Trump 27: Happy Holidays Orange Menace

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Okay, so is he going to let these 'great Iranian people' into our country if life is so bad for them at home? And when is he going to stop blaming Obama?  He has been in office or almost a year now, and he hasn't 'fixed' everything?

He seems to be working himself into a frenzy. Soon, every past President will be "BAD, VERY BAD" and he will be the world's only salvation. I think the popularity polls are eating at him so he's having to work extra hard to spin gold out of that dead ferret on his head.

[apple1]

He seems to have a very limited vocabulary, and most of his words are 3 or 4 letters.

My first-grade granddaughter has a bigger vocabulary. Seriously.

[fraurosena]

How... predictable.

Trump’s Pick to Run 2020 Census Has Defended Racial Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Laws

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In June 2011, the North Carolina legislature hired Thomas Brunell, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Dallas, to produce a report that would help defend the state’s new redistricting maps. The maps, approved by the Republican-controlled legislature, concentrated black voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe Republican districts. Under the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina had to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes, and so it asked Brunell to provide a justification for the maps.

Brunell argued that clustering black voters into a few districts was necessary to maintain their political influence. Though North Carolina was a racially integrated swing state, where black officials represented majority-white districts and vice versa, Brunell’s report found “there is clear evidence for the presence of statistically significant racially polarized voting” in North Carolina, necessitating majority-black districts. When the maps were challenged in court, state Republicans paid Brunell $300 an hour for research and $500 an hour for testimony as an expert witness.

The strategy worked—for a time. With the new maps in effect, Republicans controlled 10 of the state’s 13 congressional districts after the 2014 election and had a supermajority in the legislature. But in 2017, federal courts struck down two of North Carolina’s congressional districts and 28 state legislative districts, calling the state maps “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.” A unanimous three-judge court in North Carolina said Brunell’s “generalized conclusions regarding racially polarized voting” demonstrated a “misunderstanding” of the Voting Rights Act and “fail to demonstrate a strong basis in evidence justifying the challenged districts as drawn.”

According to multiple reports, Brunell will be appointed deputy director of the US Census Bureau and de facto leader of the 2020 census, which is constitutionally mandated to count every person in America. The census determines the level of representation for state and federal districts, and how $600 billion in federal funding is allocated to states and localities. (In addition to Brunell, the Trump administration has hired Kevin Quinley, a former research director for Kellyanne Conway’s polling firm whose clients included Breitbart News, as a special adviser to the Census Bureau.)

The deputy director of the Census Bureau has historically been a nonpartisan career civil servant. Brunell, a registered Republican, has no prior government experience and a deeply partisan background. He has testified or produced expert reports for Republicans in more than a dozen redistricting cases and has defended new voting restrictions passed by Republicans. His 2008 book, Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America, argued that extreme partisan gerrymandering should be the norm because, he claimed, ultra-safe blue or red districts offered better representation for voters than competitive ones.

The census, conducted every 10 years, forms the basis for redistricting, and its detailed demographic data is used to implement the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws. Voting rights lawyers and longtime observers of the census worry that instead of committing to accurately count every American, Brunell and the Trump administration will use the 2020 census to concentrate power, representation, and economic resources in Republican hands. “He would be a terrible, terrible person to be running the census,” says Allison Riggs, an attorney for the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which challenged the North Carolina maps in court. “In part because he has absolutely no qualifications to do so, but also because he’s a rank-and-file ideologue.” (Brunell did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

“It’s breathtaking to think they’re going to make that person responsible for the census,” says former Attorney General Eric Holder. “It’s a sign of what the Trump administration intends to do with the census, which is not to take a Constitutional responsibility with the degree of seriousness that they should. It would raise great fears that you would have a very partisan census run in 2020.”

Democrats in Congress have also raised concerns about Brunell’s appointment. “Dr. Brunell has neither the managerial experience nor the non-partisan reputation to fill this position,” Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) wrote to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on December 21. (The Census Bureau is part of the Commerce Department.) “The appointment of Dr. Brunell would be a significant departure from past practices and would further undermine the Census Bureau’s efforts to increase public trust in the Census. It would also raise questions about the Administration’s intent to comply with the constitutionally mandated requirement to complete an accurate count of the U.S. population.” 

Brunell first became acquainted with the census when he was awarded a nine-month congressional fellowship with the American Political Science Association that placed him in the office of the House Subcommittee on the Census in the run-up to the 2000 census. The Census Bureau had failed to count around 8 to 10 million people during the 1990 census—those who didn’t return the form or respond to canvassers at their homes. It proposed statistically adjusting its data in 2000 for a more accurate count, particularly of minority communities that were more likely to be missed. That prompted a furious response from Republicans like Newt Gingrich, who called it “a dagger aimed at the heart of the Republican majority.” Gingrich sued and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won after the court ruled the Census Bureau didn’t have the authority to adjust its data for redistricting purposes.

Brunell worked on the census subcommittee under Tom Hofeller, the Republicans’ go-to redistricting expert, who led the opposition to adjusting the census. “A census that uses sampling and statistical adjustment will be the biggest victory for big government liberalism since the enactment of the Great Society,” he wrote in a memo to Republicans. “These statistical techniques will be used to add millions of ‘virtual people’ to big city population centers, thus increasing the political power and levels of federal program funding in these jurisdictions.” 

Hofeller and Brunell were reunited during the 2010 redistricting cycle, when Hofeller, as redistricting consultant for the Republican National Committee, drew maps for Republicans in North Carolina and other states. Roughly half a dozen states hired Brunell as an expert witness to defend those maps. Republicans adopted North Carolina’s strategy throughout the South, isolating black voters in heavily minority districts in order to secure as many Republican seats as possible. Brunell was hired by Republicans in at least three states—Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia—where courts subsequently invalidated the maps as racial gerrymandering.

In Virginia, Republicans added 44,000 black voters from four different congressional districts to the Third District, represented by Bobby Scott, a black Democrat who’d been easily reelected in the already majority-black district. “Race played a role in drawing the Third Congressional District, but did not predominate,” Brunell wrote in his expert report for the state, saying it was “rather absurd” to argue the district was packed with black voters.

In a rebuttal for the plaintiffs, Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, wrote, “Dr. Brunell believes that it is impossible for any plaintiff to sustain a racial gerrymandering claim.” He cited Brunell’s testimony at another redistricting trial in South Carolina, where Brunell said proving a racial gerrymander “from the outset is almost impossible” and “there’s really no good way of knowing this.”

“In short, Dr. Brunell’s conclusion is preordained,” McDonald wrote. “In his own words, there is no evidence that he would ever agree with that shows race predominated in the creation of a redistricting plan. His expert report is therefore not credible, since he has not fairly weighed the evidence in this case to arrive at his opinion.”

McDonald says that after his rebuttal, Brunell became “suddenly unavailable” and withdrew as an expert in the case, taking a visiting fellowship at a university in Australia. Brunell does not list the Virginia report on his CV. A federal court found that “race was the legislature’s paramount concern” in drawing the Third District and ordered it redrawn.

n his 2008 book, Brunell admitted that he was making a “provocative argument” by saying that extreme gerrymandering was preferable to swing districts. “Rather than drawing 50-50 districts, we should be drawing districts that are overwhelmingly comprised of one party or the other (80-20 or even 90-10) to whatever extent possible,” he wrote, because that “substantially increases the number of voters who will be both happier with their representative and better served by this representative.” The book’s front cover featured an endorsement from former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who wrote, “Brunell provocatively challenges conventional thinking about representation and political satisfaction.”

Republicans in the Ohio legislature hired Brunell as an expert witness after the Ohio NAACP challenged the repeal of the first week of early voting in 2014, when 80,000 Ohioans voted in 2012 and African Americans were five times likelier than whites to cast a ballot. “People who want to vote will vote,” Brunell wrote in a report for the legislature. “A marginal reduction in the cost of voting does not inspire thousands of would-be non-voters to cast a ballot. Moreover, early voting diminishes the effect of Election Day as a civil event, which causes some folks who intend on voting to procrastinate so long that they forget to vote altogether.” 

Daniel Smith, an expert on early voting at the University of Florida, wrote a rebuttal to Brunell for the Ohio NAACP and its fellow plaintiffs. “This is an unsubstantiated claim,” he wrote. “Dr. Brunell provides no empirical evidence from states where early voting opportunities have been eliminated to support his assertion that these ‘voters will adapt and show up on another early voting day,’ nor does he cite any scholarly literature suggesting that we should expect this to be the case in Ohio.” 

Even before Brunell’s appointment, the 2020 census was facing a “perfect storm” of problems, says Terri Ann Lowenthal, the former staff director to the House census subcommittee. The head of the Census Bureau resigned in June, and the Trump administration has yet to name a permanent replacement, which would make Brunell its de facto head. (Even with a director in place, the deputy typically runs the decennial census.) The bureau’s funding has been cut dramatically. Dress rehearsals scheduled for this year to prepare for 2020 were canceled in Puerto Rico and on Native American reservations in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington because of a lack of funds. And the next census will rely much more on online responses and less on traditional door-to-door canvassing, potentially leading to dramatic undercounts of certain communities that are less likely to have reliable internet access and more likely to live in neglected areas that can only be reached through concerted in-person canvassing.

The 2010 census failed to count 2.1 percent of African Americans, 1.5 percent of Hispanics, and 4.9 percent of Native Americans living on reservations, while overcounting whites by nearly 1 percent. These errors gave Republican areas more power, representation, and resources than they deserved, and gave Democratic ones less. In California, for example, the census failed to count 1.5 million residents, costing the state $1.7 billion in annual federal funding and depriving it of at least one congressional district.

This undercount of Democratic and minority areas is likely to be much worse in 2020 than in previous years because of budget cuts, a reliance on internet responses, and fears among undocumented immigrants that the Census Bureau will share their personal information with the Department of Homeland Security to initiate deportation proceedings. A draft executive order by the Trump administration proposed adding a question about US citizenship to the census form, which would dramatically depress responses among immigrant communities. In December, the Justice Department wrote to the Census Bureau and requested that such a citizenship question be added.

In the past, Brunell has argued that the census is an inherently political process. “The Census cannot be made antiseptic and apolitical and suggestions for making it so are misguided,” he wrote in a 2001 journal article. “It would be like taking the wax out of crayons. It can’t be done.”

The census begins on April 1, 2020. If it’s done wrong, there are no do-overs until 2030.

9

Democracy? What's that? Everyone has an equal say? Surely, you jest!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s lawyer is a specialist in securing preemptive pardons"

Spoiler

John Dowd, who says he ghostwrote President Trump’s incriminating tweet about firing Michael Flynn and argues that the president cannot commit obstruction of justice, appeared to be a man enjoying retirement when I visited him at his home in February. We chatted for a couple of hours that day in the sunroom of his rancher in Northern Virginia about brawls back before the turn of the century — among them his investigation for Major League Baseball of Pete Rose, his counsel to John McCain during the Keating Five scandal and his marathon defense of former Arizona governor Fife Symington, a sprawling federal fraud case that ended when Dowd helped Symington become the fourth person in U.S. history to receive a preemptive presidential pardon. After Richard Nixon, Symington is the only one to receive such a pardon while facing no criminal charges. Dowd replayed some of his greatest hits with bravado, wit and more than one f-bomb, but he is 76 and seemed content to be looking back and taking stock.

So I was surprised to hear that Trump added Dowd to his personal legal team in the summer. At the time, Dowd was a relative unknown to the current generation of political operatives. Even for boomers, I’d found during my research for a book about Symington, recognition usually took the form of I think I remember that guy.

But as the Russia investigation unfolds, Dowd’s new job makes more and more sense. Soon after Dowd became a Trump adviser, the president reportedly asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and himself. Dowd called that report “nonsense.” The president’s lawyers are cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on behalf of the president, he said. But the next day, Trump bragged on Twitter that he had “the complete power to pardon.” In the fall, he went further, arguing that the president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer.

If anyone knows the near boundless powers of the president to pardon his fellow Americans — and his friends and family — it’s Dowd. Dowd and his partner in the Symington case are the only attorneys to ever successfully earn a get-out-of-jail-free-before-you-even-go-to-jail card for a client who didn’t work with the president. (President Gerald Ford pardoned his old boss, Richard Nixon, and George H.W. Bush pardoned Iran-contra operatives Caspar Weinberger and Duane Clarridge.) This credential could come in awfully handy as the Justice Department’s probe, led by Mueller, picks up steam. If the president wanted to preemptively pardon Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner or anyone else in his orbit, Dowd is the man who knows how to do it.

In the early 1990s, Symington was a rising star in the Republican Party. The great-grandson of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick had built an impressive portfolio of commercial real estate properties in Phoenix before getting elected governor of Arizona as a moderate, tax-cutting Republican.

The period around Symington’s campaign in 1990 was the pinnacle of the nationwide savings-and-loan crisis that saw hundreds of the cooperative banks close. Symington had served on the board of Southwest Savings and Loan in Arizona from 1972 to 1984. In 1989, the Resolution Trust Corp., set up that year to resolve the spreading crisis, began an investigation of Southwest Savings, a probe that morphed into a deep dive into Symington’s personal finances. In 1996, during Symington’s second term, he was indicted on 23 felony counts of extortion, making false financial statements and wire fraud. Dowd and his partner, Terry Lynam, represented him in a 17-week trial the next year, after which a jury convicted Symington on seven counts.

But, on appeal, Symington’s lawyers held that a juror had been improperly dismissed for her refusal to deliberate (she felt sure Symington was innocent). The circuit court agreed; the three-judge panel overturned Symington’s felonies and sent the case back for retrial.

The retrial never happened. On Jan. 20, 2001, in one of his final acts as president, Bill Clinton pardoned Symington.

Symington certainly had an inside track to Clinton’s favor, and not just because both men were former governors and targets of real estate-based financial scandals. Symington had saved Clinton from drowning during a Hyannis Port beach vacation in 1967.

According to Tommy Caplan, a mutual friend of the men, Symington had asked him to find out whether Clinton would be open to a pardon. Caplan approached Clinton at a White House Christmas party and Clinton gave an enthusiastic go-ahead to apply via the White House Counsel’s Office. That’s when Symington called Dowd. On Dec. 22, 2000, Dowd hand-delivered the petition and several supporting affidavits of character directly to a Clinton staffer at the northwest gate of the White House.

The petition itself looked like a typical government form. Under the heading “Petition for Pardon After Completion of Sentence” (there isn’t even a form for a preemptive pardon), it asked for the applicant’s name, date of birth, location of birth, height, hair color and the like. Then Symington was asked to list the charges on which he or she was convicted. Dowd and Lynam noted that the case didn’t fit the standard form: “Petitioner’s conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeals. The pardon is sought for all charges for which he could be retried.”

There followed a “Summary Of Offenses For Which A Pardon Is Sought,” plus a questionnaire. Had the petitioner committed any crimes? (No.) Had he served in the military? (Symington had received a Bronze Star during Vietnam.) Had he attended school since his offense? (He attended culinary school in Scottsdale soon after his conviction, which he did mainly to land a kitchen job if he was sent to federal prison.)

Under “Reasons for Seeking a Pardon,” Symington, Dowd and Lynam crafted a two-page argument for why the case against Symington had been flawed, arguably politically motivated and why Symington — forced to resign with his reputation and finances in tatters — had already suffered enough. Affidavits from Caplan, Dowd and three longtime staffers and friends of Symington rounded out the application.

Once Dowd filed it, he and his client waited. Clinton’s clock was winding down. “It seemed like nothing was going to happen,” Symington told me. Finally, on the morning of George W. Bush’s inauguration, Symington received a call while eating breakfast with friends in a Phoenix restaurant. It was his father, himself a longtime conservative political figure, saying he had seen the news of his son’s pardon on Fox News.

Dowd had helped guide his client to freedom down a path that arguably was unique in American history.

That path is again relevant, and Dowd is in a position to reprise it. From inside the White House, one need not be a gifted debater or legal scholar to manage presidential passes and blanket absolutions. His new client wasn’t far off when he said, “all agree the U.S. president has the complete power to pardon.” The Constitution says the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardon for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Reached this weekend, the White House did not answer a request for Dowd to comment on this story.

Although Clinton came under intense criticism for his pardoning of Symington and 395 others, he was far from the most prolific presidential pardoner, according to data from the Justice Department. Franklin Roosevelt pardoned 2,819 people, more than the last seven presidents combined. George H.W. Bush was by far the stingiest, with 74 pardons. Obama pardoned 212, George W. Bush pardoned 189. Pardons can be given for any reason or no reason, and they have been dispensed (as in the Symington case) without traditional input from Justice.

So far, besides his Thanksgiving pardons to two turkeys, Trump has dispensed just one pardon. That went to the controversial former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of court for failing to follow an order to stop racially profiling Latinos. Citing the Constitution and centuries of legal precedent, most legal scholars agree there is one person Trump probably can’t pardon, at least without a firestorm of legal challenges and perhaps crippling political fallout: himself.

How much do you want to bet that Dowd has already drawn up the paperwork for pardons for Junior, Ivanka, Jared, and maybe Pencey?

[fraurosena]

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

How much do you want to bet that Dowd has already drawn up the paperwork for pardons for Junior, Ivanka, Jared, and maybe Pencey?

Yep, I'm pretty sure those pardons only need the presiduncial signature. Too bad for them it won't help them with all those state-level criminal charges, eh? 

[fraurosena]

Corruption. Pure and simple. But nobody's going to do a damn thing about it because those that should are corrupt themselves. What a sad state of affairs for a country that used to pride itself on being a shining beacon on the hill.

Foreign governments are finding ways to do favors for Trump’s business

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In Indonesia, a local government plans to build a road to shorten the drive between the main airport on the island of Bali and the new high-end Trump resort and golf course.

In Panama, the country’s federal government intervened to ensure a sewer system around a 70-story Trump skyscraper shaped like a sail in Panama City would be completed.

And in other countries, governments have donated public land, approved permits and eased environmental regulations for Trump-branded developments, creating a slew of potential conflicts as foreign leaders make investments that can be seen as gifts or attempts to gain access to the American president through his sprawling business empire.

The White House dismisses these concerns, as does the Trump Organization’s attorney. But when foreign governments that provide gifts to the Trump Organization, even those that benefit other businesses, it puts President Donald Trump in possible violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause that states officials may not accept gifts from foreign governments and that no benefit should be derived by holding office.

“If you have a foreign government providing a benefit to the Trump company that is going to violate emoluments clause of the Constitution,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Quite simply, Bookbinder and other ethics experts say, a gift to the Trump Organization is a gift to the president of the United States.

At least half a dozen groups have been researching Trump’s foreign businesses, including CREW, Public Citizen and the left-leaning Center for American Progress. But few beyond American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic opposition research group, have examined what foreign governments have given the Trump Organization overseas. The organizations say it’s difficult to determine what is being given because foreign governments often don’t have databases and information publicly available, they have different political and regulatory cultures and their workers might not speak English.

Some of those same groups are involved in several lawsuits accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clause in other ways. In December, a federal judge dismissed two such lawsuits because those suing did not show how they were harmed, arguing Congress and not the courts should look into the president’s conduct.

Yet watchdog groups accuse Trump of violating the law in big and small ways in many of the nearly two dozens countries that his family business has developments, including Uruguay, India and the Philippines.

In Indonesia, where Trump is constructing two projects, Bali’s government plans to build a toll road to cut the time it takes to get from the airport to the six-star Trump International Hotel and Tower Bali roughly in half. The project, which will include an 18-hole golf course designed by golf great Phil Mickelson, will be located next to a sacred Hindu temple and overlooking the Indian Ocean.

“According to the local Government’s master plan, there is now a plan to develop a toll road extension that will shorten the distance between the Ngurah Rai International Airport and MNC Bali Resort,” according to the 2016 annual report by the developer MNC Land, Trump’s partner. “When the work is completed, the travel time from the airport to MNC Bali Resort or vice versa will only be about 25 minutes.”

An Indonesian state-owned firm, PT Waskita Karya Tbk, is building another toll road at a second Trump project in the country, Lido City, that includes a Disney-like theme park and a golf course but the developer, also MNC Land, expects to pay for construction, according to news reports. That road will reduce hours-long travel time from Jakarta to 60 minutes, according to a press release. MNC’s annual report boasts its development will be “within easy reach from Jakarta.”

In Panama, the government has stepped in to finish sewer and water pipes that would benefit the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower after the company that received the contract went bankrupt, according to Sarah Chayes, senior fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peacewho researched Trump developments as part of a brief filed in an emoluments lawsuit.

An investigation by the organization Global Witness in November accused Trump of making millions of dollars by allowing Colombian drug cartels and others to launder money through his Panama development, which includes condos, a casino and stunning views of the Pacific Ocean. It was Trump’s first international hotel development when it opened in 2011.

An attorney for the Trump Organization said the president’s business empire receives no benefit from these foreign government expenditures. “Because the developments you are referring to are all license deals owned and developed by others, any improvements made to the local infrastructure provide no benefit to the Trump Organization or any of its affiliates,” said Alan Garten, executive vice president and general counsel for the Trump Organization.

While in most cases, the Trump Organization does not own the overseas developments, it earns money by licensing its name and managing the properties.

And its payout is likely tied to the development’s success. For example, the business earned royalties between $1 million and $5 million in Bali and between $100,000 and $1 million in Panama City while the Panama City management fees came to $800,000 in 2016 and the early months of 2017, according to financial disclosure statements filed with the federal government in June.

MNC and representatives of the Indonesian and Panamanian governments did not respond to questions.

Chayes, a former adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, argues that emoluments clause violations can be much broader than just infrastructure improvements and include benefits such as donated public land, approved permits and eased regulations, which is occurring in every country Trump has a development.

>Cheetolini tweet<

Trump, for example, applied for new trademarks for a variety of businesses from hotels to apparel in China in June 2016 when he was a presidential candidate. They were granted in the weeks after he became president.

Robert Weissman, president of the watchdog group Public Citizen said Trump’s decision to retain his business meant he would have numerous conflicts of interests. “That’s why he shouldn’t have holdings,” he said.

Trump did not fully separate from his business interests when he was sworn in as president. Instead he placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his “exclusive benefit,” which he can receive at any time. He also retains the authority to revoke the trust.

The Trump Organization announced it would not be involved in new foreign deals or transactions with a foreign entity — country, agency, official, sovereign wealth fund or member of a royal family — other than “normal and customary arrangements” made before inauguration. It withdrew from some foreign projects but kept others.

McClatchy has reported that a construction company owned by the Chinese government was awarded a contract to build a road as part of the residential piece of a Dubai development and that a construction company owned in part by the governments of Saudi Arabia and South Korea expects to build the Lido City development.

In December, Trump downplayed potential conflicts of interests with his business. “It’s not a big deal — you people are making it a big deal, the business...” he told reporters at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. “They all knew I had big business all over the place.”

3

 

Wow, he managed to cram a lot of accusations in a single presiduncial tweet.

1. Hillary
2. Huma Abedin
3. Justice Department
4. Comey
5. & others 

No mention of his son-in-law and daughter using private email servers while in the WH.

The hypocrisy is... well, unsurprising, really.

[fraurosena]

Of course, he's taking credit for something he has had absolutely no influence on whatsoever... what else is new?

 

[fraurosena]

After more than a week of golfing, he's back to his regular day job of tweeting idiocy.

After that short period of respite, I guess the universe thought our eyes were in need of some exercise again. 

[Howl]

From the Mother Jones article posted above by @fraurosena

 

Quote

“A census that uses sampling and statistical adjustment will be the biggest victory for big government liberalism since the enactment of the Great Society."

Let's briefly enumerate some legislative achievements of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, from a  2014 WaPo article, on the 50th birthday of the Great Society:  Evaluating the success of the Great Society  There were some failures, sure, but the successes are key. 

Quote

Most of the Great Society’s achievements came during the 89th Congress, which lasted from January 1965 to January 1967, and is considered by many to be the most productive legislative session in American history. Johnson prodded Congress to churn out nearly 200 new laws launching civil rights protections; Medicare and Medicaid; food stamps; urban renewal; the first broad federal investment in elementary and high school education; Head Start and college aid; an end to what was essentially a whites-only immigration policy; landmark consumer safety and environmental regulations; funding that gave voice to community action groups; and an all-out War on Poverty.

For those of you reading this who were not yet born when Civil Rights legislation was enacted , it's hard to fathom the ugliness, brutality and extent of segregation in this country and the extent of grinding poverty among both blacks and whites.  A relative was a social worker in the south during this time, and yes, there were many malnourished children who did not have shoes and wore dresses made out of flour sacks. 

That the Republican party is trying to turn back the clock on any progressive legislation that has helped U.S. citizens live better, more productive lives since the 1930s (Social Security) is simply horrifying.  WTAF are they thinking?  Social security and MediCare are part of my life now, and I don't know where I'd be without either.  And for those who are a long, long way from the benefits of either program,  MediCare is not free; there's a monthly premium, but I'm not at the mercy of insurance companies. I love it. 

Also, related, kind of.

Throughout my life, I've learned to fear unfettered corporate greed.  One should fear that far more than government regulatory "overreach" or the nanny state.  For heaven's sakes, legislation to control monopolies goes back to the 1890s.  The current Republican agenda seems desperate to relive the era of Robber Barons, most recently manifested in the death of Net Neutrality. 

And a book recommendation, a memoir about growing up black in the 1950s in segregated Bryan, Texas: Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because he does everything bigly: "President Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims over 347 days"

Spoiler

With just 18 days before President Trump completes his first year as president, he is now on track to exceed 2,000 false or misleading claims, according to our database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.

As of Monday, the total stood at 1,950 claims in 347 days, or an average of 5.6 claims a day. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.)

As regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. There are now more than 60 claims that he has repeated three or more times. The president’s impromptu 30-minute interview with the New York Times over the holidays, in which he made at least 24 false or misleading claims, included many statements that we have previously fact-checked.

We currently have a tie for Trump’s most repeated claims, both made 61 times. Both of these claims date from the start of Trump’s presidency and to a large extent have faded as talking points.

One of these claims was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Indeed, healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised health-care experts. Trump used to say this a lot, but he’s quieted down since his efforts to repeal the law flopped.

Trump also repeatedly takes credit for events or business decisions that happened before he took the oath of office — or had even been elected. Sixty-one times, he has touted that he secured business investments and job announcements that had been previously announced and could easily be found with a Google search.

With the successful push in Congress to pass a tax plan, two of Trump’s favorite talking points about taxes — that the tax plan will be the biggest tax cut in U.S. history and that the United States is one of the highest-taxed nations — have rapidly moved up the list.

Trump repeated the falsehood about having the biggest tax cut 53 times, even though Treasury Department data shows it would rank eighth. And 58 times Trump has claimed that the United States pays the highest corporate taxes (25 times) or that it is one of the highest-taxed nations (33 times). The latter is false; the former is misleading, as the effective U.S. corporate tax rate (what companies end up paying after deductions and benefits) ends up being lower than the statutory tax rate.

We also track the president’s flip-flops on our list, as they are so glaring. He spent the 2016 campaign telling supporters that the unemployment rate was really 42 percent and the official statistics were phony; now, on 46 occasions he has hailed the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years. It was already very low when he was elected — 4.6 percent, the lowest in a decade — so his failure to acknowledge that is misleading.

An astonishing 85 times, Trump has celebrated a rise in the stock market — even though in the campaign he repeatedly said it was a “bubble” that was ready to crash as soon as the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. Well, the Fed has raised rates three times since the election — and yet the stock market has not plunged as Trump predicted. It has continued a rise in stock prices that began under President Barack Obama in 2009. Again, Trump has never explained his shift in position on the stock market.

Moreover, the U.S. stock-market rise in 2017 was not unique and mirrored a global rise in equities. When looking at the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, it’s clear U.S. stocks haven’t rallied as robustly as their foreign equivalents. Yet Trump loves this claim so much that he has repeated it 28 times in the 49 days since our last update — more often than every other day.

We maintain the database by closely reading or watching Trump’s myriad public appearances and television and radio interviews. The interviews are especially hard to keep up with, in part because the White House does not routinely post on them on its website. In fact, a recent redesign of the White House website appears to make it difficult to find transcripts of Trump’s remarks at the White House.

This project originally started as a first-100-days database, but by popular demand we extended it to one year. We will soon face a decision about whether to maintain it beyond one year, even though it strains the resources (and weekends) of our staff. In at least one instance, the database was used for academic analysis. We welcome thoughts from readers about whether it remains a worthwhile endeavor.

 

[47of74]

I see fuck face is complaining about the Justice Department, Comey, and Clinton's aide again;

Quote

President Trump on Tuesday suggested the Department of Justice “must finally act?” to investigate longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department last week released emails belonging to her, including some marked classified that were found on her husband’s laptop.

“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols,” he wrote on Twitter. “She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”

The State Department last Friday released parts of 2,800 emails that belonged to Abedin but were recovered by the FBI on the laptop of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, during an investigation into his sexting with a female high school student.

The discovery of the emails, some marked as classified, prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, that he would reopen the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo's daily roundup is a good read -- today it reviews some of the crap that happened over the holiday season: "The Daily 202: Trump’s true priorities revealed in holiday news dumps"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: The tax cut bill wasn’t the only Christmas gift that President Trump gave billionaires and big businesses.

The fireworks seen at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve were paid for by billionaire industrialist David Koch, according to the Palm Beach Daily News, as part of another private party put on by an even more exclusive club.

The Koch party was held at the Flagler Museum, a 75-room mansion that was built by one of the founders of Standard Oil for his third wife at the turn of the last century. He was the business partner of John D. Rockefeller, who was as big a boogeyman among anti-monopolists in the 1890s as the Kochs are now on the left.

We are living through another Gilded Age, with growing inequality and a government that is once again tipping the scales in favor of the rich at the expense of the little guy.

“You all just got a lot richer,” Trump boasted to members of Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 22, according to CBS.

He was talking about the tax bill that he had signed a few hours earlier, which will add more than $1 trillion to the national debt to line the pockets of the 1-percenters who can afford the $200,000 initiation fee to join Trump’s club.

In the week that followed, Trump kept giving his members new reasons to celebrate. While cable news fixated on how much he was golfing — NBC reports that Monday was Trump’s 91st day at a golf course as president – his political appointees back in Washington worked overtime to deconstruct the administrative state, eviscerate several of Barack Obama’s signature achievements and roll back significant environmental protections.

Underscoring how politically unpopular these moves are, most were rolled out on the Fridays before Christmas and New Year’s Eve to minimize media coverage and public notice.

Like Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell said, watch what they do — not just what they say. Trump campaigned like a populist. Now more than ever, he’s governing like a plutocrat.

Connecting the dots, here are 10 important stories you might have missed while on vacation:

1. Overturning key regulations on fracking:

“On the last business day of the year, the Interior Department rescinded a 2015 Obama administration rule that would have set new environmental limitations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on public lands,” Chris Mooney reported Friday. “The regulation from the Bureau of Land Management, which had been opposed by the oil and gas industry and tied up in court, would have tightened standards for well construction and wastewater management, required the disclosure of the chemicals contained in fracking fluids, and probably driven up the cost for many fracking activities.”

Fracking entails blasting enormous volumes of water into wells to crack open rock layers and unleash oil or natural gas. “The technology has been transformational for the industry, driving down the price of natural gas dramatically,” Chris notes. “But it has also raised many environmental concerns, including that fracking fluids could pollute water supplies and that the flowback fluids or liquids that reemerge from the earth after hydrocarbons are released may be improperly stored and get into waterways.”

2. Weakening the rules that were designed to prevent another Deepwater Horizon spill:

At the request of the oil companies, on the Friday before New Year’s Eve, the administration softened a pair of rules enacted in the wake of the 2010 BP spill.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) published new regulations for what’s called the production-safety-systems rule, which addresses devices used during offshore oil production. The agency also moved to water down the well-control rule, which is intended to prevent the kind of blowout that killed 11 workers.

“Neither proposal amounts to a wholesale reversal of existing regulations, according to experts, but instead each minimizes some of industry’s obligations and changes compliance terms in several instances to language favored by drillers,” Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni report. “The proposed rule, for example, eliminates a requirement that safety and pollution prevention equipment be inspected by independent auditors certified by the BSEE. A bipartisan presidential commission established after the disaster had recommended such inspections. Instead, under new regulations, oil companies will use industry-set ‘recommended practices’ for ensuring that safety equipment works — as was done before the Deepwater Horizon incident. Recommended practices by industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute ‘are simply that — they make recommendations but don’t require anything,’ said Nancy Leveson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as a senior adviser to the presidential commission. ‘The documents are filled with ‘should’ instead of ‘must.’’

“The BSEE’s proposed revisions also include several other changes that the industry has long sought,” Juliet and Dino note. “For example, while it does not change the level of downhole pressure the agency requires operators to maintain in a given well to avoid an accident, it removes the word ‘safe’ in describing that balance. In the case of pressure tests, which failed in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, those no longer have to ‘show’ that a well is in balance. Instead, they should ‘indicate’ that. Some changes are more substantive. The existing well-control rule requires that companies complete any investigation and failure analysis within 120 days of an equipment failure. The proposed rule, by contrast, calls for this process to start within 120 days and provides no specific end date.”

3. Declaring open season on migratory birds:

On the Friday before Christmas, the Interior Department quietly rolled back an Obama-era policy aimed at protecting migratory birds by announcing that oil, gas, wind and solar operators who accidentally kill birds will no longer be prosecuted.

The new interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), another big win for energy interests, was written by a former lawyer for the political network financed by the Koch brothers, whose fortune comes from oil. It was pushed hard by another billionaire, Harold Hamm, who advised Trump on energy issues during the campaign and in 2012 successfully challenged a fine under the law in court.

“While exact estimates are difficult to find, hundreds of thousands of birds probably die each year when they become caught in wind turbine blades,” Juliet reports. “Oil-waste pits kill between a half-million and 1 million birds each year, according to Audubon, while power lines cause the death of up to 175 million birds per year.”

Without the risk of fines for killing birds, energy exploration businesses are certain to spend less on precautionary measures and technologies that might prevent unnecessary deaths.

4. Reinstating mining leases for Ivanka Trump’s landlord:

If you’ve never been to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota, try to get out there this summer. It is one of the most pristine and beautiful places in America. I believe this despite getting hypothermia there while dogsledding as a Boy Scout.

On the Friday before Christmas, though, the Interior Department moved to renew expired leases for a copper and nickel mining operation on the border of the park, reversing a decision that was reached by the Obama administration after careful deliberation.

This directly benefits the Chilean mining firm owned by billionaire Andrónico Luksic, who rents a six-bedroom mansion to the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, in the posh Kalorama neighborhood of Washington.

Reflecting the terrible optics of this, the Interior Department didn’t even put out a release to let reporters know the news. They also didn’t give a heads up to Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D), who opposes the mines. Instead, Juliet reports, aides from Interior notified Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Daudt (R), who then broke the story.

“This shameful reversal by the Trump Administration shows that big corporate money and special interest influence now rule again in Republican-controlled Washington,” Dayton said in a statement. “We will have to uncover why the financial interests of a large Chilean corporation, with a terrible environmental record, has trumped the need to protect Minnesota’s priceless [crown jewel.]”

Luksic says there is no connection between his business and his real estate relationship with the Trumps, and a White House spokesperson said Ivanka and Jared were “not aware of the situation, had nothing to do with it and have never met their landlord.”

5. Letting nursing homes off the hook when patients suffer in their care:

“The Trump administration — reversing guidelines put in place under [Obama] — is scaling back the use of fines against nursing homes that harm residents or place them in grave risk of injury,” Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News reported on Christmas Eve. “The shift in the Medicare program’s penalty protocols was requested by the nursing home industry. … The new guidelines discourage regulators from levying fines in some situations, even when they have resulted in a resident’s death. The guidelines will also probably result in lower fines for many facilities. … ‘They’ve pretty much emasculated enforcement, which was already weak,’ said Toby Edelman, a senior attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.”

This is just the latest example of the Trump team taking the side of business over the elderly: “In November, the Trump administration exempted nursing homes that violate eight new safety rules from penalties for 18 months,” Rau notes. “In June, CMS rescinded another Obama administration action that banned nursing homes from pre-emptively requiring residents to submit to arbitration to settle disputes rather than going to court.”

6. Civil servants may not get a bonus because the rich got a tax cut:

“By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January — with most shedding many hundreds of employees,” Lisa Rein and Andrew Ba Tran reported over the weekend. “The falloff has been driven by an exodus of civil servants, a diminished corps of political appointees and an effective hiring freeze. The White House is now warning agencies to brace for even deeper cuts in the 2019 budget it will announce early next year, part of an effort to lower the federal deficit to pay for the new tax law, according to officials briefed on the budgets for their agencies. One possible casualty: a pay raise that federal employees historically have received when the economy is humming …

“Federal workers fret that their jobs could be zeroed out amid buyouts and early retirement offers that already have prompted hundreds of their colleagues to leave, according to interviews with three dozen employees across the government,” per Lisa and Andrew. “‘Morale has never been lower,’ said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers at more than 30 agencies.”

7. Undercutting enforcement by waging a war of attrition against the bureaucracy:

Several important government offices that enforce the laws and ensure public safety have been decimated by neglect during Trump’s first year. From Lisa and Andrew’s must-read story:

“In some agencies, the number of people leaving has been crippling, according to former officials. At the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a wave of recent retirements has depleted the managerial staff at the enforcement agency’s 70 field offices, said Jordan Barab, who was a top OSHA official in the Obama administration. In all, the agency shed 119 permanent workers by the end of September, a 6 percent drop, personnel data shows. ‘It’s starting to create major problems,’ Barab said. Enforcement actions must be reviewed by supervisors in multiple offices, he said, and if too many months pass, they can be thrown out. ‘You can’t run an enforcement agency with no managers.’

“Meanwhile, other federal workers are in limbo because their jobs could cease to exist. That’s the precarious state right now of the tiny Chemical Safety Board, one of 19 small agencies Trump has marked for elimination. The $11 million office investigates the causes of major chemical accidents and makes recommendations for safety improvements. In early December, a White House budget official told Chairperson Vanessa Allen Sutherland that because the deficit has grown, the safety board must do its part and prepare to shut down, she said.”

8. Reneging on a federal commitment to fund a major infrastructure project:

“Trump dropped his own New Year's ball — in the form of a wrecking ball — with a late Friday afternoon announcement that effectively wipes out plans for perhaps the nation's most crucial infrastructure project,” Will Bredderman of Crain’s Business reported on Dec. 29. “The president officially scrapped his predecessor's proposal to have the federal government underwrite half the cost of a multi-billion-dollar Amtrak tunnel connecting New Jersey to Penn Station, the busiest transit hub in the U.S. The lone existing tunnel is rapidly deteriorating, threatening to sever Amtrak's popular Northeast Corridor and to divert tens of thousands of New Jerseyans from their daily Manhattan commutes via New Jersey Transit …

“The administration released the news on the cusp of a holiday weekend in a letter from a top Federal Transit Administration official to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his New Jersey counterpart Chris Christie, who had agreed with the Obama administration to split the project's costs 50-50,” Crain’s notes. “Obama's Department of Transportation, which encompasses the FTA, had consented to that framework with Christie, Cuomo, now-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker in 2015. Friday's letter, in response to an updated proposal by the two states to fund their half of the plan with federal loans, declared the deal null and void.”

There’s speculation up and down the Acela Corridor that this is a political maneuver by Trump to punish Schumer or perhaps coax him to come to the table to negotiate for this money as part of a bigger infrastructure package.

But this is part of a pattern: Trump governs as if he’s the president of the Red States of America, not the United States. He routinely pushes policies that are tailormade to help places that elected him at the expense of those who voted against him. This was on vivid display during the tax negotiations.

Reflecting his red-state mentality, he just became the first president since 1953 to skip a visit to California during his first calendar year in office. “A president so fixated on the 2016 election results as Trump may not want to be reminded that just 31% of California’s voters chose him,” the Los Angeles Times noted last week. “Of the 29 states Trump has visited since taking office, just eight are west of the Mississippi River. He’s mostly visited friendly red states in the Southeast and the Northern industrial belt that he won … Of the 20 states that went to Clinton, Trump has been to eight.” (And that includes New York, New Jersey and Virginia, where he owns golf clubs.)

9. Firing all the members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS:

“Months after a half-dozen members resigned in protest of the Trump administration's position on health policies, the White House dismissed the rest through a form letter,” Ben Guarino reported on Friday. “The notice ‘thanked me for my past service and said that my appointment was terminated, effective immediately,’ said Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University who works on HIV testing programs. He was appointed to a four-year term in May 2016. … The council, known by the acronym PACHA, has advised the White House on HIV/AIDS policies since its founding in 1995. Members, who are not paid, offer recommendations on the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, a five-year plan responding to the epidemic.”

The termination letters were delivered without warning by FedEx, according to the Washington Blade.

This follows a New York Times report on Christmas Eve that an enraged Trump blew up at members of his national security team during a June meeting over the number of immigrants who were being given visas to enter the country: “Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They ‘all have AIDS,’ he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there. Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never ‘go back to their huts’ in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.” (The White House denies that Trump made any derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.)

10. Maneuvering behind the scenes to “sabotage” the Census:

“The Justice Department is pushing for a question on citizenship to be added to the 2020 census, a move that observers say could depress participation by immigrants who fear that the government could use the information against them,” ProPublica’s Justin Elliott reported on Dec. 29. “That, in turn, could have potentially large ripple effects for everything the once-a-decade census determines — from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent. The DOJ made the request in a previously unreported letter, dated Dec. 12 … to the top official at the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. A Census Bureau spokesperson confirmed the agency received the letter and said the ‘request will go through the well-established process that any potential question would go through.’”

Trump political appointees at DOJ claim that their goal is to use the information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act, but this spin doesn’t pass the smell test. “A recent Census Bureau presentation shows that the political climate is already having an effect on responsiveness to the bureau’s American Community Survey, which asks a more extensive list of questions, including on citizenship status, to about one in 38 households in the country per year,” ProPublica notes. “In one case, census interviewers reported, a respondent ‘walked out and left interviewer alone in home during citizenship questions.’”

The framers of the Constitution wanted to count everyone in the country, not just citizens. The 1790 census illustrates that, and the full census hasn’t included questions about citizenship since 1950. “This is a recipe for sabotaging the census,” Arturo Vargas, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Census and the executive director of NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino advocacy group, told ProPublica.

...

Sigh. 'nuff said.

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting perspective: "Iowa went big for Trump, but there are signs its voters are souring on the president"

Spoiler

DES MOINES — As Republicans celebrated their tax bill passing Congress late last month, Iowa Democrats raised a toast of their own. Candidates for Congress and governor, gathered at the annual Progress Iowa holiday party, took turns recapping a year of sinking GOP poll numbers and Democratic ­special-election wins — the “waking of a sleeping bear,” they said.

“If Trump were to run again, he’d be in deep trouble,” said Janet Petersen, the leader of Iowa’s Senate Democrats. “A dog bites you the first time, it’s not your fault. The second time it bites you, it’s your own damn fault.”

Iowa, the epicenter of the Republicans’ 2014 and 2016 surge, is not an obvious place for a Democratic comeback. Unemployment, sinking under 4 percent when Donald Trump won the state, has fallen to 3 percent. Iowa’s Republican delegation to Washington voted for the tax cut bill with no qualms or protests. Iowans can also subtract their federal income taxes from their state income taxes, a bonus enjoyed in only five other states.

Despite it all, Iowa has seemingly soured on the president and his party. The end-of-year Iowa Poll, an industry standard conducted by Des Moines-based Selzer and Co., found Trump with just 35 percent approval in the state. Only 34 percent of Iowans said they would back Republicans for Congress in 2018, and 61 percent said they were turned off by politics altogether.

The discrepancy between the rosy economic picture and the public’s distaste for Trump in Iowa has confounded both parties and complicated one of the major political stories of the decade — the Republican romp through the Midwest.

Why Iowa has turned against Trump and Republicans is a mystery that both parties are eager to figure out ahead of the 2018 midterms, looking to understand whether it’s an aberration or a sign of a greater political trend.

Republicans took charge of Iowa’s legislature last January and since then have advanced the agenda they promised voters — pushing through tax cuts, passing labor rules that require unions to hold fresh elections and maintaining a privatized version of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

Some conservatives saw it as a strong start and suggested polling that showed dark voter moods about Republican governance reflected a cynicism that would fade as the policies took effect.

“You’ve got record consumer activity. The market is high. Job growth numbers are impressive,” said Drew Klein, the Iowa director of the conservative grass-roots group Americans for Prosperity. “Now, if you ask somebody, ‘Is this something you feel?,’ they might say no. But this is stuff that affects them down the line.”

Few states had so loudly invited Republicans to try it their way. A swing state for decades, Iowa broke so dramatically in 2016 that Democrats wondered if it had become a demographic write-off. Thirty-one of Iowa’s 99 counties voted for Barack Obama twice, then flipped in 2016 to support Donald Trump. Just 41.7 percent of Iowans backed Hillary Clinton for president, the weakest showing for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1980.

For the first half of the year, Democrats looked at Iowa as a cautionary tale. White voters without college degrees had wiped the party out in the eastern part of the state, where it had always won strong. National groups had tied Rep. Rod Blum (R) to Trump, expecting a wipeout in a district that had voted for Obama by 14 points in 2012. But Trump won the district, and Blum, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, became a reliable voter for his agenda.

Even Obama, in a subdued post-election news conference, cited Iowa as the place where Democrats lost their drive.

“I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa,” he said. “It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points.”

Now, Iowa Democrats believe they’ve begun the climb back. On Jan. 31, the party easily held a state House seat in the first special election of the Trump era. On Aug. 8, it did the same, but in a southeast Iowa district where Trump had won by 21.3 points. And on Dec. 12, when most national political attention was focused on Alabama, Democrats lost a special state Senate race in red northwest Iowa by nine points. The seat had been so safely Republican that Democrats had not run a candidate in 2010 or 2014.

Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman who has presided over the Republican surge, did not sugarcoat the matter. “They’ve picked good candidates, and there may have been a complacency factor on the part of Republicans,” Kaufmann said. “I see that Senate race as a wake-up call.”

It wasn’t clear to Kaufmann whether the Trump administration would help or hurt going forward. In other parts of the Midwest, Trump’s promise to pull out of NAFTA or to renegotiate the treaty drew Democratic voters away from Clinton. In Iowa, Trump’s trade protectionism was a risk and came during a slump for farmers who depend on open markets. Longtime governor Terry Branstad (R) left Des Moines to become the administration’s ambassador to China, and his successor, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), has found herself lobbying the administration to go slow on changes to trade policy.

“Whenever we talk about pulling out, commodity prices are affected immediately, and that will be one of the first casualties that we’ll see,” Reynolds said at a Dec. 19 news conference. “So we’re going to hold them accountable.”

The out-of-power Democrats hope to take advantage of the simmering Trump angst, even if they were surprised in 2016. At the Progress Iowa gala on Dec. 19, where New York Mayor Bill de Blasio gave the keynote speech, Democrats talked confidently about running against the just-passed tax cut. It was, they said, going to sail right past the sort of Iowans who had trusted the GOP the previous year.

“They’re going to see who the winners and losers are in this, and they’re going to identify the corporations and wealthy people who came out way ahead of their families,” said Nate Boulton, a state senator who is running for governor in 2018.

Some of the Democrats’ takes on the tax cut began to sound like talking points. Locked out of power and watching Republicans preside over a growing economy, they were still optimistic that the state’s new rulers would give them issues to run on. Policies favored by conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity had sometimes divided Republicans. A conservative dream bill that would have ended professional licensing requirements for barbers, therapists and other skill-based professions was stopped by Republicans; state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann (R), son of the state party chairman, dramatically ripped a copy of the proposal in half.

Jeff Kaufmann, cognizant of how Democrats could run against his party, expected the state’s economic picture to block them. “If the economy’s good, I don’t know if a lot of voters’ analysis is going to go beyond that,” he said.

Other Republicans were all-in on the federal GOP agenda. In a short interview, Blum said he was confident that the tax cut package — like the president, suddenly unpopular in Iowa — would become a boon for the party.

“People will see the benefits in their first paychecks in January,” Blum said. “Their 401(k)s are 40 percent higher since November of last year. They’re going to be retiring earlier. And if they’re working, companies are going to be hiring more.”

Asked about the Iowa Poll, Blum said he had not seen it.

“I don’t pay attention to politics,” he said. “I really don’t.”

I'm not sure the Dems will take it back, but it would be a nice slap to Agent Orange if Iowa turned blue.

[fraurosena]

Oh for goodness sakes! How delusional can you get?

 

[fraurosena]

My, what an eventful year 2017 was for the presidunce!

I confess I had no idea he signed 96 bills into law...

[smittykins]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Democracy? What's that? Everyone has an equal say? Surely, you jest

Don't call me Shirley!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.   Just trying to find some humor in this situation.)

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s Irish golf course lost $2.3 million in 2016"

Spoiler

President Trump’s golf course in Ireland lost about $2.3 million in 2016, according to new documents filed with the Irish government — the latest in a series of Trump golf clubs that have recently reported losses or declining revenue.

The Irish course, called Trump International Golf Links Ireland, is located in Doonbeg on the island’s west coast. It was bought by the Trump Organization in 2014, and then renovated — requiring more than $32 million in spending so far by the president’s company — before fully reopening in May 2016.

The new figures for 2016, provided Tuesday by the Trump club, show some good news for the course. Its revenue increased by 30 percent in 2016. Its operating losses were only half what they’d been in 2015.

But the bottom line was that the course lost money, for a third year in a row. Its total losses of $2.3 million were only about 15 percent lower than they’d been in 2015, while the course was hamstrung all year by renovations.

In the club’s annual filing to Irish regulators, the Trump Organization did not offer an explanation for the club’s continued losses, saying instead that it was “confident [of] the return of operating profits in 2017.”

Eric Trump, the president’s son who is now helping to run his businesses, did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

Eric Trump told the Irish Times, which first reported the Doonbeg club’s losses, that “it is incredibly gratifying to see our vision for Trump Doonbeg come to life. I continue to be impressed by the beautiful product and the business improvement at the property.”

The club’s general manager told the Irish Times that he also expected the club to lose money overall in 2017. The official figures for 2017 will likely not be filed with the Irish government until late 2018.

So far, it appears that Trump’s divisive presidency has pulled his businesses — which the president still owns — in opposite directions.

At Trump businesses that can sell the glamour of the presidency itself, or a hope of access to the president or his circle, business has surged. Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., for instance, has reported unexpected profits. His Mar-a-Lago Club has raised membership fees and raised the ticket price for a New Year’s Eve party that the president attended.

But at other businesses — located in more liberal areas, offering no access to the president himself — the Trump presidency seems to be hurting, not helping, his businesses.

Trump’s 16 golf courses, for instance, are mostly spread out in blue coastal areas of the United States, or in European countries where he is unpopular.

Many of these courses are private and release few details about their financial situations. But in recent months, government data has already provided snapshots of struggles at four other such courses.

In Scotland, for instance, Trump’s golf courses at Aberdeen and Turnberry reported to the British government that their losses had doubled in 2016, to more than $24 million combined. Trump significantly increased the amount of money he’d loaned those clubs, to more than $200 million, according to those government filings.

In California, Trump’s golf course outside Los Angeles has reported unusually low revenue from greens fees and cart rentals: At last count, the totals for 2017 were the lowest since at least 2011.

And in the Bronx, Trump’s new course at Ferry Point also reported declining revenue. This year, the club’s revenue from the busy summer season — from April to September — was down 14 percent from its first summer in 2015, according to city figures.

In Ireland, Trump’s club includes an 18-hole golf course and a hotel, catering to both Irish golfers and international visitors. Condé Nast Traveler magazine’s readers this year rated it the 18th best resort in all of Europe.

Late last month, the club won a preliminary victory in a long-running battle to build a kind of rock sea wall to stop coastal erosion, made worse by climate change. An earlier plan to build a bigger sea wall was scaled back after local opposition, in a saga that Trump said soured him on the European Union (although the E.U. had very little to do with it ).

Trump is not popular in Ireland — in a recent opinion poll, the online publication the Journal found that just 21 percent of Irish people supported a state visit by Trump to their country.

But, in at least one case, Trump’s politics brought his Irish club some new customers.

The National Party, a small right-wing Irish political party, began holding its events at the Trump club just before last year’s U.S. election. The party returned to the club this year, holding its annual convention there in November.

The National supports banning abortion, restricting immigration to Ireland and is critical of the E.U., of which Ireland is a member.

“There’s certainly a huge amount of common ground with Trump the candidate. And the party membership was very supportive of Trump the candidate,” said Justin Barrett, the party’s leader.

Still, Barrett said, “We’re cautious of Trump the president. There’s certain things he hadn’t delivered yet.” For one thing, Barrett said they were disappointed in the slow progress toward construction of Trump’s promised border wall.

Aw, my heart bleeds for the TT losing a few (to him) dollars. (end of sarcasm)

[AmazonGrace]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Oh for goodness sakes! How delusional can you get?

 

BREAKING: Area man forgets he ended DACA

[fraurosena]

This is where things get real. Very real. And distressing. The atrocious greed leading to the change in policy and policy-makers is costing human lives.

Oh yes, the presidunce is creating jobs in coal. So many vacancies to be filled, when the current miners die off, one by one.

/end angry, cynical sarcasm

Coal mining deaths skyrocket in 2017

Quote

Workplace deaths in the coal mining industry increased last year to their highest point in three years.

A total of 15 miners died on the job in 2017, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) data show, compared with eight in 2016. That year saw the fewest mining deaths since records began.

The 15th death occurred early Friday morning at a Revelation Energy mine in Fayette County in southern West Virginia, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported. Thurman Watts died when a piece of machinery he was operating traveled over a wall. West Virginia saw the bulk of the 2017 miner deaths, with eight.

The Senate last month approved David Zatezalo, a former coal mining executive, to lead MSHA, the main agency responsible for coal mine safety. Zatezalo faced numerous questions about his own safety record throughout the confirmation process. He was previously head of Rhino Resources when MSHA took multiple enforcement actions against the company.

Zatezalo sought to assure senators that he would take strong enforcement actions when necessary.

 

Do you think the BT's will finally catch on that they've been scammed, in the worst possible way?

[AmazonGrace]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Of course, he's taking credit for something he has had absolutely no influence on whatsoever... what else is new?

 

Hopefully he starts getting strict about tropical storms, wildfires, power outages, civilian war deaths and shooting rampages soon and 2018 is a great year. 

[GrumpyGran]

7 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Hopefully he starts getting strict about tropical storms, wildfires, power outages, civilian war deaths and shooting rampages soon and 2018 is a great year. 

Who knew that he was beaming protective rays into our skies, shielding aircraft from danger, directly from his golf cart? I swear, by the end of the year he'll be taking credit for the sun shining. He's definitely starting the year off on a roll. Completely delusional.

[47of74]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Do you think the BT's will finally catch on that they've been scammed, in the worst possible way?

Branch Trumpvidians are so stupid they wouldn't know rabbit shit from rice krispies.  Even if there was rock solid proof and the majority of Americans and the rest of the planet all agree that fuck face scammed them Branch Trumpvidians would still not believe it.  That of course is assuming they have enough functioning brain cells to catch on to the scam.

[fraurosena]

I just had to make a screen-shot of the presidunce's latest tweet, so you can see it in the childish scribble. It doesn't need any other comment...

[AmazonGrace]

He can't even congratulate "a friend" without making it all about himself and his tremendously Successful Presidency. SAD!

[GrumpyGran]

56 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I just had to make a screen-shot of the presidunce's latest tweet, so you can see it in the childish scribble. It doesn't need any other comment...

With the script done like that it really does sound like something out of a High School yearbook.