Month: July 2019

As another not-so-glorious Independence Day approaches, I can’t help but reflect on George Orwell’s 1984. So many of his predictions seem to be coming true. Doublethink. Newspeak. The Memory Hole. The Cult of Personality.

[Record scratch]

I’m sorry, but “cult of personality”? I honestly don’t get it with Trump and his worshippers.

When I envisioned Big Brother, I imagined an austere, stentorian authoritarian whose image took over everyone’s minds and lives through sheer force and threat of death. I did not expect a needy, whining, wheedling, insecure despot like Trump.

Instead of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” which is horrifying enough, we get “LOOK AT ME, EVERYONE. LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT MY VERY LARGE HANDS. LOOK. EVERYONE, PLEASE LOOK. PAY ATTENTION TO ME. LOOK AT ME. ME. HERE I AM. STOP LOOKING THERE, LOOK HERE. AT ME.”

Orwell couldn’t have predicted a stupider future.

Understanding the U.S. Census is not easy and I certainly don’t expect people to have a firm grasp on things that I find confusing even after doing a fair amount of research. What’s relatively uncomplicated is the Republicans’ effort to use the Census for their own political benefit. They wanted to discourage non-citizens from participating so that they would be undercounted. Overall, this would benefit for the GOP (in most places, but not in Texas) by giving them an advantage in two main areas.

Census data is used to determine how many representatives will be awarded to each state, and this calculation also determines how many Electoral College votes each state will receive. The hope was that a skewed Census might give them a couple extra seats in Congress and a couple more Electoral College votes for president. There are also governmental programs that divide up money to the states based on population, and those numbers come from the Census. So, the Republicans figured they also get more money.

The U.S. Constitution says that the Census must be done every ten years and that the population must be “enumerated,” which means “counted” rather than estimated. What this means that the government can’t use the sampling techniques pollsters utilize to compensate for underrepresented populations that have a low response rate. If certain groups of people have a low participation rate, they are simply not included in the overall count. The Republican strategy for the Census has been to drive up the non-participation rate of non-citizens by including a citizenship question.

The lied repeatedly (including in court and under oath during congressional testimony) about why they wanted this question included. They said, for example, that they simply wanted an accurate count of eligible voters so they could better enforce the Voting Rights Act. Of course, you can ask felons about whether being a citizen automatically means that you can vote. In any case, voting rights had absolutely nothing to do with their motivation.

The [Commerce] department’s explanation was further undermined last month after plaintiffs uncovered computer files from a deceased Republican political strategist, Thomas B. Hofeller, who had first urged the incoming Trump administration in 2016 to consider adding the question to the next census.

The files included a study in which Mr. Hofeller concluded that a citizenship question was central to a strategy to increase Republican political power by excluding noncitizens and persons under voting age from the census figures used for drawing new political boundaries in 2021.

The Supreme Court did not buy the administration’s explanations and now it appears that the Census forms will be printed out with the citizenship not included.

The Trump administration, in a dramatic about-face, abandoned its quest on Tuesday to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, a week after being blocked by the Supreme Court.

Faced with mounting deadlines and a protracted legal fight, officials ordered the Census Bureau to start printing forms for next year’s head count without the question.

This is good news for Democrats (and Republicans in Texas), but there is going to be lasting damage from the fact that this legal dispute went on as long as it did (assuming it is truly over now). The media coverage around the Census has been almost entirely about the citizenship question, and surely some people won’t get the news that the administration lost. When combined with Trump’s other aggressive anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, they will probably succeed in dragging down participation through pure intimidation.

Some people may reasonably want to know why the Census counts people who aren’t citizens. The simple answer is that the Constitution requires this. Everyone is supposed to be counted, and the seats in Congress are apportioned according to the total number of people. However, there’s nothing to prevent the states from drawing their districts based on the population of eligible voters, which could add population to rural districts and reduce it in urban ones. That might even be justifiable, although it’s not something Democrats would like to see happen.

The overall effort has no legitimate purpose however and has always been a raw power grab. Even the conservative Supreme Court could not conclude otherwise, so the administration finally gave up.

Trump, however, is still tweeting that the fight will go on even though his own Commerce Secretary says it’s over.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement on Tuesday night that he respected the Supreme Court, but strongly disagreed with its ruling.

“The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question,” he said. “My focus, and that of the Bureau and the entire Department is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”

Wilbur Ross perjured himself and belongs in jail.

Hey music lovers!

I got to be home briefly, and now I am about to head overseas on business. I love the Netherlands though, so it’s all good. I’ll leave y’all with a new cafe and lounge. Our trusty bartender, Neon Vincent will have some really cool drinks to serve, and I’ll report back about whether folks in Rotterdam really do dip their fries in mayo (actually the answer is yes).

I have no real theme here, so I will lead off with something quirky. This is a track Robert Fripp and Brian Eno recorded in the late 1970s, but did not release til much later. I think you’ll hear some similarity to a project Eno and David Byrne pursued at the start of the 1980s.

Okay. Until a bit later, cheers! If I have some downtime and am not out doing tourist stuff, I’ll try to update!

Somewhat surprisingly, at least for me, there are two Republican U.S. senators who think E. Jean Carroll’s allegations against Donald Trump should be investigated.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said both Trump and Carroll should be questioned about the alleged assault.

“I think anybody that makes an accusation like that, they should come forward,” Ernst said when asked if Carroll should be believed. “But obviously there has to be some additional information. They need to interview her. They need to visit with him.”

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said there needs to be an “evaluation” but that he didn’t know what entity should conduct it, “whether it’s Congress or whether it’s another setting, I’m not sure.”

“It’s a very serious allegation,” Romney said. “I hope that it is fully evaluated. The President said it didn’t happen and I certainly hope that’s the case.”

Neither of them defended Trump or suggested that the allegations were outrageous or unlikely to be true. CNN reporters attempted to get reactions from as many Republican senators as they could, and they got a variety of responses.

John Thune lent no more weight to Trump’s denials than Carrol’s version of the story:

The second-ranking senator in GOP leadership, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, called the alleged acts “unacceptable, deplorable behavior” but said because “the President is denying them, I can’t comment on them because I don’t know what the truth is.”

Thune added, “I think anytime you have a situation like this where nobody knows exactly what the truth and exactly what the facts are, it’s hard to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions.”

Lindsey Graham drew a deep breath before taking the president’s word, but with a caveat:

When Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and ally of Trump’s was asked about the rape charges, he paused, took a deep breath and shook his head. Then he said, “He’s denied it, and that’s enough for me. Until somebody comes up with something new.”

Thom Tillis said he accepted Trump’s denial but tried to deflect the discussion to some false allegations that were lobbed at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Even Tillis said he might change his mind if he sees new information.

Most senators opted to either give a “no comment” or lie and say that were not even aware of the story:

“I don’t have any comments on that,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when asked if it was appropriate for Trump to say the alleged victim wasn’t his type.

“I’m paying attention to (the National Defense Authorization Act), so I’m focused on getting that bill done,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, a Republican from Nebraska referencing the defense authorization bill that’s on the floor now.

“I don’t know what case you’re talking about,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida. “I’ve been reading about policy. You’re asking about a story that I’ve never even read.”

“I haven’t followed those. I don’t know anything about them,” said Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee.

“I’m not going to comment,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas.

“I have no comment on it,” said South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott. “I haven’t taken the time to read anything about that yet.”

Not a one of them said that it was preposterous to allege that the president sexually assaulted a woman in department store changing room. Most people would call it rape, although Carroll refuses to characterize it that way. She calls it “a fight.”

President Clinton also faced allegations that he committed a sexual assault long before he became president. Juanita Broaddrick said she was attacked in 1978 in her hotel room. There was no way to arbitrate their dispute over what happened that day so the story did not get a ton of traction outside of right-wing media circles. But since Clinton’s reputation was for infidelity rather than assault, it didn’t fit a pattern. Democratic senators didn’t have difficulty saying they found the charges out of character for the president.

This time is much different. Even those who are willing to say they believe Trump’s denials do so tepidly and leave room to reverse themselves later. This is closer to the defenses we saw of Clinton from Democrats after the Lewinsky affair was reported but before the DNA from the blue dress confirmed it. The people who knew Clinton best knew that an allegation of infidelity was quite possibly true, and the people who know Trump best feel the same way about allegations of rape.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, why the Hell are Rick Wilson, Bill Kristol, George Conway, and the rest of the useless Never-Trump brigade always complaining about the predictable (and predicted) result of their lifelong projects?

Did Rick Wilson NOT spend his life lobbing ugly and unfair attacks at Democrats, including war veterans who gave all while Rick gave nothing? Here he is shitting all over Obama for eating ice cream. Here’s one of Rick’s “Obama is not like us” quotes:

“Obama is always going to struggle with the cultural disconnect — he scans very much as liberal Ivy League elitist. People automatically put him in a box with people who are not like middle America’s view of patriotism.”

Wilson spent his entire career trashing Democrats, and now he’s got the GOP government he claimed to always want: no “liberal Ivy League elitist.” What’s his problem? I can’t find his net worth on line, but I think we can safely assume one of the most prominent Republican strategists in the country and a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC is rich, and got a tax cut. Now, the ungrateful man who who’s so influential he couldn’t stop his own party from nominating Donald Trump has advice for Democrats. That’s kind of like taking fire prevention advice from someone who was so incompetent he burned down his own house.

Next up is Bill Kristol, who literally wrote the book on lying to the public, the unitary executive, and unleashed presidential power:

Following that logic, the Supreme Court has never ruled that the president does not ultimately have the authority to collect foreign intelligence–here and abroad–as he sees fit. Even as federal courts have sought to balance Fourth Amendment rights with security imperatives, they have upheld a president’s “inherent authority” under the Constitution to acquire necessary intelligence for national security purposes. (Using such information for criminal investigations is different, since a citizen’s life and liberty are potentially at stake.) So Bush seems to have behaved as one would expect and want a president to behave. A key reason the Articles of Confederation were dumped in favor of the Constitution in 1787 was because the new Constitution–our Constitution–created a unitary chief executive. That chief executive could, in times of war or emergency, act with the decisiveness, dispatch and, yes, secrecy, needed to protect the country and its citizens.

Well, you got what you wanted, didn’t you Bill? What’s big deal? YOU WIN, DUDE.

Then we have chubby little Georgie Conway, husband to crystal-meth Barbie, Trump spokesghoul. and alleged criminal Kellyanne Conway. George is constantly on Twitter attacking his wife’s boss/source of probably more than half the family income. If he cared about his kids’ well-being he’d take them out of that toxic environment, but as we all know, for conservatives money means more than children.

Conway’s bad fathering aside, I remain confused by his objections to Donald Trump. Did George (and his wife) NOT spend the 1990s trying to take down the hated Clintons?

In the 1990s, George was a quiet but critical presence in what Hillary Clinton would dub a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — a hotshot young attorney working to undermine President Bill Clinton by offering secret legal aid to his accusers and reportedly funneling salacious details to the Drudge Report. “This one disgruntled New York lawyer almost single-handedly brought down the president,” David Brock, the conservative provocateur-turned-Clinton acolyte, later wrote.

Years later, George would marry Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a publicity-prone Beltway pollster, and move with her to an apartment in Manhattan’s Trump World Tower. There, he caught the future president’s attention by arguing to the condo board against stripping Trump’s name from the exterior. The speech earned him an appreciative call from the mogul and an offer to join the board. He declined, but Kellyanne said she’d do it.

Shouldn’t George be at least a little proud of the outsized impact of his pet project, which nearly two decades later prevented a Clinton from returning to the White House? Didn’t he and his wife ultimately get their victory? I mean, the guy went out of his way to attack that awful Bill Clinton, including “unpaid work — research, legal briefs and organizing moot courts for the team to practice their arguments” and leaking details about the “distinguishing physical characteristic” of the 42nd president’s terrifying penis “to keep the story alive.” So why do I keep seeing him comparing the Republican standard-bearer unfavorably to that presumably equally awful woman who decorated the White House Christmas tree with dildos?

Like Ricky and Billy, Georgie and Kellyanne are also rich as Hell. Has he even said “thank you” ONCE for the tax cut his wife’s boss gave them? Nope: it’s just bitch, bitch, bitch, whine, whine, whine about the success of his 20-year effort to defeat Democrats once and for all, just like the rest of his Never Trump colleagues.

On a related note, Rick Wilson’s new book is titled “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” But frankly, that title applies to the entire Republican Party and the conservative movement from whence sprung Wilson, Conway, Kristol, and a whole bunch of other malefactors turned malcontents. I’ll quote a different book: Matthew 7:15-20:

15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.
16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?
17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.
19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

These guys planted a whole orchard of bad trees, and now they want to disown their bountiful crop.

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Matt Yglesias helpfully explains how Donald Trump ran and won as a moderate Republican. He even has a succinct and blogger-centric way of making his point:

When I was a young blogger in the mid-aughts, the big issues in national politics were Social Security privatization, marriage equality, and the war in Iraq.

Trump ran as an Iraq War proponent who vowed to avoid new Middle Eastern military adventures, as an opponent of cutting Social Security and Medicare (and Medicaid), and as the first-ever Republican candidate to try to position himself as an ally to the LGBTQ community — going so far as to actually speak the words “LGBTQ.”

Trump also ran as opponent of free trade agreements. These unorthodox positions made him more popular with moderate voters, not less, and they gave permission to some lifelong Democrats to cross over to support a Republican presidential nominee.

Of course, to get to that point, moderates and soft Democrats had to get past Trump’s quirks, lack of qualifications and preparedness, hard-right views on race and immigration, and treatment of women. For a lot of people, these flaws just added to Trump’s attractiveness, but for others the fact that they’d finally found a Republican who would protect their retirement while promising to crack down on the loss of manufacturing jobs was enough for them take a chance.

Trump needed both groups to support him. The racists who came out of woodwork or crossed the aisle for him were important, but so were the people who simply shrugged off the things they didn’t like because of things they did like. Democrats were left wondering how people could vote for a guy who admitted to sexual assault on tape and said egregiously insensitive and hurtful things on a routine basis. But he offered an alternative for once for Rust Belt workers who blame free trade for job loss. For some gay voters, he seemed like a fiscal conservative who wasn’t an obvious enemy. For advocates of peace, he (and Russia) never tired of making Clinton sound like more of a risk. Trump would not have won without breaking with the Republican Party on some major issues.

Yglesias goes on to make two points about this. The first is about the value of winning with a moderate:

One reason liberals are reluctant to acknowledge that Trump ran and won as a moderate is that to their eyes, he’s scoring conservative policy wins all the time.

And that’s true. One could imagine a Republican reacting to Trump’s platform and saying, “Are you really expecting me to get excited about a president who doesn’t plan to challenge the biggest elements of the welfare state or the left’s single biggest culture war win in a generation?”

But it turns out that conservatives find it pretty exciting to be in power.

And the second is that the lesson from Trump’s success is not that you can say anything and nothing matters, but that taking popular positions on issues is better politically than taking unpopular positions on issues. In Trump’s case, it was his popular take on some key issues that allowed him to compensate for his unpopular ones and his many shortcomings.

I don’t think this ends the conversation about where the Democrats should position themselves. After all, I could argue that a progressive Democrat could also compensate for being an outlier in some areas by also taking some really popular positions that contrast with Trump. Just by being someone who is not Trump, the candidate is going to be doing something very popular with a lot of people. But Yglesias does us a service by reminding us that Trump was seen as more moderate by the public than Hillary Clinton, and as insane as that seems, it’s because he was more willing to break with his party’s orthodoxy.

Philip Klein of the right-wing Washington Examiner has a message for those who would criticize David Brooks and Bret Stephens for concern-trolling the Democrats.

Embracing a radical Left agenda because you think Trump is vulnerable so you may as well shoot for the moon is understandable, but it’s also completely reasonable for those who don’t like Trump but don’t buy into that agenda to say, “No thanks.”

But are these two things equally reasonable? Are they really equivalent postures at all?

I think the answer to both of those questions is ‘no.’

Both Brooks and Stephens (as well as Andrew Sullivan) are warning the Democrats that the hard-left shift of the party on display in the primaries is going to lose them much-needed votes in the middle and put the defeat of President Trump in jeopardy. It’s not something I disagree with and there are plenty of other Democrats who are raising the same concern. But the idea that Trump is so vulnerable that progressives should shoot for the moon is a calculated gamble rather than a moral consideration. The Democrats may choose a nominee who is unelectable thereby showing that they miscalculated. They may force an electable candidate to sabotage their general election chances in the process of winning the votes for the nomination. But that will also be more of an unintended consequence than a decision. Either way, you can chalk it up to making a mistake. In no way, will any of these people have chosen Trump or seen him as the better of two options.

For the Republican #NeverTrump crowd and those in the mushy-middle of American politics, the election is going to be a choice or a decision about whether Donald Trump should be granted a second term in office. Some may decide that it’s better to stick with Trump than put things in the hands of a Democrat running on a radical or socialistic platform. If they make that choice, then they’re showing that they’re really not that concerned about Trump.  Whatever his faults, they are not as severe as living with college debt forgiveness or “open borders.”

Maybe some people will try to convince themselves that they can reject both options and avoid a choice. Some will rationalize that their state is going to be blue or red and their vote won’t change anything. Some will talk themselves into believing that a vote for a third-party candidate is at least half a vote against Trump even if will also be half a vote against the Democrat. But if you believe Trump should not be reelected, you can’t avoid a decision. Either you cast the vote with maximum power to defeat him or you don’t. If there are people out there who, given the power to wave a magic wand and determine the winner of the election, would choose Trump, then those people aren’t serious about opposing him.

What makes these choices different is that people on the left are clear on who they want to be president (the Democrat) and they’re arguing about how much they can get away with without jeopardizing that victory. Some people don’t want to shoot for the moon because they themselves are in a moderate camp. But they’re all engaged in a dispute about priorities and strategies rather than any confusion about whether someone could possibly be worse than Trump.

For people like Bret Stephens and David Brooks, they’re threatening to not support the Democrat if the Democrat is too far out of the mainstream. That’s a clear indication that the reelection of Trump isn’t the worst thing that can happen in their minds, and that’s a moral judgment. If Medicare-for-All and free college and the abolition of ICE are more repugnant than being a suspected foreign agent, an obvious criminal, an opponent of NATO and friend of Putin, a menace to a free press, and a brutalizer of migrant children, then they should be clear that they’ll tolerate everything Trump can dish out to prevent the election of a far left-wing Democrat.

The Democrats want to win the votes of all decent people, but you’re not a decent person if you would consider Trump over the alternative. It is not “reasonable” to say “no thanks” to the Democrat because you think their policies are too far left if those policies don’t involve crippling America’s alliances and moral leadership while committing a litany of crimes, including crimes against humanity.

It’s obviously a harder choice for a Republican to cast a vote for a Democrat than for a Democrat to cast a vote for a Democrat, but the referendum on Trump transcends ideological or ordinary political considerations. That’s why the choice David Brooks faces is not equivalent to the choice a Democrat faces in choosing between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders. It’s not the same kind of decision, as well, because when the Democrats argue about policy and strategy, it’s in the context of defeating Trump rather than in the context of possibly choosing Trump, staying home or casting a protest vote.

The bottom line is that you can’t be #NeverTrump if Trump is still an option for you. And you can’t oppose Trump with all your might by staying home or voting for the Libertarian or Green Party candidate. If you really want him gone, you’ll vote for the Democrat. If you want to have influence over who his opponent will be, you can hardly do worse than to threaten to leave the battlefield if you don’t get who you want.

Greg Sargent raises a good point:

Given that Robert S. Mueller III’s findings supposedly amounted to “total exoneration” for President Trump, you might be puzzled to learn that Trump’s top allies are spending enormous amounts of time scheming about how to undermine the former special counsel’s credibility and cast doubt on those findings.

With Mueller set to testify to Congress on July 17, Politico reports that Trump’s leading Republicans defenders in the House are putting together a new battle plan that will finally expose the Mueller investigation once and for all as the fraud it has always been.

I think this is a simple recognition that when Mueller goes in front of the cameras and answers the Democrats’ questions, his honest and straightforward answers are not going to jibe with the narrative that has been told by the White House and attorney general William Barr. In other words, they know that narrative will immediately become obsolete.

During Watergate, President Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler initially told reporters that there was nothing to see: “it was a third-rate burglary.” Later on, he conceded that his first spin on the story had become “inoperative.”

So, it’s in anticipation of having a major problem that the Republicans are readjusting their strategy. Mueller is no longer “The Great Exonerator,” but the leader of a failed coup run by Obama holdovers, Clinton diehards, and rogue and treasonous leaders of “the Deep State.”

It’s easy to understand why Mueller resisted having to testify. I think he also is capable of anticipating how these hearings will go, and he didn’t want to have his reputation tarnished.

In the first phase of this saga, the White House has some big advantages. Number one, since the public was primed for evidence of a conspiracy, the report was less damning than many expected. Number two, since William Barr was able to dictate how the information was doled out and put his own spin on it, the White House has control of the narrative.

In the second phase, beginning with Mueller’s testimony, the surprise at the tepidness of the report has worn off and the focus is going to be on the parts that are most incriminating.  At least on the House side, the Democrats and Mueller will be in charge of the narrative. This changes the dynamics in a way that is hard to defend on the merits. So, the alternative strategy is to trash Mueller so that people will be less inclined to accept what he says as the holy gospel.

Unfortunately, there are countless quotes on the record from Republicans who defended Mueller’s integrity before, during and after his inquiry.