California Has A Leader Of The Resistance In Congress-- Meet Ted Lieu

In 2012 Henry Waxman had served nearly 4 decades in the House. A Republican billionaire, Bill Bloomfield, rebranded himself as an independent and ran a slash and burn campaign against Waxman, spending $7,567,080 of his own money (and another $400,000 from his wealthy friends) to pulverize the iconic progressive congressman. Waxman still won 171,860 (54%) to 146,660 (46%), but it was uncomfortably close and he was in no mood for that kind of fight again. So he didn't run in 2014. Ted Lieu, who is an even stronger and more hard-hitting champion of progressive causes than Waxman, ran instead. Elan Carr, a right-wing lunatic with no principles who sometimes runs as a Republican and sometimes pretends he's an independent, ran against Lieu with Adelson backing. He spent $1,575,540 to Ted's $2,173,521 but at the last moment, two Adelson-funded SuperPAC orchestrated a vicious smear campaign against Lieu costing $750,000. Lieu went to the DCCC for help. According to a confidant of mine who worked there at the time, Steve Israel told him to go pound sand. The DCCC informant called me just weeks before the election and told me Lieu was in trouble and Israel refused to help. He asked if Blue America could do anything. Fortunately we had enough money in our account to take out full page ads in the L.A. Times and a local newspaper to respond to Adelson's lies. Despite the onslaught of Adelson-directed money, Ted kicked his ass-- 108,331 (59%) to 74,700 (41%). This past November, the GOP didn't even try, putting up a weak unknown, under-financed candidate who Ted eviscerated 66.3- 33.7%.

His colleagues in the House recognized his potential right away; he was elected the 114th Congress' Democratic freshman class president. His constituents have gotten to understand they now have one of the best Members of Congress representing them. What does "best" mean? It kicked in for me one day when a friend of mine, Matt Stoller I think, asked Ted, an Air Force colonel and a hugely successful state legislator, why he wanted to go live in the hellhole that is congressional life in Washington, DC. Ted explained to us that there were many policies he felt needed to be addressed thoughtfully and aggressively and then talked about Climate Change in great depth and said his reasons for wanting to be in Congress were tied up with his two very young sons. More and more people have been referring to him as Southern California's Jedi Knight. He's looking to save the planet for Brennan and Austin-- as well as for his other constituents.

Thursday, Los Angeles Magazine-- which directly covers an area represented by two dozen members of Congress. Writer Julia Herbst correctly pegged him as "a real leader of the resistance," pointing out that his twitter account is a beacon of light in the post-election darkness. She wrote that "if you’re looking for a ray of sunshine in the alternative fact-riddled hellscape that is our life now (we’re looking at you, EPA social media ban, Betsy DeVos and friends, executive order about the Affordable Care Act, advancement of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, and revival of the Reagan-era Mexico City Policy), look no further than Congressman Ted Lieu’s Twitter. Because the dude is killing it." And she thinks his twitter style is a laugh fest. She concluded with: "Many have (rightfully) expressed concern that Trump’s election might bring out the worst in people. But it’s also bringing out the best-- and most hilarious-- in others. Never stop being you, Representative Lieu."

Right on. So far this year, Blue America has endorsed only 6 incumbents. There will be more, as it becomes clear that they're going to not just be part of the resistance but approach it as aggressively, courageously and intelligently as Ted Lieu does. Please consider supporting Ted's 2018 reelection bid. With enemies like Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, let's not take any chances-- and we already know better than being able to count on the DCCC. Late Friday afternoon, in response to Trump's latest executive order making it more difficult for refugees to enter the United States based on their religion or religious heritage, Ted told his constituents that "Today’s executive order by President Trump using extreme vetting and banning refugees from many majority Muslim countries is offensive and a monumental waste of federal resources. Having served on active duty, we are taught that to defeat the enemy, we first need to know our enemy. Our enemies are terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, not children, women and senior citizens fleeing those groups. The chances of being struck by lightning TWICE is 1 in 9 million. The chances of being killed by a refugee committing a terrorist act is 1 in 3.6 billion. These facts lead me to conclude that Trump's action is not based on national security, it is based on bigotry. Lady Liberty is crying."

Precinct Captains, Social Media And The 2017 Elections

Grover Cleveland is the only mayor (Buffalo) to become president. Will Eric Garcetti be the  2nd?

-by Alice Marshall

Have you ever wondered how it's possible for such rotten Republicans to get elected? Or how it is possible to smear good progressive politicians? Lack of information.

This is especially true of local elected officials. How many people could name their state legislators, even less discuss their legislative record? Very few. Social media can remedy that.

The Virginia House of Delegates and the New Jersey and North Carolina legislatures are up for election this year, as are at least a dozen races where special elections are already scheduled or in the process of being scheduled. So if you are an activist in these states you can use social media to publicize the work of those you support and soften up the opposition. Follow every twist and turn of the legislature, and every time the opposition betrays the public trust, use Facebook, Twitter, and your blog, whatever platform you use, to alert your followers to what is happening. Post news stories to the regional subreddits so that voters know in real time what is being done in their name. Long before Labor Day rolls around you can drive up the negatives of your opposition and protect those politicians you support.

[Also keep in mind that there are important mayoral elections this year in Atlanta, New York, St. Louis, Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Seattle, San Antonio, Buffalo, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Boston, Detroit and San Bernardino.]

Create news alerts on the names of every local politician you wish to track, and then share those links on social media whenever you think appropriate. If you are on your neighborhood or civic association's email list, that is a good place to share news articles. You could share press releases of your favorite politician on such lists, but I would advise caution in that regard. The same people who might be interested in a news article might not be receptive to a politician's press release.

Don't worry if your link doesn't receive any clicks or shares. The power of precinct work is in its cumulative effect. It is sufficient to make your point, it is not necessary to “win the internet.” What you are attempting here is to draw the connection between your elected official's actions and what is happening in your community.

Ideally the Democratic Party would have a team doing precisely this. But realistically that will not happen. Besides the whole point of being a precinct captain is not leaving this sort of thing to the party. If you take care of it, you know it will be done, and done to your liking.

Social media is a double edged sword; you can stab yourself if you are not careful. From my book, The Precinct Captain's Guide To Political Victory :  

Twitter-- use it. Reporters are on Twitter and do searches on hashtags. Twitter is an easy and economical way to influence the press.

Twitter-- don't be a jerk. Reporters are on Twitter and Twitter is an easy and economical way to make an ass of yourself and embarrass your campaign.

Do not join and/or participate in online mobs, even, especially if the candidate's campaign encourages it. Don't let yourself be used that way.

Don't get into a wrestling match with a pig.

Used with discretion, social media can be a powerful tool. Use it consistently, and by Labor Day your work will be half done.



UPDATE: A Little Addendum From A Purple County In California

A View From The Inside Of The Other Side
-by Anonymous, edited by DWT

Last night I attended a Pro-President Trump meeting... Last night 3 of us went to a group meeting. Two women and one man. What we saw and heard was both scary and informative. The meeting was led by 5 men and we counted approximately 70 people in the room including us. We counted 13 women.

They started the meeting with a pledge of allegiance to the flag. Then they jumped into discussions, the first being the Marches. It was a lot of WTF and why don’t they just shut up. They discussed the report that there were no arrests so that meant that the police and the media were lying. The leader(s) then gave them an “action item” to find anything to dispute the no arrests report and to put pressure on the police to arrest protestors. Several people in the group admitted to being at the March to try to interfere, but felt they were bullied by the Marchers and had to stop “for their own safety” (actual quote). They questioned why so many people “got away with it” (Marching). It seemed to be a hot point with them.

They moved on to reports from the teams. They have teams and committees with specific tasks, ie: daily phone calls and collect tally’s of who makes phone calls to their Reps. It appears they call throughout the day, and each call is either a different issue or their personal favorite.

They have a team that monitors the public blogs and event postings of the Liberal groups (specifically mentioned Indivisible and MoveOn.) They laughed at the Indivisible Guide when one leader said “the Liberals will never get organized and carry any of this out, the snowflakes give up too easily, "a little heat and they melt." They talked about the “visit your representatives office event” that was planned for earlier in the day which was posted on MoveOn and all over FB. They also were at their reps offices, and a handful admitted to going to the Democratic representatives office in their own district to have their voice counted.

They have a team who spies on FB posts. When the man who was with us asked how to do it, he was told that if he was a member of Pantsuit Nation it’s almost an automatic in into most closed groups, and then once you are in one, you can get invited to others. Someone on their team joins all the public and open groups. Their report included reading a few actual posts, in a mimic whining voice, where the members were posting their concerns and frustrations and why bother. They actually cheered this. One leader applauded the report and said, “we don’t care if they like what we have to say, we don’t need them to agree with us. We just need them to give up, shut up and stay out of our way.”

They discussed some of the issues and the recent signed orders from the WH. Some of this discussion sounded intelligent, as if they had researched not only the issue, but how to present it to get the buy-in from the group. It felt to us like a persuasion/programming tactic.

They broke into their teams and anyone not on a team was asked to choose one to sit in on. We each went to a different team. Each team talked about their mission and their strategy. The phone team assigned times for each phone call and a number to text after you called. They practiced scripts. The Anti-Abortion team talked about how to plan protests at Planned Parenthood and other clinics, to find the names of doctors who perform abortions and out them by protesting at their offices and clinics. The communications team discussed the content of their newsletter, the content they were borrowing from other newsletters and articles from Briebart that they wanted to circulate. We didn’t get the names of the other teams that we didn’t sit in on but there were 4 others.

We found out that this group used to be a young Republican group and after the election and seeing the actions of the Liberals, they changed to a support Trump group to stand up for him and against Liberals.

I don’t believe all groups are this scary, however, they appear to be organized. One of the members in one of my groups, changed her registration to Republican so she could see what they do from the inside. She gets phone calls from a phone bank, sometimes several times a week, about issues and actions she should take, she gets their weekly newsletter and she attended a local Rep meeting. Her report is similar only in that they are very organized, take daily actions and communicate often.

So knowing this, what do we do?

Our recommendations:

1.) Don’t give up.

  2.) If you marched, email your local police to write a thank you for their part in keeping the peace.

3.) Get organized. Even if you are not with an organized local group, you can organize yourself. Set aside certain times for certain actions based on what you CAN do. We are all under time constraints and work/family/life commitments, however, find what time you CAN give. We have found that being with an organized local group that you can see and touch helps us to stay focused and feeling our strength.

4.) Determine what actions you CAN take-- when and how many phone calls, emails, visits, protests CAN you do. Focus on that. 

5.) Limit your time reading all the comments on FB. Too many can become overwhelming and can end up feeling like you are carrying a larger burden.

6.) Find and cross post the good results that are happening, so we can all see the progress. It may be small steps like the postponement of a cabinet position approval/rejection, however, every step counts. If you have ever attempted to lose weight, you remember how some days feel like nothing is happening, and then little by little the results start to appear. Whatever goal you have reached in little steps, remember the little steps got the momentum started. Stay strong.

7.) Find support when you need it. It’s been shown that if you vent to someone who is also venting, you both stay in the same spot. If you can vent to someone who will HEAR you without judgement and without chiming in, you can both get through it faster and back to feeling stronger. If you both need to vent, take turns; 2 minutes each venting and really HEAR each other, then switch places. When the venting is done, take a positive action.

8.) Take a break. Do something positive for yourself every day (more a few times during the day if you need it) that doesn’t include thinking about politics-- exercise, spas, reading a good book, writing a love letter. Find something that bring you joy and shifts your energy.

9.) Don’t give up. We are Stronger Together.

The opposition may believe that a snowflake is fragile when the heat is on, however, although the snowflakes may melt, enough heat can also cause a boil. Together, we can be an avalanche, and if we can focus our boiling angry energy we can be the heat that they fear.

Looking At The Trumpanzee Amateur Hour, One Tends To Ask, "Who's In Charge Here?"

Existential evil

You probably recall that when candidate Trumpanzee was still unsure Vladimir Putin and Robert Mercer could actually deliver the election to him, he made Ohio Governor John Kasich a very attractive offer-- take the VP job and run the government. The offer came from Fredo Trump, the eldest and dumbest of the offspring. Back in late July, the NY Times' Robert Draper reported that "according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history? When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of? “Making America great again” was the casual reply. There's no reason to believe that Trumpanzee didn't make the same or a similar offer to Mike Pence.

Unsubstantiated White House scuttlebutt has it that Pence, a Paul Ryan ally, is, more or less, in charge of domestic policy-- certainly many of Trump's most heinous appointments are coming straight from Pence, particularly Betsy DeVos and Tom Price-- but that everything has to be cleared by Jared Kushner-in-law. On the foreign policy front, crackpot ex-General Michael Flynn, neo-Nazi Steve Bannon and Kushner-in-law are piloting the ship. Yesterday, the neocon editorial board of the staunchly Republican Wall Street Journal worried that Trump's foreign policy was amateurish, wrong-headed and off to a really bad start. As Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto went on TV to promise his countrymen to turn Mexico’s 50 consulates in the U.S. into "true ramparts in defense of migrant rights," Ryan Lizza, at the New Yorker was even harsher towards Trump's bungling and heavy-handed Twitter diplomacy.

This depressing episode confirms several of the worst fears about Trump. The first is that he is not a good negotiator. Rather than waiting a week before he issued his executive orders on immigration, Trump signed them at a moment that maximally embarrassed Videgaray, the Mexican official who is the most sympathetic to him. The moves left the unpopular Peña Nieto with no choice but to cancel next week’s visit, and poisoned the relationship with one of America’s closest allies and our third-largest trading partner.

Furthermore, it showed that with his impulsive use of Twitter to make foreign-policy statements, Trump is turning American diplomacy into a series of personal relationships unguided by strategy or forethought. He praises foreign leaders who flatter him, such as Vladimir Putin, and marginalizes those who criticize him, like Peña Nieto, without regard to the strategic value of the relationship. He is turning foreign policy into a version of professional wrestling, where alliances and rivalries shift based on petty personal factors. At any moment, Trump is a tweet away from creating an international conflagration.

The incident also made it clear that congressional Republican leaders, who, during the Obama years, were vocal about the President’s relationships with other countries, have no interest in policing Trump’s foreign policy. At a press briefing in Philadelphia yesterday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who casually announced that Congress would find some fifteen billion dollars to pay for the border wall, had nothing to add about Trump’s detonation of the U.S.-Mexico alliance. “The President can deal with his relationships with other countries,” McConnell said.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Trump’s treatment of Mexico reinforces an emerging world view that casts aside the values at the center of American foreign policy since the Second World War. As with his degrading comments about nato, his view that Taiwanese democracy and independence is a negotiating chip with China, his cavalier attitude toward Russia’s annexation of Crimea and meddling in Ukraine, his abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership without even a cursory consultation with allies in the region who fear Chinese hegemony, his obsessions with the use of torture and the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields, Trump’s views on U.S.-Mexico relations are devoid of the liberal values that have kept Western democracies together for decades. During the Cold War, Reagan pushed Mexico to liberalize its economic and political system and tried to bring the country closer to America and away from any Communist-inspired Latin American movements. Both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama made economic integration with Mexico a priority, and they all worked toward humane immigration solutions. Trump, meanwhile, is treating Mexico like a nineteenth-century colony. Other countries are watching, and the long-term effect could be to gradually isolate us from the rest of the world.

Mexican grassroots groups are reacting badly-- albeit predictably-- to Trump. There are already calls for boycotts of iconic American brands, from Coke, McDonald's and Walmart to Starbucks, which is already reporting a fall off in business. So is this all the fault of the impulsive Adderall-addicted orange ape? Or is there someone else driving the crazy car? Mike Allen, writing for Axios.com, points directly at Bannon, Trump's deranged Rove. Bannon's been stocking the Regime with his allies, many if them certifiably insane. He wrote Trumpanzee's widely panned Inaugural speech and the poorly-crafted-- probably illegal-- executive orders that went out this week. Bannon incited Trump's bickering not just with Mexico, but with China, the EU and the media. It certainly appears that Bannon has outmaneuvered the more mainstream Priebus, the Paul Ryan ally many conservatives had hoped would be running Trump's bizarre show. He isn't. Bannon-- and through him, sociopathic billionaire Robert Mercer-- are. This is Trump's daily approval ratings for his first week in the White House. Ever see anything like this before?

Has There Ever Been A New President So Widely Despised So Quickly By Americans?

Politico's Gabriel Debenedetti reported Thurdsday that national Democrats have largely "settled on a scorched-earth, not-now-not-ever model of opposition" to Señor Trumpanzee." I don't believe most of them are even capable of carrying it out or that most of them have the guts to try it but he claims that "[i]n legislative proposals, campaign promises, donor pitches and even in some Senate hearings, Democrats have opted for a hard-line, give-no-quarter posture, a reflection of a seething party base that will have it no other way." Really? Only 17 Senate Democrats opposed granting Mad Dog Mattis an exemption from a law that makes it illegal for a recent non-civilian to serve as Defense Secretary. And the only vote against confirming him was from a self-serving corporate shill who wants to run for president by recalling an uninformed Democratic base with her "progressivism" and courage. Only 11 Senate Democrats voted against confirming General John Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security. Only 8 Senate Democrats were serious in their opposition to torture enthuseiast Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA. And only 4 Senate Dems voted against confirming Nikki Haley as the Ambassador to the UN. Doesn't sound very scorched earth/no-quarter to me. You?

According to interviews with roughly two dozen party leaders and elected officeholders, the internal debate over whether to take the conciliatory path-- to pursue a high-road approach as a contrast to Trump’s deeply polarizing and norm-violating style-- is largely settled, cemented in place by a transition and first week in office that has confirmed the left’s worst fears about Trump’s temperament.

“They were entitled to a grace period, but it was midnight the night of the inauguration to 8 o'clock the next morning, when the administration sent out people to lie about numerous significant things. And the damage to the credibility of the presidency has already been profound,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. “They were entitled to a grace period and they blew it. It’s been worse than I could have imagined, the first few days."

That conclusion comes after two months of intra-party debates about how to outwardly treat the Trump White House, a process which played out not only in public but in private meetings and conference calls between leading party operatives, elected officials, and message crafters.

“I predict the coming divide in the Democratic Party won’t be ideological so much as it will be between those who resist and oppose and those who accommodate and appease,” strategist David Brock told roughly 120 donors gathered in Florida to plot a path forward over the weekend... At a forum this week for candidates running to be the next Democratic National Committee chair, the very idea that the party should try to work with the new president was dismissed as absurd.

...Chicago mayor and former Barack Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel advocated a measured approach to Trump opposition, one in which Democrats choose only specific fights with a tight game plan. Sitting opposite Emanuel, former Joe Biden chief of staff Ron Klain shared his rules for a “100 Day Fight Club”-- a battle royale he advocated to mark Trump’s opening stretch, according to people in the room.

...“Three days ago Donald Trump went from being a private citizen who tweets and criticizes to the establishment,” said Ted Lieu, a Los Angeles-area congressman who has been vocally anti-Trump, to the point of introducing legislation to stop the new president from launching a nuclear first strike without passing it by Congress. “He and the Republicans have unified control, and they own it. It is Trump’s foreign policy, Trump’s economy, Trump’s healthcare plan. So he has to govern and in less than two years voters will go to the polls, and he has to own it.”

“We are very wary that this administration is trying to flood the zone with a whole lot of stuff that is very objectionable all at once, and make it very difficult by creating a cacophony of terribleness so that not one thing gets through. It’s a tactic that they used on the campaign and they were fairly successful at doing so, so in a lot of ways we look at our jobs is focusing in on what we think are the most objectionable things," added Zac Petkanas, the director of the DNC’s anti-Trump war room, which is currently taking on Trump's cabinet nominees, ties to Russia, and potential conflicts of interest.

Even so, strident anti-Trump Democrats worry that dealmakers like Senate Minority Leader Schumer will try to find agreements with the new president-- concerns that have been heightened by the cabinet confirmation process, in which Schumer has prioritized eight nominees rather than trying to gum up all of the picks at once.

In their view, a true opposition party in the Senate should grind all Republican movement to a halt. But that creates a problem for the senators leading the charge, who insist choosing their battles is the most effective way to kneecap Trump’s agenda.

“Opposing every nominee was not seriously on the table, it never has been. That’s not a test of whether or not you’re resistant," said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, noting that the party simply doesn’t have the votes to stop many of them.

Democratic lawmakers have still found ways to embarrass Trump, by pushing to get Trump’s nominees to disagree with the president, and introducing legislation aimed at disempowering him or forcing him to disclose personal information like tax returns. And by letting some of Trump’s less objectionable picks through without a fight, like Housing and Urban Secretary nominee Ben Carson, senators believe they can inoculate themselves from the criticism of obstructionism often leveled at McConnell during Obama’s presidency.

Trump doesn't care about being embarrassed; only about winning. And winning is what theDemocrats should be thinking about too. Grassroots Democrats are riled up, something that's likely to turn against collaborators like New Dem chief Jim Himes and Big PhRMA whore Cory Booker.

Meanwhile, we've been talking with Democrats around the country eager to take on Trumpism, from fired-up state legislators in Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania, states where Mercer's Cambridge Analytica was able to manipulate enough weak, simple-minded voters to give Trump his win, to elected officials in states as diverse as California and Texas. In fact, in Texas, one of Trump's most persistent antagonists, El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke is preparing to take on Ted Cruz in the 2018 Senate contest. This week, Beto told the Texas Observer that for the Democratic Party to move forward-- to be more than just the party that focuses on hating Trumpism-- Democratic office-holders have to listen to and talk with "the people who have been the bedrock of Democratic support for the better part of 70 years. I think that should cause us to assess whatever we’ve been doing. Nancy Pelosi has been able to leverage what is, relatively speaking, a weak negotiating position into significant concessions on funding bills. She’s also a terrific fundraiser. Congressional elections have become multimillion-dollar affairs, and she’s been able to pump a lot of money into the party. But this is all a pretext for what I’m going to say next. We need to do a much better job of listening to the people we represent and understanding their anxieties, and then be able to craft a legislative agenda and talk about it in a way that connects with constituents. I don’t know that the same leadership team that’s been in there for more than a decade and through four congressional cycles of loss can effectively do what’s necessary for change."

I remember my first official meeting at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-- I’d just been sworn in. Steve Israel, who was the chair and a member of Congress from Long Island, laid out for [newly elected members] how we should do our job. When you broke down his daily agenda as to how we should be spending our time, more than half of it was fundraising. It showed me just how screwed up the place was. Because the opening conversation wasn’t, “Hey, I know you came here to improve [health care] access for veterans or pursue a smarter foreign policy or fix health care”-- it was all about how to stay in office. It was absolutely disgusting to me. It’s probably disgusting to Steve Israel. I don’t think anybody likes it.

But it’s the system into which people were elected. I think that’s the way most people look at it: to be reelected and to have any weight with the caucus they need to do these things, even if they find them distasteful. I spent about a half-session trying to figure out how to play that game, and then I gave up and stopped taking PAC checks. I decided I was going to sacrifice my ability to be a player in that large-dollar world and just focus on the issues I was excited to be there for.

I think with America’s disgust with politicians in general and congressional members in particular, and part of that connected to the obsession with money and with being re-elected, I think there’s a golden opportunity for the Democratic Party to set itself apart and renounce Big Money. It’s counterintuitive. It means you leave some big bucks on the table, but I think it could be inspirational and could become the brand that will set us apart.

...One thing I’ve learned is that very rarely does the moral argument, which is the compelling one for me, persuade anybody. So I try to make the strongest economic argument that immigration is in America’s self-interest. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries, for example, will earn $4 trillion in taxable income over their lifetimes, and I’ve looked at what it would cost to deport them and what it would do to our economy should we lose them.

Those are things hopefully I can get Republicans to pay attention to. No state would be hurt more than Texas should we take a draconian turn on immigration enforcement, and it’s hard to imagine a more draconian turn than what we saw during the Obama administration, which deported more people than any previous administration.

I might mention that Beto may have a primary opponent for that Senate nomination. Joaquin Castro, a more cautious, collaborator type is sniffing around as well. He's hoping for a signal of some kind that the can win before spring when he promises a decision. He's the kind of weak loser who Texas Democrats feel comfortable losing with. If he's the candidate, Cruz is guaranteed 6 more years.

Some good polling news on the congressional front. Voters are repulsed by Trump and by Trumpism and buyers' remorse is huge already. According to a new survey released Thursday by PPP voters, by a nice healthy 48-40% margin, want to see Democrats take back Congress. Only 44% of voters see Trump favorably-- a shockingly low number for a new president-- and 50% already view him unfavorably. 35% are actually ready to see him impeached now! Voters don't like the agenda he's been pushing. Only 34% are willing to see American tax dollars pay for that idiotic wall of his. Now that the GOP is moving towards repealing the Affordable Care Act, support for keeping it now tops support for repealing it, 45-41%. Most Americans (59%) think the crooked prwsisdnet should release his tax returns and 61% say he needs to fully divest from his business interests.

Trump's ties to Russia continue to be a problem for him. Only 13% of voters have a favorable opinion of Russia, to 60% with a negative view of it. For Vladimir Putin himself, the numbers are even worse. Just 10% of voters see him positively, with 67% having an unfavorable opinion of him. Continued close ties to Russia could be a problem for Trump even with his own base-- among his voters Russia has a 20/47 favorability rating and Putin's is 15/55.

When asked who history will judge as a worse president, Trump is seen as worse than both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Obama, Carter and Jerry Ford! They think he'll be better than Nixon though. (They're wrong about that.)

In addition to losing out to all of his predecessors, Trump is also losing most of the fights he's picked recently. Voters say 58/21 that they think the intelligence agencies have more credibility than Trump, 50/40 that they think CNN has more credibility than Trump, and 46/41 that they have a higher opinion of the Today Show than Trump.

For the most part Americans don't buy claims about Trump having had the biggest crowds in history at his inauguration last weekend, although there's still a substantial portion of his base that goes along with him:

• Only 18% of voters overall think Trump's inauguration had the biggest crowd of any Presidential inauguration in history, to 62% who think it didn't. 34% of Trump voters do still say they think he had the biggest crowd ever though, to 32% who say he didn't, and 34% who aren't sure.

• Only 21% of voters overall think that Trump had a bigger crowd for his inauguration than Barack Obama, to 61% who think Obama had bigger crowds. 43% of Trump voters do still think that he had a bigger crowd for his inauguration though, to 26% who grant that it was Obama, and 32% who say they aren't sure.

• Only 29% of voters overall think that Trump's inauguration had a bigger crowd than the women's march, to 54% who think the women's march had a bigger crowd. 59% of Trump voters insist though that his inauguration had a bigger crowd than the women's march, to just 20% who say the march was bigger. Trump voters also have an explanation for why so many women turned out last weekend-- 38% think the marchers were paid to do so by George Soros, to 33% who say they don't think that was the case, and 29% who aren't sure.

The lying about crowd size has already taken a toll on Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer's credibility with the public. Conway has a 32% favorability rating, with 43% of voters viewing her negatively. By contrast when we polled on her a month ago she actually had a positive rating at 34/32, so she's had a 13 point net decline in the wake of 'alternative facts.' Spicer, who we polled for the first time, is seen favorably by 24% of voters and negatively by 37%.

Paul Ryan also has a terrible approval rating, just 33% to 43% who disapprove of the job he's doing. Miss McConnell fares even worse-- 15% approve and 52% disapprove. Congress as a whole also comes in at 15% approval-- with 65% disapproving.

Will The 2018 Midterms Put A Quick End To Trumpism?

Blue America's operating plan for 2017-18 is based on 2 simple premises-- first that Trump will be the worst and most destructive and hated president in history, and second, that Ryan, McConnell and the Republican Congress will drastically overreach, cement themselves to him, and make themselves vulnerable to a massive backlash in the 2018 midterms.

I spend a significant part of my days-- every day-- on the phone with perspective candidates, mostly for Congress, from around the country. I was even doing it when I was on vacation in Thailand last month. Sometimes its downright depressing. Many former candidates or activists who have worked for former candidates are bitter and filled with hopelessness because of the DCCC and DNC. More than I've ever seen, loathing for Pelosi and the DCCC is off the charts. Democrats around the country don't trust them and don't want anything to do with them. They routinely screwed over candidates everywhere and the corruption inside the DCCC is so overwhelming that potential candidates are almost unanimous is worrying that it isn't worth their time and effort to run before Pelosi and her failed, crumbling system are gone from the scene. Ironically, with Steve Israel now banished from Congress and no longer part of the DCCC-- he's at Third Way where he belongs-- the DCCC is showing early-- very early-- signs of a new beginning. I'm still skeptical but... no longer hopeless. Potential candidates aren't as tuned into the subtle changes and they're still hopeless.

Even in blue districts that the DCCC managed to lose because of their incompetence, venality, stupidity and corruption, candidates are reticent about what could turn out to be a banner year for Democrats, equivalent to the 2006 midterms, in which the Republicans lost 30 seats, forfeiting their majority and ousting Speaker Denny Hastert-- currently in prison after being convicted om charges stemming from decades of molesting underage boys-- and replacing him with Nancy Pelosi. In 2006, disgust with Bush and the GOP led to 42,338,795 votes being cast for Democratic congressional candidates, as opposed to 35,857,334 votes for Republicans. When the dust cleared, the Democrats held 233 seats and the Republicans 202, almost a mirror reflection of the 2004 results. Powerful and well-known Republicans, not just backbenchers, were swept out of office-- like Richard "Dirty Dick" Pombo (CA), Jim Leach (IA), John Sweeney (NY), northeast "moderates" Nancy Johnson (CT), Rob Simmons (CT), Jeb Bradley (NH), Charles Bass (NH), Sue Kelly (NY), Mike Fitzpatrick (PA) and far, far right doctrinaire extremists-- from J.D. Hayworth (AZ) and Charles Taylor (NC) to the 3 Indiana crackpots, Chris Chocola, John Hostettler and Mike Sodrel.

Recent polling shows that Trump and the congressional GOP are already creating the conditions for the kind of revulsion and backlash that not even DCCC incompetence can save them from. Trump's approval ratings, in poll after poll, are already circling the toilet in a way unprecedented for a new president:

• Quinnipiac- 36%
• Gallup- 45%
• ABC News- 40%
• CNN- 40%
• CBS News- 32%

This week, PPP released a more detailed poll showing how widespread anti-Trump sentiments are already hurting his party. Disapproval is 44% and expectations are very low. Voters expect him to be a worse president than Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter and Ford... though not as bad as Nixon. "Usually a new President comes in with voters having positive feelings and high expectations for them," said PPP President Dean Debnam. "Trump comes in with Americans expecting him to be the worst President in 40 years from Day 1." Voters are finally recognizing that he's a congenital liar and that his spokespersons, particularly Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, are liars as well.

The lying about crowd size has already taken a toll on Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer's credibility with the public. Conway has a 32% favorability rating, with 43% of voters viewing her negatively. By contrast when we polled on her a month ago she actually had a positive rating at 34/32, so she's had a 13 point net decline in the wake of 'alternative facts.' Spicer, who we polled for the first time, is seen favorably by 24% of voters and negatively by 37%.

The upshot of all this is that 35% of voters already say they support impeaching Trump, to 50% who say they're opposed. We will continue to regularly poll on impeaching Trump as long as issues like his tax returns, business interests, and ties with Russia remain unresolved.

The ascendance of Republicans in Washington has voters already looking toward creating some balance of power in next year's election. Democrats lead the generic Congressional ballot 48/40. This is partly an outgrowth of Trump's unpopularity but it's also a function of GOP Congressional leaders being unpopular in their own right. Paul Ryan has a 33/43 approval rating, and that makes him look positively popular in comparison to Mitch McConnell's 15/52 rating. Congress as a whole comes in at 15% disapproval and 65% disapproval.

Writing for the NY Times yesterday, Jennifer Steinhauer, highlighted how Ryan and the rest of the congressional Republicans are setting themselves up for a big fail by fully embracing Trumpism and Trump. They're no longer treating him and his insane pronouncement "as essentially a distraction... [T]he question of whether congressional Republicans would change President Trump or Mr. Trump would change them has an early answer. Mr. Trump cheerfully addressed the group here at their policy retreat on Thursday, and they responded with applause to many proposals they have long opposed." And proposals most Americans oppose.

Republican lawmakers appear more than ready to open up the coffers for a $12 billion to $15 billion border wall, perhaps without the commensurate spending cuts that they demanded when it came to disaster aid, money to fight the Zika virus or funds for the tainted water system in Flint, Mich. They also seem to back a swelling of the federal payroll that Mr. Trump has called for in the form of a larger military and 5,000 more border patrol agents.

They have stayed oddly silent as Mr. Trump and Senate Democrats push a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, larger than one they rejected from President Barack Obama. Once fierce promoters of the separation of powers, Republicans are now embracing Mr. Trump’s early governing by executive order, something they loudly decried during Mr. Obama’s second term.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan, whose own website this week still praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, now applauds Mr. Trump for putting the final shovel of dirt over the accord, with the president saying he is interested in bilateral agreements instead.

Many Republicans, who have been longstanding opponents of Russia and written laws that prohibit torture, have chosen to overlook, or even concur with, Mr. Trump’s embrace of both. Even on the subject of Mr. Trump’s call for an investigation into voter fraud, a widely debunked claim, Republicans have often demurred. “The notion that election fraud is a fiction is not true,” said the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Mr. Trump said he could not wait for lawmakers to get to work on their newfound common ground. “This Congress is going to be the busiest Congress we’ve had in decades, maybe ever,” Mr. Trump said. In an apparent reference to forthcoming bills, he added, “We’re actually going to sign the stuff that you’re writing. You’re not wasting your time.”

...But it is the sudden embrace of federal spending that represents perhaps the most striking departure, with Republicans backing the concept of starting the financing for the border wall with a new appropriation.

And the list is much longer. By contrast, last year, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, called Democrats’ request for $600 million in aid to Flint added to an energy bill “a huge earmark,” adding, “I think it’s not something I could support,” in keeping with most of his colleagues. Republicans also pushed for and partly succeeded in offsetting a bill to fight Zika last year.

The talk of a spending surge has left some Republicans worried about an exploding deficit. “There are going to have to be some cuts,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah. “I am not interested in raising our spending levels.”

Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, seemed tense when asked about the open checkbook. “We’re a fiscally conservative group,” he said of the committee. “We’re going to want to see things paid for.”

Republicans are also at times confused about what Mr. Trump is actually seeking when he makes policy declarations on Twitter. “‘Appears’ I think is the big word,” said Representative Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania. “I don’t think anyone in the House of Representatives on the Republican side of the aisle wants to go through the legislative process,” only to have the Trump administration send a bill back, he said.

Republicans had expected to reveal great progress on their plans to replace the health care act here, but instead seemed stuck in a perpetual debate over the timeline of coming up with a replacement. Senators in large part made a strong argument for making sure that a replacement plan had been fashioned before repealing the law, while many in the House continue to push for a repeal with replacement coming much later.

The public is watching and 2018 isn't that far away. I'm in the middle of discussions with potential candidates to take on Paul Ryan in his swingy south Wisconsin district, a district Obama won in 2008, 51-48% and Romney won in 2012, 52-47%. I don't have the exact numbers for 2016 yet, but Trump won. Racine and Kenosha counties provide the most votes in the congressional district. In 2012, Obama won Kenosha 44,838 (56%) to 34,942 (43%) and won Racine more narrowly-- 52,887 (51%) to 49,173 (48%). This past November Trump won both counties-- Kenosha with 36,025 votes to Clinton's 35,770 and Racine with 46,620 votes to Clinton's 42,506. In other words, in more Democratic Kenosha, Clinton lost just over 9,000 votes that Obama got, while Trump bested Romney's total by slightly over a thousand votes. Plenty of Kenosha voters apparently didn't want Hillary--the county went overwhelmingly for Bernie (57-42%) in the primary-- but didn't want to vote for Trump. In Racine, Hillary underperformed Obama by a bit over 10,000 votes and Trump underperformed Romney by just over 2,500 votes. Racine had also gone to Bernie in the primary (51-49%) and, again, many voters-- decisively so-- didn't want Clinton but couldn't stomach voting for Trump. With Ryan attaching himself to Trump at the hip, will these voters be ready to make the move and elect a solid progressive offering clear departure from the ugly dystopia Trump and Ryan are offering up? We think so-- and we think we are close to persuading a candidate who sees it the same way to commit to jumping in against Ryan soon.

Trump-- Already Making America Less Safe With His Adderall-Fueled Twitter Feuds

Wednesday, Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, announced he was thinking about canceling his meeting with Señor el Presidente Trumpanzee in Washington next week, as a matter of Mexican national pride. Within hours, Thursday morning, he tweeted that he canceled the meeting with the deranged, Adderall-addicted orange orangoutang. Trumpanzee, a pathological liar unable to control himself even at this high a level, claims the idea to cancel the meeting was his own since Peña Nieto was once again refusing to pay for Trump's foolish and absurd wall.

Today's Wall Street Journal slammed Trumpanzee as a pathetic and dangerous amateur: "The world is not a Republican primary. President Trump’s Twitter broadsides against Mexico have unleashed a political backlash that has now become a diplomatic crisis with a friendly neighbor." The editorial board tried to remind the idiot that "With a population of 128 million, Mexico is America’s second-largest export market for goods. Some six million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Mexico."

Trump, in a freak-show display of his brand of twitter-diplomacy tweeted that "The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost." Moments later, Josh Rogin reported that the entire senior management team at the State Department had just resigned en masse, unwilling "to stick around for the Trump era." He was still at it this morning, tweeting that "Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S. for long enough. Massive trade deficits & little help on the very weak border must change, NOW! Maybe it wasn't just because of Trumpanzee's twitter diplomacy; aftern all, T-Rex had just spent Wednesday meeting with them the day before.

Undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, handed in their resignations. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. A few days earlier Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, quit as well.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

Several senior foreign service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive because those offices need to be led by people who know the department and have experience running its complicated bureaucracies. There’s no easy way to replace that via the private sector, said Wade.

“Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”

Or maybe they didn't like the idea of advocating for the illegal use of torture. Was this part of the Resistance? Trumpanzee, of course, claims he fired them all... the same way he claims it was his idea it cancel the meeting with the President of Mexico.

And speaking of torture, I was putting my shoes and socks on and switched on the TV. Andrea Mitchell was on with a former Bush Regime torture advocate and she asked him if Trump openly advocating torture-- not even calling it "enhanced interrogation" the way Cheney and Bush and their stooges used to-- was giving "the bad guys" a propaganda tool. Why are Andrea Mitchell and the rest of the media hacks unable to realize that Trump and his team of miscreants ARE the bad guys?

CAVEAT: Silver Lining

One of the State Department officials who resigned is Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, wife of notorious neocon Robert Kagan and one of the worst of the Cold War neanderthal hold-overs, someone Clinton was said to be considering for a top post.

Mary Tyler Moore (1936-2017)

The final episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, written by series co-creators and masterminds James L. Brooks and Allan Burns and core collaborators Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniels, David Lloyd, and Bob Ellison and directed by (who else?) the great Jay Sandrich, first aired March 19, 1977.

Picking up at 20:40, as LOU GRANT (Ed Asner), MARY RICHARDS (Mary Tyler Moore), MURRAY SLAUGHTER (Gavin MacLeod), SUE ANN NIVENS (Betty White), and TED and GEORGETTE BAXTER (Ted Knight and Georgia Engel) are gathered for their last moments together in the WJM-TV newsroom, with MARY hugging LOU --

LOU: I treasure you people.
[The two-person hug turns into a group one as MURRAY, SUE ANN, and GEORGETTE jump in, followed finally, haltingly, by TED, who is now heard sobbing loudly.]
LOU: I think we all need some Kleenex.
GEORGETTE: There's some on Mary's desk.
[In one of the more celebrated -- and wonderful -- shots in TV history, the huddled group shuffles over to MARY's desk and partakes of the promised Kleenex.]
MARY: Mr. Grant, could I say what I wanted to say now? Please?
LOU [amid a fair amount of sniffling]: Okay, Mary.
MARY: Well, I just wanted you to know that sometimes I get concerned about being a career worman. I get to thinking my job is too important to me. And, I tell myself that the people I work with are just the people I work with, and not my family. And last night I thought, "What is a family anyway? They're just people who make you feel less alone, and really loved." And that's what you've done for me. Thank you for [as she breaks up] being my family.
[After nearly 10 seconds of resumed group hugging --]
MURRAY: Now for the hard part. [Pause] How do we leave this room?

The answer, of course, is history -- and not just TV history.

by Ken

When the news came Wednesday of the death of Mary Tyler Moore, I thought for a moment that I would scrap the post I was working on and, you know, whip something up. I regained my senses quickly enough to realize that no speedy whipping-up was likely to be forthcoming and resumed work on the post I was working on, which wound up being late but a lot less late than the whipped-up Mary Tyler Moore post would have been.

Now here it is a certain amount of time later, and the whipping-up still isn't going to happen. Because the proper answer to the question "What does the Mary Tyler Moore Show mean to me?" is "Everything." Women have treasured it understandably for its trailblazing look at a single woman living her life as a single woman from age 30 to age 37, but in truth it's a treasure for all of us in showing us a person trying to figure out how to live her life while that life is happening all around her.

Since time insists on doing the only thing it knows how to do, which is to say march on, or maybe fly, it's kind of staggering to realize that, this being 2017, it is now coming up on 40 years since The Mary Tyler Moore Show went off the air. I'm chilled to hear that there are loads of people now who don't even know what it was. Yikes!

I've said it before, so I might as well say it again: The friendship between Mary Richards (MTM) and Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) remains one of the great relationships created by the mind of humankind, and the show -- with its roster of memorable characters -- seemingly effortlessly survived the transplantation of Rhoda to her own show after four of its eventual seven dazzling seasons. There are shows, as we all know, even very good ones, that outlast their welcome, that limp to the finish line. The Mary Tyler Moore Show wasn't one of them. It was never better, never richer, funnier, or wiser, than in its final season.

So for today, while I try to gather my thoughts, I thought we might look at the final episode.

I've only begun to tap the special features included in the Mary Tyler Moore Show DVDs, recorded a bunch of years later, and so imparting extra wisdom, but there are lots of real nuggets, like Allan Burns pointing out that as the show approached its premiere, the network geniuses were filled with dread, because instead of consisting of jokes, its comedy all came out of character, and the suits weren't necessarily crazy about those characters -- he and Jim Brooks were under heavy pressure to replace Ed Asner as Lou Grant on the ground that he wasn't "funny." Of course he hadn't been hired to be funny, he was hired to play Lou Grant -- and the rest is history.

The present-day CBS suits probably wouldn't own up to the reality of that history (another nugget: the network dug in and wanted to refuse to air the show that featured Nancy Walker's first appearance as Rhoda's mother, Ida Morgenstern -- one of the supreme characters in TV creation, and one of the finest half-hours in its history), but the network came up with a fine hour-long tribute last night, Mary Tyler Moore: Love Is All Around, hosted by Gayle King and prominently featuring Oprah, but also including lots of other people who are important to the MTM story. The show touched most of the right bases, and if you can't access it via, say, "On Demand," on Heavy Daniel S. Levine has instructions on "How to Watch the CBS Special Online."

In the course of the show, Mary herself is seen saying in an interview that for her the show was about family -- that is, the people who become your family. Of course lots of other TV shows have also been about this kind of family, which over this last half-century has increasingly become the kind of family that many of us live closest to. Nobody's done it better, though.

Eventually I'll try to write about all this more coherently, but for now I thought I'd just toss in two clips. First, this famous Oprah one, which unfortunately doesn't include the part where she tries to explain why Mary Tyler Moore is so important to her.



And finally, as a teasing reminder of another side of Mary, here's just a tiny clip you can find of her astounding performance in the first film Robert Redford directed, Ordinary People, in which Mary, who had recently lost her son Richie, plays an icily detached mother unable or unwilling to deal with the emotional crisis of the younger son, the one who survived after she lost the son she really loved. The role was played equally brilliantly by the young Timothy Hutton, and Donald Sutherland gave maybe the best performance of his career as the husband-father. (I assume that media people have been soliciting comment from Redford this week.)

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Is Trump A Pawn In Psychotic Billionaire Robert Mercer's Plot To Take Over The World-- The End Of Privacy

This is a translation from the German language Swiss Magazine Das Magazin, something like the New Yorker, based in Zurich, that goes beyond another report on the campaign and victory of a fascist and would-be dictator in the U.S. The German version, by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus was published on December 3, under the title "Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt" ("I just showed that the bomb was there"). Keep in mind when you read it that Robert Mercer controls Cambridge Analytica and, to a great extent the media has not yet understood, the Trump Regime.

Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method of analyzing people’s behavior down to the minutest detail by looking at their Facebook activity—thus helping Donald Trump to victory.

On November 9th, around 8:30 in the morning, Michal Kosinski awoke in his hotel room in Zurich. The 34-year-old had traveled here to give a presentation to the Risk Center at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich] at a conference on the dangers of Big Data and the so-called digital revolution. Kosinski gives such presentations all over the world. He is a leading expert on psychometrics, a data-driven offshoot of psychology. Turning on the television this morning in Zurich, he saw that the bomb had gone off: defying the predictions of nearly every leading statistician, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States of America.

Kosinski watched Trump’s victory celebration and the remaining election returns for a long while. He suspected that his research could have had something to do with the result. Then he took a deep breath and turned off the television.

On the same day, a little-known British company headquartered in London issued a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in president-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix is quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He only appears in public in a tailored suit and designer eyeglasses, his slightly wavy blond hair combed back.

The meditative Kosinski, the well-groomed Nix, the widely grinning Trump-- one made this digital upheaval possible, one carried it out, and one rode it to power.

How dangerous is Big Data?

Anyone who didn’t spend the last five years on the moon has heard the term Big Data. The emergence of Big Data has meant that everything we do, online or off-, leaves digital traces. Every purchase with a card, every Google search, every movement with a cellphone in your pocket, every “like” gets stored. Especially every “like.” For a while it wasn’t entirely clear what any of this data would be good for, other than showing us ads for blood pressure medication in our Facebook feeds after we google “high blood pressure.” It also wasn’t entirely clear whether or in what ways Big Data would be a threat or a boon to humanity.

Since November 9th, 2016, we know the answer. Because one and the same company was behind Trump’s online ad campaigns and late 2016’s other shocker, the Brexit “Leave” campaign: Cambridge Analytica, with its CEO Alexander Nix. Anyone who wants to understand the outcome of the US elections-- and what could be coming up in Europe in the near future-- must begin with a remarkable incident at the University of Cambridge in 2014, in Kosinski’s department of psychometrics.

Psychometrics, sometimes also known as psychography, is a scientific attempt to “measure” the personality of a person. The so-called Ocean Method has become the standard approach. Two psychologists were able to demonstrate in the 1980s that the character profile of a person can be measured and expressed in five dimensions, the Big Five: Openness (how open are you to new experiences?), Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), Extroversion (how sociable are you?), Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?), and Neuroticism (how sensitive/vulnerable are you?). With these five dimensions (O.C.E.A.N.), you can determine fairly precisely what kind of person you are dealing with-- her needs and fears as well as how she will generally behave. For a long time, however, the problem was data collection, because to produce such a character profile meant asking subjects to fill out a complicated survey asking quite personal questions. Then came the internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

A new life began in 2008 for the Warsaw-born student Michal Kosinski when he was accepted to the prestigious University of Cambridge in England to work in the Cavendish Laboratory at the Psychometrics Center, the first-ever psychometrics laboratory. With a fellow student, Kosinski created a small app for Facebook (the social media site was more straightforward then than it is now) called MyPersonality. With MyPersonality, you could answer a handful of questions from the Ocean survey (“Are you easily irritated?”-- “Are you inclined to criticize others?”) and receive a rating, or a “Personality Profile” consisting of traits defined by the Ocean method. The researchers, in turn, got your personal data. Instead of a couple dozen friends participating, as initially expected, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people had bared their souls. Suddenly the two doctoral students had access to the then-largest psychological data set ever produced.

The process that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the years that followed is actually quite simple. First surveys are distributed to test subjects-- this is the online quiz. From the subjects’ responses, their personal Ocean traits are calculated. Then Kosinski’s team would compile every other possible online data point of a test subject-- what they’ve liked, shared, or posted on Facebook; gender, age, and location. Thus the researchers began to find correlations, and began to see that amazingly reliable conclusions could be drawn about a person by observing their online behavior. For example, men who “like” the cosmetics brand MAC are, to a high degree of probability, gay. One of the best indicators of heterosexuality is liking Wu-Tang Clan. People who follow Lady Gaga, furthermore, are most probably extroverted. Someone who likes philosophy is more likely introverted.

Kosinski and his team continued, tirelessly refining their models. In 2012, Kosinski demonstrated that from a mere 68 Facebook likes, a lot about a user could be reliably predicted: skin color (95% certainty), sexual orientation (88% certainty), Democrat or Republican (85%). But there’s more: level of intellect; religious affiliation; alcohol-, cigarette-, and drug use could all be calculated. Even whether or not your parents stayed together until you were 21 could be teased out of the data.

How good a model is, however, depends on how well it can predict the way a test subject will answer certain further questions. Kosinski charged ahead. Soon, with a mere ten “likes” as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could “know” a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.

The day he published these findings, Kosinski received two phonecalls. One was a threat to sue, the other a job offer. Both were from Facebook.

Only Visible to Friends

In the meantime, Facebook has introduced the differentiation between public and private posts. In “private” mode, only one’s own friends can see what one likes. This is still no obstacle for data-collectors: while Kosinski always requests the consent of the Facebook users he tests, many online quizzes these days demand access to private information as a precondition to taking a personality test. (Anyone who is not overly concerned about their private information and who wants to get assessed according to their Facebook likes can do so at Kosinski’s website, and then compare the results to those of a “classic” Ocean survey here).

It’s not just about likes on Facebook. Kosinski and his team have in the meantime figured out how to sort people according to Ocean criteria based only on their profile pictures. Or according to the number of their social media contacts (this is a good indicator of extroversion). But we also betray information about ourselves when we are offline. Motion sensors can show, for example, how fast we are moving a smartphone around or how far we are traveling (correlates with emotional instability). A smartphone, Kosinski found, is in itself a powerful psychological survey that we, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly filling out.

Above all, though-- and this is important to understand-- it also works another way: using all this data, psychological profiles can not only be constructed, but they can also be sought and found. For example if you’re looking for worried fathers, or angry introverts, or undecided Democrats. What Kosinski invented, to put it precisely, is a search engine for people. And he has been getting more and more acutely aware of both the potential and the danger his work presents.

The internet always seemed to him a gift from heaven. He wants to give back, to share. Information is freely reproducible, copyable, and everyone should benefit from it. This is the spirit of an entire generation, the beginning of a new era free of the limits of the physical world. But what could happen, Kosinski asked himself, if someone misused his search engine in order to manipulate people? His scientific work [e.g.] began to come with warnings: these prediction techniques could be used in ways that “pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to understand what he meant.

Around this time, in early 2014, a young assistant professor named Aleksandr Kogan approached Kosinski. He said he had received an inquiry from a company interested in Kosinski’s methods. They apparently wanted to psychometrically measure the profiles of ten million American Facebook users. To what purpose, Kogan couldn’t say: there were strict secrecy stipulations. At first, Kosinski was ready to accept-- it would have meant a lot of money for his institute. But he hesitated. Finally Kogan divulged the name of the company: SCL, Strategic Communications Laboratories. Kosinski googled them [so did Antidote. Here. -ed.]: “We are a global election management agency,” said the company website [really, the website has even creepier language on it than that. “Behavioral change communication”? Go look already]. SCL offers marketing based on a “psychographic targeting” model. With an emphasis on “election management” and political campaigns? Disturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company is this? And what do they have planned for the United States?

What Kosinski didn’t know at the time was that behind SCL there lay a complex business structure including ancillary companies in tax havens, as the Panama Papers and Wikileaks revelations have since shown. Some of these had been involved in political upheavals in developing countries; others had done work for NATO, developing methods for the psychological manipulation of the population in Afghanistan. And SCL is also the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, this ominous Big Data firm that managed online marketing for both Trump and the Brexit “Leave” campaign.

Kosinski didn’t know any of that, but he had a bad feeling: “The whole thing started to stink,” he remembers. Looking into it further, he discovered that Aleksandr Kogan had secretly registered a company to do business with SCL. A document obtained by Das Magazin confirms that SCL learned about Kosinski’s methods through Kogan. It suddenly dawned on Kosinski that Kogan could have copied or reconstructed his Ocean models in order to sell them to this election-manipulating company. He immediately broke off contact with him and informed the head of his institute. A complicated battle ensued within Cambridge University. The institute feared for its reputation. Aleksandr Kogan moved to Singapore, got married, and began calling himself Dr. Spectre. Michal Kosinski relocated to Stanford University in the United States.

For a year or so it was quiet. Then, in November 2015, the more radical of the two Brexit campaigns (leave.eu, led by Nigel Farage) announced that they had contracted with a Big Data firm for online marketing support: Cambridge Analytica. The core expertise of this company: innovative political marketing, so-called microtargeting, on the basis of the psychological Ocean model.

Kosinski started getting emails asking if he had had anything to do with it-- for many, his is the first name to spring to mind upon hearing the terms Cambridge, Ocean, and analytics in the same breath. This is when he heard of Cambridge Analytica for the first time. Appalled, he looked up their website. His methods were being deployed, on a massive scale, for political purposes.

After the Brexit vote in July the email inquiries turned to insults and reproaches. Just look what you’ve done, friends and colleagues wrote. Kosinski had to explain over and over again that he had nothing to do with this company.

First Brexit, Then Trump

September 19th, 2016: the US presidential election is approaching. Guitar riffs fill the dark blue ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York: CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising.” The Concordia Summit is like the WEF in miniature. Decision makers from all over the world are invited; among the guests is Johann Schneider-Ammann [then nearing the end of his year term as president of Switzerland’s governing council].

A gentle women’s voice comes over the PA: “Please welcome Alexander Nix, Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Analytica.” A lean man in a dark suit strides towards the center of the stage. An attentive quiet descends. Many in the room already know: this is Trump’s new Digital Man. “Soon you’ll be calling me Mr. Brexit,” Trump had tweeted cryptically a few weeks before. Political observers had already been pointing out the substantial similarities between Trump’s agenda and that of the rightwing Brexit camp; only a few had noticed the connection to Trump’s recent engagement with a largely unknown marketing company: Cambridge Analytica.

Before then, Trump’s online campaign had consisted more or less of one person: Brad Parscale, a marketing operative and failed startup founder who had built Trump a rudimentary website for $1,500. The 70-year-old Trump is not what one would call an IT-whiz; his desk is unencumbered by a computer. There is no such thing as an email from Trump, his personal assistant once let slip. It was she who persuaded him to get a smartphone-- the one from which he has uninhibitedly tweeted ever since.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was relying on the endowment of the first social media president, Barack Obama. She had the Democratic Party’s address lists, collected millions of dollars over the internet, received support from Google and Dreamworks. When it became known in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, Washington collectively sneered. Foreign noodlenecks in tailored suits who don’t understand this country and its people? Seriously?

“Ladies and gentlemen, honorable colleagues, it is my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process.” The Cambridge Analytica logo appears behind Alexander Nix-- a brain, comprised of a few network nodes and pathways, like a subway map. “It’s easy to forget that only eighteen months ago Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates seeking nomination, and certainly one of the more vilified,” begins the blond man with his British diction that produces the same mixture of awe and resentment in Americans that high German does the Swiss. “In addition, he had very low name recognition; only about forty percent of the electorate had heard of him.”

Everyone in the room was aware of the sudden rise, in May 2016, of the conservative senator within the Republican field of presidential candidates. It was one of the strangest moments of the primary campaign. Cruz had been the last of a series of Republican opponents to come out of nowhere with what looked like a credible challenge to frontrunner Trump. “How did he do this?” continues Nix.

Cambridge Analytica had begun engaging with US elections towards the end of 2014, initially to advise the Republican Ted Cruz, and paid by the secretive American tech billionaire Robert Mercer. Up to that point, according to Nix, election campaign strategy had been guided by demographic concepts. “But this is a really ridiculous idea, the idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender; or all African-Americans because of their race.” The Hillary Clinton campaign team was still operating on precisely such amateurish assumptions-- Nix need not even mention-- which divide the electorate up into ostensibly homogeneous groups…exactly the same way as all the public opinion researchers who predicted a Clinton victory did.

Nix clicks to the next slide: five different faces, each representing a personality profile. It is the Ocean model. “At Cambridge, we’ve rolled out a long-form quantitative instrument to probe the underlying traits that inform personality. This is the cutting edge in experimental psychology.” It is now completely silent in the hall. “By having hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans undertake this survey, we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing arises from the combination of three elements: this psychological behavioral analysis of the Ocean model, Big Data evaluation, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertisement tailored as precisely as possible to the character of a single consumer.

Nix explains forthrightly how his company does this (the presentation can be viewed on YouTube above). From every available source, Cambridge Analytica buys up personal data: “What car you drive, what products you purchase in shops, what magazines you read, what clubs you belong to.” Voter and medical records. On the screen behind him are displayed the logos of global data traders like Acxiom and Experian-- in the United States nearly all personal consumer data is available for purchase. If you want to know, for example, where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information. Including telephone numbers. Now Cambridge Analytica crosschecks these data sets with Republican Party voter rolls and online data such as Facebook likes, and constructs an Ocean personality profile. From a selection of digital signatures there suddenly emerge real individual people with fears, needs, and interests-- and home addresses.

The process is identical to the models that Michal Kosinski developed. Cambridge Analytica also uses IQ-Quiz and other small Ocean test apps in order to gain access to the powerful predictive personal information wrapped up in the Facebook likes of users. And Cambridge Analytica is doing precisely what Kosinski had warned about. They have assembled psychograms for all adult US citizens, 220 million people, and have used this data to influence electoral outcomes.

Nix clicks to the next slide. “This is a data dashboard that we prepared for the Cruz campaign for the Iowa caucus. It looks intimidating, but it’s actually very simple.” On the left, graphs and diagrams; on the right, a map of Iowa, where Cruz had done surprisingly well in the caucuses. On this map, hundreds of thousands of tiny dots, red and blue. Nix begins to narrow down search criteria to a category of Republican caucus-goers he describes as a “persuasion” group, whose common Ocean personality profile and home locations are now visible, a smaller set of people to whom advertisement can be more effectively tailored. Ultimately the criteria can be narrowed to a single individual, along with his name, age, address, interests, and political leanings. How does Cambridge Analyica approach this person with political messaging?

Earlier in the presentation, using the example of the Second Amendment, Nix showed two variations on how certain psychographic profiles are spoken to differently. “For a highly Neurotic and Conscientious audience, you’re going to need a message that is both rational and fear-based: the threat of a burglary and the ‘insurance policy’ of a gun is very persuasive.” A picture on the left side of the screen shows a gloved hand breaking a window and reaching for the inside door handle. On the right side, there is a picture of a man and child silhouetted against a sunset in tall grass, both with rifles, obviously duck hunting: “for a Closed and Agreeable audience, people who care about traditions and habits and family and community, talking about these values is going to be much more effective in communicating your message.”

How to Keep Clinton Voters Away

Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct variations on his arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix explained to Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Cambridge Analytica regaled residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton voters-- skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women-- to stay home. To “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-Americans, for example, are shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton referring to black youth as “super predators.”

“Blanket advertising-- the idea that a hundred million people will receive the same piece of direct mail, the same television advert, the same digital advert-- is dead,” Nix begins to wrap up his presentation at the Concordia Summit. “My children will certainly never understand this concept of mass communication. Today, communication is becoming ever increasingly targeted.

“The Cruz campaign is over now, but what I can tell you is that of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies. And it’s going to be very interesting to see how they impact the next seven weeks. Thank you.” With that, he exits the stage.

It is not knowable just to what extent the American population is being targeted by Trump’s digital troopers-- because they seldom attack through the mainstream broadcast media, but rather mostly with highly personalized ads on social media or through digital cable. And while the Clinton team sat back in the confidence that it was safe with its demographic calculations, a new crew was moving into the Trump online campaign headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, as Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg noted with surprise after a visit. The Cambridge Analytica team, apparently just a dozen people, had received around $100,000 from Trump in July; in August another $250,000; five million in September. Altogether, says Nix, they took in around fifteen million.

And the company took even more radical measures: starting in July 2016, a new app was prepared for Trump campaign canvassers with which they could find out the political orientation and personality profile of a particular house’s residents in advance. If the Trump people ring a doorbell, it’s only the doorbell of someone the app has identified as receptive to his messages, and the canvassers can base their line of attack on personality-specific conversation guides also provided by the app. Then they enter a subject’s reactions to certain messaging back into the app, from where this new data flows back to the control rooms of Cambridge Analytica.

The company divided the US population into 32 personality types, and concentrated on only seventeen states. And just as Kosinski had determined that men who like MAC cosmetics on Facebook are probably gay, Cambridge Analytica found that a predeliction for American-produced cars is the best predictor of a possible Trump voter. Among other things, this kind of knowledge can inform Trump himself which messages to use, and where. The decision to focus candidate visits in Michigan and Wisconsin over the final weeks of the campaign was based on this manner of data analysis. The candidate himself became an implementation instrument of the model.

What is Cambridge Analytica Doing in Europe?

How great an influence did these psychometric methods have on the outcome of the election? Cambridge Analytica, when asked, did not want to disclose any documentation assessing the effectiveness of their campaign. It is possible that the question cannot be answered at all. Still, some indicators should be considered: there is the fact that Ted Cruz, thanks to the help of Cambridge Analytica, rose out of obscurity to become Trump’s strongest competitor in the primaries; there is the increase in rural voter turnout; there is the reduction, compared to 2008 and 2012, in African-American voter participation. The circumstance of Trump having spent so little money on advertising could also speak for the effectiveness of personality-specific targeting, as could the fact that three quarters of his marketing budget was spent in the digital realm. Facebook became his ultimate weapon and his best canvasser, as a Trump staffer tweeted. In Germany, the rightwing upstart party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) may like the sound of this, as they have more Facebook friends than Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) combined.

It is therefore not at all the case, as is so often claimed, that statisticians lost this election because their polls were so faulty. The opposite is true: statisticians won this election. It was just certain statisticians, the ones using the new method. It is a cruel irony of history that Trump, such a detractor of science, won the election thanks to science.

Another big winner in the election was Cambridge Analytica. Steve Bannon, a Cambridge Analytica board member and publisher of the ultra-rightwing online site Breitbart News, was named Trump’s chief strategist. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, ambitious Front National activist and niece of the presidential candidate, has tweeted that she has accepted the firm’s invitation to collaborate. In an internal company video, there is a live recording of a discussion entitled “Italy.” Alexander Nix confirms that he is in the process of client acquisition, worldwide. They have received inquiries out of Switzerland and Germany.

Kosinski has been observing all of this from his office at Stanford. After the election, the university was in an uproar. Kosinski responded to the developments with the most powerful weapon available to researchers: a scientific analysis. Along with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he conducted a series of tests that will soon be published. The first results seen by Das Magazin are unsettling: psychological targeting, as Cambridge Analytica deployed it, increases the clickthru rate on Facebook ads by more than sixty percent. And the so-called conversion rate (the term for how likely a person is to act upon a personally-tailored ad, i.e. whether they buy a product or, yes, go vote) increases by a staggering 1400 percent.

The world has been turned upside down. The Brits are leaving the EU; Trump rules America. It all began with one man, who indeed tried to warn of the danger, and who still gets accusatory emails. “No,” says Kosinski quietly, shaking his head, “this is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I just showed that it was there.”