Last Call For Tales From The Trump Depression, Housing Edition

The racism dog whistles of "those people moving into the neighborhood" reminiscent of 60 years ago are Trump's greatest weapon to win the white vote in November, and the regime is now pulling out all the stops on that front.

President Trump moved Thursday to repeal a fair housing rule that he claimed would lead to “destruction” of the country’s suburbs, continuing an aggressive push that coincides with his campaign’s attempt to paint Democrats as angry mobs on the brink of upturning peaceful, mostly white neighborhoods.

Trump had telegraphed the Housing and Urban Development Department’s move against the Obama-administration rule in recent tweets and comments that made thinly veiled appeals to a key electoral constituency that has drifted away from him over the past four years: suburban white voters.

Trailing Democrat Joe Biden, the presumptive presidential nominee, in the polls just over 100 days before the election, Trump has shed much of the subtlety behind his pitch to skeptical voters. Increasingly, he is portraying himself as the only barrier between them and chaos.

“The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article,” Trump wrote Thursday on Twitter, linking to a New York Post op-ed by former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey that argued that Biden would ruin the country’s bedroom communities.

“Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!” Trump said in his tweet.

Political strategists say the overt appeals to racial fear and grievance are politically precarious at a time when much of the country is trying to reckon with issues such as systemic racism and discrimination.

“There seems to be a complete lack of understanding why he’s been getting drubbed in the suburbs,” said Brendan Buck, who was a top aide to Republican officials including Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) when Ryan was House speaker. “Educated suburban voters are not interested in — and are actually repelled by — his fearmongering and these racial dog whistles.”

I don't buy that at all.

Trump won college-educated white voters in 2016.

This plan worked perfectly four years ago, especially in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt states.  All Trump is doing now is dropping the pretense, and is straight up saying that he will work to preserve white neighborhoods and "property values" by ending housing desegregation.

Attitudes among white suburban voters have shifted somewhat, enough for Republicans to lose dozens of House districts in 2018, but let's also remember that Democrats lost several Senate seats regardless. It makes sense for Trump to go on the attack here, because it's an effective strategy that has worked in the past time and time again. The gains Trump has made by turning out rural white voters who never voted before was the key to his win then, and he's mashing on that button as hard as he can now.

What I'm saying is that college-educated white voters put Trump in power.

Don't depend on them taking him out of it.  He's playing to their weakness directly, and it's going to start tightening up the polls, especially if Trump can force armed confrontations in multiple major US cities.

Only Trump can save white America™

A hell of a motto for 2020, but one that's going to keep him close.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The country to melting down along with Trump, and Trump is considering...rebranding!

Amid nationwide protests and a historic economic contraction, President Trump is running for reelection to “Keep America Great” — at least according to the hats he sells on his campaign website, the signs waved by his supporters and the television ads he’s airing in key states.

But in recent weeks he has retreated to contradictory slogans with a less triumphant ring, repeatedly reviving his 2016 motto “Make America Great Again!” and trying out new catchphrases like “Transition to Greatness!” and “The Best Is Yet to Come,” a Frank Sinatra lyric etched on the crooner’s tombstone.

Phrases such as “Promises Made, Promise Kept,” once a cornerstone of the reelection campaign, have been subsumed by current events. Economic messaging still used by the campaign online, including boasts about low unemployment, is now woefully out of date.

The search for a slogan, which Trump confidants say he is likely to resolve in the coming weeks, is a symptom of the president’s larger problem: The booming economy that he assumed would be his chief argument for reelection has foundered for the moment, a casualty of a coronavirus crisis he initially downplayed and more recently has sought to move beyond.

On issues compelling to most Americans — health, economy and national unrest about police violence — Trump has offered few new proposals, relying on pointed warnings that Democrats and their liberal ideas would make the country worse. On Friday, asked whether he had a plan to address systemic racism that has sent millions of Americans to the streets — some in view of the White House — he replied: “That’s what my plan is: We’re going to have the strongest economy in the world.”

The president and his top political advisers met Thursday afternoon to discuss how Trump should make his case and how he could improve his standing among voters, a person familiar with the meeting said. Participants included senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Brad Parscale, his recently elevated deputy Bill Stepien and campaign pollsters. Trump was also presented with “tough” swing state polls from his political team in the Oval Office.

How about "Hitler, Only Better!"

I'm sure that will resonate with the base.

Trump even wants to address the nation, but because he can't help but make things about himself, I'm hoping he'll be talked out of it.

After a weekend of massive peaceful protests around the country, White House officials are currently deliberating a plan for President Donald Trump to address the nation this week on issues related to race and national unity, as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson hinted in an interview with CNN on Sunday and a senior administration official said was under serious consideration. 

Many allies of the President spent the last week distraught as they watched Trump fumble his response to the police killing of George Floyd, only to follow his perceived silence on the resulting racial tensions with a federal law enforcement crackdown on the protesters near his fortified doorstep. 

Aides and allies were not comforted by the backlash over his decision to have federal officers aggressively clear Lafayette Park in front of the White House to facilitate a widely-panned attempt at a photo-op in front of St. John's Church. And the rest of the week continued on a downward spiral, as protests across the country grew and Trump faced an onslaught of well-known conservatives, generals and former Trump administration officials who excoriated his response and called for new leadership come November. 

Carson suggested during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that the President this week would further address Floyd's killing and the tensions it exposed. 

"I believe you're going to be hearing from the President this week on this topic in some detail. And I would ask you maybe to reserve judgment until after that time," Carson said.

If you need time still to judge Trump, you're part of the damn problem.

The Biden folks on the other hand should be using "Trump is Out of Control".

80% of the country now think things are completely out of control in America.

Eight out of 10 voters believe that things are out of control in the United States, with majorities still concerned about the spread of the coronavirus, pessimistic about the economy's returning to normal before next year and down on President Donald Trump's ability to unite the nation.

Those are the major findings of a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that was conducted May 28 to June 2, during the aftermath of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, as the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 100,000 and after millions of people have lost their jobs.

But the survey was conducted before Friday's surprising jobs report, which found the unemployment rate declining to 13.3 percent and the economy adding 2.5 million jobs in May.

"Out of control — that's America in 2020," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who helped conduct the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff and his GOP colleagues at Public Opinion Strategies.

Rebrand all you want, Don. Things are going very badly for you.

As protesters gather daily near the White House and the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the American public is souring on President Donald Trump. A new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS finds Trump's approval rating down 7 points in the last month as the President falls further behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, whose support now stands at its highest level in CNN polling. 

The survey also finds a growing majority of Americans feel racism is a big problem in the country today and that the criminal justice system in America favors whites over blacks. More than 8 in 10 also say that the peaceful protests that have spread throughout the nation following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers are justified. Americans now consider race relations as important a campaign issue as the economy and health care, according to the survey. 

Overall 38% approve of the way Trump is handling the presidency, while 57% disapprove. That's his worst approval rating since January 2019, and roughly on par with approval ratings for Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their reelection years. Both went on to lose the presidency after one term. 

In the race for the White House, among registered voters, Trump stands 14 points behind Biden, who officially secured enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination in CNN's delegate estimate on Saturday. The 41% who say they back the President is the lowest in CNN's tracking on this question back to April 2019, and Biden's 55% support is his highest mark yet.

Joe Biden's going to need to be ahead by double digits to win and top Trump's cheating, Russian interference, and voter suppression efforts.  This election can't be close, because Trump will never leave the White House voluntarily. He has to be forced out, and that means he has to lose so badly that Republicans finally abandon him.

But having said all that...Biden is well on his way.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The next step in the Trump regime's coming roundup and mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants from the country took a dark step closer to reality this week with news of HUD plans to evict more than 100,000 undocumented immigrants from public housing and putting tens of thousands of US citizen kids in detention camps.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that a Trump administration plan to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing could displace more than 55,000 children who are all legal U.S. residents or citizens.

The proposed rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, would tighten regulations against undocumented immigrantsaccessing federally subsidized housing to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said last month.

But the agency’s analysis of the rule’s regulatory impact concluded that half of current residents living in households potentially facing eviction and homelessness are children who are legally qualified for aid.

Current rules bar undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing subsidies but allow families of mixed-immigration status as long as one person — a child born in the United States or a citizen spouse — is eligible. The subsidies are prorated to cover only eligible residents.

The new rule, pushed by White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, would require every household member be of “eligible immigration status.”
Undocumented immigrants may no longer sign the leases of subsidized housing, even if their children are entitled to prorated benefits.

Approximately 25,000 households, representing about 108,000 people, now living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member, according to the HUD analysis.

Among these mixed-status households, 70 percent, or 76,000 people, are legally eligible for benefits — of whom 55,000 are children, HUD says. The vast majority live in California, Texas and New York.

We're about to put 55,000 more kids in concentration camps, guys.

This is what America is now.  It will only get worse later as a few court decisions allow the Trump regime to declare that immigration status must be checked before a housing lease is signed anywhere in America, and then the real deportations begin.

Keep in mind all of this:

• from the building of the private ICE camps with government funding and blessing, 
• to expanding ICE and Border Patrol boots on the ground, 
• to bringing in ICE/BP as "intelligence agencies", 
• to going after "sanctuary cities", 
• to increased ICE raids at workplaces, 
• to attacking "birthright citizenship", 
• to ignoring legalized asylum policies that the rest of the planet allows,
• to child separation policies, 
• to the Muslim visa ban, 
• to making passports harder to get for trans folks, 
• to effectively ending legal immigration (except from Russia it seems),
• to the leadership purges at Homeland Security and ICE,
• and now to HUD's policy to evict undocumented,

all of this is being done on purpose to build the legal justification framework, the logistics, the manpower, and the social normalization of one singular evil, twisted goal.

That goal is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mass deportations of undocumented out of the country in the name of demographic reversal and white supremacy.

Never forget that.

A Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

It's good to finally see someone from my generational cohort (younger Gen Xers) running for President, and Julian Castro has a pretty good track record as he enters the 2020 contest.

Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and housing secretary in the Obama administration, on Saturday joined the increasingly crowded field of candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

As Castro, 44, stood in the working-class neighborhood where he grew up, he promised to expand prekindergarten programs, make the first two years of college more affordable, expand Medicare to all Americans, overhaul the criminal justice system and immigration laws, increase the minimum wage and make housing more affordable. If elected, he would be the nation’s first Latino president.

“I’m running for president because it’s time for new leadership. Because it’s time for new energy. And it’s time for a new commitment to make sure that the opportunities that I’ve had are available for every American,” Castro told hundreds of supporters packed into San Antonio’s Plaza Guada­lupe.

The announcement was intended to introduce Castro to an audience beyond San Antonio. He arrived at the plaza on the No. 68 city bus, the same one he and his twin brother, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), rode to school as children. He pointedly noted that “no front-runners” are born in the neighborhood. He told the crowd about the most influential women in his life: his single mother, Rosie Castro, a political activist, and his grandmother, Victoria Castro, who as a 7-year-old orphan immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1922. He announced his decision in both English and Spanish.

Before Castro took the stage, a mariachi band played and a diverse body of supporters endorsed him. Castro’s announcement was not a surprise. He launched an exploratory committee on Dec. 12 and, the next night, Joaquin Castro confirmed his brother would run for president. Before taking the stage Saturday, Castro tweeted with the hashtag #Julian2020.

Castro grew up on the west side of San Antonio, studied at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, and was elected to the San Antonio City Council when he was just 26. He ran for mayor of San Antonio twice, losing the first time in 2005 and then winning in 2009.

During his announcement speech, Castro spoke at length about how he expanded prekindergarten programs in the city as mayor — an initiative financed by an increase in the sales tax. If elected president, Castro said, he would like to expand access to free prekindergarten to “all children whose parents want it.”

The Brothers Castro, Julian and Joaquin, have been into Texas politics for a while now.  Both of them are whip-smart and have great voting records.  Expanding Medicare to everyone should be the plan for every Democrat, and I'm glad to see Castro's platform is solid.

When he was Obama's HUD Secretary and a contender for Hillary's Veep, Castro made the right moves in 2016.

Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books. 

The changes, which HUD officials will brief stakeholders and activists on during a conference call on Monday, could be made public as early as Tuesday — depending on when department lawyers give the green light to publishing them in the Federal Register.

But they won’t take effect before the next auction of HUD mortgages, scheduled for May 18. 

Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters. 

Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight. 

And of course, all of those positive changes to prevent banks from profiting off of HUD properties were wrecked by Ben Carson and Trump a year later.  I said then we'd be seeing more of Castro in the future, and the future is now.

I'm glad to see him in the race.  For all the shouting about Beto in Texas, it's Julian Castro who has the credentials.  I feel a lot more excited about him than say, Tulsi Gabbard.

The Real Housing Crisis

The availability of affordable housing in America's cities is only getting worse.  It's easy to blame NIMBY gentrification in a country where 90% of your wealth is tied up in your home (and the rest of us are just stuck being 10% as wealthy at max) and while local zoning regulations and homeowners voting to make housing as expensive as possible in order to raise home prices are both serious issues, let's not forget landlords and homebuilders looking to make as much money as possible on rents and scarcity.

One morning last year, Michele Carter woke up to find an eviction notice slipped under her apartment door. She had to move, she was later told, to make way for the renovation of her high-rise and the higher-paying tenants it would bring.

Ms. Carter, 66, an Air Force veteran who lives on a small monthly disability check, did not panic, at least not at first. She considered herself one of the lucky handful of her building’s tenants who had what they called a “golden lottery ticket” — a voucher from the federal government’s Section 8 housing program that would allow them to move anywhere in Philadelphia with a guaranteed subsidy paying 70 percent of the rent.

But she quickly discovered that her Section 8 voucher, for decades an essential way of providing low-income people with affordable housing, had diminishing value.

“I saw this flier for an apartment up on the wall in the building. It looked perfect. Then I get to the bottom, and in big black letters was written, ‘No Vouchers,’” said Ms. Carter, who ended up moving in with relatives for 13 months before being placed in a senior supportive living complex earlier this year. “That kind of thing happened over and over. I wore my eyes out looking at ads.”

For most of its existence, the main shortcoming of the Section 8 program, created in 1974 as an alternative to ghettoizing public housing projects, was its inability to keep up with demand. But the recent economic boom in Philadelphia, long one of the most affordable big cities in the Washington-to-Boston corridor, has led to rent increases even in poor and working-class neighborhoods, and many landlords are now refusing to accept the vouchers when they can get higher rents, without the bureaucratic red tape that plagues the program, on the open market.

A survey by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and released in August, documented the problem in stark terms. It found that 67 percent of Philadelphia’s landlords refused to even consider voucher holders, some candidly citing the low subsidies and their desire to cash in on a hot market. The rejection rates were even higher in Fort Worth and Los Angeles, where three-quarters of landlords turned away Section 8 tenants.

Put at risk by these market forces is the future of a core federal housing program that now serves 2.2 million low-income families and was started with a simple goal: to enable those families to escape neighborhoods increasingly segregated along racial and economic lines for a place with decent housing and better schools, stores and transportation.

“It is a crisis,” said Rasheedah Phillips, managing attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia’s housing unit, which defends tenants in court. “It used to be that Section 8 was basically a guarantee of shelter for families, for the elderly, for disabled people, but now it’s becoming much harder for tenants to get landlords to take the vouchers. And it’s only getting worse as the market heats up.”

Remember, under the Trump regime and HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Section 8 housing has already taken a big funding hit.  With the coming economic recession caused by Trump's trade war, we're going to see homelessness explode exponentially across the country.  It's going to be bad.

Remember the reasons why.

 

Last Call For Uncle Ben's House Of Pain

Meanwhile, the Trump regime continues to reverse every Obama-era policy it can find, and in the end few people in the cabinet will have done more damage to black people in America than HUD Secretary Ben Carson.

In a press release on Monday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development made its firmest commitment yet to tear down the Obama-era framework for enforcing the Fair Housing Act.

In a public notice dated Thursday, Aug. 9, HUD outlined its reasons for quashing the 2015 “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule (AFFH), which had been the strongest effort in decades to crack down on segregation and discriminatory practices in and by American cities and suburbs. HUD Secretary Ben Carson cited the Obama administration’s “unworkable requirements” in a statement, saying the rule “actually impeded the development and rehabilitation of affordable housing.” Under AFFH, Carson said, cities and other HUD grantees had “inadequate autonomy” according to his understanding of federalism.

Neither criticism, fair housing experts say, is accurate. The AFFH rule told cities to set fair housing goals, but not how to meet them. It was flexible on doctrinaire questions like: Should assistance go to people or places?

Neither did the rule seem likely to dampen the supply of affordable housing. “It’s important and worthwhile and corresponded to the importance of what it’s designed to do,” says Andrea Ponsor, the COO of Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future, which advocates for the preservation and production of affordable rental housing. “We were very supportive of the rule and we don’t feel like it had its opportunity to work yet.”

It's the usual conservative bromide: protections against discrimination are always bad for business.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Monday, Carson framed the change as a way to bolster housing production across the board. “I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place,” he told the paper. While it’s true that the affordability crisis is in part rooted in housing starts per capita hitting a 60-year low, the Fair Housing Act is intended to attack segregation, not scarcity.

That comment does not mesh with Carson’s established philosophy. In his only published commentary on housing policy before his appointment to HUD, he called the 2015 AFFH rule “social engineering” that would “fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas.” Fair housing advocates would have found that a dreamy, if outlandish scenario. Recipients of Community Development Block Grants have been required for decades to “affirmatively further fair housing,” but have rarely if ever been punished by HUD for not doing so.

A quick glance at the notice reveals that while the secretary contradicts himself, the outlines of a policy—to the extent they can be read that way—hew closely to conservative orthodoxy on housing, which is to reject federal efforts to demolish the walls that wealthy white suburbs have built. HUD’s new approach does not appear likely to increase production or decrease segregation. Instead, it poses a series of questions that appear almost painfully rudimentary on the heels of the Obama administration’s six-year effort to draft the AFFH rule (and 50 years of rampant local disregard for the FHA), such as:

• “Instead of a data-centric approach, should jurisdictions be permitted to rely upon their own experiences?”

• “How much deference should jurisdictions be provided in establishing objectives to address obstacles to identified fair housing goals, and associated metrics and milestones for measuring progress?”

One of HUD’s new goals is to “provide for greater local control,” a phrase understood to conjure the strict, racially-motivated land use laws that were developed by American suburbs to keep out minority populations.

So protecting affordable housing from discrimination is destroying affordable housing, the same way protecting lenders from discrimination by banks and mortgage shops "caused the 2008 Great Depression".  The "Community Reinvestment Act wrecked the economy because banks were forced to give loans to poor black and Latino people who couldn't afford them" is the worst zombie lie of the last decade.

Now Carson is resurrecting it to do the same thing to housing.  It's sickening.  But this is who the Trump regime is.

Last Call For Housing Of Pain

Glenn Thrush at the New York Times notes that the affordable housing crisis in America has only gotten worse under the Trump regime, and that millions of Americans will receive no help from the federal government.  After all, HUD Secretary Ben Carson doesn't even think HUD should exist.

The country is in the grips of an escalating housing affordability crisis. Millions of low-income Americans are paying 70 percent or more of their incomes for shelter, while rents continue to rise and construction of affordable rental apartments lags far behind the need.

The Trump administration’s main policy response, unveiled this spring by Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development: a plan to triple rents for about 712,000 of the poorest tenants receiving federal housing aid and to loosen the cap on rents on 4.5 million households enrolled in federal voucher and public housing programs nationwide, with the goal of moving longtime tenants out of the system to make way for new ones.

As city and state officials and members of both parties clamor for the federal government to help, Mr. Carson has privately told aides that he views the shortage of affordable housing as regrettable, but as essentially a local problem.

A former presidential candidate who said last year that he did not want to give recipients of federal aid “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say, ‘I’ll just stay here; they will take care of me,’” he has made it a priority to reduce, rather than expand, assistance to the poor, to break what he sees as a cycle of dependency.

And when congressional Democrats and Republicans scrambled to save his department’s budget and rescue an endangered tax credit that accounts for nine out of 10 affordable housing developments built in the country, Mr. Carson sat on the sidelines, according to legislators and congressional staff members.

Local officials seem resigned to the fact that they will receive little or no help from the Trump administration.

“To be brutally honest, I think that we aren’t really getting any help right now out of Washington, and the situation has gotten really bad over the last two years,” said Chad Williams, executive director of the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority, which oversees public housing developments and voucher programs that serve 16,000 people in the Las Vegas area.

Nevada, ground zero in the housing crisis a decade ago, is now the epicenter of the affordability crunch, with low-income residents squeezed out of once-affordable apartments by working-class refugees fleeing from California’s own rental crisis.

“I think Carson’s ideas, that public housing shouldn’t be multigenerational, are noble,” Mr. Williams said. “But right now these programs are a stable, Band-Aid fix, and we really need them.”

Local governments do have a lot of blame to take for housing issues.  Local politicians are elected by homeowners, and homeowners want property values as high as possible after the housing collapse ten years ago. Increasing property values to create a better tax base was the only priority for cities and counties over the last decade, because without that, everything else falls apart.

So zoning laws became worse, and voters elected people who would raise property values back to where they were ten years past, and that meant being as hostile as possible to the concept of affordable housing.

Of course the Trump Regime then basically got out of the affordable housing business altogether, so for millions of us, it's not going to get any better anytime soon.

Why the Trump regime is trying to bring on another housing collapse, well, if you're as obviously turned on by autocracy as Trump is, the chaos of another 2008 housing collapse sure would be useful, right?

Trump Cards, Con't

It looks like the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was only the beginning as Trump, increasingly cornered and with investigations now closing in on his businesses, has now decided that everyone else in the White House and Cabinet has failed him and is now ruthlessly culling those around him.

President Trump has decided to remove H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser and is actively discussing potential replacements, according to five people with knowledge of the plans, preparing to deliver yet another jolt to the senior ranks of his administration.

Trump is now comfortable with ousting McMaster, with whom he never personally gelled, but is willing to take time executing the move because he wants to ensure both that the three-star Army general is not humiliated and that there is a strong successor lined up, these people said.

The turbulence is part of a broader potential shake-up under consideration by Trump that is likely to include senior officials at the White House, where staffers are gripped by fear and un­certainty as they await the next move from an impulsive president who enjoys stoking conflict.

For all of the evident disorder, Trump feels emboldened, advisers said — buoyed by what he views as triumphant decisions last week to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum and to agree to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The president is enjoying the process of assessing his team and making changes, tightening his inner circle to those he considers survivors and who respect his unconventional style, one senior White House official said.

And yes, Trump is considering replacing McMaster with John Bolton's Mustache, which would be a dead solid indicator of war coming with somebody before Mueller can complete his work.  Mueller might not get to finish though if Trump goes full Saturday Night Massacre.

McMaster is not the only senior official on thin ice with the president. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin has attracted Trump’s ire for his spending decisions as well as for general disorder in the senior leadership of his agency.

Others considered at risk for being fired or reprimanded include Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who has generated bad headlines for ordering a $31,000 dining room set for his office; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who has been under fire for his first-class travel at taxpayer expense; and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose agency spent $139,000 to renovate his office doors.

Meanwhile, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos drew attention this week when she stumbled through a pair of high-profile television interviews. Kelly watched DeVos’s sit-down with Lesley Stahl of CBS’s “60 Minutes” with frustration and complained about the secretary’s apparent lack of preparation, officials said. Other Trump advisers mocked DeVos’s shaky appearance with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today” show.

Kelly’s own ouster has been widely speculated for weeks. But two top officials said Trump on Thursday morning expressed disbelief to Vice President Pence, senior advisers and Kelly himself that Kelly’s name was surfacing on media watch lists because his job is secure. Trump and Kelly then laughed about it, the officials said.

The widespread uncertainty has created power vacuums that could play to the advantage of some administration aides.

Pompeo, who carefully cultivated a personal relationship with the president, had positioned himself as the heir apparent to Tillerson, whom Trump had long disliked.

Similarly, Pruitt has made no secret inside the West Wing of his ambition to become attorney general should Trump decide to fire Jeff Sessions, who he frequently derides for his decision to recuse himself from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

White House officials have grown agitated that Pruitt and his allies are privately pushing for the EPA chief to replace Sessions, a job Pruitt has told people he wants. On Wednesday night, Kelly called Pruitt and told him the president was happy with his performance at EPA and that he did not need to worry about the Justice Department, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

At this point Trump does whatever he wants, advisers and Cabinet be damned, and everyone's going to pay the price.  And I bet if Sessions won't fire Mueller, Scott Pruitt would in a heartbeat. 

The Front Man For The Next Housing Crisis

The Trump regime isn't just repeating the mistakes of the Dubya years on housing by dismantling Obama-era protections, they're not just going down the same path with banks playing Big Casino games, they're gutting affordable public housing ahead of time through HUD and Ben Carson, so when this bubble does burst the pain is going to be astronomical.  Alec MacGillis:

The Trump cuts would mean that several programs would be eliminated entirely, including the home program, which offers seed money for affordable-housing initiatives, and the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program that Carla Hills, Ford’s HUD secretary, had praised to Carson at the dinner. In New York, CDBG helped pay for, among many things, housing-code enforcement, the 311 system, and homeless shelters for veterans. But the grants were also relied on in struggling small towns, where they paid for sidewalks, sewer upgrades, and community centers. In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so weak that the school bus couldn’t cross it, forcing kids from one part of town to cluster along a busy road for pickup. “Without those funds, it would just cripple this area,” said Nathan Simons, who administers the grants for the surrounding region. HUD, for all its shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived. 

But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising — a notion that his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. “I’m not sure he understood how that would work,” Kemp told me. “He was probably repeating what had been told to him.” Then, a day after the budget was released, Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a “state of mind.” This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be replicated millions of times over. 

Two weeks later, Carson went to Capitol Hill to testify on the budget proposal before Congressional panels that would have the final say on the numbers. With Kasper perched over his shoulder, he told both the Senate and House committees that they shouldn’t get overly hung up on the cuts. “We must look for human solutions, not just policies and programs,” he said. “Our programs must reach out and so must our hearts.” The budget, he added, would “help more eligible Americans achieve freedom from regulations and bureaucracy and the ability to govern themselves.” 

Members of both parties on the panels seemed dubious. Even conservative Republicans challenged the elimination of CDBG and dismissed Carson’s repeated claim that those and other cuts would be made up for with “public-private partnerships,” noting that such partnerships depended on exactly the public seed money that the budget was jettisoning.
Carson remained unruffled. The cuts were made necessary by the “atmosphere of constraint” created by a “new paradigm that’s been forced on us,” he said, presumably referring to the desire for tax cuts for the wealthy and an even larger military. “The problem that faces us now as a nation will only be exacerbated if we don’t deal with them in what appears to be a harsh manner,” he told the Senate panel. “We have to stop the bleeding to get the healing.” 

As I watched the hearings, it occurred to me that Carson was the perfect HUD secretary for Donald Trump, the real-estate-developer president who appears to care little for public housing. He offered a gently smiling refutation to accusations from any corner that the department’s evisceration would have grave consequences. After all, Ben Carson had made it from Detroit to Johns Hopkins without housing assistance, a point of pride in his family. Not to mention that Carson’s very identity — theoretically — helped inoculate the administration against charges of prejudice. (Just last week, Carson said, in the wake of racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, that the controversy over Trump’s support of white supremacists there was “blown out of proportion” and echoed the president’s “both sides” language when referring to “hatred and bigotry.”) 

Even better, Carson could be trusted not to resist Mick Mulvaney’s budget designs. At one moment in the Senate hearing, Carson noted that Congress’s recent spending package for the current year had given the department more than it had been expecting. “I’m always happy to take money,” he said, smiling. 

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, was unamused. “You have to ask for it first,” he said.

The cuts are going to wreck the government's capacity for responding to the massive financial damage that is assuredly coming, at the time it will need it the most.  I don't know what else to say other than this country will be in a full-blown depression if Trump's GOP has their way, and what happens after that is anyone's guess.

The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind)

Dr. Ben Carson, Trump HUD Secretary and apparently the world's worst history student, strikes again.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson referred to slaves as "immigrants" while speaking Monday to department employees. 

"That's what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity," Carson said. "There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

Ben, "immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships" were in fact, you know, slaves.

You know what, I'm sure he's a gifted neurosurgeon, but the guy is a terrible, terrible civil servant, Cabinet secretary, and human being.  How could anyone, let alone an African-American, be this utterly tone deaf and blockheaded?  Did nobody pull his sleeve and get him to stop before he was able to finish this paragraph on "gosh slavery wasn't so bad, they had dreams too to keep them going!" or something?

Can we hire somebody to do that?

Thanks.

Last Call For Is There A Doctor In The House?

Looks like Trump really is going to nominate Dr. Ben Carson as HUD secretary. Remember this is a man for whom even with all his talents, he freely admits that he's patently unqualified to run any federal department, including HUD. So naturally, he's running HUD.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked Ben Carson to be his secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who faced off against Trump in this year's Republican primaries, is the first African-American nominated for Trump's Cabinet. 

In a statement announcing the nomination, Trump referred to Carson's overcoming a troubled youth in Detroit to become head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

"I am thrilled to nominate Dr. Ben Carson as our next secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development," Trump said. "Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities." 

"I am honored to accept the opportunity to serve our country in the Trump administration," Carson said. "I feel that I can make a significant contribution particularly by strengthening communities that are most in need. We have much work to do in enhancing every aspect of our nation and ensuring that our nation's housing needs are met."

Andrew Flowers at FiveThirtyEight gives a number of reasons why HUD needs to be a top priority in the Trump administration (or any administration for that matter) and why leaving it to someone like Carson is playing with fire.

Housing should be at the center of any attempt to fight poverty. Recent research by Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, among others, has shown that inadequate housing is often a catalyst for a cycle of poverty; it triggers residential instability, which hurts the life outcomes of children and their parents. And for the poorest of the poor, the homeless, experts are increasingly promoting a “housing first” approach, in which authorities try to help people find housing as a first step toward addressing other poverty challenges. 

But housing policy in the U.S. is skewed toward rewarding wealthy homeowners (with tax deductions) rather than renters, who tend to be poorer. HUD oversees the Section 8 housing voucher program, which helps about 5 million people pay for private housing. Another roughly 2 million people are in public housing. 

But, crucially, the majority of poor Americans who qualify for housing assistance don’t get it — about 75 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Of those families below the federal poverty guideline, 67 percent don’t get any housing assistance. A new HUD secretary could help change that, or could promote other reforms that would let the government help more poor families afford housing.

The fact that HUD is responsible for nearly $1 trillion in home mortgage loans should give a hell of a lot of people mild angina now that Ben Carson's in charge of it.  And let's remember, this is a guy who thinks the Fair Housing Act, arguably HUD's most important component?  Carson thinks HUD has no business actually enforcing it.

Perhaps HUD’s most important role is that of ensuring equal access to housing, a role enshrined in the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The law made the agency responsible not just for fighting housing discrimination but for “affirmatively furthering” fair housing. The Obama administration last year announced plans to enforce that requirement by withholding federal funds in historically segregated areas. Contingent on receiving funds, state and local public housing authorities would be required to address how affordable housing development and zoning regulations further the goals of the FHA. 

Not much is known about Carson’s views on housing. But in 2015, he published an Op-Ed in The Washington Times lambasting the Obama administration’s enforcement measures. As Emily Badger of The Upshot wrote recently, Carson’s comments suggest that if he takes charge of HUD, he could water down — or end outright — the agency’s role in desegregation and in fighting housing discrimination.

 Let's take a look at America's new housing chief on HUD and the Fair Housing Act in his own words, shall we?

It is true that the Fair Housing Act and other laws have greatly reduced explicit discrimination in housing, but significant disparities in housing availability and quality persist. To address them, The Obama administration’s new agency rules rely on a tortured reading of the Fair Housing laws to empower the Department of Housing and Urban Development to “affirmatively promote” fair housing, even in the absence of explicit discrimination. 

The new rule would not only condition the grant of HUD funds to municipalities on building affordable housing as is the case today, but would require that such affordable housing be built primarily in wealthier neighborhoods with few current minority residents and that the new housing be aggressively marketed to minorities. In practice, the rule would fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas by encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose — including race-neutral zoning restrictions on lot sizes and limits on multi-unit dwellings, all in the name of promoting diversity. 

These rules come on the heels of a Supreme Court decision narrowly upholding the use of “disparate impact” analysis in determining whether municipal housing policies have a racially discriminatory effect, whether intended or not. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs vs. Inclusive Communities Project, et al., turned on whether the Texas housing agency decision to authorize more subsidized housing developments in poor rather than wealthy areas was racially discriminatory since it resulted in less affordable housing being made available in wealthier, non-black areas. The court ruled that it was proper for the lower courts and HUD to make a determination based on “disparate impact” rather than any specific intent to discriminate. 

Fair housing advocates saw this as a victory, but as with other mandated social-engineering schemes, the sort of unintended consequences Justice Samuel Alito alluded to in his dissent lurk in the shadows. New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio recently announced a plan to build almost 80,000 new affordable housing units in the city’s minority neighborhoods, but the new rules could conceivably prevent their construction because of the “disparate impact” doing so might have on minority access to affordable housing in non-minority areas of the city.

These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse. There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.

A HUD chief that thinks HUD shouldn't actually do anything outside of "explicit discrimination", and that it shouldn't "promote diversity" in housing.  Carson may be one of Trump's most dangerous and most detrimental cabinet choices in the long run, folks.

Be afraid.

The Next One Out Of The Clown Car-son

With Pataki (who?) gone, looks like the next Republican voted off the island will be Dr. Godwin as his campaign is coming apart at the seams.

Ben Carson’s top aides have resigned, casting the retired neurosurgeon’s campaign into chaos just a month before the Iowa caucuses.


Carson’s campaign manager Barry Bennett and communications director Doug Watts announced Thursday they will leave the team.

In an exit interview with The Hill, Bennett blamed Carson’s close friend and adviser Armstrong Williams for a handful of political missteps and accused him of railroading the retired neurosurgeon’s White House bid.“I called Ben this morning…and explained to him the root of the problem is that you told me Armstrong is not involved in the campaign but he clearly is,” Bennett said. “My frustration level is boiling over so I told him I think it’s best that I leave."

Bennett said he believes “a lot more” staffers will follow him out the door and predicted the campaign team will be “decimated.”

Williams does not have an official role with the campaign, but he’s a longtime friend of Carson’s and has his ear on everything from politics to business deals to life.

Williams, who often sets up media interviews for Carson without the campaign’s knowledge, and the top advisers have been on a collision course for some time.

Things came to a head last week when Williams arranged for several media outlets to interview Carson at his Maryland home, and Carson openly mused about a staff shake-up.

The interviews caught the campaign off guard and infuriated Carson’s top aides.

“I’ve been in politics 30 years and don’t know anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to have your candidate go on national TV and announce they’re taking charge of the campaign,” said Bennett. “That’s the most obscure idea I've ever heard.”

No, the most obscure idea would be "The Pyramids of Giza were built to store grain".

Anyhow, with Carson self-destructing in the polls, on the airwaves and on the ground, 2016 looks to be starting off with a "meh" for Team Ben.

Happy 2016, doc.  Now go back to hawking your crappy book, please.

Cruzing To Get Trumped

With just seven weeks left until the Iowa Caucuses in February, Sen. Ted Cruz has picked up Dr. Ben Carson's support and now has a 10-point lead over Trump in Iowa, 31%-21%.  Two things: first, a majority of Republicans are backing the loudest, most bigoted Republicans in the race, and second, with the holidays now approaching quickly, there's not a whole lot of time left.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz now has a firm lead among likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers, according to the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll released Saturday evening.

Cruz polled at 31 percent while real estate magnate Donald Trump — who regularly led most national polls — held a distant second place at 21 percent.

These results mirror those of Monday's Monmouth University Poll, which gave the freshman senator a five-point lead over Trump.

The top slot in Iowa has cycled among Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Cruz. Carson, once an evangelical voter darling, was almost an afterthought among Iowa Republican voters in comparison.

Carson polled at 13 percent, followed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at 10 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) at 6 percent.

Cruz had the support of 51 percent of likely caucusgoers when asked about their first and second choices.

Bloomberg Politics reported this 21-point jump is the largest in the Iowa polls in the last five presidential caucuses.

The last Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll of Iowa voters was conducted in late October. Carson led at 28 points, followed by Trump at 19 points and Cruz at 10 points.

But they still tell me the smart money's on Rubio.

Night Of The Don's Knives

The political science performance art piece that is Donald Trump hit another box on the way to completing the Modern Fascism bingo card this week with The Donald calling for a "total and complete shutdown" of allowing Muslims into the United States, including American citizens.

Trump, in a formal statement from his campaign, urged a “total and complete shutdown” of all federal processes allowing followers of Islam into the country until elected leaders can “figure out what is going on.” Asked by The Hill whether that would include American Muslims currently abroad, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied over email: “Mr. Trump says, ‘everyone.’ ”

The call, which he made hours after the release of a poll showing Trump being overtaken by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-­Texas) in early-voting Iowa, drew swift and forceful condemnation from the White House and virtually every presidential candidate in both parties.

Describing Trump’s proposal as “unhinged,” “fascist” and “downright dangerous,” Trump’s rivals sought to characterize it as further evidence the bombastic real estate mogul is unfit to lead the country.

“Again, this is the kind of thing that people say when they have no experience and don’t know what they’re talking about,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said in an interview. “We do not need to endorse that type of activity, nor should we.”

Yet Trump maintains that a significant number of Muslims harbor a “hatred” toward America, citing a poll by the Center for Security Policy, a think-tank that has criticized the role of Muslims in America.

That survey showed that one-quarter of Muslims living in America polled “agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as part of the global jihad” and that a majority think that Muslims in America should be allowed to answer to Shariah law.

“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine,” Trump said.

“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

Trump isn't the problem, he's just the symptom.  The problem is the millions of Republicans who think his increasingly incendiary and racist hatred is permissible, even necessary, here in America today. 

I know I called him a performance artist above and many other things in the past, but let's remember his words are truly dangerous and people will be hurt because of what he says.  The Republican candidates attacking him now are across the board hypocrites who have called for religious tests, visa program restrictions, and monitoring of mosques and Muslims too...they've just been more polite about it.  Republicans are fascist at this point, Trump is just the most overt.  All of them would sacrifice human rights for votes in 2016.  All of them.

And reminder, this is nothing new.  WWII Japanese internment camps, black slavery and Jim Crow, Chinese indentured servants, mass deportation of Mexican-Americans under Operation Wetback, and oh yeah an entire country conquered from Native Americans...America has always been a real piece of work if you're not a white guy.  Why is anyone surprised that we have a major political party gunning for Muslims in this country literally built on racism and intolerance?

Hell, the Carson camp tried to one-up Trump with this idiocy last night.

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful, thinks everyone visiting the United States should register and be monitored while in the country, a spokesman for his campaign said on Monday.

The statement came after Donald Trump, the businessman and current front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, called for an immediate halt to all Muslims entering the country until further notice.

“Everyone visiting our country should register and be monitored during their stay as is done in many countries,” said the spokesman, Doug Watts. “We do not and would not advocate being selective on one’s religion.”

All visitors.  I mean, it's not racist if you do it to everybody equally, right?  Jesus.  America, you've got to find something approximating a soul and fast.

Panic At The GOP Disco

Time to check in with Ivor Tossell's "Five Stages Of Trump" tweet again.

5 stages of Trump thinkpiece: 1. Ha Ha, Trump 2. Why Trump Can't Win 3. Explaining Trump 4. We Must Respect Real America 5. Oh God, Oh God

— Ivor Tossell (@ivortossell) July 25, 2015

Hello, Stage Five!

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them. 

Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands. 

The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet. 

In normal times, the way forward would be obvious. The wannabes would launch concerted campaigns, including television attack ads, against the ­front-runners. But even if the other candidates had a sense of what might work this year, it is unclear whether it would ultimately accrue to their benefit. Trump’s counterpunches have been withering, while Carson’s appeal to the base is spiritual, not merely political. If someone was able to do significant damage to them, there’s no telling to whom their supporters would turn, if anyone.

Dr. Heckle and Mr. Jive here haven't just upended the apple cart, they've set it on fire and are throwing flaming apples at everyone they can find. They've taken the bread and circuses grift to the endpoint and everyone's all stunned to see that in the era of reality show politics that the hooting masses love the guys that aren't supposed to have any chance of winning. Oh, and there's this.

According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.

And the Republicans will look up and shout, "Save us!" And Mitt Romney will look down and whisper "47 percent." Oh well, I guess those sidelined mega-donors will have to console themselves with all the local, state, and House races that they've bought over the last five years. I'm sure they'll be okay even if they don't win the White House. The rest of us?  Well...not so much.

The Great Debate Debate, Con't

A couple of points raised in last night's GOP debate that I wanted to bring up, first Trump on the minimum wage:

But, taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can't do it.

Considering Trump inherited his millions from his dad, that's a hell of a thing to say.  The greatest capitalist country on earth has businesses that can't afford to pay taxes or to pay workers?  Ben Carson was even more nuts.

As far as the minimum wage is concerned, people need to be educated on the minimum wage. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.

It's particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job, who are looking for one. You know, that -- and that's because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down.

What?  Black teenagers are making too much money?  People should be grateful for the experience, Carson said.  You don't need to be paid.  Does anybody actually agree with that?  Rubio weighed in too:

If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

Here's the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don't know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

You should be grateful for the experience, you don't need to be paid, and you should be lucky we don't replace you with a robot.  Amazing.

That's where Republicans are on the working poor.  You make too much money and you're ruining it for the rest of us.

The Carson Show, Con't

Over at TPM, Ed Kilgore argues that Ben Carson may be even more dangerous an ideologue than Donald Trump is, and unlike Herman Cain, he's not going anywhere.

Cain was not a revered figure before running in 2012, beyond those who listened when he sat in for an Atlanta-based radio host. He also was not exactly a non-politician, having run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. But the most important reason to stop identifying Carson with Cain is simple: Cain’s loss of his once-high poll ratings were not caused by a voters getting tired with a “flavor of the month” or realizing his slim qualifications; he was brought down by a series of sexual allegations that escalated from multiple claims of sexual harassment to a long-term extramarital affair. Cain never admitted any wrong-doing, but he also never convincingly rebutted the allegations, and all the smoke convinced many observers there might be fire. He left the race on his own terms, but after losing most of his altitude.

There’s zero reason to think Carson has any such skeletons in his closet. The one thing we know about his background that is politically dangerous is his testimonial work for a subsequently fined nutritional supplement company. But unless it turns out he was paid a lot more than seems to be the case, he’s only in hot water if he cannot soon keep his story straight. Being a straight shooter is extremely important to his image.

He seems to have successfully back-pedaled on his one easy-to-understand policy heresy, a proposal to replace Medicare and Medicaid with heavily subsidized health savings accounts, which he now describes as an “option” for beneficiaries (that, too, is problematic, but not as much as his original “idea”).

So there remains what should actually disqualify Carson: his extremist, paranoid “world-view” which treats regular boring old center-left liberals as conscious and systematically deceitful would-be destroyers of this country bent on imposing a Marxist tyranny via “politically correct” suppression of free speech and confiscation of guns.

There’s unquestionably a constituency for this point of view, but we may never know whether it would outnumber the Republicans baffled or horrified by it until such time as one of his rivals or the heretofore clueless media start talking about it. If they don’t pretty soon, then one theory of the 2016 GOP nominating process could come true: conservatives want to rerun the 1964 elections, and they’ve finally found their Barry Goldwater.

And that's some relatively scary stuff.  Carson may be soft-spoken and somewhat obsessed with weird stuff like grain-storing pyramids, but the man's worldview is pretty clear: liberals aren't just politically opposed to Carson and the GOP, liberals are Communist enemies of the state that must be purged from the country. As Ed points out in his piece, MoJo's David Corn has documented Carson's hero, Bircher nutbag Cleon Skousen, pretty well.

Carson swears by Skousen, who died in 2006. In a July 2014 interview, Carson contended that Marxist forces had been using liberals and the mainstream media to undermine the United States. His source: Skousen. "There is a book called The Naked Communist," he said. "It was written in 1958. Cleon Skousen lays out the whole agenda, including the importance of getting people into important positions in the mainstream media so they can help drive the agenda. Well, that's what's going on now." Four months later, while being interviewed by Megyn Kelly on Fox News, Carson denounced unnamed Marxists who were presently seeking to destroy American society: "There was a guy who was a former CIA agent by the name of Cleon Skousen who wrote a book in 1958 called The Naked Communist, and it laid out the whole agenda. You would think by reading it that it was written last year—showing what they're trying to do to American families, what they're trying to do to our Judeo-Christian faith, what they're doing to morality." (Skousen had been an FBI employee—not a CIA officer—and mainly engaged in administrative and clerical duties; later he was a professor at Brigham Young University and police chief of Salt Lake City.) And the most recent edition of this Skousen book boasts Carson's endorsement on the front cover: "The Naked Communist lays out the whole progressive plan. It is unbelievable how fast it has been achieved."

Skousen's book was a hyperbolic, far-from-sophisticated Cold War denouncement of communism and the Soviet Union. Marx, Skousen claimed, had set out "to create a race of human beings conditioned to think like criminals." And in McCarthyesque fashion, Skousen contended that "agents of communism" had "penetrated every echelon of American society—including some of the highest offices of the United States Government." He insisted that many "loyal Americans" had been duped by Communists into doing the Reds' dirty work because "they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us." Thus, these fellow travelers and naive citizens were part of a "campaign to soften America for the final takeover."

Skousen listed dozens of the goals of the commies and their useful idiots, including pushing free trade, promoting coexistence with the Soviet bloc, capturing "one or both of the political parties in the United States," winning control of schools ("use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda"), and infiltrating the press ("get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, and policy making positions"). He said they wanted to control "key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures," weaken American culture by degrading artistic expression (and substituting "good sculpture from parks and building" with "shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms"), and present homosexuality as "normal, natural, and healthy." What's more, he claimed, they wanted to discredit the Bible, eliminate prayer in schools, demean the American Founding Fathers as "selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the 'common man,'" and support "any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc." He said they also wanted to encourage divorce and promiscuity, incite "special-interest groups" to "rise up…to solve economic, political or social problems," and seize control of unions and big business.

If this all sounds like Glenn Beck-level "blackboard full of plans for fluoride to become the next caliphate" insanity, that's because it is. It's quite easy to laugh this garbage off as funny, but it's not.

This guy is leading the polls now among the GOP.

The Carson (No) Show, Con't

You know guys, it's totally weird now that Ben Carson is leading, he wants no more televised debates.

Ben Carson’s campaign is suggesting that future Republican presidential debates only be broadcast over the Internet, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The suggestion that the future debates not be televised is one of several calls for reforms from one of the frontrunners for the GOP nomination after a debate last week on CNBC that was widely criticized by the candidates.

“We also think there are too many debates,” Carson spokesman Doug Watts told the Wall St. Journal on Saturday. “They’re all bunched up and they really do take a lot of time away from the campaign and they take a lot of financial resources for us to be able to work on them.”

Carson is leading polls in Iowa, which hosts the first contest in the GOP primary in February. He also has surpassed Donald Trump in some national polls, giving him leverage in the loud debate over changing the debate process.

Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, is holding a meeting with GOP campaign representatives on Sunday night to discuss changes to the remaining debates.

The retired neurosurgeon’s campaign says future debates could be carried on Facebook and YouTube, unnamed sources familiar with the situation told the Journal. They believe doing so will strip television networks of their power to control the formats of the debates.

The campaign also says the forums should prioritize lengthy statements from candidates rather than frequent moderator intervention.

So Internet-popular Carson wants internet-only debates, a limited number of them, and ones that are more infomercial than debate.  In other words, now that he's ahead, suddenly people asking him questions are a bad thing.  In fact it's such a bad thing, the Carson campaign is publicly saying so.

Now, you tell me why that is.

The Unbearable Whiteness Of Jonah

After seven years of the Obamas being too ghetto for conservatives to handle, the new charge from professionally compensated idiot Jonah Goldberg is that Ben Carson is what real blackness is, and Obama is not black enough.

But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

Meanwhile, Carson grew up in Detroit, the son of a very poor, very hard-working single mother. His tale of rising from poverty to become the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories of the last half-century. (Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in the movie about his life.) He was a towering figure in the black community in Baltimore and nationally — at least, until he became a Republican politician.

And that probably explains why his race seems to be such a non-issue for the media. The New York Times is even reluctant to refer to him as a doctor. The Federalist reports that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is three times more likely to be referred to as “Dr.” in the Times as brain surgeon Carson. If the Times did that to a black Democrat, charges of racism would be thick in the air.

Goldberg manages to get all his racist hangups in one article here: Carson is One Of The Good Ones(tm), Liberals Are The Real Racists(tm), and Only In My Infinite White Wisdom Can You Judge Blackness(tm).

Expect a lot more of "Hey black voters, since you only voted for Obama because he's black, you'll vote for Ben Carson now, right?" in the future.

The Carson Show, Con't

Of course Ben Carson wants to eliminate abortion nationwide.  What kind of candidate did you think he was going to be?

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would "love" to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, making abortion illegal nationwide, with almost no exemptions.

"I'm a reasonable person and if people can come up with a reasonable explanation of why they would like to kill a baby, I'll listen," Carson said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

While the Republican candidate said he opposes abortions for unwanted pregnancies and in cases of rape and incest, the retired neurosurgeon told moderator Chuck Todd he might be open to allowing abortions to preserve the life and health of the mother.

"That's an extraordinarily rare situation," Carson said. "But if in that very rare situation it occurred, I believe there's room to discuss that."

On "Meet the Press," the soft-spoken candidate said his past controversial comments have become flash points because they resonate with "people who aren't really thinking deeply."

Carson was asked how he would respond if he became the GOP nominee and those contentions remarks are used to attack him. His response: "As people get to know me, they know that I'm not a hateful, pathological person like some people try to make me out to be. And that will be self-evident. So I don't really worry about that."

So, we know Carson is anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and his "reasonable" stance on abortion is maybe, maybe allowing discussion of having the procedure if and only if the health of the mother is at risk.  Oh, and if you think that's controversial, it's because you're not a "very deep" thinker.  That's "self-evident".  But at least he "probably" would raise the debt ceiling rather than default!

Of course, there's no difference between him and Clinton/Sanders, say the people who convinced you not to vote in 2014, leaving a ready GOP Congress to eliminate the filibuster and pass laws like this.

And should he end up the candidate, well, he'll get 60 million votes in the general, easily.  Even Romney got that, and the Republicans hated him.  They hated Obama more though, and they will be out to vote.

If we don't, like Tom Hilton said, All dark. Forever.