This Is What Happens When You Lose Credibility

Dan Rather. (photo: USA Today)

By Dan Rather, Facebook

22 October 17

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his is what happens when you lose credibility. This is what happens when you lie repeatedly about issues big and small. This is what happens when you foment divisions and show no remorse. This is what happens when your words have no meaning. You lose the benefit of the doubt.

Today John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff issued an emotional defense of President Donald Trump's phone call to the widow of a fallen soldier. He opened up about the death of his own son in combat. He claimed that Mr. Trump was being sensitive. He said he hadn't meant to criticize previous presidents when he said he wasn't sure if they made calls to the fallen. He criticised the conclusion of a Democratic congresswoman who shared her vantage point of the call. Everything that Mr. Kelly said may be true. Or maybe not. This could fall legitimately in the grey area of different interpretations, at least in cases where the president isn't Donald Trump.

Why did millions of Americans jump to the conclusion that Mr. Trump was criticizing President Obama with his words? Because that is what Mr. Trump always does, including questioning whether President Obama was a real American. Why did millions of Americans not trust Mr. Trump's denials about what he said and that he had proof? Because Mr. Trump repeatedly lies about what he says and what he means. Why did millions of Americans assume that Mr. Trump could not feel empathy for the death of Sgt. La David T. Johnson? Because he has shown no empathy for the people of Puerto Rico still suffering from a hurricane without power or safe drinking water. Why did millions of Americans think that Mr. Trump could disrespect American servicemen and women? Because he attacked a war hero and a Gold Star Family during the presidential campaign.

The impression of Mr. Trump that fueled the narrative around this phone call is one for which Mr. Trump has only himself to blame. General Kelly has served with distinction and honor. He has born grave personal sacrifices. He has every right to speak in the manner he did today. But he also has to understand that while millions of Americans may be inclined to believe his sincerity and character, they have long since given up on those attributes when it comes to his boss.

Yes elections have consequences. But so do words and deeds.

Reverse Robin Hood - rob the poor and give to the rich: Republican Budget Is a Gift to Billionaires

'It takes from those in need and gives to those who are already living in incredible opulence.' (photo: Jim Young/AFP/Getty Images)

By Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK

22 October 17
readersupportednews.org

Donald Trump and Republican leaders claim their plan would provide a ‘big league’ tax cut for the middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth.

fter failing to pass a “healthcare” bill that would have thrown up to 32 million Americans off of health insurance, a bill that was more unpopular than the Wall Street bailout, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress are back.

Now, they are pushing one of the most destructive and unfair budget and tax proposals in the modern history of our country – a plan that would do incalculable harm to tens of millions of working families, our kids, the sick, the elderly and the poor.

The Republican budget, approved by the Senate last week, is the Robin Hood principle in reverse. It takes from those in need and gives to those who are already living in incredible opulence.

Donald Trump and Republican leaders claim their plan would provide a “big league” tax cut for the middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, by the end of the decade, nearly 80% of the tax benefits of the Republican plan would go to the top 1% and 40% would go to the top one-tenth of 1%.

Meanwhile, while the Republicans want to give a $1.9tn tax break to the top 1%, they are proposing massive cuts in programs that working-class Americans desperately need.

This budget cuts Medicaid by more than $1tn over 10 years – which would throw some 15 million Americans off of the health insurance they currently have. Further, this budget does what the Republicans have not yet attempted to do in their previous healthcare legislation and that is to make a $473bn cut to Medicare, despite Trump’s campaign promises not to cut these programs.

Poll after poll after poll tells us that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not want Congress to cut Medicare or Medicaid and they do not want to provide tax breaks to the wealthy or large corporations.

A recent Pew Foundation poll finds that 85% of Republicans and 94% of Democrats want to either maintain or increase funding for Medicare. And 60% of Americans oppose slashing Medicaid, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.

A recent Wall Street Journal and NBC poll finds that only 12% of the American people believe the wealthy should receive a tax cut; while 62% believe the wealthy should pay more in taxes.

Why are the Republicans bringing forth such an absurd budget that, in almost every instance, is diametrically opposed to what the American people want?

The answer isn’t complicated. Follow the money.

Today, we have a corrupt campaign finance system that enables multibillionaires, along with some of the most powerful CEOs in America, to contribute many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Republican candidates to represent their views. As a result, the top 1% has been able to rig the political system to favor them at the expense of virtually everyone else. Here are just a few examples.

The Republican budget would give the richest family in America, the Walton family of Walmart, a tax cut of up to $52bn by repealing the estate tax – a tax that only applies to multimillionaires and billionaires. But, if you are a lower-income senior citizen you and over 700,000 other families may not be able to keep your home warm in the winter because of a cut of about $4bn to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

This budget says that if you are the second-wealthiest family in America, the Koch brothers, you will see a tax break of up to $33bn. But if you are a working-class student trying to figure out how you could possibly afford college, your dream of a college education could evaporate along with 8 million other students because of more than $100bn in cuts to Pell Grants and other student financial assistance programs.

This budget gives members of the Trump family a tax cut of up to $4bn, but if you are a low-income pregnant woman you and over 1.2 million new moms, babies, and toddlers may not be able to get the nutrition you need thanks to a $6.5bn cut to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

What is alarming is that despite this incredible giveaway for the billionaire class, the Koch Brothers and their network say that it’s not enough.

When David Koch ran for vice-president under the Libertarian party in 1980, he advocated not just to cut Medicare and Medicaid, he wanted to abolish these programs. He didn’t just want to cut taxes for the wealthy he wanted to eliminate all forms of taxation.

At a time when the middle class is shrinking and over 40 million Americans are living in poverty, this budget must be defeated and replaced with a plan that reflects the needs of the working families of our country, not just the wealthy, the powerful and large campaign contributors.

The Right Is Apoplectic Over This Piece About A Post-Trump "Reckoning"—Which Means It's Good.

Yes, he really is on the way out.

By Dartagnan  

Friday Oct 20, 2017 · 10:02 AM PDT

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James Wolcott is never going to be America’s favorite columnist. I suspect that’s just fine with James Wolcott.

As a contributor to the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire and numerous other publications over the last four decades, Wolcott is best known for his critiques of modern culture and in particular, media culture. His breezy, often acerbic style (think of a jaded aristocrat channeling Matt Taibbi), is notably averse to pulling punches.

Writing for Vanity Fair  (his most visible platform) since 1983, Wolcott has managed to irk both the left and right, proving himself an equal opportunity provocateur (which I say with a certain warmth as his past blog notes have links to Daily Kos dating back to the George W. Bush Administration). All in all, he has cemented a solid reputation as an unusually perceptive observer of our times.

But his most recent essay appears to have twisted the girdles of the right moreso than others, because in it he contemplates what this country will need to do once Donald Trump has been, how you say, “put out to pasture” by whatever means that may occur. Indeed, the piece, appearing in this month’s Vanity Fair, is apparently hitting so close to the bone that it’s incurred the wrath of some conservative Women’s Organization (translated as a group of women who live to hate on other women) calling itself the “Independent Women's Forum," some Matt-Drudge wannabe site called the “Rightly Report," FreeRepublic  (yep, hold your nose!) and Newsbusters, to name a few. 

Oh, yeah. They’re pissed. Maybe it was this that got them all hot and bothered:

In the sorriest days of the Watergate scandal, the iconoclastic journalist and 60 Minutes commentator Nicholas von Hoffman compared the Nixon presidency to “a dead mouse on the American family kitchen floor. The question is: who is going to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash?” It would be premature to write off the Trump presidency as a deceased rodent lying on the linoleum. In its nasty defensiveness, it is closer to a cornered rat. It still has plenty of ugly fight left. But we are at the beginning of the endgame and it is not premature to start imagining how to pick through the damage the Trump presidency will leave behind and future-proof the republic so that It Can’t Happen Here never happens again.

OMG—a dead rat! Such dehumanizing rhetoric, the wailing goes, as if Trump's campaign wasn't built on the dehumanization of entire swaths of the American population. As if many of his most rabid supporters weren’t Dehumanizers of the First Order.  

Actually, the image of Trump’s presidency as a dead rat waiting to be scooped up and summarily dumped in the trash bin has a certain poetic resonance. As Wolcott notes, the reality is that this Orange Abomination is going to be history one day, hopefully sooner rather than later. And then—to borrow further from this metaphor—we’ll all be tasked with cleaning up the stinking residue on the floor. That’s what Wolcott’s essay is really about—what kind of country will we be forced to contend with after Trump and his minions are gone, and what ought we do about it? Wolcott has a couple suggestions:

The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin. Cue the exodus of his cronies from the Cabinet and commence the shunning. The Trump family itself should be as unwelcome in what passes for society as Bernie Madoff at a Bar Mitzvah. Pay no heed to those pious owls in politics, the op-ed pages and cable-news panels—pastoral Voices of Civility such as Jon Meacham and David Gergen—who will caution that “now is not the time” to be raking over the recent past, casting recriminations, and turning Schadenfreude into tasty casseroles; the nation must move forward and let the healing process begin. To such doily knitters and thumb twiddlers, it’s never the right time to sift through the debris, apportion responsibility, and name the guilty parties; this is why it took more than a year to establish a 9/11 commission, and its final report was analytical, rhetorical mush. The day after Trump is deposed will be the day to get cracking on addressing what got him to where he never should have been.

I can see how the right could be shuddering a little after reading that. In other words, if Wolcott has his way the entire accursed Trump family is going to become the equivalent of a virulent case of genital herpes the minute the Tweeter-In-Chief is cast out, whether it’s under criminal indictment or at the considered  behest of the general electorate. And we will eventually find out exactly who in Russian Intelligence—and perhaps in the Republican ranks of Congress-- conspired with them.

All in good fun: Laura Ingraham throws a Nazi Salute to Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

But it isn’t Trump's fate personally or that of his family that really has the right up in arms. No, it’s something much more close to home, something that really scares them if it were ever able to be accomplished. It’s also something that looks more and more necessary with each passing day as the true character of Trump’s base of support becomes evident:

Post-Trump, the country needs its own, domestic version of the de-Nazification program established in Germany after World War II, an inquiry into how so many alleged neo-Nazi, white-supremacist sympathizers had input into this presidency, and their connection with neo-Nazi and nativist movements overseas. Trump has legitimized the hate militias like no president ever before, one of his many blighting legacies and perhaps his most lasting. The domestic threat posed by white-supremacist militias and other violent extremists armed to the steel teeth has been minimized by Republicans, who, jerked around by their Fox News puppet masters, prefer fulminating against Black Lives Matter and antifa street fighters. But white people’s grievances are always given precedence, reflecting the racial makeup of newsrooms and corporate hierarchies.

”Domestic De-Nazification?” Oh my stars, shades of Bolshevism, right there! But really what other choice would we have? It’s not going to be palatable to have hordes of Nazis running around the country brandishing their hatred and threatening violence about their supposed grievances under a less-than-tolerant Administration they can’t cuddle up to like this one. 

These rotten people have to be reined in, one way or another, if our country is going to retain any semblance of decency. That fact may bother Trump’s base of core Nazi support. It shouldn’t. They asked for it. In fact, they’ve been begging for it. But they should relax, after all it probably wouldn’t amount to anything more than being identified. What, you don't want that?  Then don’t threaten other Americans with your hate. 

The right just hates it when a whiff of that eliminationist impulse they love to so casually embrace gets blown back at them. It can be an awfully stinky experience, can’t it?

And what of these seemingly obligatory sojourns by mainstream journalists into the “heartland" for earnest tete-a-tetes with the poor, conflicted Trump voter? Wolcott thinks those should be consigned to the ashbin of history as well:

How nice it would be if even before Trump humps out of view and into the elephants’ graveyard we were given a journalistic moratorium on earnest dispatches devoted to the Loyal Trump Voter in the battered industrial ruinscape who still supports the big guy despite the latest storm out of Washington…
* * *

Wolcott is as disdainful of these “outreach" efforts to "understand" Trump voters as most of us have already become. We have seen the Trump voters, thanks very much:

This sentimentalization of the Loyal Trump Voter, whose rationale for standing by the president is often cradled in incoherence and plain, proud ignorance with a large chunk of stubborn pride, is the latest extension of the press’s centering of the White Working Class in the national narrative, no matter how much the demographics and the complexion of the country change. Every election cycle, eastern reporters ritualistically venture into caucus and primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire on Norman Rockwell safari to file copy from the diners and truck stops on “real Americans” in plaid jackets and tractor caps with heartland values and comfort-food appetites. It is time this romance with Ma and Pa Kettle was put out to pasture...[.]

Wolcott ends by warning those majority of American voters who did not vote for Trump not to be lulled into complacency by the fact that the media, celebrities and news organizations appear to share their revulsion to the Dear Leader. That revulsion did not affect this election and it won’t affect the next one. That revulsion didn’t affect the fact that a woman’s right to choose is on the verge of being outlawed in more than half the country, that voting is being made an increasingly difficult, harassing experience for young people and people of color, and that the Supreme Court appears poised to gut the remaining power of unions and allow the Republican Party to gerrymander itself into permanent one-party rule.

 

And he’s serious that we better find a way so that this atrocity never, ever happens again:

If we don’t prevent future Trumps, the next self-styled, Putin-picked autocrat may not be a complete boob and may have a better handle on how to accomplish his heinous goals. Which suggests a President Pence won’t be any picnic. Oh well, let’s just wait and detonate that bridge when we get to it.

Some may regard Wolcott’s prognosis for a post-Trump America as overwrought, flippant or hysterical, a product of (as one conservative outlet deemed it) “the Trump-loathing panic of the Liberal media.”

 

But with every passing day of this malevolent administration spinning diabolical, newfangled threats to the lives and livelihoods of American citizens, all while gleefully ginning up the darkest possible ways to divide us from each other, others might simply see it as prophetic.

Cartoon: The leaked NFL memo to players on acceptable stances during the national anthem

By RubenBolling  

Thursday Oct 19, 2017 · 6:51 AM PDT

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John Kelly's A Snake, If There's A Doubt Left In Anybody's Mind

Don Trumplioni and his hit man, John Kelly.

 

They must have a third faucet next to hot and cold in the White House by now, labelled “duplicity.” 

By ursulafaw  

Thursday Oct 19, 2017 · 2:50 PM PDT

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The jury was out on how John Kelly was going to react to the furor over Trump’s insensitive handling of the condolence call to Green Beret widow Meishia Johnson.

Some people speculated that Kelly was going to resign, others opined that Kelly would be willing to lie for Trump and say that Trump never said, “He must have known what he was signing up for,” which is what Trump alleged on twitter that the congresswoman was “fabricating.”

Kelly didn’t directly lie and say that Trump didn’t make the remark. Instead, he made a tangential attack on Congresswoman Wilson saying that, ”It stuns me that a member of Congress listened in on the phone call. I thought at least that's sacred.” Axios:

He said that he initially advised Trump not to make phone calls to families.

Kelly told Trump, "There's nothing you can do to lighten the burden." The president called the four families who lost soldiers in Niger and offered condolences in "the best way he could ... It stuns me" that a member of Congress listened in on that phone call. "I thought at least that's sacred," he said. The Chief of Staff also confirmed that the president told Myesha Johnson her husband "knew what he signed up for" and added Trump meant the statement as a testament to La David Johnson's heroism.

• On the situation in Niger: "An investigation does not mean ... people's heads are gonna roll."
• Kelly spent over an hour at Arlington Cemetery yesterday to "collect [his] thoughts."

The salient fact that is getting buried in all this is the fact that Congresswoman Frederica Wilson was one of several people in a limousine when the call came through and the phone was on speaker. She could not have avoided hearing what was said. She did nothing to intrude herself into the situation, which is how Kelly is spinning it. And then it gets worse. The Hill:

After learning of what he called Wilson’s “selfish behavior,” Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose son was killed in battle in Afghanistan, said he was so taken aback that he walked for an hour and a half in Arlington National Cemetery to compose himself.

Speaking slowly and solemnly, he described Thursday what happened when he learned he [his son Robert] had been killed.

“He was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed,” Kelly remembered being told by his casualty officer, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, who is now chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.

“He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent,” he added.

“He knew what the possibilities were because we're at war.”

Then Kelly finished off this debacle upon a debacle by saying, “He [Trump] expressed his condolences in the best way that he could.”

Isn’t that wonderful? The Fox News watching Trumpites will eat that up with a spoon because they know that their boy Donald is learning and trying. Justification and excuses flow more freely in the Trump administration than milk and honey in Eden.

They must have a third faucet next to hot and cold in the White House by now, labelled “duplicity.”

This is the second time this week that John Kelly has come forth to normalize this insane administration and in that process demean and diminish existing institutions and individuals.  He took a swipe at the media earlier this week, decrying all the “misreporting” he saw and admonishing the press to “get better sources,” and now Kelly has demonized Rep. Wilson when all she was, in truth, was a family friend who told the truth of what happened in the limousine and the Johnson family corroborated her statement.

No attention, needless to say, was paid to Trump’s obligatory twitter tantrum where he accused Wilson of “fabrication” and said he could prove it. No, Kelly waffled beautifully with this one. He's a spin meister, par excellence. He could step into a post at Breitbart or Fox News at any time. He's perfect. They can’t answer a direct question either, they pivot and then attack somebody innocent to deflect attention from Trump. That is precisely what happened in Washington this afternoon.

Kelly has said that the military men and women are the best one percent that this nation produces. Indeed they are. It’s John Kelly who is failing to live up to the lofty standard he touts by putting his new job as White House propagandist above his code of honor as a Marine, not to mention his oath as Chief of Staff. John Kelly is a snake.

The Race-baiter As Kindly Monarch: Trumpism On Full Display in Puerto Rico Visit

 
Chucking paper towels to the peasants with the Donald.

By Pakalolo  

Wednesday Oct 18, 2017 · 4:31 AM PDT

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Climate change and extreme weather events are not devastating a random selection of human beings from all walks of life. There are no billionaires among the dead, no corporate executives living in shelters, no stockbrokers watching their children die of malnutrition. Ian Angus    / climateandcapitalism.com 

Wow! Does Jonathan Chait writing in NY Magazine ever nail Trump’s response to the catastrophe in Puerto Rico to the wall for all to see. It’s an amazing piece, Chait was able to get inside Trump’s twisted mind and expose his lack of empathy for the 3.5 million Americans that are suffering and dying needlessly because of his cruelty.

Combine the cruelty with sheer incompetence and dereliction of duty and we witness what is likely to be one of the worst humanitarian disasters in this nation’s history.

This does not need to happen, the military can get the job done and the GOP knows it. Do they really want to be complicit in a crime against humanity? This has the feel of genocide. I could rant forever, but here is an excerpt of Chait’s piece.

Puerto Rico’s disaster has made Trump think about the role of the state in furnishing basic survival goods. He quickly adopted positions far to the right of even the most hardened libertarian ideologue. Trump assailed “ingrates” who “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” How could people possibly take personal responsibility when they lack access to electricity, drinking water, and even their own money? He mused that Puerto Rico is “throwing our budget out of whack,” a strange complaint from a man who frequently calls for the “the biggest tax cut we’ve ever had.”

The Trump who complained about lazy Puerto Ricans who needed to pick themselves up by their bootstraps rather than drain the Treasury was the familiar race-baiter. But there was also another dynamic on display: Trump’s habit of personalizing every case to an almost pathological degree. What set off the president was less the formal position of Puerto Rican politicians and their constituents (that they needed help to recover from a natural catastrophe) than the fact that they complained about it.

Trump views his powers as president in near-absolute terms. “I will give you everything,” he promised during the campaign. “I will give you what you’ve been looking for 50 years. I’m the only one.” In this sense, Trump occupies the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the small-government conservatism of his party. He imagines himself as a monarch, dispensing favors to grateful subjects and punishing the ungrateful. He has promised to give the people “everything,” but if he sees them expecting to be given “everything,” he will rage at them.

When Puerto Rican officials grasped the dynamic, and dutifully praised their commander-in-chief for his attentive and not-at-all-incompetent handling of the disaster, it set the stage for Trump to flip from scornful race-baiting autarch to generous favor-dispensing autarch. The scene of the president tossing out paper towels to his citizens like they were contest winners recalled Immortan Joe favoring his subjects by turning on the water spigot.

Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich: "This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward..."

Say what you mean coach.

By durrati  

Monday Oct 16, 2017 · 3:29 PM PDT

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San Antonio Spurs Head Coach Gregg Popovitch spoke out today on drumpf’s silence on the fallen soldiers in Niger. And, boy, did he speak. 

The Nation: — Dave Zirin:

“We’ve all seen San Antonio Spurs’ future Hall of Fame coach Gregg Popovich in a state of exasperation on the sidelines, or in post-game news conferences. Many of us have also heard him speak with great vexation and clarity about the direction of this country and the actions of Donald Trump, particularly on Trump’s “disgusting tenor and tone and all the comments that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic.” But I have never heard this man so frustrated, so fed up, and so tense with anger than today.

Here is what he expressed:

Coach Pop:
“I’ve been amazed and disappointed by so much of what this President had said, and his approach to running this country, which seems to be one of just a never ending divisiveness. But his comments today about those who have lost loved ones in times of war and his lies that previous presidents Obama and Bush never contacted their families, is so beyond the pale, I almost don’t have the words.

This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner–and to lie about how previous Presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers–is as low as it gets.  We have a pathological liar in the White House: unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically to hold this office and the whole world knows it, especially those around him every day. The people who work with this President should be ashamed because they know it better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”

You speak for many Americans, Pops.

Bless you.