Quick Quote

Vanity Fair's TA Frank:

"...the latest from Republicans in Congress — a Dumpster of a health-care bill (so bad it’s not even worth setting on fire)..."

The rest of it's pretty good too - trying to talk us away from the logical extreme as we're trying to get 45* outa there before he crashes the whole system.

It's a bit Glenn Greenwald-ey, but we really do have to make sure we're following the rules.

WaPo Hangs In

It seems pretty weird, but WaPo is starting to do some real reporting all of a sudden.

In response to a question about his party’s plan to increase the cost of health insurance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) suggested that people should “invest in their own health care” instead of “getting that new iPhone.” He doubled-down on the point in a later interview: “People need to make a conscious choice, and I believe in self-reliance.” Of course, Chaffetz is wrong. But he isn’t alone.

While he has been met with justifiable derision for the comparison (Christopher Ingraham walked through the math for us, pointing out that a year’s worth of health care would equal 23 iPhone 7 Pluses in price), the claim he is making is hardly new. Chaffetz was articulating a commonly held belief that poverty in the United States is, by and large, the result of laziness, immorality and irresponsibility. If only people made better choices — if they worked harder, stayed in school, got married, didn’t have children they couldn’t afford, spent what money they had more wisely and saved more — then they wouldn’t be poor, or so the reasoning goes.

This insistence that people would not be poor if only they would try harder defines the thinking behind the signature welfare restructuring law of the Clinton era, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It’s the logic at the heart of efforts to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, to drug-test people collecting unemployment insurance or to forbid food stamp recipients to buy steak and lobster.

Since the invention of the mythic welfare queen in the 1960s, this has been the story we most reliably tell about why people are poor. Never mind that research from across the social sciences shows us, over and again, that it’s a lie. Never mind low wages or lack of jobs, the poor quality of too many schools, the dearth of marriageable males in poor black communities (thanks to a racialized criminal justice system and ongoing discrimination in the labor market), or the high cost of birth control and day care. Never mind the fact that the largest group of poor people in the United States are children. Never mind the grim reality that most American adults who are poor are not poor from lack of effort but despite it.

The reason poor people are poor has nothing to do with how they manage their money.

Poverty is not a moral deficiency.

Being poor enough to require assistance from government doesn't mean poor people like it where they are.

And and and

Stop blaming poverty on the poor.

It's Not Trumpism

45* is almost exactly the latest version of the dumbass empty vessel the GOP has been saying they want for at least 20 years now. So it's not Trumpism, and if we walk around using that term to describe what's going on, we allow the GOP to distance itself (again) from what they've created.

driftglass has been making the point forever.  Since Nixon, whenever we go along with the GOP's nutty idea du jour, it leads us into disaster, and as we pull ourselves up, suddenly there are no Repubs anywhere willing to admit they voted for the guy, or there's a concerted effort to revise history and canonize the prick, or we get "Yeah but he did some things the liberals like too".

Anyway. Washington Post put up a piece taking a look at the scam 45*'s running. It's a little hard to pat the Press Poodles on the head when they helped put this rolling clusterfuck in office, but maybe we're seeing a self-redemption thing now, so I want to acknowledge that.

WaPo:

The set of policy proposals and ideas loosely known as Trumpism goes something like this: President Trump is not an ideological fellow traveler of congressional Republicans on the economy, the safety net and immigration. Unlike Paul Ryan Republicans, he sees a robust government role in maintaining protections for the poor, sick and old; and he is much more willing than other Republicans to slam the brakes on immigration to protect blue collar whites from global forces that are making them feel culturally, economically and demographically destabilized.

But little by little, as Trump seeks to make good on his promises, Trumpism — as sold by the man himself — is being revealed as fraudulent to its core.

- and -

The split was obscured for years, because Republicans could call for repeal, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t happen. It is between two camps. There are conservatives (mostly in the House) who actually want repeal, because they don’t think the government should be spending and regulating to expand coverage to poor and sick people, and instead want free markets to fulfill this goal. And there are other Republicans (mostly senators and governors) who want to say they’re repealing Obamacare (since they’ve railed against it for years in the abstract) while actually minimizing just how much of the coverage expansion gets rolled back in their states. Trump is more or less in the second camp, since he doesn’t want to be the guy who kicks millions off insurance or shatter Trumpism’s aura of ideological heterodoxy.

Today's Tweet

The Republican health plan. pic.twitter.com/Ej3ZOhMou8

— avalanche engineer (@tristanreveur) March 7, 2017

A Question

It's been around, but it's worth repeating

Educated, well cared for kids
Healthcare insurance
Consumer protection
Sick leave
Equal pay
Clean water and air
Non-toxic meds & food
Safe workplace
Living wage & basic labor protections
Arts & Sciences endowments

If we can't afford any of those, what the fuck are we actually defending with that ginormous military?

Joe Biden

"If we undermine or destroy [the free press] we do it at our own peril."

Former VP Joe Biden has a powerful message about the media: pic.twitter.com/pzCckA5cpp

— Fusion (@Fusion) March 5, 2017

Podcast

There's no more haystack - only needles.

Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill



It's scary to find out that someone you don't even know exists can find out everything there is to know about you with a few clicks of his mouse.

That's a bit Sci-Fi for me right now, but the spooks are into some shit we'll prob'ly never hear about.  And that can make it more scary, but it's a good thing to remember that every new "age" has brought along it's own set of scary things, and we have to learn how adapt to them and/or otherwise deal with it so we can keep moving.

The last block with James Risen is a little less than fully convincing, but it does some good in educating me more about the balance between my right to know what my government's doing and the need for some secrets to stay secret - which will be a bone of contention for as long as we have politics.

You may have noticed I'm bouncing back and forth on most of it - that's what makes me like this kinda shit.

Anyway.

Sometimes awareness is your armor. Sometimes it's all you'll get. And sometimes it's enough.

Sweet dreams, kids. Hope you don't talk in your sleep.

One From driftglass

driftglass blog

Featured Pic

Duck Before You Drown

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

The folks at Camp Runamuck, and their auxiliary down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, have yet another present for those economically insecure folks who didn't want the lady to replace the black guy because Mexicans and ISIS and telling-it-like-it-is. And economic insecurity. You can die on the job now and not burden your boss with unnecessary paperwork. From The Washington Post:

In a narrow result that divided along party lines, the Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies. The measure to abolish it had already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote will be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it. A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers — meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.

Chipping away at the protections - the institutions that are there to help us push back.

Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

It's A Big Deal

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg:

The sitting president has accused his predecessor of an act that could have gotten the past president impeached. That’s not your ordinary exercise of free speech. If the accusation were true, and President Barack Obama ordered a warrantless wiretap of Donald Trump during the campaign, the scandal would be of Watergate-level proportions.

But if the allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.

I confess a degree of ignorance on this one. My initial reaction was that it's mostly just Trump being Trump, but Feldman makes a good point. Once you're inaugurated, the pivot to being the top guy - and behaving like the top guy - is necessary. You become not just the guy, but the office as well. And you have to step up to that higher standard.

45* is failing again.

Today's Tweet

Let's put the GOP in charge and be done with it - it's not like it'll make difference.

@owillis pic.twitter.com/I0wNLZb4aO

— Bad Hombre JP (@MeMySylvanEye) March 7, 2017

Info And Academics

Spark at CBC Radio: (I have a hard time getting the embed thing to work sometimes, so if you don't see anything in the space below, just follow the link)



Here's the only infographic I've been able to find so far. It's supposed to show how the websites interlock, which Albright hypothesizes is driven by analytics and the bots that grab little bits of info about where you go on the web and uses that info to feed similar info to you.

eg: Use Google to search for widgets and you'll see ads for widgets the next time you go to Facebook.

Or follow a link to Breitbart on your Twitter feed, and guess what's going to pop up as a Promoted Tweet when you go back. And then, you'll start getting links to other similar websites on Facebook, and before you know it, you're in a silo.

There's not a lot there that's brand spanking new, but now we're getting some research that begins to prove out the problems of confirmation bias and propaganda in the Information Age. 

The Guardian:

Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5 billion a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”

The sixth is from Yahoo Answers: “Why are Jews so evil?” The seventh result is: “Jews are demonic souls from a different world.” And the 10th is from jesus-is-saviour.com: “Judaism is Satanic!”

There’s one result in the 10 that offers a different point of view. It’s a link to a rather dense, scholarly book review from thetabletmag.com, a Jewish magazine, with the unfortunately misleading headline: “Why Literally Everybody In the World Hates Jews.”

I feel like I’ve fallen down a wormhole, entered some parallel universe where black is white, and good is bad. Though later, I think that perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it. It’s been there all the time, of course. Just a few keystrokes away… on our laptops, our tablets, our phones. This isn’t a secret Nazi cell lurking in the shadows. It’s hiding in plain sight.

 

Here It Comes

Grease up and bend over, America - the GOP's back in town.

The Hill:

The two committees will be working on the bills even though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not completed its analysis; as a result, estimates of the plan’s cost and how many people could lose coverage will not be immediately available.

Sources said previous versions of the plan faced unfavorable coverage numbers from the CBO.

The tax credit under the GOP plan ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a year per individual, increasing with someone’s age. That system would provide less financial assistance for low-income and older people than ­ObamaCare, but could give more assistance to younger people and those with somewhat higher incomes.

Democrats warn that between the phasing out of ­ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion and the smaller tax credit for poorer people, the 20 million people who gained coverage in recent years will be put at risk.

So let's see - the GOP has long contended that 47% of us don't pay federal taxes, so obviously, the best way to help us with this healthcare insurance thing is to give everybody a federal tax break.

Why do I always get the feeling that there's no vision or imagination in the GOP that isn't aimed at fucking us over in another attempt to advance a bogus economic theory, even when every one of those attempts turns out to be further proof that it doesn't fucking work?

And let's not lose sight of the high probability that guys like Ryan would engineer the "collapse" of Obamacare as a political maneuver just so they could use it to bully their way thru with this new bullshit plan (which is nothing new at all).

1. Fuck it up
2. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up"
3. Sell your ideology-driven bullshit as the only solution that can possibly help
4. Collect campaign contributions from the cronies who get richer from that solution
5. Enjoy our re-election
6. Find something else you can "fix" and start again at step 1

Today's Tweet

"Holy fuck, I'm lucky to be alive!" - Every patient operated on by Ben Carson.

— David Hines (@dbh1ne2) March 6, 2017

Today's Pix

Some Questions

In case you're among the folks who support the idea that federal  funds shouldn't go to states supporting "Sanctuary Cities", I need to know 2 things.

First, where do think that money comes from in the first place?

Second, how did you get to be as old as you are without knowing one goddamned thing about how this joint works?

OK, 3 things: What the fuck is wrong with you?

Mr Agrievement

Some points to keep in mind:

• Every accusation is a confession
• Every time he warns of dire consequences, he's making a statement of his goals

It's become pretty much the Republican Way - they're installing this top-down Daddy State authoritarianism as their operating system.  They want the government to be run more like a business because rules are for chumps and losers and cucks. Eat or be eaten. Killers are the ones who prevail. Fuck your due process. Muscle, force, dominance - it's the only thing that matters. So don't worry your pretty little head, Daddy will protect you - even if he has to protect you to death.

He was complaining about - and warning about - organized crime. And gee golly, now it would seem he's pretty mobbed up.

Also, it looks a lot like he was trying to wield the power of government to beat down on his competition.  He tries to sell it as leveling the playing field, but the field has been tilted in his favor since forever, so we've got a guy in a position of privilege and power bitchin' about what a poor defenseless victim he is - as always - and blaming people who just want a square deal for everybody. Playing the Opposites Game.

Newsweek: (updated piece from Fall 2016)

Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.

No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, were sucking up to criminals.

- and -

As Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, other casino magnates were striking management agreements with them. Trump knew the business was there even when he was testifying; despite denying under oath that he had ever tried to arrange deals with Indian casinos, he had done just that a few months earlier, according to an affidavit from Richard Milanovich, the official from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians who met with Trump, letters from the Trump Organization and phone records. The deal for the Agua Caliente casino instead went to Caesars World. (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.) And in his purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, Trump alienated politicians from around the country, including some who had the power to influence construction contracts—problems that could have been avoided if he had simply read his prepared speech rather than ad-libbing.

Lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions and indifference to investors—Trump’s business career is a long, long list of such troubles, according to regulatory, corporate and court records, as well as sworn testimony and government investigative reports. Call it the art of the bad deal, one created by the arrogance and recklessness of a businessman whose main talent is self-promotion.

- and -

Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields. Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is Daddy-made. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father.

The thing that sticks for me is that 45* has spent his whole life failing up. Because he was born into a network of the kind of people who are (eg) regular attendees at Davos, there's always somebody to bail him out, or the next bunch of suckers who can be talked into thinking he'll owe them something big if they prop him up, or some Coin-Operated Politician who can't resist the chance to play at a level he's only dreamed about - or whatever.

Anyway, he's acting like there's still some headroom for him - that he can bomb out in the White House, and get to another higher destination.

That one really scares me.

Now maybe it's just that he's Russkied up to the extent he seems to be, but if we don't get a good look at his tax and finance documents, we don't ever get to know.

PS) I wondered if a FISA warrant could've been aimed at some IRS records instead of signal surveillance, so I looked it up. Turns out the government can do that, but only if it's aimed at something owned or controlled entirely by a foreign entity, and I don't think even Obama's lawyers are clever enough to stretch it to 45*'s tax records. Damn.

Pushing Back

There's a bunch of unprecedented shit flying around, and I think we all know the 45 administration is the asshole it's flying out of.

One of the big ones for me is the fact that we won't be seeing Obama retire quietly to some nice joint on Lake Shore Drive.  He intends to stay in the fight, and that's not just unheard of for a former POTUS, it's a strong indicator that Obama and his crew know something's really going wrong and they're gearing up to countervail it as best they can.

Politico:

"President Obama has said repeatedly that his lawyers deserve a lot of credit for helping his Administration go eight years without a major scandal,” said Danielle Gray, one of Obama’s former secretaries of the Cabinet. “The leaders of this effort will bring that experience to protecting and preserving accountable and democratic government.”

Bassin “has managed to gain the support of a lot of very serious people,” said Karen Dunn, another former associate White House counsel best known for helping run debate prep for Obama and Hillary Clinton, and called her former colleague the “perfect person for this particular organization at this particular moment.”

“It’s really important for a bunch of people to shine the light on this question, to make very clear when autocrats are starting in any way to detract from democratic institutions,” said Yascha Mounk, a Harvard Law lecturer who specializes in the rise of authoritarianism and has been having high level strategic advisory conversations with the group.

But it’s more than just the smaller encroachments that are on Bassin’s mind. Trump’s attack on the judge who halted his immigration ban already has him building a plan for what might happen if the White House directly defies a judicial ruling, and what they’d need to do in the potential constitutional crisis that would follow. Existing nonprofits, he said, have not been structured to deal with the kind of unprecedented, norm-breaking threats that he believes are coming from Trump and his aides.

“We need an organization that is specifically and holistically focused on that worst-case scenario,” Bassin said.

 

Nothing Sucks More

Scott Dworkin's analysis of the Dossier

Go look - this is a tiny little taste: