Yes, Of Course

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. Did anyone think anything else was going to happen?

That, and the rest of the news is too depressing to comment on. If you really want a good take on how we're shuffling down the road to fascism -- and I mean that literally -- take a look at the posts at Hullabaloo over the past day or three. This one is key. It's really too intricate for a short quote, but here's the lead-in:

Please read this sobering assessment of our current moment by Christopher R. Browning,  historian of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Europe between the two world wars. It's important. He draws some very uncomfortable parallels and also explains some important differences which are unfortunately not at all comforting.

Particularly noteworthy is the role filled by Mitch McConnell:

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

Even more than Trump, McConnell is the embodiment of what the Republican party has become.

Tristero has an interesting post on Facebook's role in the debacle of November, 2016:

The Autocracy App, a devastating indictment of Facebook and other predatory social media by Jacob Weisberg, also should not be missed (it's behind a paywall, so buy a copy of the print edition, or subscribe). Once again, I'm struck by how incredibly stupid the digital engineers designing the 21st Century are.

Stupid? Yes, about everything that truly matters.

Mastering C++ and other computer "languages" in order to create a social network platform requires merely the ability to master rigid and fairly straightforward logical and mathematical procedures. On the other hand, creating a social network that doesn't directly lead to genocidal horrors — as Facebook's platforms did in Myanmar — now, that's really fucking hard. That takes more than programming ability. That takes a deep understanding of ethics, compassion, empathy, and a willingness to tolerate limits on one's own will to power. That takes genius.

My favorite quote:

Look, I've got nothing against STEM. Like any non-Republican, I admire and respect scientific information and reason. But a culture that worships STEM like ours? A culture where the most highly educated and financially rewarded citizens are so morally stunted they actually mistake libertarianism — a crude rationalization of narcissistic indulgence — for a philosophy?

Best put-down of libertarianism I've seen in a long time. I usually just content myself with noting that it's an ideology that appeals to the morally bankrupt.

Tom Sullivan has this commentary:

"This is exactly what the Kavanaugh nomination has come to represent," writes Gail Collins in the New York Times. "A vote for the nomination became a symbolic vote for a political ethos that thinks grabbing private parts is fun and complaining about sexual assault is a threat to young manhood."

And of course, there's Fox. From Digby, quoting an article at The Daily Beast:

Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative radio host, noted that the scandals and boycotts haven’t hurt Fox because the network understands it will stay in business by “tending to and feeding the tribe.”

“Fox followed their audience into full-on Trumpism, making themselves into a safe space for the right,” Sykes said. “The scandals don't hurt Fox for the same reasons that Trump's scandals and lies don't seem to hurt him. Fox is a reflection of this new political culture as much as they are its creator.”

“The audience/base doesn't care as long as they own the libs.”

That's all they care about -- consciously, at least: they need an enemy to validate themselves, and at this stage of our history, that enemy is you and me.

That's it. There are a couple of other posts worthy looking at, but those above are the ones I think are key to getting a clear picture of how far down the toilet this country is.

If I can manage to get past the Chicago Marathon, I'm going to go down and look at real dinosaurs.

Today's Must-Read: The G7 Debacle

There's a lot of commentary on how Trump's behavior at the G7 summit shows his ignorance of the mechanisms of international trade. Take this, via Digby:

From the Economist:

On trade, at one point it seemed as though Mr Trump was in search of some sort of grand bargain, as he called for the end of all subsidies, tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade. But this was more an indication of how poorly Mr Trump understands the global trading system than a serious summons to the negotiating table. Even so, combing through the joint communiqué, signs of genuine co-operation were to be found, including a commitment to agree on new rules regarding “market-distorting subsidies” and state-owned enterprises.

Of course, Trump repudiated the communiqué, but then, he'd never intended to support it anyway -- it smacks too much of cooperation with other countries. o (I'm not the only one who thinks so -- Rachel Maddow has the same take.) He's not stupid. He's not as smart as he claims, by any stretch. I wouldn't call him intelligent -- that implies the ability to learn from new evidence, and in that regard he displays the same characteristics as his more ardent worshippers: he, and they, reject anything that doesn't support what they "know" to be true. (It's no coincidence that he has such strong support among evangelicals.)

It is perhaps more surprising that Mr Trump still faces people who think he can be persuaded by facts. The Cirque du Soleil performers who entertained the G7 leaders on Friday evening were not the only ones tying themselves in knots. At the meeting, Mr Trump’s counterparts brought binders of figures to the session devoted to trade in an attempt to persuade him that his belief that the rest of the world was unfair to America was mistaken. Tellingly, the desk in front of Mr Trump was bare. He later told reporters the others had been smiling at him as if they could not believe they had got away with using America as a “piggy bank” for so long. “The gig is up,” he said.

Read the whole thing -- it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what was going on.

Digby has another piece that ties into this directly, in which she underscores what I just said about Trump's lack of good faith going in:

If you wanted a president who would tell his friends to go pound sand, then Donald Trump fulfilled your every wish. He went to Quebec for the G7 summit meeting with the intention of putting American allies in their place. They were to understand who was in charge and who makes the rules: The Trump States of America. On the White House lawn prior to taking off in Marine One for the Canadian summit he made it clear:

We’re going to deal with the unfair trade practices. If you look at what Canada, Mexico, the European Union, all of them have been doing to us for many, many decades, we have to change it. And they understand it’s going to happen . . . European Union treats us very unfairly. Canada, very unfairly. Mexico, very unfairly.

(If you don't understand why this is nonsense, read this from Paul Krugman, who won his Nobel Prize for his work on international trade.)

Then this got published, and Trump lost it:

I've already mentioned the attacks on Trudeau by Kudlow and Navarro. Digby offers more on Kudlow's performance:

Kudlow, who should know better but seemed somewhat "under the weather," didn't recognize the total absurdity of such pearl-clutching in light of the thuggish threats his boss has been issuing for months. But somewhere in the middle of his bleary tantrum he opened a new front, indicating to Jake Tapper that the G7 countries had been expected to kowtow to Trump and allow him to dominate their industry and trade, as a way to impress North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with Trump's manly superiority. He portrayed their unwillingness to sacrifice their own voters to make Trump look like a Real Man as a betrayal of world peace.

Kim may have led a cloistered life, but he's not that dumb. He has already shown that he largely has Trump's number, and what he didn't know before, Chinese President Xi Jinping has surely shared with him in their meetings leading up to this summit. All Trump has done is degrade the alliances between the U.S. and its closest allies for reasons that only he knows.

The reason is that the whole G7 performance was meant to show Kim Jong-Un that Trump is the alpha male, so he'd better watch his step and give Trump what he wants.

We've already seen that Kim can play Trump like a fiddle. I'm half expecting the Singapore summit to end up with a declaration of war.

Read both pieces -- the details are fascinating.

Today in Stalin's Krem- . . . Uh, Trump's White House

The firings haven't been as random as we thought -- although if we'd thought a bit more closely, this would come as no surprise:

A trove of e-mails obtained by House Democrats reveal efforts by top State Department officials — working hand in hand with the White House, outside conservatives and right-wing media — to sideline and demote career civil servants who are seen as disloyal to President Trump.

The report on the emails set off alarm bells across Washington, D.C. and prompted Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to demand that the State Department hand over records of internal communications on the issue. Department officials have reportedly labeled certain career staffers “troublemaker,” “turncoat” and “Obama/Clinton loyalist” because of their work for past administrations.

But independent watchdog groups tracking the issue tell TPM the problem is not confined to the State Department, citing similar acts of retaliation against career staffers throughout the government.

The first thing this calls to mind, of course, is Stalin's purges of the 1930s. (And do remember that we still have Guantanamo, just in case. Our very own gulag.)

And lest you think this is just Trump being Trump:

A slew of bills recently introduced by House Republicans would implement the weakened employee protections now in place at the VA and other government agencies.

The Labor Department Accountability Act and Education Department Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act replicate the VA’s legislative language almost exactly, giving the secretaries at those agencies more authority to swiftly  suspend, involuntarily reassign, demote or remove employees.

The Promote Accountability and Government Efficiency (PAGE) Act would classify all new federal hires as “at-will” employees, meaning they could be “removed or suspended, without notice or right to appeal, from service by the head of the agency at which such employee is employed for good cause, bad cause or no cause at all.”

And the Modern Employment Reform, Improvement, and Transformation (MERIT) would allow Cabinet secretaries to fire any employee, provided they give a notice in writing, and would limit the employee’s ability to appeal the case to the MSPB.

I love the names they give these bills -- just they opposite of what they're really about.

Trump's doing what the Republicans want -- have wanted, for years: a) they don't like laws that protect workers, of any kind, at any time; b) they're authoritarians at heart, or at best, oligarchs -- conservatives have never gotten over expanding voting rights to non-landowners, former slaves, and women (their response, of course, is to try to make it impossible for undesirables to vote); and c) they don't want to govern, they want to rule.

The other thing that popped into my head as I was reading this was that piece from The Mikado: "I have a little list./They never will be missed --/No, they never will be missed. . . ."

There had damned well better be a Blue Tsunami this November, or we are royally screwed. Although at the rate things are going, November may be too late.

Today's Must-Read: Trump's War on Democracy, Free Press Edition

This post from Digby is really pretty scary:

I'm glad to see someone of Tom Edsell's stature say this in such stark terms:

More than any president in living memory, Donald Trump has conducted a dogged, remorseless assault on the press. He portrays the news media not only as a dedicated adversary of his administration but of the entire body politic. These attacks have forced the media where it does not want to be, at the center of the political debate.

Trump’s purpose is clear. He seeks to weaken an institution that serves to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority. He has initiated a gladiatorial contest pitting the principle of freedom of the press against a principle of his own invention: freedom from the press.

This is not something Trump invented:

[Jay] Rosen observed that the history of right-wing attacks on the media extends back through Agnew’s speeches for Nixon to Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 and winds forward through William Rusher, talk radio, and of course Fox News, which founded a business model on liberal bias.

I don't find it surprising in the least that this is coming from the Republican side of the aisle. The GOP has become the resting place of the most retrograde elements in our society, the 27 or 28 percent who, in William F. Buckley's description, have always stood athwart the flow of history yelling "Stop!" -- except that they're yelling "Go back!"

And make no mistake -- the right has never been all that fond of democracy. All the progress made toward extending the right to vote, for example, has been made in spite of conservatives. (Remember that the likes of Tony Perkins consider working to preserve civil rights for all Americans a "radical agenda.")

At any rate, read Digby's whole post.

Footnote: And it's not just the press that's under attack -- it's anyone not considered a Trump loyalist. Which unfortunately includes most of the people in the executive branch who know what they're doing.

Today's Must-Read: We're Screwed

The Supreme Court seems to feel that police need to be protected from accountability when they shoot someone on a whim:

In recent years, the justices have regularly shielded police from being sued, even when officers wrongly shoot innocent people in their own homes.

They have done so by extending a rule adopted in the 1980s that gave government officials "qualified immunity" from being sued over constitutional violations unless they did something that the court already had clearly defined as illegal and unconstitutional. It is not enough to cite the words of the Constitution, such as its ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures." To bring a claim before a jury, the injured plaintiff must show the officer had obviously and unquestionably violated a recognized and specific right. In practice, this rule has served as a broad shield to prevent cases from proceeding.

There's a pending case described in the opening paragraphs of this article that may change this course, but I have no confidence that this Court will see fit to protect civilians from police misconduct: they're real big on authority. There is one small ray of hope, however:

Last year, Justice Clarence Thomas cited law professor Baude's criticism of the court's approach to these cases. "In the appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence," he wrote.

Yes, you read that right: Clarence Thomas wrote that.

However, given the Court's tortured reasoning in cases such as Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, I can hardly wait to see what rationale they'll come up with should they decide in favor of the police.

Yes, read the whole thing -- some of the incidents described are appalling.

More Pushback, Different Subject

I think we're all ready to admit that Trump can't do anything right. (Except con the gullible, but anyone can do that.) I'm sure you've read or heard about his speech to a group of police officers the other day:

“When you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice,” Trump remarked at Suffolk County Community College.

“Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody — don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”

At a time when police-community relations are arguably worse than ever before, when there is widespread criticism of racial bias in enforcement and prosecution, when almost everyone (except Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III) is aware that the "War on Drugs" is dismal failure, and almost everyday sees another story about police brutalizing random suspects, Trump comes up with something like this -- if he had set out deliberately to make the situation worse, he couldn't have done a better job.

Of course, Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he has no understanding of basic American principles such as the rule of law and the presumption of innocence.

By all reports, those cops in attendance loved it.

Not so much the heads of police departments around the country:

The Suffolk County Police Department was one of the first to criticize.

“The SCPD has strict rules & procedures relating to the handling of prisoners,” the department wrote. “Violations of those rules are treated extremely seriously. As a department, we do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners.”

New York, Los Angeles, and Boston have also weighed in.

The heads of police unions, on the other hand, were in support of Trump's remarks -- but then, they're the union equivalent of the NRA.

Of note: I haven't been able to find a reaction from the Chicago PD or the mayor to that speech. Of course, we do our best to ignore The Hairpiece here.

Today in Disgusting People

Pastor-Governor Mike Huckabee (who doesn't know the difference between the two) is not happy about the Senate doing its duty -- in this case, killing the latest incarnation of Trumpcare:

Time to repeal 17th Amendment. Founders had it right-Senators chosen by state legislatures. Will work for their states and respect 10th amid

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) July 28, 2017

The article goes on to theorize about the genesis of this idea:

Obviously he’s frustrated with last night’s failure of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare. But the reason that repeal of the 17th Amendment would favor his party is because the majority of state legislatures are Republican. The Republicans control both chambers in 33 states. Not because the majority of Americans are Republican, mind you. But because Republicans have gerrymandered their way into power.

I have another answer: He's a Republican, and Republicans, as has become more and more obvious, don't like democracy. Look what they put in the White House.

Via Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: The Right's Moral Vacuum

Tom Sullivan has a good piece at Hullabaloo on the Republican's complete lack of moral foundation:

After decades of accusations from conservatives that the American left advances reprehensible moral relativism, this week we saw that the real sin was having morals of any kind. What the Trump family modeled for the world this week is what it looks like to have none. Watergate veteran John Dean warned during the Bush II administration of the rise of "Conservatives Without Conscience." The Trumps consider that lack a plus.

"What stood out most in the interview was the moral emptiness of the president’s son," Slate's William Saletan wrote after Donald Trump Jr. appeared with Sean Hannity to explain away his meeting last June with a Russian emissary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. What looks to be a willingness to conspire with a hostile foreign power to undermine an American election, Trump Jr. dismissed as no big deal. “That’s what we do in business. If there’s information out there, you want it." He might have done things differently, but he'd done nothing wrong.

It's not just the Trumps, although more and more I think that they're an accurate reflection of their class -- the movers and shakers, the "job creators," the plutocrats who trade in congressmen and senators -- it's the right as a whole: they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no idea of what morality is about. (This is only one example.)

Sullivan digs deeper, noting this by WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin:

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trump’s racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trump’s “Russia first” policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOP’s disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what “conservatives” must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”

I'd take Rubin's final comment one step further: the Republican party and its adherents are completely lacking in any moral truth or ethical code whatsoever.

Read it and weep.

Today's Must-Read: Yes, I Said "Dictator": A Twofer

First up, this commentary by Digby on Trump's attitude toward the press:

You will notice that Trump’s main nemesis is still the press, which he has villainized since he began his campaign. One suspects that this started out as shtick, building on the thousands of hours of talk-radio research that his lieutenant at the time, Sam Nunberg, provided to him. Beating up on the press is a staple of right-wing media and it gets a huge response from conservative crowds. But up until he started the campaign Trump had always reveled in media attention and went to great lengths to draw it. In fact, he considered himself a member of the club. But over the course of time the hatred has obviously become very real and very personal. He loathes the press and considers it the source of all of his problems.

Obviously, he isn’t the first president to feel this way. Richard Nixon famously kept an enemies list which included a large number of journalists. But Trump is taking this in a dangerous direction. The New York Times story about James Comey’s memo rightly focused on the fact that the president may have tried to obstruct justice by taking the FBI director aside privately to ask him to let Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, off the hook. But Trump said something else in that meeting which has received less attention:

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

I find that quote from the Times story very revealing on a couple of counts. First, we all know the FBI doesn't put people in jail -- but Trump doesn't. It's emblematic, however, of his whole attitude that he seems to think all he has to do is make the suggestion and it's a done deal. Second, and much more worrying, is the fact that he made the suggestion at all. Perhaps it's not so surprising, given that he's already branded the press as an "enemy of the people" -- which his followers ate up. (It's worth noting here something that I've not seen in any analysis of the "Trump voter": They are the natural fodder for the authoritarian: they want to be told what to think and what to believe, and they have no understanding or particular reverence for our foundational principles -- such as an independent press.)

This attitude is filtering down to law enforcement and the security details of government officials.

There's an element of lawlessness in all of this that is really dangerous, especially since, as we might well suppose, the Department of Justice under the present attorney general is not going to be bothered with reining in rogue law enforcement -- after all, there's police morale to worry about.

Second is this piece by Benjamin Wittes specifically about Trump and James Comey. The key paragraph, at least for purposes of this post:

Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had “asked for loyalty” and that Comey had promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly uncomfortable with this answer. And he said that ever since, the President had been trying to be chummy in a fashion that Comey felt was designed to absorb him into Trump’s world—to make him part of the team. Comey was deeply uncomfortable with these episodes. He told me that Trump sometimes talked to him a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. While I was not sure quite what this meant, it clearly disquieted Comey. He felt that these conversations were efforts to probe how resistant he would be to becoming a loyalist. In light of the dramatic dinner meeting and the Flynn request, it’s easy to see why they would be upsetting and feel like attempts at pressure.

The whole idea of personal loyalty to the president as a requirement for a government official is, in what's left of this republic, at least, anathema. It's the sort of thing you expect from the likes of Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-Un. In America, we want government officials who are competent and loyal to the country.

Granted, personal relationships matter a great deal, in government as well as in daily life -- we are what we are, after all, which is essentially social animals -- but most of us recognize by the age of two or three that we're not the center of the universe. Trump has not, apparently, made it that far in his emotional development.

What I'm seeing here is an incipient cult of personality, one of the hallmarks of dictators throughout history. That, coupled with Trump's disdain for the basics of the American system of government -- which has become a signature characteristic of the right in general -- is much more than cause for concern.

Footnote: It's not just Trump himself that hates America.

Footnote 2: About the Republican attitude, read this from Paul Krugman:

They may make a few gestures toward accountability in the face of bad poll numbers, but there is not a hint that any important figures in the party care enough about the Constitution or the national interest to take a stand.

Krugman holds up one really scary possibility, but doesn't seem to make the connection:

The point is that given the character of the Republican Party, we’d be well on the way to autocracy if the man in the White House had even slightly more self-control. Trump may have done himself in; but it can still happen here.

If Trump is somehow removed from office -- and like Krugman, I'm not counting on the Republican majority to move on that, unless they start losing elections -- we're left with Mike Pense, who in real terms, given the realities of the situation, is a much scarier prospect, at least for the long-term health of the country.

OK, yeah, another must-read. Deal with it.

Another Must-Read: Trumponomics

Via Digby, this article from PRI on an interview by reporters from the The Economist with our "president." The telling point:

The Economist’s own analysis was even more scalding than the snarky tweets. The magazine declared: "The impulsiveness and shallowness of America's president threaten the economy as well as the rule of law." The article goes on to compare Trump to a modern-day Henry VIII, which is never a good thing: "Donald Trump rules over Washington as if he were a king and the White House his court. His displays of dominance, his need to be the centre of attention and his impetuousness have a whiff of Henry VIII about them. Fortified by his belief that his extraordinary route to power is proof of the collective mediocrity of Congress, the bureaucracy and the media, he attacks any person and any idea standing in his way."

As PRI comments, "Ouch."

What struck me is the complete lack of any integrity -- let's not even bring up principles -- displayed by Trump's advisors and cabinet. I had thought that the primary qualification for being appointed to high-level positions in the Trump regime was opposition to the purpose of the department one was chosen to head. Apparently, abject servility is really the primary consideration.

TW: So this interview was in the Oval Office. What did the atmosphere there feel like?

DR: It's kind of like being in a royal palace several hundred years ago, with people coming in and out, trying to catch the ear of the king. That's the feel at the Trump Oval Office. He likes to be surrounded by his courtiers.
TW: Your magazine described it as being a little bit like Henry VIII.

DR: There is a "Tudor court" side to it. And the role of some pretty senior figures, including cabinet secretaries, was to chime in and agree with whatever the president had just said, rather than offering candid advice.

There was a moment with Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary.

We were talking [to Trump] about China and currency manipulation. On the campaign trail, Trump was very ferocious about [calling China a currency manipulator.] [In our interview], he said, “As soon as I started talking about China being a currency manipulator, they cut it out.” Actually that’s not true. China [stopped manipulating the currency] two or three years ago.

What was striking was, when he made that point, Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, chimed in and said, “Oh yeah. The day he became president, they changed their behavior!” And factually, that’s just not right. It's quite striking to see a cabinet secretary making that point in that way.

Can you say "Yes-man"? I wonder if Mnuchin took a loyalty oath.

Of course, given what Trump is, why am I surprised?

Art? Culture? History? Who Needs 'Em?

Interesting article from TPM on the threat to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's another budget cut that will impact smaller towns and rural communities the most, of course -- another kick in the teeth to The Hairpiece's base.

I found this telling:

Advocates feel they have a good chance of lobbying Congress to save funding for the endowments, which they say fund programs that offer crucial support to the public education system, help veterans readjust to civilian life and bring arts and culture to small communities.

“What we have here is an attack upon global citizenship and national civic culture," Jim Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, told TPM of the potential elimination of the NEH.

(Emphasis added.)

That's the point. Digby pointed out that Trump's proposed budget is authoritarian. I'll go a step further: it's a dictator's budget. The devil's in the details, as they say, and that comment about global citizenship and civic culture underscores it: that's the point.

Dictators start off by controlling the media, or trying to, and Trump's got the media chasing its tail 24/7.

And next they rewrite history. And the best way to accomplish that is to be sure that there are no other sources available, no other viewpoints to be had.

I wonder how successful he's going to be. He makes a big deal about how social media enables him to go directly to his supporters, but, as we've seen, that cuts both ways. And the cuts can be really sharp.

Today's Must-Read: First Amendment? What First Amendment?

You may have gotten the idea, from way too many reports, that the right believes the only freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment is religious freedom -- their religious freedom, because any other belief is a political philosophy, not a real religion. They tend to ignore things like freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly.

And now a number of states are starting to put that idea into practice:

Thom Hartmann reminds readers that the war on drugs arose as a Nixonian tactic for suppressing the antiwar left and black people. Half a century later, Nixon's heirs are using Arizona's RICO statutes to suppress dissent in Donald Trump's America. Arizona's version of North Carolina's "economic terrorism" bill, Hartmann writes, "would hyper-criminalize any sort of organized political dissent if any person involved with that dissent (including, presumably, agent provocateurs) were to engage in even minor 'violence,' so long as that violence harms the 'property,' regardless of value, of any person (including a corporation)." Attend a street protest and you might go to jail and lose everything. Riot is helpfully redefined under the proposed Arizona law to include, "A person commits riot if, with two or more other persons acting together, such person recklessly uses force or violence or threatens to use force or violence, if such threat is accompanied by immediate power of execution, which EITHER disturbs the public peace OR RESULTS IN DAMAGE TO THE PROPERTY OF ANOTHER PERSON." (Caps in the original.)

Stifle dissent and protect money. These guys never do anything that's not at least a twofer.

Read the whole thing, but I'm warning you -- it's pretty sickening.

Here It Comes (Updated)

If you had any doubts as to the authoritarianism in the Trump administration, watch this video of Stephen Miller's statements on presidential authority. (Can't embed; follow the link.)

From Face the Nation, here's a sample of what I'm talking about:

WH Sr. Policy Adviser Stephen Miller: "The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned" pic.twitter.com/sn3GyFATPD

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) February 12, 2017

It's not just the words; look at his face. Yipes.

From Think Progress, via Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, the meat:

“I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government,” Miller told John Dickerson of CBS News, as first noted by Will Saletan of Slate. “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

(Emphasis added.)

Update: For more on Miller, here's a profile at Mother Jones.

What McConnell Didn't Want the Senate to Hear

You may have read or heard (depending on how you get your news) about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulling the plug on Elizabeth Warren during the Democrats' filibuster of debate on the nomination of Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as attorney general. She was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions' nomination to the federal bench in 1986. McConnell, for whom Senate rules apply when he wants them to, ruled her out of order for saying bad things about another senator.

Well, here's the letter:



Via RawStory.

Today's Must-Read: The Slide Toward Autocracy: A Checklist

Via Digby, this list from Amy Siskind of "Trump atrocities" of the week.

Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you'll remember. Here's my list for week 9[.]

Digby just shows this week's list, but has links to the previous eight.

I found this one possibly the most worrisome:

35. Human Rights Watch issued it's annual report of threats to human rights around the world. For the first time in 27 years, the US is listed as a top threat because of the rise of Trump.

Here's Human Rights Watch's article on the 2017 World Report. Just one salient section:

Executive Director Kenneth Roth writes that a new generation of authoritarian populists seeks to overturn the concept of human rights protections, treating rights not as an essential check on official power but as an impediment to the majority will.

“The rise of populism poses a profound threat to human rights,” Roth said. “Trump and various politicians in Europe seek power through appeals to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and nativism. They all claim that the public accepts violations of human rights as supposedly necessary to secure jobs, avoid cultural change, or prevent terrorist attacks. In fact, disregard for human rights offers the likeliest route to tyranny.”

Roth cited Trump’s presidential campaign in the US as a vivid illustration of the politics of intolerance. He said that Trump responded to those discontented with their economic situation and an increasingly multicultural society with rhetoric that rejected basic principles of dignity and equality. His campaign floated proposals that would harm millions of people, including plans to engage in massive deportations of immigrants, to curtail women’s rights and media freedoms, and to use torture. Unless Trump repudiates these proposals, his administration risks committing massive rights violations in the US and shirking a longstanding, bipartisan belief, however imperfectly applied, in a rights-based foreign policy agenda.

I'm wondering again whether New Zealand is far enough away.

Today's Must-Read: The Russian Connection

Vis-a-vis the last post, this from Kurt Eichenwald on the relationship(s) between the Trump campaign and the Russian government:

In phone calls, meetings and cables, America’s European allies have expressed alarm to one another about Donald Trump’s public statements denying Moscow’s role in cyberattacks designed to interfere with the U.S. election. They fear the Republican nominee for president has emboldened the Kremlin in its unprecedented cyber-campaign to disrupt elections in multiple countries in hopes of weakening Western alliances, according to intelligence, law enforcement and other government officials in the United States and Europe.

While American intelligence officers have privately briefed Trump about Russia’s attempts to influence the U.S. election, he has publicly dismissed that information as unreliable, instead saying this hacking of incredible sophistication and technical complexity could have been done by some 400-pound “guy sitting on their bed” or even a child.

Officials from two European countries told Newsweek that Trump’s comments about Russia’s hacking have alarmed several NATO partners because it suggests he either does not believe the information he receives in intelligence briefings, does not pay attention to it, does not understand it or is misleading the American public for unknown reasons. One British official said members of that government who are aware of the scope of Russia’s cyberattacks both in Western Europe and America found Trump’s comments “quite disturbing” because they fear that, if elected, the Republican presidential nominee would continue to ignore information gathered by intelligence services in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.

I really am trying to resist seeing grand conspiracies here -- I don't think anyone involved is that together (except maybe the Russians) -- but it's getting a little too close for comfort.

Via Joe.My.God.

Inadvertent Truths

This:

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Correct The Record ✔ @CorrectRecord

.@GenFlynn: "#Trump is not doing this for the next four years. He's running to be POTUS for like the next 40, or the next 400."

12:59 PM - 30 Oct 2016

• 175 175 Retweets
• 110 110 likes

I don't think he meant it the way I took it.

Today's Must-Read: Whistleblowers

This is what happens to whistle-blowers who go through channels:

But if you want to know why Snowden did it, and the way he did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s surveillance programme were largely ignored.

Edward Snowden learned from Drake's experience, revealed in the story of another man, a senior official at DoD:

But there is another man whose story has never been told before, who is speaking out publicly for the first time here. His name is John Crane, and he was a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

His testimony reveals a crucial new chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers should now make it very clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public with his revelations.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane told me how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

This is horrible enough in itself, but think of what we're in for if, by some bizarre circumstance, someone like Donald Trump actually becomes president -- which is to say, someone with no concern for the rule of law.

Read the whole article.

Via Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo.

Today in Stupid

I know, there's almost too much to choose from, but this story stuck out a little bit:

The lawsuit says many are either placed on what's called a Selectee List, which subjects them to extra scrutiny, or the more stringent No-Fly List, which prevents the traveler from flying.

One of the plaintiffs is a 4-year-old baby from California, listed in the lawsuit as "Baby Doe."

"He was 7 months old when his boarding pass was first stamped with the 'SSSS' designation, indicating that he had been designated as a 'known or suspected terrorist,'" said the lawsuit. "While passing through airport security, he was subjected to extensive searches, pat-downs and chemical testing."

"Every item in his mother's baby bag was searched, including every one of his diapers."

Remember that your basic TSA agent is not known for actually thinking -- remember the five-year-old handicapped boy who was forced to crawl through the security station without his crutches?

As for the list itself, it's become nothing more than a sick joke, as might have been expected, seeing as how it was first instituted by John Ashcroft when he was Dubyah's AG. According to the article, there are now over 1.5 million people on the list. I doubt there are 1.5 million terrorists in the whole world, but rationality is no longer part of our security establishment's repertoire.

OK -- the stories behind the lawsuit are bad enough, but the rationale -- well, I don't know whether to laugh or scream and throw things:

The FBI says on its website that "the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center) regularly conducts comprehensive and case-specific quality assurance reviews of its data to ensure the U.S. government’s substantive criteria for watch-listing are met and to ensure the records maintained in the Terrorist Screening Database are current, accurate, and thorough. The TSC also participates in redress procedures established by agencies that perform terrorist screening."

Can you say "bullshit"? I wonder how many of that 1.5 million are on the list because someone doing data entry can't spell?

Via RawStory.

And a foonote: more on our culture of paranoia.

Land of the Free

This, via Digby:



Read the post.