Kansas Anymore?

You know what would be amazing? That Trump winds up being so toxic that he even manages to lose the Kansas Senate seat for the Republicans! I know, I know... it's impossible. Actually it is-- literally-- impossible since even if the Schumer candidate, Barbara Bollier, wins, it's still a Republican in the seat. (A few months ago, she switched parties, although certainly not her ideology, but... good enough for Schumer.) Pat Roberts is retiring and the seat is open and-- that aside-- Kansas has elected Democrats in the past-- although only one after senators started being elected by popular vote rather than by state legislatures. That one time Kansas elected a Democratic freshman was in 1930 when George McGill won after Charles Curtis resigned to become Herbert Hoover's vice president.

But a newly released poll of registered voters in Kansas by Civiqs, shows the Kansas Senate contest all tied up-- quasi-Democrat Barbara Bollier beating neo-fascist Kris Kobach 42-41%, losing to establishment Republican Roger Marshall 41-42% and beating establishment Republican Bob Hamilton 41-40%. The same poll, but of Republicans only, indicates that Bollier will probably get her wish to take on Kobach:

• Kobach- 35%
• Marshall- 26%
• Hamilton- 15%

In 1960 Kansas voted for Nixon over JFK, 561,474 (60.5%) to 363,213 (39.1%). In 1968, Kansas would have given Nixon an even bigger percentage but George Wallace was running so it was Nixon 54.8% to Humphrey 34.7% and Wallace 10.2%. Four years later, you can probably imagine the Kansas landslide to reelect Nixon, right? 67.7% to 29,5% for George McGovern. "Trump," wrote David Frum yesterday, "is no Richard Nixon." That's true, even Kansans know the difference. They only gave Trump 56.2% against Hillary. But's that's not exactly what Frum had mind. "As riots and looting have disordered cities across the United States, many have speculated," he wrote, "that the troubles could help reelect President Donald Trump. The speculation is based on analogy. American cities were swept by riots in the mid-1960s, and then, in 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on a pledge of “law and order” and won the presidency. As it was then, so it will be now-- or so the punditry goes. The riots of 2020 may or may not help Donald Trump. The analogy to 1968, however, misunderstands both the politics of that traumatic year, and the success of Richard Nixon. One thing to remember about the presidential election of 1968 is that it was a three-way race. Nixon ran not only against the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, a liberal stalwart with a long civil-rights record, but also against the outright segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama. Wallace would ultimately collect 8.6 percent of the popular vote and win five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Facing those two rivals allowed Nixon to run as the candidate of the middle way, committed both to civil rights and to public order." But, yeah, Wallace did better in Kansas... of course.

Today, we know the Nixon of the secret tapes: crude, amoral, often bigoted. The public Nixon of 1968, however, behaved with the dignity and decorum Americans then expected in a president. Trump in 2020 occupies the place not of Nixon, but of Daley and George Wallace: Trump is the force of disorder that is frightening American voters into seeking a healing candidate-- not the candidate of healing who can restore a fair and just public order.





The irony, of course, is that at the same time that Trump tweets bloodthirsty threats, he has turned off the White House lights and cowered in the bunker below. He joins noisy bluster to visible weakness-- exactly the opposite of the Nixon formula in 1968. Trump will not repeat Nixon’s success in 1968, because he does not understand that success. Nixon joined his vow of order to a promise of peace at home and abroad. Trump offers only conflict, and he offers no way out of conflict, because-- unlike Nixon in 1968-- Trump is himself the cause of so much conflict.”

If Trump seeks historical parallels for his reelection campaign, here’s one that is much more apt. There was a campaign in which the party of the president presided over a deadly pandemic at the same time as a savage depression and a nationwide spasm of bloody urban racial violence. The year was 1920. The party in power through these troubles went on to suffer the worst defeat in U.S. presidential history, a loss by a margin of 26 points in the popular vote. The triumphant challenger, Warren Harding, was not some charismatic superhero of a candidate. He didn’t need to be. In 2020 as in 1920, the party of the president is running on the slogan Let us fix the mess we made. It didn’t work then. It’s unlikely to work now.

The L.A. Times published an editorial at 3AM yesterday about Trump poring oil on the flames. He's overtly calling himself "your president of law and order" and threatening to send the military into American cities. The Times labeled that another demonstration "that he has little understanding of why Americans have taken to the streets [and] reinforced the impression that he sees the current crisis as an opportunity for him to score political points in an election year with a new iteration of his 2016 claim that 'I alone can fix it.'... A different president would have been able to credibly lament that lawlessness, and call for measures to deal with it, with no one suspecting ulterior motives. Trump has forfeited any such benefit of the doubt. In his remarks on Monday, as in previous comments, he expressed sympathy for George Floyd, whose death led to a murder charge against the former Minneapolis police officer shown kneeling on Floyd’s neck in a video that went viral. But Trump consistently has failed to recognize that Floyd’s death was the latest example of a pattern of police violence against African American men that in turn is a manifestation of entrenched and pervasive racism."

The Sanders Plan to Legalize Marijuana Does More Than Legalize Marijuana

Concerns about a marijuana monopoly are not unfounded (source).

by Thomas Neuburger

"Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
—John Ehrlichman, Chief Domestic Advisor for Richard Nixon

In the welter of plans from the welter of Democratic primary candidates, this should not be missed. Bernie Sanders' plan to legalize marijuana does exactly that — he will take it off the Schedule I list of controlled substances by executive order and not add it to the Schedule II list (as Biden would do), leaving it completely unregulated nationally.

But the Sanders plan also does more. He will start to repair the damage done to millions of people, mainly those of color, by conviction of marijuana "crimes." In addition, a third part of his plan will prevent the marijuana industry from becoming (or being dominated by) Big Tobacco.

Here are the pieces in detail.

Legalizing Marijuana Immediately

From Sanders plan:

As president, Bernie will:

Legalize marijuana in the first 100 days with executive action by:

• Nominating an attorney general, HHS secretary, and administrator for the DEA who will all work to aggressively end the drug war and legalize marijuana
   
• Immediately issuing an executive order that directs the Attorney General to declassify marijuana as a controlled substance
  
  
  • While Congress must aggressively move to end the war on drugs and undo its damage, as president Bernie will not wait for Congress to act.
     
• Passing legislation to ensure permanent legalization of marijuana

I would expect most serious candidates to follow suit on this plan, but I trust Sanders more than almost any other candidate to follow through as a Day 1 action. Would this be a Day 1–type action for Buttigieg or Warren? I doubt it. O'Rourke perhaps would prioritize this, but he's not going to see the White House anytime soon without a visitor's pass.

Vacate All Past Marijuana Convictions

It's not enough — not by half — to simply legalize marijuana for the current generation of users. One of the greatest injustices in our history — the utter and deliberate devastation of millions of American lives, most of them people of color — was perpetrated on two past generations as well, starting with the generation that came of age under Richard Nixon.

Yes, deliberate devastation. Here's John Ehrlichman in a late-in-life interview confessing to this decades-old crime. Ehrlichman speaking (quoted here; emphasis mine):

“You want to know what this [the war on drugs] was really all about? ... The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Bernie Sanders will do his best to undo this damage, starting with the living victims. Those who have died in prison or at the end of reduced or destroyed post-prison lives cannot, sadly, be made whole. They must remain on Nixon and Ehrlichman's account book forever. (For crimes like this, I do hope there's a hell.)

Here's what Sanders will do for the victims still alive (emphasis mine):

Vacate and expunge all past marijuana-related convictions.

• In a Sanders administration we will review all marijuana convictions - both federal and state - for expungement and re-sentencing. All past convictions will be expunged.
   
• Based on the California model, we will direct federal and state authorities to review current and past marijuana related convictions for eligibility. This review will include re-sentencing for all currently incarcerated with marijuana convictions. Following determination of eligibility or status, prosecutors will have one year to appeal or object, after which authorities will automatically expunge and vacate past marijuana convictions for all those eligible.
   
• Federal funding will be provided to states and cities to partner with organizations that can help develop and operate the expungement determination process, much like how California worked with Code for America.
   
• Allow people with marijuana convictions to contact the state to ensure the list did not miss them. And we will grant people with marijuana related convictions an administrative remedy, if after two years, the state has not taken action on their sentences and records.
   
• Revitalize the executive clemency process by creating an independent clemency board removed from the Department of Justice and placed in the White House.
   
• Ensure a just reentry for people leaving incarceration as detailed in Bernie’s Justice and Safety for All plan.

All this is promised by executive action on Day 1, or as near to Day 1 as can be managed.

Invest Revenue from Legal Marijuana into Communities Hardest Hit by the "War on Drugs"

As the legal marijuana industry grows — and it will get a massive boost from immediately 50-state legalization — tax money that results from it must be used properly. For Sanders this means returning that money to the hardest hit communities.

From the plan:

Ensure that revenue from legal marijuana is reinvested in communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs, especially African-American and other communities of color.
With new tax resources from legal marijuana sales, we will:

• Create a $20 billion grant program within the Minority Business Development Agency to provide grants to entrepreneurs of color who continue to face discrimination in access to capital.
   
• With this revenue we will also create a $10 billion grant program to focus on businesses that are at least 51% owned or controlled by those in disproportionately impacted areas or individuals who have been arrested for or convicted of marijuana offenses.
   
• Provide formerly incarcerated individuals with training and resources needed to start their own businesses and worker owned businesses, and guarantee jobs and free job training at trade schools and apprenticeship programs related to marijuana businesses. [...]
   
• Use revenue from marijuana sales to establish a targeted $10 billion USDA grant program to help disproportionately impacted areas and individuals who have been arrested for or convicted of marijuana offenses start urban and rural farms and urban and rural marijuana growing operations to ensure people impacted by the war on drugs have access to the entire marijuana industry. [...]
   
• Create a $10 billion targeted economic and community development fund to provide grants to communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs.
  • We will also ensure that every community in the country has the resources they need to address our opioid addiction crisis and prevent the abuse of other hard drugs. And we will work with states to fund and pursue innovative overdose prevention initiatives.

Eliminate barriers to public benefits for people who have interacted with the criminal justice system, including licenses and contracts, based on prior records, and eliminate drug testing requirements from future benefits and ensure people cannot be removed from public housing for marijuana use.

• We will also direct agencies to remove all references to marijuana that limit people’s ability to access government services and we will eliminate the consequences of a marijuana record related to immigration.

Legalization without reparations is simply cruel, benefiting the unpunished at the expense of the already broken and destroyed. Sanders plan includes reparations.

Prevent Marijuana from Becoming Big Tobacco

One of the greatest fears of many who watch the marijuana business grow is that it will become yet another rip-off billionaire industry dominated by a few players who charge what they please and buy laws and regulations that outlaw or disadvantage smaller entrepreneurial enterprises from participating. (For examples, see here and here).

Fears of a "neoliberal response" to the prospect of marijuana decriminalization are not unfounded. Do you want Coca Cola, Disney, or RJ Reynolds to gain control of the marijuana market? Each of them, and many many more, would like to.

Bernie Sanders' plan addresses that possibility.

Ensure Legalized Marijuana Does Not Turn Into Big Tobacco

Big Tobacco is already targeting the marijuana industry for its profits. As president, Bernie will not allow marijuana to turn into Big Tobacco. He will:

• Incentivize marijuana businesses to be structured like nonprofits. 
  
  • We will provide resources for people to start cooperatives and collective nonprofits as marijuana businesses that will create jobs and economic growth in local communities.
     
• Prohibit products and labels that target young people.
   
• Ban companies that have created cancer-causing products or guilty of deceptive marketing.
   
• Ban tobacco/cigarette corporations from participating in the marijuana industry.
   
• Institute market share and franchise caps to prevent consolidation and profiteering.
   
• Regulate the safety of marijuana products by granting the federal government regulatory authority. Partner with USDA to establish safety inspection and quality control processes for growers and producers.

A comment about point three above: Punishing companies for past bad behavior is decidedly non-neoliberal, and just a start in my view for how these companies should be treated. If a living breathing person committed premeditated murder, what would the punishment be? Now what if that deliberate murderer were a non-breathing corporate person? Should the sentence be less?

Jeffrey Dahmer killed fewer than twenty people. He was incarcerated for life and later beaten to death by a fellow prisoner. How many hundreds did Ford Motors kill with its exploding Pinto? How many millions does Big Tobacco continue to kill? Should any company with this kind of past be rewarded with the gift of the next big profit opportunity, or should it be shut down instead ("incarcerated for life") and their executives prosecuted as breathing deliberate killers?

Other parts of Sanders' platform deal with forbidding monopoly practices, and they would apply here as well. But making explicitly sure that a vibrant marijuana industry is not quickly dominated by a de facto monopoly of its own would be, dare we say it, a breath of fresh air.
  

No, Not ALL The House Democrats Are Cowards Worthy Of Contempt

Their time is passed for the kind of energy it would take to fight for impeachment-- old and in the way

There are various whip counts of which Democrats support and which Democrats do not support impeachment. The New York Times tally says 54 House Democrats support impeachment, 58 do not support it and 123 have not committed. And then there's Justin Amash, the only House Republican to support impeachment. It takes just 118 votes to approve a resolution to begin a formal impeachment process. None of the whip counts are the same. For example, take the Times' interpretation of Judiciary Committee member Karen Bass' spokesperson: "If there’s a vote on opening an impeachment inquiry in the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Bass would vote yes, as indicated by her voting record established by the two votes she’s already taken on the House floor against tabling an impeachment resolution." The Times puts her under the "59 do not support now or undecided" column. I'd put her in the "56 support" column. But we'll use The Times faulty whip list anyway, since they're all faulty. First off, there are 13 on the Judiciary Committee Democrats calling for impeachment (not including Bass). There are 8 Judiciary Committee members most of whom are basically sating, "You may not have noticed before, but I have no brain and I will do whatever Pelosi tells me to do. Best example-- Hakeem Jeffries: "not at this time." Others, like Bass, are more nuanced. Eric Swalwell says he is "preparing for impeachment," which doesn't sound like a no to me. Most members are just hiding and refusing to answer. My Twitter followers answered this question correctly: 

I've arranged the ones who are for impeachment by their district's PVI. The bluer the district, the higher on the list (and the more likely they are unlikely to get into any political trouble back home by backing impeachment (bolded members are on the Judiciary Committee):

• Adriano Espaillat (NY-13)- D+43
• Dwight Evans (PA-03)- D+41
• Barbara Lee (CA-13)- D+40
• Danny Davis (IL-07)- D+38
• Nanette Barragán (CA-44)- D+35
• Ayanna Pressley (MA-07)- D+34
• Pramila Jayapal (WA-07)- D+33
• Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)- D+33
• Chuy Garcia (IL-04)- D+33
• AOC (NY-14)- D+29
• Maxine Waters (CA-43)- D+29
• Robin Kelly (IL-02)- D+29
• Al Green (TX-09)- D+29
• Steve Cohen (TN-09)- D+28
• Brendan Boyle (PA-02)- D+27
• Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18)- D+27
• Bobby Rush (IL-01)- D+27
• Ilhan Omar (MN-05)- D+26
• Cedric Richmond (LA-02)- D+25
• Earl Blumenauer (OR-3)- D+24
• Jared Huffman (CA-02)- D+22
• Juan Vargas (CA-51)- D+22
• Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11)- D+21
• Don Beyer (VA-08)- D+21
• Mike Quigley (IL-05)- D+20
• Norma Torres (CA-35)- D+19
• Mark Pocan (WI-02)- D+18
• Alama Adams (NC-12)- D+18
• Veronica Escobar (TX-16)- D+17
• G.K. Butterfield (NC-01)- D+17
• Ted Lieu (CA-33)- D+16
• Lloyd Doggett (TX-35)- D+15
• Jamie Raskin (MD-08)- D+14
• Betty McCollum (MN-04)- D+14
• David Cicciline (RI-01)- D+14
• Bennie Thompson (MS-02)- D+14
• Alan Lowenthal (CA-47)- D+13
• Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05)- D+13
• Raul Grijalva (AZ-03)- D+13
• Val Demings (FL-10)- D+11
• Joaquin Castro (TX-20)- D+10
• Filemon Vela (TX-34)- D+10
• Joe Neguse (CO-02)- D+9
• Suzanne Bonamici (OR-01)- D+9
• Jim McGovern (MA-02)- D+9
• Chellie Pingree (ME-01)- D+8
• Tim Ryan (OH-13)- D+7
• Madeleine Dean (PA-04)- D+7
• Paul Tonko (NY-20)- D+7
• John Yarmuth (KY-03)- D+6
• Seth Moulton (MA-06)- D+6
• Darren Soto (FL-09)- D+5
• Greg Stanton (AZ-09)- D+4
• Kathleen Rice (NY-04)- D+4

• Tom Malinowski (NJ-07)- R+3

Young Tom grew up to be a courageous congressman from New Jersey

You'll notice that the one Democrat taking a relatively big chance is TomMalinowski, a freshman, in a red-leaning district and where this will absolutely be an issue. Trump isn't particularly popular there, though-- having lost to Hillary 48.6% to 47.5%.

Everyone has their own reasons for deciding to go for it or not go for it-- and they're not always apparent. Rep. Danny Davis (D) is in a deep blue district where voters hate Trump (he only carried 9.2% of the vote there in 2016) but his motivation may have had more to do with the fact that he has a strong progressive opponent this cycle, Kina Collins. In fact, last night Collins told us that "There is no middle ground for me. We need to investigate him, and we need to impeach him. There has been a complete breach of trust, and a breakdown of the checks and balances that are constitutionally bound. In our current political climate, it is critical that we elevate new leaders who will take bold action. I will not shy away from difficult political fights, and I stand by Congresswoman Maxine Waters who has talked about impeachment from the very beginning. I wonder why it has taken this long for so many other Democrats to step up."

Another interesting dynamic is the one in Rhode Island. There are 2 House seats, one held by David Cicciline, a progressive, and the other by Jim Langevin, a moderate. There's a 50-50 chance that after the census, Rhode Island is going to wind up with just one seat, which could easily result in a Cicciline vs Jim Langevin. And right now, Cicciline is pushing aggressively for impeachment and Langevin's spokesman said "Congressman Langevin does not support opening an inquiry at this time."

In yesterday's Washington Post, Greg Sargent offered data from Nixon's impeachment to show how public support for impeachment would grow (if the Democrats grew a pair). "In early 1973," he explained, "Gallup polling showed that only 19 percent of Americans supported removing President Richard M. Nixon. By the summer of 1974, when Nixon resigned, support had climbed to the high 50s-- which illustrates that on impeachment, public opinion can be moved in a big way, including, presumably on Trump." He pointed to Clyburn lame appearance on CNN over the weekend whining about bringing the public along. before they start impeachment.

So now let’s look at what happened with Nixon in that regard. Gallup provided me with this breakdown of four of its national polls on impeachment (the question wording shifts midway through):

As you can see, among Republicans, support for impeachment or removal moved from 6 percent in June of 1973, to 31 percent in August 1974.

Among independents, those numbers moved from 18 percent to 55 percent. And among Democrats, they moved from 27 percent to 71 percent.

In some ways, this offers more grist for believing that public opinion can be shifted again. Note that the shift was more substantial among independents, eventually amounting to a solid majority, than it was among Republicans.

Right now, independents are a key reason public support for impeachment is low. A recent Post-ABC News poll, which found that only 37 percent of Americans support beginning impeachment proceedings while 56 percent oppose it, also found that among independents, those numbers are 36 percent to 59 percent.

The Gallup numbers on Nixon suggest that big shifts among independents are possible and show that a substantially larger percentage of independents now support impeachment hearings than at the outset in Nixon’s day.

In other words, it might be possible to build majority support for an impeachment inquiry on Trump, even if Republican voters don’t ever move much on this question.

How support grew for impeaching Nixon

Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, the co-author of a new book on U.S. history, points out that some jumps in support for impeaching Nixon came after high-profile events.

For instance, Zelizer noted, the jump in July 1974 came after the House Judiciary Committee launched impeachment hearings in May 1974, and the subsequent jump in August 1974 came after the Committee approved articles of impeachment in July of that year.

It’s clear from the data that impeachment proceedings provided the jolt that shook the public, among independents in particular,” Zelizer told me. “An independent by nature is not going to make a quick decision. Impeachment proceedings and then the approval of articles of impeachment are what ended up moving independents.”

“This wasn’t Congress waiting on the public,” Zelizer added. “It was the other way around-- Congress provided guidance to the public.”

Democratic leaders insist an impeachment inquiry must have bipartisan support, meaning Republicans must come around. If that doesn’t happen, goes this argument, the Senate will acquit, so an impeachment inquiry will rip the country apart and potentially alienate swing voters while resulting in no serious consequences for Trump.

But if anything, this new data casts doubt on that approach. It raises the possibility that public opinion can be shifted in the middle regardless of whether Republicans ever support an inquiry in large percentages. What’s more, note that Republican support for impeaching Nixon never even reached one-third even at the end of the process.

And given current realities-- deep partisan polarization, and the massive media propaganda apparatus Trump enjoys that Nixon never had-- it’s plausible that Republicans could never come around in even those numbers. “Republican voters might be much less movable than in 1974,” Zelizer noted.

Here’s Gallup’s data on Nixon’s approval over the same period:

Try to imagine Trump’s approval among Republicans falling to 50 percent, and you get the idea.

It’s possible that because of this polarization, Republican-leaning independents might also be less movable, but we cannot know this in advance. And it’s also true that in Nixon’s day, there was far more time in advance of the next election to build support, but that perhaps argues for more prompt action now.

The bottom line is that insisting that even an impeachment inquiry can’t happen until Republicans support one might be tantamount to giving Republican intransigence-- and Trump’s disinformation network-- total veto power over whether our political system ever even considers the question of whether Trump’s corruption and misconduct amount to the high crimes and misdemeanors that merit removal.

That is likely tantamount to saying it can never happen at all. If that’s the real point, Democratic leaders should say so.

In fairness, Democratic leaders argue that pushing forward with oversight outside impeachment will shed light on Trump’s misdeeds, and that if this builds support for an inquiry, it might then be appropriate.

Look: If Democrats score multiple oversight wins in court, and new light is being shed on Trump’s corruption, it would be somewhat understandable if they then refrained from an inquiry, though the case for one has already been strong for many months.

But as many legal experts have pointed out, an inquiry would strengthen Democrats’ hands in these very same oversight battles, making success more likely. And if Democrats lose a bunch of them, and we find ourselves in the fall, and Democrats don’t want to launch one due to the looming election, then what?

If you oppose an inquiry, but also want Trump held accountable, you should at least engage with the risks embedded in this scenario-- and with the fact that the current conduct of Democrats could dramatically influence public opinion on the impeachment question. It’s not enough to simply declare that opinion tilts against an inquiry. Democrats don’t lack agency here.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

I'm old enough to have lived through the Nixon years, and, yes, he was a crook, but, as as bad as he was, Trump runs circles of sleaze around him. Back in the Nixon years, we thought that no one could be worse. It turns out we were wrong. For instance, Trump is brazenly, openly profiting financially from his position with his hotel right across the street from the White House, and doing so bigly. Notice I used 'position' not Nixon's phrase "public service." Trump can't even put those two words together.

Although there will be secret and semi-secret things uncovered in the future, Trump's obstruction of justice is far more obvious and out in the open than most of what Nixon did. So is his ruthless and psychotic vindictiveness. True, Nixon famously said "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal," but Trump has taken that as an encouragement and a creed. Of the two men, Nixon was a more traditional Washington type in that he at least made some attempt to hide whatever little nasty thing he was up to from public view, especially his 1968 campaign treason. Trump's ego is so hugely out of control that he has to flaunt his actions in front of the cameras on a daily basis, whether at his rallies or in his interviews such as the one with Lester Holt. "See what I can get away with?"

Trump usually attempts to hide his worst transgressions from view and probably does so reluctantly but he didn't even bother when he had Russian spymasters come to the oval office so he could hand over some top secret Israeli intelligence. His refusal to hand over his tax info and an un-redacted Mueller report is a case in point. He may chant "No collusion. No collusion," but you know he's looking forward to a day when he can smugly satisfy himself by boasting about it, probably when he's out of office or some statute of limitations has run out; maybe when he's living high up in his new golden digs at his Trump Moscow Tower.

In the end, Nixon skated. He walked free, with his pension intact, giving future scumbags a kind of permission. Letting Nixon walk lowered the standards in Washington, as if they weren't already low enough. Nixon got to live out his days on our dimes at his San Clemente beachfront estate rather than in a cage at Leavenworth, which is exactly where he belonged. In a supreme case of Washington taking care of its own, his newly appointed dirtbag VP, Gerald Ford, a former House Speaker, pardoned him, saying that no one wants to see the president go to jail. Yeah, right, he actually said that.

Nixon only erased (call it a redaction)18 minutes of his tapes and later regretted not incinerating all of them. Ask yourself what would Trumpie do. I think it's an interesting question. Would he burn such tapes, or, would he take them over to Sean Hannity and proudly play them on a nightly "Trump's Big Tapes" segment, boasting "See what I did. My party loves me for it!" Count on Rudy Giuliani being the Ed McMahon in the scenario. The more that Trump's mental condition deteriorates, the more likely it is that he would do the later. He'd even publish them in book form and offer to sign copies for any Republican who asks. Such a book would "grace the bookshelves of any Republican, right next to a book called "The Complete Tweets Of Donald Trump." There would, of course, be fawning forwards to the book by the integrity-challenged William Barr and Lindsey "Knee Pads" Graham.

Trump is what happens when you let predecessors off the hook. It normalizes bad behavior and it assures that someone else who's even worse will come along and push the envelope even further. This is the reality that those who own and operate our politicians have been pushing for a very long time. More directly, consider Trump to be Nixon and Ford's worst gift to America, topping even Reagan. Blame all who sat idly by while Nixon was pardoned, too. Blame those who let the Bush administrations off the hook for their crimes against humanity. Both parties. Now, we have a president who really could murder someone out on Fifth Avenue to the cheers and applause of his supporters. If we continue to give him time, opportunity, and a get out of jail free card, he will do so, or a successor will down the line.

"We need leaders who tell the truth. This is not now happening" (William D. Ruckelshaus, this August)

"William Doyle Ruckelshaus [seen above c2009] served as the first EPA Agency Administrator, from December 1970 to April 1973. During EPA's formative years, he concentrated on developing the new agency's organizational structure; enforcement actions against severely polluted cities and industrial polluters; setting health-based standards for air pollutants and standards for automobile emissions; requiring states to submit new air quality plans; and the banning of the general use of the pesticide DDT."

-- from an Environmental Protection Agency website bio,
"William D. Ruckelshaus: First Term [as EPA administrator]"

"It’s hard to believe that, 45 years later, we may be in store for another damaging attack on the foundations of our democracy. Yet the cynical conduct of this president, his lawyers and a handful of congressional Republicans is frightening to me and should be to every citizen of this country. We are not playing just another Washington political game; there is much more at stake. . . .

"We need leaders who tell the truth. This is not now happening. [Special counsel Robert] Mueller is living up to his superior reputation as a model public servant. His is a search for the truth; we should not complicate his job. Support him, and when he has finished his work, listen to what he has found.

"What Mueller unearths will guide our next steps and will strengthen our trust in our institutions -- including the one we are now using to find the truth. I hope the president at last studies the lessons of a history I lived -- and that he heeds its warning."

-- long-ago Deputy AG William D. Ruckelshaus, in an Aug. 6 WaPo
op-ed, "Only one other president has ever acted this desperate"

by Ken

My apologies if everybody else has long since read and processed the op-ed published by the Washington Post on August 6, "Only one other president has ever acted this desperate." I've only just read it -- by clicking an (undated) WaPo link that appeared following a new op-ed, "The clownish caricature of Nixon in the White House," the other day by true-red Post columnist Michael Gerson assailing the character and deeds of this monster whom circumstances oblige us to call President Abomination.

What can I say? The news these last couple of years has been so unremittingly grim that I've largely retreated into isolation from it. Still, this doesn't mean I have to go looking for trouble -- reality has a nasty, vindictive way of finding me anyway.

I should note that following the Gerson op-ed there was also a link to an equally forceful anti-President Abomination piece by another committed conservative WaPo columnist, Jennifer Rubin, "If only Republicans weren’t such cowards." Now, there's an awful lot that Michael and Jennifer and I will never agree on, but in these dark and dangerous times they have both amply demonstrated, going back to the 2016 presidential campaign, that -- appearances to the contrary -- there is still such a thing as "principled conservatives." There are others of their kind, but not all that many -- I'm well aware how lonely they're feeling, not least because such voices seem to be heard only in the media, and not all that frequently there. However, in the realm of Republican public officialdom, I'm hard put to think of any such voices I've heard.

Which brings me back to William Ruckelshaus. Just seeing his name attached to the aforementioned WaPo op-ed got my total attention, because there are names you just can't let go of.

I love that little bio of WDR from the archive of the Environmental Protection Agency website, which covers only his first term as EPA adminstrator -- the very first EPA administrator. It's often pointed out, when the abominations of the presidency of Richard M. Nixon are discussed, usually in the context of the subsequent, serially more abominable presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are discussed, that there were redeeming features of the Nixon administration, and usually topping the list is that it was during Nixon's presidency that the EPA was created, and under its first administrator it carved out a mission, a mission that has been ever more fiercely undermined by those successively more abominable Republican administrations.

What's more, as that designation "First Term" reminds us, Ruckelshaus served a second term as EPA administrator, in 1983-85 brought back by a somewhat abashed President Reagan to clean up at least some of the public-relations mess created by his disastrous first EPA administrator, the frightful Anne Burford Gorsuch, a monstrosity who would leave an even viler legacy in the person of her son, eventual Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (who clearly comes by his monstrousness honestly, possibly the only lick of honesty that can be attributed to him).

IN BETWEEN WDR'S TERMS AS EPA ADMINISTRATOR --

There was another small matter, which the gentleman himself recalled in starkly matter-of-fact terms in that August op-ed. He had already been used by Nixon to try to clean up PR messes, first as acting FBI director and then as deputy attorney general. And then --

In October 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire [Watergate special prosecutor Archibald] Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. As deputy attorney general and next in line, I was ordered by the president to fire Cox; I also refused and resigned. Cox was finally fired by Solicitor General Robert H. Bork. The result is what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

And there we have it, in a mere handful of words. There are moments in history when individuals are called on to stand up and show what they're made of. On that fateful night in October 1973, in quick succession AG Richardson "refused and resigned" and Deputy AG Ruckelshaus "refused and resigned."

"Neither Richardson nor I saw any justifiable reason for Cox’s dismissal," Ruckelshaus wrote in August.

WDR back in the day (c1970)

When it became clear that Cox would not give up his pursuit of the Oval Office tapes, Nixon took the only action he could to protect himself: He tried to get rid of the man charged with investigating him.

Nixon was desperate. His goal was to shut down the Watergate investigation by ridding himself of Cox. Instead, Nixon got Leon Jaworski, the highly respected former president of the American Bar Association. Nine months later, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision forcing Nixon to release the tapes that proved his guilt. Shortly thereafter, the president resigned.

Not only was that Saturday night the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency, but it also accelerated the growing wave of political cynicism and distrust in our government we are still living with today. One manifestation of that legacy: a president who will never admit he uttered a falsehood and a Congress too often pursuing only a partisan version of the truth.

Ruckelshaus recalled receiving "hundreds of letters" after he refused and resigned, and those letters "enshrined this thought in my head for the rest of my life": that "Nixon was brought down by his disrespect for the rule of law." Earlier in his piece WDR offered a laconic gloss on the events of October 1973:

A lesson for the president from history: It turned out badly for Nixon. Not only could he not derail the investigation, but also, 10 months later, he was forced to resign the presidency.

"IT TURNED OUT BADLY FOR NIXON"

I love it! It will be interesting to see whether this bit of history repeats itself. In which connection I heartily recommend a Dana Milbank op-ed, "The truth is finally catching up with Trump":

In the beginning, they proffered “alternative facts.” Later, they told us that “truth isn’t truth.”

All along, President Trump and his lieutenants were betting that Jonathan Swift was correct when he wrote more than three centuries ago that “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

But after two long years, the truth is finally catching up with Trump and his winged whoppers.

Note, however, the care with which Dana points out, in the case of each of these "winged whoppers," that, while "Americans no longer need trust the media’s word against Trump’s," because "they can see with their own eyes, if they choose to, that facts are closing in on him from all directions," there's a crucial qualification: that "if they choose to." As more and more commentators are pointing out, this Trump legacy will endure long after he has walked or been booted into the sunset: a codification of Ronald Reagan's debilitating legacy: that "reality" can be whatever you want it to be.

None of which changes my takeaway for the day: that an important part of the reason Nixon's machinations turned out badly for him was that first Elliot Richardson and then William Ruckelshaus, received an illegitimate and unjustifiable order from the president of the United States and did the two things that an honorable person would have to do -- they "refused and resigned."

We might also recall that the third man in the October 1972 DoJ chain of command, the one who without apparent difficulty carried out the boss's execution order, a far-right-wing GOP legal hack name of Robert Bork, was rewarded by the Abominable Reagan first, in 1982, with a seat on the country's second-highest court, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then, in 1987, with nomination to the Supreme Court. True, that nomination failed, with 58 "no" votes in the Senate, as a result of what right-wingers still call "Borking," a supposedly despicable tactic that consisted of simply citing stuff the "victim" has said, written, or done.

It's one of those curious facts of life that right-wing crackpots are deeply, loudly, indignantly, self-righteously offended when you dare to simply citing things they've said or written or done. But this is another story. Today I just want to remember that night in October 1973 when two men understood what they were being ordered to do and instead of doing it, "refused and resigned."

#

The Emperor Has No Mind

by Noah

Nixon was pretty damn bad. We knew he was a bad guy. He’d given some signs of mental instability too, perhaps most notably with his 1962 “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech. Sadly we did 6 years later. But, it wasn’t until he was heading for his exit that we learned just how wacked out he was. Now we have Donald Trump. Like with Nixon, the signs were there before he got "elected" President. It was even more obvious, but his voters went to the parade and saw what they wanted to see and saw what they were told to see by the corporate media.

What we have here in Donald Trump and his supporters is a variation of the old Emperor Has No Clothes thing. He acts like he should be bowed down to by all, as if he was an emperor or dictator. His enablers and supporters look at him and they refuse to see the reality that their "president" is stark, raving mad and could destroy us all, including them, if he isn’t stopped. A madman can lose his mind but that doesn’t mean he can’t plot his trajectory, and ours, every day.

Crazy as he is, he is able to deliberately create chaos. He does it in order to achieve a result. History and comic books are full of truly evil and demented people like Donald Trump. Consider Trump a real life example of The Joker from the Batman comics, a twisted man bent on creating mayhem simply for his own gratification and personal gain.

On Wednesday, the day after the elections turned over the control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, Trump was fuming and panic stricken over what he correctly saw as a rapidly coming future of at least some level of reckoning. For the first time in his life, at least since he and his father lost a racial bias court case or two in New York, Trump stands to face, if not some accountability, some high profile exposure of his misdeeds and criminality. He knows that his obsequious cabana boy, California Rep. Devin Nunes, is no longer in charge of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Come January, California's Rep. Adam Schiff will be.

So, what was a sniveling caged rat in a freaked out panic state of feverish mental illness like Donald Trump to do? Ever the marketing man, he knew a smokescreen, a distraction was required and it had to be an elaborate one. He would hold a long and rambling press conference. Don’t look over there! Look here! He would pretend the takeover of the House was meaningless, almost never happened. Takeover? What takeover? Ditto for the losses of governorships and state legislatures. He would play up the Senate victories and he would display his vile, virulent pettiness and mock those in his own party who lost House and Senate races as getting what they deserved for not embracing and praising him at every opportunity. He would, once again, attack the press as “the enemy of the people” when it is only the perceived enemy of himself. His mobster-style message to all was “If you don’t kiss my ring and kiss my ass, then bad things will happen to you.“ In so doing, he once again displayed his massive insecurities and psychosis; something a person in full control of their mind would never do, certainly not live on national TV.

As if to deliberately reveal how far gone Trump’s aides are, one of them was heard to say words to the effect that “this is going to be great” as Trump waddled into the room to give his version of the theater of the absurd. What followed could just be titled “President Crazy Pants Loses It On National TV For An Hour And A Half” or, perhaps, “The Crackup Of A President” or some thing similar.

It backfired. Trump could not control his mind and he went off the deep end. He went way too far. He was more than confrontational, petulant and belligerent as he fumbled at his podium and stalked around it aimlessly like a deranged street person. His mental illness is in full bloom now. It's more out in the open than ever before. Only his support group of fellow crazies could possibly look at the actual film of the press conference and see it otherwise and they did. FOX “News” reported that CNN reporter Jim Acosta “strong-armed” a female intern who Trump had sent to seize his microphone. Nothing could be further from the truth of course, as film of the entire incident clearly shows, but FOX “News” and their White House partner showed the public a doctored version of the film of the incident that had been made by another one of Trumpanzee’s favorite “news” outlets, Alex Jones’ Infowars. When you’re afflicted with Republican Insanity Syndrome, the truth is not the truth.

The White House’s presentation of the Alex Jones video recreation of the Acosta incident did nothing to change the minds of sane people but it was a real Goebbels moment. In tandem with their presentation of genuinely fake news, however, the White House revoked Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials. Trump sent out Sarah Huckabbee Sanders to lie to the world about what everyone had seen with their own eyes on live TV; and lie she did with all of her customary great fervor; falsely accusing Acosta of putting his hands on the female intern. It was a perfect manifestation of the Republican “truth is not the truth” way of life. That girl Sarah was born to lie! But, born of what, who knows?

I’m actually happy for Acosta. I know he must be disappointed and frustrated at the turn of events but I know I wouldn’t want the job of visiting an insane asylum every day forever. Having to constantly look in on the insane likes of sociopaths like Stephen Miller, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly and all the rest of Trump’s servile toadies is bound to take its toll. It has to be one of the very most depressing jobs in journalism, right up there with seeing kids in cages, reporting on people who are doomed to die simply because they can’t afford proper medical care, or listening to Eric and Donnie Jr. talk.

Once the whole press conference debacle blew up in their faces, Trump and his White House needed yet another “event” to redirect the spotlight yet again. They came up with a doozy, they pulled out AG Jeff Sessions’ resignation “at your request” letter. Yeah, that’s going over real big, just like Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre. Sessions is now free to go home to Alabama and bake swastika cookies for the rest of his days, but odds are, he will try to run for the Senate. Oh joy!

Do Republicans Not Know Trump Is A Congenital Liar? Or Do They Just Not Care? Or Even Approve?

If you input "Big Lie" into Google, the first thing that pops up is Post Malone's song.

Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you got the shit you don't got
Heard you say that shit a hundred times, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie

Right after that you get the wikipedia definition-- including the original German große Lüge-- explaining that the Big Lie is a propaganda technique that was coined by Hitler in 1925 for his book, Mein Kampf, the only book that Trump is known to have read and which is first wife says he keeps on his night stand. Hitlerexplained that the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a forerunner of Huckabee's daughter, "put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression 'big lie'. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

During World War II the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, a precursor to the CIA) prepared a report on Hitler's psychological profile, that included this-- "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Who does that sound like?

Last year, Emily Dreyfuss, writing for Wired, explained how the Big Lie technique is used by people like Trump: repetition.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high.

None of those things are true.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias-- which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. Or look at just this week, when the president signed three executive orders designed to stop what he describes-- over and over again-- as high levels of violence against law enforcement in America. Sounds important, right? But such crimes are at their lowest rates in decades, as are most violent crimes in the US. Not exactly, as the president would have it, "American carnage."

...Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality-- so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

I'm going to guess this works even more effectively as you descend the intelligence curve and get to the average Trump voter.

This week presidential historian Jon Meacham castigated Trump for calling the media an "enemy of the people," pointing out that the phrase itself and that the whole reason authoritarians use it is part of a "totalitarian" strategy. "It’s an elective kind of base management. It’s pernicious, it’s dangerous... It’s simply a Stalinist phrase, for God’s sake. It comes out of totalitarian regimes to declare that a free press is the enemy of the people."

Early yesterday morning The Atlantic published an essay by Olivia Pascall, Trump's Tweets and the Creation of 'Illusory Truth', asserting that Trump's repetition of words like "witch hunt" could have a psychological effect on Americans-- say it enough, and people might start to believe it... Trump’s consistent tweeting-- and the constant media coverage of those tweets-- makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable."

Every time a Trump tweet calling the investigation a “witch hunt” flashes up on people’s Twitter feeds or television screens-- regardless of the context-- it’s becoming more and more familiar to them. They’re becoming increasingly fluent in the language of Trump’s claimed innocence. Even if they don’t think Mueller’s investigation is a rigged witch hunt, they are becoming more and more familiar with the idea that it could be.

... [T]he way to combat this effect would be for people to stop responding directly to the president’s charges. “It’s actually very ineffective to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t a witch hunt,’ because what you’re doing is reinforcing the ‘witch hunt’ frame,” he says. “You can’t just get people to stop believing something by contradicting it.” [A more effective response is] creating a positive, alternative story, such as “Mueller’s investigation is aimed at safeguarding America’s elections.” But that’s not always a natural position for the president’s opponents, or the media, to take. What effect all of this repeated language could have on public opinion of the investigation itself is unclear. It probably won’t turn public opinion in the president’s favor anytime soon, but it might mean that people take the Russia investigation less seriously-- the most recent Suffolk poll is already indicating that it’s a relatively unimportant issue for voters in the midterms. It’s almost certainly succeeding in framing the debate around whether it’s a witch hunt. And maybe, for the president’s purposes, that’s enough.

Yesterday everyone was talking about Susan Glasser's New Yorker piece about Trump lying more... and purposefully. "In his first year as President," she wrote, "Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to The Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, The Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were 'false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.'" The Post fact-checkers never refer to his lies as "lies," although their chief, Glenn Kessler pointed out that Señor T "has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO."

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans-- the group at which his lies seem to be aimed-- means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

...Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.

...The previous gold standard in Presidential lying was, of course, Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee four years before Nixon won the White House in 1968, famously called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Writing in his memoirs, Goldwater observed that Nixon “lied to his wife, his family, his friends, longtime colleagues in the U.S. Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.”

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

A little entertainment?