Hullabaloo

Thursday, June 30, 2016

 
People who live in Trump's rickety glass house shouldn't throw stones

by digby

So right wingers are having a lot of fun mocking President Obama and the leaders of Mexico and Canada for this awkward handshake. It's fair enough. It does look pretty silly.

.@CanadianPM @POTUS & @EPN take a break during #NALS2016 for a quick photo-op in front of #Parliament Hill #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/ck3g5U0Tpt

— CPAC (@CPAC_TV) June 29, 2016

But they shouldn't get too cocky. The last guy who occupied the White House did this:



And then there's this freakshow:





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

 
The Heebeejobbies

by digby


Or Heebiejeebies?

She seems nice.

That reminded me of this one, from last September:



Trump did look at "getting rid of" Muslims and he decided to ban them from immigrating and deport all Syrian refugees. So there's a decent chance he'll "look into" firing all the "heebejobbies" and retired retired veterans to man the borders and the airports. No word on whether it will be ok to hire heebeejeebie or heebiejobbie veterans.  There are a bunch of them.

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

 
Trump QOTD: Too good for the average voter

by digby

He 's just better than your average voter --- and they know it.

Don't forget when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can't do that in New Hampshire, you can't do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see --- cause I did these big rallies, 3,4, 5k people would come. And they said, wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that's not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go into people's living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.  

I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living rooms they'd lose total respect for me. They'd say, "I've got Trump in my living room, this is weird!" 

The King doesn't visit his subjects in their living rooms. They would lose respect for him.

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

 
A full blown macho bully ticket?

by digby

Looks like it might come to pass:

Four months after endorsing Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie remains one of the few major figures in the Republican establishment to align himself entirely with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. In public, he has defended Mr. Trump’s freewheeling and sometimes offensive pronouncements, vouching for him even after Mr. Trump attacked a federal judge for his Mexican heritage. (Mr. Christie said he knew from personal experience that Mr. Trump is not a racist.)

Mr. Christie is among those being vetted as Mr. Trump’s possible running mate, according to people briefed on the process, and Mr. Trump has said in interviews that Mr. Christie would have a prominent place in a Trump White House.

Already, Mr. Christie has begun the task of designing a government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Tapped to lead Mr. Trump’s transition efforts, Mr. Christie has taken a role that some of his allies liken to that of a White House chief of staff, soliciting views on what a potential Trump administration should look like.

Mr. Christie has taken the transition process firmly in hand, according to people familiar with his activities, which have been kept from public view so far. He has enlisted his former top aide in Trenton, Richard H. Bagger, to help manage the transition team.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Christie has prodded his fellow governors and Republican political donors to line up behind a candidate many view with distaste. He has made only modest headway in the last few months: Mr. Trump has struggled badly with fund-raising and Mr. Christie has pleaded with donors, in personal phone calls and fund-raising events, to give him a second look.

A couple of years ago I wrote that I thought the GOP would naturally nominate Christie to go up against Hillary Clinton. He's a sexist bully who revels in going after women. I didn't see Trump coming and he out-bullied Christie to o on to win. But it makes perfect sense to me that they would team up.

If Clinton picks Warren and Trump picks Christie it would be an epic battle of the sexes. Bring it on.

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

 
Trump's credo: "whatever you do, don't apologize"

by digby

This article by the right wingnut radio host Howie Carr says it all. After doing a racist war whoop in his Trump introduction he joined the candidate on his plane and reported back:

The candidate loosened his tie and offered me some advice.

“Whatever you do, don’t apologize,” he said. “You never hear me apologize, do you? That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek way back. Remember? He was doing okay ’til he said he was sorry.”

Not to worry, I wasn’t going to say I was sorry for mentioning the name of the fake Indian and then doing a few seconds of a war whoop. About an hour earlier, I had been at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, warming up a crowd of maybe 5,000 Trump supporters for Gov. Paul LePage before he introduced The Donald at a weekday rally.

I was speaking extemporaneously when I free-associated Fauxchohantas’ name, and suddenly a war whoop seemed appropriate for the occasion. Moments after I left the stage, one of Trump’s aides handed me his cellphone, with a fresh headline from Politico:

“Boston radio host at Trump event mocks Warren with war whoops.”

The Trump guy smiled. “That didn’t take long.”

Interesting that he referenced sports betting expert and TV commentor Jimmy the Greek who lost his job almost 30 years ago for saying African Americans were "bred" to be better athletes. He apologized but he refused to resign. So they fired him.

Apparently, the campaign "re-boot" doesn't include soft-pedaling the racism. Good to know.

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digby 6/30/2016 12:00:00 PM

 
Obama's epic rant on Trump's "populism"

by digby

"That’s not the measure of populism. That's nativism, or xenophobia, or worse. Or it's just cynicism....Let's just be clear: Somebody who labels 'us versus them' or engaged in rhetoric about how we’re going to look after ourselves and take it to the other guy — that’s not the definition of populism. Sorry.”

Actually it's pretty standard with right wing populism. But the rant is good nonetheless.

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

 
Onward Christian Torturers

by digby

I wrote about Trump, torture and the evangelicals for Salon this morning:

I wrote earlier in the week about the warm embrace of Donald Trump by 1,000 leaders of the religious right. After meeting with him and praying with him in New York, they decided that he's a sincere man who has the kind of morals and values that qualify him for the most powerful job on earth. All in all it was a very successful meet-up for Trump and portended an alliance that will help him in the fall.

Yesterday Focus on the Family's James Dobson  slightly walked back his comment that Trump had been born again however:

"Only the Lord knows the condition of a person's heart. I can only tell you what I've heard. First, Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit. I also hear that Paula White has known Trump for years and that she personally led him to Christ. Do I know that for sure? No. Do I know the details of that alleged conversion? I can't say that I do... if anything, this man is a baby Christian who doesn't have a clue about how believers think, talk and act. 

It turns out that Paula White is a "prosperity gospel" preacher who is not highly regarded by other evangelical leaders:

@saletan @jlupf Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe.

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 28, 2016

Dobson is a cunning politician and he had his reasons for trying to make Trump appear to be on the "right path." And he is still backing Trump to the hilt because he says the very thought of Hillary in the White House "haunts" his "nights and days."

But I must admit that even I have been surprised by the fact that Christians, even leaders as cynical as this man, would stick with a man who would say what Trump said on Tuesday night. For all the talk of him "pivoting" to a more presidential style and professional campaign he went back to some of his most depraved and barbaric rhetoric at a rally in Ohio:

They said, "what do you think about waterboarding," I said 'I like it a lot and I don't think it's tough enough." 

We’re living in Medieval times. We have to stop it. We have to be so strong, we have to fight so viciously and so violently, because we’re dealing with violent people, vicious people.

We have laws and the laws say you can't do this , you can't do that, well, a lot, alright? Their laws say you can do anything you want and the more vicious you are the better.

So we can’t do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages. They can do whatever they want to do.  

They eat dinner like us. Can you imagine them sitting around the table or wherever they’re eating their dinner, talking about the Americans don’t do waterboarding and yet we chop off heads. They probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership.  

You know, you have to fight fire with fire.

He didn't tell his favorite gripping tale of General Black Jack Pershing putting down a Muslim uprising by dipping bullets in pigs blood and ordering a mass execution.  But he got big cheers of "USA, USA!!" nonetheless.

I have long wondered why serious Christians would support a man who openly endorses torture, war crimes and cruel and unusual punishment. It seems counter-intuitive since the most famous torture victim in world history is Jesus Christ. But a Washington Post/ABC poll from 2014 showed American evangelical Christians are more supportive of torture than those who are not religious. Sarah Posner reported:

Remarkably, the gap between torture supporters and opponents widens between voters who are Christian and those who are not religious. Just 39% of white evangelicals believe the CIA’s treatment of detainees amounted to torture, with 53% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 45% of white Catholics agreeing with that statement. Among the non-religious, though, 72% said the treatment amounted to torture. (The poll did not break down non-Christian religions in the results.)

But then certain Christian Right leaders have demonstrated a violent streak that may explain their willingness to jump on board the torture train. Take James Dobson himself who was known for many years as an expert on child rearing. His book "The Strong Willed Child" featured a chilling story of animal cruelty.

He discusses his little pet dachshund named Siggy (named for Sigmund Freud) who refused to "yield to his authority" when he returned from a business trip. This is what he did:

"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me "reason" with Mr. Freud." 

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!"

Dobson's book sold many, many copies to social conservatives over decades. It's still in print and people are still buying it. So, perhaps it's not really that difficult to understand why so many of the people raised with Dobson's philosophy believe torture is fine and think Donald Trump will Make America Great Again. The common thread isn't religion it's authoritarianism.

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

 

Enforcing norms of reciprocity

by Tom Sullivan

Reducing human decision-making to a binary this or that choice turns humans into Flatlanders with no other dimensions to their thinking. So the rush to explain last week's Brexit vote as simple xenophobia or stupidity is rankling. (Don't get me started on the complaint that people voted against their best interests.) A flush of articles examines the human psychology that led to it.

Time magazine quotes Drew Westen ("The Political Brain"):

“There’s a very legitimate reason to be concerned about immigration,” says psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University. “Unfortunately ISIS has given would-be fence-sitters the permission to vote out of some combination of conscious or unconscious prejudice or bias.” That hardly means that pro-Brexit Britons acted out of racism; it does mean that people who do traffic in racism had more power to influence voters than they would have had in more peaceable times.

Writing for Scientific American, Julia Shaw cautions that the Leave camp mirrored Donald Trump's appeals to fear undercut the brain's ability for rational decision-making:

When pundits argue that people don’t need experts, they are actively trying to push you from using central processing to a peripheral approach. They are asking you to turn off your logic and turn on your emotion, because they know that it is difficult to use logic once fear takes over.

This is also why politicians like Trump and the Brexiters like to say they represent "ordinary people." Of course, "ordinary people" don’t exist. Even if they did, they'd be unlikely to be a billionaire or an old-Etonian who delivers speeches in Latin. Presenters of such arguments are trying to make you feel negative emotions against an imaginary opponent (usually the ‘elites,’ who also don’t actually exist), trying to get you to disregard evidence and logic.

"Very few people are stupid in any meaningful sense, and the British aren’t either," writes Thomas Hills at Psychology Today. Simmering anger at growing inequality gets his vote for why Leave prevailed:

People who are unhappy and angry often don't attend to the long-term consequences of their actions. Crimes of passion, by definition, lack the premeditated thinking-it-through that tends to keep people out of trouble. Still, crimes and emotionally driven actions are often the outcome of a history of emotional dissatisfaction. People don't just get angry one day and stab their partner. They get angry, and then they get angry again, and then they stomp their feet for a while, and then one day they get really angry and they happen to be cutting onions.

Working-class people in places with high inequality have been angry for a long time, perhaps since the dawn of work. The referendum on Brexit in the UK just handed the working class a knife and placed a blow-up-doll of the EU nearby.

But humans seem to have evolved a sophisticated sense of fairness that a growing body of research supports. Perhaps the most satisfying response to Brexit comes from Eric Beinhocker at the Atlantic:

People are what behavioral economists call strong reciprocators and altruistic punishers. Humans are wired for reciprocal cooperation: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine, etc.

Beinhocker recounts experiments using the Ultimatum Game,

... in which one person is given some money (say $100) and asked to offer a share of it to another person (say $20). If the second person accepts the offer, both keep the money, but if he or she rejects it, both get nothing. The rational solution is to accept any offer except $0, as even $1 is better than nothing. But experiments on thousands of subjects around the world show that offers below around 30 percent are typically rejected, thus harming both individuals.

He explains, "People will sacrifice their own self-interest and harm themselves, even severely, to enforce norms of reciprocity." So the Leave voters have done in the U.K. So might Trump voters in the U.S. this fall, Beinhocker warns. (Or the Bernie-or-Bust crowd he leaves unmentioned.) The lack of accountability for Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis coupled with unsustainable levels of economic inequality have created a vast, untapped market for enforcing norms of reciprocity.

From the time we are in the Terrible Twos (I want to do it myself!), people exhibit a need not just for cooperation, but some autonomy and control over their fates. Working people feel the economy and capitalism itself is failing them, that they are getting a raw deal and lack control their fates. Offer them less than 30 percent and they'll offer you a middle finger.

There is a reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren excite crowds. They have given voice to the complaints of the masses and convinced their respective audiences that they have been heard, that they have an advocate. People who know Hillary Clinton tell us privately she is a good listener. This is her chance to prove it publicly.

Beinhocker concludes:

The reason the Remain camp lost was that they didn’t understand the game they were playing. They thought they were playing a rational game, appealing to people’s pocketbooks and sense of security. They fought their campaign with facts and figures and by highlighting the risks of Brexit. But the voters were playing the Ultimatum Game. Leave understood this and fought with promises to “take back control.” Like the Remain campaign, Hillary Clinton is also playing the rational game, appealing to voters’ economic and security self-interest. Donald Trump is the weapon of the altruistic punishers.

I'm not as sanguine about their altruism as Beinhocker. Clinton and the Democrats risk selling into the wrong market if they're selling rational self interest this fall. That's not what working people are buying. They want an economic system that treats them fairly.


Undercover Blue 6/30/2016 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

 
QOTD: That nice Dr Carson

by digby

What a guy:

[My mother] has Alzheimer’s. She’s not really cognizant of that, which is a good thing because my mother is really a fighter. She probably would have taken a gun and gone out and shot some of the dishonest reporters... One of the reasons that our founders said that our system and our freedom depends on a well-informed and educated populace is because they recognize that if people were not well-informed and well-educated, they can be easily manipulated by a dishonest media and that’s exactly what happens in our society today.

Did anyone ever find out where all that money went?

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digby 6/29/2016 06:00:00 PM

 

What a mexit

by digby

There's too much to read these days on the ramifications of the Brexit vote and it's hard to keep up, but this struck me as a useful encapsulation of why Britain's leadership looking little better than the Trump campaign:

Mr. Johnson is clearly looking to unite the divided Conservative Party behind his own, flamboyant self and to burnish his free-market economic credentials. 

But playing down immigration, Mr. Goodwin said, could create more political trouble. “I worry for senior euroskeptic leaders, because there is a misunderstanding of the vote, and that will feed voter dissatisfaction,” he said, driving many of the voters who chose a British exit to turn away from both mainstream parties and move to the populist right. 

The referendum was unusual, because it pitted a government on one side, “Remain,” against a loose coalition on the other, made up of Conservatives, some Labour legislators and U.K. Independence Party supporters. The Leave side never had to hammer out an agreement on how to proceed if it won, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. 

“There was no coherence, because it wasn’t a political party fighting for government, but an odd coalition fighting against something, but with no consistent view of what it was fighting for,” he said. 

Even on the economy, the Leave side was made of free-market economists who believe in no tariffs at all, those who believe in trade deals and protectionists who want to shield the declining working class against globalization, Professor Travers said. 

“And now the government will have to be reformed as if it were representing the Leave side and yet represent both, a one-party government that must reflect the schism in itself,” he said.

 Sometimes the old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing creates more problems than it's worth.  If Conservatives had simply taken responsibility for the consequences of their harsh austerity programs and tried to ameliorate some of the discomfort with the rapid cultural and social change of our modern world instead of seeing opportunities to use all that to advance their own agendas they might have avoided all this. Instead, they just seemed to run with it without any plan or vision for how it was going to work out. Let's just hope their ineptitude doesn't result in Britain voting in a Far Right party. That will not end well.

It's quite a fine mess they've gotten themselves into.

And speaking of Boris Johnson, this article by Tina Brown called "Beware Boris Johnson: The Power of a Cunning Clown"  is devastating.

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digby 6/29/2016 04:30:00 PM

 
Trump is soliciting donations from foreign leaders?!?

by digby

TPM has the scoop and it's unbelievable:

Since members of the British Parliament have complained about receiving several fundraising emails from Donald Trump, politicians in several other foreign countries have revealed that they've also been flooded with email requests for donations from Trump.

Members of parliament in Australia, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland have all received the emails, according to news reports and tweets from the politicians.

Tim Watts, an Australian member of parliament, told TPM's John Marshall on Twitter that he has received several fundraising emails from the Trump campaign, and that he believes all Australian members of parliament have gotten the emails as well.

The Trump campaign has also asked members of parliament in Iceland for campaign contributions, according to Icelandic media. At least three Icelandic members of parliament have received a Trump fundraising email, according to the Iceland Monitor. A couple members of parliament told the Morgublaðið newspaper that they had received emails, according to a report in Iceland Magazine.

"This whole matter is very perplexing. The letter left me speechless," Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the head of Iceland's Left Green Party, reportedly said.

And a member of parliament in Denmark, Ida Auken, revealed on Twitter that she had also received a fundraising email from Trump.

Anders Adlercreutz, a member of parliament in Finland, also said on Twitter that Finnish elected officials have received the fundraising pleas from Trump.

Read the whole story. You won't believe it.

Marshall assumes this is a screw up in buying an email list from someone and not knowing how to eliminate the addresses from which it's illegal to solicit donations. Because this is definitely illegal:

The only plausible answer seems to be that the Trump campaign either dealt with a sloppy or disreputable list broker or was so desperate after its horrible May FEC report was released that it went to a broker and just said they wanted every list and they'd sort it all out later. I confess that both scenarios seem a little farfetched. But some version of one of them basically had to happen, unless there's a prankster actually inside the campaign.

Whatever the case, I would just like everyone to remember this the next time you hear Trump caterwauling about Clinton selling out to foreign governments...

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digby 6/29/2016 03:00:00 PM

 
Cleveland should be loads of fun

by digby

People are starting to get a little bit concerned about violence at the RNC in Cleveland. It's not so much that people are afraid of what might happen at the convention center. The Secret Service will have the place locked down tight.  These events require unbelievable security checks so most people feel pretty confident that the worst that could happen would be some fisticuffs between delegates, not a mass shooting event or something like that. But that's not where the concern lies:

It’s the streets themselves where tension will run highest. Cleveland’s protest zone, even in its revised form, will permit demonstrators to roam freely, so long as they don’t block pedestrian or vehicle traffic. That raises the prospect of pro- and anti-Trump groups meeting in the same vicinity. Groups like the anti-LGBT Westboro Baptist Church intend to rally, and a white supremacist group at the center of a violent outburst in California last week has pledged to show up in Cleveland too.

Local pro- and anti-Trump organizers say they have confidence that even their political opponents are planning peaceful rallies, but they’re less certain that outside agitators won’t show up to stir the pot.

Larry Bresler, a leader of the progressive Organize! Ohio, said he speaks regularly with pro-Trump organizer Tim Selaty and is confident they’re both committed to holding peaceful rallies. But the agitation by anti-Trump activists from outside Cleveland who are pledging to stop Trump’s nomination at the convention has heightened tension.

“This is a whole different animal from other political conventions,” he said, noting that typically, most RNC protesters come from the left. “The serious problems that you had in terms of any kind of disruption by and large came from the anarchists. Here you’ve got a big number that are coming from the right this time … it presents a different dynamic.”

Bresler noted that firearms will be allowed in the “event zone” because of Ohio’s status as an open carry state, even though other more mundane items will be banned — from water guns to tape to sleeping bags.

You can't bring a water gun but you can bring a real gun.

This country is fucking insane.

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digby 6/29/2016 01:30:00 PM

 

Benghazi is evergreen

by digby

Green is the color of money. The Senate Democrats report today:

One Day After Releasing Partisan Report, Republicans Schedule Another Interview

Anti-Clinton Air Base Mechanic Flown to Washington D.C. at Taxpayer Expense for Interview Today

Washington, D.C. (June 29, 2016)—After more than two years and $7 million, and one day after releasing what they claimed would be the “definitive accounting” of the Benghazi attacks, Select Committee Republicans have scheduled yet another interview today with a mechanic from a U.S. air base in Europe who posted allegations on Facebook that planes could have been deployed to Benghazi sooner.

This individual included on his Facebook postings the hashtag “#ifyouvoteforhillaryyouarebeyondstupid.”   

It appears that the hashtag was removed from his Facebook page within the past 24 hours.  He questioned in this Facebook posting whether fighter jets did not provide air support in Benghazi because “we have a corrupt government with disregard to human life, that looks at us as tools on the physical side of their political battles.”

I'll just use one example from the past so you can understand how this works:

Multiple official investigations into Vince Foster's death concluded that he committed suicide.

The first was by the United States Park Police in 1993, in whose jurisdiction the original investigation fell. Because of Foster's position in the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation assisted in the investigation.

Investigations by a coroner and Independent Counsel Robert B. Fiske, in a 58-page report released in 1994, also concluded that Foster had committed suicide. Theories of a cover-up still persisted, some of which were promulgated by the Arkansas Project. The speculation and conspiracy theories featured on talk radio and elsewhere caused pain to the Foster family.

After a three-year investigation, Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr released a report in 1997 also concluding that the death was a suicide.

In addition, two investigations by the U.S. Congress found that Foster committed suicide, making a total of five governmental investigations to come to the same conclusion.

Donald Trump brought it up on the campaign trail 20 years later, saying the matter had never been resolved.

Part of this is a simple kitchen sink strategy to create an atmosphere of scandal. It divides the voters, keeps the press excited and forces the Democrats on to the defensive. Eventually plenty of people who don't follow the details but just hear the endless drumbeat decide on some level that there must be something to it because ... well, people wouldn't be obsessing on it otherwise, amirite?

But these days it really mostly a con game for wingnut welfare recipients. They've all got dollar signs in their eyes.

We'll be hearing BS about Benghazi for a long time to come.

The National Rifle Association’s political arm is launching its first ad campaign of the 2016 presidential race, with a survivor of the terror attack in Benghazi urging viewers to vote for Donald Trump.

The ad, which the NRA Political Victory Fund is backing with more than $2 million, is one of the larger expenditures by an outside group on behalf of the presumptive Republican nominee.

The 30-second spot, entitled “Stop Clinton, Vote Trump,” features Mark Geist, a Marine Corps veteran and security contractor who fought the assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 that claimed four American lives, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

“A lot of people say they’re not going to vote this November because their candidate didn’t win; Well, I know some people who won’t be voting this year either,” Geist says as he walks through a cemetery in the ad. “Hillary as President? No thanks. I served in Benghazi. My friends didn’t make it. They did their part. Do yours.”

digby 6/29/2016 12:00:00 PM

 

Yeah, that's the ticket

by digby

I wrote about a possible Clinton Warren ticket for Salon this morning:

One of the more tedious political parlor games in any presidential election is now fully underway --- Vice Presidential speculation. On the Republican side we have the unusual spectacle of far more people running away from the possibility than coyly making themselves available. It seems few people wish to end their political careers this year by diving over a cliff holding hands with Donald Trump.

On the Democratic side the conventional wisdom for months has been that Clinton would pick Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. I’ve never been quite sure why this became the CW but it seems to stem from a conviction that Clinton is so hyper-cautious she would never think outside the box enough to choose someone CW didn’t say was the obvious choice. However, there are others beside Kaine on the list, many of whom would be exciting for different reasons. Choosing a person of color would be an obvious consideration for a multi-racial coalition. Picking someone younger would make sense as well.

But this week we had preview of what it might look like if Clinton decided to defy the CW and instead chose someone who doesn’t “balance” the ticket but rather doubles down on what makes her run risky in the first place --- being the first woman nominee. I’m speaking of Senator Elizabeth Warren, of course, with whom Clinton appeared at an Ohio rally on Monday.

By all accounts it was a very successful event. The Washington Post reported it this way:

If there were any doubt that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren are the “it” couple of the moment in Democratic politics, it was silenced here Monday when they took the stage together for the first time. The two nerdy wonks and feisty grandmothers, who built rival power centers on the political left but this spring gradually became allies, together electrified a crowd of thousands by locking their arms, punching the air and excoriating Donald Trump.

Warren is on the VP short list for obvious reasons. First is the fact that she represents the progressive wing of the party, which has exerted substantial influence in this campaign through the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and has had some success over the last decade or so pulling the mainstream of the party away from the centrist orientation it adopted during the years of conservative ascendance. This faction would warmly embrace Warren on the national ticket and in this political era that may be more important than “balance” of region or age if Clinton wants to unify the party.

And Warren could also bring something important to the table in the role of “surprising validator,” which is someone from a particular group who can challenge something called “biased assimilation”:

[P]eople assimilate new information in a selective fashion. When people get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it...This natural human tendency explains why it’s so hard to dislodge false rumors and factual errors. Corrections can even be self-defeating, leading people to stronger commitment to their erroneous beliefs.[...]

But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.

Clinton has been the subject of malicious right wing smears for more than a quarter century and it has taken a toll. And as I noted yesterday, GOP Super Pacs have successfully deployed a strategy to sow discord on the left in this cycle based upon those pre-existing narratives. Warren, on the other hand, is considered to be a scrupulously honest progressive with a reputation for rectitude. Her enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton’s character is extremely valuable to the Clinton campaign.

There are those who assume that two women at the top of the ticket is too much for the country to handle. After all, it took nearly 230 years for one to even be nominated by a major party for the top job. I thought that myself but after seeing them together I changed my mind. It looked like a natural combination to me. When you think about it, it’s simply illogical to be willing to vote for a woman president but unwilling to vote for a woman to replace her if something happened. That makes no sense. And if you are the type of person who believes that a woman at the top of the ticket needs a man around to keep her steady, why would the VP have to be that person? The administration will surely be filled with men, they always are. In any case, there’s really nothing new about voting for president and VP of the same gender.

Most importantly, the Republicans have nominated a man whose views about everything, but especially women, are nothing short of antediluvian. The prospect of a campaign featuring two strong women standing toe to toe with Trump is just too delicious to pass up. It’s already making him come unglued. So Clinton-Warren may not be a risky ticket at all --- it may be exactly the right one at the right time.

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digby 6/29/2016 10:30:00 AM

 
Trump is running to be a war criminal

by digby

The GOP nominee makes you so proud to be an American:

We're living in Medieval times. We have to stop it. We have to be so strong. We have to fight so viciously and violently because we're dealing with violent people, vicious people. So we can’t do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages. They can do whatever they want to do. They eat dinner like us. Can you imagine them sitting around the table or wherever they’re eating their dinner, talking about the Americans don’t do waterboarding and yet we chop off heads. They probably think we’re weak, we’re stupid, we don’t know what we’re doing, we have no leadership. You know, you have to fight fire with fire.

Once more he's implying that he would behead people. That's on top of the waterboarding and the hostage taking and the torturing and killing of their families.

The crowd responded with shouts of "USA! USA!"

I just saw a succession of Republicans on CNN agree that Trump is right about terrorism and that we need a "strong[man]" leader.

I feel sick.

Update:  A new Quinnipiac poll has Trump almost tied with Hillary Clinton, and favored over her 52-39 on the question of who would more effective handling ISIS.

Just because it seems ridiculous to think Donald Trump could become president it doesn't mean it can't happen.

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digby 6/29/2016 09:00:00 AM

 

Just a change of conservative

by Tom Sullivan

Via Paulette Mitchell Lein at Readeatlive blog.

So there were runoffs yesterday in South Carolina. This stuck out:

COLUMBIA — Voters fired a backlash against Statehouse incumbents in runoff elections Tuesday as a string of veteran lawmakers were tossed out of office, including controversial Spartanburg County Republican Sen. Lee Bright, who made gender bathrooms and defense of gun rights a cornerstone of his last months in office.

[...]

Bright, who is also known for his failed bills to track refugees resettling in South Carolina and to limit which bathrooms transgender individuals can use, lost to former state Rep. Scott Talley, a favorite of both Gov. Nikki Haley and the S.C. Chamber of Commerce. Both had been critical of Bright’s over-the-top stances.

“The results are clear: the majority of the people two weeks ago and again tonight wanted new conservative leadership in Columbia,” the Chamber statement said after Bright’s 52 to 48 percent loss to Talley. “The business community looks forward to working with Sen. Scott Talley.”

Librul is still a slur in South Carolina. So obviously, the remedy for over-the-top, xenophobic, gay- and transgender-hating leadership that's bad for the Chamber's bidness isn't a change of heart, just a change of conservative.

Perhaps Spartanburg County has been watching what's happening over the border in "hipster haven" Asheville, NC where local independent bookseller Emoke B’Racz is feeling the economic impact of HB2 — that's HB2 the North Carolina "bathroom bill," not the just-overturned HB2 Texas abortion clinic bill. Malaprop's bookstore is feeling the bite:

Out-of-town visitors are essential to her business. But after HB2, sales slumped in April, and again in May, “at a time when they’re up for other independent bookstores,” says B’Racz. “Our business is off on a day-to-day basis.”

Tourists who couldn’t cancel their trips would walk into Malaprop’s and other shops in town and announce that they weren’t spending money.

If there's one thing South Carolina Republicans understand, it's money.

More than $1 million in hotel bookings have been canceled due to HB2, according to the visitors bureau, and business owners such as B’Racz worry about the vital summer season, which is Christmas in terms of sales for this town of 88,000.

Filmmaker Erin Derham had $1.1 million in pledged funding yanked by a tech company that didn’t want to do business in North Carolina. “It was pretty abrupt,” she says. “Everyone stopped answering my emails.”

Can't have that sort of thing happening in South Carolina, though. I mean, they took down the Confederate flag and all. Once it was clear it was bad for business.


Undercover Blue 6/29/2016 06:00:00 AM

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

 
A Child's Garden of Trump

by digby

From National Memo, how to talk to your kid about Trump:

Having “the talk” about the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. You want your kids to hear about him from you, not from other kids at school or, worse yet, from the omnipresent and omniperfidious man himself.

Why does the orange man want to build a wall? I thought bragging was bad manners? How come he keeps calling people stupid? That’s not nice!

If you’re a Trump supporter, the talk will be considerably easier, consisting largely of: “HE’S THE MAN WHO’S GONNA MAKE US ALL RICH AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN AND SEND SHILLARY CLINTON TO PRISON!!” After which you pat the child on his or her bright-red Trump 2016 hat and get back to blogging about how many people the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has murdered with her laser eyes.

But if you’re wary of Trump and his rhetoric, you have to gently explain to your child why the man who’s constantly on the television is saying what he’s saying.

To that end, writer, comedian and actor Michael Ian Black has given all Trump-concerned parents a useful tool: “A Child’s First Book of Trump.”

Illustrated by Marc Rosenthal in a style I’d describe as Seussically dystopian, this parody of a children’s book does a lovely and hilarious job of distilling Trump to his bare essence: narcissism.

Black writes: “It’s true! A Trump needs all of our noise to exist. Without chaos it shrinks to a sad, orange disc.”

And, of course: “Don’t respond to its brags, its taunts or its jeers; ignoring a Trump is a Trump’s biggest fear.”

Aaand, of course this happened:

As the book — which comes out July 5 — started getting publicity, I noticed Black getting blowback from a certain swath of Trump supporters. They’re rabid anti-Semites, and Black’s book was discussed on one website under the headline: “Sickening Jew Michael Ian Black Makes Anti-Trump Children’s Book for Stupid Goyim.”

This reaction all but demonstrates why it’s important to talk to kids about the Trump phenomenon. The virulent racism and xenophobia he has stirred up does not exist in a vacuum, and children are almost bound to hear about it or get some sense of what’s happening.

Black believes, and I agree, that people, children or otherwise, should know about the unsavory elements that have rallied behind Trump.

“Online, I had never experienced anti-Semitism before Trump became a candidate for the presidency,” Black said. “But suddenly, I and other people like me, meaning Jews, are experiencing that on a daily basis. I don’t know what that says.”

He continued: “My feeling is if you want to support Trump, fine, but understand who you’re in bed with. These are the people you’re throwing in your lot with. If these are the people who support the candidate you support, at least take a moment and ask yourself why, and make all decisions accordingly.”

And for those who bristle at Trump’s bluster, consider having a chat with your kids.

This kind of a joke but the truth is that kids are being harassed over this, with high schools building fake "walls" and kids in the bleachers shouting "illegal" at rivals which have immigrants (or "immigrant looking" whatever that is) on the team. Little kids are being trrorized by bullies saying they're going to be deported or calling them terrorists. It's ugly.

Sadly, the same thing has apparently been unleashed in full force in Britain in the wake of Brexit.

The human species is tragically flawed.



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digby 6/28/2016 06:30:00 PM

 
What could go wrong?

by digby

I assume they will be armed with something that has a little more pop this time:

A group of white nationalists and skinheads who held a rally in Sacramento, Calif., over the weekend where at least five people were stabbed plans to show up at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month to "make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended."

The violent clash at the California state Capitol accentuates concerns about the RNC, with political tensions high and thousands of pro- and anti-Trump protesters expected to descend on Cleveland.

"I think everybody is concerned about the potential for violence at the convention," said Ryan Lenz, senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and hate groups.

Sunday's mayhem in Sacramento began as the white nationalist group Traditionalist Worker Party, along with the Golden State Skinheads, were setting up for a state Capitol rally the group characterized as a response to aggression against supporters of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump.

Brawls quickly erupted between the group of fewer than 30 skinheads and the estimated hundreds of anti-fascist protesters that left at least 10 people injured. Police have made no arrests.

Traditionalist Worker Party spokesman Matt Parrott, who blamed the anti-fascists for the riot, said about 30 members of his group would come to Cleveland.

"We're essentially just going to show up and make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended from the leftist thugs," he said.

This is his base.

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digby 6/28/2016 04:30:00 PM

 
One down, 7,322 to go

by digby

Sane people have known this for years of course. But that didn't stop the Republicans from going there and it won't stop them in the future. This is one of their favorite ploys to try to take down Clinton and it never works.

They really should try something different. Acting like adults for instance. They could even give actual governing a try.

By the way, there is such a thing as poetic justice in this world. The fall of Ken Starr is a cautionary tale. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.



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digby 6/28/2016 03:00:00 PM

 
Racism? Not a problem

by digby

This new Pew poll on race relations is just heartbreaking:

Now why do you suppose they think that?

Among whites, 28% say Obama has made progress toward improving race relations and 24% say he has tried but failed to make progress. But a substantial share of whites (32%) say Obama has made race relations worse. 

This is driven largely by the views of white Republicans, 63% of whom say Obama has made race relations worse (compared with just 5% of white Democrats).


I know we're supposed to take pity on these people because they've had a rough time of it but really ... this is just unacceptable.



digby 6/28/2016 01:30:00 PM

 
Trump's new hire didn't like him very much

by digby

It's been reported that poor Donald is having a hard time recruiting anyone to work for him. It seems that most Republican political professionals figure he'd be poison for their careers, just as he's poison for the party and the country and the world.

But there's always somebody who really needs a job or who doesn't really have any scruples. So it looks as if Trump finally landed a communications director. Think Progress reports:

Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser for Ted Cruz, signed up to be Trump’s communications director.

Before Miller signed on, however, he had some cleaning up to do. Miller deleted dozens of harshly anti-Trump tweets from his Twitter account, many of them authored just a few weeks ago.

ThinkProgress was able to recover cached versions of Miller’s deleted anti-Trump tweets.

Any member of a rival’s staff is likely to have some negative things to say about their opponents. But Miller’s tweets about Trump frequently drip with contempt and disgust.

Here's a small sample, more at the link:

The sad thing is that I doubt he'll get paid in full ...

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digby 6/28/2016 12:00:00 PM

 
Reboot delayed again

by digby

"She made up her heritage, which I think is racist. I think she's a racist, actually because what she did was very racist," Trump said in a phone interview.  

She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud," Trump said. 

In the phone interview Trump re-upped his "Pocohontas" nickname for the Massachusetts senator, which some in the party have cautioned him against using in his attempt to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate. 

"I do what I do. I've listened to this for a long time - at the beginning of the primaries, ' he should do this, he should do that." I won in a landslide," Trump said.

The real estate mogul added that he hopes Clinton chooses Warren as her running mate, saying he would "speak very openly about her if she is."

Tony Soprano threats again...

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digby 6/28/2016 10:30:00 AM

 
Amateur GOP ratfucking 2016

by digby

I wrote about the latest pathetic attempt for Salon this morning:

It’s standard operating procedure for political campaigns to try to poach votes from their rivals by appropriating their rhetoric and repurposing it to sell their own philosophy. Ronald Reagan springs to mind as one of the best at that game, subtly appropriating liberal icons to use for his own purposes and driving a wedge between the Democratic rank and file and their party. He would blatantly steal from FDR, for instance, using phrases like "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny” for his own right wing purposes. In later years, the Republicans tried to appropriate the martyred Democratic president John F Kennedy as a fellow cold war hawk leading to the famous vice presidential debate exchange between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentson who zinged the callow Quayle with the famous line, “I knew John Kennedy, John Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you sir are no John Kennedy.”

Back in the 90s, the Republicans created a scandalmongering cottage industry mostly designed to titillate a gullible press corps but the assumption was always that they were one scandal away from the Democratic rank and file turning on President Clinton and voting him out of office after the first term or, when that didn’t work, help push him out of office before the second one was done. This led to a strategy to throw the kitchen sink at the White House to create what they called “Clinton fatigue” the idea that voters would get so sick of scandals that they didn’t care anymore if they were true and just wanted them to end. It was not very successful. The more they pushed, and the more hysterical the media became, the more the people dug in their heels. The week they voted to impeach him Gallup reported:

Despite the fact that he is only the second President in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, President Bill Clinton received a 73% job approval rating from the American public this past weekend, the highest rating of his administration, and one of the higher job approval ratings given any president since the mid-1960s.

On the day he left office he had a 66% job approval rating.

The point of this is that while it often seems like a good idea for the opposing party to try to sow discord between a candidate and his or her base (or take advantage of discord that already exists) it doesn’t always work out the way they plan it. Indeed, Democrats have become very good at seeing when they’re being manipulated by ever-so-clever Republican operatives. But with a Clinton back on the scene, it appears that like moths to a flame, Republicans just can’t help themselves.

Last May Ashley Parker and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the GOP was executing an elaborate social media strategy to make the case that Hillary Clinton was selling out the left wing of the Democratic Party. They sent out tweets and Facebook posts which were then shared by thousands of Democrats in their circles without realizing they were generated by Republicans. The program was run by the right wing PAC America Rising’s Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager who took the lesson from his own experience that the best way to weaken a general election candidate was for their own base to attack relentlessly during the primaries, as had happened to Romney in 2012. He was not alone. Karl Rove’s group American Crossroads created digital content with the same intention: to portray Clinton as corrupt and untrustworthy and aim it from her left:

Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, said the goal was simply to erode what should be her natural core of support. 

“It can diminish enthusiasm for Hillary among the base over time,” he said. “And if you diminish enthusiasm, lukewarm support can translate into lackluster fund-raising and perhaps diminished turnout down the road.

Both groups used sophisticated micro-targeting:

“You might start looking at union households. You might start looking at Bernie Sanders’s core of support,” Mr. Moffatt said, referring to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Mr. Law said members of his staff at American Crossroads had easily been able to inhabit the liberal role, despite being fervent Republicans. “We wear these little bracelets — W.W.E.W.D.,” Mr. Law joked, referring to “What would Elizabeth Warren do?”

At that point they had no idea how the Sanders campaign would catch fire on its own or that they might have been better off using some of that clever technological know-how to tend to their own back yard. If they had kept their eyes on the prize and tried some of these tricks on Donald Trump they might have spared themselves the embarrassment they’re facing today.

But they don’t seem to have learned their lesson, at least the RNC hasn’t. As my colleague Sean Illing reported yesterday, a strategy memo has leaked in which it’s revealed that the GOP is planning to attack Clinton’s choice for Vice President, you guessed it, “from the left.” They plan to “drive wedges” between the top contenders and “traditional left-wing constituencies” and frame the choice as “an insult to the large deep base of Sanders supporters.” Unfortunately, they’re a little bit late. As Illing pointed out, Sanders supporters are already moving to Clinton in large numbers if nothing else out of terror at the prospect of the GOP nominee.

You would have thought that Clinton surviving these sorts of attacks 20 years ago and coming out more popular than ever would have shown them that this strategy just doesn’t work very well. Perhaps if they spent more time working with their own extremist base and less time trying to manipulate the Democratic base they might have a little bit more luck actually winning the presidency.

digby 6/28/2016 09:00:00 AM

 

To Veep or not to Veep?

by Tom Sullivan

The idea of Sen. Elizabeth Warren joining Hillary Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket leaves me uneasy, as much as I would enjoy the show. Warren brings real progressive chops to a presidential campaign that could use it with the electorate in an anti-establishment mood. Plus, she brings a lot of her own star power. Warren proved yesterday in Ohio she can sure wow a crowd as Clinton cannot. And brother, can she get under Donald Trump's skin. From the Guardian:

Warren laid into the presumptive GOP nominee, characterizing him with a now familiar line as a “small, insecure money-grubber who fights for no one but himself”.

“I’m here today because I’m with her,” she said, as Clinton stood by her side. “She doesn’t whine. She doesn’t run to Twitter to call her opponents fat pigs or dummies.

“Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States because she knows what it takes to beat a thin-skinned bully who is driven by greed and hate.”

And the crowd goes wild.

But Warren can play attack dog for Clinton without leaving the Senate, where since arriving she has been a thorn in the side of all the right people. She's proven she doesn't need a VP slot to have a platform. Besides the risk of a Clinton–Warren ticket becoming effectively a Warren-Clinton ticket, Slate's Jamelle Bouie has reservations similar to mine:

In Warren’s case, the vice presidency could be valuable if she’s empowered to make crucial bureaucratic and regulatory decisions. It’s not hard to imagine a Vice President Warren who acts as a watchdog within the administration, pushing Clinton to find and hire aggressive regulators and reject Wall Street–sourced appointees. But this would be an unusual amount of freedom for a vice president not named Dick Cheney. Given the extent to which the modern vice president is something like a chief advocate—responsible for pressing, negotiating, and enforcing the president’s agenda—Warren could find herself bound to Clinton’s agenda and priorities, even when she disagrees, leaving her with less autonomy than she had in the Senate. In which case, progressives will have lost one of their most able and vocal champions with little in return.

There’s real symbolism in “Warren for vice president,” but it may hurt progressives in the long term to have her in a presidential administration versus in the Senate, where her advocacy has long and impressive reach. (The same, incidentally, goes for another vice presidential contender, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a strong progressive choice who would be replaced by a Republican if he left the Senate.)

Those were some strong signals yesterday in Cincinnati that Warren has the inside track. Whether Clinton has the nerve to form a two-women tag team against the Misogynist from Manhattan remains to be seen. But it won't hurt my feelings if Elizabeth Warren stays right where she is.


Undercover Blue 6/28/2016 06:00:00 AM

Monday, June 27, 2016

 
The conservative containment strategy isn't working

by digby

This piece by Brian Beutler on how some conservatives who oppose Trump have shown that they still haven't learned the lesson by their Brexit reaction is very insightful:

Most conservative and liberal American elites here are alarmed by both the success of the Leave campaign and by Trump’s victory in the Republican presidential primary. American nativists, along with a subset of leftist radicals, support the Brexit along with domestic political threats to the established order.

The outliers are conservative elites who profess to oppose Trump’s candidacy, but who nevertheless celebrate or romanticize triumphant Trumpian forces in the United Kingdom.

It’s obviously not racist, per se, to support the notion of Britain exiting the E.U. But the elite right’s winking alliance with the bigoted faction of British voters that pushed Leave past 50 percent represents a swift return to form for elite American conservatives.
[...]
To the extent that these conservatives acknowledge the racial aspect of right-wing populism at all, it’s to intimate that progressives ought to dial back their cosmopolitanism–their hospitality to refugees, their more general openness to immigration–as ransom to bigots.

For Brexit foes preoccupied with the fact that forces of reaction and xenophobia carried the day in the U.K., New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested their own unwillingness to accommodate the reactionaries and xenophobes may explain their defeat...
[...]
When data show that support among Britons for Brexiting isn’t correlated with material losses associated with immigration—and where anti-immigrant sentiments long predate the migration explosion associated with EU liberalization—this counsel of prudence reads more like extortion. It amounts to setting forth conservative policy as the only way to keep truly dark forces at bay. Or, perhaps less generously, giving quarter to indefensible prejudices out of political expedience. Nice pluralistic society you’ve built there—hate to see anything happen to it.

And frankly, on some level, I have to assume that these people aren't quite as taken with pluralism themselves as they are currently pretending. You have to wonder is Trump weren't such a clownish figure, so obviously in over his head if a lot of them wouldn't have jumped eagerly on his bandwagon.

I've always felt that the chest beating over Trump's horrifying extremism seemed a bit weird coming from the kind of people who would call a Supreme Court justice a "goat fucking child molester." But even if one assumes Trump truly appalls them with his calls for a wall and deportations and banning of immigrants on the basis of religion, Beutler is right that catering to extremists hasn't really worked out very well to keep their destructive impulses in check has it? Maybe it's time to consider an alternative strategy.

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digby 6/27/2016 05:00:00 PM

 
From the party that brought you "you lie!"

by digby

... during the State of the Union, comes Representative Pete Sessions calling for the smelling salts over the House sit-in. He believes the Democrats who sat in should be investigated for breaking the rules.

When the House went into recess Wednesday night and live camera feeds were cut, Democratic House members used Periscope and Facebook Live to continue giving the public look at their spontaneous protest.

"They should not have used that nor would we allow a bunch of people at a court room to take advantage of a courtroom,” Sessions said. “There are places that business is done where decorum is utilized and where we respect each other.”

Yes there are such places. But the House hasn't been one of them since they decided to obsess over fellatio and semen stains for months on end nearly 20 years ago, turning the words "house decorum" into an oxymoron.

But hey, go for it. It's always fun to see swashbuckling, gun slinging, anti-PC dudes clutching their pearls over decorum.

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digby 6/27/2016 03:30:00 PM

 
Just don't call it tyranny

by digby

Don't look now but Trump is all for executive orders:

Trump has already promised to be as aggressive as Obama on executive orders on a wide range of issues. Early in his campaign, for instance, he vowed to use the power of the pen to give all cop killers the death penalty. More recently, in his response to the shooting death of 49 people inside an Orlando gay club this month, he pledged to use executive power to implement one of his signature proposals: A temporary ban on Muslim immigration (even though the shooter was born in New York).

“The immigration laws of the United States give the president powers to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons,” Trump said June 16, two days after the shooting. “I will use this power to protect the American people.”

Check out a few of his other proposals:

• Tighten regulations on money-transfer companies: The cornerstone of Trump's candidacy has been a promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. While Congress approves spending for construction projects, Trump says he can force Mexico to pay for it by taking control of an estimated $26 billion that is wired to Mexico from the U.S. every year.

Trump has said he would halt these remittances “on day one” by rewriting banking rules to expand the federal regulations on companies like Western Union and PayPal. He'd then add a new rule to block undocumented immigrants from wiring money outside the borders.


• Cancel visas and increasing visa fees: Trump says he could increase his leverage on Mexico's leaders by making it harder for their people to live and work in the U.S. The country accounted for about 14 percent of the 10.9 million visas issues by the U.S. in 2015, according to State Department data. Only Chinese visitors, who received one of every four U.S. visas last year, took more. Trump’s administration would have broad discretion in choosing who to give visas, and how much to charge, said John Sandweg, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

• Increase wages for certain foreign workers, and require companies to hire Americans first: Foreign workers hired for high-skilled jobs, like software engineering and research, must be paid a prevailing industry wage, as determined by a Labor Department database. Trump says requiring higher wages for those who receive H1-B visas will deter companies from hiring foreign workers. U.S. companies want more of these visas, not fewer, but it’s something President Trump could do with the rule-making process, Sandweg said. Similarly, Trump could change rules to try to force companies to search for new hires first from the country's pool of unemployed workers before turning to overseas labor.

• Mandatory deportation for all undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and detentions for those caught at the border: Like Obama and Bush before him, the Trump administration would set parameters on how to focus the deportation budget. Obama has focused resources on violent criminals, but Trump could undo that to go after those with traffic offenses.

• Stop defending NATO allies: Trump used his foreign policy address on April 27 to echo concerns shared by many U.S. officials that most of the 28 nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, as required by the agreement. “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense—and, if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves,” Trump said. As commander-in-chief, Trump could take that unprecedented step, foreign policy experts said.
“He would risk blowing up the entire alliance over what could be an exchange rate or accounting issue,” said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

• Cancel the Paris climate accord and stop paying U.S. tax dollars into UN global warming programs: During a May 26 speech in North Dakota, Trump said he would yank U.S. support from the Paris agreement to slash carbon dioxide emissions that 195 nations endorsed last December. There isn't much Trump could do to kill the accord itself. The deal isn't a treaty, and it doesn't require Senate ratification. Instead, it goes into force automatically when at least 55 parties, accounting for 55 percent of global emissions, have ratified the pact. Still, under Trump, the U.S. could sit out future United Nations negotiations designed to deepen carbon cuts over time. And because individual country commitments are voluntary, Trump could easily walk away from the U.S. pledges at the cost of alienating other world leaders.

• Scrap “job-destroying” energy regulations: Trump singled out Obama's new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants -- and the “waters of the U.S.” rule that defines what waterways are under the government's jurisdiction. He would also rescind “any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interest.”

Also:
• Approve the Keystone XL pipeline
• Reverse moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands
• Declare China a currency manipulator
• Bolster the U.S. military presence in the East and South China Seas: Increasing troop levels here will help strengthen America’s ability to negotiate with the Chinese, Trump says. Obama’s administration sent about 300 additional troops with combat aircraft and helicopters into the area earlier this year in response to a border dispute between China and the Philippines. Trump has not said how many more troops he’d like in the region.


That's not a comprehenisve list. But I especially like the last one. For those who actually believe that Trump's nationalism is confined to trade, they should probably think again. Many a trade war has erupted into a shooting war --- and Trump talks just as much about being "respected" as he does about commerce. He's itching for a war, don't think he isn't. And his preference would be a big one. Because he has very big hands.

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digby 6/27/2016 02:00:00 PM