Hullabaloo

 
Four years ago today something crawled out from under a rock

by digby



My Salon column this morning:

It was four years ago (plus one day) when Donald Trump descended his golden elevator at Trump Tower and announced to the world that he was running for president to make America great again. It was a memorable day, although I don't think anyone believed at the time it would be more than a bizarre blip in presidential campaign history.

It was a patented Trumpian spectacle, ridiculous and over the top. Needless to say, the speech itself was offensive and absurd. He called Mexicans rapists and criminals, bragged about his allegedly enormous wealth and said that the U.S. had never beaten China and Japan at anything. He lied about the crowd size and insulted the press. In other words, it was the template for all the speeches that were to come, throughout his campaign and his presidency.

The immediate reaction among the media was incredulity mixed with smug condescension. Most apparently assumed this was one of those laughable gadfly campaigns, like former Sen. Mike Gravel's 2008 Democratic run, or the 2012 bid by Republican businessman and flat-tax fan Herman Cain. After all, Trump had feinted toward running for years, even launching a short-lived bid for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. And the GOP primary of 2016 was already proving to be one for the books. On the day Trump announced for president, the man leading in the polls was Dr. Ben Carson, a political neophyte who had recently declared that the United States is "very much like Nazi Germany."

I wrote about the announcement for Salon and I saw it a bit differently than most. To me, this mixture of Tea Party right-winger and wealthy showbiz celebrity seemed like a potentially potent combination. He had enough money to self-finance, which meant he could stay in for the long haul. I looked up the numbers for his TV show and found that he had reached millions more people with his various iterations of "The Apprentice" than Fox News could ever dream of. He had the potential to reach a far bigger audience as a right-wing blowhard than most professional politicians.

While Trump's guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar style was flamboyant, nothing he said was anything that a person who watched Fox News or listened to Rush Limbaugh wouldn't nod along with in agreement. In fact, the headline for my piece was "We must take Donald Trump seriously: Yes, he's a right-wing blowhard. But he's rich & famous, and his kooky ideas fit snugly in the Tea Party mainstream."

But there was something much darker happening that I didn't see coming. That piece didn't run as planned on the day after the Trump Tower announcement. It ran the following Saturday. That's because on the evening after Trump's announcement a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof went into a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine African American church members, injuring three more. He confessed that he was hoping to start a race war.

That tragedy necessarily meant that any snarky pieces about Donald Trump were suddenly inappropriate. But looking back on it four years later, those two events were psychically connected.

Roof was not motivated by anything Donald Trump said in his announcement speech, of course. He probably didn't even know about it. According to the FBI, he was "self-radicalized" on the internet and through contacts with other white supremacists. The manifesto he posted on a website called "The Last Rhodesian" featured derogatory opinions about African Americans, Jews, Hispanics and others, and featured pictures of him posing with the Confederate flag. He explained that the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin made him "racially aware" because Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, had been right to shoot him.

But there are threads of similar ugly thought processes at work in these two events that took place within a day of each other. When Roof began to open fire on those people at the prayer meeting he reportedly said, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

One day earlier on a stage in his golden Manhattan tower, Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency by saying, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people ..."

These racist ideas have been with us a long time, and America's history is full of the violent horrors that result from them. Neither Trump or Roof said or did anything that hasn't been said or done before. Indeed, Trump himself had quite a history of racist activities, from the disgraceful rhetoric in the Central Park Five case to his "birther" crusade against Barack Obama.

But looking back, it feels as if something shifted in that 48-hour period four years ago this week. A rock was overturned and something truly grotesque crawled out, something that hadn't seen the light of day for quite a while. Since Trump announced his candidacy, white supremacist violence has surged. That's not limited to the U.S., although when it comes to racist violence, Trump has succeeded in making America No. 1. The president's shameful reaction to the racist violence in Charlottesville, and his inflammatory rhetoric about the border — which clearly inspired the massacre of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh — are just two incidents among many that illustrate how the white supremacist movement has taken on new life in the last four years, drawing strength and motivation from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.

When a man gunned down 51 people in a pair of mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, this March, he too left a manifesto. In it, he claimed he supported Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity.” When asked if he thought white nationalism was a problem, Trump responded, “I don't really."

The president is holding a big rally on Tuesday in Orlando to announce that he's running for re-election. I don't think anyone will be surprised if he says the same things he said four years ago. He's been repeating them almost daily ever since then. People still laugh and roll their eyes, just as they did back in 2015. But now we've seen the results of his rhetoric, and we know how he reacts when those results inevitably turns violent. It's not a joke. It never was.

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digby 6/17/2019 09:30:00 AM

 

Blue Mondays in June

by Tom Sullivan

Mondays are tough enough for most Americans without the added stress of awaiting Supreme Court pronouncements on whether a) the 2020 census will include a citizenship question for all households for the first time in decades, and b) partisan gerrymandering will be declared constitutional. A lot is riding on those with two Mondays left in June. With June 30, 2019 as the nominal “go to print” deadline for census questionnaires, today could be the day for some answer on Department of Commerce v. New York,, the census case (a). No doubt the North Carolina and Maryland gerrymandering decisions (b) will wait a week.

Decisions are due to post at 10 a.m. EDT/ 7 a.m. PDT.

But what am I thinking? Most Americans don't pay much attention to Supreme Court cases. They are too busy working for an economy that doesn't work for them. Who does it work for? But you know already.

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project examined data from the Federal Reserve and found that from 1989 through 2018 the richest one percent grew their wealth by $21 trillion. Those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (maybe you) lost $900 billion.

After explaining what those numbers include and exclude, Eric Levitz asks whether this conforms to any American sense of economic justice:

Put differently: Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?

That was a rather freighted rhetorical question.

In those accented European countries not worthy of calling themselves free (in the Lee Greenwood sense), income inequality is not as skewed as here, Levitz adds, where wealth builds primarily on the "passive income to America’s wealthiest citizens." Levitz cites data from the 2018 World Inequality Report to support that assessment.

But we need not rely on such studies. Real people feel the effects of that inequity on a daily basis. You'll be shocked, shocked to find who benefited (and who did not) from the Trump tax bill. In Connecticut, the Guardian reports, AT&T; is laying off workers:

AT&T;’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, promised in November 2017 to invest $1bn in capital expenditure and create 7,000 new jobs at the company if Trump’s hugely controversial tax cut bill passed. Many opponents had slammed the cuts as a corporate giveaway that benefited the super-rich. But big firms lobbied for it, saying – as AT&T; did – that it would fund job-creating expansions.

The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T;’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T; has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T; reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn.

General Motors is laying off workers and closing plants, lending credence to claims by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, that the tax plan was "a scam, a giant bait-and-switch."

Wells Fargo Bank's 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the value of minimum wage hikes it promised if the tax cuts took effect. Instead, Wells Fargo bought back $22.6 billion in stock, raised its CEO's salary by 36 percent, and "announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas."

But Wells Fargo offers it is putting more of its after-tax profits into corporate philanthropy. For which it will enjoy good press and tax deductions while former employees enjoy scrambling to feed families and stay in their homes.

If this is not on the minds of voters the president is filling with fears of immigrants, it should be, writes E.J. Dionne. Conservatives have repeatedly teed up this bill of goods for America's working class like Lucy with her football. They've promoted a worshipful attitude towards supposed "job creators" and lavished on them government largesse while recommending patience and austerity laced with blame for workers:

The vision of a lower-tax, lightly regulated economy, which gained ascendancy during the Reagan years, was always defended by its advocates as a bottom-up idea because it extolled the role of the entrepreneur who bravely started a business. If he or she worked hard enough and had something worthy to sell, the business would take off, creating jobs and new opportunities. It’s why Republican politicians argue obsessively that what’s good for “job creators” is good for the rest of us.

But this conception of economic life is not really bottom-up; it has little concern about concentrated economic power. Its policies reward those at the top. That’s where the term “trickle down” comes from. Investors and business people are the heroes of this story. The worker owes everything to them.

That's not the way it feels. Ask employees no longer employees at AT&T;, at GM, at Wells Fargo.

On Friday, I mentioned Nick Hanauer's 2012 TED talk debunking the myth of the job creator. In 2014, he offered this warning:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Productivity and growth may matter, but so do people's lives, Dionne insists, "We don’t usually think of the word 'moral' as attached to the word 'economics.' It’s time we started."

A change has to come. The question immediately before us is what kind. The clock is ticking. There may be a bomb attached.


Undercover Blue 6/17/2019 06:00:00 AM

Sunday, June 16, 2019

 
Just a little reminder

by digby



I'm not saying it can't change. But with all the polling out right now, it's important to remember that in the polling averages, Trump dipped to 42 percent within one month of becoming president and hasn't risen above it since. It's frighteningly consistent.

I hope it isn't a reflection of a bunch of people being too embarrassed to admit they really like him. I wish I didn't think that was possible. But this consistency in his ratings shows me that at least 50 million or so of my fellow Americans approve of the imbecile's leadership and nothing he's done has changed it. That astonishes me. Bigly.

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digby 6/16/2019 05:00:00 PM

 
Prove it Chief

by digby

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. began the Supreme Court’s term last fall seeking to assure the American public that his court does not “serve one party or one interest.”

He will end it playing a pivotal role in two of the most politically consequential decisions the court has made in years.

One initiative is to include a citizenship question in the 2020 Census, which has fueled a partisan showdown on Capitol Hill. The other could outlaw the partisan gerrymandering techniques that were essential to Republican dominance at the state and congressional level over the past decade.

The politically weighted decisions, by a court in which the five conservatives were chosen by Republican presidents and the four liberals were nominated by Democrats, threaten to undermine Roberts’s efforts to portray the court as independent.

They are among two dozen cases the court must decide in the next two weeks, and never before has the spotlight focused so intently on the 64-year-old chief justice.

Roberts sits physically at the middle of the bench in the grand courtroom and now, for the first time since he joined the court in 2005, at the center of the court’s ideological spectrum. With the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy last summer, the most important justice on the Roberts Court became Roberts himself.

Roberts in the past has shown himself to be far more conservative than Kennedy, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested recently that has not changed.

Kennedy’s retirement, she told a group of judges and lawyers in New York, was “the event of greatest consequence for the current term, and perhaps for many terms ahead.”

Roberts has been on a mission to convince the public that if the court is ideologically split, it is about law, not politics.

“We do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, we do not serve one party or one interest, we serve one nation,” Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota in October.

He repeated the message at Belmont University in Nashville in February. “People need to know we’re not doing politics,” he said.

In between was the well-publicized spat with President Trump, who just before Thanksgiving criticized an “Obama judge” serving on a lower court who had ruled against his administration in a contentious case centered on immigration policy and border security.

Roberts issued a rare public statement: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Trump shot back on Twitter: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”

So the citizenship question and gerrymandering cases, which have generally split along party lines, do not come at an opportune time.

Brianne J. Gorod, chief counsel of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said the many questions about whether Trump’s citizenship question is intended to benefit Republicans should be a warning for Roberts.

“If Roberts votes to uphold this plainly unlawful administration action, it will give credence to Trump’s claim that he can simply look to the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to save him,” Gorod wrote on the Take Care blog.

“That would be a deeply troubling state of affairs — both for the court and for the country.”

Well, what else is new, amirite?

But it is a very, very big problem. I wish I had some instinct hat told me Roberts would end up being a reasonable mediator on some these highly charged super politicalcases, but honestly I doubt it.

We are in for a very rough ride, I'm afraid. Roberts is no Trump but I'm sure he's more than willing to say up is down and black is white, claiming that he court isn't partisan even as they place a chokehold on the democratic processes. He showed his hand in the Voting Rights Act case. He's a rock-ribbed Reaganite steeped in the wingnuttia of the past 30 years. I expect him to be much more like William Barr than Anthony Kennedy (who was no prize, by the way...)

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digby 6/16/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Treasonous fake news

by digby

Can you see the problem here?

.....ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019

I knew that you could. It's treason against the United States to print this totally untrue information in a newspaper.

Speaking of traitorous behavior, what can we say about a president who repeatedly threatens to defy the constitution and refuse to leave office after his term is up?

.....news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019

digby 6/16/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
Trump's killing the messengers now

by digby



Don't tell the King what he doesn't want to hear and certainly don't ever let anyone know the truth:

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is cutting ties with some of its own pollsters after leaked internal polling showed the president trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in critical 2020 battleground states, according to a person close to the campaign.

The move comes after NBC News obtained new details from a March internal poll that found Trump trailing Biden in 11 key states.

Portions of the campaign’s expansive March polling trickled out in recent days in other news reports.

But a person familiar with the inner workings of the Trump campaign shared more details of the data with NBC News, showing the president trailing across swing states seen as essential to his path to re-election and in Democratic-leaning states where Republicans have looked to gain traction. The polls also show Trump underperforming in reliably red states that haven’t been competitive for decades in presidential elections.

A separate person close to the Trump re-election team told NBC News Saturday that the campaign will be cutting ties with some of its pollsters in response to the information leaks, although the person did not elaborate as to which pollsters would be let go.

The internal polling paints a picture of an incumbent president with serious ground to gain across the country as his re-election campaign kicks into higher gear.

While the campaign tested other Democratic presidential candidates against Trump, Biden polled the best of the group, according the source.

In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan — three states where Trump edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by narrow margins that proved decisive in his victory — Trump trails Biden by double-digits. In three of those states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida — Biden’s leads sit outside the poll’s margin of error.

Trump is also behind the former vice president in Iowa by 7 points, in North Carolina by 8 points, in Virginia by 17 points, in Ohio by 1 point, in Georgia by 6 points, in Minnesota by 14 points, and in Maine by 15 points.

In Texas, where a Democratic presidential nominee hasn’t won since President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Trump leads by just 2 points.

Portions of the internal Trump polling data were first reported by ABC News and The New York Times. The Times reported earlier this month that the internal polling found Trump trailing across a number of key states, while ABC News obtained data showing Trump trailing Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida and holding a small lead in Texas.

The president denied the existence of any negative polling during comments last week in the Oval Office, saying his campaign has “great internal polling” and saying the numbers reported were from “fake polls.”

“We are winning in every single state that we've polled. We're winning in Texas very big. We're winning in Ohio very big. We're winning in Florida very big,” he said.

I guess we'll eventually find out which pollsters are being fired. But if it's Tony Fabrizio they've lost a good one.

As the Russia scandal unfolded, I've often thought of this quote from Fabrizio:

“What was happening in this election that nobody was taking into account was Donald Trump was going to underperform in states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia. States that deliver Republican numbers,” Fabrizio said.

But, as he pointed out, running up the score in these states was completely irrelevant.

What was important was flipping traditionally Democratic-voting states and edging out Clinton in states that were toss-ups up until the final votes were tallied.

“When you really drill down on this election, if you change the vote in five counties, four in Florida, one in Michigan, we’d be having a totally opposite conversation right now,” Fabrizio said of the race. “For all the money that was spent, for the all the effort that was made, literally four counties in Florida, one county in Michigan puts us at 261 [electoral] votes and makes Hillary Clinton the president. So, remember that.”

You will recall that there was a lot of "interference" centered in those places.


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digby 6/16/2019 12:00:00 PM

 
Our top diplomat is a rude jerk

by digby




Crooks and Liars caught Mike Pompeo on Fox News this morning:

Donald Trump's Secretary of State became very perturbed after Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked him to comment on Trump's belief that he would take information from foreign governments against his rivals without informing the FBI, a very clear violation of the law.

Towards the end of this morning's interview, Wallace played video of Donald Trump's response to George Stephanopoulos' question about accepting aid from foreign powers to help get him elected.

Wallace then asked, "Is accepting oppo-research from a foreign government right or wrong?"

Secretary Pompeo: "Chris, you asked me not to call any of your questions that are ridiculous. You came really close right there."
What a rude and unserious response to a serious question.

Forcing Donald Trump to account for his words and actions by the news media is now deemed ridiculous by the U.S. Secretary of State.

Pompeo continued, "President Trump has been very clear."

Yes, he has. He said he would take dirt from hostile foreign countries - his idiotic Norway comment not withstanding, and said he "maybe" would tell the FBI.

"[Trump] clarified his remarks later," Pompeo said.

Then he began to lie.

Pompeo continued, "He made it very clear even in his first comments, he said 'I'd would do both.' He said he'd call the FBI."

Wallace rightly corrected the SOS and said, "He said 'maybe' I'd would do both."

Pompeo then made an innocuous statement about Trump's love of America and Wallace continued to grill.

Wallace said, "At the risk of getting your ire, the president told Fox and Friends on Friday, and I agree he kind of walked back -- "

Secretary Pompeo interrupted Chris, "No, he didn't walk it back."

Wallace replied, "Yes, he did because he said "maybe" on Thursday and then on Friday on Fox and Friends, he said he would listen first and then if the information was bad that he would take it to the FBI or the attorney general, but he also made it clear to George Stephanopoulos that he did not see this as foreign interference."

FNS played another clip from the ABC interview and Trump's "own words" bore out Wallace's point.

Trump clearly stated he would commit a felony to get reelected.

Wallace schooled Pompeo on American history to back up his point.

Wallace said, "He says it's not interference, it's information." He continued, "The country, sir, and I don't have to tell you, has a long history dating back to George Washington in saying that foreign interference in our elections is unacceptable."

Secretary Pompeo: "President Trump believes that too."

That's another lie since he just heard Trump say exactly the opposite.

The SOS continued, "I have nothing further to add. I came on to talk about foreign policy and I think the third time you've asked me about a Washington piece of silliness, that chased down the story that is inconsistent with what I've seen president Trump do every single day."

So, America's top international statesman is a liar and a hothead too. Figures. But I doubt it's helping.



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digby 6/16/2019 10:00:00 AM

 
An Obvious Answer to an Absurd Question  

by tristero

The New York Times published an op-ed by someone whose church traumatized her when she was a child. Her ministers were obsessed with a sexual fetish, their particular kink being a hyper-Puritanical "purity" obsession:

One piece of youth-group folklore was a “game” in which a cup would be passed around a circle. At each turn, someone would spit in the cup, until the last person had a cup full of spit. “Would you want to drink this?” the youth pastor intoned. “No. And that’s how others will see you if you sleep around.” 

And now, as an adult, she is plagued by doubts and worries about what she can and can't do when it comes to sex. She can't fully grasp what was done to her and how to let go/move on. The title of the op-ed succinctly summarizes her present confusion over physical intimacy:

How Should Christians Have Sex?

What an absurd question. How should Christians have sex? Any way Christians want to, as long as everyone's comfortable doing whatever it is they want to do.

Y'know, it's a free country, and people are entitled to worship (or not) however they see fit. But I'm finding it hard be tolerant of what was done to her and to so many other children. It's the American  equivalent of female genital mutilation.

I hope she can continue to recover.
tristero 6/16/2019 07:30:00 AM

 

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”

by Tom Sullivan

Political satire sometimes leaves a mark that lingers. I would have sworn the old joke involved an eye-rolling Al Gore debating George W. Bush in 2000. In fact, it was "Saturday Night Live" in 1988. Jon Lovitz played Gov. Michael Dukakis to Dana Carvey's platitude-spouting George H.W. Bush (“Stay the course, a thousand points of light … stay the course”). Future former Sen. Al Franken wrote the Dukakis line, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

Democrats Dukakis and Gore both lost to a George Bush.

NBC News just announced the lineups for the two-nights of debate among Democratic candidates for president. Ten each night, beginning Wednesday, June 26. Barring any unforeseen accidents, resignations or removals from office, one of those Democrats will face off against Donald J. Trump. Unless Trump decides he doesn't want to, like he decides which laws he'll obey.

Democrats might remember that old joke when taking on Trump. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's got an animal cunning that his whole life has helped him evade accountability before the law. It may yet serve to prevent accountability before voters in 2020.

The New York Times revealed on Saturday that U.S. cyber warriors have pre-positioned "potentially crippling malware" inside Russia's electrical grid "and other targets." Unnamed officials in three months of interviews told the Times the code is there "partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow." The commander of United States Cyber Command, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, describes such efforts as meeting the need to "defend forward."

A 2018 military authorization bill and a classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 signed by Trump last summer provide authorization for such actions without presidential approval.

Now, back to Trump not being too sharp:

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Good call. The Times report Saturday night set him off:

So to recap: it’s treasonous that the New York Times reported on U.S. cyberstrategies that according to you are... not true? pic.twitter.com/0YfRCt7lUu

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) June 16, 2019

The Times responded it had described the article to "the government" prior to publication and "President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns."

Trump has told so many lies, he can't tell what the truth is when he hears it from someone else about an operation he himself authorized. Or Donald simply considers it treason to report information that might upset Vladimir and that Trump Tower Moscow deal he still dreams of. While his thumbs yammer about "THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!", Trump's own people worry he'll give away secrets to America's enemies.

And still, he could win reelection in 2020.

For his part, Dubya had trouble putting together a coherent sentence without turning it into a Bushism. Yet he managed to launch the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam after relentlessly selling it to America with lies. For all its undermanned incompetence, a Trump White House staffed by family members may do it again.

The 2020 Democratic candidate for president (and there are some very, very smart ones) cannot afford to find themselves in a position of saying, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” Already, they are planning to make foreign policy and issue. But it is not attention to issues that made Trump a survivor, and certainly not intelligence. Beating him will take more than smarts. It will take political savvy and an ability to connect with voters on a personal level that, for all their intelligence, Dukakis and Gore could not.


Undercover Blue 6/16/2019 06:00:00 AM

Saturday, June 15, 2019

 
Saturday Night at the Movies

Goin’ mobile: Top 10 road movies

By Dennis Hartley

With the summer travel season just ahead, I thought I would address those stirrings of wanderlust we get this time of year by sharing my picks for the Top 10 road movies…

Five Easy Pieces – “You see this sign?” Thanks to sharp direction from Bob Rafaelson, a memorable screenplay by Carole Eastman (billed in the credits as Adrien Joyce) and an iconic performance by Jack Nicholson, this remains one of the defining American road movies of the 1970s. Nicholson’s plays an antihero teetering on the edge of an existential meltdown; a classically-trained pianist from a moneyed family who nonetheless prefers to martyr himself working soulless blue-collar jobs. Karen Black gives one of her better performances as his long-suffering girlfriend. The late great DP Laszlo Kovacs makes excellent use of the verdant, rain-soaked Pacific Northwest milieu. And don’t forget where to hold the chicken salad…

Genevieve-A marvelous entry from Britain’s golden age of screen comedies, this gentle 1953 film centers on the travails of an endearing young couple (Dinah Sheridan and John Gregson) as they join their bachelor friend (Kenneth Moore) and his latest flame (Kay Kendall) on their annual road trip from London to Brighton as participants in an antique car rally. After the two men have a bit of a verbal spat in Brighton, they decide to convert the return trip to London into a “friendly” race, with a 100-pound wager to be awarded to whoever is first across the Westminster Bridge.

Colorful, droll, and engaging throughout, especially thanks to Sheridan and Gregson’s onscreen chemistry. Oh, in case you were wondering- “Genevieve” is the name of the couple’s antique car! Director Henry Cornelius’ next project was I Am a Camera, the 1955 film that was reincarnated as the musical Cabaret.

Lost in America –Released at the height of Reaganomics, this 1985 gem can now be viewed in hindsight as a spot-on satirical smack down of the Yuppie cosmology that shaped the Decade of Greed. Director/co-writer Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty portray a 30-something, upwardly mobile couple who quit their high-paying jobs, liquidate their assets, buy a Winnebago, and hit the road with a “nest egg” of $145,000 to find themselves. Their goals are nebulous (“we’ll touch Indians”).

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the “egg” is soon off the table, and the couple find themselves on the wrong end of “trickle down”, to Brooks’ chagrin. Like most Brooks films, it is as painfully funny as it is to watch it (I consider him the founding father of the Larry David/Ricky Gervais school of “cringe comedy”).

Motorama – This darkly comic 1991 road movie/Orphic journey nearly defies description. A rather odd 10-year old boy (Jordan Michael Christopher) flees his feuding parents to hit the road in pursuit of the American Dream-to win the grand prize in a gas station-sponsored scratch card game called “Motorama”.

As he zips through fictional states with in-jokey names like South Lyndon, Bergen, Tristana and Essex, he has increasingly bizarre and absurd encounters with a veritable “who’s who” of cult filmdom, including John Diehl, John Nance, Susan Tyrell, Michael J. Pollard, Mary Woronov, Meatloaf and Red-Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.

What I find particularly amusing is that none of the adults think to question why a 10-year-old (who curses like a sailor and sports a curious bit of stubble by film’s end) is driving a Mustang on a solo cross-country trip. Not for all tastes-definitely not one for the kids (especially since the venerable parental admonishment of “You’ll poke your eye out!” becomes fully realized). Director Barry Shils has only made one other film, the 1995 doc, Wigstock: The Movie.

Powwow Highway – A Native American road movie from 1989 that eschews stereotypes and tells its story with an unusual blend of social and magical realism. Gary Farmer (who resembles the young Jonathan Winters) plays Philbert, a hulking Cheyenne with a gentle soul who wolfs down cheeseburgers and chocolate malts with the countenance of a beatific Buddha. He has decided that it is time to “become a warrior” and leave the res on a vision quest to “gather power”.

After choosing a “war pony” for his journey (a rusted-out beater that he trades for with a bag of weed), he sets off, only to be waylaid by his childhood friend (A. Martinez) an A.I.M. activist who needs a lift to Santa Fe to bail out his sister, framed by the Feds on a possession beef. Funny, poignant, uplifting and richly rewarding. Director Jonathan Wacks and screenwriters Janey Heaney and Jean Stawarz keep it real. Look for cameos from Wes Studi and Graham Greene.

Radio On – You know how you develop an inexplicable emotional attachment to certain films? This no-budget 1979 offering from writer-director Christopher Petit, shot in stark B&W is one such film for me. That said, I should warn you that it is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, as it contains one of those episodic narratives that may cause drowsiness for some after about 15 minutes. Yet, I am compelled to revisit this one annually. Go figure.

A dour London DJ (David Beames), whose estranged brother has committed suicide, heads to Bristol to get his sibling’s affairs in order and attempt to glean what drove him to such despair (while quite reminiscent of the setup for Get Carter, this is not a crime thriller…far from it). He has encounters with various characters, including a friendly German woman, an unbalanced British Army vet who served in Northern Ireland, and a rural gas-station attendant (a cameo by Sting) who kills time singing Eddie Cochran songs.

As the protagonist journeys across an England full of bleak yet perversely beautiful industrial landscapes in his boxy sedan, accompanied by a moody electronic score (mostly Kraftwerk and David Bowie) the film becomes hypnotic. A textbook example of how the cinema can capture and preserve the zeitgeist of an ephemeral moment (e.g. England on the cusp of the Thatcher era) like no other art form.

Kings of the Road—Wim Wenders’ 1976 bookend of his “Road Movie Trilogy” (preceded by Alice in the Cities and The Wrong Move) is a Boudu Saved from Drowning-type tale with Rudiger Vogler as a traveling film projector repairman who happens upon a suicidal psychologist (Hanns Zischler) just as he decides to end it all by driving his VW into a river. The traveling companions are slow to warm up to each other but have lots of screen time to develop a bond at 2 hours and 55 minutes (i.e., the film may try the patience of some viewers). If you can stick with it, though, you’ll find it rewarding…it kind of grows on you. A lot.

Sullivan’s Travels – A deft mash-up of romantic screwball comedy, Hollywood satire, road movie and social drama that probably would not have worked so beautifully had not the great Preston Sturges been at the helm. Joel McCrea is pitch-perfect as a director of goofy populist comedies who yearns to make a “meaningful” film. Racked with guilt about the comfortable bubble that his Hollywood success has afforded him and determined to learn firsthand how the other half lives, he hits the road with no money in his pocket and masquerades as a railroad tramp (to the chagrin of his handlers).

He is joined along the way by an aspiring actress (Veronica Lake, in one of her best comic performances). His voluntary crash-course in “social realism” turns into much more than he had originally bargained for. Lake and McCrea have wonderful chemistry. Many decades later, the Coen Brothers co-opted the title of the fictional “film within the film” here: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Trip – Pared down into feature length from the 2011 BBC TV series of the same name, Michael Winterbottom’s film is essentially a highlight reel of the 6 episodes; which is not to denigrate it, because it is the most genuinely hilarious comedy I’ve seen in years.

The levity is due in no small part to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, basically playing themselves. Coogan is commissioned by a British newspaper to take a “restaurant tour” of England’s bucolic Lake District and write reviews. He initially plans to take his girlfriend along, but since they’re going through a rocky period, he asks his pal, fellow actor and comedian Brydon, to accompany him.

This setup is basically an excuse to sit back and enjoy Coogan and Brydon’s brilliant comic riffing (much of it feels improvised) on everything from relationships to the “proper” way to do Michael Caine impressions. There’s unexpected poignancy as well-but for the most part, it’s comedy gold. The director and both stars reunited for two equally enjoyable sequels, The Trip to Italy(2014) and The Trip to Spain (2017).

Vanishing Point – I don’t know if there was a sudden spike in sales for Dodge Challengers in 1971, but it would not surprise me, since nearly every car nut I have ever known usually gets a dreamy, faraway look in their eyes when I mention this cult classic, directed by Richard C. Sarafian. It’s best described as an existential car chase movie.

Barry Newman stars as Kowalski (there’s never a mention of a first name), a car delivery driver who is assigned to get a Challenger from Colorado to San Francisco. When someone wagers he can’t make the trip in less than 15 hours, he accepts the, erm, challenge. Naturally, someone in a muscle car pushing 100 mph across several states is going to eventually get the attention of law enforcement-and the chase is on.

Not much of a plot but riveting nonetheless. Episodic; one memorable vignette involves a hippie chick riding around the desert on a chopper a la Lady Godiva, to the strains of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” (riveting!). Cleavon Little plays Supersoul-a blind radio DJ who becomes Kowalski’s guardian angel and a sort of Greek Chorus for the viewer. The enigmatic ending still mystifies.

Previous posts with related themes:
They Live By Night
Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy
Microbe and Gasoline
The Curve
On My Way
The Trip to Italy
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry/Race with the Devil

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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On Twitter


--Dennis Hartley

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digby 6/15/2019 05:30:00 PM

 
Oh, Jared

by digby

This piece by Anne Applebaum in the WaPo says it all:

Imagine there was a completely secret, perfectly legal way to bribe a government official. Well, let’s not say “bribe”: Let’s imagine that you could channel money to this official — large amounts of money — and never have to reveal your name. Imagine that this official could accept this money, and then use it to make more money, without ever revealing that fact to the public.

Actually, there is no need to imagine such a thing, because it already exists. The thing is called an “opaque offshore vehicle.” Although that sounds like a motorboat with blackout curtains, this one is in fact a kind of bank account, based in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven where business deals are legally shrouded in secrecy. According to a report this week in the British newspaper the Guardian, the investment bank Goldman Sachs uses an account like this to funnel money from unnamed investors to a company called Cadre. Cadre, to oversimplify slightly, pools investments in real estate. One of Cadre’s co-founders is Jared Kushner; another co-founder is Kushner’s brother. Cadre’s headquarters are in a building in Manhattan owned by Kushner’s family real estate company.

Kushner — the United States’ prime envoy to the Middle East, to Mexico and to much else — seems to be nervous about Cadre. When he joined the White House, he resigned from the board and reduced his stake to less than 25 percent, though his holding is, according to the Guardian, now worth between $25 million and $50 million. When he filled out his first disclosure form, he somehow forgot to list Cadre, though later, under pressure, he added the company’s name. His forgetfulness is unsurprising: Other investors in the company include George Soros, a hate figure of the right. The company is already the subject of a conflict-of-interest complaint because it benefits from “Opportunity Zones,” part of a new tax law — a program that was specifically advocated by Ivanka Trump.

Now the Guardian reports that $90 million has come into Cadre via the opaque offshore vehicle. But from where? According to the report, which has not had much of an echo in the United States, at least $1 million has come from an unnamed Saudi investor. Other investments have arrived from an anonymous fund based in the Virgin Islands, another tax haven where business deals are shrouded in secrecy. Who is the real owner of this fund? We don’t know.

We don’t know and, thanks to the extraordinary system of tax havens and shell companies that we have allowed to flourish all around the world, we may never know. Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can’t identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily. As Oliver Bullough puts it in his book, “Moneyland,” “You can wrap a paper chain of paper people around the world in an afternoon, but it will take investigators years of patient detective work to unpick it, and years more to prosecute.”

It’s perfectly possible that Kushner, who has not commented on the Guardian report, himself has no idea who put this large sum of money in his company’s opaque offshore vehicle, which is what Goldman Sachs is claiming. But it’s also possible that, privately, he has a pretty good idea. [Of course he does --- d] 

The fact that we don’t know, and may never know, points to yet another deep conflict of interest inside the Trump administration. More important, it points to a major flaw in Western capitalism.

By some calculations, more than 10 percent of the world’s wealth is held offshore, in places such as the Cayman Islands. Some of this money is obtained illegally, which is why it is hidden; some of it is just money that is not taxed to pay for the schools that educated its owners or the infrastructure that was used to build their companies. This is money that can be used for political purposes or simply for the excessive spending — on yachts, mansions, jewelry — that has contributed to so much anger and ill will around the world.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments. Not only that, my guess is that the politician who decides to do so will discover that this is a popular cause, among not only those fighting inequality on the center-left but also those promoting entrepreneurship on the center-right. There is no reason a completely secret, perfectly legal way to channel money to a government official, or anybody else, needs to exist at all. The fact that we have come to accept this as “normal” is one of the symptoms of a deeper democratic diseas

Apropos of nothing, it is widely rumored that Vladimir Putin is the richest man on earth.

This is the era of the oligarch. Ending it must be a top priority but it encompasses not only domestic legal policies, but foreign policy and international banking. It's a big topic that the next Democratic president is going to have to be committed to dealing with.

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digby 6/15/2019 04:00:00 PM

 
The global order has shifted and we don't know yet what will replace it

by digby



Brett McGurk, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford, Foreign Affairs Analyst, Former Presidential Envoy who served under Bush, Obama, Trump posted this series of tweets about the Iran situation:

The US seems to have embarked on its “maximum pressure” campaign with few allies and little forethought as to unintended consequences or how to respond if key assumptions — e.g., that Iran will implode or succumb and enter talks on US terms — prove false.

Those assumptions are now highly questionable at best, which means the entire policy foundation as articulated by Trump has eroded. Iran appears to have made the strategic decision (not surprising) to resist economic pressure and respond asymmetrically, not directly against us.

I suspect Iran’s aim is to draw the US in deeper to the Middle East and heighten US rifts with allies or force removal of new sanctions as a pre-condition to talks. Those are likely goals behind reckless acts. They have also likely prepared responses should we respond militarily.

Thus, any US military response would need to be decisive and sustained over a period of months. That is not where a maximum pressure policy was supposed to lead. It was supposed to set the table for a “new and more comprehensive” deal. That’s now highly unlikely. So what now?

Strategy 101: when assumptions underlying a policy prove false, it’s critical to immediately review the policy and adjust course. Failure to do so doubles down on risk. Here, Trump may soon be boxed in: either back down or resort to military tools (as economic tools have failed).

In my view, targeting tankers in int’l waterways warrants a rallied international response with military measures to deter future incidents. If Washington had developed a policy with allies, it could rally the world to isolate Iran and reinforce economic with diplomatic pressure.

Unfortunately, our great comparative advantage as a nation — building and working with alliances — has eroded, particularly with respect to Iran. Key western allies warned of this very circumstance and sequence of events when the US began its maximum pressure campaign a year ago.

Our regional partners are now divided amongst themselves, lack confidence in the White House, and do not want an escalation given risks of an uncontrollable spiral. This is not 1988 where the “tanker war” was limited in time, scope, and geography. More risk and uncertainty today.

Moreover, Trump has made clear he does not want a military confrontation and hopes to drawdown from the Middle East. On Iran, this means a policy that appears to be executed without the full buy-in from the president or at least his personal consideration of downside risks.

On multiple fronts now, the national security team is pursuing maximalist policy aims backed by a minimalist president. Iran is just the latest example of this problem. Consider the last two weeks alone on Iran policy:

In Japan, Trump said he opposes regime change & only wants to talk about the nuclear file (albeit after leaving the table where that file is discussed). Pompeo in Switzerland floats talks without preconditions. Bolton then tweets Iran must “first end its 40-year reign of terror.”

Worse, Trump asked a key ally @AbeShinzo to carry a message to Tehran and float dialogue but less than one week before Abe visits, Trump’s national security team announces significant new sanctions against Iran. This is how Bolton set up the Abe trip:

Iran is spending its money to fund & conduct terrorism, resulting in serious economic problems that will only get worse. The President has given Iran the opportunity to pursue a better future, but first the regime must end its 40-year reign of terror.

Was that a coherent sequence and plan? Did Trump know about it? Did Abe? Did anyone think such an announcement would help the visit of our key ally, made at the behest of Trump himself? Was it intended to sabotage the visit? In any event, it’s peculiar diplomacy/sequencing.

This incoherence has ramifications beyond Iran; it’s weakening our position globally. Iran is a 5th-rate power. Its economy is smaller than our poorest state. Its defense budget a fraction of our regional allies. China & Russia are our near-peer rivals — and now sense advantage.

If you focus on the signal and not the noise as @JoeNBC has been saying, here’s what happened last week alone (some broader strategic trend-lines worth noting when considering the issue of Iran and US strategy)

1) China’s President Xi completes a historic three-day visit to Moscow and hails strategic ties with Putin.

2) Chinese and Russian military commands meet to discuss deepening strategic partnerships.

Today, both Putin and Xi met with Iranian President Rouhani and expressed their full support for Iran even in the wake of smoking tankers and US evidence that Iran was unquestionably behind the attack.

This trend threatens to reverse a signal achievement of the Cold War and runs totally contrary to Trump’s own national security strategy with emphasis on great power competition, and needlessly avoiding Chinese-Russian convergence.

Our intelligence community similarly warned earlier this year that “China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the 1950s” and the tend is likely to grow due to “perceived US unilateralism and interventionism.”

China and Russia have also made a decision with respect to US policies in the Middle East. They believe our zero-sum objectives on Iran as well as Syria cannot be achieved (given incoherence in resourcing, Trump’s aversion to more investment, mixed messages, and basic reality).

China has now afforded highest diplomatic status to Iran — and also Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt — positioning itself for the next 50 years on four pillars. I wroteabout this trend-line in @TheAtlantic after a @CarnegieBeijing seminar theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

With smoking tankers attributable to Iran, this would be an opportune time to bring China and even Russia into a diplomatic coalition given that threats in the Gulf impact their own economies. Not unthinkable before. Now impossible: thus advantaging Iran, and limiting US options.

Bottom line: Iran is a real problem. But this policy is piling on strategic risk with little reward. It’s driving allies away & peer-competitors together. It’s not leading to talks but increasing risk of conflict. It’s ramifications go beyond the Middle East. Worth reassessing.

Yeah, it's worth reassessing.

There is no strategy. There is only impulse and infighting leading to chaos and incoherence.

Our best hope is that Trump's luck holds up.

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digby 6/15/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
Marsha Blackburn, a very, very good little soldier

by digby



It looks like Mitch has found a new henchman more than willing to do the dirty work.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) blocked an effort by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to pass a bill via unanimous consent requiring campaigns to report any offers of foreign assistance to the FBI.
"We are all for free and fair and honest elections. ... These reporting requirements are overbroad. Presidential campaigns would have to worry about disclosure at a variety of levels. So many different levels. Consider this: vendors that work for a campaign, people that are supplying some kind of voter service to a campaign. ... It would apply to door knockers, it would apply to phone bankers, down to any person who shares their views with a candidate."


Warner then countered that Blackburn's reading of the legislation is "not accurate .., The only thing that would have to be reported is if the agent of a foreign government or national offered that something that was already prohibited."

The big picture: President Trump's comments on Wednesday that he would consider accepting intelligence on a political opponent from a foreign entity set off immediate outrage from Democrats, who see it as an invitation for foreign adversaries to interfere in future U.S. elections. Lawmakers in both the Senate and the House have renewed calls to pass election security measures, with some going as far as to call Trump's comments "anti-American" and grounds for impeachment.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, responding to Blackburn's objection, said on the Senate floor: "How disgraceful it is that our Republican friends cower before this president when they know that the things he does severely damage democracy."

I knew she was going to be bad in the Senate. And she is already fulfilling every expectation.

They are accomplices, every single one of them. This must never be forgotten. Ever.

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digby 6/15/2019 12:30:00 PM

 
I Don't Believe a Thing the Trump Administration Says About the Oil Tanker Attack 

by tristero

And no one else should, either. These guys have less credibility than an 80's infomercial hawking baldness cures.

An independent international commission is needed.
tristero 6/15/2019 11:00:00 AM

 
Tips for Dems when they roll out Trump's Impeachment

by Spocko

I believe there is already a group planning the impeachment roll out. I'll call them the Impeach The MFer Already (ITMFA) group.  I'll call the woman in charge of the media strategy the Media Strategist for Impeach the MFer Already or (MS for ITMFA). She probably already has her staff lining up the experts on emoluments, obstruction of justice, money laundering and other crimes from the Mueller Report.

Her goal is to show the crimes and/or treasonous activity of Trump AND HIS INNER CIRCLE and push new parts of it out to the public every single day, using multiple methods on multiple platforms to multiple audiences.

The Democrats need to tell a story to the American people that will convince them to act in a certain way.  Impeachment will require figuring out the best ways to deliver the news, images and video from the hearings to the multiple audiences that have to be reached.  How? My first tip:

1) Recreate conclusions from the Mueller Report in a way the American people can absorb.

That involves first getting experts to explain the crimes, second providing video of the criminals talking about doing those crimes and third, getting more experts to refute the excuses from Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney or Donald Trump that the crimes aren't really crimes. They need to be shown they are are wrong, wrong, wrong. 10,000 times wrong.

The Captain, Spocko and the late great Joel Silberman discussing ways to show the American people how to take down a penny-ante operator like Trump

[If my friend, the late great Joel Silberman, were alive I'm sure he would be an adviser to this group.  He would explain to them the importance of telling a story with emotional beats, backed up by hard facts, political and legal analysis all topped off with damning video clips. ]

The Trump White House is fighting hard to keep any Mueller witnesses off camera.  If I wasn't a polite Vulcan I would scream, "STOP LETTING THEM WIN BY GIVING DON JR. A CLOSED HEARING!"

But a modern media strategist doesn't have to only use hearings and they don't have to just work with what the MSM clips at hearings and uses. Rachel Maddow can bring on all the experts, but not everyone sees them. My next tip.

2) Create your own clips and get the story out directly to the world via Social Media.

I'm sure the MS of ITMFA already knows this, but I want to remind Democratic activists to not count on the MSM to show why Trump is a criminal and should be removed from office.  We need to use our own platforms, social media and connections to help the process.

I'll admit I'm no expert on Social Media but I know a lot about how it has been used and how it can be manipulated by bots to amplify messages. If you read the Mueller report, you would know who the the Russian government controlled Internet Research Agency was and what they did to influence people's opinions. Here's a clip on them from the report.

The ITMFA should hire the American equivalent of the Internet Research Agency to get the impeachment story out. The IRA used actual people pushing a specific message and used bots to amplify them. ITMFA shouldn't hide the use of bots either. Just explain the new battleground, "We are using the same methods and bots as the IRA. It worked for Putin and got us Trump, so we are learning from our enemies." That story alone will educate people on bots and social media manipulation.

Other social media ideas for ITMFA:

• Hire YouTube stars to create explainer videos on obstruction of justice, money laundering or the history of foreign influence on politics
• Hire comedians & smart writers to help politicians with clever, retweet-able tweets and vicious sub-tweets. (Hire my friends Jeff Tiedrich
  @itsJeffTiedrich and Frank Conniff @FrankConniff.)
• Bring Instagram Influencers to the hearings and pair them with someone who can explain the impeachment story to their audience
• Bumperstickers!
  

The MS of ITMFA can suggest that committee members at hearings ask the kind of questions that will create video clips of the people talking about what they heard, what crimes they committed, or the obstruction orders they got from the President but didn't carry out. The media will use them but that leads me to my third tip.

3) DON'T TRUST THE MEDIA!


The Media will water down the story that Trump is a criminal and should be removed from office.

It appears to me that certain news producers, journalists and hosts want to believe rational Republicans exist. They keep providing Trump with "to be fair" comments about his lawlessness and keep bringing on Giuliani types to explain away crimes and treasonous activities.  The GOP today are extremists. But some mainstream media and Democrats STILL think the Republicans will reach a point where "The Fever Will Break." once Trump is out of office, and things will go back to normal.

NEWSFLASH for Joe BIDEN: Today's GOP IS the fever, and it's coursing through Trump's plaque-clogged veins.

I understand people who don't follow politics want the Republican party to stop being insane. But the insanity has worked for the GOP extremists. They have gotten what they wanted, conservative supreme court judges, multiple federal judges, huge tax cuts, cut backs on regulations, no action on the climate emergency and nativist attacks on immigrants. Why would they change? What's in it for them? Respect from people on the left? HA!

The ITMFA group can arrange the right video clips for the MSM, but they can't fix the media's attitude of giving the benefit of the doubt to the GOP's bad faith actions in support of Trumps's lies and criminality. Many are still stuck playing along believing a President wouldn't be a traitor to his country and Republicans wouldn't support him if only they knew the truth.

We need to help Democrats successfully Impeach Trump for his crimes and treasonous activity.  Pick an area you are interested in, learn the story, then learn how the Trump people are trying to quash that story. Then explain to the people who mostly listen to NPR, watch the NewsHour or see a few headlines, what is happening, why Trump's excuses are invalid and why it matters. Even if they think they can predict the future and say, "But the current GOP senate won't act!" They don't know the future. Only time travelers like me do, and even then things can change.

I'm just a brain in a box and not even from this planet, but I'm half-human and I want a better future for my friends in this time in this timeline.  I've learned that we are not alone in this fight. There are people who ARE working to ensure impeachment and the removal of Trump. Give them a signal boost when you can. Your nudge might be the one to move us out of the darkest timeline.

Cross posted to Spocko's Brain 
Spocko 6/15/2019 09:00:00 AM