Trump still flailing, campaign still failing

-- He cannot speak intelligently about his immigration plan's "softening".

Donald Trump on Thursday night insisted on CNN that his recent comments about immigration reflect a "hardening" of his stance, but the Republican nominee refused to directly answer questions about his position on deportation.

"I don’t think it’s a softening," Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper when the host noted that Trump actually said there could be a "softening" of his policy on deportation. “I’ve had people say it’s a hardening, actually.”

Despite the fact that he does not demonstrate a working knowledge of his campaign's core issue, that response might have been TMI, given Trump's propensity for sexual entendre'.  (This list is only up to date through June; his most recent comment mentioned Hillary's celebrity support as "not very hot".  It does not appear as if he was referencing the male celebrities.  I can't wait to see what he says when someone tells him today is Women's Equality Day.  Oh, and thanks to Seth Meyers for the inspiration to write this paragraph.)

Update: PolitiFact actually fact-checked Trump's claim with barely any naughty tongue-in-cheek that I could discern or even infer (the definition of 'hot' they use is 'popular', and not 'sexy'), and found it to be Mostly False.

Throughout the interview, Cooper attempted to clarify Trump's stance on deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, but with no success.

When he first asked Trump if he had a change of heart about deporting all undocumented immigrants, Trump launched into a rant about building a wall and said that he will give more details on his plan in a week. In addition to building a "great wall," Trump said he'll use "tunnel technology" and "all sorts of e-verify."

Trump reiterated that he will deport the "bad" undocumented immigrants, but suggested that he doesn't have much of a plan beyond that.

"After that, we’re going to see what happens," he said.

Trump dodged the question again when Cooper asked if there would be a path to legalization.

"You know it’s a process? You can’t take 11 at one time and just say, ‘Boom, you’re gone.’ We have to find where these people are," Trump said in response.

He put himself in this position.  Being asked questions he doesn't know the answer to should be familiar territory for him; certainly his being vague and defensive about the questions is old hat for the rest of us.  But his base isn't noticing the hypocrisy, and something on the order of 35-40% of the nation's voters like it just like that.  It's more than 50% of the voters in Texas and several other southern and mountain western states.

I'm so old I remember when people carried beach sandals, i.e. "flip-flops" to the Republican National Convention, and wore Band-Aids on their chins with purple hearts colored on them.  Either a lot of conservatives have died since 2004 or the nation's collective IQ has gone up a few points.  I'm guessing both, causatively, though some days it barely seems like it.

-- Trump's new campaign manager Steve Brietbart Bannon has been found to have been charged with domestic violence in the 1990s, and also to be currently registered to vote at a home which is both vacant and scheduled for demolition.  Perhaps we have at last found the infamous Voter Fraud Unicorn in Florida, the one that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton have been so afraid of that also lives in disguise as a chupacabra in Texas.

If you're Trump's campaign manager, is taking millions of dollars from the Russians better or worse than being a voter fraudster who beats his wife?  I report, you decide ... because the Trumpets don't give a shit either way.

Here's what bad about Trump being so incompetent, and not just for the GOP but the nation: it leaves Hillary Clinton with no competition whatsoever, and that makes her an even lousier candidate than she already is.  She's been on cruise control to the White House since the convention, and not even her own foundation issues will likely slow her down much.

Does make great fodder for the cartoonists, though.

Something about power and corruption

Once more, a little collection of things I have read this week that deserve more than a Tweet, but for which I do not have time to write a full post.

So let me get this straight. President Obama is meeting with senior Congressional leaders to discuss sequestration on Friday, after the deadline has passed. Meanwhile, the Dow rallies and defense stocks, which are highly sensitive to government spending, are outperforming the market.

Is the market just conditioned to getting a last minute deal, just like what we saw during the 2011 debt ceiling impasse, or endless Eurozone summits over Greece in the same year?

What happens to equity prices if the cavalry doesn't arrive?

Ah, that would be 'crash', I believe.

-- The Supreme Court is poised to declare racism is over in America.

"There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," Bert Rein, the attorney leading the legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act—the landmark law intended to ensure all Americans can vote—told to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "That problem is solved."

Rein represents Shelby County, Alabama, one of the jurisdictions covered by a key section of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5. Under Section 5, parts of the country with histories of discriminatory election practices have to ask for permission—or "preclearance," in legal terms—from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting rules. But the South, where most of the covered jurisdictions are, has changed, Rein said, and the law, although once justified, is now unfair and unconstitutional. The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to agree. "The Marshall Plan was very good too," argued Justice Anthony Kennedy, "but times change."

There was also something Scalia said about the right to vote being an entitlement, and not a right. And then there's John Roberts, who has been shaping arguments against VRA since he was a pup (and Reagan was president).

Pre-clearance might just survive this challenge because of the egregiousness of Shelby, but it certainly won't last much longer. A case with enough merit for the conservatives on the Court to strike it down is all but inevitable. Democrats in state legislatures across the country would do well to begin considering what legal challenges to voting discrimination would look like in a post-Section 5 landscape. Kuffner has more.

-- Jack Lew got quietly confirmed as Treasury Secretary yesterday. A topic of somewhat under-the-radar discussion prior to his approval by the Senate were his large bonuses, one from Citigroup (which conservative media from the WSJ to Brietbart.com assailed) and one from NYU. The bank bonus has been defended as SOP on Wall Street, as if that makes everything dandy.

I just can't be too enthusiastic about a fox of a different color pretending to guard the henhouse. Thank goodness for Elizabeth Warren. I'll bet those Republican senators who tried to block her as head of the CFPC wish now they had been unsuccessful.

"Any idea about when we're gonna arrive in the right direction?"

Update: Firedoglake has more.

-- Speaking of massive capitalist assholes, Jamie Dimon was in town yesterday to say thanks to the peasants who work for him, and some of the rich people who give him their money.

"We need a bankruptcy process that can take apart a big bank without taking down the economy. It's been done before," Dimon said in a phone interview before starting a four-city Texas bus tour. He was in Houston on Wednesday and goes to San Antonio on Thursday.

Some veterans of the financial services industry have called for dividing diversified global banks into separate commercial banking companies - those that take deposits and make loans - and investment banks that invest in companies and trade in derivatives that hedge risks. But Dimon argues against it.

"We don't speculate with depositors' money," Dimon said of JPMorgan Chase's derivatives activities.

[...]

Dimon, 56, repeatedly has said the United States needs large, diversified banking companies to help U.S. companies operate internationally with services that are efficient due to economies of scale.

"We have to compete globally," he said, citing larger, more consolidated banks in other parts of the world such as those in China. "They'd eat our lunch" if the large U.S. banks were broken into smaller companies, Dimon said. "We need global banks."

The day before yesterday, Dimon revealed his inner pig for a moment.

At JPMorgan Chase's annual investor day on Tuesday, CEO Jamie Dimon answered one analyst's question by saying, "That's why I'm richer than you." 

What do you suppose he meant by that?

-- And starring Bob Woodward as Derp Throat.

Woodward, who once upon a time went after presidents for breaking the law, finds himself in the comically hypocritical position of condemning Obama for not ignoring federal law. Woodward is shocked, shocked that a president isn't consolidating even more authority in the executive branch.

We have passed through the looking glass.

Update: Glenn Greenwald.

(H)ere is Bob Woodward, with one rant, expressing the core values of America's media class. The president is not constrained by law (contemptuously referred to as "this piece of paper"). He not only has the right but the duty to do anything - even if the law prohibits it - to project military force whenever he wants (even though the Constitution mandates as his prime duty not to Keep Us Safe but rather that he "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed" and thus must swear as his oath "to the best of [his] ability [to] preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"). The US must act as empire, dominating the world with superior military force if it wants to stay safe. Any reduction in military spending and deployment will endanger us all.

It's to be expected that these authoritarian and militaristic values shape political leaders and their followers. That these values also shape the "watchdog" media class, as embodied by one of their "legends", explains much about US political culture generally.

Bob Woodward fulfills an important function. Just as Tim Russert was long held up as the scary bulldog questioner who proved the existence of an adversarial TV press while the reality was that, as Harper's Lewis Lapham famously put it, he maintained "the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter", the decades-old Woodward lore plays a critical role in maintaining the fiction of a watchdog press corps even though he is one of the most faithful servants of the war machine and the national security and surveillance states. Every once and awhile, the mask falls, and it's a good thing when it does.

Ciro, the newspaper, and the TeaBagger

I discovered a right-wing blogswarm yesterday. It was amusing.

It seems that Ciro Rodriguez, of Texas' 23rd Congressional district, had a town hall meeting last weekend and while a TeaBagger lady was calling him a liar, he swatted a fly on a chair with a newspaper.

This led to the illustrious David Brietbart's Big Gov posting video of the exchange, where it moved through Red State and Weekly Standard and then on to the dregs of our Texas coterie of wingnut goonbat blogs. The El Paso Times and the Dallas News dutifully followed their lead, covering the story and including the video with reports including grave political overtones for the Congressman.

See for yourself:



Ciro later apologized ...

"Unfortunately political operatives associated with my opponent's campaign tried to turn it into something else -- attempting to hijack a 'congress on your corner' event merely to engage in uncivil, cynical videotape baiting tactics," Rodriguez said in a statement. "The people of Southwest Texas deserve better than that."

"That said, I apologize for losing my temper at an event that should always be a civil and respectful exchange of ideas," he said in the statement. "I look forward to continuing to listen to folks all across southwest Texas, as we work together to create jobs and get this economy back on track."

Honestly ... I wish he had slapped her across the face. At least then he would have something to apologize for.

These town hall-disrupting thugs and morons deserve far more public rebuke than they are currently getting, and so does the network of indignant fools who instigate and then advance tripe like this.

Update: Wonkette, with a much funnier takedown ...

The best part of this stupid thing is the guy eating chips behind Rodriguez who is bemused that these people are forced to yell at each other about politics in this place instead of enjoying chips like him.

Following up two recent posts *make that three*

-- "TeaBuggin'" drew an enormous amount of unique visitors and click-throughs this week. The post connected the escapades of filmographer/"pimp"/"telephone repairman" James O'Keefe, his employer/contractor Andrew Breitbart, and Governor Rick Perry, who hosted Breitbart and other right-wing bloggers in an Austin get-together just this past weekend. Perry praised the "New Media" which Brietbart advocates and O'Keefe creates.  Maybe some enterprising journalist will ask the governor how proud he is of their most recent work in tonight's debate.  Meanwhile, you can view Brietbart (who demonstrates the same unhinged rage in person that he does in his writing on his blog) and MSNBC's David Shuster squaring off -- loudly and rudely -- in this video:



... and Perry and Brietbart and the other conservo-bloggers worshipping their weapons and each other in this video (Pajamas Media will allow you to watch it a limited number of times before they force you to register).

-- The snickering and implied sexism noted in "iPad: Mini or maxi?" also made several rounds elsewhere throughout the online world. Here are some pictures of the, ah, "hybrid product" introduced by Apple and Steve Jobs earlier in the week, courtesy Freetechie. And Feministing piled on, observing the probable lack of women's input on the name. But Apple has endured snark before about its branding and seems poised, as usual, to capitalize on the power of its product (and not its marketing).

Update: And Obama's State of the Union address, advanced here in cartoons and reacted to here by our Alliance, drew only a muttered 'you lie' instead of a shouted one, this time from Justice Samuel Alito. Demonstrating his remarkable judicial temperance, Alito scowled, shook his head, and said "not true" in response to the president's criticism of the Citizens United v. FEC decision handed down last week. Republican reaction -- led in ever-embarrassing fashion by our very own John Cornyn -- was proto-typically hypocritical. It conveniently overlooked GOP presidents' own harsh criticisms of Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade. And as the world comes around once more, we recall that Alito, as a Reagan DOJ attorney, had a hand in crafting legal strategies to overturn Roe as well.

Say no to activist judges? Republicans lie.