Delaware Liberal

The December 13, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, “the top choice for secretary of state in a Trump administration, faces bipartisan resistance in Congress over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Republican hesitation over Mr. Tillerson marked the first sign of division between congressional GOP and the Trump team over its likely cabinet picks. All of President-elect Donald Trump’s other nominees so far appear likely to be confirmed by the Senate.”

“Mr. Tillerson, a seasoned deal-maker whose company has a long history of doing business in Russia, is drawing unease from senators on both sides of the aisle. Republicans can likely afford to lose only two GOP votes next year in the new Congress when it meets to consider Mr. Trump’s nominees.”

This seems big. Said Obama: “This was not a secret running up to the election! The president-elect in some of his political events specifically said to the Russians, ‘Hack Hillary’s emails so that we can finally find out what’s going on, and confirm our conspiracy theories.’ You had what was very clear relationships between members of the president-elect’s campaign team and Russians, and a professed shared view on a bunch of issues.”

Jonathan Chait at the New Yorker:

What is more interesting in the Post story is the response of various officials to the revelations. The Obama administration declined to publicize, wary of being seen as intervening on Clinton’s behalf. Instead, it devised a fallback plan. Concerned that Russia might attempt to hack into electronic voting machines, it gathered a bipartisan group of lawmakers to hear the CIA’s report, in the hopes that they would present a united front warning Russia not to disrupt the election. According to the Post, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.” Other Republicans refused to join the effort for reasons that can only be understood as a desire to protect the Republican ticket from any insinuation, however well-founded, that Russia was helping it.

Even the most cynical observer of McConnell — a cynical man to his bones — would have been shocked at his raw partisanship. Presented with an attack on the sanctity of his own country’s democracy by a hostile foreign power, his overriding concern was party over country. Obama’s fear of seeming partisan held him back from making a unilateral statement without partisan cover. No such fear restrained McConnell. This imbalance in will to power extended to the security agencies. The CIA could have leaked its conclusion before November, but held off. The FBI should have held off on leaking its October surprise, but plunged ahead.

The Hill: “Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump is an unmitigated disaster for Democrats, who want to ensure nothing like it happens again. But Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Trump is so large that it complicates the question of how to recalibrate for future elections.”

“Clinton led Trump by almost 3 million votes as of Sunday, according to a Cook Political Report tracker, with some final results still to be tabulated. More than 128 million votes were cast for the two main candidates nationwide, and Trump emerged as the victor by winning three Rust Belt states by margins of roughly 11,000 (Michigan), 23,000 (Wisconsin) and 44,000 (Pennsylvania).”

Honestly, focus on the economic message that we already have ($12-15 Minimum Wage, Income Inequality, Social Safety Net) and fighting Trump on everything that goes against that (like repealing Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security) is all we need to do. We lost because of a combination of three things: 1) our messenger was unpopular herself (as a Clinton supporter I do grant that); 2) she did choose the wrong strategy of focusing on Trump; and 3) because of the Comey FBI revelations (she was going to win before that, even though she was unpopular and chose the wrong campaign strategy).

So Democrats don’t need to change. We do not have to drop our equality message to appeal to racists. So it is not as complicated as the Hill suggests.

I’m going to read this to figure out why Perez is not in the Warren camp. I never read him as being in any camp.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez “has told three senior Democrats that he intends to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, challenging the front-running candidate, Rep. Keith Ellison, and inserting an ally of President Obama into the contest to rebuild a bruised party,” the New York Times reports. “Mr. Perez, who had also been considering a run for Maryland governor, is expected to reveal his plan to seek the D.N.C. chairmanship this week.”

The RNC “is overseeing an expansive whip operation designed to lock down Donald Trump’s Electoral College majority and ensure that the 306 Republican electors cast their votes for the president-elect,” Politico reports.

“Two RNC sources familiar with the effort said the committee — with the assistance of state Republican parties and the Trump campaign — has been in touch with most of the GOP electors multiple times, and has concluded that only one is a risk to cast a vote against Trump on Dec. 19, when the Electoral College meets.”

Which is why I have been dashing any liberal or progressive dreams that somehow the GOP electors will vote their conscience. These people are usually GOP partisans and party regulars. So they don’t have one.

David Frum: “Beyond the incredible claim of a Russian spy operation to assist the winning candidate in this election, it might be illuminating to place Russia’s pro-Trump espionage in a worldwide context. Trump is not the only candidate for whom Putin’s Russia has intervened. It’s a matter of open record that state-owned Russian banks have lent millions of euros to the French National Front. The president of the Czech Republic received substantial campaign contributions from Russian oil interests. The heads of German and British intelligence have complained of Russian attacks on democratic institutions in those countries. Obviously, Russia’s success in the United States represents its greatest coup. But it was not an isolated attempt, and cannot be understood in isolation from other elements of Putin’s strategy.”

David Dayen at The Nation points out Tillerson has an SEC problem:

Most of the commentary over Donald Trump’s presumed secretary-of-state nominee Rex Tillerson concerns the Exxon Mobil CEO’s closeness to Russia, and Senate Republican discomfort with that relationship. But Trump and Tillerson share something else that hasn’t gotten as much attention—a penchant to rip off their business partners.

In ExxonMobil’s case, I’m talking about shareholders. Tillerson’s company has been under formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission since August for failing to accurately value its proven oil reserves.Those reserves are critical to investors for assessing the future viability of the company. Without the certainty that the company can keep crude oil flowing decades into the future, ExxonMobil stock would plummet. Rewriting the disclosures to investors with lower valuations would cost the company billions of dollars. And actually the entire oil and gas industry would be affected by a new standard rather than the current ad hoc system.

The investigation is a kind of companion piece to the “Exxon Knew” campaign, which charges that the world’s largest publicly traded oil company was aware of the catastrophic effects of climate change nearly 40 years ago, but lied to shareholders about these risks to its business model. Attorneys general in over a dozen states have opened investigations into these matters.

More Jonathan Chait in a separate piece than the one above:

Trump has dismissed the CIA’s findings as fundamentally untrustworthy on the grounds that the agency failed to assess Iraq’s weapons of destruction before the war (and ignoring the distortions of strong-arming from the Bush administration that contributed to this error). His aide Carter Page, and his prospective deputy secretary of State, John Bolton, are suggesting the U.S. government may have conducted the hacks in order to frame Russia, and hence Trump.

While it may give Trump too much credit to assume he has followed a considered strategy, there is a coherent pattern to the discourse he has promoted. It is a comprehensive attack on empiricism. He spreads distrust against every institution, so that the only possible grounds for belief is trust in a person. The suspicion he spreads against every institution protects Trump from accountability. If everybody is guilty — what governments don’t murder journalists? — then nobody is guilty. Questions about Trump’s own suspicious financial and political ties are simply more conspiracy theories.

John Cassidy at The New Yorker dives into Trump’s attacks on the CIA:

Trump doesn’t confine himself to reality—nothing new there. For once, though, he has been called on it, and there will be more repercussions. The confirmation prospects of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, whom Trump reportedly has settled on as his pick for Secretary of State, have been further complicated. Other nominees will also be affected: Democratic senators are sure to take their confirmation hearings as a chance to ask whether they agree with Trump’s statements about the C.I.A. and Russia. And, while that’s happening, the new Administration will find itself embroiled in hearings about the extent and impact of the Russian cyber attacks. Testifying at these hearings, senior intelligence and law-enforcement officials are likely to contradict Trump, or at least express views that diverge from his.

For anyone who had been hoping that the fabled “checks and balances” in the U.S. system wouldn’t fail us, this is just the sort of thing we want to see happening. Of course, it doesn’t mean the threat of democratic erosion has been beaten back—far from it—or that Trump won’t ride through this squall. But the reaction to his latest hissy fit does suggest that he has made his first big misstep since the election. In the phrase often attributed to Talleyrand after Napoleon ordered the summary execution of the Duke of Enghien, Trump’s attack on the C.I.A., and his refusal even to countenance the notion that Putin’s hackers sought to help him out, was “worse than a crime—it was a blunder.”

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