Conditions May Change Before November-- But Likely, Every Change Will Be Worse For Trump, Not Better

Every pollster or prognosticator who concludes that Trump has no path to victory says something to the effect of "but it's a long time until November 3 and things can change." Well, things will change. You don't have to be Nostradamus to figure out that if Trump keeps doing what he's been doing or his whole life, Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi will eventually be battleground states. Yes, things change but there is no reason to imagine that they will change in favor of Trump and the GOP. Every indication is that they will change in favor of the Democrats.

Did Trump lose some libertarians who, cluelessly, still support him by sending some kind of brutal secret police force into Portland to scoop up peaceful protesters?

How about Republicans who might possibly be confused by the Regime attempting to block billions of dollars for contact tracing, additional testing and other coronavirus mitigation efforts-- and by blocking funding for the CDC? Will they vote for him anyway? Or Republicans reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal story about how masks matter? "Face masks are emerging as one of the most powerful weapons to fight the novel coronavirus, with growing evidence that facial coverings help prevent transmission-- even if an infected wearer is in close contact with others. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the pandemic could be brought under control over the next four to eight weeks if 'we could get everybody to wear a mask right now.'" And then-- as Trump decided to cut billions from the CDC budget-- he announces on Fox that there will be no national mask mandate, in effect, not recovery from the pandemic until he's out of office.

The House passed legislation 2 months ago to aid Americans hard-pressed by the economic consequences of the pandemic. McConnell said they Senate will get to it when they get to it-- it hasn't-- and that what he comes up with will look nothing like what the House passed anyway. Trump, McConnell and their cronies in Congress have their own priority: shielding businesses that screw up from coronavirus-related lawsuits in state courts. McConnell and Trump have both said they will hold aid to working families hostage unless they get the shield fro their big campaign donors-- and that it has to be retroactive to December, 2019.

Last week, campaigning in Kentucky, McConnell lisped menacingly that any bill "must have, must... no bill will pass the Senate without liability protection for everyone related to the coronavirus... Nobody should have to face an epidemic of lawsuits on the heels of the pandemic that we already have related to the coronavirus."

It would prevent workers, for example, from suing over unsafe working conditions, something contributors to Republican campaigns are notorious for doing. Chuck Schumer called the Republicans' top priority a "liability shield for CEOs."




One more boneheaded reason for supported to abandon Trump between now and November? Writing for MSNBC.com, Steve Benen reported that The benefits for laid off workers created by last March's CARES Act, including enhanced unemployment insurance, "were temporary-- and they're due to expire this month. By refusing to act on the package the Democrats passed 2 months ago, the Republicans purposely guaranteed pain and suffering since it is too late to pass something that will keep people from going without a check. That, of course, was the point-- a vicious, poisonous bargaining chip for McConnell and chip. Trump wants a payroll tax and says it must be part of any package or-- he implies, he'll veto it.

it's a difficult position to take seriously, and it's worth appreciating why. Under the status quo, 6.2% of American workers' paychecks are deducted to help fund the Social Security system. When there's a payroll tax cut-- as there was during Barack Obama's first term as president-- that number is temporarily reduced as a way to put some extra money in every paycheck. The government makes up the difference, paying into the Social Security fund so benefits remain unaffected.

Trump has argued that the cut gets money into people's hands "quickly," and there's some truth to that: if the payroll tax were temporarily scrapped, every American worker's paycheck would have a little more money in it right away.

But there are also some downsides, too. As The Atlantic's Annie Lowrey has explained, a temporary payroll tax break tends to be small, insufficiently targeted, and largely meaningless to those who've lost their jobs and are no longer receiving paychecks. For Americans who rely on tips, or who've seen their hours cut, this policy also would offer very little.

What's more, as the Obama administration discovered nearly a decade ago, many Americans don't necessarily notice the small increases in their paychecks, so they don't feel like they have a little extra money in their pockets to spend, which diminishes the larger impact.

So why is Trump so adamant about this? No one really seems to know. Maybe he's confused; maybe he's getting some bad advice; or maybe he remains preoccupied with his political standing and sees this as a possible device for his re-election campaign.

Remember, Bloomberg News reported a few months ago that the president specifically told Republican senators that "he wants a payroll tax holiday through the November election so that taxes don't go back up before voters decide whether to return him to office."

In other words, Trump is threatening to derail an economic aid package at a key moment unless Congress gives him an unnecessary tax break that the president wants to use as a campaign talking point.

No good can come of this.

On Friday, Bernie and Andy Slavitt co-authored an OpEd for CNN about masks that approaches the pandemic problem very differently from the way the Trump regime does-- clearly and simply and constructively. "In the midst of this unprecedented global pandemic," they wrote, "it is clearer than ever that not only is health care a human right, but so too are the resources to protect your health and the health of your family and neighbors. That's why we are urgently calling for a simple, common-sense, practical and inexpensive way to protect Americans during the coronavirus pandemic: Masks for All. Our goal must be to make high-quality masks available on an equitable basis to every single person in this country at no cost. Next week, one of us will introduce legislation to do just that. The science is clear: Wearing a mask not only saves lives, but the widespread use of masks will get Americans back to work sooner and reunite families who have stayed apart. Hopefully, this legislation will even help counter some of the confusion and misinformation over mask-wearing... Unfortunately, it is absolutely clear that we cannot wait for this administration to take action. So, as a first step, the Masks for All legislation will instruct the Trump administration to acquire and deliver three high-quality, reusable masks to every person in the country with the best available designs that can be manufactured. They would be delivered via US mail, made available free locally at testing sites, post offices and pharmacies, as well as distributed in collaboration with state and local governments to homeless shelters, jails, detention centers and other congregate-care settings... We are all in this together. During World War II, factories across the country were given the opportunity to play a role in winning the war. Today, US manufacturers and workers could play an equivalent, vital role in winning the war against the pandemic, and ensuring a healthy society for all."

Fred Trump's Young Herr... A Racist? How Could It Be?

Yesterday, in his Washington Post column, Greg Sargent wrote that ever since Señor Trumpanzee "launched his candidacy by declaring Mexicans to be 'rapists,' Trump's public racism has often included two additional important elements: an adamant refusal to apologize for it in the face of outrage, and an equally adamant denial that the offending language was racist in any way. Central to Trump’s racism-- and more broadly to Trumpism writ large-- is not just the content of the racism itself. It’s also that he’s asserting the right to engage in public displays of racism without it being called out for what it is."

And he's dragging the Republican Party into the open pit sewer with him. Even the Republicans who have "condemned" his demented racist barrage against AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, have used words and phrases that show what they are really made of:

• Fred Upton (R-MI): "both sides"
• Susan Brooks (R-IN): "ALL...need to raise their level of civility"
• John Katko (R-NY): "vehemently criticized lawmakers on the far left"
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY): "strongly disagree w/ the tactics of the far left socialist Squad"

More typical was Long Island Trump supporter Lee Zeldin who wound up, like Lindsey Graham, denouncing the same 4 women of color for what he called a "blame America first mentality." But speaking of Long Island, another suburban swing-district member, this one a Democrat, Tom Suozzi-- vice chair of the Trump-oriented Problem Solvers Caucus-- just came back from a tour, not with Pence, of the concentration camps on the border. Watch this clip from Morning Joe, where he said he wants to be made an honorary member of "The Squad." Trump has united all the Democrats; too bad the Republicans are so much more reconciled to racism, xenophobia and bigotry than any Democrat. Tom did well-- now everybody in Congress in following Tom's idea to ask for membership in The Squad!




Even genuinely horrible New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer, the single worst Democrat in Congress, couldn't quite bring himself to countenancing Trump's vile tweets:

So why are Republicans being such dicks about this? For one thing, Trump's racism polls well with Republicans-- although not so much with normal people. Trump has given left behind Republicans the OK to embrace racism-- and they have... in droves, even if some if them are too obtuse to realize it. Trump's net approval among Republicans rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, after his racist attack on four Democratic female lawmakers. His support among Democrats and Independents has dropped and his overall approval/disapproval remains at 41-55%. Steve Benen tried answering that dick question for the MaddowBlog yesterday (before the House voted). He began by quoting Eugene Robinson: "'Trump is a racist' does not exactly qualify as breaking news. But the silence from prominent Republicans is staggering-- and telling. It amounts to collaboration-- perhaps 'collusion' is a better word-- with the president’s assault on diversity and pluralism. In the coming campaign, you will hear Republican candidates at every level claim to be colorblind and embrace all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity. Do not believe them. Their failure to speak out now tells us everything we need to know about their true feelings."

Members like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had an opportunity to stand up for core principles such as decency and respect, but by all appearances, they were simply too afraid to lead.

Their reticence served as a painful reminder: it really is Donald Trump’s party now.

In practice, Trump operates from the assumption that the key to electoral victory is maximizing racial resentments and reaping the benefits of some Americans’ worst and most divisive instincts. In effect, the president sees value in ripping the country apart, confident that he and people like him will be left with the biggest chunk.

Greg Sargent raised a related point yesterday that stood out for me:

As Jacob T. Levy observes, Trump’s repetition of racist and white nationalist tropes is laying waste to the norm, recently observed in both parties, according to which elites signal to white voters (at least nominally) that they should be better than our history.

In so doing, Levy notes, Trump is “changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican.” He’s changing their expectations of how Republican politicians should behave.

In that context, the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to condemn Trump’s latest racism becomes a lot more significant.

Quite right. It’s certainly true that many Republican leaders and high-profile members are afraid, not just of Trump’s ire-- note the president’s recent hysterics in response to Paul Ryan’s modest rebukes-- but of his followers and their expectations.

Party officials who believed they’d help set the party’s direction in the Trump era now realize that power is in the hands of one man: a hapless amateur whose rhetoric on race is too often indistinguishable from the angry, racist drunk at the end of the bar.

Republicans aware of their party’s demographic challenges-- the party is increasingly dependent on older white voters, in a nation that’s becoming increasingly diverse-- no doubt realize that Trump is making a risky electoral bet. But instead of pushing for a smarter strategy, most GOP leaders have effectively surrendered and accepted defeat.

The first time Trump was ever in the newspapers, it was because he had broken the law by refusing to rent apartments to people of color in buildings his father had financed with loans from the government that stipulated no racial discrimination would be tolerated. Did you listen to that song in the video up top? That's Ryan Harvey, Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello performing the long-lost Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump." Guthrie had been a tenant at the notorious Beach Haven property in Brooklyn, a cesspool of racism back in the 1950s-- and the reason he wrote the song.

Fred Trump gave gave his son a lot of money and a lot of knowledge about building and selling. But, apparently, that isn't all he taught his young Herr. In 2016, before Trump won the GOP nomination, Will Kaufman wrote a piece for Quartz that shows the Trumpf family through the eyes of one of America's greatest songwriters: Woody Guthrie really did not like Donald Trump's racist dad. In December 1950, Guthrie rented an apartment from the Trumps.

Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, affordable public housing had become an urgent priority.

For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.

When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”

Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of $3.7 million.

What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing”-- or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects-- a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

...For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing-- both public and private-- out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project...

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees-- strangers in their own strange land-- Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is sadly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God don't
know much
about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps-- father and son alike-- might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser?” And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for "Old Man Trump."

We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.

More cheeseburgers, please by Chip Prosser

Now, imagine this: some people are just finding out Trump is a full-fledged racist this week... for the first time. Really! In fact... remember The Mooch? I do believe he's known Trump for decades and was, very briefly, even White House communication director for him. He says he's afraid Trumpanzee may be turning into a racist. "I don’t think the president is a racist. But here’s the thing, if you continue to say and act in that manner, then we all have to look at him and say, OK, well, maybe you weren’t a racist, but now you’re turning into one." Mooch, what's the cut-off point? How many times exactly?

Will There Still Be A Viable Economy Left When Trump Is Finally Kicked Out Of Office?

Señor Trumpanzee seems to think he's a better president than Reagan was. I doubt anyone would agree but he told right wing operatives Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, according to their just-released book, Trump Enermies that "The amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren’t Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I’m the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away... got the biggest regulation cuts in history in less than two years, judges, environmental stuff, getting out of the Paris horror show. If you said that conservative president John Smith did that, they would say he’s the greatest president. Far greater than Ronald Reagan."

His policies are chipping away at the successful economic engine that Obama left him and slowly but surely, the imbecile is destroying the economy. Steve Benen explained what's wrong: Trump doesn't understand the basics of his own economic policies. Benen, frustrated, was merciless:

A couple of months ago, Donald Trump boasted at a White House event that thanks to his tariffs, there’s “a lot of money coming into the coffers of the United States of America. A lot of money coming in.” Soon after, the president released a video via social media in which he said Americans are “taking in a lot of money” as a result of his tariffs.

A month later, the Republican reversed course, suggesting to the Wall Street Journal that the tariffs he’d spoken about for months may not actually exist. “We don’t even have tariffs,” Trump said, adding, “Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.”

On Thanksgiving, he switched back to his original position.

“Now, as of already, we’re taking in-- right now, we’re taking in billions. China is-- people don’t understand this: China is right now paying us-- right now, paying us billions of dollars a month. That’s never happened before.”

It’s true that it’s never happened before, but it’s also true that it’s not happening now. Nearly a year after Trump launched a trade war, assuring Americans that the fight will be “easy” to win, the president is still confused about the basics of his own policy.

There is no foreign money “coming into the coffers of the United States” from China as a result of the tariffs. As Politico recently explained, “President Donald Trump said Monday that China is paying the U.S. billions of dollars in tariffs as he ramps up his trade war with Beijing. But that’s inaccurate: American consumers and businesses are the ones who will be paying higher costs for imports after he slapped penalties on $200 billion in Chinese goods.”

This is not some obscure triviality, only of interest to trade wonks. Rather, this is the principal presidential defense of his entire policy: Trump has told Americans, repeatedly over the course of several months, that “billions” of dollars are filling U.S. coffers from Beijing. It’s proof, according to the Republican, that his entire strategy has merit.

Reality, however, should still have some meaning. The actual amount of money China is paying us as a result of Trump’s tariffs is zero. When the American president boasted on Thanksgiving that China is “paying us billions of dollars,” he was off by billions of dollars.

Trump’s entire defense is based on payments that simply don’t exist outside his overactive imagination.

Either the president doesn’t know this, in which case his entire trade gambit is being driven by his profound ignorance, or Trump understands the details perfectly well, and he’s just brazenly lying to the public, hoping Americans won’t know the difference.

Either way, if the president sees this money as proof of his policy’s merit, shouldn’t the absence of that money be evidence of his policy’s failure?

Yes... as well as the bankruptcies his policies are causing across the Midwest-- not to mention the plant closings and job disappearances. Monday, local newspapers across the farm belt ran a report from the Associated Press. Short version: "84 farms filed for bankruptcy in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana in 12 months... That’s more than double the number over the same period in 2013 and 2014."

The number of farms filing for bankruptcy is increasing across the Upper Midwest, following low prices for corn, soybeans, milk and beef, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Current price levels and the trajectory of the current trends suggest that this trend has not yet seen a peak,” said Ron Wirtz, an analyst at the Minneapolis Fed.

The increase in Chapter 12 filings reflect low prices for corn, soybeans, milk and beef, the Star Tribune reported. The situation has gotten worse for farmers since June because of the retaliatory tariffs that have closed the Chinese market for soybeans and held back exports of milk and beef. Chapter 12 bankruptcy allows for repayment of debt over three years.

Minneapolis Fed analyst Ron Wirtz says the bankruptcy trend has not yet peaked.

“Dairy farmers are having the most problems right now,” said Mark Miedtke, the president of Citizens State Bank in Hayfield. “Grain farmers have had low prices for the past three years but high yields have helped them through. We’re just waiting for a turnaround. We’re waiting for the tariff problem to go away.”

Yesterday, at The Nation, John Nichols wrote that GM's closures confirm what we know-- Trump is a liar and a fool who never cared about the men and women who build cars in places like Michigan and Ohio. This was election year bullshit: "If I’m elected, you won’t lose one plant, you’ll have plants coming into this country, you’re going to have jobs again, you won’t lose one plant, I promise you that."

The heartbreaking reality is that Trump was never going to be a good president for the American workers who build cars and other vehicles in the nation’s historic factory towns. A reality-TV star with almost no understanding of the complex and demanding circumstance of domestic manufacturing in an age of globalization and automation, Trump peddled a combination of bumper-sticker slogans and past-their-expiration-date policy proposals on the 2016 campaign trail. That was enough to win narrow victories in a number of manufacturing states-- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin-- that were hurting after years of bipartisan neglect. It is true that many voters who felt they had been let down by both parties took a chance on Trump. But Trump assumed the presidency without an agenda, and he embraced the schemes of a Congress led by two of the worst players in Washington on manufacturing issues: House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

It was only a matter of time before Trump’s facade of empty rhetoric and false premises crashed into the reality of 21st-century economics and technological change. The midterm elections revealed the extent to which confidence in Trump had already crumbled. In the three Great Lakes states that gave Trump the presidency by delivering the Electoral College votes he had needed two years ago-- Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-- voters handed victories to the Democrats in three gubernatorial races and three US Senate races.

Despite Trump's gigantic tax cuts-- much of which went into big bonuses for top management-- GM is closing down 2 plants in southeast Michigan, one in Maryland and one in northeast Ohio. The idea is to boost profits by slashing 15% of the company's salaried workforce (about 8,000 people). GM sees a future defined by ride-sharing networks, self-driving cars and electric vehicles (though they're discontinuing the Volt). Trumpanzee, who, during his campaign consistently promised-- based on nothing but pure hot air and shameless guile-- that he would bring prosperity to the Rust Belt, had this to say: "This country has done a lot for General Motors. They better get back to Ohio and soon. So we have a lot of pressure on them." I'm sure that will scare them into action; not. And, what about Michigan?

The Sound of Music by Nancy Ohanian

UPDATE: Trump Has A Gut

During a Washington Post interview Tuesday, Señor Trumpanzee was asked about Wall Street's collapse and GM closing plants and laying off workers under his watch. He blamed Jerome Powell, his pick to run the Federal Reserve, with whom, he warned, he's "not even a little bit happy... I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me."

Trump And Ryan-- The Destroyers Of Regulations That Protect Americans From Greed And Avarice

Did anyone ever really believe Trump's idiotic campaign promises to drain the swamp that he personifies or hold Wall Street-- which now runs his regime-- accountable? If so... how tragic! Late Tuesday evening Trump had Mike Pence break the 50-50 tie in the Senate that will now allow banks more leeway to prey on their customers without fear of sanctions. That it even got to a point where the GOP-controlled Senate needed a tie-breaking vote from Pence was strange. And it wasn't because McCain, Flake or Corker, who had spent the day warning about the existential threat of Trumpism to America had decided to stop rubber-stamping his agenda-- they all voted with him as usual-- or because "the moderates" like Murkowski and Collins had decided to represent their incumbents back in Alaska and Maine instead of their campaign donors on Wall Street. No it was because ex-Democrat John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) and flitty Lindsey Graham (R-SC) crossed the aisle and voted with all the Democrats against the GOP proposal.

Maddow's blogger, Steve Benen, pointed out that "it’s easy to forget that there were voters last year who helped elect Donald Trump and a Republican Congress because they were concerned that Hillary Clinton might not be tough enough on Wall Street. As regular readers may recall, Trump swore up and down for months that it was Clinton who’d do Wall Street’s bidding, while Americans could expect his administration to stand up to the finance industry and its lobbyists. Though millions of voters actually believed all of this, the claims appear quite ridiculous now." It appeared quote ridiculous then as well. A new poll from Morning Consult shows that 53% of voters say Trump is not trustworthy; only 33% of voters think he is. 51% say he's dishonest and only 35% disagree. Yesterday Ipsos released a new poll through Reuters indicating that less than a third of Americans agree with the Trump-Ryan tax proposals.

As the 2018 midterm congressional election campaigns grow nearer, the poll found that more than two-thirds of registered voters said reducing the U.S. federal budget deficit is more important than cutting taxes for the wealthy or for corporations.

Trump’s plan would balloon the deficit and add to the $20 trillion national debt, according to critics and independent analysts, but Republicans say the tax cuts proposed in the plan would be offset by economic growth that would generate new tax revenue.

Among Republicans surveyed, 63 percent said deficit reduction should take priority over tax cuts for corporations, while 75 percent said deficit reduction should take priority over tax cuts for the wealthy.

But Trump and his rubber-stamp Republican Congress is moving ahead in reshaping the financial environment anyway, part of which was the successful vote Tuesday night neutering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Benen summed up the vote by writing that he had "naively thought Republicans would want to avoid being seen doing Equifax’s bidding so soon after last month’s controversy. Evidently, the party doesn’t care."

Ian Millhiser put it like this: "Tuesday night, as many Americans were preparing to go to bed, an evenly divided Senate voted to give broad lawsuit immunity to credit card companies, auto lenders, credit reporting companies like Equifax, and many other financial firms. The 50-50 tie in the Senate was broken by Vice President Mike Pence (R), and the House approved the lawsuit immunity measure. President Trump is expected to sign it. The resolution passed by the Senate overrides a rule created by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which prevents many financial firms from engaging in two abusive practices. The rule prohibited much of the financial industry from using “forced arbitration” agreements-- a common tactic where a company refuses to do business with consumers who will not sign away their right to sue the company in a real court. Consumers who sign away their right to sue must resolve any disputes with the company in a privatized arbitration system that favors corporate parties. Additionally, the CFPB rule prohibited credit card companies and many other financial firms from requiring consumers to sign away their right to bring class action lawsuits, a form of litigation that ensures that companies that charge certain illegal fees to consumers face a consequence for their actions."

The progressive Blue America-endorsed Democrat running in Indiana's flippable 9th district, Dan Canon, is an attorney who fights against this kind of regulatory capture that puts consumers at legal disadvantage and at the mercy of DC-connected corporate power. "This is yet another transparent sellout of the working class to the financial industry," he told us this morning. "There is simply no such thing as frivolous class-action litigation of consumer claims. The courts are the only place where citizens can be an even remotely equal footing with big business. Congressional Republicans and their donors know that, so they've been working to restrict meaningful access to the courts for American consumers for decades. This is just another step toward the Trump/GOP agenda of total corporate supremacy."

I was discussing the vote with the progressive Democrat running for the Maine second district seat held by Wall Street puppet Bruce Poliquin-- who takes bankster bribery bucks while sitting on the House Financial Services Committee-- and he pointed me to something he had written last month when the Republican plan was just being debated in the committee. "Earlier this month," he wrote, "the Credit reporting company Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the credit information for 143 million Americans, including Social Security numbers, birthdates and home addresses." And then he went after Poliquin and his cronies in Washington:

Equifax discovered the hack in July but waited more than a month to make news of the breach public. In response the company offered free credit monitoring services for one year, but the offer came with fine print that would have resulted in consumers who accepted the services giving away their ancient right to a trial in court by a jury of peers.

This term buried in the fine print is called an arbitration clause. Usually when we click a box to agree to terms of service, we are agreeing that any disputes will be taken to an arbitrator instead of a court on an individual basis, and we cannot band together with other victims to bring in a class action. But it can cost thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to bring a claim to arbitration, so it never makes sense when a corporation rips us off by a few dollars here or there.

Without the threat that they will have to face a jury, corporations have every profit-making incentive to cut corners and take risks. Why invest in data security if nobody is going to hold you accountable for a breach? Only when corporations know that consumers can band together to enforce their rights, will they act as responsible stewards or our information.

We need to ban compulsory arbitration in these form contracts, but Bruce Poliquin is doing everything he can to protect the corporations. In June of this year, Bruce Poliquin voted for HR 10, which would block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from finalizing a rule to prohibit credit card, bank account, and other financial contracts from having fine print forced arbitration clauses with class action bans.

On the day that the Equifax data breach was made public, the House Financial Services Committee, on which Bruce Poliquin serves, considered a bill to cap statutory damages in lawsuits against credit-reporting companies at $500,000, and entirely prohibit punitive damages.

Bruce Poliquin’s support of the financial sector at the expense of his constituents is yet another example of how he continues to fail to represent the people of Maine’s Second Congressional District... He should be working to protect everyday people from data breaches and ensure they are fairly compensated when they fall victim. Instead, he’s working to limit the damages and fall out for the institutions that allow the breaches to happen. That’s unacceptable to me and in Congress I promise to protect people’s right to a day in court against banks and corporations like Equifax that fail to protect consumers’ sensitive information.

And he's been fighting with Poliquin about it ever since. The Sun Journal has called it a "hot campaign issue." While Poliquin puts all his energy into collecting bribes from Wall Street and smearing Jared as "a liberal," Jared was explaining to the media how Poliquin puts the desires of the country’s financial sector ahead of his constituents including the vote "to allow financial firms to force their customers into arbitration instead of allowing them to file lawsuits against firms such as Equifax... Golden, who is the assistant majority leader in the state House, said Poliquin'should be working to protect everyday people from data breaches and ensure they are fairly compensated when they fall victim. Instead, he’s working to limit the damages and fallout for the institutions that allow the breaches to happen.'"

We Don't Have Grayson To Call Them Out On It Any Longer But Republican Health Care Is Still "Die Quickly"

This week NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released a poll showing Trump with an unfavorable rating from 46% of Americans and a favorable rating with 40%, an improvement for him since last month, but the lowest favorability rating of any president-elect about to take office ever. Although he's being installed by an antiquated, anti-democratic electoral college that should have been abolished at the turn of the century (the 20th Century), Trump actually lost the election to Clinton 65,844,610 (48.2%) to 62,979,636 (46.1%). Trump has no mandate to make any drastic changes-- not that that will stop him, of course.

And the first drastic change he and his party want to make is to health care. Everyone wants "change" but we'll soon see if the kind of change the GOP has been talking about-- basically, less health care-- is what Trump voters are going to feel comfortable with. As Steve Benen explained it, the long-standing difference between the progressive approach (embraced by most, but not all, Democrats) and the conservative approach) embraced by all Republicans, is that "Dems saw a system in which too many Americans paid too much and received too little, while the GOP saw a system in which Americans’ health coverage was too good and families enjoyed too many benefits." That second one takes a lot of tap-dancing to explain to constituents. Benen references an unremarkable right-wing backbencher, Bill Huizenga, from west Michigan who admits that when the GOP starts rolling back Obamacare parents will have to consider waiting and thinking about more carefully before bringing in their sick or injured kids for costly treatments.

The Republican congressman explained to the Michigan outlet that he and his wife thought about taking their son to the emergency room, but they decided instead to wait and gauge his injuries the next day, to see if the child’s arm improved. (It didn’t.) Huizenga sees this anecdote as a model for how the process should work on a more systemic level.

“If you don’t have a cost difference, you’ll make different decisions,” the congressman said, adding that financial burdens should be shifted to consumers because the current system “continue[s] to squeeze providers.”

Huizenga went on to say, “Way too often, people pull out their insurance card and they say ‘I don’t know the difference or cost between an X-ray or an MRI or CT Scan.’ I might make a little different decision if I did know [what] some of those costs were and those costs came back to me.”

This is not a new argument. Among Republicans, it’s not even unusual. It is, however, kind of terrifying.

I first started writing about this about seven years ago, right around the time former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) summarized the Republican position in just 17 words: “The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too over-insured.” Two Republican congressman had a Wall Street Journal op-ed around this time making the same case: “When was the last time you asked your doctor how much it would cost for a necessary test or procedure?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. For most of us, if we have an ailment, we see a doctor and follow his or her recommendations. If physicians recommend tests they consider medically worthwhile, we naturally agree, knowing insurers will cover most of the costs.

And for Republicans, therein lies the problem. If the system shifted the cost burden away from insurers and employers and onto individuals and their families, the result would be amazing savings-- because consumers would seek and receive less health care.

The GOP idea, in other words, is to create a medical environment in which Americans are acutely aware of costs, to the point that we turn down recommended treatments. Our kid may have a broken arm, but can we really afford an emergency-room visit? My doctor says I need a CT scan, but can I really afford such an exam? My friend has a lump and an unsettling family history, but can he really afford to have it removed and sent to pathology? His spouse was prescribed medication by her doctor, but does she really have to take it or can she save some money by going without?

In the Republican model-- by GOP officials’ own admission-- these are the kinds of questions Americans should be asking themselves. Having excellent health coverage, Republicans argue, is a problem in need of a resolution. As the aforementioned Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) put it, “If you don’t have a cost difference, you’ll make different decisions.”

As Republicans move forward with repealing “Obamacare” and looking for some kind of alternative blueprint, keep this simple fact in mind: much of the GOP is convinced your insurance is too good, and they intend to help improve the system by making your coverage worse.

I was delighted that on the same day Benen wrote that, Jonathan Rothwell, writing for Gallup about American healthcare inefficiency made the case against Obamacare that progressives have always made and that I wish-- futilely-- Republicans would adopt. The only social health insurance plan that actually works is single payer-- the polar opposite direction in which Trump, Pence, Ryan, Price and McConnell intend to take the health care system.

Rothwell starts from the supposition that "costs are increasing much faster than any incremental improvement in quality... From 1980 to 2015, healthcare expanded from 9% of the national GDP to 18%. Some of this is natural and good. The aging population requires more healthcare, and even modest economic growth has freed up spending power for healthcare. The problem is that the per-unit costs of healthcare-- actual procedures, visits with doctors, pharmaceuticals-- have all soared. So the question must be asked: Has it been worth it? I conclude not."

One way to evaluate advances in healthcare is to compare new treatments with the current standard treatments (e.g., how a new fever-reducing drug compares with ibuprofen) in terms of both costs and effects on "quality-adjusted life years." University of Chicago economists have done this for every healthcare advancement analyzed in medical journals since 1976. The results suggest that the quality-to-cost ratio has fallen. Most new treatments introduced since 1976 have lower benefits per dollar than standard treatments. Indeed, for typical treatments, quality advances were very modest (1%) but cost increases were substantial (8%).

One can see evidence of systemic healthcare inefficiencies in the general health of the U.S. population, which collectively is much lower relative to peers in other developed countries despite the U.S. spending about twice as much on healthcare on a per capita basis. Mortality rates, which remain high by international standards, have fallen since 1980, but most of the progress has occurred among infants and the elderly. The working-age population has seen little improvement-- and for whites and American Indians, there have been no gains in age-adjusted mortality for people aged 15 to 64, at least since 1999.

Even as Americans are living slightly longer, the quality of life hasn't necessarily improved for people of working age. For U.S. residents, self-reported health status has fallen among each age group between 25 and 59 since 1990.

Additionally, the share of the working-age population suffering from a disability that prevents them from working rose from 4.4% in 1980 to 6.8% in 2015, adjusting for age.

One reason for the decline in Americans' self-reported health status is the extraordinary inefficiency of the U.S. healthcare system.

It may be tempting to dismiss these poor health outcomes as driven by cultural or demographic changes, but the broadest evidence suggests this would be misleading. The fastest-growing minority groups-- Hispanics and Asians-- are typically healthier than whites and blacks. Moreover, compared with 1980, Americans are exercising more, smoking less and eating somewhat healthier diets, and they are less likely to be abusing drugs and alcohol. The exception is the rise of prescription opioid use and related abuse, but our healthcare system bears much of the blame for that.

On the cost side, it is easier to identify specific causes for rising inefficiency.

Administrative costs related to healthcare billing are astronomical (hundreds of billions of dollars annually)-- especially compared with other advanced countries, where single-payer systems streamline procedures. Compared with their Canadian counterparts, nurses in the U.S. spend an extra 18 hours per week on administrative tasks and clerical workers spend an additional 37 hours. In 1983, Medicare started requiring that medical service providers identify the specific diagnostic code (out of roughly 90,000 in the latest system) to get reimbursed. Complicating matters more, Medicare and private insurance companies have different billing, documentation, and submission rules and procedures, making it extremely difficult to create efficient software.

Even without a single-payer system, Congress could reform the medical billing system with the goal of creating a simplified, universal, digital process. The goal should be to require only the minimum information that is necessary to avoid fraud. Reimbursement should be based on reasonable approximations of the actual costs to providers in terms of time and use of equipment, and the application process for providers to become a qualified biller of either private or public insurance should be streamlined.

Another issue relates to competition. Consumer advocates at the Federal Trade Commission argue that state laws protect hospital monopolies and raise prices by blocking the introduction of competitors into the market, driving up costs by tens of billions of dollars. State licensing regulations restrict qualified healthcare providers-- like nurse practitioners and dental hygienists-- from practicing independently, as pointed out by the Institute of Medicine. Addressing these restrictions could reduce the costs of medical care.

There are other problems with the U.S. healthcare system. The complicated practice by which pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs and set their (often very high) prices continues to come under scrutiny and provides the opportunity for potential reform. Likewise, agencies are forbidden by Congress to explicitly recommend or deny public funding for treatments based on the most widely used quality-to-cost comparisons.

The overarching point is that the absurd inefficiency of U.S. healthcare is not necessary or permanent. The system we have now is harming us through its exorbitant costs and weak efficacy, which drive down economic growth and deprive future generations of greater prosperity.

If only Price, Ryan, Pence and McConnell weren't so deeply committed to the right-wing ideological frame for looking at this. The only hope that this change that's coming won't be change for the worse is if the one person on the team not wedded to the ideology, the captain of the team, somehow gets persuaded to do the right thing for the American people. I'd say the chances of that are one in a hundred-- which was about the chances he had of winning the Republican nomination and then the electoral college.

UPDATE:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." – Anatole France

"The GOP, in its majestic equality, prevents the ill as well as the healthy from affording the care that they need to stay alive." - Alan Grayson

The Far Right Has A New Villain: Trey Gowdy

Wednesday Ken delved into the costly and meaningless farce of the Benghazi! report from the failed Trey Gowdy witch-hunt. Gowdy doesn't want to give away any of the suspense so he just answers any questions with a request that people read the 800 pages of drivel. At a press conference he admitted he doesn't wear a "Hillary Clinton Lied, People Died" tee-shirt. "And you've never seen that bumpersticker," he added, "on any of my vehicles." This absolutely incensed everyone who plans to Trump-- AKA, conspiracy nuts.

Yesterday, MSNBC's Steve Benen looked at how the right-wing crackpots are now cannibalizing their former icon from an especially backward part of South Carolina. His committee failed to jail Hillary and now the Hate Talk Radio morons who had their psychotic hopes stoked for over a year, are fuming. I wonder if Trump will get tee shirts and bumperstickers made up to sell at his performances.

Just yesterday, I predicted that some conservatives would turn on Gowdy, in whom they’d invested so much hope. The far-right South Carolinian was supposed to bury, not exonerate, Hillary Clinton, I wrote, and his inability to deliver a useful campaign weapon will likely be seen as both a failure and a betrayal.

A few hours later, far-right radio personality Michael Savage told his audience, “Trey Gowdy should be impeached for wasting my time! He promised us a lot! Remember?” (Members of Congress can be expelled, but not impeached, under the U.S. Constitution.)

Of course, Savage isn’t alone. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank explained today that “conspiracy-minded” conservatives are blaming Gowdy “for failing to deliver the goods.” There was a meeting yesterday of the “Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi,” where members agreed the far-right South Carolinian let them down by failing to confirm their beliefs.

A woman in the crowd floated a new Benghazi conspiracy. “Has someone in the GOP leadership gotten their fingers involved in watering down some of this to benefit Secretary Clinton?” she asked. Nobody rebutted this idea.

Herein lies a lesson for Republicans who are perpetually trying to appease the far right: It’s a fool’s errand. They went to the tea party-- and now they’re taking Donald Trump to the prom. Likewise, then-House Speaker John Boehner named the Benghazi committee because activists were dissatisfied that seven previous congressional investigations had failed to uncover major scandal material. Now an eighth has produced more of the same-- and the agitators are as agitated as ever.

There’s a certain twisted logic to this. The unhinged right starts with the ideologically satisfying answer-- President Obama and Hillary Clinton are guilty of horrible Benghazi-related wrongdoing-- and then works backwards, looking for “proof” that matches the conclusion. When their ostensible allies fail to tell these activists what they want to hear, they could reevaluate their bogus assumptions, but it’s vastly easier to believe Republicans have let them down.

Wait, it gets worse.

As Milbank reported, a former Ted Cruz adviser complained yesterday that Gowdy “did not draw a connection between the dots.” And why not? According to retired Gen. Thomas McInerney, the Benghazi Committee chairman “had his reasons-- political” for holding back.

McInerney “speculated that congressional leadership had approved ‘black operations’ to run weapons from Benghazi to Islamic State forces in Syria.”

This is what it’s come to: Benghazi conspiracy theorists are so creative, and so unmoved by evidence or reason, that they can convince themselves that congressional Republicans are in on the conspiracy.

As Donald Trump and his allies try to incorporate ridiculous Benghazi rhetoric into their 2016 platform, keep in mind who his unhinged allies are.

Mainstream Conservative Richard Hanna (R-NY) Spills The Beans On GOP Benghazi Hypocrisy

When New York lost two House seats after the 2010 census, the 24th CD morphed into a slightly redder 22nd CD that includes not just Utica and Rome, but also Binghamton way down south, which used to be part of Maurice Hinchey's very blue district. In 2010 Republican multimillionaire Richard Hanna ran-- for a second time-- against cowardly freshman Blue Dog Richard Arcuri, who lost much of the district's progressive base by voting against the Affordable Care Act and obsessively carrying water for Wall Street. Hanna, a mainstream Republican and Lebanese-American, ran to Arcuri's left on several issues (Hanna was anti-TARP, pro-LGBT, pro-Choice) and exploited Arcuri's ugly Islamophobia. He beat Arcuri in 8 of the district's 11 counties (including populous Oneida, Herkimer and Broome counties), winning 53-47% in a district that saw 49-49% ties for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Last year Hanna beat Democrat Dan Lamb 61-39%.

Wednesday night the above sound clip from an interview Hanna has just done with WIBX radio host Bill Keeler began circulating. Eventually it will wind up as evidence in Alan Grayson's ethics complaint against Trey Gowdy and Kevin McCarthy for their roles in using taxpayer dollars to conduct a partisan witch hunt. The entire interview with Hanna is worth listening to since he;'s one of the only even remotely rational Republicans left in Congress. But the evidentiary part is towards the end of the recording (around 9:40):

Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth. This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people, an individual, Hillary Clinton... This has been the longest investigation-- longer than Watergate... you’d like to expect more from a committee that’s spent millions of dollars and tons of time.

He then went on to predict he and other mainstream Republicans would work with the Democrats to prevent GOP extremists from shutting down the government, which he called "an unmitigated crime against this country." This all infuriated Wisconsin neo-fascist Ron Johnson, a senator about to lose his seat to Russ Feingold, who immediately attacked Hanna on CNN and called his statement on the Benghazi Committee, "is opinion; I don't share that opinion. Johnson, a vicious Ayn Rand devotee, is obsessed with Hillary Clinton's e-mails and vows to keep the controversy going no matter what happens in Trey Gowdy's compromised faux-investigation.

Clinton is due to testify before this partisan witch hunt in less than a week. It's outrageous that the committee hasn't disbanded by now and apologized to the American people for wasting at least $4 million in taxpayer money. As Steve Benen, put it at the MaddowBlog, "The Benghazi Committee isn’t investigating a scandal. The Benghazi Committee is the scandal... Given the circumstances, it’s not unreasonable to think there should be an independent investigation into the Republican’s Benghazi Committee itself in order to uncover why it was formed, why its redundant work was deemed necessary, how it spent millions of taxpayer dollars, why the probe has been dragged out for so long, and whether the panel violated ethics laws by using official resources for partisan political purposes. Clinton’s testimony will no doubt receive a bright spotlight next week, but testimony from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), and other GOP leaders would probably shed more light on the ongoing controversy."

Or, in the immortal words of Kevin Drum, "Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary's email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he's actually been exposed. It's getting harder and harder to play along with the charade."

This 62 seconds earned Bernie Sanders almost $3 million in small contributions immediately after the debate. (It infuriated Donald Trump though, who is now busy attacking Bernie.) Americans are getting sick and tired of this GOP hyper-partisanship and irresponsible use of public funds.

17 Fake Dems Voted With Darrell Isis To Hold Eric Holder In Contempt

The ugly face of Isis in America

On June 28, 2012, House Witch Hunt Committee chair, Darrell Isis (R-CA) introduced H.RES 711:

• Resolved, That Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, shall be found to be in contempt of Congress for failure to comply with a congressional subpoena.

• Resolved, That pursuant to 2 U.S.C. 192 and 194, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall certify the report of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, detailing the refusal of Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, to produce documents to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as directed by subpoena, to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, to the end that Mr. Holder be proceeded against in the manner and form provided by law.

• Resolved, That the Speaker of the House shall otherwise take all appropriate action to enforce the subpoena.

It passed the House 255-67. Two Republicans voted against Isis' partisan game-playing, Scott Rigell (R-VA) and Steven LaTourette (R-OH) and Pelosi led a Democratic boycott of the vote, 108 Democrats walking out of the chamber to keep themselves from watching Congressman Isis masturbating at the well of the House. 238 Republicans and 17 Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- which is what allowed for the word "bipartisan" in this Isis tweet this morning-- voted, for the first time in history to hold a Cabinet member in contempt of Congress. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that this happened to be the first black Attorney General in history since who would ever think Republicans like Rep. Isis are vile, contemptible racist scum? Would you?

You probably saw us warning New York voters in the last weeks to oppose arch-conservative Kathy Hochul's bid for the Lt. Governor job in New York. Hochul was one of Isis' "bipartisans" voting to hold Holder in contempt. These are the 17 "Democrats" who joined Isis that day:

• Jason Altmire (Blue Dog/New Dem-PA)- defeated for reelection
• John Barrow (Blue Dog/New Dem-GA)
• Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)- forced to retire
• Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA)- defeated for reelection
• Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)- defeated for reelection
• Mark Critz (Blue Dog-PA)- defeated for reelection
• Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)- used a Hail Mary pass to wind up in the Senate
• Kathy Hochul (New Dem-NY)- defeated for reelection
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)- defeated for reelection
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC)
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)
• Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)- forced to retire
• Tim Walz (MN)

Almost all of the "Democrats" who voted with Isis were defeated in the next election-- and 3 others, McIntyre, Owens and Matheson no longer have enough grassroots support to run and are all choosing voluntary retirement over certain defeat this year-- but the right-wing cowards inn bold are all getting massive financial support-- over a million dollars each-- to fight for reelection.

Holder didn't prosecute any of the Wall Street banksters who crashed the economy, but that isn't why reactionaries hate him. This morning, MSNBC's Steve Benen wrote an impressive defense of Holder's six-year term,

Holder is leaving the Attorney General’s office with a legacy more impressive than much of the political world generally appreciates.

Regular readers may recall that I’ve long been impressed with Holder’s progressive accomplishments, which haven’t always been front-page news, but which have made a significant difference in the lives of millions of Americans.

The A.G., for example, has shown amazing leadership on the issue of LGBT rights. He’s challenged Republican restrictions on voting rights. He’s fought for sentencing reforms. He’s condemned “Stand Your Ground” laws and showed effective leadership during the crisis in Ferguson. He cleared the way for Colorado and the state of Washington to pursue marijuana legalization. He’s worked to reverse the disenfranchisement of the formerly incarcerated.

We don’t usually think of the office of Attorney General as one in which a policymaker can become one of the nation’s champions of a progressive agenda, but that’s exactly what Eric Holder has done.

This obviously isn’t to say that Holder’s tenure has been perfect – I would have liked to have seen far more Wall Street prosecutions, and congressional Republicans have demanded his impeachment on more than a few occasions for a variety of strange, perceived failings-- but I’d argue Holder leaves his post as one of the most accomplished and important Attorneys General in modern American history.

Darrell Isis would argue otherwise, and has, all day today on Twitter, where he has been engrossed in an orgy of incoherent, partisan rage, bordering on insanity.