Hullabaloo

Thursday, December 22, 2016

 
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The War on Christmas is over (if you want it)

by digby

It's hard to keep your sense of humor right now. This may be the most disorienting and frightening holiday season I can remember and I've got quite a few under my belt.  But I am trying to keep it together and summon up my zen "this too shall pass" attitude about all of it. Indeed, I'm fervently hoping that my worries are overblown.

But whatever happens, with your help, we'll be keeping it real here as long as they let us keep the internet lights on. All of us here at Hullabaloo will be paying attention, even when it hurts, and we'll share with you our impressions and observations of how it's going.

So thanks again for your generosity in supporting the fundraiser this year. If you would still like to put a little something in the stocking, you can do so with the buttons to your left or use the snail mail address right underneath.

Meanwhile, I wrote this little ditty in the hopes of giving you a chuckle or two:

The holiday season is usually a joyful time when most of us get together with family, eat a lot of fattening food, watch football, take some time off work and celebrate the religious ceremonies of our choice. This year promises to be a little bit less enjoyable for many of us, due to the recent “unpleasantness” I probably don’t need to spell out. There are good reasons to be depressed but I won’t go into that now because there is good news to share that will make the season a little bit brighter. The “War on Christmas” is finally over.

V.C. Day was officially declared this week by Bill “Santa’s General” O’Reilly, the man who led the fight:


You may remember about 10 years ago, “The O’Reilly Factor” began spotlighting companies that refused to say the words “Merry Christmas.” In fact, some of those businesses actually ordered their employees not to say that. Well, that culture war issue ignited.

And we won.

Most companies stopped the nonsense and “Merry Christmas” became a common greeting once again. For me, it was interesting to go through that, because some on the far left actually denied there was any controversy at all and claimed that I fabricated it. More lies from a crew that is incapable of telling the truth.

Commander Newt “Zuzu Petals” Gingrich fought bravely by O’Reilly’s side for years, relentlessly attacking the government forces who were banning all federal employees from saying “Merry Christmas” — well, banning them from using federal money to send their personal Christmas cards anyway, which, of course, is exactly the same thing.

And Sgt. Denny Hastert, the former speaker of the House and current inmate at a Minnesota federal prison, won one of the earliest and most important battles of the war by making it a steadfast rule that the U.S. Capitol tree be referred to only as a Christmas tree, not a “holiday tree.” There are some who say that early victory sustained the troops through the hard years that followed.

Gen. O’Reilly and the rest of the far right fought a trench war for a decade, getting nowhere as the secularists insisted on banning “Merry Christmas” and forcing everyone in America to regurgitate the hated words “Happy holidays” instead. And then a true leader emerged, a man so strong, so powerful, so magical that like a superhero he was able to win the war pretty much single-handedly. That man, of course, is President-elect Donald Trump.

As his former campaign manager, CNN commentator and newly minted lobbyist Corey Lewandowski declared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, “You can say again ‘Merry Christmas’ because Donald Trump is now the president. You can say it again. It’s OK to say.”

Hallelujah.

At a victory rally last week, the man who insists that the country is going to come together (or else) got huge cheers when he said, “So when I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here someday and we are going to say Merry Christmas again. Merry Christmas. So, Merry Christmas everyone!” And all of Christian Wisconsin was free once more to say the sacred words.


At Trump’s Michigan rally he took it even farther and declared that all those department stores that refuse to celebrate Christmas are going to toe the line from now on:


We’re gonna start saying “Merry Christmas” again. How about all those department stores, they have the bells and they have the red walls and they have the snow, but they don’t have “Merry Christmas”? I think they’re gonna start putting up “Merry Christmas.”

But like those lone Japanese soldiers found still carrying on the fight on islands years after the end of World War II, some grizzled “War on Christmas” veterans are still skirmishing. The Breitbart Brigade is still battling a few stray secularists who they say have moved “beyond opposition to Nativity scenes and Wise Men to denying the very existence of Jesus.” If that catches on, the fragile peace could be broken and everyone will once again be racing through department stores, knocking over Christmas trees, shrieking, “Happy Holidays!” and spitting on Santa. (They never thank him for his service.)

Those holiday haters will be met with fierce resistance if they try. Trump’s Christmas army is prepared to do whatever it takes to secure the right to say, “Merry Christmas” in America again. For instance, there are brave soldiers like the mayor’s chief of staff in Mobile, Alabama, who went the extra mile to honor his leader the way he most wanted to be honored, with a Christmas tree.

But chief of staff knew that just going to a corner tree lot would not suffice. The great Donald Trump would need a yuuuge tree, a beautiful tree, a special tree. So this good man went above and beyond the call of duty and had an old-growth evergreen in one of Mobile’s public parks cut down to use as a prop for Trump’s Christmas victory rally.

Some anti-Christmas crusaders were unhappy, of course, and the good soldier had to offer up an apology. But being the hero he is he made sure that everyone could see that his confession was forced:


I accept full responsibility for having this done. For this, I sincerely apologize. Going forward, I will be more sensitive to the spectrum of concerns regarding trees.

One can imagine him defiantly blinking, “Merry Christmas” in Morse code as he said it.

The good news is that war is over, if you want it, America. Happy Holidays, everyone. And now that we are finally free at last, Merry Christmas, too.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby




digby 12/22/2016 11:30:00 PM

 
This takes the cake (the pumpkin cake)

by digby

Many years back (before the pumpkin spice craze) on Thanksgiving eve I ran this recipe for Pumpkin Cake on the blog and received a very nice note from Washington Post journalist Karen Tumulty saying that she'd been tooling around the web for something to bake and tried it and liked it. Ever since then I've called it Karen Tumulty cake. I usually run it every Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but I forgot this year what with all the recent unpleasantness and all. Luckily, it works for Christmas too!

It's easy even for non bakers and it really is very good.

For cake

* (3/4 cup) softened unsalted butter.
* 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for dusting pan
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 teaspoon cinnamon
* 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
* 2 tablespoons crystalized ginger, finely chopped
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 1/4 cups canned pumpkin
* 3/4 cup well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3 large eggs

Icing

* 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons well-shaken buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar,
* 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
* a 10-inch nonstick bundt pan


Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter bundt pan generously.

Sift flour (2 1/4 cups), baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together pumpkin, 3/4 cup buttermilk, ginger and vanilla in another bowl.

Beat butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, add eggs and beat 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and pumpkin mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture, just until smooth.

Spoon batter into pan, then bake until a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan 15 minutes, then invert rack over cake and reinvert cake onto rack. Cool 10 minutes more.

Icing:

Whisk together buttermilk and confectioners sugar until smooth. Drizzle over warm cake, sprinkle with chopped walnuts (keep a little icing in reserve to drizzle lightly over walnuts) then cool cake completely. Icing will harden slightly.

The falvors actually improve with time so you can make it ahead if you like.

Bon Appetit!

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby


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digby 12/22/2016 05:00:00 PM

 
God bless us everyone --- and that MEANS YOU!

by digby

Philly.com reports:

A Jewish family has fled Lancaster County after the cancellation of a fifth grade production of A Christmas Carol was partially blamed on them by conservative news outlets.

The Hempfield School District said the extra time the non-curricular event required and not complaints about the line "God bless us, every one!" prompted cancellation,according to a story on PennLive.

The play has been a holiday tradition at the Centerville Elementary School for more than three decades. In September, the Jewish parents asked if their child could be excused from the play, and were told yes. After the decision to cancel the play in November, their child was harassed at school, according to a story on LancasterOnline.

When news stories, which portray the school’s move as part of a “war on Christmas," broke on Fox and Breitbart News Network, the school received more than 200 complaints.

When the parents saw the reader comments to the Breitbart story suggesting their address should be published, they pulled their child from school and temporarily left the area, according to the LancasterOnline story.

“There’s no way we’re going to take a chance after the pizza incident,” they told the website.

Basically, the lesson here is that the Trump "movement" doesn't believe in religious freedom. They believe in religious coercion. But then right wingers have always had a problem with the concept of consent.

Oh, and if you haven't seen this lovely lady exhibiting the Christmas spirit, enjoy. It's really ... something.

Update: According to this, the family didn't "flee" they left town on vacation. It's unclear why they said what the said about the pizza incident.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby

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digby 12/22/2016 03:30:00 PM

 
The Secret Sessions Sessions

by digby

Well, they aren't exactly secret. But when he returned the standard Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire which asked for all his recent interviews, Senator Sessions didn't include some with Steve Bannon of Breitbart. And it's no wonder why.

Miranda Blue of Right Wing Watch:

In his questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions listed nine radio and four print interviews he had given to Breitbart since 2013. We found nine additional radio interviews and three additional print interviews that were not included in the senator’s questionnaire, along with a handful of op-eds written by Sessions for the site and a number of instances of Sessions’ office providing Breitbart with exclusive first access to a statement, data or other documents.

A review of these interactions, which include at least 14 radio interviews with Bannon—10 in the year before Bannon left to join Trump’s campaign—show a cozy relationship between the senator and the far-right news agency, and in particular Bannon. (Two of the interviews we have counted were announced in advance on Breitbart’s website, but we have been unable to find audio or transcripts of them.)

In an interview in February of this year, Bannon called Sessions “one of the intellectual, moral leaders of this populist, nationalist movement in this country”; two days later, on the day Sessions endorsed Trump, Bannon told Sessions he was “the leader of this populist revolt against the political elite and standing up for the American people, particularly when it comes to broken borders, unlimited immigration, illegal immigration, and these trade deals that have really gutted the American working man and woman.”

In a November 2015 interview, Bannon called Sessions “one of the great leaders in this country and one of the great leaders of this movement” and asked him if he was “open to running for president” to elevate the issues of immigration and trade. When Sessions demurred, Bannon said he hadn’t “given up yet.” Earlier that month, Bannon invited Sessions for an interview on his very first weekday Breitbart broadcast. Telling Sessions that he was “really honored and beloved” by the Breitbart audience, Bannon said “we didn’t feel it was right to have our initial show” without the Alabama senator.

Many of Breitbart’s print stories describe Sessions in similarly gushing terms. One 2016 story by Neil W. McCabe refers to Sessions as “the courtly senator”; in a February 2016 interview, Bannon compared the “courtly southern gentleman” Sessions to Trump with his “New York edge.”

Sessions has returned the praise. In February 2015, on the day that Sessions was set to address a Breitbart-sponsored event at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Sessions told Bannon on his radio program, “Let me just stop a minute and say Breitbart has been the absolute bright spot in this whole debate. You get it, your writers get it, every day they find new information that I use repeatedly in debate on the floor of the Senate because it’s highlighting the kind of problems that we have. And nobody else is doing it effectively, it’s just not happening, so to me it’s like a source. And we consistently find your data to be accurate and hold up under scrutiny.”

Bannon responded by calling Sessions’ communications staff “one of the best on Capitol Hill.” At the time, Sessions’ communications director was Stephen Miller, who later left to work on the Trump campaign and is set to be a senior policy adviser in Trump’s White House.

In a profile of Miller for Politico in June, journalist Julia Ioffe outlined the close relationship between Miller’s communications office and Breitbart:

Breitbart is Miller’s preferred media ally. “Every movement needs a dialogue,” Miller says. “Breitbart was a big part of that.” Miller worked tirelessly to make sure the dialogue kept going, and in the right direction. “When I first joined the staff, the first email I got was from him,” says one former Breitbart reporter. “It said something like, ‘Congratulations from everyone at Sessions’ office, we look forward to working with you.’” From that day on, the day’s first email would come from Miller, highlighting inaccuracies in other media outlets’ work or suggesting avenues for investigation. He worked primarily with two reporters at Breitbart, Caroline May and Julia Hahn, constantly feeding them scoops about the Disney workers’ plight, immigration numbers and welfare fraud. He used to organize a weekly Friday happy hour for Sessions and Breitbart staffers at Union Pub, across the street from the Heritage Foundation. “They’re all really good friends,” says the former Breitbart reporter.

Breitbart was also Sessions country long before it was Trump country. “Anything that Sessions sends out, Breitbart writes up immediately,” says the former Breitbart reporter. “There was no question whatsoever. They’d send out an email saying, ‘Anyone who has five minutes, can you write this up?’ I would do it sometimes because people were overloaded and it was just regurgitating a press release into a blog post.” The reporter added, “It was their way of repaying them” for the scoops. Now that Breitbart has also thrown in for Trump, the same happens for his news releases. “They’re all in the same boat together, Sessions, Trump and Breitbart,” the reporter said. “There’s no other politician that Breitbart does that for. They go above and beyond.”

Bannon told Ioffe, “You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent. And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’ staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.”

Sessions’ interviews with Bannon show a mutual admiration based on their joint leadership in what Miller called “this movement for nation-state populism.”

In a December 2015 interview with Bannon that we reported on at the time, Sessions defended Trump’s proposal for a ban on all Muslims from entering the United States. Bannon started the interview by telling his listeners that the “political class and the media” “mock” them for their views on immigration.

In an interview with Bannon in October 2015, Sessions lamented current levels of legal immigration, pointing favorably to a 1924 effort that set strict quotas on immigrants based on their nation of origin, which heavily favored immigrants from largely white countries, and disparaging the 1965 immigration measure that undid that quota system:

In fact, when the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly. We then assimilated, through 1965, and created really a solid middle class of America with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. And then we passed this law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.

When Bannon asked Sessions to respond to critics who call him a “nativist,” Sessions said, “I love America.” He added that some people” in Congress “think they represent groups, they seem to think we represent the whole world, and they think we represent business groups and activist groups and [National Council of] La Raza and the Chamber of Commerce, and we’re losing sight of who we represent.”

The two then moved on to discuss what Bannon called the “Muslim invasion of Europe” and the “almost a Camp of the Saints type of invasion” by Middle Eastern refugees into Europe, a reference to a racist, anti-immigrant novel popular among white supremacists.

In a November 2015 discussion with Bannon, Sessions once again pointed to the immigration restrictions that were in place between 1924 and 1965, prompting Bannon to ask him how “this kind of populist, nationalist, conservative Right” listening to his show could assist him in pushing his immigration priorities.

Frequently, Bannon enlisted Sessions in setting up their “populist, nationalist” movement against vaguely defined “elites.” In an interview in June about Islamic radicalism and the refugee crisis, Bannon asked Sessions if he believed “the elites in this country have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West, to actually win this war.”

“I’m worried about that,” Sessions responded. “As a matter of fact, I’m losing great confidence that our elites, as you described them, do not operate sufficiently in the real world, and it’s a dangerous thing. And they’re eroding regularly, it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success. So it’s a big problem.”

This nomination is as provocative as it gets. The man is the Senate's reigning southern bigot. And he's going to be the next Attorney General and his staunchest intellectual ally in the White House is the white nationalist Steve Bannon.

Because this country has gone batshit crazy.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby

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digby 12/22/2016 02:00:00 PM

 
"I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me"

by digby

Apparently, this is the list of President-elect Trump's national security priorities as provided to the Pentagon:

Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cyber strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.

“People there now would be pretty concerned to see Russia not on the list,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former senior Pentagon official who worked on Russia policy before leaving in 2015.

I don't have an opinion on where Russia should appear on the list of national security priorities but this list is strange. Sure, I can see why Trump would make ISIS the number one priority but it's still daft. They do not present an existential threat to the US. (Well, maybe in an indirect way by helping Donald Trump gin up fear of Muslims.) But eliminating budget caps and finding greater efficiencies as the number two and four priorities for the defense department? That's odd.

And the idea that Trump is worried about cybersecurity is a dark joke. But then he, of all people, knows just how risky it is and even he may have figured out that it may not always swing in his favor. On the other hand, his idea of "cyber-security" and our idea of cyber security may be very, very different.

And then there's this:

This will all be good for defense contractors. I'm not so sure about the planet. 

Remember this:

Hugh Hewitt: "Mr. Trump, Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out. It's an executive order. It's a commander-in-chief decision.

"What's your priority among our nuclear triad?"

Trump: "Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important."

"And one of the things that I'm frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you're going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important."

"But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out – if we didn't have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can't just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn't care. It was hand-to-hand combat."

 "The biggest problem this world has today is not President Obama with global warming, which is inconceivable, this is what he's saying. The biggest problem we have is nuclear – nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That's in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now."

Hewitt: "Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Sen. Rubio after that and ask him."

Trump: "I think – I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me."

The man is an imbecile. But then you knew that.

Here are nine other terrifying things Donald Trump has said about nuclear weapons.

omg.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby

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digby 12/22/2016 12:30:00 PM

 
Somebody got a spanking

by digby

Newtie has loose lips and Emperor Trumpie doesn't like it:

I goofed. Draining the swamp is in, @realDonaldTrump is going to do it, and the alligators should be worried. #DTS https://t.co/nCHs61gpve pic.twitter.com/OCO7eaSKvk

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) December 22, 2016

The next four years look to be a non-stop series of public humiliations for wingnuts who deviate from their Dear Leader's line. Hey, every cloud has a silver lining.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby

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digby 12/22/2016 11:00:00 AM

 

Hey, watch this!

by Tom Sullivan

It is customary in the South to yell, "Hey, watch this!" before humiliating yourself in front of an audience. An international audience, in this case. But nothing is customary about what Republican lawmakers are doing in North Carolina.

In a 5th special session of the North Carolina legislature called yesterday specifically for addressing repeal of the state's anti-LGBT/anti-worker HB2 law, the Republican super-majority but failed to do so. From the L.A. Times:

On Monday, Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, a Democrat, announced that Republican House and Senate leaders had assured him that after the city of Charlotte repealed its anti-discrimination ordinance, a special session would be called to “repeal HB2 in full.”

Yet after hours of intense backroom maneuvering Wednesday, legislators in the Senate offered only a compromise bill that repealed HB2 while introducing a moratorium, or “cooling-off period,” that would prevent local governments across the state from crafting or changing anti-discrimination ordinances.

What Republicans wanted was a bipartisan "repeal" bill Democrats would vote for, you know, to spread the shame around, and one that repealed the bill with one hand while extending it with the other. The NCGOP measure would prevent cities from enacting any other nondiscrimination ordinances virtually indefinitely. Democrats yesterday were not playing along.

Democratic state Senator Jeff Jackson tweeted during a 9-hour session that was more recess than session:

Quick update: #ncpol #ncga pic.twitter.com/QGNUMEN5OC

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) December 21, 2016

A retiring Republican state senator wasn't going to go without one, last rant:

... Republican Sen. Buck Newton of Wilson argued that the moratorium would prevent measures the “lunatic left of the city of Charlotte and other places want to enact.”

“I have no faith in the city of Charlotte, no faith that anybody on the other side at this point … will act honorably and in good faith to find a way forward,” he said.

Translation: To help Republicans find a way to shed this albatross while not losing face.

"This is smoke & mirrors. You never intended to fully #RepealHB2. I don't know if you think the public is stupid" applause from the gallery

— NC NAACP (@ncnaacp) December 22, 2016

The disaster & shame caused by #HB2 was created by #NCGA for no reason other than hate & fear mongering. Accept nothing but full repeal.

— ACLU-North Carolina (@ACLU_NC) December 21, 2016

On the upside, the NC Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the state could not abscond with the water system in our fair city:

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina's highest court says state legislators went too far in stripping Asheville of the municipal water system it built with taxes, borrowing and grants.

The NC Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the General Assembly violated the state Constitution by interfering in local government decisions involving health and sanitation.

The decision scraps the 2013 move by Republican-led legislators to take millions of dollars of assets from Asheville and place them in a newly created metropolitan water and sewer district. Lawmakers also tried to wrest Charlotte's airport from city control in 2013. Both cities are run by Democrats.

That fight only took 5 years and cost both city and state millions of dollars in legal costs. And all because the state, led by a former ALEC board member, wanted to punish Asheville's lunatic left, blow a hole in the city's budget, and (we firmly believe) eventually privatize the water system.

If you live in a blue city in a red state, watch your back.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby
Undercover Blue 12/22/2016 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

 
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Trump brought "new hope to the news business"

by digby

Once again, thank you so much to those of you who have contributed to this year's fundraiser. I am so grateful for your continued support and I'll try to do my best to deliver the best commentary about the political train wreck we are experiencing as I can.

One of the big questions following the election is why we all didn't see the appeal of Donald Trump more clearly. And as someone who made her share of mistakes over the past year in predicting Trump's success, I try to be appropriately humble. He's a unique figure and none of us got it all right.

However, I will say that I got some of it right about Trump, mostly because I was following him so closely and watching his following grow with increasing horror. I took him seriously from the beginning.

But I also think that the media missed the boat by failing to understand that Trump's status as an entertainer was very powerful, particularly since his show business persona was that of a super-successful businessman whose most important job was firing people who didn't get the job done.

I wrote this in September of 2015 about the media and Trump:

We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds… We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. In God’s name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! — Howard Beale, “Network”

So far, this presidential cycle has been one for the books. The 1992 cycle featured a similar dynamic with a wealthy outsider running as a third party candidate and capturing the imagination of the press and the people alike. That race also featured generational change, petty sex scandals, an incumbent surprisingly in free-fall from a recent high of 90 percent approval and a right-wing nativist exciting a fairly large segment of the right wing over immigration. It was a roller coaster of a race in which the third party candidate, Ross Perot, of course, even dropped out after the Democratic convention, saying that the Democratic Party was “revitalized” and then joined up again a few months later.

And while the 2000 race was fairly predictably dull throughout, the aftermath was a doozy and the Sarah Palin addition to the 2008 GOP ticket didn’t exactly usher in a staid political campaign of ideas. So, it’s not fair to say that a weird presidential race is unprecedented, but this one is undoubtedly one of the weirdest, at least on the Republican side.

We have had entertainers run for office before, Ronald Reagan being the most obvious example. But he had spent decades as an expressly political figure and had been Governor of California before venturing into presidential politics as a candidate; he ran as a serious ideological political leader of a movement and a party. Arnold Schwarzenegger was an international movie star who ran in a bizarre off year California recall election but he had long been associated with Republican politics, was married to a scion of the Kennedy family and had been mentioned as a candidate for Governor many times in the past. Sarah Palin was always more entertainer than politician, and she rapidly made the transition to reality TV star after quitting her job as Governor after two years. But Donald Trump is the first current TV star to run for president and actually run his campaign as a reality TV show. And this is something we really haven’t seen before.

When a recent Rolling Stone profile of Trump was released, the press went wild with a couple of outrageous quotes, one about Fiorina’s looks and another about how attractive he finds his daughter. These are creepy, off-color comments at best and ended up accruing to Fiorina’s benefit in the CNN debate, where she deftly turned it back on him. But the article had another series of quotes the media didn’t mention which show some intriguing insights into Trump’s strategy:

“I thought I’d have spent $10 million on ads, when so far I’ve spent zero. I’m on TV so much, it’d be stupid to advertise. Besides, the shows are more effective than ads.”

He’s right, isn’t he? Ads can have an effect. But getting the chance to talk for hours at a time, uninterrupted, on all three networks is much more valuable.

He admits that you have to build a team on the ground and says he’s got “huge, phenomenal” teams staffing up the first seven states. But he adds:

“I know that costs money, but I’ve got this, believe me. Remember: The two biggest costs in a presidential run are ads and transportation. Well, I own two planes and a Sikorsky chopper, so I’d say I’m pretty well covered there, wouldn’t you?”

The article goes on to speculate just how much money Trump can really afford to spend and while it’s surely enough, the question remains if he wants to spend it. His history suggests that one of the business lessons he’s learned over the years is not to expose his own fortune to too much risk. So we’ll see if he ever actually starts writing big checks. But it’s his insight into the world of TV and how to manipulate it that’s truly interesting.

I think there is probably a lot of handwringing going on behind the scenes at the news networks over their Trump coverage. Some serious journalists undoubtedly think it’s insane to spend so much time covering his every bizarre utterance. But the people who look at the ratings obviously see something different. The first Republican debate drew 24 million viewers. The second drew 22 million.(This article from CNN Money explains that the drop off from the first is not because of less interest but because the debate was 3 hours long compared to 2.) Primary debates at this point in the 2011-2012 campaign cycle averaged 4 to 5 million viewers each. And nobody doubts that the reason people are tuning in to primary politics in such vast numbers so early in the cycle is because of one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump.

And as Michael Wolff wrote in this piece for the Hollywood Reporter, however he shakes out for the GOP, there’s simply no doubt that Trump has brought big bucks to television this summer. But it’s a mixed blessing for the network that created Republican TV:

[E]ven with such additional riches at Fox, the network suddenly finds itself in a deeply unsettled world. Trump is not one more product or reflection of the Fox News media philosophy and of its hold on the Republican party. Rather, Trump is the first Republican in the Fox age, who — in a weird sort of justice that liberal Fox haters might come to rue — threatens to break the network’s hold on the Republican party and the discipline it has imposed on it. At best, Trump negotiates with Fox on an equal footing. Arguably, he dominates it, demanding it dance to his tune.

And dance to his tune they have done. We’ve never seen Roger Ailes so pliable before in the face of a Republican candidate who defies his power. But he has a big problem he’s never had before. Wolff points out that up until now Fox has defined the GOP brand and maintained a strong hold on its identity but Trump may be breaking that dominance:

Disorientingly, Trump is as much the candidate of CNN as he is of Fox, as much a friend of CNN chief Jeff Zucker as he is of Fox’s Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly, as much a golden goose for Zucker as for Ailes. Indeed, Zucker’s star rises at CNN and within its parent Time Warner along with Trump’s. It is, of course, Zucker who, while running NBC, commissioned The Apprentice and its offshoots, transforming Trump from a local New York personality to national phenomenon. (Piers Morgan, the former CNN host who regularly had Trump as one of his highest-rated guests, was a winner of Celebrity Apprentice.)

Interesting, no?

So Trump is playing Fox and CNN off of each other and getting so much free airtime in the process he has no need to run any ads. But with the ratings bonanza he’s creating, these news networks have no complaints about that. It is a very mutually beneficial arrangement.

As Wolff says:

Trump is less like a traditional Republican candidate than he is like the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. He’s the kind of news event that CNN has, in the Zucker era, become best at covering — the news event that can fill the vacuum of endless cable time, with no details too small, no rehash too repetitive. Such stories require no secret political and culture language. Rather, you just keep the camera trained on what’s in front of you. Trump provides his own narrative and talking points. In this, Trump, beyond politics, offers new hope for the news business.

At this stage of the electoral process the Donald Trump campaign is literally a live reality TV show that is being shown on several different networks at once, all of whom are making a bundle from it. And in the process, he is breaking down the system that’s been dominating TV news for the past 20 years.

That may actually be good news, depending on how this all ends. The political media, particularly on TV, has largely been a disaster for decades now and it’s not showing any sign of improvement. In fact, they seem to retreating to an earlier age, before Fox became dominant and the establishment press was obsessed by manufactured GOP scandals. Trump is doing something different and they have not yet fully caught on to what it is.

None of this means that Trump’s not a real candidate, far from it. It may just mean that he’s a new political paradigm, a celebrity politician who brings new found riches and power to the media conglomerates by being a dangerous highwire act from which nobody can look away.

Wolff notes that this may be the first time in a couple of decades that we have a candidate who breaks down the media silos and reaches into the general viewing population. He hypothesizes that with politics polarized and the most engaged citizens dividing more neatly within the two parties and squeezing the political audience into a much smaller universe than ever before, perhaps this represents a sort of new “center” of millions of people who are drawn in by the drama. As he writes, everyone’s riveted to the show, asking each other:

“Will he self-destruct? And how? And who will he take with him? Or, even more astounding, will he go the distance and blow up everybody in his way? That’s news. That’s a story. That’s television.”

It is. And it’s possible that going forward it’s also politics, which is a much more scary proposition. For democracy to work, it requires at least a baseline level of rational understanding of what politics does. The Trump paradigm has no use for that.

This was foreseen by the brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky exactly 40 years ago in his classic film “Network.” But even he didn’t see the possibility that Howard Beale would actually be a very slick operator with tremendous fame and fortune who played the networks off of each other for ratings and profits. Maybe Trump really is the best deal-maker the world has ever known after all.

That was what we saw in the early fall of 2015 but I honestly can't say I thought it would play out exactly the way it did. But some of us did see that Trump had something going for him that other politicians did not and he was riding the zeitgeist masterfully. Perhaps if the mainstream news media had seen that more clearly they would have handled their coverage differently. Yeah,  probably not ...

Anyway, if you think that sort of analysis in real time is useful and you'd like to contribute to the annual fundraiser, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby

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digby 12/21/2016 11:30:00 PM

 
Trump's casting call

by digby

The Washington Post reports that Trump is choosing his cabinet members based on how they "fit the role." And this should not surprise us. Since he is an imbecile and completely ignorant of how government works or what these people will have to do,it's the only criteria he has. He literally has no other way of judging people.

The parade of potential job-seekers passing a bank of media cameras to board the elevators at Trump Tower has the feel of a casting call. It is no coincidence that a disproportionate share of the names most mentioned for jobs at the upper echelon of the Trump administration are familiar faces to obsessive viewers of cable news — of whom the president-elect is one.

“He likes people who present themselves very well and he’s very impressed when somebody has a background of being good on television because he thinks it’s a very important medium for public policy,” said Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of Trump. “Don’t forget, he’s a showbiz guy. He was at the pinnacle of showbiz and he thinks about showbiz. He sees this as a business that relates to the public.”[...]

As Trump formally announced his vice presidential pick in July, he said that Mike Pence’s economic record as Indiana governor was “the primary reason I wanted Mike, other than he looks very good, other than he’s got an incredible family, incredible wife and family.”

And in picking retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as his nominee for defense, Trump lauded him as “the closest thing to General George Patton that we have.”

Mattis has a passing physical resemblance to the legendary World War II commander, as well as to the late actor George C. Scott, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Patton in the 1970 biopic. Trump also seems particularly enamored with a nickname that Mattis is said to privately dislike.

“You know he’s known as ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, right? ‘Mad Dog’ for a reason,” Trump said in a recent interview with the New York Times.

The president-elect, however, does not mention Mattis’ other sobriquet, which is “Warrior Monk.” Or his call sign: “Chaos.”

On the other hand, in Trump’s book, not having the right kind of appearance is tantamount to a disqualifier. During the presidential campaign, he stirred a controversy when he pronounced that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lacked “a presidential look, and you need a presidential look.”

Battling through the GOP primary, Trump frequently made barbed comments about his opponents’ appearances.

Those kind of skin-deep standards helped make Trump a success as a reality-television star and international brand, but his critics say they are worrisome in the Oval Office.

His personnel choices show signs of being “cast for the TV show of his administration,” said Bob Killian, founder of a branding agency based in Chicago. “They are all perfectly coiffed people who look like they belong on a set.”

But Trump spokesman Miller insisted that some qualifications do not lend themselves to lines on a résumé: “People who are being selected for these key positions need to be able to hold their own, need to be doers and not wallflowers, and need to convey a clear sense of purpose and commitment.”

All of which has led him to some unconventional picks. If confirmed by the Senate, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson will become the first secretary of state in modern history to come to the job with no experience in government. Then again, Trump himself has none.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has little obvious foreign policy experience to qualify her for United Nations ambassador, but she is a rising political star who brings diversity to Trump’s largely white and male picks for top jobs. Given how she and the president-elect had clashed during the 2016 campaign, Haley’s selection also suggests that Trump is willing to bring adversaries into the fold when they suit his needs.
[...]
Trump’s closest aides have come to accept that he is likely to rule out candidates if they are not attractive or not do not match his image of the type of person who should hold a certain job.

“That’s the language he speaks. He’s very aesthetic,” said one person familiar with the transition team’s internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don’t look the part, they’re not going anywhere.”


John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, at the elevator at Trump Tower on Dec. 2 (Justin Lane/Bloomberg News)
Several of Trump’s associates said they thought that John R. Bolton’s brush-like mustache was one of the factors that handicapped the bombastic former United Nations ambassador in the sweepstakes for secretary of state.

“Donald was not going to like that mustache,” said one associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. “I can’t think of anyone that’s really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes.”

Trump was drawn to Tillerson and 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney for secretary of state because of their presence and the way they command a room when they walk in.

The president-elect considered Romney despite the former Massachusetts governor’s scathing criticism of him during the presidential campaign. Several Trump associates say he was drawn to Romney, and later to Tillerson, by their “central casting” quality, a phrase the president-elect uses frequently in his private deliberations.

People close to Trump said he has been eager to tap a telegenic woman as press secretary or in some other public-facing role in his White House — both because he thinks it would attract viewers and would help inoculate him from the charges of sexism that trailed his presidential campaign.

Central Casting would have chosen this handsome superstar to play the role of president, for sure:

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby
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digby 12/21/2016 05:00:00 PM

 
He's busy enriching himself and holding Victory Rallies

by digby

He can't be expected to know what statements he's made this week. He's got a lot on his plate:

Trump doesn't appear to know/remember that his own statement (issued in his name) on the Berlin attack said it was an attack on Christians pic.twitter.com/V1MpUm9fM6

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) December 21, 2016

One reporter asked Trump about his previous statement that the truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany was an attack on Christians. In response, Trump asked, “Who said that? When was that said?”

The person who allegedly said it was Trump, in this statement:

“Our hearts and prayers are with the loved ones of the victims of today’s horrifying terror attack in Berlin. Innocent civilians were murdered in the streets as they prepared to celebrate the Christmas holiday. ISIS and other Islamic terrorists continuously slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad. These terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the earth, a mission we will carry out with all freedom-loving partners..”

Not to worry people. He says he can run his business and the country "perfectly" so this sort of thing isn't a problem.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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digby 12/21/2016 03:30:00 PM

 
Come on in, the swamp water is fine

by digby

They've decided they don't even need to hide it:

Trump, who pledged to drain the swamp of lobbyists, is getting, by all appearances, his own private lobbying arm steps from the White House pic.twitter.com/gGFVq5Yf2n

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) December 21, 2016

Trump's voters don't care if he and his cronies get rich doing it. In fact, they respect them for it. Remember, Trump told them over and over again that he had manipulated the system, bought off politicians and didn't pay taxes because he is "smart." They cheered him wildly.

Recall:

"She said, 'Maybe you didn't pay taxes.' And I said, 'Well, that would make me smart,' because tax is a big payment. But a lot of people say, 'That's the kind of thinking that I want running this nation.'"

And this:

"As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do."

It's true that he did always promise to "fix it" saying that only someone as corrupt as himself understood how to get it done. Well, that was just silly ...

Another top adviser to Mr. Trump suggested on Wednesday that the president-elect had tired of his own rhetoric regarding lobbyists and consultants. “I’m told he now just disclaims that,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told NPR on Wednesday of the “drain the swamp” promise. “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore.”

It's all about mutual back-scratching. Lewandowski gets fabulously wealthy selling access to the president and the president gets even more wealthy doing favors for businessmen who can help his business:

“I will always be President-elect Trump’s biggest supporter,” he said. “After considering multiple opportunities within the administration, I informed him and his team I think I can best help him outside the formal structure of the government.”

That's what's called win-win in Trumpland.

It's Holiday Fundraiser time. If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

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digby 12/21/2016 02:00:00 PM

 
This post will remain at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer material

The Power of Trump's celebrity

by digby

First of all, thanks to everyone who's donated to the holiday fundraiser this year. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. It's been a dark year, but you've made it a little bit brighter.

Last year at this time we were all watching the debates and everyone was laughing about the idea that Donald Trump and Ben Carson were the front-runners for the GOP nomination. Oh how hilarious it was!  All the sage pundits and political analysts assured us the Trump had no chance, he was like the Herman Cain of 2016 or, at worst, the Newt Gingrich. Surely Jeb! or Rubio or Chris Christie would be the nominee.

What a difference a year makes. We are now dealing with Donald Trump the president-elect.

I never understood why people dismissed him. It was clear from the very beginning that he was something very different than we'd ever seen before and that he brought with him a kind of celebrity and fame that was very powerful.

On the day after Trump announced, I wrote this:

The GOP race for the presidency has been upgraded from a clown car to a three-ring circus with the official entry of Donald Trump into the race. After daughter Ivanka delivered a stirring introduction worthy of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, the audience waited expectantly for the great man to appear. And it waited. And waited. Finally after several long moments, the great man finally emerged above the crowd on the mezzanine level of the glittering Trump Tower building waving as if he were Juan Peron (or the Queen of England). As Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” continued to play over and over again, he then descended to the stage on an excruciatingly slow-motion escalator and began his speech by insulting his fellow Republican candidates for failing to know how to put on a competent political event.

It was a perfect beginning to what is going to be an astonishing political spectacle.

Right out of the gate he began to free-associate like a drunken Tea Partyer on 2 Shots For A Buck night, insulting Mexican immigrants by calling them rapists and drug dealers, asking when we’ve ever beaten China or Japan (!) at anything, declaring himself to be potentially the greatest jobs president God has ever created and more. Oh, and he also told us that he’s worth $8,737,540,000 — more or less. It was the best presidential campaign announcement ever, even better than Lindsey Graham’s.

The media seemed a little bit shell-shocked in the early going — perhaps they’ve never actually heard what the average right-winger believes. They seemed to find it noteworthy that he was incoherent and contradictory, with promises of totally free trade even as he said he would make Mexico pay a tariff to construct the Great Wall he envisions building on the border.

And they didn’t seem to know what to think about his endless gobbledygook about “making” the world do what he wants it to do. They are clearly unaware that members of the far right don’t follow the philosophy of Edmund Burke. They follow the philosophy of Glenn Beck, Joe McCarthy and P.T. Barnum. Not even Roger Ailes can control the way their minds work.

Donald Trump may not make sense to the average journalist — but to the average Tea Partyer, he’s telling it like it is, with a sort of free-floating grievance about everyone who doesn’t agree with them mixed with simplistic patriotic boosterism and faith in the fact that low taxes makes everybody rich. It’s not about policy or even politics. It’s about following your instincts. (“In your heart you know he’s right.”)

But it wasn’t long before Twitter lit up with insider jokes and insults among the Village press. Salon chronicled some of them here. The only one to take Trump seriously was Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin, whose first impression was quite a bit less derisive than anyone else’s, giving him a solid B- on his tiresome political report card:

Substance: Made a concerted and admirable effort to laundry-list his presidential plans before the speech was finished, calling for the replacement of Obamacare, cautioning foreign adversaries about messing with the U.S., expressing opposition to the current trade bill, promising to build a southern border wall and sticking Mexico with the bill, terminating Obama’s executive order on immigration, supporting the Second Amendment, ending Common Core, rebuilding infrastructure, resisting cuts in entitlement programs. Still, left open too many questions about the hows and wherefores, given that he has never run for nor held office. 

Best moment: Protracted run-up to formal declaration of candidacy was spirited and engaging. 

Worst moment: Lost his rhythm a bit whenever cheerful supporters in the crowd tossed out helpful prompts or encouraging chants. 

Overall: A madcap production–garrulous, grandiose, and intense—that displayed his abundant strengths and acute weaknesses. For the first time in decades, Trump is a true underdog, but his ability to shape the contours of the nomination fight should not be ignored. On the debate stage, through TV advertising (positive and negative), in earned media, and by drawing crowds, Trump has the potential to be a big 2016 player. He staged an announcement event like no other, and now he will deliver a candidacy the likes of which the country has never seen.

What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump.

First, let’s dispense with the fact that his ideas are more bizarre than anyone else in the field. They are not. Say what you will about the Donald, but nobody can bring the wingnut cha-cha-cha like Tea Party fave Dr. Ben Carson:

“I mean, [our society is] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.”

This week’s latest poll actually shows him in first place.

Lindsey Graham often appears on television and breathlessly proclaims that we must stop ISIS “before we all get killed here at home!” Presumed top-tier Scott Walker makes so many gaffes you can’t count them anymore, including some doozies like musing publicly with Glenn Beck about shutting down legal immigration.

Compared to that, building a wall on the border is standard boilerplate on the right and it certainly isn’t hard to find candidates who are willing to demagogue China or Japan and claim that liberals have destroyed the American way of life. Trump’s style is colorful, to be sure. His ideas are disjointed and irrational. But they are hardly unique. In fact, he represents a very common strain in American political life: the right-wing blowhard.

Trump actually has something that none of these other candidates have and they’re pretty important. First, of course, is the money. Trump says he’s worth 9 billion. Let’s assume he’s exaggerating by 50 percent. That’s still a whole lot of money, more than enough to finance a presidential campaign for as long as he wants to do it. The Beltway wags seem to believe that he’s only announcing so that he can get himself into the debates but it seems more likely that he’s finally so wealthy that the cost of a campaign is so negligible he figures he’s got nothing to lose. After all, if he were to spend even a hundred million on the primary it wouldn’t make a serious dent in his bottom line. What else has he got to do?

But there is something else he has that may be even more valuable than money: stardom. I don’t think it’s possible to place a political value on the fact that Trump has had a prime-time network TV show for over 10 years with “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“The Apprentice” averaged 6 to 7 million viewers a show with finales sometimes getting between 10 and 20 million viewers. Last year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” averaged 7.6 million a show. Fox News’ highest rated shows rarely get more than a couple of million viewers and they are all elderly hardcore Republicans. The Donald has a wider reach and might even appeal to the most sought-after people in the land: non-voters.

It’s impossible to know if that’s a serious possibility. But it’s fair to say that many more people in the country know the name of Donald Trump than know anyone else in the race (with the possible exception of Jeb Bush). It’s hard to quantify that kind of name recognition but it’s certainly not worthless in our celebrity-obsessed culture. And remember, Trump would not be the first show business celebrity who everyone assumed was too way out there to ever make a successful run for president. The other guy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

Sure, Trump is a clown. But he’s a very rich and a very famous clown. And he’s really not much more clownish than many of the current contenders or some serious contenders in the past. It’s interesting that the one time Mark Halperin deviates from the conventional wisdom he may actually have seen something more interesting than the rest of his cohort: the fact that Donald Trump has the potential to be a serious 2016 player. And that says everything you need to know about the Republican presidential field and the state of our politics today.

I underestimated how bad he could be. But I think I understood from the beginning that he could win, which is something that mainstream journalism, for the most part, failed to see. Case in point:



I was wrong about many things this past year, of course. I'm not an oracle. But I wrote about Trump seriously from the beginning, knowing that he represented a strain in American politics that could be powerful if given voice. I have never been so unhappy to be right about anything in my life.

I'm not part of the Village and I don't pretend to be a journalist. I'm just a political observer, blogger and essayist who tries to sort out what's going on in the world around me. I'm lucky to be able to spend my time doing this, but I couldn't do it without the support of my readers.

If you find this sort of thing valuable in this age of fake news and alternate reality, I hope you'll consider donating or subscribing to keep the lights on for another year.

If you'd like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers --- digby



digby 12/21/2016 12:00:00 PM