by Tom Sullivan

All the 1% complaints about being “vilified” for their wealth miss an essential point: their getting impossibly richer eventually destabilizes the planet.

Donald Trump and his allies argue that if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. The subtext is about keeping non-white people from emigrating to the U.S. and diluting white sovereignty. But capital flowing unrestricted across borders? No problemo.

Eric Levitz addresses the issue of capital flows and wealth taxes for “Intelligencer.” Economists and billionaires themselves argue the country would be unable to enforce the sorts of wealth taxes supported by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and 60 percent of Americans. Wealth taxes would simply incentivize more tax-dodging by the super-rich and/or moving their wealth offshore.

Levitz observes:

This argument asks Americans to accept a stark limitation on their nation’s sovereignty. It stipulates that in a world of globally mobile capital, the effective limit on top tax rates is set by our superrich, not our democratic polity. Why this diminution of the nation-state’s authority should be acceptable — even as a minuscule amount of undocumented immigration is regarded as a crisis of the rule of law — is difficult to explain.

Well, not really. Steeply progressive taxation is politically untenable “because of the outsize political influence (and innovative unlawfulness) of the cosmopolitan elites who bankroll the Republican Party.”

Not that Democratic elites don’t have skin in that same game too.

But here’s something else to consider as apologists for unfettered wealth ply us with tales of all the good billionaires might do with their fortunes.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has pledged to give away nearly all of his wealth. He has, Vox reported last year, given away over $45 billion through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s saved millions of lives using his wealth to fight malaria and global poverty. (Bloomberg estimates the donations at a mere $35 billion.)

Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett has donated over $34 billion since pledging to give away his fortune. Reuters reported in July Buffet still owns “about 15.7 percent of Berkshire, despite having given away 45 percent of his 2006 holdings.” He gave $3.6 billion this year to five charitable foundations so they can give it away for him. Reporting earlier this year showed Berkshire Hathaway was taking in money faster than Buffett could invest it.

It turns out giving away money is as hard, if not harder. It takes “expensive and time-intensive” due diligence to be sure the money isn’t simply thrown at scam charities. (Our acting president’s former charity, for example.) Gates’ fortune has grown so large he can’t give away his money as fast as he’s making it. Gates’ portfolio today is $16 billion larger than when he started giving it away.

Gates and others likely didn’t set out to become Weyland-Yutani, “The Company” of the Alien and Predator franchises. But despite laudable efforts like Gates’ and Buffett’s, is that where unfettered wealth is headed?

Among the terrible B-movies from the 1950s is one called The Magnetic Monster (1953). Except, there is no monster. A scientist, naturally, creates a marvelous new something that is neither marvelous nor even visible at first. It quickly gets out of control, naturally again. But Jurassic Park this is not. The “monster” here is not alive, but a new isotope that grows, doubling in mass every 11 hours by sucking in energy and matter from around it. This script arrived before “black holes” had agents, but that’s the idea. If other scientists cannot “kill” the stuff in time, it will grow massive enough to throw Earth out of its orbit and hasta la vista, baby.

Here we have massive fortunes growing ever more massive. Wealth concentrates itself in the hands of a tiny segment of the population as the middle class shrinks. The more high-minded billionaires can’t even give it away faster than the piles swell. And in the roles of frantic science geeks trying to keep expanding piles of money from throwing the planet out of its orbit we have Warren and Sanders. Naturally, they are opposed by skeptical wealth-o-philes and Cold War dead-enders who condemn them as socialists who want to punish success.

In the 1950s, we knew who would prevail. Today, that’s not a sure bet.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

The acting president, his staff, enablers in Congress, and red-hat true-believers have their golden oldies. Donald Trump’s Greatest Hits are material he trots out at rallies when he needs an applause line whether or not riff is already yesterday’s news or overtaken by subsequent events. “Lock her up” still shows up occasionally. “Fake news” is a staple. So is the “the phony, fake dossier, the disgusting fake dossier,” as he describes the report developed for Fusion GPS by former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele.

Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch have taken considerable heat for the material Steele leaked to the press. Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his firm’s role in contracting the opposition research on candidate Donald Trump. BuzzFeed published the dossier in early 2017, but it had floated around Washington for months. Days before the election, David Corn of Mother Jones named Christopher Steele as the veteran British spy with a bundle of human intelligence detailing Trump’s ties to Russia.

Obscured by right-wing smears is the fact an unnamed conservative Trump opponent first contracted the opposition research project through the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. Once Trump became the presumptive Republican nomination, the pair explain, the donor pulled the plug and Democrats resumed the funding. Their interest was in Trump’s overseas business deals. They hired Steele for his Russia experience because of the opaqueness of the country’s business arrangements. Steele turned up troubling information that Russians had tried to cultivate Trump and develop blackmail material on him.

Simpson and Fritsch are making the rounds of talk shows promoting their book, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.” Simpson and Fritsch explain they never met or spoke with Hillary Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” they write.

Steele defends his research as based on “tried and tested” sources, neither a fabrication nor Russian disinformation. Jane Meyer of the New Yorker adds:

Steele points out that the most critical criteria for judging disinformation is “whether there is a palpable motive for spreading it”; the ultimate Russian goal in 2016, he argues, “was to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally spread embarrassing information about Trump—true or not—is not logical.”

Steele, according to Simpson and Fritsch, is equally dismissive of those who claim that the Russians spread disinformation in order to discredit him. “The stakes were far, far too high for them to trifle with settling scores with me or any other civilian,” he said. “Damaging my reputation was simply not on their list of priorities. But helping Trump, and damaging Hillary was at the very top of it. No one denies that anymore.”

Even if everything contained in the dossier is proven, say Simpson and Fritsch, “a spy whose sources get it 70 percent right is considered to be one of the best.” The central message stands, they argue: Russian President Putin was actively meddling in the U.S. elections in an effort to “sow discord and disunity with the United States itself but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance.”

Nevertheless, the Steele dossier remains a bugaboo for Trump and Republican supporters who defend his Ukraine arms-for-political dirt scheme. Ukraine eventually got the aid, they argue. Ukraine’s President Zelensky never announced an investigation into Joe Biden and his son as Trump demanded. No harm. No foul.

Still, Republicans condemn Democrats for paying Fusion GPS for foreign dirt aimed at stopping Trump from being elected. Simpson and Fritsch should argue since Trump was elected and Steele’s dossier wasn’t published during the campaign, then no harm, no foul. Quit yer whining!!! Right?

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

A flurry of breaking stories uncorked over the weekend still require time to age properly. But after two weeks of testimony in the impeachment inquiry, a review might be in order this morning. It’s been hell keeping up.

Thankfully, several sources provided summaries to help ensure everyone is on the same page.

The Washington Post provided a short video cataloging 24 GOP defenses of Donald Trump’s arms-for-political-dirt scheme with Ukraine. It’s a moving target. On Nov. 12, the Post counted 17.

Here’s a summary of this weekend’s count:

Walter Shaub, former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics under presidents Obama and Trump, provides a lengthy bill of particulars against Trump. For a moment there, I thought I was reading the list of 27 complaints against King George III. But Shaub counts 40 against Trump, a few of which are posted below. Donald will be pleased the size of his list is bigger:

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1198670442829094912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama and MSNBC contributor, watched every minute of the hearings and knows most of the witnesses to date. “After 2 weeks,” McFaul tweets, “none of the basic facts were ever seriously disputed.” He summarizes his takeaways in a tweet thread. “Trump used his public office — the most sacred office in our country — to try to pursue his private electoral interests,” McFaul concludes. Trump only stopped because he got caught. McFaul’s first few conclusions are below:

Let's start with President Trump and Ukraine. Trump has never cared about Ukrainian sovereignty, democracy, rule of law, or the war with Russia. He made that clear as a candidate. He has been consistent in that view. Trump seeks Putin's favor. Appeasing Putin = dissing Ukraine.4

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) November 22, 2019

https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1197693236166324224

There is more, naturally. Settlements against Trump’s “sham university,” his Trump Foundation (closed down by the state of New York), and decades of questionable tax dodges by the Trump Organization document a pattern of self-dealing that will follow Trump’s family business out of office even if as a former president Trump himself somehow evades legal accountability for offenses committed in office.

Finally, over the weekend yet another billionaire master-of-the-universe — Michael Bloomberg — announced he would run for president as a Democrat against Trump in 2020. Not even Wall Streeters think Bloomberg has a chance. If nothing else, it will be fun reminding Trump at every opportunity that Bloomberg’s stack is bigger. Much, much bigger. Perhaps seventeen times bigger. And Bloomberg is actually self-made.

Trump has a history of threatening lawsuits against people who publicly question the size of his, um, endowment. One hopes Bloomberg will question the size of Trump’s fortune for the entertainment value alone.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

The key moment in Thursday’s impeachment hearing came when Dr. Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official, began explaining that the Trump administration had steered American foreign policy into the weeds.

Hill described a couple of “testy” encounters with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. In one, she was angry that Sondland was not coordinating with the rest of the NSC team and career diplomats in the field. Sondland had insisted during his testimony that he was following the president’s orders in pursuing an arms-for-political dirt deal with Ukraine. “Everyone was in the loop,” the newly minted diplomat testified. That is, everyone Sondland thought mattered: President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

But Sondland’s assignment and Hill’s were very different.

Hill explained:

But it struck me when yesterday, when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails and he said “These that these people need to know,” that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged. So he was correct.

And I had not put my finger on that at the moment, but I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn’t fully coordinating. And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up. And here we are.

This was not going the way Republicans on the panel wanted. Hill continued, explaining in a sleight-of-hand way she’d been unfair to Sondland:

And after I left to my next meeting, our director for the European Union talked to him much further for a full half-hour or more later, trying to ask him about how we could coordinate better or how others could coordinate better after I had left the office. And his feeling was that the National Security Council was always trying to block him.

What we were trying to do was block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that was precisely what I was trying to do.

But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been.

And it was at that moment that I started to realize how those things have diverged. And I realized, in fact, that I wasn’t really being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out what he thought he had been instructed to carry out. And we were doing something that we thought was just as or perhaps even more important, but it wasn’t in the same channel.

Ranking member Devin Nunes jumped in, cut off staff attorney Steve Castor, and launched into 2016 conspiracy theory questions. He needed to change the subject. Now. The rest of the Republican bench tried to discredit Holmes or stalled for time, trying to avoided giving Hill more rope.

The Ukraine scandal has unfolded like a Quentin Tarantino film. Different time frames. Different characters with different viewing points. Same arms-for-political-dirt story.

Hill was based in the White House. David Holmes, a State Department political aide, works at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Both told the same story from different angles thousands of mile apart. Sondland told the same story from his perspective. As did Amb. William Taylor and George Kent. As did former Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and others. How many career professionals (and one, millionaire Trump donor) have to tell the same story before Republicans sworn to uphold the Constitution acknowledge they are not part of a Never-Trump conspiracy? Trump abused his office to direct an international smear campaign against a domestic political rival.

Perhaps headlines will convince them? As Digby (and TPM) noted on Thursday, headlines from coast to coast blared that Sondland implicated Trump. “We followed the president’s orders.” “Diplomat acknowledges ‘quid pro quo’.” “Envoy Says Trump Directed Effort.” “Trump directed Ukraine pressure campaign, EU envoy says.” And as MSNBC’s Chris Hays pointed out Thursday evening, many of the subheads implicated Pompeo by name.

And today’s online headlines?

Impeachment Hearing Takeaways: A ‘Domestic Political Errand’

‘I think this is all going to blow up’: Witness says EU ambassador was running ‘domestic political errand’

Trump Ukraine pressure campaign was ‘a domestic political errand,’ Fiona Hill tells impeachment inquiry

Hill Calls Investigations A “Domestic Political Errand”; Holmes Details Trump Call

Impeachment hearings: Sondland was ‘involved in domestic political errand’, Hill testifies

Fiona Hill: Trump Ukraine Dealings a ‘Domestic Political Errand’

In her opening statement, Hill chastised those (Republicans) peddling “politically driven falsehoods.” She refused “to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.” She requested they “please” not aid the Russian security services’ propaganda campaign,

I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.

The narrative Republicans advance is professionals such as Hill, Holmes, et. al. mean to undermine Donald Trump. In fact, such career patriots mean to defend the U.S. from being undermined by him, by those in his thrall, and by foreign adversaries with agendas hostile to U.S. interests and to democracy itself.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

“I thank the gentleman, always, for his remarks,” a bemused committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said to laughter in the hearing room after Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), ranking member, completed his remarks after a long day of impeachment inquiry testimony. Nunes hits all his marks during these now-familiar derisive opening and closing speeches before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: circus, hoax, sham, Star Chamber, three-card monte, con game, Spanish inquisition, story-time-hour.

“Ambassador Sondland, you are here today to be smeared,” Nunes said Wednesday morning. He was clearly unprepared for testimony by European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland that implicated “everyone” in the Ukraine arms-for-political dirt scheme, including President Donald Trump, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Rudy Giuliani. “Everyone was in the loop.“

In his opening remarks, Nunes listed a series of facts he claimed Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to prove. Salon sampled a few from what Nunes branded false charges:

“Trump had a diabolical plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow,” he said. (True.) “Trump changed the Republican National Committee platform to hurt Ukraine and benefit Russia,” he added. (True.) “Trump’s son-in-law lied about his Russian contacts while obtaining his security clearance,” he continued. (True.)

“It’s a long list of charges, all false,” Nunes declared of the largely corroborated list of allegations.

Nunes insists it was Ukraine and the Democrats that interfered in the 2016 election, that “their operatives got campaign dirt from Ukrainians in the 2016 election” [timestamp 3:16:15]. Why do that? Because Nunes is not speaking to “those of you at home,” as he claims. He is playing to an audience of one in the White House, to someone who actually believes this nonsense and/or wants to see his minions repeat it.

The audience in the hearing room thinks Nunes and his spewings are as much a joke as his suing a fake cow earlier this year. Nunes is committed to debasing himself to serve his liege.

Betsy Swan breaks news that Nunes and his aides traveled to Europe in 2018 to search out foreign origins for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian election-meddling investigation. Attorney Ed MacMahon, representing indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, told The Daily Beast Parnas had helped arrange meetings and calls for Nunes’ team. A Nunes spokesperson declined comment:

Nunes has been at the center of the broader story about foreign influence in President Donald Trump’s Washington. When congressional investigators began probing Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, Nunes made a late-night visit to the White House and announced the next day he’d found evidence of egregious wrongdoing by Intelligence Community officials. The move appeared to be an effort to corroborate a presidential tweet claiming that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. Nunes then stepped back from the committee’s work scrutinizing Russian efforts. Instead, he ran a parallel probe looking at the origins of Mueller’s Russia probe. The undertaking made him a hero to the president and Sean Hannity, and a bête noire of Democrats and Intelligence Community officials. That work was still underway when he traveled to Europe in 2018.

Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York last month charged Parnas and colleague Igor Fruman with (among other things) conspiring to violate campaign finance laws by laundering foreign money through straw donors and dummy businesses to U.S. campaigns. Parnas and Fruman, U.S. nationals, sought to “advance the political interests of… a Ukrainian government official who sought the dismissal of the U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian government official was Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. The U.S. ambassador eventually forced out in May is Marie Yovanovitch. Lutsenko had “sharp disagreements with Yovanovitch over his handling of corruption cases, and was also seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration,” according to two former U.S. officials.

It was not a good day for Nunes. Twitter took notice.

https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1197184057249062915

Nunes' face w/ the curb your enthusiasm theme is everything. #ImpeachmentHearings (credit @WEATHERISHAPPEN) https://t.co/E8ReuAxcZJ

— chip goines (@chipgoines) November 20, 2019

It was not the first time this week Nunes was the butt of viral jokes.

But let’s not pile on.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Military surplus sites have long peddled a cocky, in-your-face tee shirt that reads, “JOIN THE MARINES! TRAVEL TO FOREIGN PLACES, MEET EXOTIC PEOPLE, AND KILL THEM.” Millionaire Gordon Sondland thought he would be doing the diplomatic equivalent by donating enough to a presidential candidate to garner an ambassadorship. He would join the diplomatic corps, travel to foreign capitals, hobnob with heads of state. “And go to jail” was not what the naif had in mind.

Now Ambassador to the European Union, Sondland this morning takes the hottest seat yet when he is sworn in to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His original testimony in the Ukraine affair, already amended, will receive close scrutiny from Democrats on the committee. Their questions will look to tie President Donald Trump directly to the arms-for-political-dirt scheme revealed in a call between the White House and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Reported by an anonymous whistleblower, that July 25 call precipitated the ongoing House impeachment inquiry.

Democrats may be Sondland’s only “friends” on the panel. Republicans are setting him up (with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney) as a fall guy in the scandal.

WATCH: At a public event in 2016, Sondland spoke out saying he's good at politics because he's good at using "quid pro quos." Sondland said he also finds it "unfortunate" that there aren't more quid pro quos or "transactional" deals used in government and politics. pic.twitter.com/P2GgVcz6gN

— The Beat with Ari Melber 📺 (@TheBeatWithAri) November 19, 2019

Democrats will ask why in his original testimony Sondland failed to disclose his July 26 restaurant call to Trump in which they discussed whether Zelensky would publicly announce an investigation into Trump political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. They will ask for details of another call prior to the Trump-Zelensky conversation on July 25. Sondland is thought to have briefed Trump on what to say to Zelensky. Shortly thereafter, Trump told Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor though …” after Zelensky expressed interest in buying Javelin anti-tank missiles. Trump asked for an investigation into Biden and a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election. The consensus of the U.S. intelligence community is it was Russia.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Sondland is the witness who most concerns people close to Mr. Trump, several of them said, expressing worry that he interacted directly with the president about Ukraine and that they do not know what he will say. Mr. Sondland has already amended his testimony once, in writing.

Mr. Sondland’s statements look increasingly suspect, said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official who is following the hearings closely. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t come in now and tell the truth,” Mr. Rosenberg added.

Mr. Sondland’s recollection of his July 26 call with Mr. Trump might never have been questioned had not another American official overheard the conversation, conducted from Mr. Sondland’s lunch table on the terrace of a restaurant in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Mr. Trump was speaking so loudly that Mr. Sondland held the phone away from his ear, broadcasting the call to his dining companions.

David Holmes, an American Embassy official in Kyiv who had joined the ambassador for lunch, said he clearly heard Mr. Trump ask whether Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly installed president, was “going to do the investigation.” Mr. Sondland replied: “He’s going to do it.”

“Will he do it?” is the question again this morning with cameras rolling. Sondland faces a choice of standing by his earlier testimony (contradicted by prior witnesses) or answering fully and truthfully no matter how it reflects on Trump. Courts have already convicted other Trump associates for lying under oath, including Trump confidant Roger Stone last week.

Of the witnesses appearing in public so far, none have been helpful to the president, even those requested by Republicans on the committee. Things just look worse. Trump has lost three of four statewide races this month that he’d made tests of his ability to elect Republicans. As Trump’s polling numbers erode, Republican allies may find their enthusiasm for defending him flagging unless they can pin the arms-for-political-dirt scandal on a convenient patsy. How they treat Sondland this morning may indicate their choice.

The Times continues:

Mr. Sondland once described himself as a “results-oriented,” take-charge type. Now investigators are asking him why he pushed a so-called deliverable for the president — an announcement of the investigations — that other officials have said was ethically wrong and ran counter to American national security interests.

Mr. Sondland also liked to present himself as a refreshing alternative to hidebound bureaucrats. Now some of those same bureaucrats have described him as an aggressive operator who elbowed them out of the way, rejected time-honored protocols and turned his personal cellphone into a national security risk.

Sondland’s attention-getting donations to the Trump campaign meant he could boast he was harder to reach than the president he could call on a whim. How cool is that?

Much cooler than the seat he’ll occupy this morning.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

The House impeachment inquiry continues this morning with additional witnesses to the Fall of the House of Trump. “Fall” here may not mean Trump’s removal from office, nor “House of Trump” his family, but the party he has put under his boot heel. History will be kind to neither.

Spoke to a sr former justice dept official. He too worries Trump can’t get off, won’t get off, “dictator’s treadmill.” Once you’re on the ride is high, so you’ll do anything, and everything, to keep running and not to crash and burn. I’ve seen it all my life. Never ends well

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) November 17, 2019

NBCNews foreign correspondent Richard Engel suggests President Donald Trump will not stop the behaviors that sparked the Mueller investigation and subsequent congressional inquiry. Nor will his coterie of enabler/defenders get off the Trump train. Public opinion may be turning against Trump, but his American unfaithful remain behind him to the end, it seems.

After the first week of public impeachment testimonies, 70% of Americans said that President Trump's actions towards Ukraine were wrong, according to a new ABC News poll conducted over the weekend.https://t.co/RqWH8KxdC6

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 19, 2019

An ABC News/Ipsos poll finds 70% of Americans think President Donald Trump’s attempt to leverage military assistance to Ukraine to obtain an investigation of a political rival is wrong. Furthermore:

… 51% of Americans say that “President Trump’s actions were wrong and he should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.” Nineteen percent of Americans say President Trump’s actions were wrong but he should not be removed from office and 25% say President Trump did nothing wrong.

None of that will move Trump defenders on Capitol Hill from supporting him. As Attorney General William Barr’s Friday speech to the Federalist Society demonstrates, they too are on the “dictator’s treadmill” with their amoral tower of insecurities.

Dahlia Lithwick concurs. Fantasies of Senate Republicans rediscovering their consciences, rededicating themselves to upholding the Constitution, and removing Trump from office “in a blaze of bipartisan glory” are the stuff of Hallmark holiday movies:

Don’t believe it for a minute. Senate Republicans may be fussing internally about how best to play out the impeachment trial, but not one of them, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney, is casting around for any kind of off-ramp here. As Renae Reints notes in Fortune, this isn’t even a close call. Republicans in the Senate are not looking for a principled reason, or even a pretext, that might allow them to follow their heart’s true desire and break with this president. “On the whole, however, Republicans side with party leadership,” Reints writes. “The latest Gallup poll on Trump’s job approval—conducted after the House launched their impeachment inquiry—show 87% of GOP voters are behind the president. This means Republican members of Congress are likely to stick behind Trump, regardless of what the independents or the other 13% of Republicans believe.”

Senate Republicans were never going to help Democrats “save constitutional norms, values, or institutions, and they won’t do so now.” As recent Republican electoral losses sink in, only the prospect of losing everything might move a few to realize the Ghost of Election Future’s shroud is only the bed curtains and there is time yet to redeem their supreme self-interest.

“President outsources his foreign policy to gangsters” ought to draw more attention than it has, writes Jonathan Chait. So far, the impeachment inquiry has focused less attention on “a pair of sleazeballs with ties to the Russian mafia” — meaning indicted Trump associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — than on Trump’s lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Is it possible Trump also sought to enrich himself through their actions?

It’s possible Trump sent Parnas, Giuliani, and Fruman to Ukraine solely for his political mission, and while there, they decided to shake down the Ukrainians for some energy money. But Trump is famous for his intense, almost fanatical hatred of hangers-on who make money for themselves off his name. Trump was so enraged in 2016 by the very thought that transition planners were making money that belonged to him — “You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?” he screamed at Chris Christie …

Given that, Chait speculates plans by Parnas, Fruman, Giuliani and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to turn their Trump connections into natural-gas contracts might even have involved Trump eyeing a piece of the action. Who knows?

The quote Chait references above is from a 2018 column by Michael Lewis (“Moneyball” and “The Big Short”) that paints a portrait of how Trump sees his government job. Reacting to Trump’s fury about hirelings stealing his money, Steve Bannon and Christie tried to explain the nuances of federal law. His response (per Lewis)?

Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

Three years later, he faces impeachment if not removal from office. His denialist defenders may stick with them to the end, even to their own removal from office.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Where we sit today is at the end of a very long, cultural slide. President Donald Trump is hardly patient zero in the epidemic of lies and bad faith leading to the House impeachment hearings that resume Tuesday. But he is a carrier.

Trump “spreads corruption, keen to make other leaders as complicit as he is in order to gain leverage over them,” writes Garry Kasparov, Russian expatriate and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “These are the practices of Putin … and it’s a sad day when these same habits are preferred by the president of the US.”

Jennifer Rubin takes her former Republican allies to task for trafficking in lies about Trump and the Ukraine affair. They deny the truth before their eyes in the testimony of multiple witnesses, some of them Trump’s own hires:

House Republicans have become so invested in crackpot theories, bogus procedural complains and constitutional illiteracy that they will never recognize the president’s wrongdoing. They are as incapable of upholding their oath, which requires impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery, as he is. Both Trump and his House enablers are unfit to serve since personal and political considerations obliterate their ability to detect the truth and thereby to uphold their public obligations. It would be refreshing if House Republicans simply admitted Trump violated his oath but that they are unwilling to abide by theirs and remove him. The candor would be preferable to the non-stop lying.

Rubin considers it highly unlikely “more than a few (if that many)” would publicly admit Trump and the right-wing echo chamber have fed their cult a diet of lies “for nearly three years.”

Missing from both analyses (as I have written for years) is how long the right-wing echo chamber marinated people’s brains in lies before they completely pickled:

Case in point. I once worked in an office where a guy recorded Rush Limbaugh every afternoon. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads in the building so they would be primed for Limbaugh’s live broadcast at noon.

That story written in 2009 was about where I worked in the mid-1990s. (Remember “Rush Rooms“?) While working the 2006 campaign, I caught two minutes of prime-time screed by some unrecognized pundit and knew CNN had handed a propagandist a national platform. His name turned out to be Glenn Beck.

Trump may be sui generis, but conservative “truth decay” spread for three decades awaiting his arrival. I wrote this post after a Republican presidential candidate debate in October 2015:

Truth is no longer an American value

by Tom Sullivan

As a kid, I watched Superman on TV in black and white fighting his never-ending battle for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” All three have since fallen out of fashion. Carly the Fabulist’s tales of Planned Parenthood reminded us just how far we have fallen. Her “willingness to unrepentantly and repeatedly” look into the camera and lie to our faces recalls Dick Cheney’s talent for that, Digby reminded this week at Salon.

Digby references a post (in part about Mitt Romney) by Rick Perlstein that I want to revisit. While his books might bear pictures of presidents to please the marketers, Perlstein writes, he is much more interested in how “both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?”

Indeed. Direct-mail maven Richard Viguerie is one of his Perlstein’s touchstones for seeing into the conservative mind. Perlstein’s insights also come in part from examining the snake-oil ads in conservative publications such as Human Events and Townhall, as well as the more plebian Newsmax. My viewport is the conservative pass-it-on spams that land in my in-box. I collect them. I lost count somewhere around 200.

Perlstein contrasts the ubiquitous “get rich quick” appeals in these publications to one he noticed in the liberal The American Prospect for donations to help starving children in the Third World. I contrast them with the lack of appeals found in pass-it-on spam. They are lies, smears, distortions, propaganda — passed along dutifully by the parents who warned us about communist propaganda as kids:

Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.

That really is the point of Carly Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood lie. It’s not even a particularly original one, as Perlstein observed of Viguerie’s efforts at Huffington Post a decade ago:

With a couple of hours’ research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood.”

Perlstein continued that thread of thought at The Baffler in 2012 (emphasis mine):

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

This has made the RNC “less the party of Goldwater, and more the party of Watergate,” as Perlstein wrote. But the long march of lies in service to ideology has over time also served to “dissolve external reality” among extremists, as Larry Massett once said of New Agers. People marvel at how Donald Trump supporters can take his pitches for anything other than a mountebank’s. Yet comforting lies are the junk food the extremist faithful have been conditioned over decades to prefer, like kids and sugary cereals. Truth? Truth is like eating your vegetables. As Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, said of a deceptive Americans for Prosperity election mailer, “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.” If truth used to be an American value, it is no longer.

It reveals “a structure of thought,” as Perlstein once put it that Stephen Colbert’s faux-conservative parodied with “truthiness,” that “quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” For the Fiorinas, the Trumps and their followers reality is now as bendable as Dali’s clocks. It bends according to the tribal affiliations of the person making the truth claims. “True facts” support their underlying ideology. These they open wide for. Garden-variety facts are suspect, and they clamp their mouths shut like toddlers to strained spinach.

Truthiness is not funny anymore.

*****

American conservatism has not evolved but devolved. From Barry Goldwater’s 1960 “The Conscience of a Conservative” to former White House counsel John Dean’s 2006 “Conservatives Without Conscience” written during the Bush-Cheney administration (originally conceived as a mid-1990s collaboration with Goldwater), the march to authoritarianism has been helped along by the right’s alliance with religious conservatives and by the shock of the September 11 attacks. Dean worried during the Bush administration that right-wing authoritarians and authoritarian followers exhibited “proto-fascist behavior” of the kind that gave rise to Hitler and Mussolini.

Thirteen years later we have a future Guinness world-record-holding liar sitting in the Oval Office facing impeachment for attempted extortion and bribery of a foreign government. The country’s attorney general speechifies on the glories of having a supreme leader. A cadre of supporters in Trump’s party, emboldened perhaps by the lack of accountability for war crimes under Bush II, now lie with abandon if not in supplication. Truth decay is endemic. The conservative effort to dissolve external reality and to construct an alternate one has taken decades. We can no longer say Trump and his unfaithful know lying is wrong and just don’t care. Lying is now more than a political tactic. It is cultural.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

by Tom Sullivan

Testimony Friday by former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was dramatic and powerful, and made more so by the acting president’s attack on her in real time via Twitter.

….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019

Donald Trump sent a signal to Yovanovitch and to follow-up witnesses in these hearings that they might expect a similar digital broadside from the most powerful insecure man in the world. Former independent counsel Ken Starr described Trump’s action as “extraordinarily poor judgment” and “quite injurious.” Even Chris Wallace of Trump-friendly Fox News observed, “It does raise the possibility of witness intimidation or witness tampering as a new charge here.”

Trump removed Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine earlier this year after what she described as a “campaign of disinformation” against her by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, Giuliani’s associates, and former conservative opinion contributor John Solomon.

Yovanovitch refuted under oath accusations she had bad-mouthed Trump to embassy officials and circulated a “do not prosecute” list to Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general of Ukraine. “These attacks were being repeated by the president himself and his son,” she said.

While Trump’s real-time attack on Yovanovitch drew the most attention Friday, a moment later in the hearing seemed to me more indelible.

Trump’s defenders on Capitol Hill repeated Trump’s assertion Friday that ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president and can be removed at any time. At the end of his questioning, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) repeated the observation that any president has “the right to make his own foreign policy” and his own decisions, President Trump included.

At the end of Wenstrup’s time, Yovanovitch asked to make her own observation about the president’s prerogatives:

“What I’d like to say is, while I obviously don’t dispute that the President has the right to withdraw an ambassador at any time for any reason, but what I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation … falsely?”

A therapist friend once spoke of an encounter with a man at her condo association meeting. She stood up to raise a question about some detail in changes to the association rules under discussion. Out of nowhere, this man got up and launched into a personal attack on her. Had she not read the memo? Was it not clear to her? Etc., etc.

When he finished, she looked him coolly in the eye and asked, “Do you have a need to have an argument with me tonight?”

He shriveled, sat down, and the meeting continued.

Notice that Trump had not felt the need to give career diplomats William Taylor and George Kent the same treatment on Wednesday. But Yovanovich, a woman, a smart, accomplished one at that, was a target of opportunity to be put in her place. Somewhere under his heel.

Why was it necessary to smear her instead of simply dismissing her? Because even as President of the United States Trump is a small-minded man of low intelligence with an inferiority complex the size of Manhattan. He self-medicates his insecurity by demeaning everyone around him, or by browbeating them into demeaning themselves. (See: Republican congressional caucus.) Capable women threaten him. As a misogynist too, naturally he felt a need to smear her.

In Friday’s Twitter feed, I noticed someone from another country, I think, using Adam Serwer’s “cruelty is the point” to describe Trump’s actions. That understanding has gone global.

Blogger Susie Madrak (help her out here, please) observed:

I almost feel sorry for Trump. He clearly has learning disabilities and his cruel father relentlessly ridiculed him for it. But you know who else went through the same thing? Henry Winkler, who is dyslexic and by all accounts is a real mensch. Trump chose to be an asshole.— Suburban Guerrilla Ω (@SusieMadrak) November 15, 2019

I hope Democrats turn that 30-second Yovanovitch clip into a 2020 campaign ad. Women all across the country need to see it. Over and over and over.

Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.

As we brace for another day of impeachment drama, Eric Levitz at New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” offers support for why your health care is another key 2020 election issue.

One of the classic arguments for having strong unions is that not only union members benefit from their bargaining power, but nonmembers as well. Strong unions constrain income inequality generally.

Levitz suggests universal health care has similar effects. Examining states that implemented Medicaid expansion with neighboring holdout states provides “a nifty natural experiment for assessing the impacts of expanding access to public health insurance.” Comparisons demonstrate Medicaid expansion reduces premium costs for non-beneficiaries as well as increasing self-reported health and financial well-being.

But more than that:

Border-county studies have also yielded a less intuitive benefit of expansion. A 2018 study from the political scientists Joshua Clinton and Michael Sances found that in counties with high populations of Medicaid-expansion-eligible residents, the policy’s implementation increased both voter turnout and registration in the 2014 midterm elections. A 2017 study from Missouri political scientist Jake Haselswerdt found a similar correlation between Medicaid expansion and higher rates of voter turnout at the congressional district level in the 2012 election. Finally, just this year, a study of Oregon’s experiment with expanding Medicaid by lottery (prior to the Affordable Care Act’s passage) found that the program increased its recipients’ individual likelihood of voting by 2.5 percentage points.

Data for Progress helpfully draws out the implications of these findings in a recent report. Using Medicaid’s average impact on turnout across the three studies and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s estimates of the Medicaid coverage gap in the 13 states that still haven’t implemented expansion, the progressive think tank calculates that full implementation of Medicaid expansion would bring as many as 1.3 million Americans off our democracy’s sidelines and into the electorate by 2022.

Just why Medicaid expansion increases voter participation is unclear, Levitz writes. Beside offering voter registration as part of signing up, perhaps providing nonvoters with a tangible government service of benefit to their lives gives them a greater stake in the political life of the country than evanescent promises of more “freedom.” Levitz adds, “This would be consistent with MIT political scientist Andrea L. Campbell’s research on the development of Social Security, which suggests the program was a cause of American seniors’ high levels of voter participation, not a mere response to that participation.”

No wonder Republicans oppose universal health care.

Cross-posted from Hullaballoo.