Voting rights have a long and sordid history in our country. There have always been people who try to maintain political and economic power by keeping others from voting — landowners over renters, men over women and whites over black. As a result, a fraction of Americans has been more powerful in deciding who our lawmakers are and what laws govern us.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the 10 pillars of fascism. What are they?
JASON STANLEY: The 10 pillars of fascism are, number one, a mythic past, a great mythic past which the leader harkens back.
The cold-blooded, most corporate-indentured Republicans dominate our political process today. Mitch McConnell (see Kentucky Values), led by the election-buying Koch brothers, drove Kavanaugh's nomination through the Senate, excluding important witnesses who wished to testify. To shore up claims of legitimacy, McConnell allowed the FBI to conduct a sham investigation that was shaped by Trump's White House lawyer Don McGahn and the FBI head, Christopher Wray. Wray had previously worked with his friend Kavanaugh on the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct.
Resilience and action are required. The Supreme Court is deeply political – forget about the claims of judicial independence by the five Justices in the majority. Their votes on issues of class, race, presidential and corporate power, peoples' rights, and remedies and access to justice (day in court with trial by jury) against corporations are quite predictable.
The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21775485/migrant-child-crisis-trump-presidency/
No one who's studied business as long as I have — more than 40 years now — should be shocked by the headline above. In fact, I've believed for years that luck is a better determinant of success than smarts (or effort). It's why I adopted a motto soon after my journalism career kicked off that tried to capture the perception: "There is no big-time." That is, it's remarkable how many at the top are, well, unremarkable. So I figured luck had to play a lead role in their ascension. I've never had occasion to change my mind.
Solman's Sense and Sensibility
But of course, this was a subjective judgment. Now, however, comes support for the cynicism: a study that claims the predominance of luck over talent in the distribution of wealth has been mathematically confirmed. Two Italian physicists — Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda — and one economist — A. E. Biondo —make the case, and they've got a computer model to back it up.
While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/james-comeys-remarkable-story-about-donald-trump
From the site:
President Trump appears to be guilty of obstruction of justice. That’s the only rational conclusion to be reached if James Comey’s opening statement for his planned testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Thursday, is to be believed. The lurch of the Trump Presidency from one crisis to the next scandal produces a kind of bombshell-induced numbness, but that should not prevent us from appreciating the magnitude of Comey’s statement.
From the site:
RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
This president claims he 'hit a home run.' It's ridiculously obvious that he doesn't belong in the big leagues!
From the site:
President Donald Trump returned late Saturday from his first overseas trip as president, clearly more welcomed by the Muslims he’d proposed barring from the United States than by allies in Europe whose priorities and values have long been parallel with U.S. ideals.
“I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” says Rep. Mark Sanford, a Republican Representative from South Carolina. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.”
From the site:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Wednesday called for a select committee to investigate Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election and potential ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials, telling MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren that Congress lacks the credibility to “handle this alone.”
McCain was reacting to revelations that House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) met with Trump on Wednesday to brief him on new information suggesting the president may have been monitored—legally—through “incidental collection.”
Nunes informed the president and the press before sharing the details with fellow members of of the House Intelligence Committee, prompting Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) to blast the House Intel chairman’s decision.
In an interview with Van Susteren, McCain called the situation “bizarre,” arguing, “no longer does the Congress have credibility to handle this alone.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/conservative-fantasies-colliding-with-reality.html
From the site:
Think for a minute about the vision of government and its role that the right has been peddling for decades.
In this vision, much if not most government spending is a complete waste, doing nobody any good. The same is true of government regulations. And to the extent to which spending does help anyone, it’s Those People — lazy, undeserving types who just so happen to be a bit, well, darker than Real Americans.
This was the kind of thinking — or, perhaps, “thinking” — that underlay President Trump’s promise to replace Obamacare with something “far less expensive and far better.” After all, it’s a government program, so he assumed that it must be full of waste that a tough leader like him could eliminate.
Strange to say, however, Republicans turn out to have no ideas about how to make the program cheaper other than eliminating health insurance for 24 million people (and making coverage worse, with higher out-of-pocket spending, for those who remain).
And basically the same story applies at a broader level. Consider federal spending as a whole: Outside defense it’s dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — all programs that are crucial to tens of millions of Americans, many of them the white working-class voters who are the core of Trump support. Furthermore, most other government spending also serves purposes that are popular, important or (usually) both.
https://www.thenation.com/article/fear-of-diversity-made-people-more-likely-to-vote-trump/
From the site:
In previous analyses of Trump’s support during the primaries, we showed that racial resentment played a larger role in the 2016 election than economic concerns. Recently released survey data allows us to ascertain in what ways Trump’s general election support compares to previous elections. The data also give us the opportunity to focus in on those voters who switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and compare them to those voters who did not support Trump in 2016 but voted for Romney in 2012.
We find that opinions about how increasing racial diversity will affect American society had much more impact on support for Trump during the 2016 election compared to support for the Republican candidates in the two previous presidential elections. We also find that individuals with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump, but those with low racial resentment and more positive views about rising diversity voted for Romney but not Trump.
"You can draw a straight line from Reaganomics to Trump's budget." So very true!
From the site:
Every year, during the run-up to Halloween, when Jim DeMint goes to Hell's mega-mall and sits on Satan's lap, he has a list of things he wants for the holiday. The parents of the assembled demons and imps behind him in line often get frustrated because the list is so long. On Thursday, the Trump Administration released its proposed national budget. It's been a long time coming, but DeMint and the rest of the greasy barbarians at Heritage finally got most of what they asked for.
This proposed budget isn't extreme. Reagan's proposed budget in 1981 was extreme. This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich.
Republican Rep. Tom Cole has not seen any evidence that suggests former President Barack Obama wiretapped the Republican nominee during the 2016 presidential election. Cole told a gaggle of reporters Friday that President Donald Trump, who raised the allegation against his predecessor two weeks ago, should apologize to Obama.
“I have seen no indication that that’s true,” Cole said of Trump’s tweets, which baselessly claimed Obama “tapped” him.
“It’s not a charge I would have ever made,” Cole told reporters. “And, frankly, unless you can produce some pretty compelling proof, then I think that President Obama is owed an apology in that regard because, if he didn’t do it, we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did,” Cole said.
From the site:
President Donald Trump may owe his election to white working class voters like coal miners in Appalachia, but so far he hasn’t been serving their best interest. Just look at how his budget proposes to save $340 million by cutting funds to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.
The ARC is particularly important, as it works to diversify the economies in areas hard-hit by the faltering coal industry. Its actions are expected to create or save more than 23,670 jobs and educate over 49,000 students of all ages due to the more than 650 projects that it has managed in 13 states between 2011 and 2015, according to the organization’s statistics.
From the site:
The last Republican president, George W. Bush, branded himself a compassionate conservative. In many ways Bush certainly did not live up to that principle, but he at least knew to pay lip service to the notion that conservatives should care for the needy while also tending to the free market and national defense.
Now, even that pretense of compassion has gone out the window. Based on his actions so far, and in particular his budget released this week, President Trump seems to be practicing a different ideology: unabashedly cruel conservatism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/a-bill-so-bad-its-awesome.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1
From the site:
Given the sick joke of a health plan, you might ask what happened to all those proclamations that Obamacare was a terrible, no good system that Republicans would immediately replace with something far better — not to mention Donald Trump’s promises of “insurance for everybody” and “great health care.”
But the answer, of course, is that they were all lying, all along — and they still are. On this, at least, Republican unity remains impressively intact.
From the site:
There is a good reason why Trump and his partisans are so apoplectic about the prospect of a special counsel, and it is precisely why it is imperative to appoint one: because otherwise we will never know the full story of the Kremlin’s tampering with our elections and of the Kremlin’s connections with the president of the United States. As evidenced by his desperate attempts to change the subject, Trump appears petrified of what such a probe would reveal. Wonder why?
Great article / explainer on the ACHA (ACA replacement) bill.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-republican-health-care-bill-is-the-worst-of-so-many-worlds/
From the site:
With the release of the American Health Care Act, House Republicans have pulled off an impressive feat: managing to alienate virtually everybody with a stake in health care. If you liked the Affordable Care Act, you will, unsurprisingly, hate this bill. We’ll get into the details later (the bill is in two parts; the Energy and Commerce Committee text is here, the Ways and Means Committee text here; summaries in plain English here and here), but in short, the subsidies for insurance coverage are stingier, the coverage itself is worse, and the penalty for non-coverage is actually higher.
The Repub's replacement is here and it reveals, as Krugman points out, that all these years they had no better ideas. Nothing to offer except to take away health care from those who desperately need it. Our clownish President has broken all his promises related to health care.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/a-plan-set-up-to-fail/
From the site:
Taken together, these moves would almost surely lead to a death spiral. Healthy individuals, especially low-income households no longer receiving adequate aid, would opt out, worsening the risk pool. Premiums would soar – without the cushion created by the current, price-linked subsidy formula — leading more healthy people to exit. In much of the country, the individual markets would probably collapse.
The House leadership seems to realize all of this; that’s why it reportedly plans to rush the bill through committee before CBO even gets a chance to score it.
It’s an amazing spectacle. Obviously, Republicans backed themselves into a corner: after all those years denouncing Obamacare, they felt they had to do something, but in fact had no good ideas about what to offer as a replacement. So they went with really bad ideas instead.
I am still amazed that even Morning Joe has turned against the clown we have installed in the White House.
From the site:
A tumultuous two months was all Mika Brzezinski needed to realize that hope in a Donald Trump presidency was futile. On Monday, the co-host of “Morning Joe” said that Trump’s tweeted accusation about an alleged wiretapping ordered by former President Barack Obama shows that the current president is unable to handle such a monumental job.
“I had hope and an opened mind. I have lost hope completely and my mind is closed,” she said to close the show. “This presidency is fake and failed.”
As if we needed any more proof that we have a clown in the White House....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/trump-twitter-talk-radio-conspiracy-theory.html?_r=0
From the site:
WASHINGTON — It began at 6 p.m. Thursday as a conspiratorial rant on conservative talk radio: President Barack Obama had used the “instrumentalities of the federal government” to wiretap the Republican seeking to succeed him. This “is the big scandal,” Mark Levin, the host, told his listeners.
By Friday morning, the unsubstantiated allegation had been picked up by Breitbart News, the site once headed by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Less than 24 hours later, the president embraced the conspiracy in a series of Twitter posts accusing his predecessor of spying on him, setting in motion the latest head-spinning, did-he-really-say-that furor of Mr. Trump’s six-week-old presidency.
This is the 'cause' of the bogus charges about Obama's wiretapping. Already a very predictable pattern: create a distraction from bad news by flinging ridiculous charges.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/04/politics/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-reince-priebus/index.html
From the site:
President Donald Trump is extremely frustrated with his senior staff and communications team for allowing the firestorm surrounding Attorney General Jeff Sessions to steal his thunder in the wake of his address to Congress, sources tell CNN.
"Nobody has seen him that upset," one source said, adding the feeling was the communications team allowed the Sessions news, which the administration deemed a nonstory, to overtake the narrative. On Thursday, Sessions recused himself from any current or future investigations into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign after it was reported he had met with the Russian ambassador to the US, something he had previously failed to disclose.
From the site:
Guest Moore was asked by host Chris Matthews, “What do you think about his counting the applause minutes that passed over a very poignant moment with the widow, who looked like a wonderful person, in love with her husband? Then he said ‘He’ll be happy up there in heaven with how many minutes of applause he got.’ Isn’t that strange?” “Ryan Owens, his death came as a result of a dinner Trump had with his son-in-law,” Moore replied. “The widow, that’s why she’s there as sort of an F-you to the people who are criticizing him for this. And this poor women, this widow who has lost her husband is in desperate grief right now.” “And to use that to put another notch on his belt and what is he thinking about?” Moore continued. “‘My ratings, my record applause. I’m going to get an Emmy for this, most applause for a dead soldier on my watch.’ That is the sickness of this man.”
From the site:
President Trump’s maiden address to Congress was notable because it was filled with numerous inaccuracies. In fact, many of the president’s false claims are old favorites that he trots out on a regular, almost daily basis. Here’s a roundup of 13 of the more notable claims, in the order in which the president made them.
From the site:
n Tuesday night, President Trump defied critics by proving he could read a teleprompter. In Trump’s hands, any evolution toward mastery of that skill could prove as dangerous as the improvisational oratorical bullying for which he is better known, for Trump’s reading style renders the articulation of evil into a banal-sounding sing-song celebration of resentment, greed, grief, and death.
The consensus forming among political observers on Donald J. Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress is that the president seemed “presidential.” Well, sure, if your idea of presidential is an authoritarian maniac who can read a teleprompter.
From the site:
Meet the Press host Chuck Todd blasted President Donald Trump on Sunday for resorting to attacking the press every time a new revelation about his administration’s involvement with Russia is revealed.
According to the NBC host, Trump’s tweeted attacks on the press –specifically aimed at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and his own network — always follow those outlets reporting on the murky relationship between Trump’s inner circle and Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
From the site:
Of the six swing states that were key to Trump’s unexpected win in November, his margin of victory was the highest in Iowa, where he beat Clinton by 9 percentage points. Yet at the dawn of his presidency, only 42 percent of Iowans approve of the job that he’s doing and 49 percent disapprove, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll this month.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/27/paul-ryan-donald-trump-enabler
From the site:
Nearly all the oxygen and outrage in DC is being sucked up by Donald Trump and his outrageous executive orders. But let’s not forget about the man without whom Trump could not accomplish his larger agenda: the spineless speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, Trump’s mainstream defender and apologist at every turn.
Ryan, who has cultivated a sham image as the “reasonable” Republican for years, has backed virtually all of Trump’s most controversial and cruel policies. Ryan manages to never buck Trump on anything of significance, while getting publicity for meaningless, quasi-critical statements. He is the biggest fraud in American politics.
I'm loving these town halls! The Repub lawmakers are really getting an earful! Most are avoiding their constituents by scheduling tele-town-halls, by scheduling in small venues, and with limited notice. What's up with that?
From the site:
The crowd at Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s town-hall meeting, held in a suburb of New Orleans on Wednesday, was is no mood for a lecture. Some people had waited in line for three hours to make sure they got one of the 200-some seats in the library auditorium. By the time Cassidy was due to arrive, the room was packed, with hundreds of others left outside. The mood was tense and angry; the senator was late, and when he finally entered it was to boos, hisses, and chants of “Shame!” He tried to begin with a slideshow laying out the Obamacare replacement legislation he introduced with Maine Senator Susan Collins in January, but he was shouted down. “We can go to your website and read this,” someone shouted. “You’re filibustering!” yelled another. For Cassidy, the meeting only got more difficult. Cassidy was one of several members of Congress to face furious constituents at town halls this week. Senator Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Senator Chuck Grassley in Iowa, and Representative Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee were among those who heard raw, emotional testimony from people worried about losing their health care, among other issues. While Cassidy’s meeting in Metairie on Wednesday was exceptionally raucous, he received tough questions at several other town halls throughout the week, even in more conservative areas. Obamacare, and the GOP’s efforts to repeal it, came up repeatedly—no surprise, as Louisiana is one of 10 states with the largest drops in the number of uninsured residents because of the law. The state only recently accepted federal dollars to expand its Medicaid program, after the election of a Democratic governor. More than 350,000 people signed up in the first six months. Cassidy’s plan for replacing Obamacare is incredibly complex, but in short it punts the decision of whether to keep the law to the states.
From the site:
In an interview with TODAY’s Matt Lauer on Monday, former President George W. Bush weighed in on Donald Trump’s first month in office, covering his immigration ban, Trump’s assault on the media, and Russian involvement in the election. Spoiler alert: It was not a glowing review, to say the least.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/27/predatory-presidency
From the site:
The season premiere of BBC America’s Planet Earth II includes remarkable footage from the desolate Galapagos Islands. In one striking scene, baby marine iguanas race across the sand, desperately trying to elude dozens of snakes eager for their next meal. Although such stark life-or-death struggles are difficult to watch, it helps to remember that they reflect nature’s dynamic balance.
Far more disturbing—and unnatural—are the Trump Administration’s similarly ruthless predator-like attacks on whatever groups it chooses as its prey. Adding to their repugnance, several of these assaults over the past month—through a series of executive orders—are inherently racist, seemingly propelled by the ugly 14-word credo of white nationalists everywhere: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Three White House orders stand out. First, there’s the determined pursuit of a Muslim travel ban, one that will prevent thousands of tempest-tossed and despairing refugees from entering the country. Second, there’s the heartless stalking of undocumented Hispanic immigrants, including the near indiscriminate roundup, detention, and deportation of law-abiding men, women, and children. And third, there’s the early blueprint for a “tough on crime” law enforcement crackdown, an onslaught that will inevitably and predominantly disrupt and besiege Black communities and activists.
Great column from Paul Krugman. Read and heed!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/opinion/the-uses-of-outrage.html?_r=0
From the site:
Are you angry about the white nationalist takeover of the U.S. government? If so, you are definitely not alone. The first few weeks of the Trump administration have been marked by huge protests, furious crowds at congressional town halls, customer boycotts of businesses seen as Trump allies. And Democrats, responding to their base, have taken a hard line against cooperation with the new regime.
So details of the Repub health plan are beginning to emerge. As expected, sick people will get screwed!
From the site:
Hey, no one said Speaker Ryan wasn't a smart guy. (Actually, many people have, but whatever.) Anyhow the Republicans have published an outline of their proposal for an Obamacare replacement. It seems designed to ensure that tens of millions of people lose their health insurance coverage.
The basic story is that the plan is designed to fragment the market by both allowing a wider range of insurance policies and also by promoting health savings accounts in which people can place money tax free. (Oh yes, and the financial industry can make lots of money on fees.) This will mean that almost anyone in good health will get catastrophic policies that cover large expenses, but leave most normal expenses to the patient. Since most people are relatively healthy, this would be a good deal for most of the population.
The numbers on this are striking. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that health care costs in 2017 will average $10,800 this year. The average for cost for the ten percent of most expensive patients is $54,000. The average cost for the least expensive 50 percent is just $700. (These figures include seniors who are covered by Medicare. The skewing would be a bit less if the over 65 age group were pulled out of the calculation.)
Since most people have very little by way of health care spending, it would make sense for them to use the tax credit proposed in the Republican plan to buy a catastrophic plan, that may have a deductible of $10,000 or $12,000 or more. This plan would cost little and allow them to put most of the credit in a health savings account.
This means that the only people who would be interested in buying conventional insurance policies would be people with high medical expenses. Insurers will price these policies to reflect the anticipated costs. This means that they would have to cost tens of thousands of dollars per person. Most of these people will not be able to afford these plans. The credit proposed by the Republicans (which is likely to be around $2,500 from the description in the plan), will not go far towards meeting the cost of policies for these people.
So, the Republican deserve credit for devising a plan to reduce the cost of insurance for healthy people. It just means that tens of millions of people who actually need insurance won't be able to get it.
Even Morning Joe has had enough of Trump's hateful rhetoric that promotes violence! Who would have thought it possible?!
From the site:
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough worries that President Donald Trump’s attack on the media as “an enemy of the American people” could incite violence against individual journalists.
The “Morning Joe” host agreed with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that Trump’s tweet Friday blasting the media sounded like something a dictator would say, and he said the president had crossed the line with his attack.
“It’s one thing to say the press is liberal, it’s one thing to say the 9th Circuit (Court) is liberal, but when you start saying that somebody is an enemy of the people, then that does incite people to violence — especially if it’s coming from the president of the United States,” Scarborough said.
He said many journalists retweet the death threats they received daily for perceived negative reporting on the Trump administration, so he believes Trump’s words could inspire an unbalanced supporter to take action.
“When you receive tweets every day, and somebody’s threatening your life and they talk about lynching you and your family after President Trump has his way with the media, this happens over and over again, and I don’t think there’s anybody who’s in the media that doesn’t hear that every day,” Scarborough said. “So yeah, this is very, very dangerous.”
Scary stuff -- excerpts from this week's press conference.
http://www.mikemalloy.com/shows/the-lunatic-is-in-my-head-2/
From the site:
Talk about Meet the Press! Did you see that train wreck of a “press conference” performance from Trump today? Is there any doubt about his sanity and his fitness for office? His wild manic ravings made Jack Nicholson’s “you can’t handle the truth” rant look like Mr. Rogers.
It was like watching a twitching paranoid schizophrenic on a couch talking to his shrink – just an endless whine-fest about all the things he hates and are wrong and how upset he is about the “fake news” that caused his national security adviser to resign (then why did he if it was all fake?). Russia was a ruse and Hillary got the debate questions and gave away uranium and Obama left the economy in ruin and he won the popular vote by a larger margin than anybody in history and the false horrible negative reporting by the media has ruined his chance to “make a deal” with Putin and the media hates him and they lie and why can’t anybody ask him a nice question anyway?
Where do you begin? It’s not been a month and he’s coming apart at the seams. All he knows how to do is campaign. He’s going to Florida to campaign this weekend. He hasn’t the faintest idea how to be a President. He needs a campaign opponent….so he invented one – the press. He can’t operate without an enemy, so like any good psycho, he invents one. Some have imaginary friends or see imaginary rabbits, Trump has imaginary enemies.
Can't you just smell the corruption? Let's see what the emails say when they are released next week.
From the site:
If Scott Pruitt is hiding something—and it sure looks like he is—Senate Republicans refused to wait around to find out what it is. Our Republican friends will rue the day they rammed this nomination through the Senate just as the emails were being litigated.
The Oklahoma attorney general and the president’s nominee to run the EPA has dodged open information requests from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) for over two years. Yesterday, the Oklahoma County Court found Pruitt’s office in violation of the state’s Open Records Act, and ordered the attorney general to release thousands of emails by next Tuesday, February 21.
Rather than wait to see what Pruitt’s office has been trying to conceal in those emails, Senate Republicans rushed a vote—and early Friday afternoon confirmed Pruitt to serve as EPA administrator by a 52-46 vote. Susan Collins of Maine was the lone Republican to vote against Pruitt.
Great piece by Matt Taibbi. This gets to the essence of how potentially effective legislation gets watered down (or lawyered down). As Taibbi says, "the public perception that nothing ever gets done in Washington is driven by this very dynamic."
From the site:
This is why laws like Dodd-Frank end up being unwieldy monstrosities of thousands and thousands of pages: On the road to trying to kill a law outright, lobbyists usually try to weigh it down first by adding exceptions and verbiage. Ironically, this ends up driving the industry's own compliance costs higher in the meantime, but it's worth it, as it stalls the process.
Another irony here is that the public perception that nothing ever gets done in Washington is driven by this very dynamic. The public becomes impatient for action when every tiny provision of every bill gets bogged down as fat-cat lawyers fight for years on end over the definition of words like "compilation" and "project."
This is the ultimate in overpaid busywork for the overeducated. The ongoing bureaucratization of the legislative process is really just a high-priced welfare program for corporate lawyers.
And while lawyers make fortunes pushing commas around and adding mountains of words to already overwritten laws, ex-middle-class workers in places outside of the Beltway keep findin
From the site (Truthout link above quotes the Huffington Post story below):
As the Huffington Post reports:
In late December, President Barack Obama announced the sanctions, which included the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence operatives, in response to Russian interference in the November election designed to help Trump win.
Flynn at first denied that he had discussed the sanctions when he spoke with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He said the conversations concerned setting up a phone call between Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin and offering condolences after the murder of a Russian diplomat in Turkey.
But following a Washington Post report -- based partially on transcripts of the conversations -- Flynn's office revised his earlier statements, and said that he couldn't recall whether the topic of sanctions had come up. On Monday night, the plot thickened, with The Washington Post reporting that top officials at the Department of Justice warned the Trump administration weeks ago that Flynn might have been compromised by Russian influences and The New York Times reporting that the Army had investigated whether Flynn received payments from the Russian government in 2015.
From the site:
SNBC’s Joe Scarborough harshly criticized the White House for sending senior advisor Stephen Miller to question the bedrock constitutional principle of judicial independence.
The “Morning Joe” host has been an outspoken critic of Miller, whom he has described as too inexperienced and immature for his position, and Scarborough and his fellow panelists were left speechless by the official’s shouted claim that the president was “correct 100 percent of the time.”
“Oh my God,” said co-host Mika Brzezinski, who later suggested Miller should be fired in a tweet posted during the broadcast.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/donald-the-weak-214771
From the site:
Donald Trump ran for president boasting of his supposedly legendary negotiating and management skills while promising that he alone could fix the problems ailing the country. But three weeks into his presidency, a combination of inexperience, lack of attention to detail and an engaged opposition inside and outside the government have left him as the weakest new president in modern American history.
Paul Krugman of the NYT rightly warns us about the dangers of not standing up to this administration. In the end, it's the people who will save us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/when-the-fire-comes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1
From the site:
What we see here is the most powerful man in the world blatantly telegraphing his intention to use national misfortune to grab even more power. And the question becomes, who will stop him?
Don’t talk about institutions, and the checks and balances they create. Institutions are only as good as the people who serve them. Authoritarianism, American-style, can be averted only if people have the courage to stand against it. So who are these people?
It certainly won’t be Mr. Trump’s inner circle. It won’t be Jeff Sessions, his new attorney general, with his long history of contempt for voting rights. It might be the courts — but Mr. Trump is doing all he can to delegitimize judicial oversight in advance.
What about Congress? Well, its members like to give patriotic speeches. And maybe, just maybe, there are enough Republican senators who really do care about America’s fundamental values to cross party lines in their defense. But given what we’ve seen so far, that’s just hopeful speculation.
In the end, I fear, it’s going to rest on the people — on whether enough Americans are willing to take a public stand. We can’t handle another post-9/11-style suspension of doubt about the man in charge; if that happens, America as we know it will soon be gone.
This administration is headed to a very bad place -- in so many ways.
From the site:
The ideological leader of the Trump movement is Sessions, hailed by Bannon for “developing populist nation-state policies” from his somewhat isolated perch in the Senate. Bannon, who avoids the spotlight, gives away the game in his praise of Sessions. “In America and Europe, working people are reasserting their right to control their own destinies,” he wrote in a recent statement to the Washington Post, blasting the “cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities.” Given the demographics of Trump’s support—given the demographics of Europe—this definition of “working people” can mean only one thing: white people. And “cosmopolitan elites” has a long history as a euphemism for Jews and other minorities.
The passage below was written in 1998 by Richard Rorty. Good article by Sean Illing at Vox.com.
From the site:
A prescient passage from a forgotten book has been making the rounds since Donald Trump’s election. It’s plucked from a 1998 book titled Achieving our Country. The author is Richard Rorty, a liberal philosopher who died in 2007. The book consists of a series of lectures Rorty gave in 1997 about the history of leftist thought in 20th-century America.
To read the viral passage is to recognize immediately why it has caught fire:
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
This from the Huffington Post. Bannon subscribes to the theory of historical cycles discussed in the article. This guy is very dangerous. As noted, political scientists consider these theories quackery.
From the site:
“This is the fourth great crisis in American history,” Bannon told an audience at the Liberty Restoration Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, in 2011. “We had the Revolution. We had the Civil War. We had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the great Fourth Turning in American history, and we’re going to be one thing on the other side.”
Major crises “happen in about 80- or 100-year cycles,” Bannon told a conference put on by the Republican women’s group Project GoPink that same year. “And somewhere over the next 10 or 20 years, we’re going to come through this crisis, and we’re either going to be the country that was bequeathed to us or it’s going to be something that’s completely or totally different.”
The “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing,” he went on. “It’s imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous.”
War is coming, Bannon has warned. In fact, it’s already here.
“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China,” he said during a 2016 radio appearance. “They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”
“Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war,” he told Political Vindication Radio in 2011.
“We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to 10 years, aren’t we?” Bannon asked during a 2016 interview with Reagan biographer Lee Edwards.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a speech to a Vatican conference in 2014. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon described how he ran Breitbart, the far-right news site he chaired at the time. “It’s war,” he said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”
To confront this threat, Bannon argued, the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. He called Islam a “religion of submission” in 2016 — a refutation of President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 description of Islam as a religion of peace. In 2007, Bannon wrote a draft movie treatment for a documentary depicting a “fifth column” of Muslim community groups, the media, Jewish organizations and government agencies working to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law.
Now Donald's true colors emerge. Working folks, this is what you voted for? This was a bad choice on your part!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/opinion/springtime-for-scammers.html
From the site:
Last week Mr. Trump released a memorandum calling on the Department of Labor to reconsider its new “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to act in their clients’ best interests — as opposed to, say, steering them into investments on which the advisers get big commissions. He also issued an executive order designed to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform, enacted in 2010 in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Both moves are very much in line with the priorities of congressional Republicans and, of course, the financial industry. For both groups really, really hate financial regulation, especially when it helps protect families against sharp practice.
Why, after all, was the fiduciary rule created? The main issue here is retirement savings — the 401(k)’s and other plans that are Americans’ main source of retirement income over and above Social Security. To invest these funds, people have turned to financial professionals — but most probably weren’t aware that these professionals were under no legal obligation to give advice that maximized clients’ returns rather than their own incomes.
