“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN)
is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
Donald Trump, February 17, 2017
A discussion of the most interesting, useful and entertaining recent articles and observations on Trump, the Republicans, and politics generally from the enemies of the American People:
You knew we were headed straight here. The Trump White House both confirms the accuracy of the tax leak story AND calls it “Fake News.”
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I am pretty sure this is “Real News”: “Mike Pence Clearly Went To Ash Wednesday Services Dozens Of Times.”
Plus, Rolling Stone provides a deeper dive into the creepy personality that is V. P. Mike Pence:
While Mike Pence was governor, his relationship with the Democratic minority in the legislature was crap. Someone on his staff suggested having the Democratic leaders over to the governor's mansion for dinner. The table was set for 20, but there were only around seven in attendance. One unlucky legislator stuck next to Pence tried to make conversation, but found even at dinner she couldn't shift Pence off his talking points. [RET: God, I knew that.] Gov. Pence shouted to his wife, Karen, his closest adviser, at the other end of the table.
"Mother, Mother, who prepared our meal this evening?"
The legislators looked at one another, speaking with their eyes: He just called his wife "Mother." Maybe it was a joke, the legislator reasoned. But a few minutes later, Pence shouted again.
"Mother, Mother, whose china are we eating on?"
Mother Pence went on a long discourse about where the china was from. A little later, the legislators stumbled out, wondering what was weirder: Pence's inability to make conversation, or calling his wife "Mother" in the second decade of the 21st century.
And, Mother-Mother, Pence is quite the Christian:
"It was clear upon observing his expenditures that he was using campaign funds for personal use. He was making his mortgage payments. He was making a car payment for his wife. He was making payments for his personal credit card, and he was even spending money for his family groceries."
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Quotables.
- Obama cares: “Now is the time when Republicans have to go ahead and show their cards. If in fact they have a program that would genuinely work better, and they want to call it whatever they want — they can call it Trumpcare or McConnellcare or Ryancare — if it actually works, I will be the first one to say, ‘Great; you should have told me that in 2009. I asked.’” — President Obama
- Dysfunctional Democrats: “[A] friend reminded me the other day of just how infuriating Democrats have been on Obamacare. They've had seven years to extol its benefits, which they should have been doing at the top of their lungs. Instead, most of them have done their best to avoid being associated with it. This is one of the biggest own-goals in party history. Is it any wonder that the public has been lukewarm about Obamacare when one party has attacked it relentlessly and the other has mostly twiddled its thumbs and stared at the ceiling?” — Kevin Drum
- White “populism”: “[W]hat we call populism is really in large degree white identity politics, which can’t be addressed by promising universal benefits. Among other things, these “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it or believe it if told. For sure many if not most of those who gained health coverage thanks to Obamacare have no idea that’s what happened.” — Paul Krugman
- Trump/Russia: “Something is stanky with the Trump administration when it comes to Russia. We don’t know what it is. It’s like when you open your refrigerator door, you know something is bad but you can’t figure out where it is. That is why we need an independent investigation to go in and take a look at this.” — Jamal Simmons on This Week
- Trump v. Reason: “[Trump] too has a contempt for any facts that do not fit his own ideology or self-image. That’s why the lies he repeats are not just moments of self-interested dishonesty. They are designed to erode the very notion of an empirical reality, independent of his own ideology and power. They are an attack on reason itself. A fact-driven media has to be discredited as “fake news” if it challenges Trump’s agenda. Equally, a bureaucracy designed impartially to implement legislation has to be delegitimized, if its fact-based neutrality challenges Trump’s worldview. And so the “administrative state,” in Steve Bannon’s words, has to be “deconstructed.’” — Andrew Sullivan
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Uh-oh. “Democrats paralyzed as Gorsuch skates”:
Democrats can’t seem to land a punch on Neil Gorsuch — and it’s not even clear they want to.
President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has breezed through more than 70 meetings with senators. Opponents who’ve scoured his record have found little to latch onto. And some Democrats are privately beginning to believe that Gorsuch — barring a blunder at his Senate confirmation hearings next week — will clinch the 60 votes he needs to be approved without a filibuster.
I’ve written somewhat unemotionally about this before, but what I do know is this — there will be an internal Democratic bloodbath if the Gorsuch confirmation becomes a (first!) Trump “high point” and fuel for “come back” stories. That would be unimaginable. (In the article above, Chuck Schumer tries to reassure: “We’re strategizing. We’re just not telling you.”)
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Keep your eyes on the apartment sales. In the first deal consummated by the Trump Org. since Trump became President, Mother Jones reports that a Chinese American businesswoman — a self-described “access” salesperson with ties to Chinese intelligence organizations - recently purchased a $15.8 million penthouse at the Trump Park Avenue building. Or:
To sum up: An influence-peddler who works with a princeling tied to Chinese military intelligence placed $15.8 million in the pockets of the president of the United States.
Or, “[a] Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.”
There is no pretense of oversight or disclosure as to Trump’s financial dealings while in office. Nor is there any precedent for this kind of profiteering by a U.S. President. I think we all know exactly where this is headed.
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A positive Trump legacy? . . . it would be killing the idiotic, already disproven, mantra that “what this country really needs is a businessman as a president!” Thank you Ryan Cooper for writing “Donald Trump shows why businessmen make bad presidents”:
[T]he government is not a business, and not simply because its basic structure and function are dissimilar to that of a corporation. The really bedrock difference, as Charles Peters writes in his new book We Do Our Part, is that quality government requires a sense of public spiritedness and a moral conscience. Sociopathic pursuit of profit at all costs — the defining characteristic of the modern American businessman — is a route to corruption and disaster.
Or, as Paul Waldman explains in “Why is the Trump presidency such a rolling disaster”:
Abysmal management. Trump was only the latest in a long line of political figures who argued that if someone from outside politics took over the government, he’d whip it into shape with his business savvy and management expertise. The result has been the most chaotic and incompetent White House anyone can remember. As Politico reported Wednesday, “A culture of paranoia is consuming the Trump administration, with staffers increasingly preoccupied with perceived enemies — inside their own government,” creating “an environment of fear that has hamstrung the routine functioning of the executive branch.”
Almost no one at the top levels of the Trump administration has experience in government, which not surprisingly has made everything more difficult as they bumble around trying to figure out how things work. Whether because of their own indifference to governing or the inability to find anyone willing to work for Trump, the administration hasn’t even nominated people to fill more than 500 of the 553 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, leaving agencies across the government barely able to function. If this is what Trump considers a “fine-tuned machine,” imagine what it would look like if it weren’t running so smoothly.
Waldman’s piece is worth a full read if only for the schadenfreude.
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On a related note, it is time to revisit Obama’s auto bailout. As TPM reported, ”President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed that he ended "the assault on the American auto industry," though the actions of President Barack Obama's administration are widely understood to have saved the industry.” Indeed, President Obama’s successful bailout rescued a vital U.S. industry, saved millions of direct and indirectly related jobs, and did so at a profit on the government’s investment. (Remember when less than that was enough to make Lee Iacocca a presidential wet dream?)
It is important to revisit this when the recurrent mantra we hear is that government involvement in any industry — including the healthcare, education, infrastructure, prison and environmental fields — will simply lead to incompetence and disaster. After all, ”everyone knows that.” Well, in rebutting such nonsense, I think it is useful to remember that these same failed arguments were lodged at the outset of President Obama’s successful auto bailout. Courtesy of ThinkProgress:
Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “Does anyone really believe that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can successfully steer a multi-national corporation to economic viability?” [6/1/09]
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): “It’s basically going to be a government-owned, government-run company. …It’s the road toward socialism.” [5/29/09]
RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “No matter how much the President spins GM’s bankruptcy as good for the economy, it is nothing more than another government grab of a private company and another handout to the union cronies who helped bankroll his presidential campaign.” [6/1/2009]
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): “Now the government has forced taxpayers to buy these failing companies without any plausible plan for profitability. Does anyone think the same government that plans to double the national debt in five years will turn GM around in the same time?” [6/2/09]
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA): “Unfortunately, this is just another sad chapter in President Obama’s eager campaign to interject his administration in the private sector’s business dealings.” [6/2/09]
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX): The auto company rescues “have been the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism.” [7/22/09]
Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ): When government gets involved in a company, “the disaster that follows is predictable.” [7/22/09]
The evidence long shows that in some sectors, and during some emergencies, the government — run by people committed to excellence — does better than the private sector. That is a truth that the purveyors of private wealth desperately don’t want you to understand.
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A good catch on the issue of Trump’s tax returns. Paul Waldman makes the important point that there are even stronger arguments that Trump must disclose his current tax returns, while in office, and that such returns are also more valuable:
[W]e need something else even more than Trump’s returns from 2005, or 1995 or 2015. We need to see the tax returns he files while he’s president. Every president for the past 40 years has released theirs — you can read them here. We need to know what he’s making, who’s paying him, and how it relates to the policy decisions he’s making. The past returns are important, but the future ones are even more vital.
After all, Trump supposedly divested himself of his business conflicts, right? And he has nothing to hide . . . nothing to do with Russia. These would be like the returns of any other President . . . right?
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Republicans’ healthcare lies are spiraling.
On Face the Nation last Sunday, Paul Ryan seriously upped the ante on Republican lies. In short, Speaker Ryan argued that there is no health coverage crisis, anyone who wants health insurance can get it, and the decreased uninsured rate under the ACA is a merely a parlor game of identifying the number of people who did not want health insurance but were forced to buy it under a government mandate. I am not making this up. He said it. Or, as David Frum tepidly defends Ryan’s “commendably frank” remarks:
Ryan’s forthright remarks reveal the assumptions on which his policy is founded. Health-care coverage, his comments suggest, is a good that comes with a cost primarily borne by the covered individual or family. If individuals or families assesses that the good is not worth the cost, then they should be free to forgo the coverage. If that decision should ruin them financially—or expose them to life-threatening medical risk—then that is the price of freedom. As Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness: “No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.” And what is a mandate but an unchosen obligation?
Ryan’s rhetoric, however, does not acknowledge the no-coverage results of Republican policies. Rather, his rhetoric is designed to obfuscate that fact, which is why Frum must talk in terms of “assumptions” and “suggestions” underlying Ryan’s remarks. And, of course, Frum’s “freedom” and “choice” verbiage is pure unadulterated bullshit. Universal coverage is simply a moral choice: do we want it or not?
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The one bedrock truth about the Republican healthcare proposal: It has nothing to do with healthcare; it is only about cutting taxes on the rich. Is there really any ambiguity on this?
GOP PLAN MASSIVELY REDISTRIBUTES WEALTH UPWARD: Vox’s Dylan Matthews looks at the CBO score of the GOP health plan, which would result in 24 million fewer insured by 2026 while delivering a huge tax cut for the rich:
The plan, the CBO concludes, would take more than $1 trillion away from programs targeting poor and middle-class families, to fund an $883 billion tax cut targeted at the wealthy … “No legislation enacted in recent decades cut low-income programs this much — or even comes close,” Robert Greenstein, the … president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities … says.
The biggest driver of that cut is the $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid — almost exactly the amount of the tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest.
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West Virginia: I know you are angry at Dems about something or other. But maybe it is time to rethink? Because the Republicans in your state are moving to eliminate all mine safety enforcement:
State safety inspectors wouldn’t inspect West Virginia’s coal mines anymore. They would conduct “compliance visits and education.”
Violations of health and safety standards wouldn’t produce state citations and fines, either. Mine operators would receive “compliance assistance visit notices.”
And West Virginia regulators wouldn’t have authority to write safety and health regulations. Instead, they could only “adopt policies ... [for] improving compliance assistance” in the state’s mines.
Those and other significant changes in a new industry- backed bill would produce a wholesale elimination of most enforcement of longstanding laws and rules put in place over many years — as a result of hundreds of deaths — to protect the health and safety of West Virginia’s coal miners.
Opponents are furious about the proposed changes but also fearful that backers of the bill could easily have the votes to push through any language they want. Longtime mine safety experts and advocates are shocked at the breadth of the attack on current authorities of the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training and the Board of Coal Mine Health and Safety.
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Let’s not forget foreign policy. Daniel Larson describes a misconception about Trump:
One key to understanding Trump’s foreign policy is that his version of “America first” has almost nothing in common with the tradition normally identified with that name. He latched on to the phrase when he heard it, but for him it doesn’t refer to keeping the U.S. out of foreign wars, neutrality, or minding our own business. I think for Trump it means above all that America should be in first place in the world, and we should “beat” any other competitors that come along by whatever means necessary. This is why Trump is fixated on “winning” and making America great, and it helps explain why he thinks that the U.S. is currently getting ripped off in everything.
It means all that to him . . . and is an effective dog-whistle to his anti-Semitic supporters. A win-win, if you will.
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No longer “Fail-Safe”? Jay Rosen puts his finger on the unnerving core of the Trump presidency — he has overturned the carefully constructed, post-WWII model of the presidency designed to reassure the world not to be terrified that one individual can destroy the planet:
Part of the psychological work the American presidency had to do was done through the media. Rituals like the televised news conference were supposed to show that the president was in command of the facts, and could handle challenges without losing his cool. Command of television in a speech or interview is one way that presidents show us they’re in command of themselves. That’s reassuring. That’s acting “presidential.”
Trump does not participate in this regime. He may have access to the best intelligence in the world, but he is at war with the intelligence community. The apparatus exists to keep him constantly informed, but he prefers to watch cable news, so that he can rage at his unfair treatment. He flies off the handle constantly. He makes threats. He free associates, speaks carelessly, and grants roaming privileges to his world class id. He doesn’t care if what he’s saying is true. When a reporter at his February 16 press conference told him his facts were wrong, he shrugged and said, “I was given that information; I don’t know… I’ve seen that information around.” That is the opposite of reassuring.
Trump is thus revising the Presidency before our eyes. In his grip, it no longer attempts to muffle anxiety about the President and make people around the world feel okay about granting one person such enormous, unthinkable and inhuman powers. Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm.
Yes, and a Republican party long committed to tearing down the post-WWII New Deal society has (intentionally or not) elected a President equally committed to tearing down the post-WWII presidency itself.
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Things continue to go well for Ivanka Trump. In the dog-bites-man reporting tradition, the WashPo reports that “[s]ales of [Ivanka] Trump’s products skyrocketed in early February, making her Lyst’s 11th most popular brand. The biggest spike, according to Lyst, came on Feb. 9, when sales jumped by 219 percent from the day before. Yes, Feb. 9 — the same day that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway promoted Trump’s clothing and jewelry line on Fox & Friends. . . . . Comparing February’s numbers with last year’s average number of orders of Ivanka Trump products shows a difference of 557 percent.” <sigh>
On a separate note, while President Trump crows about his “buy American, hire American” rhetoric, the French news organization Agence France-Presse did the leg work to obtain customs receipts showing that Ivanka had ordered 53.5 tons of Chinese made goods during the inauguration period alone.
I’m noting Ivanka news only because she has not shown up in the Trump administration to the degree many people had speculated. With her previously ubiquitous campaign presence, and post-election purchase of a new D.C. home (pictured right), some were speculating the she (weirdly) “could be the most powerful first lady ever.” Something tells me that decisions about her current role turn exclusively on the rising-and-falling sales figures discussed above. This is the “ka-ching!” presidency after all.
On a similar scale of importance, I had to laugh when I saw that blogger Dan Savage decided to “go there” and express his opinion: “I f**cking hate Melania Trump.”
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The CBO report was another Mitt Romney 47% moment. Greg Sargent deserves kudos for this perfect headline: “The CBO report demolishes the GOP’s edifice of deception.” But I want to talk about something different that was revealed by the CBO report: What American politician would want to take away health insurance from 24 million or more Americans? What kind of person harbors such contempt and malice for tens of millions of his fellow citizens? Who votes for these miscreants?
All the talk about premiums, deductibles, sign-ups, actuarial assumptions, etc. obscures the horribly immoral and disgusting truth that many Republicans deeply want to cause an unprecedented humanitarian crisis for their fellow countrymen. The last time we had such a prominent public reveal of Republicans’ sinister beliefs was Mitt Romney’s secretly taped 47% comments:
All right, there are 47 percent who are with [Pres. Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
. . . . [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Mitt Romney’s scurrilous admissions and the recent CBO report reveal the same alarming problem: one of two major political parties holds wide swaths of the electorate in deep contempt and is intentionally committed to doing them serious damage on a level not recently seen in U.S. history.
What we have is not a dry public policy debate, no matter how important, but a genuine national crisis — with internal enemies holding a ruinous agenda of many items directed towards millions of U.S. citizens.
It remains to be seen whether enough Republicans have the courage of their convictions to follow through on this plan. Depriving millions of Americans access to medical care would impose pain more directly and widely than any legislative act in modern U.S. history.
— Jonathan Chait
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This is disturbing and deadly serious. The questions of whether we have a mentally ill President, and if so, to what degree, continue to grow unchecked. Trump’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson — about Trump’s bizarre claims that frmr. Pres. Obama had wiretapped him — brings these frightening questions to an unavoidable head. Here is your President:
Now, for the most part, I'm not going to discuss it, because we have it before the committee and we will be submitting things before the committee very soon that hasn't been submitted as of yet. But it's potentially a very serious situation . . . .
But, we will be submitting certain things and I will be perhaps speaking about this next week, but it's right now before the committee, and I think I want to leave it . . . .
I think you're going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks . . . .
Let's see whether or not I proved it. You looked at some proof. I mean, let's see whether or not I prove it. I just don't choose to do it right now. I choose to do it before the committee, and maybe I'll do it before the committee. Maybe I'll do it before I see the result of the committee. But I think we have some very good stuff. And we're in the process of putting it together, and I think it's going to be very demonstrative.
Folks, there are only two possibilities: (1) Trump, improbably, shocks us all with some secret evidence, or (2) this man, unquestionably, is mentally unfit for office. There is no in-between.
On top of Trump’s original charge, consider how crazy are his voluntary statements to Tucker Carlson above. He made the original, implausible charge, he is “not going to discuss it,” but he has secret evidence, he refers portentously and repeatedly to a “committee” process that he asked to prove what supposedly he alone knows, but he won't talk to the committee, except that he just might give evidence to the committee, only he won't do it now, but “perhaps,” “he thinks” he will disclose new evidence before this committee, “maybe,” but next week, or over the next two weeks, or maybe before he sees the results of the committee, or maybe not, but he has “very good stuff,” or he is in the process of putting it together, and so we can see if he proves this . . . or if he doesn’t.
To go on TV as President and voluntarily say all that . . . means that he is crazy. It means he is not fit, clinically, to be President. So, where does that leave us? Because we are all just watching this unfold.
Jake Tapper did a good interview about Trump on Real Time last night. (Who knew that “Jake Tapper” was his porn name?) I’d only say that the conversation is still being framed meekly as about Trump’s unprecedented “dishonesty.” Soon, hopefully, we can more honestly begin to acknowledge that this is about Trump’s instability and illness.
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Republicans fight to keep 13 year old brides. From Christina Cauterucci at Slate:
On Thursday, the Republican-majority New Hampshire house of representatives voted down a bill that would have raised the legal marriage age to 18. Under current state law, boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 13 can marry with a parent or guardian’s consent and permission from a judge. . . . In New Hampshire, Republicans opposed and successfully blocked the bill by arguing that it would prevent young soldiers from getting military benefits for their underage partners and “ensure forever that every child born to a minor will be born out of wedlock.”
Because that's the biggest concern for a 13-year-old with an unwanted pregnancy: she's unmarried!
What more could I say?
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A necessary reunion. Someone needs to get Rage Against The Machine back together because — after the election of Donald Trump — I now fully realize the anger and intensity behind all their warnings. They should be the soundtrack to the Trump administration resistance.
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I will let guitarist Tom Morello speak for himself. He is an interesting guest if you are not already familiar with him . . . and who would have thought that the guitarist in the video above was once a U.S. Senate staffer?
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Reactions, comments, additional reporting, etc. are encouraged below. Plus, who knows what is the purpose of the small wooden box in the opening photograph?
[For those who missed it, last week’s Dispatches is here.]