Trump Could be a Huge Asset for Democrats This Fall

Donald Trump's defining characteristic - even more than his pathological lying - is his malignant narcissism.  Everything is ALWAYS about him and he simply cannot accept anything or anyone that doesn't support his "Sun King" vision of himself.  The good news is that this characteristic may help Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives - and with luck, the U.S. Senate.  Trump forgets that a huge number of voters failed to vote in the 2016 presidential election and that his win traces to only about 27% of voters and a 70,000 vote spread across three states.  If those who stayed home (or those who feel they made a huge mistake) turn out in disgust with Trump and/or the GOP's reverse Robin Hood policies, things could be brutal for Republicans.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at how Trump may further wound the GOP.  Here are highlights:

One of President Trump’s most bedrock character traits is his refusal to truly reckon with any piece of information that reflects poorly on him. This self-aggrandizing, reality-denying flavor of egotism has defined Trump for decades, through his roller-coaster business career and into political life. In recent months, it has sometimes veered into the straight-up delusional, as when he reportedly claimed last year that it wasn’t actually his voice on the Access Hollywood tape.

Trump’s insistence that everything is going great was validated in unprecedented fashion when he won the presidency despite some of the strongest headwinds imaginable, shocking almost everyone — possibly including, on some deep level, himself.

But now, finally, [Trump's] the president’s unwavering confidence may finally be about to take a serious electoral toll.  The New York Times reported on Saturday that in the runup to the midterm elections this fall, President Trump is simply not listening to advisers and lawmakers who tell him what anyone can plainly see: Republicans are in deep trouble:

Congressional and party leaders and even some Trump aides are concerned that [Trump's] the president’s boundless self-assurance about politics will cause him to ignore or undermine their midterm strategy. In battleground states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Trump’s proclivity to be a loose cannon could endanger the Republican incumbents and challengers who are already facing ferocious Democratic headwinds. In election after election over the last year and a half, Democrats have vastly over performed their expected vote share, largely thanks to animus toward the president. They have triumphed in a Pennsylvania Congressional district where Trump won by more than 20 points, picked up a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama, dominated state races in Virginia, and made close several contests that almost certainly would have been Republican landslides in previous years. . . . Republicans have been sounding the alarm for months.

Trump’s reaction to all this: everything will be just fine.

The Times piece also reports that, as his fellow Republicans fret, Brad Parscale, [Trump's] the president’s pollster, is feeding him inaccurate, Trump-friendly poll numbers, which [Trump] the president is more than happy to parade on Twitter.

Why does this matter? Most presidents, even if they claim not to be obsessed with polls the way Trump is, have a pretty good idea of their own political currency, and adjust their alignment with their parties accordingly.

Something different is going on this time around. President Trump remains enormously popular within the Republican Party; most Republican members of Congress have made the calculation that even if Trump is underwater in their state, defying Trump the president would be a political loser, since it leave them without any reliable constituency.

The problem is not only that Trump refuses to believe that Republicans will lose, but that, even if he were sufficiently worried, he doesn’t care enough about his own party to bother helping.

Establishment Republicans reportedly want Trump to flog the GOP’s unpopular tax law on the campaign trail. [Trump] The president is pushing back on this directive — which he is right to do, since the unpopular law probably isn’t galvanizing anyone to vote.

But [Trump's] the president’s own, predictably unpredictable routine is unlikely to work much better. He might attack vulnerable Republican Senators he disagrees with; he might serve more as a distraction than a cheerleader, . . . This routine won’t turn off voters who already love [Trump] the president. But it’s more likely to spark another Trump news cycle than rally much-needed enthusiasm for Republican candidates.

The GOP’s best hope may be to invent reasons that red-state Democrats are hurting Trump personally, then watch him go wild on Twitter and the campaign trail.

Republicans seem to have grasped the lesson that Trump needs to be personally invested in their election results. They are trying to make the stakes of the election startlingly personal, reportedly telling Trump that if he doesn’t help them out this fall, they may not have his back if and when Democrats initiate impeachment proceedings next year. That stark warning may perk Trump’s ears up, but it’s just as likely to be perceived as an unacceptable intramural threat, not as motivation to work for the party.

[Trump] will continue living in a bubble of his own making. Because Trump was right to dismiss the concerns of the many, many people who insisted he couldn’t win in 2016, he can now perennially point to that shocking election result as proof that his instincts, not some politico egghead’s, are always correct. And if Republicans lose big this year, he’ll just say they didn’t stick by him closely enough.

It’s a dishonest, solipsitic approach to life. But it’s one that has worked shockingly well for Donald Trump.

Democratic 2018 Cash Swamps House Republicans

There are many bad signs for the Republicans in the rum up to the 2018 midterm elections that range from party base enthusiasm gaps, frightening generic polls that significantly favor Democrats, to record numbers of House Republicans making the decision to retire. Now, on top of these signs there is the huge fundraising gap in favor of Democrats.  They say money is the "mother's milk of politics" and the costs of campaigns are soaring.  A piece in Politico looks at this latest welcomed sign that Trump may well be destroying the Republican Party.  Of course, simpletons like Devin Nunes are exacerbating the situation as are Republicans who silently stand by with their thumbs up their butts as the party assaults American institutions.  Here are article excerpts:

Is it time for Republicans to start freaking out?  

More than 40 House Republican incumbents were outraised in the final quarter of 2017 by one — or several — of their Democratic opponents, according to the latest round of fundraising numbers. And of that group, more than a dozen had less cash on hand than their Democratic challengers.

For the GOP, here’s the really disturbing part: The trendline is getting worse, not better. Despite the myriad advantages of incumbency and control of Congress, there are more House members with less cash on hand than their Democratic challengers than the quarter before.

 

“Those numbers should be concerning for all Republicans,” said Mike DuHaime, a GOP consultant based in New Jersey. “This is going to be the most challenging political environment since 2006, so you have to be ready. And lot of these members came in after 2006, so for many, this will be the most challenging environment they’ve ever run in. And that’s going to prove difficult.”

A flood of Democratic money poured into House races across the country in 2017, provided in large part by small-dollar, online contributors animated by opposition to President Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress. More than 80 Democratic challengers in Republican-held districts have at least $250,000 in cash on hand at the end of the year — a sign that the House battlefield may be wider than previously thought.

[Republicans] face significant structural challenges, the fundraising figures show. A slew of recent retirements in expensive media markets, like New Jersey and California, will force Republicans to spend more to defend open seats as they bid farewell to well-funded incumbents. But Republicans believe that the tax bill — passed in late December, so too late to affect these financial reports — will help them rebound in the first quarter of 2018.

Republicans acknowledged that some members are out of practice, leaving them behind with just over nine months left before Election Day.

“Sitting and dialing and pushing for money — they’re not used to doing that, and most of them don’t like to,” said Rob Stutzman, a California-based GOP consultant. “So some of this is fat, flabby and out-of-shape fundraising muscles. Those are districts where we should be raising more.”

Republican strategists stressed that falling behind in cash on hand — the amount sitting in a member’s bank account — is a serious problem because “the only thing that matters is cash on hand, and the Republican incumbent members who have Democratic challengers with a cash-on-hand advantage need to work harder and raise more money,”

Democrats, however, believe that the fundraising surge won’t diminish after the primaries because the “biggest injection of energy for Democrats is reading the front page every day, and that’s not going away,” said John Lapp, a Democratic consultant . . . . “The Democratic surge in fundraising is just another example of the Democratic surge in energy in this election overall, and that that energy is being monetized.”

 

Andy Kim, who served on Obama’s National Security Council, raised more money than Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), a self-funder who has easily won reelection since 2014.

“We have a ton of momentum in the district,” Kim said, noting that a thousand volunteers are working with his campaign. “That’s what happens when you’re running against the lead author on the Trumpcare bill and the only New Jersey congressman who voted for the tax bill.”  

Let's hope the Democrat momentum continues and additional GOP incumbents decide to hit the retirement button.  

 

2018 Women's Marches Need to Lead to Voter Turnout Surge

2018 crowds in Washington DC

On the anniversary of the inauguration of the most vile and unfit individual to ever occupy the White House, hundreds of thousands of protesters against Trump/Pence and the GOP turned out in cities across America.  The message they seek to send is lost on that individual and the congressional Republicans who have forced the federal government into shutdown through their high handed demands and noxious policies.   While it is encouraging to see that the resistance to the foul forces embodied by Trump/Pence and today's GOP is alive and well, the true test will be whether the energy can be successfully translated into a voter surge in November that will send countless Republicans to defeat at the polls at all levels of government.  Only a GOP electoral bloodbath can reset the direction of the nation.  In Virginia, Republican suffered a massive defeat last November, but it may take more than one election cycle to turn the corner - Virginia Senate Republicans are continuing their toxic policies and need to be decimated in the 2019 election cycle.  The Washington Post looks at some of the huge turnout across the country:

From Beijing to Buenos Aires, from Denver to Dallas, from California to the Carolinas, hundreds of thousands of activists once again took to the streets to protest the policies and presidency of Donald Trump. The number of participants might not have eclipsed the millions who marched in cities a year ago, but the “resistance” still brought out swarms of people from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.

Saturday’s march made clear how a movement that began as a protest has evolved. A year of the Trump presidency, coupled with the galvanizing experience of the #MeToo moment, has made activists eager to leave a mark on the country’s political system. As a result, a key component of Saturday’s demonstrations was an effort to harness the enthusiasm behind the Women’s March and translate that into political sway at the polls this fall.

“Last year it was about hope. This year it’s about strength,” said Diane Costello, 67, a retired teacher and member of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a group that advocates for gun violence prevention, said as she marched through Manhattan.

“2018 is going to be a great year to get more progressive people elected,” said Julie Biel-Claussen, 59, executive director of the McHenry County Housing Authority in northwest Illinois, as she marched through a chilly Chicago morning.

Outside Washington, one of the biggest demonstrations on Saturday unfolded in New York.

Nearby, demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial and along the still-frozen reflecting pool on the National Mall. The group heard from speakers such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who told the crowd, “It is women who are holding our democracy together in these dangerous times.”

Although many protesters were returning for a second year, many came for the first time — some so young they had not been able to vote in the 2016 election.

Across the river in Morristown, N.J., a line of charter tour buses unloaded marchers behind the town hall, an overflow crowd that Police Chief Peter Demnitz estimated had reached 15,000 by 11:30 a.m., along with some counter protesters.

Organizers say they chose Morristown because of its Revolutionary War history as the winter encampment site of George Washington’s army. Last year’s event in Trenton drew an estimated 7,500.

By late morning, crowds in Chicago stretched from Jackson Street two blocks south to Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park, and clogged Congress Parkway to Michigan Avenue. Organizers claimed to have eclipsed the 250,000 marchers from last year, despite only 40,000 signing up online.

The majority of signs protesters carried through Chicago focused on the Republican Party and Trump. Among them: “Ikea has better cabinets,” “The GOP is responsible for making America hate again” and “GOP, OMG, WTF.”

All this energy needs to be harnessed and used to turn out a huge surge in the minority and Millennial vote in November.  If this happens, the marches will have really accomplished something lasting.  Virginia showed that it can be done.  P.S. Our new Governor joined the marchers in Richmond:

Elizabeth Melson (left) holds a banner with recently elected Governor Ralph Northam on their march through Carytown on Saturday, Jan. 20.

Historian: Almost Inevitable that Trump Will Attempt a Coup

Perhaps many of us are growing accustomed to the normalization of the reprehensible and destruction of political norms after 100 days of misrule by Der Trumpenführer, Reichsmarschall Pence, and his propaganda ministers.  As I speculated over the weekend, perhaps Trump lacks the self-discipline and consistent ideology to be another Adolph Hitler.  But one historian sees Trump as a continuing danger to American Democracy.  Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the award-winning author of numerous books including the recent “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” and a new book, "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.”  Snyder, in fact believes that Trump will attempt a coup as he finds himself unable to increase his popularity and unable to pass any meaningful legislation be it good, bad or indifferent.  A piece in Salon looks at why Snyder sees a continuing threat.   It also tells us that we must resist and not dive into the flow or become complacent.  Here are excerpts:

American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.

Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

Trump is threatening to eliminate an independent judiciary and wants to punish judges who dare to stand against his illegal and unconstitutional mandates. In what appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family and his inner circle by peddling influence and access to corporations, foreign countries and wealthy individuals.

How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University . . . . explores how the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

The Greeks understood that democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money will likely take full control.

With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. . . . . Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

In your book you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?

Let me make just two points. The first is that I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.

The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

Every day you don’t do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you’ve got to get started right away. “On Tyranny” is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. There are plenty of other great ideas from people coming from other traditions, but the basic thing is you have to change your protocol of daily behavior now.

Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

I hope he's wrong, but I can all to easily see Trump using a national emergency real or manufactured - to seize power, mussel the media and curtail civil rights. 

Hypocrisy Filled Republicans Accuse Protesters of "Organizing"

Back when the Tea Party was organizing, Republicans thought it was great since the target of the venom was Democrats and progressive policies. Once the aim was shifted to incumbent Republicans, the GOP love affair for the Tea Party became something different.  Indeed, much of the GOP is now controlled by the very same Christofascists and white supremacists who used the Tea Party moniker to hide their real agenda.  Now that these same pitch fork carrying reactionaries control the Republican Party and have Der Trumpenführer as their anointed leader, suddenly organizing for political change is something abhorrent - at least if the organizers and protesters are liberals and progressives rather than right wing Christian extremists and would be KKK members and white nationalists.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the hypocrisy filled Republicans now decrying what they applauded when the insurgents were "conservatives."  Here are excerpts:Last night, congressional Republicans came home to rooms full of angry people. At town halls across the country, conservative lawmakers were protested, heckled, and shouted at. A few unfortunate souls were even asked to explain — in detail — the GOP plan for replacing the Affordable Care Act.

But Republicans aren’t worried. They’re onto liberals’ cute little game. They’ve realized that these so-called “protests” are, in truth, tactical demonstrations — planned, in advance — by people who want to bring about political change.

“The so-called March on Washington was actually, in numerous cases, planned out by civil-rights activists.”

And yet, this seems to be a genuine Republican talking point. Two days before Trump’s tweet, Texas senator John Cornyn shared a New York Post article that also tries to discredit the protests by claiming that they are strategically organized.

To be fair, “the protests are planned” is a considerably more honest line of attack than the “paid protesters” claim that preceded it. 

So, liberal activists are conscious of optics and, when possible, try to engineer an impression of widespread opposition via such nefarious tactics as “not all sitting together.”

It’s legitimate for conservative commentators and politicians to highlight these tactics. And, for many Republican House members, it’s probably true that town hall protests give a false impression of the scale of dissent in their red districts.

But there’s still a certain comedy to these complaints. The “training manual” Sperry stumbled upon has been proudly shared by Democrats and liberal activists over social media for months. The central charge of Sperry’s op-ed is that Organizing for Action is, in truth, an Obama-aligned front-group whose true purpose is … organizing for action.

Of course, the audiences at these town halls aren’t perfect representations of district-wide public opinion. And of course, professional political organizers are trying to channel liberal outrage in productive directions. This is how politics is practiced on both sides of the aisle. Earlier this month, the tea-party-aligned outside group FreedomWorks announced that it will be organizing rallies and town hall counter-protests in support of Obamacare repeal.

OFA’s “training manual” isn’t what’s unusual here. What’s unusual is the number of people eager to study it.  Activists do try to create an exaggerated impression of public support for their goals. But the more people they organize, the less hyperbolic that impression becomes.

The anti-Trump and anti-GOP protests need to continue to grow and make sure that Trump's approval numbers tank further and to insure the Congressional Republicans start worrying more about their own re-election prospects supporting the delusional, if not insane, standard bearer of their party.

Is Trumpism A Recast Version of the Culture Wars?

In some respects, the ascendancy of Donald Trump represents what will hopefully be a short-lived last gasp of white, heterosexual conservative Christians trying to impose their fantasy view of what America once was onto the majority of the population that either does not conform to this whites only world view or who recognize that the "good old days" the Christofascists long for were anything but good for many, many people.  Indeed, Trump and his supporters are fighting against modernity itself be it scientific knowledge that challenges myth based religious belief or changing economic circumstances that challenge the 1950's white nuclear family model that Trumpist desperate cling to. An undercurrent of this movement is cruelty towards others who adre diiferent in any way, be it in terms of race, religious belief, national origin, and sexual orientation.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the backward looking theme of Trump and his supporters.  Here are excerpts:

The chaos of Donald Trump’s opening weeks should not come as a total shock. The first president with no experience in government, surrounded by a chief of staff, a chief strategist, and a son-in-law who also lack any government experience and who seem to be competing ruthlessly with each other for power, is not a formula for quick success. The administration’s incompetence manifested itself most visibly in the rapid execution of a cruel, overbearing immigration restriction that provoked protests nationwide and even grumbling from some Republicans in Congress.

At another level, though, the travel ban might be seen, from the ideological perspective of the people who crafted it, not necessarily as a failure at all. Despite its ostensibly narrow scope, the operation was extraordinarily ambitious, designed to send a message to the world about who Americans are, who can become American, and, most especially, who cannot. The mayhem, inconvenience, and heartbreak it caused were in fact its very intent.

There are three different aspects of the Trump presidency at play. One is simply characterological: The president’s distinct troubled-adolescent behavior pattern, which, via regular bouts of insult-spewing, braggadocio, ignorance, extravagant promises, wild lies, and absolute intolerance of criticism, frequently throws the policymaking process into disarray.

The second component, and the largest, is standard Republican policy, developed in Congress and conservative think tanks for decades, which Trump has begun to implement fairly smoothly. 

The final and most mysterious element — the one that created the travel ban — is Trumpism. This is the ethno-nationalistic aspect of the president’s governing ideology, which springs both from Trump’s own impulses and from ideas nurtured by a handful of his closest aides, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and several staffers brought over from the alt-right publication Breitbart. Trumpism combines an instinctive belief in zero-sum relations between countries with a narrow and retrograde definition of American identity. 

The executive order halting admission of refugees and cracking down on immigration from seven Muslim-­majority countries was a narrower codification of the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that Trump had promised during the campaign. The implementation was a fiasco. . . . Families were separated, children and elderly people terrified. Parents of a 4-month-old with a serious heart condition had to cancel their baby’s planned heart surgery in Oregon. On and on the tragedies mounted. Beyond the humanitarian costs, the toll on business and intellectual life was immediate. 

A pillar of Trumpism is the refusal to distinguish between peaceful and violent Muslims. Trump has said “Islam hates us,” and when asked if he distinguishes between radical Islam and the religion as a whole, he brushed off the distinction: “It’s very hard to separate, because you don’t know who is who.” Bannon has repeatedly emphasized his belief that Islam as a whole poses an existential threat to Christianity. (“Islam is not a religion of peace,” Bannon has said. “Islam is a religion of submission.”) Trump has falsely implicated the entire Muslim-American community in the terrorist attacks of domestic radicals in San Bernardino and Orlando.  . . . . Punishing innocent Muslims for the threat posed by terrorists is not a side effect of their policy but an expression of its tenets.

The collateral damage to academia and tech firms from the ban may, too, have been part of the point. There is a plausible argument that low-skilled immigrants depress wages for workers in blue-­collar fields and that their numbers should thus be reduced. But leaked memos suggest the administration is designing crackdowns on highly skilled immigrants, despite mounds of evidence showing that such immigrants increase incomes for Americans of modest means. 

Trumpism is a culture war sold through chimerical economic and security gains. Michael Anton, a national-­security staffer in the administration and a key Trumpist intellectual, wrote an anonymous essay during the campaign predicting that Trump’s election would stanch what Anton called “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” America has long been defined — unlike France or Germany or Japan or Russia — as a country lacking a singular race. The ambition of Trumpism seems to be to create a blood-and-soil American nationalism, an identity from which Asian, Muslim, and Latin American immigrants are excluded permanently.

Trumpism’s greatest vulnerability lies not in the buried qualms of his Republican partners. It is in the American public. January was a month of citizen protest unlike anything this country has witnessed in decades. . . . . it took Trump to inspire Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others to join together in demonstrations of patriotic, ecumenical solidarity. At the moment, they are the strongest defense of the American idea against an ideology determined to thwart it.

Obama Rejects Trump Immigration Orders, Backs Protests

With the Trump/Pence regime embarked on a campaign that makes a mockery of what most decent moral people view as American values and likely appeals only to white supremacists and Christian fanatics, former President  has finally released at statement that (i) condemns Trump/Pence's anti immigrant actions, and (ii) applauds ad encourages the large scale protests taking place across the country.  No doubt Der Fuhrer will launch a twitter rant against Obama, but thankfully Obama is saying what needs to be said.  It is crucial that decent moral Americans begin to shout in one huge voice that Trump/Pence is NOT acceptable and that the majority of us condemn them and their policies. Despite his delusions of grandeur, Trump lost the popular vote and the vast majority of Americans did not vote for him.  He has no mandate and he is not above the law or the U.S. Constitution.  NBC News has details on Obama's statement.  Here are excerpts:

Breaking his silence only 10 days after he left office, former President Barack Obama backed nationwide protests against President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration Monday.

In a strongly worded statement issued through a spokesman, Obama said he was "heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country."
"Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake," he said.

Shortly afterward, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates — a holdover from the Obama administration — sent a memo to Justice Department lawyers ordering them not to defend the executive order against several legal challenges that were filed over the weekend.

The former president rejected Trump's contention Sunday that his executive orders restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries were "similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months."

The 2011 order did not ban visas for refugees, who by definition don't travel on visas. It tightened the review process for citizens of Iraq and for refugees from the six other countries, while Trump's is a near-blanket order applying to nearly all residents and citizens of all seven countries.

It should be obvious by now to any sentient individual that if Trumps lips are moving, he's lying.   

Trump Attacks Women's March Participants

Still smarting from the low attendance turnout for his coronation inauguration, Der Fuhrer attacked those who participated in yesterday's Women's March.  The New York Daily News noted as follows:  

Trump, on his second full day in office, criticized the efforts of participants in Saturday’s Women’s March held in Washington, D.C.

“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. “Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

The White House – after remaining silent on the topic Saturday – released a statement earlier Sunday addressing the march, bemoaning the lack of attention surrounding the anti-abortion March for Life scheduled for Friday, Jan. 27.

A column in the Washington Post looks at the march and more importantly why the momentum must continue to fight and oppose every effort of Der Fuhrer and Congressional Republicans to roll back time and eliminate civil rights.  Here are excerpts:

Some descended on Washington’s Mall very early, and some joined later. Some stood in long lines outside Metro stations to get downtown. Others walked a long way.

The signs were almost all homemade. Many were clever, channeling humor and whimsy (“There will be hell toupee,” “Things are so bad even introverts have to protest”), as well as anger, determination and commitment.

And the crowd got so big that it broke into tributaries, marching in different directions. The tributaries eventually joined up to form a mighty stream of protest. No matter how much President Trump and his administration try to lie and spin, every objective indication is that far more people showed up to register dissent over his rise to power than to celebrate it.

It was a diverse crowd in many ways, more white than African American and Latino but with a fair representation across racial lines. It tilted young but included many among the middle-aged and the senior set. 

For many, it was a multi-generational day, a family affair: grandparents, parents and children, some in strollers. Women predominated, but a large minority was male, and a fair number of men carried signs suggesting, in various formulations, that real men, good men, supported the rights of their sisters and wives and mothers.

[I]t was at least as much a message to Trump and to the country: Less than 24 hours after the new president took the oath of office, hundreds of thousands of Americans came together to say that they would not stand by in silence if the new administration threatened basic freedoms or the advances of the past eight years, and the last 50.

The message of the Washington March was echoed by large crowds that gathered in cities and towns across the country. In their different ways, the marchers were saying that they would not be cowed into silence or demobilized into a sullen difference.

The anger and dismay over Trump was a dominant emotion, and judging by the signs, its sources were multiple: his attitude and behavior toward women especially, given the theme of the day, but also Russia’s role in the election and Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin.

There were loud calls for the defense of free speech and freedom generally. If Trump didn’t talk about freedom in his inaugural address, this crowd picked up the slack.

There was an acceptance of the reality that Trump is president but a stout rejection of who he is and what he stands for. That included expressions of a desire to drive him from office, with the inevitable breakout of “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” chants.

The politics of the next few months and years will depend a great deal on whether the energy displayed on Saturday is sustained through the hard work of political activism. I can imagine skeptics reading this and saying one day of protests will be very easy for Trump and the Republican Party to absorb (even if one can imagine Trump’s fury at not getting even a day’s peace).

But there is reason to believe this was not a one-off. First, there was not a single march in Washington but demonstrations all over the country. As the tea party showed, change comes from local actions coordinated nationally. There is clearly a large national base of opposition, community by community.

Second, the reaction to Trump is unprecedented. No other president faced such a wave of rallies immediately after he took office. No other president so quickly mobilized so many people against him. Trump really is special.

Third, the march here (and such evidence I have seen suggests this was true elsewhere) was strikingly nonsectarian. There were not people pushing very narrow ideological agendas or political subgroups insisting that they and only they had, in old left parlance, “the right line” on the future. Different parts of the anti-Trump coalition were generally happy to reinforce one another’s messages.

Finally, Trump’s election jarred many progressives and moderates from quiescence. If these marches were for women and against Trump, they were also marches against complacency. That may have been their most important message.

What I have found encouraging is that so many people I know who have not been political activists in the past turned out in March, including one of my sisters and both of my daughters.   The momentum must continue and Trump must be driven from office.

Could There Be a "Calexit" From the USA?

Con man and demagogue Donald Trump liked to refer to the UK's Brexit vote during the campaign as a blue print for what he was attempting.  Now, besides anti-Trump protests in a number of major cities, including one outside of Trump Tower in New York City, California is seeing a movement for a "Calexit."    That's right, the movement seeks to have California leave the United States and become its own independent nation comprising the world's 7th largest economy.  Yahoo Finance looks at this development.  Here are excerpts: 

"Calexit" is swiftly taking over social media.

After Donald Trump won the race to the White House, people across California took to social media Tuesday night to call for "Calexit" — California exit — recalling Brexit, Britain's push to leave the European Union.

As the topic continues to trend on Twitter, Californians in favor of seceding from the US will gather today on the steps of the capitol in Sacramento.

The group leading the charge, Yes California Independence Campaign, assembled long before Trump's surprising victory. Its aim is to hold a referendum in 2019 that, if passed, would make California an independent country.

The movement has racked up an impressive backer already. Shervin Pishevar, an early investor in Uber and well-known angel investor, said on Twitter that he would bankroll a campaign to make California its own nation if Trump won.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, he confirmed his mission.  "It's the most patriotic thing I can do," he told CNBC. "The country is at serious crossroads. ... Calling it New California."

He expressed a desire that California, the sixth-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, might become a catalyst for a "national dialogue" as the country reaches a "tipping point."

More Silicon Valley innovators are hopping on the bandwagon. Dave Morin, an investor and founder of the private social networking tool Path, and Marc Hemeon, a former Google employee and founder of Design Inc., also showed their support on Twitter, CNN Money reports.

"What's going on in the US politically and culturally is so different from what's happening here," Marinelli told The Los Angeles Times in 2015. "I want California to be all it can, and our group feels the political and cultural connection to the US is holding us back from our potential."

The fringe political movement gathered steam in June, when the UK broke from the EU.

"This is the first Western secessionist movement that worked, and I think that is going to be very profound," Marinelli told Newsweek shortly after Brexit. "Are you going to say to people in the freest country in the world [you] don't have the right to self-determination?"

The husband's comment?  If this looks like it might really happen, we are moving to California.  I suspect at least some of my children would join us.

From a far different perspective, Vladimir Putin is no doubt celebrating.  He played Trump - and his supporters - like the village idiots and now America is already seeing protests and the largest state has a movement seeking to break fro America completely.