Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label political warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political warfare. Show all posts

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Ballistic Podiatry

Trump has been a spoiled pre-schooler his whole friggin' life.

The impulse to lash out is reflexive.

And it's just possible some people have finally caught on, and are starting to play him with it.



Trump’s Mob Boss Threat Against Nikki Haley Donors Blows Up in His Face

Sir, you are running in an election. Why the hell are you threatening your own party’s donors?


Donald Trump’s plan to threaten Nikki Haley’s financial backers immediately backfired on him on Wednesday, as several prominent people in the MAGA camp proceeded to donate to the GOP front-runner’s primary opponent, launching a spontaneous fundraising drive for the South Carolina governor.

“When I ran for office and won, I noticed that the losing candidate’s ‘donors’ would immediately come to me, and want to ‘help out.’ This is standard in politics, but no longer with me,” Trump posted during a late-night social media tantrum.

“Anybody that makes a ‘contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” he added, derogatorily referring to Haley, whom he put in his own presidential Cabinet as ambassador to the U.N.

But then several of Trump’s former staffers chimed in on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, apparently hard-withdrawing their MAGA cards in favor of sending some money to the ambassador.

“Done,” posted Trump’s former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews.

Haley caught on quickly, posting a link to her donation page.

That set the stage for other voters to gleefully join in the fundraising fray.

Others noted that the mob boss–style threat seemed particularly on edge for a candidate who just won the New Hampshire primary by double digits, and questioned the legitimacy of the financial threat from a man facing several pricy upcoming criminal trials and a potential $370 million fine for committing bank fraud to expand his real estate empire.

Despite the local drive’s overnight popularity, it will hardly replace some of Haley’s biggest backers—like venture capitalist Reid Hoffman—who began pausing donations to the campaign after Haley’s lackluster results on Tuesday.

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Don & Kev & Lil Matty

This one kinda slipped by me.


You wanna friend? Buy a dog.


McCarthy privately recounts terse phone call with Trump after ouster

During the call, former president detailed the reasons he hadn’t intervened during the effort to remove McCarthy as speaker


In the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) traveled down to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and threw a lifeline to the former president, who was under a cloud of controversy for provoking the historic assault.

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The fence-mending session between the two Republican leaders ended with a photo op of the two men, grinning side by side in a gilded, frescoed room. The stunning turnabout of the House GOP leader, who had previously blamed Trump for the deadly attack, paved the way for the former president’s return to de facto leader of the Republican Party.

When the tables were turned almost three years later, however, Trump did not return the favor.

Wait - Trump stiffed him? Whooda thunk it, huh?

During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the exchange who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation.

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

“F--- you,” McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people. A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

The transactional — and at times tumultuous — relationship has seemingly endured despite McCarthy’s ouster. The two continue to speak and text, according to people with knowledge of the relationship.

McCarthy has previously grappled with discrepancies between his private, disparaging comments about Trump to others and his continued fealty to the former president. In her new book, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) accused McCarthy of repeatedly lying about his relationship with Trump after the Jan. 6 attack. Cheney writes that when she pressed McCarthy about why he visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, McCarthy claimed that he was summoned by the former president’s staff out of concern for his well-being.

“They’re really worried. … Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him,” McCarthy told Cheney, according to CNN.

During McCarthy’s prolonged fight for the speakership in January, Trump assisted him in clinching the gavel by leaning on some of the holdouts, which he later claimed credit for on social media. But during the Gaetz-orchestrated ouster effort, Trump remained relatively quiet. After McCarthy was removed as speaker, Gaetz indicated in an interview that Trump was supportive of his actions.

“I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I’m doing the right thing,” Gaetz said.


McCarthy has not endorsed Trump or any other candidate for president. But he had always planned to endorse Trump around the Iowa caucuses next year, at a time McCarthy thought the endorsement mattered, according to people familiar with his plans. He told Trump during the call that he was unable to endorse him earlier because he feared that some of his donors would have rescinded their support if he put his thumb on the scale early in the 2024 presidential race, according to a person briefed on the conversation. McCarthy indicated to others that he also withheld his endorsement to protect some of the more vulnerable members of the House Republican conference, another person added.

Whether McCarthy will remain in public office is unclear, as he has privately indicated to allies that he has started exploring a career beyond the halls of Congress, according to people familiar with his thinking. The former speaker faces a Dec. 8 filing deadline, with a five-day leniency period offered to incumbents, to decide whether he will seek another term in 2024.

“If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart that I’m giving 110 percent. I have to know that I want to do that,” McCarthy said at an event Wednesday. “I also have to know if I’m going to walk away, that I’m going to be fine with walking away.”

Since his ouster, he has taken a no-holds-barred approach to the people who facilitated his removal from leadership, unloading on individual lawmakers in public interviews. McCarthy and his allies have at times used their power and deep coffers to weed out Republican incumbents who caused headaches in Washington, or were misaligned with McCarthy’s interests. This month, McCarthy said in an interview with CNN that Gaetz should face consequences for his actions and predicted that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of the eight lawmakers who joined Gaetz, would lose reelection for her “flip-flopping.”

McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser, has said he’d continue to assist with the party’s fundraising efforts as the new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), establishes himself in the role. On Thursday, McCarthy’s top fundraiser and confidant, Jeff Miller, will host a fundraiser for the Johnson Leadership Fund, charging $10,000 to attend, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The Washington Post. Miller, who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for House Republicans since McCarthy became House minority leader, previously told The Post that he would start fundraising for Johnson’s team.

But it’s unclear to what extent McCarthy will personally be involved with fundraising for the House GOP conference going forward. And concerns remain about whether Johnson will be able to re-create McCarthy’s fundraising juggernaut that helped win back the House in 2022 — and will be necessary for Republicans to retain power going into the 2024 election season. To date, McCarthy has funneled $35 million in direct contributions to the House GOP campaign effort since January and has sent a total of $23.8 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee and state parties this cycle.

Trump, meanwhile, has in part dragged down the party’s fundraising efforts as he maintains front-runner status in its presidential primary. The Post previously reported that big-dollar donors have cut back on issuing big checks to the NRCC in recent years because they did not want the money being used to help Trump.

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Learning


The Dems are not planning to "fight" by bending over backwards trying to be accommodating of a buncha crazed Berserker Republicans - not this time.

Because you can't do that with these assholes, and then expect to be accommodated in return.

They're assholes.

(pay wall)

Nonprofits With Ties to Democrats Plan Counteroffensive Against Congressional Investigations

The groups want to take pressure off the administration by pushing back in a more adversarial manner than President Biden’s team.

The Biden administration has added lawyers and communications staff members, while working with outside lawyers to prepare for an anticipated barrage of subpoenas.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times


WASHINGTON — With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, a loose network of groups allied with Democrats is planning a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive against an expected onslaught of oversight investigations into President Biden, his family and his administration.

The White House, which is building its own defense team, has quietly signaled support for some of the efforts by nonprofit groups with ties to some of the biggest donors in Democratic politics, according to people familiar with the groups.

The efforts appear intended to take pressure off the administration by pushing back in a more adversarial manner than Mr. Biden’s team on sensitive subjects, including the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the administration’s Covid response and — perhaps most notably — the foreign business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

“The White House cannot be the sole nucleus for publicly responding to the onslaught of congressional investigations,” reads a memo from a nonprofit group called Facts First USA that has been circulating among major Democratic donors, members of Congress and others.

It lays out a $5 million-a-year “SWAT team to counter Republican congressional investigations,” including on issues that “may be too personal or delicate for the White House to be responding or to even be seen as directing a response” — an apparent reference to Hunter Biden.

David Brock, the Democratic activist behind Facts First, said his group “intends to work with the White House where appropriate but will make our own judgments.”

Another group, the Congressional Integrity Project, announced Wednesday that it intended to launch a multimillion-dollar “war room” to undermine investigations from the Republican-led House. People involved in that initiative, which was first reported by Politico, have previously worked with Mr. Brock’s team and have close connections to the White House and the Democratic Party.

The political arm of the Center for American Progress, the influential progressive think tank, is planning to cast the Republican investigations as “politically motivated revenge politics,” according to its chief executive, Patrick Gaspard.

The rush by some of the left’s leading figures to mount responses underscores mounting concerns that Republicans could use their investigations to damage Mr. Biden and other Democrats headed into the 2024 presidential election. The scramble also highlights an old Washington dynamic: When there is divided government, lawmaking tends to grind to a halt and Congress is dominated by oversight fights.

That is likely to be particularly true when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives next year with a majority that is slimmer than the party had hoped. In such an environment, it can be easier to win support for oversight investigations, which require less consensus than major legislative initiatives.

The battles could be turbocharged by new outside groups like Facts First, which is funded by “dark money” from donors whose identities can be kept secret. The ongoing law enforcement inquiries into two figures who loom largest in the oversight investigations — Hunter Biden, who is under investigation for tax-related violations and other issues, and former President Donald J. Trump — add another layer of intensity to the fight.

Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday, even as he faces investigations related to his handling of classified materials, his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his business.

While some in the party blame him for disappointing results in this month’s midterm elections, his allies in Congress have indicated that they intend to use the oversight investigations to damage Mr. Biden and avenge Mr. Trump.

Many of the planned oversight investigations align closely with Mr. Trump’s grievances, including accusations of politically motivated Justice Department investigations into him, criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and border policies, and claims about the business dealings of Hunter Biden and other members of the president’s family.

House Republicans have been working closely for months with outside groups affiliated with Mr. Trump and funded by anonymous cash to plan for the oversight.

Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who is in line to become chairman of the Oversight Committee, and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is expected to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, planned to hold a news conference Thursday morning on “investigative actions.”

The White House declined to comment.

But it has been gearing up for the oversight battles ahead as well, by compiling research on Republican arguments and the members of Congress making them, including trawling deeply conservative corners of the internet to build out a rapid-response database, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The White House also added lawyers and communications staff members, while working with outside lawyers to prepare for an anticipated barrage of subpoenas, as well as possible efforts to impeach Mr. Biden. An administration official said that additional personnel would be added to handle the inquiries in the White House and the agencies under Republican scrutiny, including the Defense Department, the Education Department, the Health and Human Services Department, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department.

“Republicans are going to launch baseless broadsides against the White House,” Eric Schultz, who handled the Obama administration’s response to congressional oversight investigations, said in an interview. “They already have been. Holding them accountable for their own word as a measure of their credibility, that’s entirely fair game.”

Hunter Biden will be assisted in the congressional investigations by Joshua A. Levy, who previously represented the opposition research firm Fusion GPS when it became the target of Republican congressional investigations.

Mr. Levy declined to comment.

Hunter Biden himself has mostly stayed quiet as Republicans have worked to make him into a boogeyman.

It is a void that Mr. Brock and Kevin Morris, a close adviser to Hunter Biden, are preparing to fill.

Mr. Morris, a Hollywood lawyer who has been helping Hunter Biden with financial and legal support, offered to collaborate with the Facts First effort during a meeting in September in Los Angeles with Mr. Brock, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Morris has assembled a team of lawyers, computer forensic experts and public relations professionals, according to a person familiar with Mr. Morris’s plans. They have discussed plans to go on offense against allies of Mr. Trump who targeted Hunter Biden, including those who disseminated or highlighted a cache of files with embarrassing information that appears to have come from an abandoned laptop.

Mr. Brock has far more political experience than Mr. Morris, but he also has a track record of bare-knuckle tactics that have drawn criticism on both sides of the aisle.

Once a self-described “right-wing hit man,” Mr. Brock switched sides and became an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton, setting up a political action committee that coordinated with her 2016 presidential campaign to defend her against media scrutiny and attacks from rivals.

Over the last two decades, Mr. Brock built a network of nonprofit groups that are supported by some of the biggest donors on the left, and that play important roles in the Democratic Party’s ecosystem.

Mr. Brock is stepping away from his position as chairman of two of his main groups, Media Matters and American Bridge, to focus on Facts First USA, for which he will serve as president. It is in some ways modeled on the PAC he used to attack Mrs. Clinton’s rivals, and he left open the door to Facts First coordinating with the White House, the Democratic National Committee or other Democratic groups, including a potential Biden campaign, if the president declared for re-election.

“We’re an outside independent group,” he said, “and we hope that lots of people are willing to join the fight against Republican disinformation and conspiracy mongering, including the White House and all allied groups.”

His group, the Congressional Integrity Project and the White House seem aligned so far on one thing — targeting the Republicans driving the oversight.

Mr. Brock’s group and the White House are assembling research intended to cast Republicans involved in the oversight as hypocrites, pointing to those who defied subpoenas in the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Persuasion

"Once you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." --Teddy Roosevelt(?)

(as made famous by Dick Nixon's Chief Counsel Chuck Colson)


And btw, just cuz it's a natural thing don't make it a good thing for humans.

Thursday, May 09, 2019

Bad Ass Cassandra



Malcolm Nance, on Bob Cesca's Wednesday show

TRIGGER WARNING


We hear a lot of complaints about how the Dems aren't being forceful enough. While it's extremely frustrating to see it move slowly, we need to keep a coupla things in mind:

  • It's a process. We follow process in America. Without process, we're not America.
  • Dems own just one part out of the four component parts of our power structure. (one out of five if you include Republican control of a plurality of state governments)

There's no denying we're in a bad fix. We have to move and we have to move as boldly and as decisively as possible - but within the parameters of the law as much as is practicable.

So it's a major dilemma. Our strict adherence to process is the great strength of our form of government, but it's a strength that's being used against us right now by people who refuse to honor that process.

You should always try to get your adversary to fight in a place and at a time of your choosing, but when you can't do that - and you can't avoid the fight - then you have to go to where the fight is and work at shaping the battlefield from there.

It sure as hell doesn't look like we're winning much so far, but I think there's good reason to believe we're not exactly cooked either.

We're fighting from a position of relative weakness. We're outnumbered and out-gunned. But there's a few things to keep in mind.

First - Hillary had to run against Trump, and Bernie (and other 3rd parties), and The Press Poodles, and the enormous war chest funding of people with names like Koch and Mercer etc, and the full force of the Russian government - and she got 3 million more votes.

Second, George Washington went something like 3 and 9 - and we won that one.

Third, the USA went something like 25 and 2 - and we lost in Vietnam.

So if we can see this thing as an exercise in Asymmetric Warfare - and we put ourselves in the role of Insurgency - we can approach it with the understanding that the other side loses if they fail to win a decisive victory. 

We win by not losing.  We win just by surviving.

Monday, January 23, 2017

With Apologies To Mr Truman

Sarah Cooper - on psychological warfare:
“But reporters were clapping and laughing, they loved it.”  — a commenter defending Trump’s first press conference.
“But members of the CIA were clearly laughing at his jokes and clapping, so what he was saying couldn’t have been inappropriate.”  — CNN pundit defending Trump’s CIA speech where he talked about his war with the media, in front of a memorial to men and women who lost their lives in actual wars.
The clapping and laughing you hear in both instances are Trump’s own people. They are sycophants who he brings to cheer him on and make it seem like what he’s saying is being well-received. And it’s working.
The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you’re not, you start to question if maybe there’s something wrong with you for not getting it. You might even impulsively start laughing just to fit in, not because you think anything is funny. In fact that’s how these fluffers work — one person initiates a clap and suddenly everyone thinks there’s something to clap for. And then everyone is clapping. For no reason.
It's business and it's politics. It's the business of politics, and the merging of politics with business, wrapped in the flag and blessed by the church. The result is the institutionalized hyper-corruption-on-steroids called Fascism. In that system especially, if you wanna friend, buy a dog.

I won't be forgiving of willful ignorance. I won't be tolerant of Alternative Facts. I won't be quiet about it.

And while I'll always try not to be deliberately unkind to you, understand that I'll fail in that regard on occasion, because I won't treat you like a child by tiptoeing around your delicate sensibilities.

I'm really not trying to be an asshole about it - it just seems like too many people are trying to make it impossible for me not to be.

So put all of this under "Sorry-Not-Sorry-But".

If you come in here without a helmet,
you might leave with some brain damage.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Required Viewing


It's locked up pretty tight behind pay walls, but John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May is a mighty good thing to see now and again.

Lotta weird shit goes on most of the time, but now it seems the weird shit meter is about to peg in the red again.  

"...this threat from the far right is never very far from us."


$3.99 on Amazon Video

Saturday, December 12, 2015

I Done A Bad Bad Thing

I retweeted a Mock Paper Scissors thing, and I put a tag on it inviting the inference that there was something way more to the story than what it actually is, and that was a very shitty and Breitbart-ey thing for me to have done, and I apologize; and yes I'm really really really not sincere about that at all.  Fuck 'em.  Fuck 'em both.  Dig up Andrew Breitbart's dead moldy crumbling corpse, pack it in rancid lard and make Donald Trump wear it like a ski mask.



No red states and no blue states - just the United States of Fuck That Guy.

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Buh Bye


We'll hear a lot about the Midterm Massacre of 2014 - about how the Dems just didn't get the message quite right, and about how the Repubs got their ground game going again, and how angry voters rose up and begged the GOP to beat them all a bit harder because apparently we need to get our minds right and beatin' us is exactly the kind of incentive we need.  Yassa boss.

But here's the difference as I see it:  Repubs got real busy making it harder for people to vote, while the Dems were busy doing absolutely nothing to make their voters willing to fight thru it to get their votes counted.

Obama has put together a pretty decent record in spite of constant Repub obstruction.  So maybe a message like, "Things got better.  Imagine how much more we could do if we didn't have to fight The Recession and the GOP and DumFux News and the Press Poodles..."  instead of, "Vote for me because I'm not quite the asshole that other guy is".

And if you tho't the Obama Hate was bad before?
If you tho't the fuck-off-and-die economic policies were bad?
If you tho't shit can't really get a lot worse?
You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

I'm kinda done beating my head against this wall.  Y'all're on yer own.  I got shit to do.

Friday, October 10, 2014

The KrugMan Speaks

I haven't put up any of Paul Krugman's stuff for a while, mostly because it gets pretty dense and since I'm generally likely to go along with the conclusions he draws, it doesn't seem necessary for me to keep flacking it.  But that's kinda the problem - I'm convinced, and so I have what I think is a reasonable expectation for certain actions to follow; certain policies to be put forward and debated and eventually enacted.  

I understand that "the other side" is thinking the same way, but c'mon - amending the US Constitution to ban abortion and same-gender marriage?  Killing unions by force of law? Denying working people a living wage while funneling billions of tax dollars into corporate off-shore accounts?  Slashing Medicare and poverty bennies?  Turning Social Security into a cash cow for Wall Street?  Privatizing the water supplies?  Ya gotta be some kinda serious butt-plug radical dip-wad to call any of that "reasonable".

So anyway, here's Krugman in Rolling Stone, defending Obama - something I've been reluctant to do (not that RS has ever asked me - ahem).  But y'know what?  With all the time we spend bitchin' about Obama's Neo-Liberal bullshit, I still can't see how those other guys are anywhere near any kind of an improvement.
When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.
And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Heard Today

When the facts are with you, argue the facts.
When the facts are against you, argue the law.
When the facts and the law are against you, pound the table.

The Professional Left Podcast.