Trump Is A Severe Public Health Danger

Badge of Honor by Nancy Ohanian

The Washington Post's Josh Dawson and Lena Sun reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suddenly and inexplicably removed specifics on choirs in its guidelines for houses of worship to reopen. Trump had been pestering them to do so for two weeks. After thousands of church-goers around the world contracted COVID-19 during services, the CDC had included "The act of singing may contribute to transmission of Covid-19, possibly through emission of aerosols" in their guidelines and Trump got that removed. That's just one of many examples of how the Republican Party Death Cult is trying every which way to politicize the pandemic and continue spiking the death rates.

Yesterday, Bob Egelko reported for the San Francisco Chronicle on the surprise Supreme Court ruling against Trump and others rushing to open everything up too soon and without precautions. "With a deciding vote from Chief Justice John Roberts," wrote Egelko, "the Supreme Court late Friday allowed Gov. Gavin Newsom to restrict attendance at religious services in California to 25% of the capacity of a house of worship because of the coronavirus. The justices voted 5-4 to reject a challenge by a Pentecostal church in Chula Vista (San Diego County) and its bishop, who claimed the state was discriminating against religious institutions by setting undue limits on attendance."

In his first round of reopenings in early May, Newsom allowed some previously closed businesses to resume limited operations, such as curbside pickups, but refused to allow in-person religious services. After a divided federal appeals court upheld his decision on May 22, the governor announced new rules three days later allowing congregations to meet in person but limiting attendance to 25% of the building’s capacity, with a maximum gathering of 100.

The standards, in effect for 21 days, discourage such activities as sharing prayer books and ritual items as well as personal contact and congregational singing, all of which can spread the coronavirus.

President Trump has denounced such restrictions in California and elsewhere and ordered governors to rescind them, though he has not cited any federal law authorizing him to overrule state officials’ decisions on which institutions to reopen.

Roberts joined the court’s more liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, in denying an injunction sought by the South Bay United Pentecostal Church. Writing only for himself, the chief justice said detailed decisions on health-related issues should generally be left to “politically accountable” state officials unless they clearly violate a constitutional right such as religious freedom.

“Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time,” Roberts said. He said Newsom’s order “exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

Dissenting Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Roberts’ comparison and said Newsom was restricting houses of worship more severely than businesses, in violation of religious freedom.

“Comparable secular businesses are not subject to a 25% occupancy cap, including factories, offices, supermarkets, restaurants, retail stores, pharmacies, shopping malls, pet grooming shops, bookstores, florists, hair salons, and cannabis dispensaries,” Kavanaugh said.

Noting that the church had agreed to require social distancing and hygiene measures if allowed to fully open its doors, Kavanaugh asked, “Why can someone safely walk down a grocery store aisle but not a pew?” Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined his dissent, while Justice Samuel Alito dissented for unstated reasons.

Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) was one of many people begging Trumpanzee to reverse his insane decision Friday to severe U.S. ties with the World Health Organization-- one of the scapegoats for his own incompetence and the dysfunction of his regime. Hurd wrote that "leaving the WHO sends the message that the world cannot count on the United States" and that while WHO made mistakes in its response to the coronavirus spread, walking away from the organization will make it much harder to prevent the spread of future disease across the globe. Hurd, who is leaving Congress primarily because he can't stand dealing with Trump any longer: "International coalitions are essential to fighting global challenges; we should be strengthening our alliances, not dismantling them... President Trump's recent decision to terminate America's role in the World Health Organization will have devastating effects on global health, and it will benefit the Chinese Communist Party."

Meanwhile, the European Union also called on the swinish, pig-headed orange monstrosity to reconsider. Yesterday, in a joint statement, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell made it clear that, once again, the psychotic Trump is on his own:

As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the main task for everyone is to save lives and contain and mitigate this pandemic. The European Union continues to support the WHO in this regard and has already provided additional funding.

In an EU-led resolution adopted by consensus on 19 May at the World Health Assembly, all WHO Member States agreed to initiate, at the earliest appropriate moment, an impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation to review lessons learnt from the international health response to the coronavirus, notably with the objective of strengthening future global health security preparedness.

Evaluating our global response is necessary as there are lessons to be learnt from this pandemic, its outbreak and response to it. The evaluation of our collective performance at international level is only a necessary process, aiming at strengthening health security.

Global cooperation and solidarity through multilateral efforts are the only effective and viable avenues to win this battle the world is facing. The WHO needs to continue being able to lead the international response to pandemics, current and future. For this, the participation and support of all is required and very much needed. In the face of this global threat, now is the time for enhanced cooperation and common solutions. Actions that weaken international results must be avoided. In this context, we urge the US to reconsider its announced decision.

The Cure by Nancy Ohanian

American public health officials have also reacted with alarm to Pig-Man's horrific decision-- another in a long list of wrong and catastrophic decisions he has made in regard to national security and the health of the American people. Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: "We helped create the W.H.O. Turning our back on the W.H.O. makes us and the world less safe." That's a Trump specialty-- making us and the world less safe... and he's been doing it for decades, as if Satan had sent him up to do exactly that. CNN reported yesterday that the monster "has spent decades spreading and sowing dangerous misinformation about disease outbreaks-- from falsely suggesting AIDS can be transmitted through kissing to warning Americans not to get vaccinated and falsely suggesting vaccines can cause autism. Long before advising Americans to ingest disinfectant to treat the coronavirus as President, Trump demonstrated a pattern of spreading unsupported medical claims that preyed on the public's fears of getting sick, a CNN KFile review of the President's statements on past epidemics and pandemics found."

On a Howard Stern radio show in 1993 Trump told the audience that "The problem is people that get the [HIV] test, that test positive, they go out on a rampage on purpose. There's anger, there's hatred. I know and what's happening is true. There's anger, there's hatred and it's really dangerous."

In 1993, Trump promoted the widely-debunked claims that AIDS could be spread by kissing and that AIDS patients intentionally spread the virus. As the swine flu pandemic began in 2009, he warned Americans against taking flu vaccines. When the Ebola virus outbreak devastated West Africa in 2014, he disputed guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how it spreads.

Today as the nation's chief executive overseeing his own public health crisis, Trump continues to comprehensively misinform the public about the coronavirus, offering remarks riddled with false, misleading or scientifically questionable claims.

And malevolent lies. They forgot to mention Trump's trademark.

It Is Inevitable That The GOP's Racism Is Catching Up With It-- And Could Bury The Party

Meet Cheri-- too dumb and too "racially insensitive" for the job

In 2018, Republicans lost most of the districts they controlled where whites weren't the majority. There are only 11 left and if the DCCC knew how to target them-- they don't, especially not chairwoman Cheri Bustos-- they could win most of them in 2020 and the rest in 2022.

• CA-08- 45.4%- open
• CA-22- 39.1%- Devin Nunes
• CA-23- 46.5%- Kevin McCarthy
• CA-42- 42.9%- Ken Calvert
• FL-25- 18.7% (76% Hispanic)
• GA-07- 45.8%- open
• TX-02- 48%- Dan Crenshaw
• TX-22- 41.4%- open
• TX-23- 24.4%- open
• TX-24- 48.2%- open
• TX-27- 40%- Michael Cloud

The Republicans have two ways to protect themselves from a demographic catastrophe-- gerrymandering or attracting support from non-whites. They seem to prefer the former. One district the Democrats should be able to re-take next year is CA-23 which is 69.5% Latino. You'd think the DCCC would have had the thought to recruit a Latino; but if you'd think that, you wouldn't grasp how incompetent and stupid the DCCC is. Or maybe they somehow think a Filipina is a Latina. Despite themselves they'll probably win the seat, which was the seat of the only African-American Republican congressman. Was, because Will Hurd is sick of dealing with Trump and with his party's racism and has decided to retire (at age 42).





Hurd just did an interview the aired yesterday on HBO-Axios, a short clip of which is just above. "I do believe," Hurd said, "that if the Republican Party doesn't start looking like the rest of the country, there won't be a Republican Party in this country... Minorities, people under the age of 29 and women with a college degree in the suburbs are not choosing the Republican Party... We know where the trends are going [and we] know what we need to do..."

"Will Hurd is the Future of the GOP" And The Future Of The GOP Looks Worse And Worse Everyday

Hurd and Jones

Thursday night one of the most vulnerable Republicans, Will Hurd (TX-23), announced he is retiring. His gigantic district has the longest border with Mexico of any district in the U.S. and stretches from a sliver of east San Antonio down to the Rio Grande and then follows the border through Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Big Bend National Park, and Socorro just south of where El Paso and Ciudad Juarez meet. Technically the PVI is R+1, but Cook is slow and the district has already turned bluer than the PVI indicates. The population is about 70% Latino; Beto won the district and even Hillary managed to beat Trump by over 3 points in 2016. Last year Hurd barely held onto his seat against a very weak Democratic opponent, 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%). Bexar County is, by far, where most of the votes come from and Hurd just managed to hold onto it. The second biggest source of votes is El Paso County, which went for Democrat Gina Jones by a landslide. Of the 29 counties and pieces of counties that make up the district, Hurd won 18 and Jones won 11. As Hurd pointed out himself, "When you look at trends, the two-largest growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people. And we know what the broader trends are happening there." And he was talking about the whole state! His district is already, essentially blue.

The Democrats have been nominating really garbage candidates there for many years. The last Democratic congressman, Blue Dog Pete Gallego was bad enough to cure almost anyone of ever wanting to vote for a Democrat again.

The prophetic quote in the title comes from a 2017 Politico feature by Tim Alberta, in which he has a caveat: "If he can hold on to the toughest seat in Texas." Alberta wrote that "Of the 36 congressional districts in Texas, 35 are safely controlled by Republicans or Democrats; Hurd’s is the outlier. Not only is his district the biggest in the state-- encompassing 58,000 square miles, covering all or parts of 29 counties, and including 820 miles of U.S.-Mexico border—it’s easily the most competitive, with both parties pumping millions of dollars into the 23rd every election cycle." This cycle the GOP will pump millions in again-- and lose. Not because the Democrats have a good candidate; so far they're stupidly running Jones again, but because Texans here are ready to take out their hatred of Trump on the whole party.

Alberta wrote that Gallego managed to win the district because he's a unique "phenom. Republicans and Democrats who have witnessed his ascent say he possesses a rare combination of competence as a policymaker, responsiveness as a representative and ferocity as a campaigner. Consider that during his first term-- with Barack Obama, a Democrat, still occupying the White House-- Hurd authored more bills that were signed into law than any other member of Congress. (Most aren’t 'sexy' bills of national interest, he says, but rather targeted toward his constituents, such as winning overtime pay for the Border Patrol.) Meanwhile, the freshman lawmaker found time to systematically explore every parcel of his district, assemble a staff that quickly became known as one of the most effective on Capitol Hill, and raise copious sums of money to power a reelection bid that some in his party had privately written off." The opposite of Gallego, who is stupid, self-serving and lazy (as well as conservative).

Hurd is the only African-American Republican in Congress. Next year the Republican caucus in Congress is likely to be a smaller, all white, leaderless, bickering hell. And it's not going to include a member from TX-23. As NBC blared yesterday, Hurd's Surprise Reirement Is Big Bad News For The GOP. Chuck Todd and team: This 6th announced retirement in 2 weeks has already caused Cook to move the district from toss up to lean Dem. "Like Ryan’s announcement in 2018, it sends the message to GOP donors and potential recruits that flipping the House might be out of reach for Republicans" and eliminates any pretense of diversity in the caucus. "And when it comes to the immigration debate, it robs the GOP of their only member representing a district on the U.S.-Mexico border. But there’s an even more significant story going on here: The non-Trump wing of the Republican Party wants out. Think about the other GOP retirements we’ve seen-- Reps. Susan Brooks (R-IN), Martha Roby (R-AL) and now Hurd. And these Republicans parachuting out of the Republican Party underscore how vulnerable Trump really is, despite the growing economy. The fewer Will Hurd-like members running in 2020 reduces the number of moderate/non-Trump Republicans who would eagerly go to the polls for those representatives-- and then still hold their nose and vote for the president. The Republican Party is getting smaller and smaller, and that isn’t good news for an incumbent Republican president."

Good for America though. As so is this:

Trump Is As Bewildered As A Kindergartener At A Seminar On String Theory When Anything Concerning Governance And Economics Comes Up

Late Friday, Rolling Stone ran an interview by Andy Kroll with a rare Republican congressman who is acting like he's more afraid of a 2020 Democratic challenge than he is of Trump. Will Hurd only won by the skin of his teeth in November-- 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%), 926 votes-- winning at all only because the geniuses at the DCCC couldn't figure out it would have been better to run a Mexican-American in a district that is 71% Mexican-American. Hurd's district includes 820 miles on the U.S.-Mexico border and he's not in agreement with Trump about building a wall. He called Trump's claim of a border crisis is a "myth," and that "building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. The average is $24.5 million a mile" and is a "third-century solution to a 21st-century problem."

Perhaps that was the kind of thing that inspired George Will to write yesterday that "The shabbiest U.S. president ever is an inexpressibly sad specimen." What a way to think about even an illegitimate fake "president." Will reminded his Washington Post column that "Half or a quarter of the way through this interesting experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation has become accustomed to daily mortifications.  Or has lost its capacity for embarrassment, which is even worse.... Dislike of him should be tempered by this consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad specimen. It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump. He seems to have as many friends as his pluperfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in an entirely transactional life. His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a house where much magnificent history has been made. His childlike ignorance-- preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion-- concerning governance and economics guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.”

Which is why this fountain of self-refuting boasts ('I have a very good brain') lies so much. He does so less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself. And as balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his likely contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters' loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Either the electorate, bored with a menu of faintly variant servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end this, our shabbiest but not our first shabby presidency.

Trump had another bad day today

This kind of stuff has real effects in the real word. Early Friday, Noah Bierman answered a question, in part, about the government shut down. Why can’t Trump make deals? No one trusts him anymore. "[T]he president who campaigned as the world’s best deal-maker, vowing that he alone could fix Washington’s dysfunction, has been stymied as he looks for achievements before facing the voters again. Two years in, the man who built a political reputation as a guy who tells it like it is has lost the essential ingredients to closing deals: credibility and trust... The president’s squandered credibility, overlaid with nonstop investigations, is likely to imperil a second-half agenda that includes basic responsibilities-- raising the nation’s borrowing limit, most essentially-- as well as more ambitious goals. Among those are measures to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, win congressional approval of a revised trade deal with Mexico and Canada, overhaul immigration laws and lower the costs of prescription drugs.

Sen. Mitch McConnell was jolted with a fresh reminder of President Trump’s capriciousness last month: The majority leader persuaded Republican colleagues to take a politically difficult vote to temporarily fund the government, but not a border wall, only to see Trump withdraw support-- initiating the longest shutdown in history.

...McConnell, having been burned, has largely left the shutdown fight to Trump. House Republicans, having lost their majority in large part because of voters’ own dismay with Trump, are now on the sidelines as he must battle House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And Democrats, following her lead, are emboldened given their experience with the president’s unreliability as a negotiating partner.

Trump’s tactics were honed over decades. Throughout his business career, he moved from one project to the next-- real estate development, sales, casinos and branding-- often leaving scorned partners or creditors to deal with the fallout from bankruptcies or deals gone bad.

“This was all to stay ahead of his reputation,” said Michael D'Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. But “in Washington,” he said, “you can’t escape who you are for very long. He’s proven that he can’t keep his word.”

The president has broken records for false statements, according to nonpartisan fact checkers. An increasing majority of voters-- by 61% to 34% in one recent poll-- say he is not honest. The same poll, from Quinnipiac University, found that voters also rated his leadership skills as poor, by 58% to 39%.

Complicating the problem, Trump has churned through staff faster than his predecessors. He has surrounded himself with a collection of temporary officials, family members and inexperienced advisors with little sway on Capitol Hill.

“They’re lacking some of the usual negotiating infrastructure,” said John Lawrence, former chief of staff to Pelosi. “In this White House, everything changes the next day: the personnel, the policies, the view of reality.”

Republican lawmakers’ criticism is muted, however, because even as Trump has ranked among the least popular presidents in modern history, he has consistently commanded overwhelming support from Republican voters, according to polls.

Still, the mistrust from nearly every quarter of Congress has grown each time he has broken his word, complicating efforts to pass his initiatives, according to former lawmakers, aides and close observers.

“Even things that should on paper be easy, there just always seems to be a way for him to step on his own foot,” said a former aide who requested anonymity to avoid upsetting his current employer. “Sometimes, this is unintentional-- he just says stuff.”

The act that precipitated the month-old shutdown, and has come to define it, occurred in December. McConnell received bogus assurances from the White House that Trump would sign a Senate bill to fund and keep the government open to Feb. 8 while negotiations on border money proceeded, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

After senators approved the bill by a voice vote, Trump, egged on by conservative media personalities, rejected the legislation in favor of a fight with Democrats over the wall. Without any bill funding a quarter of the government, a partial shutdown began days later.

McConnell, Republicans’ foremost deal-maker, has since stayed in the background. Other Republican senators were left vulnerable to conservatives’ charges they were too quick to cave, even as they were stuck answering for the government services unfulfilled and hundreds of thousands of federal employees unpaid, with no sense of how the president intended to win.

“It would have been great if they had told us they wanted this fight, because we would have started working on it,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio fumed as the shutdown began, three days before Christmas. “We have to deal with it now.”

Lawmakers have been dealing with Trump’s abrupt tactical shifts from his start, and at the White House he leaves the impression with each advisor who talks with him that he shares their point of view, until he doesn’t.

Anyone think any foreign leaders believe a thing he says? Yeah... maybe one.

Will Closing The Border Lead To Trump's Impeachment?

Saluda al Jefe!

Republican Will Hurd's recent reelection wasn't exactly overwhelming. In the end, he beat a very weak Democratic opponent 103,285 (49.2%) to 102,359 (48.7%) in an R+1 district where Hillary beat Trump 49.8% to 46.4%. The district has-- by far-- the longest border with Mexico (over 800 miles) of any district in America. It stretches from the outskirts of San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and is over 70% Hispanic. Trade with Mexico is at the heart of the district's economic activity, so you can imagine that Hurd, a very conservative Republican, is a passionate opponent of Trump's wall and his posture towards Latinos. Hurd, a former CIA undercover agent, serves on the Homeland Security Committee where he is the vice-chair of the Border and Maritime Subcommittee. A couple of weeks ago he went on CNN to explain why he voted against Trump's wall. "Building a 30-foot high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security," Hurd said. "I represent 820 miles of border, more border than any other member of Congress. I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA chasing bad guys all over the world. In places along the border, Border Patrol's response time is measured in hours to days. So a wall is actually not a physical barrier. We-- if we want to address root causes of illegal immigration we should be doing and working on those root causes in the northern triangle like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. We should be talking about, how do we plus-up the State Department budget and USAID budget? How do we work with Mexico, who just announced $30 billion on doing-- on working on economic opportunities in Central America? There are the things that are going to address root causes of mass migration."

Yesterday it was as if Trump read his statement-- or had it read to him-- and decided to do the exact opposite. Like a petulant brat in a crib, the illegitimate fake "president" threatened to seal the border and end all economic aid to Central America if he doesn't get the money for his wall (or beaded curtain). And to continue the government shutdown until he's carted out of the oval office and dump in a landfill. The asshole: "We build the wall or... close the southern border." (Shutting the southern border will cost the country billions of dollars and ruin the economy way beyond TX-23, shuttering businesses in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and beyond.)

Other than a few neo-fascist crackpots like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), no one thinks Señor Trumpanzee is stupid enough-- or even has the cajones to-- close down the southern border. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told CNN it was "highly unlikely" the imbecile would follow through on his threat. "It’s not likely to happen. It would stifle commerce, significant commerce, between our two countries that benefits both of us. So I don’t think he will follow through, I hope not." Even Trumpanzee's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, said the silly bluff was "the only way we can get the Democrats' attention." Congressman Ryan Costello (R-PA) blasted Trump’s threat as an "angry eighth-grader’s tweet"-- infuriating eighth graders in West Chester and the Upper Main Line. "I don’t really know how to make sense of it because I don’t think he can do this even if he wanted to. It probably violates NAFTA. I don’t think he’ll have much if any support in Congress. Nor do I think logistically he’d be able to implement it... And when you start throwing out vacuous threats like this, people stop taking you seriously in terms of how you go about negotiating."

Yesterday, Elizabeth Drew penned an OpEd for the NY Times, The Inevitability of Impeachment. "Even Republicans..." she begins. I'm not so sure how many Republicans have come to the conclusion yet but Drew is correct that an impeachment process against the deranged and dangerous buffoon "now seems inescapable"-- unless it resigns. Pelosi doesn't want to do it but "the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase." Is there enough evidence to impeach (and imprison) the stinking load of crap Putin dumped in the Oval Office? Drew, who thinks there is, wrote that "we will learn what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has found, even if his investigation is cut short. A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill.

It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived.

In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival. Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.

It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed. Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection.

...Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, and despite suspicions, no evidence has ever surfaced that the fix was in. While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.

Up for reelection in 2020, aside from every single member of the House, are 11 Republicans who would be harmed-- perhaps fatally-- with Trump at the top of the ticket: Miss McConnell (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Ben Sasse (R-NE), who would likely try to run a confused anti-Trump reelection campaign, David Perdue (R-GA), Pat Roberts (R-KS), who is already making noises about retiring, Steve Daines (R-MT), Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has already announced he's bowing out rather than run with Trump. And Martha McSally, who was just appointed to McCain's old seat surely doesn't want to face Arizona voters who have already rendered a judgment against Trump last month by defeating her in her Senate race against Kyrsten Sinema.

House Republicans Think Trump's Wall Is A Good Reason For Shutting Down The Government But Almost No One Else Does

South Florida Republican Carlos Curbelo was defeated last month by a weak Democratic opponent, 119,761 (50.9%) to 115,663 (49.1%). He blames Trump, rather than his own unwillingness to break with Trump over the last two years. Yesterday he tweeted bitterly: "Still with the benefit (or curse) of an inside perspective, I must say that the instability and chaos in our government the past few days has been particularly pronounced — worse than at any point during my service in Congress, and really, my lifetime. Things are not well in the USA." Too late to save himself, Curbelo was one of only 8 Republicans-- Justin Amash, Ken Buck, Carlos Curbelo, Will Hurd, Erik Paulsen, Ileana Kos-Lehtinen, Fred Upton and David Valadao-- voting against Trump's border wall Thursday. Yesterday, Mike Allen, noted at Axios that Trump's Christmas shutdown over the wall is spooking the GOP and that it "has left Republicans with a debacle as their last act in control of the House. And now the party is even more worried about the outlook beginning Jan. 3, when Democrats take over. 'It's a showdown, but one side has already lost,' said one outside adviser in close touch with the West Wing... With his eye on 2020, he's all about the base, with no apparent plans to co-opt the center."

Yesterday hedge fund manager Mark Dow, likely losing his ass because of Trump's stock market meltdown, tweeted, a sentiment that is commonly felt in financial circles:

In a post for America's Voice, Frank Sharry remarked that "If the GOP is so worked up about border security, they should step in and protect the American people from a president at the border of insanity." Short of impeachment, it might be too late. That border wall government shut down turns out to be a real stinker. Sharry:

The Trump/Republican plan to shut down the government over an unpopular, ineffective and insulting border wall is a sad reflection of the state of our politics. The President is increasingly unhinged and, instead of checking him, the GOP Congress is enabling him.

That may help to explain why they are embarking on one of the stupidest political moves in recent history: shuttering the federal government over a rally chant and an impossible promise (“Mexico will pay for the wall!”) just weeks after the nation’s voters soundly rejected the Trump/GOP embrace of racism and xenophobia as the closing argument in the midterm elections.

The consensus view from operatives and analysts right and left is that Trump’s reliance on xenophobia in the midterms backfired, badly:  

• David Drucker of the conservative Washington Examiner noted, “Why are Dems so confident in position on border wall? 1) ‘In reviewing polling/data, GOP strategists discovered Trump’s immigration rhetoric was more damaging to House GOP during final 7-10 days of midterm campaign than they realized at the time.” Drucker also wrote, “2nd reason Dems so confident in oppo to Trump’s wall: Per GOP review of midterms: ‘POTUS’ near-singular focus on caravan/wall repelled Hispanics, indies, soft Rs, turning a race for House control that leaned Dem into a late-breaking GOP bloodbath.”
• Republican pollster David Winston on how Republican immigration fear-mongering in the midterm homestretch backfired: “The people who made their decision over the last few days voted Democratic by a 12-point margin.” Winston’s analysis showed that late-deciding voters were 59 percent less likely to back Republicans after hearing from them on immigration, and 63 percent less likely to vote for Republicans after hearing from the GOP on border security and the migrant caravan.
• In a post-election New York Times op-ed, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg wrote, “Democrats made big gains because Mr. Trump declared war on immigrants-- and on multicultural America-- and lost … Mr. Trump got more than half of Republicans to believe immigrants were a burden, but three quarters of Democrats and a large majority of independents concluded that America gains from immigration.”
• A recent USA Today op-ed by Tyler Moran, managing director of The Immigration Hub and Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster at Global Strategy Group, recapped midterm polling in Pennsylvania and Colorado: “the Trump strategy backfired with some of the exact people he tried to motivate-- women and independents … aligning with Trump on immigration pushed more people away from voting Republican than attracted them-- by 9 points in Pennsylvania and 16 points in Colorado. Among a key bloc of voters who supported Democrat Bob Casey in 2018 and voted for Trump in 2016, just 26 percent said Barletta’s alignment with Trump on immigration was a reason to vote for him, and a plurality believed it was a reason to vote against him. In Colorado, 65 percent of independents said Trump and Republicans are moving away from them on immigration.”
• National Journal political columnist Josh Kraushaar tweeted regarding immigration in the midterms, “Late deciders broke decisively against the GOP. Immigration rhetoric a major factor. You’d think Rs would have learned from Gillespie 2017.” Kraushaar added “forcing a shutdown over border security such a political loser for Trump/GOP,” pointing to post-election analysis by the DCCC and summarizing, “Late deciders identified as Republicans by 16 points, but GOP lost them in the final stretch. All about immigration.”

None of these dynamics have disappeared--the border wall is broadly unpopular and the public overwhelmingly doesn’t want to shut down the government over the wall:

• Ron Brownstein writes for CNN, in a piece entitled Trump is doubling down on his strategy that cost the GOP the House: In 10 Quinnipiac University national polls from April 2017 through August 2018, no more than 40% of Americans ever expressed support for the wall. Consistently, the share of Americans opposing construction of the wall has been much higher, from 57% to 64%. A CNN Poll conducted by SSRS that was released last week found 57% against a wall, compared with 38% in favor. Opposition to the wall is overwhelming among all the groups that moved decisively away from Trump and the GOP in last month’s election. In CNN’s poll, Trump’s border wall faced opposition from 76% of African-Americans, 66% of Latinos, 66% of adults younger than 35, 57% of independents, 66% of college-educated white voters and 56% of people aged 35 to 49.
• According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll, “most Americans oppose risking a government shutdown over a wall, but more than two-thirds (69 percent) do not believe building a wall should even be an immediate priority for Congress. That includes half who do not believe it should be a priority at all. More than a quarter (28 percent) believe it should be an immediate priority, including 63 percent of Republicans. Immigration is a cultural touchstone issue that Trump used to fuel his campaign. It’s an issue that has energized his supporters…and helped move independents largely toward Democrats’ positions on the subject.
• A Politico/Morning Consult poll this week finds that voters would blame Trump and Congressional Republicans for a shutdown and that, by a 55-31% margin, reject the idea that a border wall would be worth shutting down the government for.

What a stunning and stupid ploy by Trump and the GOP. Republicans are enabling an unhinged President desperate to please conservative media barkers, all at the expense of the strongly-held majority will of the American people.

Perhaps they noticed that the nation’s voters had a chance to weigh in just weeks ago, and soundly rejected Trump’s xenophobia. Perhaps they have seen the polling that shows strong majorities of the public-- and a third of Republican voters-- are opposed to this shutdown move.

Will Hurd, a conservative Texas Republican, is a former undercover CIA agent who worked in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. He knows a little something about national security and serves on the Intelligence Committee and on the Homeland Security Committee where he is the vice-chair of the Border and Maritime Subcommittee. HIs district has the longest border with Mexico of any district in the country-- by far. Generally considered a Trump suck-up and enabler, Hurd voted against Trump's border wall last week. Perhaps some of his colleagues should ask him why. Hurd explained his position to CNN on Friday:

"Building a 30-foot high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security," Hurd said. "I represent 820 miles of border, more border than any other member of Congress. I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA chasing bad guys all over the world. In places along the border, Border Patrol's response time is measured in hours to days. So a wall is actually not a physical barrier.

"We-- if we want to address root causes of illegal immigration we should be doing and working on those root causes in the northern triangle like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. We should be talking about, how do we plus-up the State Department budget and USAID budget? How do we work with Mexico, who just announced $30 billion on doing-- on working on economic opportunities in Central America? There are the things that are going to address root causes of mass migration," Hurd said.

Last year he told CBS News why he opposes Trump's approach:

Republicans Who Voice Concerns About Trumpanzee, Still Vote For All His Crap

Ummmm by Nancy Ohanian

If you're from Wisconsin you probably know Charlie Sykes as the voice of conservative Republicans between 1993 and the rise of Trumpism. He left Milwaukee's WTMJ is 2016. More recently he wrote the book How The Right Lost Its Mind. On Sunday The Guardian published his latest anti-Trump screed, explaining how Trump has kidnapped the GOP and that conservatives have to stand up to him. Fat chance!

Last week, anguished die-hard conservative Jeff Flake tweeted "I never thought I would see the day when our American President would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression. This is shameful." Fake is always anguished and always running his mouth-- but unlike Sykes-- he's in a position to do something about it. He votes. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for exactly one reason and one reason only: Kavanaugh doesn't believe a president can be indicted or even questioned for his criminal behavior. That should be reason enough for Flake to vote NO on Kavanaugh's nomination. If Schumer can hold all that Democrats together, that one vote by Flake will derail Kavanaugh. No one thinks he has the cajónes to do it.

Sykes wrote that Trump now controls the GOP and that "American conservatism has entered a pseudo-Orwellian stage where weakness is strength, appeasement is toughness, lies are truth, and 'America first' means 'blame America first'... Republicans have adjusted their principles to conform with Trumpism, which often means with Trump’s latest glandular impulse."

Many Republicans have rationalized their support for Trump by pointing to tax cuts, rollbacks in regulation and Trump’s appointments of conservative judges. But last week reminded us how many of their values they have been willing to surrender. Moral relativism and its cousin, moral equivalency, are not bugs of the Trump presidency; they are central to its diplomatic philosophy. Unfortunately, polls suggest that many conservatives are OK with that, despite the betrayal of what were once deeply held beliefs.

For years, Republicans derided what they saw as Obama’s fecklessness on the world stage, including what they called his “apology tour.” Trump, we were told, would change all of that by projecting strength and standing up for American values. Instead, we got last week’s parade of sycophancy and abasement.

This ought to have been a clarifying moment. Trump was supposed to be the Man on the White Horse who promised that he alone could solve all of our problems. Instead, he looked like Putin’s caddy.

The problem is that many conservatives have confused the swagger of the schoolyard bully with actual strength; we saw how Trump behaves when he’s confronted by an even bigger bully. He groveled, and then hedged, then tried to walk it all back with the absurdly laughable claim that he confused the word “would” for “wouldn’t.” Depressingly, that was good enough for some Republicans, including the Ohio senator Rob Portman, who said he was willing to take Trump at his word.

But we’ve seen this movie before, as Republicans react to Trump’s outrages by wringing their hands, only to fall back into line.

Understandably, this feeds the impression that we should regard Trumpism as a logical and organic outgrowth of conservatism rather than an existential threat to that tradition. That is, of course, the view from the (Sean) Hannitized right, which insists that opposition to Trump among so-called Never Trumpers is a form of apostasy.

...Obviously, Trump has deftly exploited many of the grievances and attitudes that have festered for decades on the right. But that’s not the whole story. Trump has more in common with populist demagogues like the “Know Nothings,” Father Charles Coughlin, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan than with conservatives like George Will or Ronald Reagan. Until the last election, conservatives had the good taste, sound judgment and wisdom to reject and even marginalize those uglier voices on the right. In that sense, Trump is the exception, rather than the rule.

Perhaps the best way to think about Trump’s nativism and isolationism is to see them as recessive genes in conservatism that had been kept in check for generations. That also suggests another tradition exists, even if it is now in eclipse.

While it’s easy (and tempting) to define a political movement by its worst aspects, it bears noting that modern conservatism also gave rise to Charles Krauthammer, Ross Douthat, Peter Wehner, Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake. In other words, it didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to continue in the future.

The real danger, however, in seeing Trump as the logical, organic product of conservatism is that it normalizes him. Discounting the peculiarity of his rise ignores the uniqueness of the danger he poses and the urgent need to confront the damage he is doing to the body politic and our political culture. If he is merely another Republican, there no cause for more than the usual alarm.

But last week reminded us that there is nothing normal about Donald Trump or the existential threat he represents. It is long past time for conservatives and Republicans to recognize that.

They do recognize it. One very recent example: last week Republican Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) wrote a pretty good OpEd for the New York Times calling out Trump for publicly felching Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. "By playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands," wrote Hurd, a former CIA agent, "the leader of the free world actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denial and weakened the credibility of the United States to both our friends and foes abroad... Congress must act to give the men and women of our intelligence agencies the tools they need to confront Moscow and prevent this from happening in the future." And yet-- like Flake-- Hurd specifically votes with Trump to do the exact opposite. Last week, for example, he voted against spending more money to counter Russian hacking of the 2018 midterm elections. That's what a Republican is today, not some airy-fairy vision Charlie Sykes images they are. (By the way, every House Republican voted against protecting the integrity of American elections and preventing Russia from hacking them again-- yes, EVERY.SINGLE.DAMN.ONE.OF.THEM.

There are 235 Republicans in the House. There are approximately 2,300 immigrant children separated from their parents. That’s 10 per Republican Congressman. Will Hurd continues to divide 10 families. Will Hurd continues to commit atrocities in our name. Voters in South Texas can let Will Hurd off the hook-- by firing his ass.

What's Worse For The Republicans-- Trump's Russian Adventure Or His Trade War Against China?

Trumpanzee is furious about his DNI's interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Washington Post reporters say that Trump enablers "were in an uproar" over the optics of Dan Coats' making a laughing stock out of a fake president who was in way, way over his head in his dealings with Putin. I assume he'll be even more angry if someone reads the Will Hurd (R-TX) OpEd in the New York Times, Trump Is Being Manipulated By Putin. What Should We Do? to him. "Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them... By playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands the leader of the free world actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denial and weakened the credibility of the United States to both our friends and foes abroad... Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them."

And a good old slap in the face for Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy and Paul Ryan who are protecting Trump and his treasonous behavior: "As a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, I strongly believe in the importance of Congress's oversight responsibilities and will work with my colleagues to ensure that the administration is taking the Russian threat seriously. Without action, we risk losing further credibility in international negotiations with both our friends and foes on critical trade deals, military alliances and nuclear arms."

And then there was the cover of today's Politicom an essay by Blake Hounshell, Why I'm No Longer A RussiaGate Skeptic. He now says that when he wrote back in February, that he was skeptical that Señor Trumpanzee would ever be proved to have secretly colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 election in his favor, he mistyped. "What I meant to write was that I wasn’t skeptical. Last week’s events have nullified my previous skepticism."

Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!” But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggests either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue, despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else-- or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.

You don’t have to buy Jonathan Chait’s sleeper agent theory of Trump to believe that something is deeply weird about all this. Nor do you need to be convinced that Putin is hanging onto a recording of something untoward that may have taken place in a certain Moscow hotel room. You don’t even have to buy the theory that Trump’s business is overly dependent on illicit flows of Russia money, giving Putin leverage. As Julia Ioffe posits, the kompromat could well be the mere fact of the Russian election meddling itself.

...We might never get clear evidence that Trump made a secret deal with the Kremlin. It would be great to see his tax returns, and perhaps Mueller has evidence of private collusion that we have yet to see. These details matter. But in a larger sense, everything we need to know about Trump’s strange relationship with Russia is already out in the open. As The Donald himself might say, there’s something going on.

If Trump is indeed a tool of Putin, what might we expect him to do next? Well, I wouldn’t be sleeping too soundly in Kiev, Podgorica or Riga right now. If the Kremlin tests America’s wobbling commitment to NATO, watch how Trump responds. And pay attention, too, to what the White House says about Russia’s absurd demand that the U.S. hand over former ambassador to Moscow Mike McFaul—Wednesday’s spectacle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders refusing to immediately rule out the idea flies in the face of decades of American diplomacy. Trump may have grudgingly admitted that Russia did the deed, but nobody should be surprised if he starts shedding doubt on it all over again. Maybe, just maybe, he can’t admit that Moscow tried to put him in the Oval Office because he’s under strict instructions not to.

Meanwhile Señor T may be trying to distract from Putin-Gate by ramping up his trade war with China. He's now threatening to put tariffs on every Chinese good imported to the U.S. That's $505.5 billion worth. Caitlin Owens at Axios this morning: "Trump's tariffs are introducing a new, wildly unpredictable issue into the midterm elections, thanks to their heavy impact on states with critical Senate races as well as their likely role in House races across the country. This puts GOP candidates in a weird position: Speaking out against trade policy that's hurting their state or district could turn off voters who would view that as criticizing Trump." Democrats have a good issue:



And this is kind of funny:

• Trump flags and hats made in China are reportedly being held up at US customs amid an intensifying trade war.
• Chinese textile suppliers have said delays at US customs is affecting their sales.
• Chinese suppliers across China have reported making merchandise for Trump's 2020 bid, although campaign officials insist all their official merchandise is manufactured in the US.

Where do they make the t-shirts though?