser described the ad as “the most successful thing we pushed out”.

Drudge played a role in that too. I wrote about this for Salon in 2016. Politico was right in the middle of it:

Mainstream publications have fed the notion with click-bait stories like this slide-show from Politico which sat at the top of their "most-read" list for months this year despite having been originally published back in 2013. As it turned out Drudge had been up to his old tricks. He had linked to a British tabloid story in which Abedin was quoted saying that she thought Clinton was beautiful which led to millions of drooling Drudge readers searching for "Clinton Huma lesbian."

digby 3/23/2018 11:03:00 AM

 
Trump and Bolton: soulmates

by digby

I wrote about the worst hire in history for Salon this morning:

Ever since Nicolle Wallace reported for NBC News that national security adviser H.R. McMaster would be leaving the White House by the end of the month, the rumor that he'd be replaced by hardline hawk John Bolton has been rampant. I've mentioned it more than once over the last couple of weeks myself. So I must confess that I'm a bit surprised at the shock that seemed to reverberate throughout Washington on Thursday evening when Trump tweeted this out:

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Of course it's terrifying. John Bolton is a certifiable loon and everyone knows it. But then, so was Michael Flynn, who briefly served as the president's first national security adviser before tumbling into disgrace, guilty pleas and a deal to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. Both of them reflect Donald Trump's temperament and worldview, which despite the insistence of many on both the right and the left has nothing to do with withdrawing from the world or "realism" or isolationism.


Bolton has always been seen as a neocon, but that's not quite right. During the George W. Bush years he was an insider in the crowd that included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, the guys who wrote the manifesto for the Project for a New American Century ,which served as the theoretical basis for the Iraq war. The idea was that America would be a benevolent unitary global superpower, spreading democracy and capitalism across the world and taking down "bad guys" two at a time so "freedom and liberty" would prevail. It was a Hollywood style starry-eyed utopianism, at the point of a gun, that allowed a lot of hawks to sing "Kumbaya" as they marched us off to war. We know how that turned out.

But Bolton wasn't one of those guys, not really. He ran with that crowd, but was never a believer in the freedom-and-democracy agenda. He's always been a straight-up warmonger who believes the United States is the only relevant power in the world. It's pretty simple, and he's been saying it straightforwardly for years:

There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that's the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along. ... The United States makes the UN work when it wants it to work, and that is exactly the way it should be, because the only question, only question, for the United States is what's in our national interest. And if you don't like that, I'm sorry, but that is the fact.
-- Speech before the Global Structures Convocation in New York, Feb. 3, 1994 

If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member, because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world — the United States.
-- Interview with Juan Williams on NPR, June 6, 2000

On another occasion, Bolton declared that it was "a big mistake" for the U.S. “to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”


You can see that it's not even a question of world leadership or political hegemony for him, still less about spreading democracy and capitalism. It's about total domination. Does that sound like someone else we know?

To that end, Bolton is a big proponent of pre-emptive war, including nuclear war. Back in 2009, he said that “unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future." Just last month he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that it was "perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first."

Bolton is a willing conspiracy theorist in the Fox News mode, and can often be seen holding forth on that channel. Most recently he shared his suspicions that the apparent Russian interference in the 2016 election was actually a "false flag" operation staged by the Obama administration to cast doubt on Trump's legitimacy, a thesis sure to warm Trump's heart. One can only imagine what this moonbat will do with a top security clearance.

But let's not make the mistake of thinking that Bolton is the real problem here. He's a disastrous choice for national security adviser, for all the reasons laid out above. But he was chosen because his ideas dovetail perfectly with the president's worldview, not in spite of them. Trump doesn't have one-tenth of Bolton's erudition, or a well thought-out national security ideology. But he has projected his own personal insecurities onto the nation as a whole, believing that everyone else is "taking advantage" of us and "laughing at us." Now he wants to hit back at the whole world and make it pay. As I wrote last year after his "American carnage" inaugural address:

When Donald Trump says "America First," he really means "We're No. 1." He talks incessantly about "winning," so much we'll be begging him to stop. He openly declares that he believes in the old saying "to the victors belong the spoils," either suggesting that he has no clue about the West's colonial past and how that sounds to people around the world or simply doesn't care. He's not talking about isolationism but the exact opposite — American global dominance without all those messy institutions and international agreements standing in the way of taking what we want.

Bolton couldn't agree more. Trump has found his national security soulmate.
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digby 3/23/2018 09:00:00 AM

 
Pro-Gun Parents Triggered by Walkout, Sue For Equal Time

by Spocko

From the unprofitable Breitbart site, Big Government.

"A group of parents from New Milford, Connecticut has hired an attorney to articulate their concerns about the decision by their school district to allow students to participate in the national student walkout held Wednesday to advocate for gun control."

I spent years learning how the right-wing mind works, so I knew this was coming. This is what they are saying:

"It's not fair that the kids get to have an anti-gun walkout! What about pro-gun kids? If you don't provide equal time we will sue."

Since I'm from the future, I can tell you that there will be more of this.

Gun loving parents have already been contacting schools complaining about the walkout on the 14th.  Sadly, it's working.  For example, students who don't want to participate in a rescheduled walkout at Romeoville High School will be given 30 minutes free time. (Why did it have to be rescheduled? A student sent out a photo of himself holding a gun saying, "yo it ain't safe to go to school tmrrw" Also, armed protesters.)

In the letter, made available as well to Breitbart News, Smith and Shugrue wrote that the district’s middle school students “also expressed an interest in participating in the broader conversation,” and would have a “grade appropriate, optional opportunity that focuses on civic participation.”

This issue of "civic participation" is a request for an equal time for the pro-gun message. If they don't get it? Lawsuits.

Breitbart News asked whether school districts could be faced with further litigation if they do not allow students who wish to hold walkouts for other causes to do so.

 “That’s absolutely a valid concern,” she said. “There are equal protection laws as well, and if you are allowing one group to have free speech on your campus for a partisan purpose, then, obviously, it’s discriminatory not to allow an opposing point of view. So, it absolutely does open up the school districts to litigation and all sorts of other problems.”

The school in question did a good job responding to the threats, pointing out what the walkout was, a student initiated remembrance, vs how the group wanted to position it, a political event pushing for gun control.  But that explanation will be disregarded as 'legal mumbo jumbo'  by the aggrieved parents and they will keep pushing.

The pro-gun parents will suggest the school districts hold some kind of "educational" event in exchange for dropping the threat of litigation.  Be on the lookout for these gun-friendly programs coming to your schools. Don't let them go unchallenged!

Yesterday I listened to The UnPresidented Podcast hosted by my friends Cliff Schecter and John Aravosis. They were talking to Shannon Watts, the head of Moms Demand Action, about the progress they have made. At 7:25 she talks about their successes   One type of success that people don't see involves constantly knocking down hundreds of BS bills from the gun lobby.



I know how much energy it takes to keep blocking the NRA's legislative work.  Now school districts will be getting pressure from the pro-gun people to implement their solution--more guns in schools.  The people on the school boards and in school districts need to hear from parents who don't want more guns in schools.

I talk to people who see the whole concept of armed teachers as so absurd and dangerous they think it should go without saying. I tell them. "It needs to be said." Say it forcefully, repeatedly and with a preponderance of evidence.

I also don't want more armed police in schools. Not everyone thinks that, but I do and I have multiple reasons why.  I hear people pushing them as an option that, "everyone agrees on." No. There are other options.

I talked to Michael Brooks on the Majority Report about some of the ways to fight this. All methods will be needed because the people who want to arm teachers have already convinced the legislators to start the money train rolling.

Personally I'm tired of the slaughter lobby and their supporters pushing us around legislatively, economically and personally.

We can stop them. It's a fight for our lives.








Spocko 3/23/2018 08:09:00 AM

 

Thank Guccifer 2.0 it's Friday

by Tom Sullivan

Washington was abuzz Thursday with news that:

a) the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 700 points on fears of a Donald Trump-driven trade war
b) Trump's national security advisor H.R. McMaster was out
c) Ambassador John Bolton was in as Trump's third national security adviser

After the Dow plunged yesterday on fears of a trade war, there is no telling what chaos the appointment of noted shooting-war hawk Bolton as national security adviser might produce today. Bolton is known for wanting regime change in Iran and for advocating a first strike on North Korea.

In repsonse to the Bolton announcement, Watergate whistleblower John Dean cheerfully tweeted, "We're all going to die..."

Trump appointed Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser after warnings Flynn was compromised by Russia. Flynn resigned after only 24 days and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts.

The departure of McMaster as national security adviser was another in a breathtaking list of staff turnovers in the Trump White House. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been keeping a growing list displayed on her set. If nothing else, it is another Trump campaign promise fulfilled. He said he would build a wall.

Virtually lost in the Beltway churn was news that special counsel Robert Mueller's team has taken over investigation of Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who took credit for providing Wikileaks with emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The Daily Beast reported last night that the “lone hacker” has been identified as a Russian military intelligence officer:

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

Through an IP address masking slip-up, investigators tracked Guccifer 2.0 to "a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow." As opposed to “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as Trump alleged during a presidential debate.

It is likely, however, that the DNC hack was carried out by other individuals. The Washington Post reports, "FBI agents had zeroed in last year on five or six individuals they believed worked for Russia’s military spy agency, the GRU, and hacked the DNC, according to one individual familiar with the case."

While The Daily Beast's report does not name specific individuals behind Guccifer 2.0, blogger Marcy Wheeler suggests two added last week to the list of GRU officers sanctioned for the DNC hack: Sergei Afanasyev and Grigoriy Viktorovich Molchanov. Wheeler writes:

Both would actually be (very) experienced officers — they are 55 and 62. And both include very interesting “as of” dates identifying the last point when our intelligence officials identified their positions: February 2017 and April 2016, respectively.

The latter is of particular interest, as it came during the period when Guccifer 2.0 was setting up his infrastructure. But the government doesn’t know a ton about this guy — they know his birth year, but not his birth date, and possibly not even his passport information.

Trump's firing of former secretary of state Rex Tillerson came one day after his public condemnation of Russia for the chemical attack against former Russian spy living in England. McMaster's ouster follows his call last week for further punishment of Russia for its complicity in "Assad’s atrocities" in Syria.

No pattern. No pattern.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.


Undercover Blue 3/23/2018 06:00:00 AM

Thursday, March 22, 2018

 

Worse than Russian propaganda

by digby

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there isn't much difference:

CNN’s top executive on Thursday tore into Fox News, accusing the network of harming America and comparing it to Russian propaganda. 

Asked at Financial Times’ “Future of News” conference about how CNN’s ratings stack up against Fox’s, CNN president Jeff Zucker offered some of his sharpest criticism of the rival cable-news network to date. 

The CNN chief specifically cited former Fox News analyst Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, who quit the network this week and sent a note to colleagues lamenting Fox’s transformation into a “propaganda machine.” 

Zucker concurred, adding that Fox’s pro-Trump turn has “shocked” him. Russia’s state-run television outlets, he remarked, “has nothing” on Fox News. 

"It is really state-run TV, it is a pure propaganda machine, and does an incredible disservice to this country,” Zucker said of Fox News. 

He added: “There are a handful of good journalists there, but I think they are lost in a complete propaganda machine, and the idea that they’re a news channel is not the case at all.”

He is obviously being self-serving but he isn't wrong. Fox has gone completely nuts and that's saying a lot considering where they started. But really, if you don't watch the channel regularly as I am forced to do, you probably don't fully understand just how batshit crazy they are.

They reflect the general lunacy of their audience and shine it back on them. They've always done that. But they no longer see the utility in maintaining a pretense of being a legitimate news They've decided that they are just going to be Trump TV and entertain the king with flattery and praise. And it's having a real world impact with Trump hiring the sycophantic, brown-nosers he sees on the "shows" to come into the White House. (Both his hires this week, DiGenova and Bolton are regulars.)

The network has changed a lot since Roger Ailes passed on. And by that I mean it's gotten even worse. It's destroying our country at a faster rate than ever.


digby 3/22/2018 06:00:00 PM

 
Stormy, Summer and Karen are the GOP's worst nightmares

by digby




Greg Sargent had a good piece this morning about how the Stormy Daniels hurricane might trip Trump up more than he realizes. It's a thought I've had as well:

In addition to legal efforts from McDougal and Daniels that might enable them to speak out about their relations with Trump, he is being sued for defamation by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who claims Trump kissed and groped her without her consent, and a judge ruled this week that this suit can proceed. As CNN’s Collinson points out, this means Trump may be facing a period of pretrial discovery and possibly a deposition, which “could put Trump in a perilous position.”

That, plus the prospect of Daniels and McDougal speaking out about Trump, means more public attention to Trump’s treatment of women. Noted Collinson: “Judging by vigorous attempts his lawyers have made to squelch the cases against him, there is considerable concern in Trump’s camp that the thickening legal jungle ensnaring him could come with a high political or legal cost.”

The evidence is mounting on many fronts that the energy, organizing and engagement among female voters — manifested in everything from the initial Women’s March through the #MeToo movement through recent Democratic electoral wins — constitute the cardinal factor in our politics right now. And it seems clear that female alienation from Trump is at the center of it.

Just consider this week’s Quinnipiac University poll, which had relatively good news for Trump. It also found that a staggering 62 percent of women disapprove of his performance, 55 percent strongly. And 55 percent of white women (a majority of whom backed Trump) disapprove, 48 percent strongly. Women want a Democratic House by 56-36. Even white women — a GOP-leaning constituency — favor a Democratic House by 48-44. Separately, new Pew Research Center data shows that among women, identification with the Democratic Party is rising.

Anecdotal evidence and fieldwork have shown that the anti-Trump backlash is heavily driven by mothers and grandmothers who are channeling their anger at Trump into organizing designed to reinvigorate our politics from the grass roots up in communities across the country. And a great deal has been written about how the Democratic victories in places such as Virginia, Alabama and Pennsylvania are being fueled by suburban and college-educated white voters, mostly women.

But Trump’s struggles among female voters may also be chipping away at the foundations of his blue-collar white coalition. As Ron Brownstein recently showed, Trump may even be losing substantial ground among non-college-educated white women, who originally backed Trump in big numbers. This is even happening in the Rust Belt, which could help put some House seats in play outside of the more educated and suburban districts that constitute the low-hanging fruit for Democrats.

In short, Trump’s travails among women may be deepening the gender divide in our politics while eroding the ways in which the class divide — among white voters, at least — had been providing the bedrock of his support.

It's impossible to know for sure whether women as a group will rise to the occasion. The special elections around the country last year and so far this year indicate that there is a lot of energy among African American women as always (they form the backbone of the party) but as Greg points out, among those suburban college educated white women as well. Polling is showing significant slippage among the white working class women and especially among millennial women who are flocking to the Democratic party and 70% (while millennial men, unfortunately, are lagging behind.)

Let's just say that a lot of women find Donald Trump and his behavior to be deplorable and leave it at that. Every day that we hear about his treatment of women whether assaulting them or paying them off to keep them silent, is a bad day for Trump's relationship with half the population. And that's going to spell trouble for all his enablers and sycophants running for re-election in the fall.


.
digby 3/22/2018 04:30:00 PM

 
Targeted retaliation for dummies

by digby

They weren't born yesterday

Trump went on and on today about using the word "reciprocity" by which he means that if one country is selling America cars, that country has to take an equal number of American cars. It's a typically childlike approach, in keeping with his puerile understanding of how the world works.  The word he should have been emphasizing was "retaliation" which is what's going to happen.

The DOW closed down 724 points today after Trump announced that he was slapping tariffs on China. He and his apologists on television (even Club for Growth's hypocrite of the year, Stephen Moore) all say they believe China will have to capitulate to Trump's macho provocation.  Yeah, I'm going to guess it may not go the way they think:

China is preparing to hit back at trade offensives from Washington with tariffs aimed at President Donald Trump’s support base, including levies targeting U.S. agricultural exports from Farm Belt states, according to people familiar with the matter.

Europe is also targeting GOP states like Wisconsin cheese and Kentucky bourbon.  They weren't born yesterday either.

But sure, a crude trade war is just what the doctor ordered. All those Trump voters will be millionaire steel workers and everyone will be happy.


*this is not to say that there are no problems with America's trade policy. But Trump is a fool and an asshole and will make things worse. Let's not kid ourselves.

.

digby 3/22/2018 03:00:00 PM

 
QOTD: Trumpie

by digby

Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

When he's right, he's right. They're saying he employed a criminal political consulting firm that stole millions of people's personal data to lie and cheat his way into the presidency using dirty tricks and underhanded tactics.

And he's bragging about it. Of course.

.
digby 3/22/2018 01:30:00 PM

 

Becoming dead wood

by digby

There is a lot of hostility toward older people these days and for some good reasons. But this isn't right no matter what and it will happen to young people too when they age out.

For nearly a half century, IBM came as close as any company to bearing the torch for the American Dream.
As the world’s dominant technology firm, payrolls at International Business Machines Corp. swelled to nearly a quarter-million US white-collar workers in the 1980s. Its profits helped underwrite a broad agenda of racial equality, equal pay for women and an unbeatable offer of great wages and something close to lifetime employment, all in return for unswerving loyalty. 

But when high tech suddenly started shifting and companies went global, IBM faced the changing landscape with a distinction most of its fiercest competitors didn’t have: a large number of experienced and aging US employees. 

The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” It slashed IBM’s US workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its total US job cuts during those years. (Read more about how ProPublica got the story here.) 

In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked US laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees. 

Among ProPublica‘s findings, IBM:

• Denied older workers information the law says they need in order to decide whether they’ve been victims of age bias, and required them to sign away the right to go to court or join with others to seek redress.

• Targeted people for layoffs and firings with techniques that tilted against older workers, even when the company rated them high performers. In some instances, the money saved from the departures went toward hiring young replacements.

• Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.

• Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.

• Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits.

I worked in an industry where except for the top executives, you rarely ever see anyone over 50. And women over 40 had better look a lot younger. So I know this phenomenon well. It's scary to lose your career at that age but it happens all the time and nobody gives a shit. For a lot of people it's devastating because they are still carrying debt and putting their kids through college.

Of course, eventually the victims just retire or die so their voices disappear. But then another generation comes along. If they're lucky.

#MeTootimestwo

.
digby 3/22/2018 12:00:00 PM

 
The character assassination of Robert Mueller begins in earnest

by digby






I wrote about the next phase for Salon this morning:

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation last spring and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as special counsel, the most common reaction across the political establishment was relief. This tweet from former House speaker and staunch Trump ally Newt Gingrich perfectly represents the bipartisan consensus at the time:

Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 18, 2017

It wasn't long however, before Republicans changed their tune. When it was reported that Mueller and his team were looking into obstruction of justice, the right wing did a U-turn and Gingrich was on the radio agitating for the special counsel's office to be shut down because James Comey "makes so clear that it's the poison fruit of a deliberate manipulation by the FBI director leaking to The New York Times, deliberately set up this particular situation. It's very sick."

Muelleris now clearly the ti[p of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 15, 2017

Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham suggested that Trump's legal team should question the constitutionality of Mueller's probe, calling it "an abomination." The White House even issued talking points instructing its surrogates to insist that if Mueller's office was looking at obstruction it meant he had "struck out on collusion," and then to whine about how long the investigation was taking:

A source sent me RNC/Trump talking points for Repubs seeking to discredit tonight’s WaPo scoop on Mueller investigating Trump obstruction —> pic.twitter.com/ctwy2si9A7

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) June 15, 2017

We know now that the president actually tried to fire Mueller during this period, but withdrew the order when White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit.

I wrote a Salon column at the time suggesting that the right was using a well-worn playbook to discredit the prosecutor, and I assumed that was the beginning of an energetic strategy to degrade Mueller's reputation and provide an argument for Trump to fire him. But it didn't happen, at least not then.

When Trump hired new attorneys John Dowd and Ty Cobb last June and July, the White House attacks on Mueller stopped and the president's defenders redirected their ire toward the FBI and Department of Justice. You may recall a report from Foreign Policy magazine last January revealing that after Dowd told Trump that "the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion," the president instructed his senior aides to devise a campaign to discredit those officials.

Those officials included former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Comey's former Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki and former FBI General Counsel James Baker. As we all know, McCabe was recently fired, just before he would have qualified for full retirement. Rybicki has left the bureau for a job in the private sector. Baker has been moved to another department by new FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump himself famously led the charge against McCabe, repeatedly taunting him on Twitter and making it clear that he wanted him fired before he could retire. He was backed up by all the shouters in the right-wing fever swamps, to the point where it became an article of faith among the Trump true believers that McCabe was an enemy of the state. Trump himself delivered the official talking points after McCabe was fired:

Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Trump hadn't tweeted anything about Mueller by name since last June, but he let fly this past weekend. He wrote that the "Mueller probe should never have been started" and wondered "why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?" (Mueller himself is a Republican, as is his boss Rod Rosenstein.)

It was also announced that Trump had hired a longtime right-wing legal hitman, Joe diGenova, which was widely assumed to be for the purpose of taking the fight to television. As I wrote on Monday, diGenova has been flogging a kooky conspiracy theory that the FBI covered up Hillary Clinton's crimes and then framed Trump when she failed to win the presidency. So it's unlikely he will be restrained when it comes to criticizing the Mueller investigation in the media.

Now the anti-Mueller crusade has officially begun. On Tuesday night, Fox News host and Trump confidant Sean Hannity threw down the gauntlet with a scorching rant:

Everybody says, ‘He’s the greatest guy in the whole wide world. Just trust us!' Well, members of Congress, the mainstream media, they’ve been trying to convince you the special counsel — he is beyond reproach. Sort of like climate change. "Oh, nobody disagrees with us. No scientist does." That’s not true either! Well, we’ve been doing some digging and we found some things you need to know about.

Hannity went on to mention the Whitey Bulger case in Boston, in which the FBI was found to have covered up for the organized-crime leader who was also serving as an informant. Four men were wrongfully convicted of murder in the 1960s as part of this conspiracy. From 1982 to 1988, Mueller was an assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, under fellow Republican and future Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, and served as acting U.S. attorney for about a year after Weld departed. Hannity and other Trump allies are claiming that means Mueller must have been in on the Bulger cover-up, which extended into that period. “They’ve never investigated him! They’re actually just lying! It’s their talking point!” he shrieked.

None of this is news. Mueller has served as acting deputy attorney general, assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice and FBI director, all of which require Senate confirmation. The fact that the Trump defenders are just now throwing this out there indicates they've been saving it for the right moment.

On the heels of Hannity's broadside, Trump's favorite O.J. Simpson lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, wrote an op-ed saying that the special counsel should never have been appointed in the first place. Trump eagerly paraphrased it and tweeted out his own version on Wednesday morning.

Then Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, a noted right-wing gadfly, went on a wild tirade about how "people have not done their homework on who Robert Mueller really is." He claimed that Mueller "is covering his own rear and his own problems that he created in allowing U.S. uranium to be sold" and had damaged the FBI with "the thousands of years of experience he ran off that might could have helped guide some of these wayward FBI agents away from the path they took." No, I'm not sure what that means either. Gohmert is a fringe character, but the fact that he too is spouting the line that Mueller hasn't been adequately vetted suggests that it's been rehearsed and tested.

Republicans have demonstrated in living color that they have lost the ability to choose competent leaders and govern effectively, but let's give them credit: They've always had a talent for dirty tricks and character assassination. Robert Mueller was undoubtedly aware that he would eventually find himself in their crosshairs and, if anything, is probably surprised it took so long. It looks as though his time in the barrel has arrived and he's about to find out if that old GOP black magic still works.

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digby 3/22/2018 10:30:00 AM