Buyers' Remorse-- In North Carolina

Trump calls her his "Foxxy Lady" because she helps him with his whole toxic agenda

That thing with the Trump family and the elephants is just so horrifying, I can't express with words the depths of my sadness. Reversing the ban on hunters importing trophies of elephants killed in Zambia and Zimbabwe has got to be one of his ugliest diversions yet.Yesterday I noted that anyone who still supports him will rot in hell with him for eternity. (But what do I know? God is wiser than I am-- though I doubt He created elephants so that spoiled assholes like Eric and Fredo could murder them and hang their body parts on walls.) So I was happy to see a post by James Hohmann in the Washington Post about Trumpian buyers' remorse based on a North Carolina focus group that was done even before the elephant murder executive order.

"Republican women," he wrote, "who voted for President Trump in North Carolina said during a focus group Wednesday night that they are embarrassed by and exasperated with him." It's an interesting look inside the heads of Trump voters and it explains why his favorability ratings are still dropping.

Annie Anthony, 56, voted for Trump last year because she opposes abortion and did not like how Hillary Clinton handled Benghazi. Now she fears that Trump is marching us toward war with North Korea. She describes the first 10 months of his presidency as “chaotic, stressful and an uphill battle.”

“While I thought his ideas appealed to me, since he’s been in there he’s embarrassed me by his behavior,” said Anthony, a divorced college graduate who runs a local nonprofit volunteer center and drives for Uber to make ends meet. “He behaves so unpresidential. The words he uses. The tweeting. I mean, he dresses nice. And Melania is looking good. When he was away (in Asia), he was great at being a president. He’s the showman. But here at home, I can’t imagine how they let him build a country club-- let alone be in one. Because adults don’t behave that way. I’ve been surprised that a billionaire would behave the way he has…

“I don’t have a problem with him tweeting,” she continued. “I follow him because I want to see what he’s saying myself and not have someone interpret it for me. But I think that his language is unprofessional. He uses words like ‘sad’ and ‘bad.’ That’s first grade language. We’re an intelligent population who elected you. Represent us!”

Anthony, a registered Republican, remains hopeful that Congress will soon pass tax cuts, but she’s nervous that they’ll take away the deduction for charitable donations. She’s also worried that, if her health insurance rates continue to go up, she won’t be able to afford to go see the doctor any more. (She makes less than $50,000 a year.)

Looking ahead to the midterms, she offered an ominous warning for the GOP: “I think the swamp is still full. I might be voting to drain that swamp some more.”

...When Hart asked for one word or phrase to describe Trump, the group initially erupted in laughter. Only two of 12 said something positive (“bold” and “fights back”). The others called him incompetent, a baffling fool, childlike, a loose cannon, an immature narcissist and ignorant.

Emily Bell, a 32-year-old occupational therapist who voted for Trump, described him as rude and stressful. “I feel like he told people that he had all these big ideas and big plans, and it just seems to kind of roll to something else. It’s like nothing is ever accomplished,” said Bell, who is married and has a postgraduate degree. “I’m going to stay optimistic, but I lean more toward being independent. Really it will come down (in 2020) to who I can trust more.”

Melissa Hight, a 62-year-old married retiree who has a postgraduate degree and voted for Trump, used the word “antagonistic” to describe him. “I had high hopes, but he just goes about things in a way that gets everybody’s back up against the wall,” she lamented. “He doesn’t facilitate working together. He comes out with these grandiose ideas, and there’s no follow through. It’s a lot of talk. … He hasn’t acted presidential at all. The tweets bother me. They may be enlightening to some people. I’m not a tweeter. But to me, firing off these tweets is just childish. … He should be above that… I will call a spade a spade because I’m a conservative more than a Republican.”

Only one of the 12 participants emerged as an unapologetic defender of the president. Cynthia Layton, a 64-year-old nurse, said she loves Trump’s tweets. “I like him because he talks like my neighbor talks to me,” she explained. “I don’t need an elitist person talking down to me. The media does not give an honest opinion. That’s why I turned off cable 10 years ago. I read my sites. I listen to his tweets. … That’s how I hear from him. The media doesn’t tell you what’s going on, so you have to find out what’s going on on your own. … To me, I think his tweets are simply what he honestly feels because he uses white and black language and doesn’t give you all these flowery descriptions about everything. I appreciate that he’s direct and tells it like it is.”

Is this going to flip any congressional seats in 2018? North Carolina is one of the most meticulously gerrymandered states in the union, with congressional districts drawn precisely to prevent anything like that. However, after the startling Isley-Freeman win in an Oklahoma state senate district that Trump won by nearly 40 points... all bets are off.

If quality of candidates count, the most flippable seat in North Carolina is the 5th district in the northwest of the state-- from Forsyth County (Winston-Salem) through Mount Airy and Boone to the Tennessee border. The odious Virginia Foxx is the incumbent and Jenny Marshall in the challenger. She's as good as Foxx is bad. This morning she told us that "Over the past months we have been meeting more and more Republicans who are willing to talk to us about our campaign. They are not happy with Representative Virginia Foxx and have been very vocal about their dissatisfaction. They recounted meetings in which she berated people who dared to ask her questions, lectured a mother of a medically fragile child on the cost of health care, and refused to attend a town hall hosted for her as she sat in her office just a few blocks away to name just a few. They are tired of her dodging them and only appearing where she can control the narrative. Unlike Donald Trump, Virginia Foxx is not a mindless tweeting fool, but her dismissive behavior has made their own waves across the district. Her unwavering support of Trump's policies and executive orders coupled with her own lack of care has made her unpopular even among those who vote Republican."

If that Oklahoma state Senate seat can turn blue, so can NC-05. And Jenny is working with every intention of doing just that. If you'd like to give her a shot, in terms of a contribution... see that thermometer up above on the right? Give it a little click.

Julius Krein, A Trump Propagandist Plays The “We Didn’t Know” Card

-by Noah

First, some background: Julius Krein is the founder of American Affairs a pro-Trump quartely, and founder of the Journal of American Greatness. He is from South Dakota and is a graduate of Harvard. He went into the financial world and worked for the Bank Of America and the Blackstone Group, a private equity and hedge fund operation that specializes in leveraged buyouts and has its roots in Lehman Brothers. Take a few moments and let the significance of that sink in.

Krein says he formed American Affairs” to, quote, “give the Trump movement some intellectual heft.”

OK, so now that we know all of this, I guess we can assume that Krein is not a stupid man, but, he is a man with a predator background who had a voice that was larger than most, and, sadly, he used it in the service of promoting Donald Trump and Trump’s brand of fascism. It’s hard to think of Krein as a “very fine” person. No, he used his money and what intelligence he has to promote Trump and the evil for which he stands.

Just think of the idea of giving Trump’s fascism “intellectual heft.” Provide cover is more like it. Anyway, Trump and intellect are not two things that would come together in any kind of word association game, unless that game required you to deal in opposites. The only real world way to associate Trump with intellect, and, more importantly, anything good and decent is through the use of propaganda.

So, there you have it, Krein is a propagandist, a press flak, a brainwasher for Trump. Calling him anything else is an insult to caring, intelligent people anywhere (Although I do have to admit that I have thought of a other few things I could call him.)

On Thursday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Krein titled “I Voted For Trump. And I Sorely Regret It.” The alternative title should be “I Voted For Trump And All I Got Was This Shitty Red Hat.”

In his mea culpa opinion piece, Krein admitted that he had made statements such as Trump being “the most serious candidate in the race” and writing dozens of articles and making a similar number of radio and TV appearances in support of his guy, even when “conservative friends and colleagues said I had to be kidding.” Krein also admits to knowing that Trump was “Crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign”, but, he saw Trump as being different than the more “conventional candidates.” True that.

Krein says he liked that Trump was a critic of corporations for off-shoring jobs and attacked financial industry executives for avoiding taxes. I guess how Trump handled his own taxes and off-shored the work of his own companies never bothered him.

The first half of the Krein piece is a catalog of all the things he liked that Trump was saying about foreign and domestic issues. Apparently he never once questioned Trump’s sincerity, perhaps seeing what he wanted to see. It’s a pathetic attempt to justify his actions. He even states that he tried to steer Trump “in the right direction,” as if anyone could. It takes an out of control ego to think you could. I’m guessing Krein saw a bit of himself when he saw Trump.

According to the incredibly self-important Krein, the support he provided to Trump through the Journal of American Greatness was him acting as “one of the leading voices supporting certain themes of Trump’s campaign.” Michael Anton, now an advisor on the National Security Council was one of the journal’s predecessor, simply called American Greatness, most prolific writers.

Once Krein’s mission was accomplished and Trump was in the White House, he formed his previously mentioned quarterly to continue what he’d started. In another moment of self-aggrandizement (that right there could be a also be big part of his attraction to Trump), Krain states that

In this role, as one of the few people in the media who has been somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Trump, I am often asked to comment on his surprise victory, or more recently on his statements, and the gusher of news pouring out of this White House. For months, despite increasing chaos and incoherence, I have given Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt: ‘No I don’t think he is a racist’, I have told skeptical audiences. ‘Yes, he says some stupid things, but none of it really matters; he’s not really incompetent.’

Really? Well, it seems his idol’s handling of what happened in Charlottesville was too much even for a professional apologist and propagandist like Krein. More likely, he just wants credit for being one of the first rats off the ship.

It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president… Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship.

Krein even has the gall to say

It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves.

Oh boy. Wow. And to think, this assclown went to Harvard! What the hell do they teach people there? Certainly, in his case, it wasn’t any kind of analytical or critical thinking ability. Then again, maybe we should demand to see his diploma.

Think about this: The birtherism that his boy Trump founded his campaign on never tipped Krein off. The Central Park 5 case, the housing discrimination suits, the treatment of African-Americans at his casinos, his relationships with mafia and Russian mob figures, the ripped off contractors, the treatment of women, the treatment of underage beauty contestants, his racist stances on Muslims and immigrants, the refusal to hand over his tax records, the hypocrisy of talking about off-shoring of jobs while he and his family have their clothing lines made in China, his obvious lack of ANY knowledge of the Constitution, the psychotic desire to take Chemo away from American cancer patients, The destruction of national parks while he tries to protect monuments to treason and slavery, the making fun of the disabled, the Hitler salutes at his rallies, and the fact that anyone with half a brain could watch Trump speak for 2 minutes and see that he is severely mentally ill… none of that tipped off Julius Krein. Fuck you Julius Krein. Lying, disingenuous, 2-bit Goebbels wanna be scumbag. Accessory to treason. Fuck you.

Krein’s piece in Thursday’s Times is like someone saying “I know I didn’t get my brakes fixed. I thought they’d be fine,” after he’s just run over a dozen school kids and a crossing guard.

In Chaucerian times, people wore hairshirts and crawled on their bellies for a hundred miles to ask for forgiveness. This assclown thinks a disingenuous, self-promoting, half-wit not even half apology article in the New York Times will suffice. Not only that, but he still adheres to the republican agenda. Some Republicans are acting all “shocked, shocked I tell you, shocked and surprised” that Trump is what he is. It’s all “gee, we didn’t know.” This is part of an attempt that Republicans are making to create the impression that they are somehow separate from their President Trump.

But, I will be fair to Krein. Regardless of his motivations, he has spoken up. That, I suppose, makes him better than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who took even longer than Trump to address Charlottesville and pretend he was affronted not that we would have ever expected him to address it at all, especially after seeing his wife by Trump’s side nodding her approval while he said that some Nazis are “fine people” during his now infamous press tantrum. It also makes Krein better in my eyes than Speaker Paul Ryan, an American terrorist in his own right, who once said he couldn’t endorse Trump, went ahead and did so anyway, and continues to support the Trump agenda every hour of every day. It also makes him better than that full staff of Nazi sympathizers that infest the White House and say nothing. Anything any of these cretins have to say from now on will have no credibility because they have given away what is in their charred little hearts. Their silence has spoken. Their words will mean nothing, and you can say that about 99.9% of their party. Only a change of actions and attitudes will matter. Don’t hold your breath.

It’s hard to say that anything good came of Charlottesville but it did expose, once and for all, what lies at the core of the Republican Party, so much so that even a smug, self-important asswipe like Julius Krein could see it. Polls show, however, that the majority of republican voters still support Trump. Trump’s poll numbers may be sinking over all, but, if the election were held today, he would still win in most places where he won last November, just by smaller margins.

One final note: On Thursday night, Krein went on CNN, the Neville Chamberlain of news channels, to make his case for redemption. Oh wait. No, that wasn’t it at all. He just loves being on TV, like someone else I could name. Fuck you again, Julius Krein. May I send you a set of Hari Kari knives?

The GOP's Class War Against Their Own Base-- Bernie Is Fighting Back For Them

Many 2018 congressional candidates are delighted to campaign against Trump and to tie their opponents to him, especially the ones with big Trump vote scores. Several of the Blue America-endorsed candidates are running against far right GOP incumbents who literally have 100% pro-Trump voting records, as Doug Applegate has pointed out about Darrell Issa and Katie Hill has pointed out in the case of Steve Knight, who blatantly lies to his Santa Clarita/Simi Valley/Antelope Valley constituents in trying to pain himself as "bipartisan" and "mainstream." Randy Bryce's opponent, Paul Ryan, has a 100% Trump score as does Paul Clements' opponent, Fred Upton.

And more candidates than not are delighted to point out the glaring Putin-Gate scandals that have become a nightly staple of the #1 and #2-rated cable TV shows, Rachel Maddow's and Lawrence O'Donnell's, both of which are absolutely crushing Fox News in their time slots, with Fox News adamantly refusing to expose Trump's and his Regime's Putin escapades. Yesterday Bernie was in Morgantown, West Virginia and Covington, Kentucky, not to talk about Russia or Trump or Putin-Gate but to talk with voters in these two states Trump won in landslides (68.7-26.5% in West Virginia and 62.5-32.7% in Kentucky) about the Republican legislation they're passing off as "healthcare" that is really nothing but the Republican Party's class warfare against workers. Before the rally in Covington Bernie issued a shot across the bow of Kentucky's senior senator, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented, no state in the country has benefited more from the ACA than Kentucky. The uninsured rate for adults in Kentucky has gone down from 20.4 percent in 2013 to just 7.8 percent in 2016-- the largest reduction in America. Today, as a result of the ACA, only 4 percent of children in Kentucky are uninsured.

Unbelievably, at a time when Kentucky has made significant progress in health care, the Republican bill being proposed in the Senate by Kentucky’s own Senator Mitch McConnell would throw over 230,000 people in Kentucky off of health insurance. It would also decimate the Medicaid program in the state which provides insurance for more than 2 million people, including 40 percent of all children.

Further, at a time when Kentucky is struggling with an opioid addiction epidemic, there is no question that if McConnell’s legislation were to be passed, thousands of Kentuckians would no longer be able to receive the treatment they desperately need.

The bottom line is that this legislation, which nationally would throw 22 million Americans off of health insurance, cut Medicaid by almost $800 billion, substantially raise premiums for older workers and defund Planned Parenthood, is a disaster for America but an even greater disaster for Kentucky and other states that voted heavily for Trump. This Republican legislation must be defeated.

Bernie's populism is as different from Trump's as their Twitter feeds are

I want to reiterate something we looked at Saturday morning. Covington is the county seat of Kenton County, Kentucky's third most populous county. And, yes, Trump won that county decisively in November-- 59.7% to 33.7% but on primary day, Kenton County told a far different story. On the Republican side, Ted Cruz won Kenton Co. with 2,475 votes to Trump's 1,997. And Hillary and Bernie each beat both of them. Bernie won 4,880 votes countywide-- more than Cruz and Trump combined. Bernie was on the road punching back-- and so are the candidates who have been inspired and energized by his message. You think candidates like Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, Dave Gill in Illinois and Jenny Marshall are going to shy away from talking about how economic inequality is impacting working families in their districts? That is largely what their campaigns are about? That and how they plan to fight back against Republican efforts to tilt the scales further in favor of the top 2% of wealth-holders. This morning Randy Bryce told us that "Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that it’s not a working person’s house that he is speaking on behalf of. In addition to not wanting to have a public town hall because of his horrible policies, he is trying to steal what we have left of health care. Now that our campaign has taken off, he’s had the NRCC unleashed against me even though he won his last election by 35 points! What is he afraid of? Oh yeah-- that would be the people in the district. He can run but he can’t hide. November 6, 2018 can’t get here soon enough."

Jenny Marshall, the Blue America-endorsed progressive running against Trump/Ryan rubber stamp Virginia Foxx in central North Carolina, has a similar perspective. "As I travel the 5th district talking to people on the street," she told us, "the overwhelming issue that keeps coming up is money. It doesn’t surprise me in the least, as the poverty rate across the 5th district is 18.6% which is 4.3% higher than the nation's average. A staggering 44% of the households in the district are low-income meaning their incomes were less than twice the poverty level ($48,500 for a family of 4). People are hurting. They want a representative who understands and will fight for a better future for their family. We cannot ignore their pain any longer." Last month, a short article in The Economist about how little tax the Scandinavian super-rich pay gave them more fodder.

Of life's two certainties, death cannot be dodged even by the well-to-do. Taxes are another matter. Quantifying quite how much they manage to keep from the taxman, however, has always been tricky. One common approach governments take is to conduct randomised audits of tax returns. This methodology can give regulators a rough sense of overall tax revenues lost. But it is far from ideal. For instance, studies based on randomised tax audits are usually both too small and too crude to reflect accurately the financial shenanigans of the most egregious tax-dodgers: the super-rich.

A new study by Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, three economists, tackles this problem by investigating two recent financial-data hoards: the “Swiss leaks,” a record of bank accounts held at HSBC in Switzerland; and the “Panama papers,” files that document the use of offshore accounts and shell companies by clients of Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama. By matching the leaked information with wealth data from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the authors are able to construct the most detailed estimate to date of the extent of tax evasion.

Their research leads to two conclusions. First, tax evasion is extremely concentrated. The average Scandinavian household paid around 3% too little in taxes in 2006; the richest 1% of households, with net assets of at least $2m, underpaid by around 10%. The truly rich, though, behave truly differently. The top 0.01% of households, with net assets of over $40m, short-changed the taxman by a whopping 30%.

Second, the numbers imply that previous estimates of wealth inequality, often based on tax data, have understated the problem. And the Scandinavian statistics may provide a conservative estimate of worldwide tax-dodging: only around 2% of Scandinavian household wealth is held in offshore accounts, compared with the global average of 4%.

Globalisation has disproportionately benefited the rich in part by rewarding capital more handsomely than labour. But globalisation has also made it easier for the well-heeled to hide their wealth. In that sense, maybe the data should cause even more surprise: despite the best efforts of a lucrative global tax-evasion industry, Scandinavia’s ultra-rich are paying 70% of their taxes.

As Alan Grayson reminded me yesterday Citizens for Tax Justice has research that shows basically identical anti-social trends by the super-rich here in the U.S. Earlier today, Ro Khanna (D-CA), who has become one of Congress' top champion's of action to make economic equality and equality of opportunity attainable goals in this country, reminded is that "Picketty has shown that today's economy favors capital over labor. Our tax rules also favor shareholders over the working class. That is why working families feel that the system is rigged against them-- that they are working harder but making less. We need to restructure the economy to reward work instead of speculation and to hold the investor class accountable for the taxes they owe."

I look forward to do the day Ro Khanna is working with Dr. Dave Gill, a central Illinois House candidate, to translate these lofty goals and ideals into programs and tangible progress. "Here in IL-13," Dave told us this morning, "we've seen the impact of economic inequality for the past 20-30 years, with jobs sent overseas and reduced access to appropriate health care and educational opportunities. As I travel through the district, I see the blight of poverty everywhere, and it pains me to know that IL-13 voted for Trump by 5 points last year. There is good news on the horizon, though-- I talk with citizens throughout the district, and among those who did vote for Trump, there are huge levels of buyer's remorse. They now recognize that his 'economic populism' was a crock, and they're angry that they got deceived by him. It started with his Cabinet picks, and the anger has grown as they've come to learn more about TrumpCare. As an E.R. physician, I know all too well the consequences of a bad healthcare system, and I look forward to going to Congress and helping to lead the charge toward Single-Payer. I've been a Bernie fan since the early 90's, and I'm proud that Bernie handily won our district in the Democratic primary last year. I hope to follow in his footsteps and ultimately join him in Washington."