"Trump's trade war took a stunning bite out of the US economy, and it's the strongest evidence yet that he's shooting himself in the foot"

Bob Bryan in Business Insider:

There's mounting anecdotal evidence that President Donald Trump's trade war is causing trouble for the US economy and businesses. But Friday's report on third-quarter gross domestic product may be the best hard evidence yet that the tariffs are causing major disruptions in the economy. 

GDP rose at an annualized rate of 3.5% in the third quarter. But the contribution of net exports of goods and services — the measure of how much trade added or subtracted to GDP growth — was a dismal -1.78 percentage points. 

- It was the largest negative contribution to GDP growth for trade in 33 years; in the second quarter of 1985, trade subtracted 1.91 points.

…

Uncertainty over trade policy may have also contributed to muted growth in capital expenditures by businesses. Nonresidential fixed investment — spending on large-ticket items like equipment — added only 0.12 points to GDP growth, the lowest in seven quarters, while overall fixed investment was a 0.04-point drag, the worst in 10 quarters. 

Companies have said that this uncertainty and the possibility that tariffs will push up costs elsewhere could result in decreased capex spending.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/gdp-trump-...

"In New York, California, Texas, and 27 other states you can take time off from work to vote — here's the full list"

Rachel Gillett and Grace Panetta in Business Insider list every state’s laws around taking time off work to go vote. If you haven’t been able to early vote, this may be a good opportunity to ensure you have the chance to contribute to the democratic functioning of our country.

Currently, there is no federal law that mandates employers provide their employees time off to cast their ballots. But the majority of US states have time-off-to-vote laws, also referred to as voter-leave laws, and have different requirements and exceptions for employers and employees. 

While some states guarantee paid time off, for example, others do not. And the time guaranteed for employees to vote varies state-by-state as well.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/can-i-leav...

"Trump’s Embrace of Racial Bigotry Has Shifted What Is Acceptable in America"

Jamelle Bouie in Slate:

“Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism—first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—anti-Muslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism.

These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. But common to every expression is a desire to ostracize, remove, and even eliminate the racialized group. The difference between segregation to isolate black Americans and race riots to remove them is one of degree, not kind. Individual efforts to keep black people out of public space are a soft expression of the same impulse that drives radical calls for a white “ethno-state.”

Seen as part of a continuum, the relationship between bigoted rhetoric and bigoted action becomes clearer. The former can facilitate the latter. A society permissive of rhetorical dehumanization is necessarily more vulnerable to actual dehumanization. Allow racial contempt to spread unchallenged, and racist violence will eventually follow.

…

Over the past month, in order to generate support for his political party, the president has tried to generate racial hysteria out of a small “caravan” of migrants headed for the American border, where they will attempt to claim amnesty…

Right-wing media followed suit, taking the president’s claim, amplifying it, and connecting it to a conspiracy theory accusing liberal philanthropist George Soros of orchestrating the “caravan.”…

This message of dangerous hordes and anti-American conspiracies was meant to inspire fear and hatred. And those inclined to fear and hate picked up the message. One of them, who blamed a Jewish refugee organization for bringing “invaders that kill our people,” decided to act, killing 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the worst anti-Semitic terror attack in American history, part of a surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes since 2016…

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/1...

"A President Who Condones Political Violence" →

David Frum in The Atlantic:

It’s striking that the president has not offered a word of sympathy for any of the targets of the bombs. After all, even if the “false flag” theory were true to any degree, the people targeted were indeed targeted. The motives or identity of the would-be bomber do not mitigate the shock and threat to the person receiving the bomb—including the line-of-duty security personnel who encountered the bombs sent to Obama and others whose mail is screened for them.

…

When people talk about Trump condoning and inviting political violence, his behavior over the past 48 hours—and that of his followers—is exactly what they have in mind: the utter lack of sympathy for those attacked or threatened; the readiness to blame victims of terrorism for being terrorized; the determination to exonerate the president of any consequences for his own wild behavior; the indulgence of wild conspiracy theories as a means to achieve that exoneration, piped directly into the Oval Office from the furthest extremes of American life.

Only eight days ago, Trump praised a Republican member of Congress who physically attacked a reporter without provocation and then lied to the police about the attack. Today, Trump claims that there’s a conspiracy to blame him for bombs mailed to CNN and other people he has abused. And this claim is not Trump’s alone; it is echoed by many of the apologists and defenders of his government. Democracy has a rule, an absolute prohibition on the use or threat of violence to coerce political ends. Trump is walking the road away from democracy, and he is not walking alone.

"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.

…

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.

…

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