Sunday Open Thread [9.4.2016]

Filed in National by on September 4, 2016

Eugene Robinson on why there is no “softening,” and why there can’t be.

Donald Trump’s diatribe on immigration Wednesday night dispelled any conceivable doubt: He is a dangerous demagogue who rejects the values of openness and inclusion that made this country great. Rarely has an American politician given such an un-American speech.

Foreigners who come here seeking a better life are the scapegoats he blames for problems real and imagined. Never mind that Trump’s mother was an immigrant, or that two of his three wives came from overseas. Ronald Reagan saw this country as a shining city on a hill; Trump wants us to cower in fear behind a Berlin-style wall. Reagan invited millions of undocumented immigrants to stay and contribute to their adopted land; Trump wants to round them up, all 11 million, and ship them home. …

Trump also told us who would go first: up to 2 million undocumented “criminals,” in addition to 4.5 million individuals who are here because they overstayed their visas. Also, any undocumented person stopped by law enforcement for any reason would be detained pending deportation. It is not alarmist to note that actually trying to do all of this would require the creation of a police state.

Ruth Marcus on Donald Trump’s latest campaign hire.

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, the old saying goes. If so, Donald Trump should be awfully itchy.

Trump has just augmented his ever-changing cast of mostly second-string campaign operatives with a new deputy campaign manager, conservative activist David Bossie. “A friend of mine for many years,” Trump told my Post colleague Robert Costa. “Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win.”

That’s one way to put it. Win at any cost would be another, and that’s being polite. If Bossie’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re lucky, because it means that you haven’t been immersed for the past two decades-plus in the mucky minutiae of the right’s no-holds-barred war against Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is a war in which Bossie has risen from foot soldier to general, in large part thanks to his willingness to do anything in pursuit of his prey. He is the Captain Ahab of Clinton haters.

Dana Milbank interrupts the regularly scheduled program.

It looks more and more as if Donald Trump’s reality show isn’t going to be renewed for another season.

I’m not talking about “The Celebrity Apprentice,” the NBC show Trump turned into a classic of the reality genre; that show is now in the strong hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The show that’s in trouble is the horrifying yet irresistible one we’ve all been watching since June 2015. Trump’s campaign is the apotheosis of reality television’s hostile takeover of the U.S. political system, in which the winner is often the one who generates the most shock and who commands the most attention. …

Trump’s bigger problem is that recent episodes of the Trump Show just aren’t very good. His rapid dispatching of competitors during the primaries, his outrage du jour and his never-ending supply of insults made for gripping television, and his rivals never got enough attention to give Trump a serious challenge.

Oklahoma has ordered a shutdown of fracking wells after a record earthquake.

Oklahoma officials on Saturday ordered oil and gas operators to shut down three dozen wastewater disposal wells following a 5.6-magnitude earthquake that tied a record as the strongest in state history.

The quake, centered near Pawnee, rattled the state just after 8 a.m. Eastern time Saturday, tying a record set in 2011 for the strongest such tremor in Oklahoma history, according to the National Weather Service.

Yeah, there has to be some cause and effect here (fracking began in 2008 or so):

download

Kevin Drum:

Have you read the entire FBI report on their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices? No? Well, I have, because that’s the kind of professional I am. And I’m going to provide you with all the most interesting excerpts. […]

If you read the entire report, you’ll find bits and pieces that might show poor judgment on Hillary’s part. The initial decision to use one email device is the obvious one, something that Hillary has acknowledged repeatedly. Another—maybe—is her staff’s view of what was safe to send over unclassified email. But this is very fuzzy. It could be that her staff knew exactly what it was doing, and it’s the subsequent classification authorities who are wrong. This is something that it’s impossible to judge since none of us will ever see the emails in question.

That said, this report is pretty much an almost complete exoneration of Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t prohibited from using a personal device or a personal email account, and others at state did it routinely. She’s told the truth all along about why she did it. Colin Powell did indeed advise her about using personal email shortly after she took office, but she chose to follow the rules rather than skirt them, as Powell did. She didn’t take her BlackBerry into her office. She communicated with only a very select group of 13 people. She took no part in deciding which emails were personal before handing them over to State. She had nothing to do with erasing information on the PRN server. That was a screw-up on PRN’s end. She and her staff all believed at the time that they were careful not to conduct sensitive conversations over unclassified email systems. And there’s no evidence that her server was ever hacked.

There’s remarkably little here. If you nonetheless believe that it’s enough to disqualify Hillary from the presidency, that’s fine. I have no quarrel with you. But if the FBI is to be believed, it’s all pretty small beer.

Read the whole piece now. He goes through the report in thorough detail.

Robert Frank calls on Democrats to make the effort needed to recapture the House.

The Democratic Party comp seems poised to recapture its Senate majority this year, but the House is a different matter. Many warn that the current 61-seat Republican majority, much of it achieved by post-2010 gerrymandering, has made flipping the lower chamber an unrealistic goal.

But that view betrays a misunderstanding of how partisan gerrymandering actually works. One aim of the practice has been to reconfigure electoral boundaries to transfer redundant votes from safe districts into swing districts. If one district usually votes 60 percent Republican and an adjacent one votes 48 percent Republican, for example, boundaries might be redrawn so that each would vote 54 percent Republican. In a typical election year, the formerly Democratic district would flip Republican. But since each new district would have only a 4 percentage point cushion, both seats would turn blue in a Democratic wave election.

Garrison Keillor pens a letter to Trump, telling him that when this is all over, he will have nothing he wants. It is also a must read.

The cap does not look good on you, it’s a duffer’s cap, and when you come to the microphone, you look like the warm-up guy, the guy who announces the license number of the car left in the parking lot, doors locked, lights on, motor running. The brim shadows your face, which gives a sinister look, as if you’d come to town to announce the closing of the pulp factory. Your eyes look dead and your scowl does not suggest American greatness so much as American indigestion. Your hair is the wrong color: People don’t want a president to be that shade of blond. You know that now.

Why doesn’t someone in your entourage dare to say these things? So sad. The fans in the arenas are wild about you, and Sean Hannity is as loyal as they come, but Rudy and Christie and Newt are reassuring in that stilted way of hospital visitors. And The New York Times treats you like the village idiot. This is painful for a Queens boy trying to win respect in Manhattan where the Times is the Supreme Liberal Jewish Anglican Arbiter of Who Has The Smarts and What Goes Where. When you came to Manhattan 40 years ago, you discovered that in entertainment, the press, politics, finance, everywhere you went, you ran into Jews, and they are not like you: Jews didn’t go in for big yachts and a fleet of aircraft — they showed off by way of philanthropy or by raising brilliant offspring. They sympathized with the civil rights movement. In Queens, blacks were a threat to property values — they belonged in the Bronx, not down the street. To the Times, Queens is Cleveland. Bush league. You are Queens. The casinos were totally Queens, the gold faucets in your triplex, the bragging, the insults, but you wanted to be liked by Those People. You wanted Mike Bloomberg to invite you to dinner at his townhouse. You wanted the Times to run a three-part story about you, that you meditate and are a passionate kayaker and collect 14th-century Islamic mosaics. You wish you were that person but you didn’t have the time.

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  1. Dave says:
    September 4, 2016 at 11:37 am

    From Drum’s excerpts

    “In other words, Hillary could get a State-approved device, but couldn’t receive her personal email on it. Likewise, she could use a personal device, but couldn’t get State email on it. The only way to get both was to carry two physical devices. She considered this inconvenient, and decided to keep on using her personal BlackBerry for everything. This is exactly what she’s been saying all along.”

    That’s exactly what I and I am sure many thousands of other feds did. I kept using my Blackberry rather than carry multiple devices and since I had a flat rate plan I never billed the government for officials calls. My government email was unclassified and if when I needed to send or receive classified, I went to a government computer and system to retrieve or send.

    Maybe the neither FBI nor the public recognizes how routine this really is, but I was doing it as early as 1995 and I’m sure I wasn’t the first to do so.

  2. puck says:
    September 4, 2016 at 12:14 pm

    Much has been made about how Hillary’s old phones were destroyed with a hammer. Physical destruction is in fact the technically correct way to get rid of an old phone with potentially sensitive information.

    The lapse, if any, was not breaking it into small enough pieces. I’m not sure exactly what protocol was in effect at the State Department, but the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) specifies that such devices should be fed into a “disintegrator”machine that chops them up, and that the pieces should fit through a specified screen size.

    At one point I had a tech graveyard in my basement of old computers my friends and relatives gave me to refurbish or for parts. At some point they were all obsolete and it was quite a pile of crap in my basement. Some of them came from a CPA business with customer tax returns on them. So first I removed all the hard drives, then I took the hard drives out in the back yard and smashed them with a sledgehammer until the platters were at least bent. Then I took all the junk to the DSWA e-recycling station.

  3. Andy says:
    September 5, 2016 at 7:50 am

    I’m actually surprised to learn that the state police took the time to arrest someone for the KHN sign stealing incident. Someone on the DSP Facebook page said the person they arrested is an attorney?!

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