June 3, 2020

Yes, the Looting Must Stop

Yes, the Looting Must Stop
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/90990

Looting is the word of the day, on the lips of every newscaster, the president, and elected officials across the country. And, indeed, looting is a major problem in America

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan ended the New Deal era, crushed labor unions, and massively cut the top personal and corporate tax rates, he kicked off the most massive and widespread looting of America since the 1920s.

Working people all across the nation have seen over $7 trillion of their wealth looted by the top 1 percent just in the past two decades, reducing them from the middle class to the working poor.

Small and medium sized businesses, since Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman AntiTrust Act in 1983, have seen their companies looted by giant monopolies and predatory banksters like Mitt Romney.

Millions of homeowners across the nation had their homes looted by thugs like Steven Mnuchen, California’s “Forclosure King,” and Wall Street banksters like Jamie Dimon, a practice that’s again exploding.

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May 31, 2020

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better

Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over
Robert Reich
A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/donald-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-george-floyd-minneapolis-tweets?

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.

By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.

He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.

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His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

May 24, 2020

We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP's Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP’s Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/90824

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.

But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.

But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle.

But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy.

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May 6, 2020

George W Bush paved the way for Trump - to rehabilitate him is appalling

George W Bush paved the way for Trump – to rehabilitate him is appalling
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/06/george-w-bush-paved-the-way-for-trump-to-rehabilitate-him-is-appalling?

snip//

On Saturday, Bush put out a video calling for compassion and national unity during the coronavirus crisis. In it, he declared: “We are not partisan combatants; we are human beings.” This is a lovely message; really, it is. It is just a shame he wasn’t so invested in our shared humanity when he used the fabricated threat of weapons of mass destruction to bomb Iraq into oblivion. It is a pity he didn’t think about “how small our differences are” when he fought LGBTQ+ rights. It is unfortunate he wasn’t so concerned about compassion during his botched and heartless response to Hurricane Katrina.

If there were an Oscar for best use of cinematography to whitewash a bloody legacy, then Dubya has certainly earned it. His three-minute message – which was part of The Call to Unite, a project featuring videos from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts – has been viewed more than 6m times and generated widespread praise. With Trump in office, suddenly Bush doesn’t seem so bad to many observers. At least Bush could reach across the political aisle now and again. “Bush handled post-Katrina by asking his father and Bill Clinton to help,” tweeted Maggie Haberman, the New York Times’ White House correspondent. “The current president has been uninterested in asking his predecessors to get involved as the country deals with Covid.”

We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to normalise Bush or rewrite his record just because Trump is unleashing his own campaign of shock and awfulness. We don’t have to minimise the enormous damage Bush did just because he didn’t tweet misspelled abuse at his political enemies. We don’t have to do any of this – but a lot of Americans seem desperately to want to. This is partly because the US has a deep-seated reverence for its heads of state, as illustrated by the fact they retain the honorific of president after they have left office. Perhaps because Britain is a monarchy with a longer history than the US, we don’t see our head of government as a national mother or father figure in quite the same way.

However, the bigger motivation behind the apparent desire to rehabilitate Bush is probably a desperation among liberals to see Trump as an anomaly who doesn’t reflect the “real” US. But Trump is not an aberration. He didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The lies, jingoism and anti-intellectualism of the Bush era helped pave the way for him – and the steady rehabilitation of Bush is paving the way for Trump to evade accountability in the future.

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March 11, 2020

A Federal Judge Condemned the "Roberts Court's Assault on Democracy.'' It's About Time

A Federal Judge Condemned the “Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.’’ It’s About Time.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/federal-judge-condemns-roberts-courts-assault-on-democracy.html

Nowhere is the problem of asymmetrical rhetorical warfare more apparent than in the federal judiciary. For the past several years, federal judges, notably those appointed by Donald J. Trump, have felt unmoored from any standard judicial conventions of circumspection and restraint, penning screeds about the evils of “big government” and rants against Planned Parenthood. Most of the judicial branch, though, has declined to engage in this kind of rhetoric. There are norms, after all, and conventions, standards, and protocols. There seems to also be an agreement that conservative judges demonstrate deeply felt passion when they delve into such issues, while everyone else just demonstrates “bias” if they decide to weigh in. So when Justice Clarence Thomas just last year used a dissent to attack the integrity of a sitting federal judge in the census case, it was mere clever wordsmithing. But when Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests, as she did recently, that the conservative wing of the high court seems to be privileging the Trump administration’s emergency petitions, she is labeled—by the president himself—unfit to judge. It’s such a long-standing trick, and it’s so well supported by the conservative outrage machine, that it’s easy to believe that critiques of fellow judges by conservative judges are legitimate, while such critiques from liberal judges are an affront to the legitimacy of the entire federal judiciary.

This dynamic is why it’s so astonishing to see progressive judges really go for broke in criticizing conservative bias in the judiciary, as U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman does in criticizing the five conservative justices on the Roberts Supreme Court in an upcoming Harvard Law review article. The article begins, brutally:

By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball “umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes” was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Roberts’ misleading testimony inevitably comes to mind when one considers the course of decision-making by the Court over which he presides. This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.

Adelman, who sits in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, goes on to methodically chronicle that which is hardly news to anyone who has observed the rightward turn of the Supreme Court. His article brings into clear relief the court’s systemic attack on voting rights for minority and other marginalized communities, by way of striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, as well as repeated blessing of voter suppression and decisions not to adjudicate political gerrymandering. He notes that the court privileges the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the public. He lays out in detail the rise of the conservative legal movement, starting with the infamous 1971 Lewis Powell memo that served as a right-wing call to arms and tracing its progress through the current well-funded effort to reverse the New Deal in the courts. The article ultimately portrays the slow movement of the Supreme Court to the right—and then the far right—through a long line of cases that reversed the Warren court’s protections for minority groups and poor and working-class Americans. It shows how the court has undermined unions and boosted corporate interests. The court, he notes, has greatly contributed to income inequality, health care inequality, and the hollowing out of the American middle class.

Adelman ends with this caution:

We are thus in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile, and it is even more so when government eschews policies that benefit all classes of Americans. We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.

<<snip>>

March 6, 2020

"Mr. Barr could not be trusted." We all knew that, so what will come of this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/politics/mueller-report-barr-judge-walton.html?

<<snip>>

Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.

The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report.

The differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s description of it “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,” wrote Judge Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.

Mr. Barr’s public rollout of the Mueller report has been widely criticized. Still, it was striking to see a Republican-appointed federal judge scathingly dissect Mr. Barr’s conduct in a formal judicial ruling and declare that the sitting attorney general had so deceived the American people that he could not trust assertions made by a Justice Department under Mr. Barr’s control.

<<snip>>

March 5, 2020

Pissed about Super Tuesday? Suck it up: Beating Trump means supporting the Democratic nominee

Pissed about Super Tuesday? Suck it up: Beating Trump means supporting the Democratic nominee
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/05/pissed-about-super-tuesday-suck-it-up-beating-trump-means-supporting-the-democratic-nominee/

<<snip>>

In a new essay for the New Republic, political scientist and pollster Rachel Bitecofer describes this moment in political history:
https://newrepublic.com/article/156402/hate-ballot

There are eight months to Election Day. Much can and will happen that is outside of the ability of the pundits, the pollsters and the commentariat to predict. But one thing is certain. There will be Democratic and independent voters who are upset that their preferred candidate is not the party's presidential nominee. Some of these voters may choose to stay home, to vote for a meaningless third-party candidate or even to support Donald Trump in some ill-conceived protest against the system.

Such impulses are dangerous. Instead, these angry and disaffected Democrats and independents must vote with their heads and not their hearts, must embrace a new maturity, and must abandon childish purity tests that are best suited for halcyon days and a time of "normalcy" than for the nightmarish crisis of the Age of Trump.

Not to support the Democratic nominee — whoever that may be — is to aid Donald Trump and his authoritarian movement in their quest for a second term.

Moreover, not to vote against Donald Trump is to betray American democracy and the very values that so many disaffected progressives, Democrats and independents claim to embrace. Is the Democratic Party perfect, or even fully functional? Of course not. But to sabotage it now is to embrace darkness.

March 3, 2020

institutional ability of the press to fully convey the abnormality of this presidency is in doubt

Trump’s new attack on Biden exposes his own unfitness
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/03/trumps-new-attack-biden-exposes-his-own-unfitness/

<<snip>>

In this election, the institutional ability of the press to fully convey the abnormality of this presidency is in doubt. As Brian Beutler details, we’re already seeing a rerun of 2016, which was beset with the press corps’ failure to clearly demarcate Trump’s history of corruption and racism from the lesser sins of Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s allies are counting on these failures to resurface. GOP senators are intensifying sham investigations into Biden and his son, in the obvious expectation that if he’s the nominee, whatever they purport to find will be treated as legitimate news, casting a pall of corruption over him.

<<snip>>

March 1, 2020

Such duplicity can't survive appeal

https://twitter.com/RepAdamSchiff/status/1233864178584125440?s=20

February 9, 2020

. "Spare me. That's what I mean. I don't need phony off-the-record after-the-fact friends."

Dem lawmaker drops hammer on GOPers ‘covering their butts’ by rushing to defend Vindman after Trump fired him
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/dem-lawmaker-drops-hammer-on-gopers-covering-their-butts-by-rushing-to-defend-vindman-after-trump-fired-him/

Saying “spare me,” Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) trashed the anonymous Republican lawmakers who contacted the New York Times to claim they tried to stop Donald Trump from firing EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman to make it look like they cared.

Speaking with MSNBC host Kendis Gibson, the New York lawmaker expressed disgust with what he called their “cowardice,” while reacting to a New York Times report noting the alleged concerns of Republicans over the president’s actions.

“I think what you’re seeing there is pretty obvious,” Maloney stated. “You’re seeing vulnerable Republicans, after the fact, try to cover their butts by leaking to the New York Times that they want us all to know they were deeply troubled by this. And even though they took a vote that could have absolutely guaranteed that people like Lt. Col. Vindman would be hurt, would be made to pay the price for their fecklessness, for their cowardice, they want us to know they were troubled by it.”

“They’re going to continue to support this president, but they want the New York Times to know they secretly know it’s wrong,” he continued. “Spare me. That’s what I mean. I don’t need phony off-the-record after-the-fact friends.”