Posted: April 5, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, U.S. Economy | Tags: destruction of scientific research, Hands Off rallies, insanity, polls, Stock Market, tariffs, Trump decision-making |
By Linda Benton
Good Afternoon!!
The news is mostly awful today. If you think too much about what is happening, you’ll sink into depression and despair. I heard a woman on TV (I can’t remember her name, unfortunately) argue that Trump wants to return to the world of his childhood–the 1950s. But there is simply no way to do that. We are no longer an industrial society and we aren’t going to return to being one. We are no longer a segregated society either. Trump can’t rid public life of Black people, women, and immigrants. It’s not going to happen. But he is going to keep trying, because he is certifiably insane. The Republicans could stop him but they won’t, because they are terrified and they are cowards.
I’m going to begin with one bit of good news. Today, Americans with gather to fight back against Trump and Musk and their efforts to destroy our government and turn most of us into serfs.
AP: ‘Hands Off!’ protests against Trump and Musk are planned across the US.
Opponents of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk plan to rally across the U.S. on Saturday to protest the administration’s actions on government downsizing, the economy, human rights and other issues.
More than 1,200 “Hands Off!” demonstrations have been planned by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The protests are planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., state capitols and other locations in all 50 states.
Protesters are assailing the Trump administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut federal funding for health programs.
Musk, a Trump adviser who owns Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in government downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. He says he is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”
No, asshole. That’s not “Democrat’s stance.”
Before I get going with the rest of today’s news, I want to highlight this piece by JV Last at The Bulwark from a couple of days ago: The American Age Is Over. The United States commits imperial suicide.
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.
Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.
The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over.
While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
By Stephanie Lambourne
And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.
We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.
He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.
He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.
There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:
- they wanted what he promised;
- they didn’t believe what he promised; or
- they didn’t understand what he promised.
Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.
And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people….
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.
If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.
This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.
Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.
Please go read the rest at The Bulwark link.
This week, Trump took a wrecking ball to the U.S. economy.
Stephen Rattner at the New York Times: I Watch the Markets for a Living. This Week, Everything Changed.
In the past, the one constituency President Trump has sometimes listened to has been our stock market. Well, it has spoken, falling 10.5 percent in one of the largest two-day stock market swoons in decades.
In the 50 years I have been immersed in markets and economic policy, I have never before witnessed a signature economic policy initiative that was met with such unalloyed criticism. What’s worse, the damage was entirely self-inflicted.
By Stephanie Lambourne
Why such a reaction? One reason the S&P 500 fell was that the tariffs Mr. Trump rolled out were so much greater than investors anticipated. (Give the White House an F for failing to prepare the market for what to expect.) Then on Friday, China announced its own 34 percent tariff on our goods, making it clear that our trading partners were not going to simply give in to Mr. Trump’s demands, as he had suggested they would.
As Mr. Trump was doubling down, asserting that “my policies will never change,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, was delivering his own bombshell: Given the higher-than-predicted tariffs, higher inflation and slower growth were likely to ensue, he said. That’s drastically different from just a couple of weeks ago, when Mr. Powell called the potential impact of new tariffs on prices “transitory.”
The business community, which by my count heavily supported Mr. Trump in the election five months ago, seems stunned. Few have spoken publicly, but the Business Roundtable, the premier corporate trade association, on Wednesday warned that universal tariffs run “the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters.”
Privately, several chief executives told me that they recognized that imposing the tariffs, as well as Mr. Trump’s intractable support of them, was a potentially cataclysmic mistake. “Few of us ever imagined he would go this far,” one told me. “He could well bring down the economy and himself.”
A bit more:
The Trump-supporting business leaders I’ve spoken to in the last two days don’t yet regret their votes, mostly because of their intense distaste (if not hatred) for the Biden-Harris administration. And they remain broadly supportive of the efforts by the tech billionaire Elon Musk to reform the federal government, even if they acknowledge that his DOGE team may be going too far in its slashing of spending and personnel.
But I wonder how some other major Trump-supporting leaders whose stock prices have been particularly hard hit now feel, like Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive of Blackstone, the investment group (down 15 percent in two days), and Safra Catz, chief executive of Oracle, the database company (down 12 percent).
Mr. Trump’s actions aren’t the only problem. Almost as important is the lack of clarity as to what policies he is pursuing and why. At times, Mr. Trump implies that the purpose of the tariffs is to bring back manufacturing, which suggests that they will stay in place indefinitely. At other times, he suggests that the goal is to negotiate tariff reductions by other countries (even though much of what Mr. Trump asserts about their tariffs is inaccurate).
The dithering takes a real toll. I see this from my role as a professional investor. How do we evaluate a company that imports goods or engages in international commerce? We seek a lower price, or we grit our teeth, or we pass on the opportunity. As a result, our pace of investing has slowed sharply this year.
And it’s not just us. In the year’s first quarter, the number of newly announced mergers and acquisitions dropped to its lowest level since the financial crisis. “Folks are looking but not pulling the trigger,” one leading investment banker told me. Equity offerings have become similarly challenged; multiple companies planning to go public have postponed their fund-raising since Wednesday.
Aaron Zitner at The Wall Street Journal: Americans Were Souring on Trump’s Economic Plans Even Before Tariff Bloodbath.
Americans elected Donald Trump with a favorable opinion of his economic plans. But his expansive push for tariffs has helped turn that confidence into skepticism, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.
Tepid support for tariffs through the past year has become disapproval, with 54% of voters opposing Trump’s levies on imported goods, 12 points more than those who support his plans. Three quarters of voters say that tariffs will raise prices on the things they buy, up from 68% who said so in January.
By Lucy Almay Bird
The Journal survey was conducted from March 27 through April 1, when Trump had imposed new tariffs on China and certain goods from Canada, Mexico and elsewhere, but before his announcement Wednesday of a sweeping program of levies on nearly all U.S. trading partners. That announcement shocked America’s trading partners and on Thursday prompted the biggest selloff of U.S. stocks since the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020. The selloff deepened Friday.
The poll suggests that a president who promised that “tariffs are about making America rich again” is facing unease with his economic leadership, especially over rising prices, the issue that bedeviled Democrats in last year’s election. By 15 percentage points, more voters hold a negative view of Trump’s handling of inflation than a positive one. Negative views of his economic stewardship outweigh positive views by 8 points….
That is a substantial change from late October, when voters by a 10-point margin said they favored rather than opposed Trump’s economic plans. The negative view of tariffs contrasts with earlier Journal surveys that found voters keeping an open mind. In both January and August, before Trump took office and his tariff program became concrete, Journal polls found voters mildly supportive of import levies as a general proposition.
The survey finds the president’s political standing to be resilient in many ways. Some 93% of voters who backed him in November give him favorable job reviews now, suggesting that few are regretting their vote. Majorities approve of his handling of immigration and border security….
Still, the survey shows the political gamble Trump has taken by using America’s muscle to try to reshape the global trading system. Voters are evenly split on whether they believe Trump’s promise that short-term economic “disruption” caused by tariffs, as he put it, will help American workers and companies by forcing other nations to lower their own trade barriers and prompting manufacturers to make more goods in the U.S.
I don’t know how people who aren’t super-rich can support what Trump is doing. I have to believe that these people are either stupid or not paying attention.
On Trump’s Insanity:
Daniel Drezner at Drezner’s World: There Are No Adults in the Room.
On Thursday, as the stock market nosedived from the Trump administration’s stupid, unthinking, destructive, error-ridden tariff policies, a respected reporter from a well-known media outlet pinged me for an interview. The journalist was interested in the roles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might have played in the formulation of Trump’s foreign economic policy.
Sardines, by Jennifer Pease
As we started talking, I realized that the reporter and I were starting from rather different premises. The reporter was thinking about the story as how one would cover a significant policy pronouncement in a normal administration: Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines within the administration? Who are the key power brokers? What was their decision-making process?
And I was thinking: there was no process. There are no power brokers. On questions of trade, there’s Donald Trump’s whims, his collection of clown car enablers, and maybe an intern who plugs some things into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much it.
I know why both of us were thinking the way we were. For reporters, looking for power brokers makes sense even when even when the policies themselves seem inexplicable. Bad policy outcomes can nonetheless be explained by rational actors pursuing their interests. Maybe it’s the result of powerful interest groups pushing their narrow interests. On occasion, bureaucratic politics are responsible. Sometimes bad policies are the result of powerful ideas that percolate within particular groups — you know, ideas like “risk assessment is bad” or “democracy is overrated.” This is slightly more unusual but it’s certainly conceivable….
As someone who has studied Donald Trump’s decision-making style at great length, however, I come at questions about Trump’s second-term advisors from a different perspective. The key to understanding Trump’s second term is to understand three basic premises:
- Trump has eliminated all executive branch guardrails;
- Trump has appointed only sycophants to serve him this time around;
- Trump’s policy instincts are the most immature, retrograde opinions out there.
Drezner refers readers to this Washington Post story by Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski, and Michael Birnbaum: Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to upend global trade.
Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.
After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets.
The president’s decision to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars of goods reflects two key factors animating his second term in office: his resolve to follow his own instincts even if it means bucking long-standing checks on the U.S. presidency, and his choice of a senior team that enables his defiance of those checks.
Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy. Trump has long characterized import duties as necessary to revive the U.S. economy, at one point calling tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
There simply isn’t any method to his madness.
At Liberal Currents, Alan Elrod writes about Trump and RFK Jr. destroying American scientific research: You’re Not Crazy. America Has Gone Mad.
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
This is an oft-quoted passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. And it’s one that has proven especially popular in the years since the rise of Trump and explosion of global authoritarianism.
Sanctuary, Lucy Almay Bird
I open with it here because I want to offer an extended reflection on what it feels like to be trapped inside the sort of madhouse she describes. Because I think sheer insanity now rules America. We have gone mad, and the consequence is that sanity now feels itself like a disorder.
We aren’t the first society to come unglued. We almost certainly will not be the last. But right now, each day in America for those of us who do not favor the president or hold to the MAGA worldview feels like we have been sent to some dilapidated asylum by mistake, like the protagonist of a pulp thriller.
Nothing is working as it should. No one is speaking in sentences that add up to anything sensible.
We are throwing the most advanced health science research system into the sea and have turned over our public health infrastructure to quacks and crooks. We are destroying our prosperity to sate the president’s desire to play at 19th century political economy. We are blithely ignoring the potential for war with former allies as Trump crows about annexing Canada and Greenland.
In a rational world, we would already have seen markets balk at Trump’s trade policies, investigations into the mismanagement of our health services, and impeachment proceedings against a man who continues to menace treaty allies for nothing but personal ego.
But it isn’t a rational world, at least not this American corner of it. And so I want to explore madness as the ordering principle of American life by looking at some of the key sites of breakdown. There is nothing curative in this essay, but diagnosis is a first step. And our symptoms are many.
On RFK Jr.’s wrecking ball:
How did a man who admitted he has brain damage from a worm and who has spent decades spreading deadly disinformation about the efficacy of modern medicine become the head of our nation’s health services?
RFK Jr. has done what we all knew he would do. On Tuesday, mass layoffs gutted HHS, threatening everything from the CDC to the FDA to programs like Meals on Wheels.
These are moves that will make Americans less safe and healthy. Our food will be more dangerous. Diseases we might have cured in the not-so-distant future will go under-researched for years. Loved ones will get sick and die. And medicine that should have been available will be stuck in an understaffed and underfunded regulatory pipeline.
Before this, he had already driven out some of HHS’s top scientists, who have warned about the damage his views on healthcare and medical research will do. Under his watch, measles has killed two Americans, and numerous children have been diagnosed with Vitamin A toxicity after their parents followed Kennedy’s recommendation that it be used as a treatment.
Kennedy’s beliefs on medicine and health are bizarre, conspiratorial, and, in some cases, simply hateful.
Read specific examples at the link.
More stories to check out today:
Politico: ‘Everyone is terrified’: Business and government officials are afraid to cross Trump on tariffs.
The New York Times: Senate Approves G.O.P. Budget Plan After Overnight Vote-a-Thon.
The Guardian: I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre.
The New York Times: Trump Weakens U.S. Cyberdefenses at a Moment of Rising Danger.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Obama’s Blistering New Takedown of Trump Gives Dems a Way Forward.
The New York Times: These Are the 381 Books Removed From the Naval Academy Library.
Politico: RFK Jr. said HHS would rehire thousands of fired workers. That wasn’t true.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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Posted: April 14, 2020 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Fauci, coronavirus "briefings", Covid-19, Donald Trump, insanity, John Yoo, meltdown, narcissism, propaganda, Tenth Amendment |
Good Morning!!
Yesterday Trump had an epic meltdown at his “coronavirus briefing,” Yes, I know he has meltdowns all the time, but this was the worst one yet. It included screaming, yelling, attacks on the press, a North Korea style propaganda video, and claims of dictatorial power. There was almost no mention of a federal response to the pandemic.
He began the performance by bringing Dr. Anthony Fauci to the podium to explain why what he said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday wasn’t a criticism of Trump. USA Today: Anthony Fauci says he used a ‘poor choice of words’ in discussing Trump administration’s coronavirus response.
Anthony Fauci, the health care policy expert under fire from allies of President Donald Trump, said Monday he used a “poor choice of words” when he suggested lives could have been saved had the Trump administration put in place coronavirus restrictions earlier in the year.
“Hypothetical questions sometimes can get you into some difficulty,” Fauci said during a unique statement delivered amid reports that Trump was thinking of firing him.
In an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Fauci was asked if lives could have been saved had social distancing been imposed during the third week of February instead of mid-March. Fauci said, “It’s very difficult to go back and say that. I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.”
Fauci said, “What goes into those kinds of decisions is – is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”
Trump, who on Sunday re-tweeted a supporters’ statement that Fauci should be fired, called the epidemic expert to the podium early in the briefing, an unusual move.
A reporter asked Fauci if he had been forced to make the statement, and he claimed it was “voluntary.” Raise your had if you believe him. It looks like Fauci has become just another Trump sycophant. We. are. so. fucked.
Ashley Parker at The Washington Post: The Me President: Trump uses pandemic briefing to focus on himself.
President Trump stepped to the lectern Monday on a day when the coronavirus death toll in the United States ticked up past 23,000. He addressed the nation at a time when unemployment claims have shot past 15 million and lines at food banks stretch toward the horizon.
Yet in the middle of this deadly pandemic that shows no obvious signs of abating, the president made clear that the paramount concern for Trump is Trump — his self-image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined.
“Everything we did was right,” Trump said, during a sometimes hostile 2½ -hour news conference in which he offered a live version of an enemies list, brooking no criticism and repeatedly snapping at reporters who dared to challenge his version of events.
Trump has always had a me-me-me ethos, an uncanny ability to insert himself into the center of just about any situation. But Monday’s coronavirus briefing offered a particularly stark portrait of a president seeming unable to grasp the magnitude of the crisis — and saying little to address the suffering across the country he was elected to lead.
At one point — after praising himself for implementing travel restrictions on China at the end of January and griping about being “brutalized” by the press — Trump paused to boast with a half-smirk, “But I guess I’m doing okay because, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the president of the United States, despite the things that are said.”
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Earlier in the day, Trump tweeted that he and he alone–not governors of states–has the authority to “reopen” their economies.
Then during the briefing, Trump claimed that he and he alone has the power to open businesses, etc. in individual states. He has no understanding of the Constitution, much less the Tenth Amendment, which reserves police powers for the states.
Rick Wilson at The Daily Beast: Trump the Narcissistic Authoritarian Statist Declares He Has ‘Total’ Authority.
If you watched President Donald Trump’s daily press briefing Monday, you know that even by his abysmal standards this was the loudest siren yet, a warning that the man occupying the Oval Office is more suited to a very long, involuntary stay in an inpatient mental-health facility than the presidency of the United States.
It wasn’t presidential leadership. It wasn’t executive power made manifest. It wasn’t a grown-ass adult facing a serious crisis. It was an angry, needy man not looking outward to the needs of a nation in crisis but inward, and downward.
Anyone—and I mean anyone—who tells you Monday’s presser was anything other than a complete meltdown shitshow on the top of the dumpster fire at the peak of Burning-Tire Mountain is a liar.
It was a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge. It left little to cling to for even his most fervent lackeys but the grunting media animus that replaced conservatism as the motivating force of the Republican Party.
There was no there there when it came to facing the most consequential national crisis in generations. Even the parts about actions by the government were just mummery to frame his desperate desire for more stroking of his delicate feels. Everything is incidental to his delicate feelings and ego. Everything—and, more importantly, everyone else—is incidental.
Trump just gave the nation a performance that was so manic, so furious, and so utterly unhinged that anyone watching it walked away thinking the 25th Amendment has been too long unexercised and the proof is behind the podium every damn day.
Even John Yoo, the torture advocate says Trump can’t force states to “reopen.”
Our elected leaders confront the difficult decision on when to start lifting the lockdowns, even at the risk of a faster spread of COVID-19. Presiding Trump claims that he has the right to determine when businesses open their doors, employees return to work, and consumers shop again. “For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government,” he tweeted earlier today. “Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect . . . It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons.”
But the federal government does not have that power. The Constitution’s grant of limited, enumerated powers to the national government does not include the right to regulate either public health or all business in the land. Congress enjoys the authority to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States.” This gives Washington, D.C. an important, yet supporting, role in confronting the pandemic. It can bar those who might be infected from entering the United States or traveling across interstate borders, reduce air and road traffic, and even isolate whole states.
But our federal system reserves the leading role over public health to state governors. States possess the “police power” to regulate virtually all activity within their borders. As the Supreme Court has recognized, safeguarding public health and safety presents the most compelling use of state power. Only the states can impose quarantines, close institutions and businesses, and limit intra-state travel. Democratic governors Gavin Newsom in California, Andrew Cuomo in New York, and J.B. Pritzker Illinois imposed their states’ lockdowns, and only they will decide when the draconian policies will end.
Read more at The National Review.
NBC News: Cuomo warns of constitutional crisis ‘like you haven’t seen in decades’ if Trump tries to reopen New York.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned Tuesday that President Donald Trump should not try to reopen the state against his wishes, saying it would create “a constitutional crisis like you haven’t seen in decades” and could result in a dramatic increase in coronavirus cases.
“The only ways this situation gets worse is if the president creates a constitutional crisis,” Cuomo said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“If he says to me, ‘I declare it open,’ and that is a public health risk or it’s reckless with the welfare of the people of my state, I will oppose it,” he said. “And then we will have a constitutional crisis like you haven’t seen in decades, where states tell the federal government, ‘We’re not going to follow your order.’ It would be terrible for this country. It would be terrible for this president.”
This morning Trump responded with another insane tweet.
Finally, there was the insane campaign ad that Trump forced the press and his science advisers to watch during the “briefing.”
The Daily Beast: Trump Uses Coronavirus Briefing to Play Batshit Campaign Ad Attacking Press.
President Donald Trump took over Monday’s White House task force briefing to lash out at critics and the press with a bizarre video that amounted to a campaign ad, before later declaring his authority is “total” if governors disagree with him during the coronavirus pandemic.
Monday’s unprecedented press briefing began to go off the rails with the video, but before the end, the president was falsely trumpeting definitive authority during the health-care crisis that has already led to the deaths of more than 23,000 Americans.
The briefing almost immediately devolved into the president airing widespread grievances against his critics, from his likely 2020 general election opponent Joe Biden to governors and reporters who have dared to call his virus response into question over the last few weeks as American life has ground to a halt during the pandemic.
In a mash up of clips and audio that amounted to a campaign ad, Trump lashed out at critics and returned to his favorite pastime of going after reporters. The video began with a white screen saying “the media minimized the risk from the start.” At one point, it showed news clips of different governors giving kind remarks about the president’s response to the pandemic.
An agitated and indignant president pointed at the seated press corps, telling them that while he’d answer some questions after airing his montage of coronavirus praise that maybe “I’ll ask you some questions because you’re so guilty.”
Both CNN and MSNBC, which have wavered between airing the increasingly antagonistic briefings, both cut away during the multi-minute campaign ad. The networks, however, came back to broadcast the performance after a short break.
The highlight of the show was questioning from CBS correspondent Paul Reid. BBC News:
CBS White House correspondent Paula Reid was met with a fiery response when she challenged President Trump during a coronavirus briefing.
Mr Trump touted his ban on travel from China at the end of January as an example of his administration taking decisive action. However, he did not declare a national emergency until 13 March – and public health experts have criticised the response to the outbreak, including early testing failures and a shortage of protective equipment.
The reporter asked Mr Trump what his administration had done in February, “with the time you bought with your travel ban”.
So . . . another crazy day has dawned in America. Will we survive? What stories are you following?
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Posted: August 24, 2019 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: caturday, China, Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, G7, insanity, Joe Biden, madman president |
By Juan Bejar, b. 1946
Good Morning!!
The insanity continues. Yesterday Trump rocked markets with a series of unhinged tweets. I hope you’ll read this CNBC thread. It’s a classic of Trump turbulence.
Last night Trump left for the G7 Summit and on his way he had another yelling session with reporters. Nothing sane came out of that, but he claimed that his remark about being “the chosen one was “sarcastic.” and “we were all laughing?” I don’t think Trump knows what sarcasm is.
This morning I turned on the TV to see him at a “working lunch” with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron spoke about the many serious problems that need to be discussed at the summit, including climate change. Trump uttered several disconnected sentences, mostly about the weather. After the lunch, Trump tweeted thanks to Macron to a parody account, misspelling Macon’s name.
The New York Times summarizes yesterday’s insanity: One Crazy Day Showed How Political Chaos Threatens the World Economy.
President Trump arrived in France on Saturday for a meeting of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, having set the stage for fireworks and confusion. In one dizzying day, he had seemed to be searching for whom or what to blame for economic troubles, first using Twitter to call his own Federal Reserve chief an enemy of the United States and then to urge American companies to stop doing business with China.
Louis-Léopold Boilly – Gabrielle Arnault as a Child, 1813
And that was just while the markets were open. Later Friday, he said he would apply tariffs to all Chinese imports and increase those already in place….if a recession and breakdown in international commerce happens in the coming year, histories of the episode may well spend a chapter on the Friday collision of official actions in the government offices of Beijing, in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming and in the Oval Office.
It became clear in real time how the risks of an escalating trade war and the fraying of longstanding financial and political ties could quickly outpace the ability of central banks — the normal first responders to economic distress — to do anything about it.
President Trump’s shoot-first approach adds to the risks at a delicate moment, with major economies in Asia and Europe already teetering and policymakers’ capacity to contain the damage in question.
“The escalation, the unpredictability, the erratic nature of policy developments is central to what is going on, and these aren’t things you can plug into an economic model,” said Julia Coronado, president of MacroPolicy Perspectives, an economic consultancy. “Something is breaking. It’s very dangerous.”
Read the rest at the NYT.
In France today, Trump claimed he has the power to force companies to follow the commands he issued on Twitter yesterday. The New York Times: Trump Asserts He Can Force U.S. Companies to Leave China.
Portrait of a Young Girl, Samuel Miller (c. 1807–1853), c. 1845
BIARRITZ, France — President Trump asserted on Saturday that he has the authority to make good on his threat to force all American businesses to leave China, citing a national security law that has been used mainly to target terrorists, drug traffickers and pariah states like Iran, Syria and North Korea.
As he arrived in France for the annual meeting of the Group of 7 powers, Mr. Trump posted a message on Twitter citing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 — a law meant to enable a president to isolate criminal regimes but not intended to be used to cut off economic ties with a major trading partner because of a disagreement over tariffs.
“For all of the Fake News Reporters that don’t have a clue as to what the law is relative to Presidential powers, China, etc., try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Case closed!” [….]
In raising the possibility of forcing American businesses to pull out of China on Friday, Mr. Trump framed it not as a request but as an order he had already issued.
“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing our companies HOME and making your products in the USA,” he wrote on Twitter, adding, “We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them.”
In fact, aides said, no order has been drawn up nor was it clear that he would attempt to do so. Instead, it could be the latest negotiating tactic by a president who favors drastic threats without always following through on them in hopes of forcing partners to make concessions.
The “president” is a madman and we’re stuck with him for now.
By George Gassner 1811–1861
According to CNN, Trump doesn’t understand why he has to go to the G7: Trump has questioned why he must attend G7.
…in conversations with aides over the past weeks, Trump has questioned why he must attend, according to people familiar with the conversations. After the past two G7 summits ended acrimoniously, Trump complained about attending a third, saying he didn’t view the gathering as a particularly productive use of his time.
He’s made similar asides in meetings with other world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Emmanuel Macron, who have encouraged him over the past six months to commit to attending the Biarritz summit, people familiar with the conversations said. Macron is this year’s summit host.
The G7 represents the world’s major economies, and has long been a regular stop on the US President’s calendar. In small group sessions, with only the leaders and few aides present, the world’s major economic and geopolitical problems are discussed at length.
It’s a more workaday style of foreign travel than the type of trip Trump has come to enjoy, which usually include lavish displays of welcome like royal parades or state banquets. It’s also a practice in the kind of multilateralism that Trump and his aides have downplayed in favor of one-one-one negotiations with other countries.
But if he didn’t attend, he would miss an opportunity to sow global chaos and frighten out allies half to death.
By Otto Van Veen, 1584
Associated Press: At global summit, Trump facing limits of go-it-alone stance.
Trump, growing more isolated in Washington, faces a tepid reception on the world stage, where a list of challenges awaits. Anxiety is growing over a global slowdown , and there are new points of tension with allies on trade, Iran and Russia.
Fears of a financial downturn are spreading, meaning the need for cooperation and a collective response is essential. Yet Trump has ridiculed Germany for its economic travails at a time when he may have to turn to Chancellor Angela Merkel and others to help blunt the force of China’s newly aggressive tariffs on U.S. goods. Those trade penalties, combined with the economic slowdown, have raised political alarms for Trump’s reelection effort .
In a late addition to the schedule, Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron sat across from each other at a small table for lunch outside the opulent Hotel du Palais before the official start of the summit. Hours earlier, Trump threatened anew to place tariffs on French wine imports to the U.S. over France’s digital services tax, and that prompted a European leader to promise European Union action if the U.S. followed through. Macron called for an end to the trade wars he said are “taking hold everywhere.”
Macron, the summit host, said two were discussing “a lot of crisis” around the world, including Libya, Iran and Russia, as well as trade policy and climate change.
Good luck with that.
Martha Bartlett with Kitten 1875 Unknown artist
At The New Yorker, David Remnick warns us about sinking into despair over Trump’s insanity: Trump Clarification Syndrome. Here’s the gist:
Again and again, Trump’s top advisers––Daniel Coats, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly among them––have left the White House clutching their heads, their dignity and nerves in rags, realizing that they have served a President who is unreachable, beyond cure and counsel; a man of rotten character, blatant instability, and zero empathy; an empty but radically dangerous human being, who occupies the highest office in the land….
But, as perilous and unnerving as things are, any form of political despair at such a moment remains unforgivable. Despair is a form of self-indulgence, a dodge. Trump’s derangements in policy and character should instead instill a kind of Trump Clarification Syndrome, a reckoning with what confronts us. A reckoning, as the Amazon rain forest burns, with climate change. A reckoning, as Trump threatens to revoke the barest protections for immigrant children and the guarantee of birthright citizenship, with the history and persistence of bigotry in all forms. With the structural persistence of inequality of income and opportunity. With matters of truth and falsehood. Trump’s presence in the White House is depressing, there is no doubt, but to wallow in that gloom, or even to imagine that public life will “return to normal” on its own after his departure, is insufficient, even inexcusable. Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who cannot countenance Trumpist politics ought to welcome the most urgent kind of political debate on matters of policy and on who we are as a country. Perhaps it is a form of derangement to say it, but it’s entirely possible that Donald Trump, who has been such a ruinous figure on the public scene, has at least done the country an unintended service by clarifying some of our deepest flaws and looming dangers in his uniquely lurid light.
A Girl with Her Cat by Hendrik Maarten Krabbe
In non-Trump news, Joe Biden committed another disturbing faux pas yesterday. The Washington Post: Evoking 1968 at town hall, Biden asks: What would have happened if Obama had been assassinated?
HANOVER, N.H. — Former vice president Joe Biden, returning to this crucial primary state and attempting to put the focus on the foibles of President Trump, took an unusual departure toward the end of a 70-minute dive into health-care policy by asking the crowd to imagine the assassination of Barack Obama.
“None of you . . . women are old enough — but a couple of you guys are old enough,” he said during a town hall at Dartmouth College. “I graduated in 1968. Everybody before me was, ‘Drop out, go to Haight-Ashbury, don’t trust anybody over 30, everybody not get involved.’ No, I’m serious. I know no woman will shake her head and acknowledge it. But you guys know what I’m talking about. Right? But then what happened?”
The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination referenced the assassinations of two of his political heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy — who was killed while running for president.
At least he’s figured out that the assassinations happening 1968, not the late-1970s.
“Imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, if Barack Obama had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee,” he continued. “What would have happened in America?”
La dame et son chat Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837)
What was his point? Your guess is as good as mine. But this puts me in mind of something Hillary said in 2008 that was met with universal outrage. The New York Times, May 24, 2008:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
Her remarks were met with quick criticism from the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, and within hours of making them Mrs. Clinton expressed regret, saying, “The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy,” referring to the recent diagnosis of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s brain tumor. She added, “And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.”
Why isn’t Biden’s strange remark getting the same amount of negative attention that Clinton’s did back in 2008? Actually, I know the answer . . .
So . . . what stories are you following today?
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Posted: August 20, 2019 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2018 midterm elections, 2020 presidential election, dementia, Donald Trump, Epoch Times, Greenland, insanity, QAnon, Rachel Bitecofer |
Illustration by Aïda Amer, Axios
Good Morning!!
Last night Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed Rachel Bitecofer about her accurate prediction of 2018 election results and her current prediction for the 2020 presidential race.
Rachel Bitecofer is assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, where she teaches classes on political behavior, campaigns, elections, and political analysis and conducts survey research on public policy issues and election campaigns. Her work and analysis has been featured in many media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, and she is a contracted commentator on CBC Radio. Her book, The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election (Palgrave McMillan) is available via Amazon. Her unique election forecasting model accurately predicted Democrats gaining 42 seats 5 months before the 2018 midterms.
Bitecofer has describes her model for the 2018 and 2020 elections at The Judy Ford Center for Public Policy: With 16 Months to go, Negative Partisanship Predicts the 2020 Presidential Election.
In July of 2018, my innovative forecasting model raised eyebrows by predicting some four months before the midterm election that Democrats would pick up 42 seats in the House of Representatives. In hindsight, that may not seem such a bold prediction, but when my forecast was released, election Twitter was still having a robust debate as to whether the Blue Wave would be large enough for Democrats to pick up the 23 seats they needed to take control of the House of Representatives and return the Speaker’s gavel to Nancy Pelosi.
Based on its 2018 performance, my model, and the theory that structures it, seem well poised to tackle the 2020 presidential election – 16 months out. I’ll serve up that result below, but first let’s set the table by reviewing my model’s 2018 forecasting success.
Rachel Bitecofer
Not only did I predict that they would gain nearly double the seats they needed, but I also identified a specific list of Republican seats Democrats would flip, including some, such as Virginia CD7, that were listed as “Lean Republican” by the majority of race raters at the time. At a time when other analysts coded even the most competitive House races for Democrats as Lean or Tilt Democrat, I identified 13 Republican-held districts as “Will Flips,” 12 as “Likely to Flip,” and 6 as “Lean Democrat.” I also identified a large list of “Toss Ups,” from which I would later identify the remaining “flippers.” In addition, I identified some “long-shot toss-up” districts that could be viable flips under some turnout scenarios. Of the original 25 districts I identified as definitely or highly likely to flip, all but one, Colorado CD3, did so, possibly because the party failed to invest in their nominee there.
What does the model say about 2020?
Barring a shock to the system, Democrats recapture the presidency. The leaking of the Trump campaign’s internal polling has somewhat softened the blow of this forecast, as that polling reaffirms what my model already knew: Trump’s 2016 path to the White House, which was the political equivalent of getting dealt a Royal Flush in poker, is probably not replicable in 2020 with an agitated Democratic electorate. And that is really bad news for Donald Trump because the Blue Wall of the Midwest was then, and is now, the ONLY viable path for Trump to win the White House.
Why is Trump in so much trouble in the Midwest? First, and probably most important, is the profound misunderstanding by, well, almost everyone, as to how he won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in the first place. Ask anyone, and they will describe Trump’s 2016 Midwestern triumph as a product of white, working class voters swinging away from the Democrats based on the appeal of Trump’s economic populist messaging. Some will point to survey data of disaffected Obama-to-Trump voters and even Sanders-to-Trump voters as evidence that this populist appeal was the decisive factor. And this is sort of true. In Ohio, Trump managed the rare feat of cracking 50%. Elsewhere, that explanation runs into empirical problems when one digs into the data. Start with the numerical fact that Trump “won” Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan with 47.22%, 48.18%, and 47.5% of the vote, respectively, after five times the normal number in those states cast their ballots for an option other than Trump or Clinton. This, combined with the depressed turnout of African Americans (targeted with suppression materials by the Russians) and left-leaning Independents turned off by Clinton (targeted with defection materials by the Russians) allowed Trump to pull off an improbable victory, one that will be hard to replicate in today’s less nitpicky atmosphere. Yet, the media (and the voting public) has turned Trump’s 2016 win into a mythic legend of invincibility. The complacent electorate of 2016, who were convinced Trump would never be president, has been replaced with the terrified electorate of 2020, who are convinced he’s the Terminator and can’t be stopped. Under my model, that distinction is not only important, it is everything.
Last night Bitecofer predicted that the Democratic candidate will win 270 electoral votes. There’s much more interesting analysis at the link above. Read a slightly less technical analysis of Bitecofer’s model by Paul Rosenberg at Salon: Does anyone understand the 2020 race? This scholar nailed the blue wave — here’s her forecast.
Meanwhile, at the moment we are at the mercy of the insane occupant of the White House. Eugene Robinson: Trump is melting down. Again.
Fears of a global recession, greatly exacerbated by Trump’s erratic and self-destructive trade policies, have sent financial markets tumbling. A sharp downturn would close off one of the principal lines of attack the president was hoping to use against his Democratic opponent. He tried it out at a rally in New Hampshire last week: “You have no choice but to vote for me,” he told the crowd, “because your 401(k)’s down the tubes, everything’s gonna be down the tubes” if he loses. “So whether you love me or hate me, you gotta vote for me.”
Fact check: No.
Trump is flailing. He berates his handpicked chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, for not cutting interest rates fast enough to goose the economy. He practically begs Chinese President Xi Jinping for a meeting to work out a trade deal — any trade deal, apparently — and is met with silence. He threatens more tariffs but then backs down, at least for now. According to published reports, he sees himself as the victim of a conspiracy to exaggerate the growing economic anxiety in order to hurt his chances of winning a second term.
He entertains grandiose, almost Napoleonic fantasies — purchasing Greenland from Denmark in what he calls “a large real estate deal,” perhaps, or imposing a naval blockade to force regime change in Venezuela. He apparently spent much of this past weekend fuming about not getting credit for how his New Hampshire rally broke an attendance record for the arena that had been set by Elton John.
And Trump can’t seem to stop railing against a recent Fox News pollthat showed him losing to four of the leading Democratic contenders. The president seems to consider Fox News his administration’s Ministry of Propaganda — indeed, that is the role the network’s morning-show hosts and prime-time anchors loyally play — but the polling unit is a professional operation. “There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it,” Trump told reporters Sunday . He added a threat, saying that Fox “is making a big mistake” because he is “the one that calls the shots” on next year’s general election debates — the implication being that Fox News might not get to broadcast one of them if it doesn’t toe the party line.
The only thing Robinson leaves out is that Trump’s health is going downhill; his dementia symptoms are getting worse by the day.
Trump’s biggest supporters are nuts too, but they are also very influential on social media. Check out this story at NBC News: Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times.
By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times.
The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.
Those video ads — in which unidentified spokespeople thumb through a newspaper to praise Trump, peddle conspiracy theories about the “Deep State,” and criticize “fake news” media — strike a familiar tone in the online conservative news ecosystem. The Epoch Times looks like many of the conservative outlets that have gained followings in recent years.
But it isn’t.
Behind the scenes, the media outlet’s ownership and operation is closely tied to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual community with the stated goal of taking down China’s government.
It’s that motivation that helped drive the organization toward Trump, according to interviews with former Epoch Times staffers, a move that has been both lucrative and beneficial for its message.
Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News that believers think the world is headed toward a judgment day, where those labeled “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sympathetic to the spiritual community will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-communist fight, former Epoch Times employees said.
Click the link the read the rest. We are truly living in the Twilight Zone.
That’s all I have for now. I’ll add some non-crazy links in the comment thread. What stories are you following?
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Posted: July 31, 2014 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2014 elections, 2016 elections, Barack Obama, morning reads, Republican politics, Rick Perry, the GOP, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics, VAGINA Rick Santorum, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: Bobby Jindal, Ed Kilgore, GOP crazies, impeachment, insanity, IRS, John Boehner, John Dickerson, Lois Lerner, Marco Rubio, Nate Silver, right wing talk show hosts |
Reading Woman, Armando Barrios
Good Morning!!
I’ve spent the past week or so reading escapist literature and watching old TV shows in an effort to anesthetize myself against the overload of bad news we’ve been hit with lately. Yesterday I was feeling a lot better–my escapism seemed to be working to improve my overall mood.
Then last night as I was surfing around in search of interesting reads for this morning’s post, I came across something that jumpstarted me right through Alice’s looking glass.
You’ve probably heard about it too. Lois Lerner, who used to work for the IRS and who is at the center of one of the GOP’s crazy efforts to create a scandal that will bring down President Obama used the word “crazies” in a private e-mail to a colleague who was complaining about right wing radio hosts. Here’s the text of e-mail as quoted in The Washington Post yesterday.
During the exchange, Lerner says she is traveling in Great Britain. The name of the person she is emailing with was blacked out.
Lerner: “I’m ready. Overheard some ladies talking about American today. According to them we’ve bankrupted ourselves and at through. We’ll never be able to pay off our debt and are going down the tubes. They don’t seem to see that they can’t afford to keep up their welfare state either. Strange.”
Other person: “Well, you should hear the whacko wing of the GOP. The US is through; too many foreigners sucking the teat; time to hunker down, buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end. The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to.”
Lerner: “Great. Maybe we are through if there are that many assholes.”
Other person: “And I’m talking about the hosts of the shows. The callers are rabid.”
Lerner: “So we don’t need to worry about alien teRrorists. It’s our own crazies that will take us down.”
My initial response was the same as that of Mark NC at News Corpse (a site that makes fun of Fox News), So F**king What? Former IRS Official Says That GOP Crazies Are…CRAZY!
Republicans and their friends at Fox News have mastered the art of building mountains of bullshit from the lowliest troll-hills. It’s one of their favorite tactics to malign Democrats. Just grab a sentence fragment from a long speech and pretend that it is the whole of the comment from which it was extracted. Then feign outrage that such an awful remark could have been uttered.
The latest example of this rhetorical deceit was demonstrated when the GOP chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, unscrupulously and selectively released some emails purported to be from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who has been hounded by malevolent cretins like Rep. Darrell Issa in an attempt to fabricate ammunition to use against President Obama. Despite hundreds of wasted hours (costing millions of taxpayer dollars) engaged in hyper-partisan investigations, the Republican Inquisition has produced nothing implicating the President in any untoward activity.
The emails that Camp is now crowing about are just as meaningless as all of the other bogus “smoking guns” that these wingnuts have claimed would topple the administration. The headline that Camp has wrenched from the documents is that Lerner may have referred to certain individuals as “crazies” or “a-holes.” And, of course, this would only be an atrocity if those individuals were Republicans. Suffice to say that Camp wouldn’t give a Fig Newton if they were Democrats.
As Camp characterized this affair, Lerner was allegedly caught red-handed expressing her disgust for Republicans. And as the person at the center of the controversy over whether the IRS improperly subjected Tea Party groups to extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status, Camp believes that these emails prove that she was biased. Consequently, Camp regards the emails as justification for appointing a special prosecutor and escalating the legal assault on Lerner and, ultimately, the White House.
There’s just one problem. The emails don’t don’t say what Camp alleges they say. And even if they did it wouldn’t mean anything. Most people in government have personal opinions and allegiances. There isn’t anything wrong with that, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the fair execution of their duties. And the evidence shows that Lerner’s department scrutinized applications of all political persuasions. The only organization that was denied tax-exempt status during the time in question was a liberal group.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich. (center), flanked by the committee’s ranking member, Sander Levin, D-Mich. (right), and Sam Johnson, R-Texas.
Please read the rest at the link.
So this humorous site agrees with me, but more mainstream sites are seemingly going along with the Camp’s notion that this e-mail is evidence of a major scandal. For example, Dave Wiegel characterized it as a “bombshell,” although he does point out that Lerner’s anonymous “e-mail partner” was talking about talk radio hosts, not Republicans in general. Huffington Post reported that Lerner had made “two disparaging remarks about members of the GOP.” Both HuffPo and Politico write that in one e-mail Lerner referred to Republicans as “a–holes,” but they sidestep the fact the context was a discussion of right wing talk show hosts.
As we approach the midterm elections, I can’t help but feel that most of the mainstream media is cheering for a Republican takeover. Am I the crazy one?
Here’s another example from self-described libertarian Nate Silver, Democrats Are Way More Obsessed With Impeachment Than Republicans.
House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that Republicans have no plans to impeach President Obama, and that all the impeachment talk was driven by Democrats hoping to stir up their base.
Boehner’s statement isn’t literally true: There have been mentions of impeachment around the edges of the GOP and by some Republican members of Congress. But on the whole, Democrats are spending a lot more time talking about impeachment than Republicans.
Consider, for example, the Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words database, which tracks words spoken in the House and Senate. So far in July, there have been 10 mentions of the term “impeachment” in Congress and four others of the term “impeach.” Eleven of the 14 mentions have been made by Democratic rather than Republican members of Congress, however.
Impeachment chatter has also become common on cable news. On Fox News this month, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, called for Obama’s impeachment, for instance. But for every mention of impeachment on Fox News in July, there have been five on liberal-leaning MSNBC.
OK, so that’s this month. And this proves what? Democrats are throwing around the word “impeachment” in hopes of calling attention to what Republicans have been saying for years! So f$%king what?!
Again, I must resort to News Corpse for a sensible interpretation of the impeachment talk, CONSPIRACY: President Obama Is Trying To Impeach Himself.
Ever since the first inauguration of President Obama, right-wingers have been trying to undo the people’s decision to make him America’s chief executive. They declared that their top legislative objective was to make Obama a one-term president. In pursuit of that goal they have blocked most of his policy initiatives, judges, and government reforms. At the same time they have been hyper investigatory on everything from Fast and Furious, to the IRS, to ObamaCare, to his birthplace. All of this was squarely aimed at crippling or revoking his presidency.
This year Obama’s critics came out of the impeachment closet and began openly advocating for that legal nuclear option despite not having any legal basis for it. While many Tea-Publican whack jobs were earlier to the gate, Sarah Palin burst onto the scene a couple weeks ago with her own demand that Congress do their duty and trump up some phony articles of impeachment. It got so absurdly intense that Obama addressed it himself with fitting mockery.
So of course the next shoe to drop in this melodrama is that, along with everything else in the world, Obama is to blame for this too. In fact, according to some in the rightist crackpot community, it was all part of his nefarious plot to embarrass the GOP. Here is what Texas Republican Steve Stockman had to say about it when interviewed by the ultra-fringe rightists at WorldNetDaily:
“President Obama is begging to be impeached. […] He wants us to impeach him now, before the midterm election because his senior advisers believe that is the only chance the Democratic Party has to avoid a major electoral defeat. Evidently Obama believes impeachment could motivate the Democratic Party base to come out and vote.”
There you have it. The evil genius in the White House orchestrated the whole Obama-hate campaign from its earliest days in 2008 just so that he would be able to use impeachment, which is every president’s dream, as an election strategy six years into his presidency.
Earth to Nate Silver and the rest of the mainstream media: Steve Stockman, although insane, is an actual member of the House of Representatives, not some fringe character with no influence. And he has plenty of company in the House and even in the Senate (Ted Cruz anyone?). These people are crazy and they are in positions of awesome power.
GOP idea men?
Here’s one more example of mainstream acceptance of GOP insanity before I end this post and run screaming into the street while pulling my hair out in handfuls. From John Dickerson of Slate (via CBS News), Why the GOP’s class of 2016 hopefuls may be the best in generations.
What if they held a presidential campaign and a think tank broke out? House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who is considering running for president, offered his thoughts on poverty last week. Sen. Marco Rubio has been giving regular policy speeches on poverty, college loans, and helping the middle class. Former senator and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is promoting a book of policy proposals on education, family, and revitalizing American manufacturing. Sen. Rand Paul is offering ideas on criminal justice and will give a big foreign policy speech in the fall. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has given speeches on health care and education aimed at a national audience. His staff recently sent an email titled “policy leader” that linked to a Time piece about how he is preparing to be the candidate of ideas in 2016.
What the f&cking f&ck? Rich Santorum? Bobby Jindal? Marco Rubio? Paul motherf&&cking Ryan?! These are “candidates of ideas?” Dickerson continues,
Who isn’t trying to be the ideas candidate in the 2016 campaign? Texas Gov. Rick Perry is working to overcome his 2012 debate aphasia, so he’s trying to show some policy chops. Though former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush holds controversial ideas on Common Core education standards and immigration, those close to him say he won’t run unless he can promote those ideas with gusto.
It isn’t usually this policy-thick in the GOP presidential field. In primaries, there is sometimes one conservative candidate who tries to position himself through the creativity of his proposals, but mostly candidates engage in displays of strength on questions of orthodoxy–how much they want to cut taxes, shrink regulation, and lock up the borders. Now the Republican candidates are not only seeking to distinguish themselves from each other with the quality and originality of their ideas, but they are making the case that unless the party promotes new ideas, it will not prevail.
The class of candidates for 2016 has the potential to be the most robust in almost 40 years–perhaps in modern Republican history. It depends on who finally decides to run, of course, but six governors and four senators are thinking seriously about it.
GOP idea men?
I’m sorry. Dickerson thinks these morons are competing with each other on “quality and originality of…ideas?” Am I nuts? Am I hallucinating this crap? Surely Dickerson can’t really believe this sh#t.
Here’s a little sanity from Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly, Can the Big Brains of the GOP Survive the Primaries? and Damon Linker of The Week, Why GOP reformers are bound to fail. But even Kilgore seems to believe that Republicans will take over the Senate. From Talking Points Memo:
AS the 2014 election cycle proceeds, it remains likely that Republicans will have a good — possibly even very good — November. If success is defined as a takeover of the Senate, the supposedly biased liberal mainstream media is pretty bullish about a GOP harvest, with the New York Times’ Nate Cohn giving Republicans a 60 percent probability of winning the Senate; the Washington Post’s Election Lab rating a GOP takeover as a 84 percent probability; and FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver projecting GOP gains of 5.7 seats (with six needed for a takeover). Nobody has talked seriously of a Democratic takeover of the House since last year; and even in state contests, where anti-incumbent sentiment should cut against GOP incumbents, Republicans could well hold or conceivably even improve their bloated margins among governors and state legislative chambers.
It’s true that public opinion surveys are not showing any 2010-style GOP “wave,” but Democrats are rightly nervous that when polls begin identifying likely voters closer to November, superior Republican “base enthusiasm” could put a thumb on the scales in their favor.
At least Kilgore thinks that catering to the base could hurt Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.
Why? Why would anyone vote for these insane right-wingers? And why is the media rooting for them? I just don’t get it. Am I crazy or what?
Now it’s your turn. What stories are you following today? Share your thoughts and links in the comment thread.
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