"Judge Orders Evidence to Be Gathered in Emoluments Case Against Trump"

Instead of divesting, or at least placing his businesses in a “blind trust,” Trump’s continued control of his businesses while he’s president remains an enormous conflict of interest (even Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm, of all things). Since he became president, the use of his hotels by other countries’ diplomats has skyrocketed. It’s effectively bribery, and it may even be so great that it counts as an unconstitutional “emolument.” A few cases have been raised, and it looks like one’s satisfactory enough that it’s being pursued by the courts.

Sharon LaFraniere in the New York Times:

A federal judge in Maryland on Friday ordered evidence-gathering to begin in a lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a financial interest in his company’s Washington hotel.

The plaintiffs are seeking records that could illuminate potential conflicts of interest between Mr. Trump and foreign leaders or state officials who patronize Trump International Hotel, blocks from the White House.

The judge, Peter J. Messitte of the United States District Court in Greenbelt, Md., said the Justice Department had failed to show a compelling reason to hold up the case while its lawyers appeal his earlier rulings. He ordered the parties to come up with a timeline within 20 days to produce evidence.

The lawsuit, filed by the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland, seeks for the first time to define the meaning of constitutional language that restricts the president from accepting financial benefits, so-called emoluments.

Beware bullshitters

Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:

Bullshitting (in the technical sense of lying for lying’s sake) takes way more time and effort to refute than it does to employ. Serial liar (bullshitting) politicians, like Trump, enjoy a strategic communication advantage; until they’ve completely undermined their own trust, all they have to do to remain in power is continue to lie, forcing others to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy fact-checking, hours or days past when the last lie was told, always playing catch-up with the next.

Furthermore, partisans can pick and choose which lies they believe, and partisanship is so strong right now, that it takes a lot of lies, proven to be lies (and ones important to partisans), to break that trust. But it’s worth the effort, especially when the bullshitter is the president of the United States (and doubly when he’s a fascist, undermining our democracy), so here’s a good list for the rest of this campaign season, a la a tweet thread from Daniel Dale, when he attended one of Trump’s rallies a week ago:

And here’s A handy guide to Donald Trump’s most-frequent campaign rally lies and false claims. There are some real whoppers, but you’ll see a lot more mundane claims, like inflating job numbers. And they all matter, because they’re part of a continuous smokescreen, to distract us from what he’s really trying to do: soak the American taxpayer for himself, rig the economy even more in the favor of the wealthy, and create a white ethnostate.

Trump's fascist fear-mongering leading into next week

Trump’s still flogging conspiracy theories and the fear of the South American refugee caravan, regardless of the truth, actual risk, or basic human decency. And even though they still have to cross the entire country of Mexico (as the Military Times notes, “As of Monday, the caravan was still an estimated 1,000 miles away, traveling mostly on foot, a pace that would not bring those men, women and children to the U.S. border for weeks.”), he’s ordered troops to the border right now, in a complete waste of soldiers’ time and taxpayers money, just to look tough for partisan Republicans before Election Day, Tuesday.

And now there’s this ad, which Trump himself is boosting, which focuses on a man who committed murder, who crossed the US-Mexico border illegally during the beginning of Bush’s first term, which it doesn’t mention (because the complexity of reality doesn’t make a good, racist attack ad!), preferring to place all of the blame on Democrats and Democratic policy. Here’s Kevin Kruse, an American historian, on Twitter:

His thread’s worth reading in full, as it contains the history of how a certain portion of the Republican Party willfully embraced a strategy of pushing coded racist appeals, that would slowly grow more untrue, violent, and explicit:

For those of you who don't remember, here are the 1988 ads and some supporting interviews, all taken from the outstanding documentary "Boogie Man" about GOP strategist Lee Atwater:

A segment on race and American politics from the award-winning documentary film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story features Mike Dukakis, Sarah Palin Senior advisor Tucker Eskew, writer Ishmael Reed, and journalist Joe Conason discussing racial politics, the Willie Horton Ad, and the Revolving Door Ad.

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A native South Carolinian, Atwater knew the power of racist appeals and was willing to go to places where others wouldn't. 

But he still understood it had to be done carefully. Here's his famous interview from 1981 on the use of racial "code words"

In 1981, the legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University.

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Unlike the Willie Horton ad -- which was outsourced to third parties to the point where Atwater insisted he had nothing to do with it -- this new ad is coming directly from the personal Twitter account of the president himself.

And it isn't just that the president of the United States is personally pushing white nationalist politics in its ugliest and crudest form, it's that he's doing it proudly and with purpose.

That is so, so much worse than "Willie Horton" ever was.

As a PS, here's another way the new ad is worse -- Dukakis was blamed for a furlough that did happen during his term, albeit through a policy his Republican predecessor created.

The new ad blames Democrats for things that happened on Republicans' watch.

This is how we defeat fascism

At the polls, before it’s too late.

As of yesterday, early voting turnout is strong:

I cannot stress enough how important this election is, first as a rejection of authoritarianism and xenophobia, but second as our chance to begin pushing back against concentrated power and corruption at the top, which has been ignored and allowed to fester for decades (no need to look any farther than the repeated financial-fraud-based recessions), leading to Trump. So vote, then stay engaged, continue to educate yourselves on what happens in our country, and keep voting for people whose eyes are open and will try to tackle the rot. Trump and his cronies won’t; they’re as much Of the Swamp as the rest of them.

From ProPublica, here are some Last-Minute Tips for Figuring Out Your Ballot and Making Sure You Can Vote

Electronic voting machines are wildly insecure

The electronic voting machine industry is one big fraud. Machines are neither secure nor dependable. State election commissions don’t have the expertise (or budget) to understand the technical issues for a market to properly work. Clear, strong, enforceable, and enforced regulation is necessary, but until that happens, we’re stuck in the position where any claim of fraudulent manipulation (at least at the level of state election commissions) needs to be taken seriously. There was the recent bug in machines in Texas which was switching votes. And now security researchers are pointing out that machines since 2016 are less secure than previous ones! From simple research by Brian Varner in Wired (a la Bruce Schneier):

This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation

RE: Ending birthright citizenship for recent and/or "illegal" immigrants

The idea has frequently been pushed by the most racist politicians in America throughout our history, both to keep the USA more white/European/Western/whatever, and as a political tactic to get people’s votes by inducing panic and fear of outsiders (even though there’s never been a real risk of hostile internal takeover). And it’s been quietly brewing again for the past few years. So it’s no surprise that the White House (which, again, includes a few white supremacists and several other highly racist individuals) would bring it up a week before midterm elections which could determine whether the Republican Party holds onto either chamber of Congress. Trump gets a partial win just by keeping us distracted and fueling the culture war, though the racist operatives in the White House probably are pushing for an Executive Order to undermine the 14th Amendment, no matter that it would be flagrantly unconstitutional. Case law and original intent are definitive about the meaning of the 14th’s clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It really was meant to be as widely interpretable as it seems, intending to undo the Dred Scott decision and ensure citizenship to the children of slaves—slaves, people who were taken from their own countries and held no intent to settle (nor allegiance toward!) the United States. “Illegal” immigrants are clearly covered, and it would require passing another Amendment to undo that. As James Ho cites in The Federalist (which I highly recommend reading in full, as it addresses a lot of little “but what if…”s):

Senator Edgar Cowan (R-PA) – who would later vote against the entire constitutional amendment anyway – was the first to speak in opposition to extending birthright citizenship to the children of foreigners. Cowan declared that, “if [a state] were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.” He feared that the Howard amendment would effectively deprive states of the authority to expel persons of different races – in particular, the Gypsies in his home state of Pennsylvania and the Chinese in California – by granting their children citizenship and thereby enabling foreign populations to overrun the country. Cowan objected especially to granting birthright citizenship to the children of aliens who “owe [the U.S.] no allegiance [and] who pretend to owe none,” and to those who regularly commit “trespass” within the U.S.[22]

In response, proponents of the Howard amendment endorsed Cowan’s interpretation. Senator John Conness (R-CA) responded specifically to Cowan’s concerns about extending birthright citizenship to the children of Chinese immigrants:

“The proposition before us … relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. … I am in favor of doing so. … We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”

The numbers are in, and Trump's tax cut didn't reduce the deficit – despite his many promises →

The “hack gap” (and the right-wing spin machine) at work.

John Harwood, in CNBC:

On the campaign trail, Trump first proposed a $10 trillion tax cut, far larger than any Republican rival's, but insisted it wouldn't boost the federal budget deficit because the economy would "take off like a rocket ship."

…the Treasury reported that the 2018 deficit swelled to $779 billion. That level, the highest in six years, marks a 17 percent increase over 2017.

The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics →

Virtually all mainstream “conservative” arguments in the news these days are hypocritical smoke, but are given constant airtime, even by the centrist/liberal media which you might think shouldn’t bother (and/or would be better served ignoring the constant bad-faith whining).

Matthew Yglesias identifies a few major political/economic effects and causes among the moderate-to-far right political/media operatives that led not only to this, but was a significant cause of the increasing radicalism of the Republican Party, leading to Trump:

The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda. 

The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda. Television producers who would never dream of assigning segments where talking heads debate whether it’s bad that the richest country on earth also has millions of children growing up in dire poverty think nothing of chasing random conservative shiny objects, from “Fast & Furious” (remember that one?) to Benghazi to the migrant caravan.

And more than Citizens United or even gerrymandering, it’s a huge constant thumb on the scale in favor of the political right in America.

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…there is simply no institution on the left that has anywhere near the institutional clout — to say nothing of the value system — of conservative broadcast media.

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 Research from Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort. A separate study by Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.

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Democratic Party politicians’ statements about troops and other matters touching on patriotism are hyper-policed by easily triggered conservative snowflakes, whose mass panics easily come to dominate the national political agenda. And it is frustrating for liberals to watch this happen when Republican Party politicians are able to skate by with little scrutiny. 

But here’s the critical thing: Even though plenty of liberals are happy to be mad about the double standard, nobody important in progressive political commentary is actually mad about Trump’s troop visiting schedule. We’re mad that Trump is destroying financial and environmental regulation while trying to screw poor people out of health care and nutrition assistance, all while imprisoning children seeking asylum and undermining the international order. That’s important stuff, while Trump’s golfing — like Clinton’s emails — fundamentally isn’t. 

And yet elections are swung, almost by definition, not by the majority of people who correctly see the scope of the differences and pick a side but by the minority of people for whom the important divisions in US partisan politics aren’t decisive. Consequently, the issues that matter most electorally are the ones that matter least to partisans. Things like email protocol compliance that neither liberals nor conservatives care about even slightly can be a powerful electoral tool because the decisive voters are the ones who don’t care about the epic ideological clash of left and right. 

But journalists take their cues about what’s important from partisan media outlets and partisan social media. 

Thus, the frenzies of partisan attention around “deplorables” and “lock her up” served to focus on controversies that, while not objectively significant. are perhaps particularly resonant to people who don’t have firm ideological convictions. 

Meanwhile, similar policy-neutral issues like Trump’s insecure cellphone, his preposterous claim to be too busy to visit the troops, or even his apparent track record of tax fraud don’t get progressives worked into a lather in the same way. 

This is a natural tactical advantage that, moreover, serves a particular strategic advantage given the Republican Party’s devotion to plutocratic principles on taxation and health insurance that have only a very meager constituency among the mass public.