"Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it"

‘Life after Trump’: Paul Ryan Is Now Reportedly ’Embarrassed’ by the President — and Is Pushing Fox News to Dump Him
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86690

Remember former House Speaker Paul Ryan? I don’t.

But a new report from Vanity Fair describing the chaos inside Fox News — where Ryan serves as a board member — reminded readers that he’s still something of a player in conservative politics. And according to the report, written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, Ryan is now, after having given up all his constitutional power, finally interested in standing up to the president.

The report describes the behind-the-scenes crisis emerging at Fox, which has been thrown into turmoil as the Democrats’ rapid impeachment push knocks the network off-kilter. Most dramatically, that disruption has played out in an on-air feud between hosts Shep Smith and Tucker Carlson. Sherman found that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace felt compelled to intervene and tell Smith to back off, though a spokesperson for the network denied this claim.
The report continued:

Does anyone else feel that the Ukraine story...

is just a prelude to a much darker narrative which is being hidden? In some of the original reporting there were mentions of multiple sinister actions but everyone, including the media, seem fixated on this one subject. I really believe there is much, much more going on here.

This is just one of the particulars I have come across, but I think there is more to it:

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/100212485209
Did Trump promise to tell Putin the identity(ies) of one or more US spies?

We are due for a course correction

To Balance the Scales of Justice, Don’t Be Afraid to Pack the Court
The lifetime appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh cry out for Democratic hardball in response.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/kavanaugh-trump-packing-court.html?te=1&nl=david-leonhardt&emc=edit_ty_20190917?campaign_id=39&instance_id=12436&segment_id=17083&user_id=ca02b127fa17b8d676fde27e367a12bb®i_id=89651072

<<snip>>

Democrats are left in an unenviable position. Should they win a federal “trifecta” — the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives — they’ll still have to deal with a Trump-branded judiciary. It’s entirely possible that a future Democratic agenda would be circumscribed and unraveled by a Supreme Court whose slim conservative majority owes itself to minority government and constitutional hardball.

So what should Democrats do? They should play hardball back. Congress, according to the Judiciary Act of 1789, decides the number of judges. It’s been 150 years since it changed the size of the Supreme Court. I think it’s time to revisit the issue. Should Democrats win that trifecta, they should expand and yes, pack, the Supreme Court. Add two additional seats to account for the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations. Likewise, expand and pack the entire federal judiciary to neutralize Trump and McConnell’s attempt to cement Republican ideological preferences into the constitutional order.

The reasoning underpinning this proposal isn’t just about the future; it’s about the past. We have had two rounds of minority government in under two decades — two occasions where executive power went to the popular-vote loser. Rather than moderate their aims and ambitions, both presidents have empowered ideologues and aggressively spread their influence. We are due for a course correction.

The goal isn’t to make the courts a vehicle for progressive policy, but to make sure elected majorities can govern — to keep the United States a democratic republic and not a judge-ocracy. Yes, there are genuine constitutional disputes, questions about individual rights and the scope of federal power. At the same time, there are broad readings of the Constitution — ones that give our elected officials the necessary power to act and to solve problems — and narrow readings, which handcuff and restrict the range of our government.

In the past, courts have walled entire areas of American life off from federal action. They’ve put limits on American democracy and blocked the people, through their representatives, from tackling fundamental issues of public concern. During Reconstruction, courts handcuffed the government as it tried to address violence and state-sanctioned racism; during the Progressive Era, they kept Congress from putting the economy under some measure of democratic control.

We’re living through a version of this right now. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court has denied Medicaid coverage to millions of poor people, neutered the Voting Rights Act, authorized new waves of voter suppression, unleashed the power of money for entrenched interests and would-be oligarchs, and opened the door to extreme partisan gerrymandering. And while this Court hasn’t brought the absurd Lochner-era doctrines that effectively made it impossible to legislate working conditions back from the dead, it has, in Justice Elena Kagan’s phrase, “weaponized” the First Amendment to strike down economic regulation and undermine organized labor.

<<snip>>

@AOC:

To Save the Republic, Some of Trump's Allies and Appointees Will Have to Face Federal Prosecution

To Save the Republic, Some of Trump’s Allies and Appointees Will Have to Face Federal Prosecution
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86461

To save our republic, some of Trump’s enablers and political appointees may have to go to jail, just like happened with Nixon’s people.

Trump’s policies are inflicting massive damage on the working class, the environment, minorities, and our economy. And the damage he’s doing to our body politic will certainly alter our form of government if there aren’t legal consequences.

Trump and his cronies have shown present and future politicians how much corruption the Republican Party and the public will tolerate, and it’s a very bad sign for the future of the American experiment.

<<snip>>

As I point out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, candidate Richard Nixon interfered with President Johnson’s efforts to negotiate peace in Vietnam; candidate Ronald Reagan interfered with President Carter’s efforts to free hostages in Iran; and George H.W. Bush loyalists on the Supreme Court corruptly disrupted the electoral process in Florida to install Bush’s son in the White House.

If Nixon had been held to account, Reagan and Bush may not have been so brazen in their willingness to subvert American democracy for political purposes and to help their campaign donors.

Their ability to get away with such corruption to win elections paved the way for Trump’s welcoming—indeed, soliciting—help from Russia and other foreign governments to become president. And now he’s even shut down the last “cop on the beat” for the 2020 election by crippling the Federal Election Commission. Furthermore, his chief enabler, #MoscowMitch McConnell, is blocking any legislation that will prevent our election infrastructure from being hacked while forestalling consequences by injecting more manifestly unqualified or corrupt people into our judicial bloodstream than during any administration in history.

<<snip>>

Now is the time to begin a conversation about how Trump’s enablers will be held to account, to bring post-Trump America back into the realm of a functioning democratic republic.

Preet Bharara: House: Scorch the earth

revisionist history seeks to make Republicans who preceded Trump look better than they ever were

Residual Rancor and Rage for Reagan, Romney, Dubya, Cheney, and Other Wingers Now Credited With Being Better Than They Ever Were
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86298

You may have noticed a bit of revisionist history going on that seeks to make Republicans who preceded Trump look better than they ever were. As we all know, Americans have very little sense of history. Even history that ain't that old fades fast. And with the glut provided by modern information systems, our memories get taxed beyond capacity to retain even stuff that happened a few weeks ago. Then, too, there are so many demands on our always flighty attention spans that most of us lose the thread, misplace the plot, and fail to keep track of the characters even as the narrative is still being written or played out.

So, is it any wonder that distinctly villainous people who turned up just a chapter or two ago can readily be re-drafted and transformed into versions of themselves we'd readily find unconvincing if we still had the tools of memory, history, or attention spans that would allow us to recall just what a bunch of venal or dishonest shits they were clearly shown to be when they first commanded the stage.

Remembering them at all might not even be that important except for the fact that all these (and other assholes) have been remarkably quiet during the incredibly crazy time of Trump. At a time when Dubya, and Dick, and Jeb, for instance, had almost nothing to lose by raising their voices about the threat Trump posed to the country they always claimed to love, they haven't said a damn thing. I mean, really, these guys already owed the country some serious acts of atonement what with the mess they left in their wake. From Katrina to the massive debt of the Iraq war, not to mention lots of people who died early and unnecessarily, the Bush bros and the Dastardly Dick Cheney should have been on Fox every fuckin' day telling their right wing brethren that nothing Trump was doing was going to make America great again. Au contraire, mes amis, Trump ain't on your side.

I guess they couldn't bring themselves to do that for the sake of their country because, though Trump wasn't really on the side of the rabble who turned out for his rallies, he was still delivering the goods to the rich and powerful, making it pretty damn hard for the rich and powerful to speak up or speak out, no matter the ultimate consequences or the disaster that was unfolding.

Back in the 90s, during the Clinton administration, Cheney was going around crying gloom and doom about deficits, but when he and George Herbert Walker Bush's son ascended to the White House, Cheney went around telling Republicans that "deficits don't matter." Then, when Obama was in office and had to try to dig us out of a deep hole dug by Bush, Cheney, and unscrupulous bankers, deficits began to matter a whole lot again, and Republicans were beside themselves with worry about the national debt, blaming Obama for reckless spending. But then, presto change-o, Trump was elected and deficits don't matter a damn again. Deficits are measured on a sliding scale, ya see. The right wingers spend like sailors on leave, about to depart for a war zone. The deficit balloons. Trump wastes money beyond the imaginations of most people, and nearly all the captains of commerce, corrupted politicians, con artists on K St., and Republican rats, active or recently retired, are quiet as monks who've taken vows of silence.

Just for the record, lots of the scoundrels who worked for Bush/Cheney also took jobs with Trump. Just for the record, Bush also tended to offer garbled and idiotic comments on a daily basis (Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.), though he didn't tweet, thank God, bird brain though he was. For the record, Dick Cheney spent much of his time defending torture, a pre-cursor to Stephen Miller and his ilk in terms of dedicated advocacy of fascist cruelty. And, just for the record, by the time Regan reached his second term, he was, like Trump, showing daily signs of severe mental deterioration. And, like Trump, Reagan was busy leaving a legacy of assaults on the environment through deregulation, veiled appeals to racism, and wealth redistribution benefitting the already-rich at the expense of the majority of Americans. Reagan screwed the country with an affable actor's smile while Trump fucks us all spitefully and sadistically, but the violation seems much the same. Victor Cantu, a writer friend of mine, describes Trump as "Miracle Grow for hatred," but Nixon was also a pretty good compound for growing hate and suspicion between Americans dating all the way back to his first political campaign when he painted his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a subversive and a "pinko." (Younger readers may not know that a "pinko" was a right-wing fearmongering term that defined liberals as "reds," only slightly less determined to destroy us than the dirty Commies who were, lest we forget, mostly Russians.

<<snip>>

The electoral college is in trouble

The electoral college is in trouble
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-electoral-college-is-in-trouble/2019/08/28/ba2b3a8c-c98f-11e9-be05-f76ac4ec618c_story.html?commentId=26ed2c27-7748-4adf-8d56-4f27a0f7739e


The assumptions underlying a controversy are often more important than the controversy itself.

Take the case of our blithe acceptance of the electoral college. There is nothing normal or democratic about choosing our president through a system that makes it ever more likely that the candidate who garners fewer votes will nonetheless assume power. For a country that has long claimed to model democracy to the world, this is both wrong and weird.

And there is also nothing neutral or random about how our system works. The electoral college tilts outcomes toward white voters, conservative voters and certain regions of the country. People outside these groups and places are supposed to sit back and accept their relative disenfranchisement. There is no reason they should, and at some point, they won’t. This will lead to a meltdown.

<<snip>>

This means that the country could render a negative verdict on Trump’s time in office by swinging away from him in a big way — and he would still be president for four more years.

Defenders of such a departure from one-person, one-vote say that if Democrats run up big leads in a few states and regions — especially California but also, say, New York, Illinois and New England — that shouldn’t count. Their strained claim is that a president is somehow more “representative” of the country if he wins by eking out tiny margins in several Midwestern states. This transforms our democracy into a casino. If you narrowly hit the right numbers in some places, you take the pot.

What they are really defending, without explicitly saying so, is the idea that states with a higher percentage of white, non-Hispanic voters should have a disproportionate influence on who becomes president.

As a short-term strategic matter, Cohn is right to stress the importance to the 2020 result of states that were closely divided in 2016. But while I have great affection for the Midwest, I see no just reason for an individual voter in California having far less power than an individual voter in, say, Wisconsin or Michigan.

And the system’s bias toward white voters only encourages Trump’s habit of dividing the country along racial lines. So in addition to being undemocratic, the electoral college encourages a particularly odious politician with no interest in uniting the country to do all he can to promote minority rule.

At some point, the majority will rise up. If Cohn’s worst-case-for-democracy scenario materializes, 2020 could be that year. Our founders admitted that the electoral college system they created in the original Constitution was defective by altering it with the 12th Amendment in 1804 . It’s time we followed their lead in showing the same willingness to scrap a system that is sending us headlong into a national crisis.

Is the GOP still the "party of Reagan"? Oh, very much so.

Donald and Ronald
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86037

<<snip>>

Joe has a real need to say that today's Republican Party - Trump's party in his eyes - is significantly different from the party he supported and served, which was, he routinely says, "the party of Lincoln and Reagan".

President Abraham Lincoln died more than 150 years ago. The "Solid South" was so enraged at him for beating them in the Civil War and at his party for ending slavery that they voted Democrat for the next 100 years. Then the Democrats started supporting civil rights for people of colour. The Republicans saw the opportunity, courted them and flipped them. The Solid South is now theirs. It has been a long time since the Republican Party has been "the party of Lincoln". Let us put that aside.

Is the GOP still the "party of Reagan"? Oh, very much so. And I was recently reminded exactly how much while re-reading a book I wrote during his presidency back in the 1980s: "You Get What You Pay For". As I flipped through the pages, I found myself saying, over and over again, "that's just like Trump".

Joe constantly points out that Trump started his campaign with racism, riding down the escalator, attacking Mexicans. Joe thinks this illustrates a difference.

But Ronald Reagan also started his presidential campaign with racism. He chose to make his kick-off speech in the heart of the Solid South, in Mississippi, quite near where three civil rights workers had been murdered. He said, "I believe in states' rights." It was the biggest dog whistle of the day, code for segregation, and the crowd cheered.

He continued: "... we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." It had been the Republican Party that had tried to impose integration after the Civil War. Reagan was making it clear that his party was completely divorcing itself from Lincoln's vision.

It was not a one-off. Reagan ran against the "welfare queens" and against "the strapping bucks" who stood in front of you at the supermarket, buying steaks with food stamps, while you made do with hamburger helper, earned by the honest sweat of your brow. It was a brilliant strategy that turned government programmes into handouts to minorities with money stolen - through taxes - from good white people.

It was called the Southern Strategy. Reagan did not invent it. But he sold it with warmth, charm, and a smile.

What he brought to the presidency that was really original was making up stories and never being embarrassed that they were not true. He made up a tale about a mysterious stranger who gave the Founding Fathers the courage to sign the Declaration of Independence.

He loved the tale of a bomber pilot who decided not to parachute from his shot-up plane in order to stay and comfort a wounded member of his crew as they plunged to the ground and received the Congressional Medal of Honor ... posthumously ... and told it often, although it had only happened in a movie.

He said that he had been present at the liberation of a concentration camp during World War II, though he had never left Hollywood.

It used to be that being caught in a lie harmed your credibility, but Reagan, for the most part, got away with it. In doing so he set a new standard that opened the tarnished road that Trump rides down on today.

<<snip>>

So, Joe, and all the ex-Republicans, and the upright Establishmentarians, Trump may be vulgar, Trump may be abrasive, but in terms of racism, corruption, and destruction, he is Mr Reagan's true heir. Trump's Republican Party is what it has been at least since the 1980s, only more so.

Are we nuts yet? I think I am.

Notes from the Cuckoo's Nest: Am I a Russian? Are You? And What about That Guy over There?
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86024

<<snip>>

According to Engel's reporting, there are armies of Russians in front of keyboards cranking out this stuff in a concerted effort to get Americans to hate one another, mistrust one another, and generally lose faith in ourselves, our system of government, and our fellow Americans.

And it's working, ain't it? The Russians have a man in the Oval Office, a guy who loves Putin, loves the love letters he gets from Kim Jong Un, and is undermining our intelligence services, ignoring the threat to our democracy, and lending all his efforts to further divide this country until it cracks.

And it's cracking, ain't it? The evidence is written in blood, written in rallies, written in the miasma of corruption and barely-concealed criminality that covers the waterfront from pedophilia to presidential malfeasance and nonfeasance, from pardons to prostitutes to stripping away of regulations meant to protect us from pollution of air and water. Add to that the creeps like Tucker Carlson and the always-odious Ann Coulter, telling us that the threat of white supremacy is a hoax, or that even a mention of background checks by Trump is a blow against the empire.

And don't it just begin to seem that very real daily malevolence is at work here. We get up, turn on our computers or our TVs and up pops the latest shooting, scandal, or presidential pally boy and pervert found dead in his cell under the most suspicious of circumstances. How can we bear such times and live?

Can we trust what we read? What we're told by anyone anymore? I'm so gaslighted and fucked over by now that I'm beginning to think I might be a Russian agent myself. I do know I've spent a lot of time sowing division with things I write, so maybe I'm working for Putin now. Maybe it's not just discourse between citizens in a democracy now. Maybe calling out the racism and decrying the corruption and ugliness of the right wing is doing nothing more than furthering the progress toward the cliff we all seem to be heading for in this once-fairly-ok country Trump promised to make great again. You know, like back when black people were charged poll taxes or made to pass impossible tests in order to vote, or when they had to drink from separate water fountains, attend separate schools, or piss in separate rest rooms. Or back in those great days when women couldn't get credit in their own names unless their husbands co-signed for the spoiled bitches.

I gotta tell ya, I'm an old man now. I've been through the political wars since I was still in my teens. I've done my tiny bit to combat the right wingers across the spectrum of their perfidies and predations against minorities, against working people, against common decency, against the raids on Social Security and the assaults on sanity, the environment, and a more viable future on this planet. Like so many others, I was sickened and appalled by the massively wasteful war in Vietnam, the virulent and persistent racism, and the constant rip offs of the treasury. Like so many other people of good will who wanted so desperately to love our country, I was disgusted by Nixon and Kissinger, by the bumbling Gerald Ford who pardoned his boss and told us our "long national nightmare" was over. I was nauseated by Reagan's phony role-playing when he cast himself as an archetypical American hero, affable, likeable, and good natured, though he was a dark and maggoty figure, wriggling with deeply embedded racism of the kind he shared with Nixon in late-night phone calls to that pathologically damaged human being. Like many others, I lent energies to opposing the nuclear buildup of the '80s, opposed wars little and bigger, from the invasion of Grenada to the war in Iraq. I lived through decades being told that the Russians were coming, that they were not our friends, and they were not bearing gifts. I shuddered when Reagan made an on-air joke about launching nukes their way. I hung my head as I watched the dumbing down of the presidency under Reagan, then the bred-in-the-bone privileged stupidity of sub-mediocrities like George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle, his hand-picked white bread VP, the dim-witted son of money who corrected a grade school kid who had correctly spelled "potato." I opposed Clinton's welfare reform bill, and went nuts when he signed off on repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act that would later help the bankers to pillage the country and bring the entire world to the brink of financial collapse when the big money thieves stole so much they nearly brought down the entire house of cards. And, like so many, I was sickened and appalled by the dim-witted George "Dubya" Bush and his merry band of neo-con henchmen and enablers, many of whom would later turn up again, undiminished, in the Trump administration. It was truly horrifying to see a man like Dick Cheney defending torture after getting us mired in Iraq, needlessly and criminally, even as his old outfit, Halliburton, pocketed billions for doing bad work and endangering American solders in the process. Like so many others, I remember Rumsfeld sending soldiers to Iraq in unarmored Humvees because that crooked administration was so eager to go to war they couldn't wait, excusing the lack of concern for the troops by saying "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." This was from a Secretary of "Defense" in charge of the most expensively funded military force in the world, where so much money disappeared without a trace.

And now, along with my fellow baby boomers, I went from diving under desks in grade school to now seeing Russians in the White House woodwork. Don't bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me.

I thought we'd seen it all, those of us who've been on this long strange trip since the Cold War. But now it seems like we ain't seen nothin' yet. Despite the craziness we've witnessed, nothing could have prepared us for what we've seen in the past three years, a massive exhibition of mind fuckery far beyond the imagination of the most gifted, addled, or paranoid writer of fiction. It's a screenplay that would have been laughed off the screen, with a cast of characters too bizarre to make it into a Marvel comic book, with a dastardly orange super villain with cotton-candy hair, a murderous Korean shrimp who writes him love letters, and cunning Russians attacking us at the most vulnerable points of our nation's original sins of slavery, racism, and distance from our ideals.

<<snip>>

Are we nuts yet? I think I am.