Today President Obama spoke at the Anaheim Convention Center in Orange County on behalf of Southern California candidates Katie Porter, Harley Rouda, Mike Levin, Katie Hill, and Gil Cisneros (AKA- the Lottery Winner). I offered Ammar Campa-Najjar, a former Obama Labor Department official who is running against Drunken Hunter (CA-50) but who the DCCC is not behind and has continued to sabotage (please contribute to his campaign here or, if you hate the DCCC as much as I do, here) a ticket but Obama's office sent him one. [The DCCC staff is made up of such utter jerks. Who hires them?]His manner and presence alone were a kind of reassurance that no matter how horrific you see Trump as being, he's just a temporary mistake that somehow happened to our country. Aside from making the point that these are "extraordinary" and "dangerous" times he seemed genuinely disturbed by the "crazy stuff" coming out of the Trump Regime, particularly the way Trump has been trying to politicize the Justice Department and the courts. "It should not be a partisan issue," said the President, "to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the FBI to use the criminal justice system as a cudgel to punish our political opponents. Or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution."Not mentioning Trump rubber-stamps Mimi Walters, Steve Knight and Dana Rohrabacher by name, he obviously found it shocking and disturbing that congressional Republicans have been "utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work."The kind of the thing Obama was so upset about was demonstrated by Trump again yesterday when he started babbling again about how the Department of Justice should try to identify the anonymous member of his own White House who wrote the incendiary NY Times OpEd about Trump's glaring and dangerous shortcomings. In an interview on Air Force One, Trump again tried to pass his problem off as a threat to national security and demanded that Sessions find out who betrayed him and punish The Times for running the OpEd. "Jeff," he insisted, "should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it's national security." His point is that if the person he hired and gave top security clearance doesn't belong in meetings where security clearance is required, even though there wasn't anything classified in the OpEd.On Fox News, Trump claimed that whoever wrote the piece "may not be a Republican; it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state person who has been there for a long time." Members of Congress, as well as members of the press, claim that Trump staffers tell them this same stuff about Trump, albeit off the record, constantly.Trump seems to have demanded letters from his top officials claiming to have not written the OpEd and he's gotten them from Mike Pence, DNI Dan Coats (both of whom were immediate suspects), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and from and other Cabinet members. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman was also a suspect and he also wrote Trump a letter saying it wasn't him. What about Chief of Staff Kelly (who Ivanka and Jared say wrote the OpEd) and Jared Kushner? Are they "members of a secret Resistance?" Ex-Libertarian Rand Paul and Rudy Giuliani want them all to take lie detector tests. "Let's assume it's a person with a security clearance," said Giuliani. "If they feel writing this is appropriate, maybe they feel it would be appropriate to disclose national security secrets, too." Why? That makes no sense at all.You can understand why the last patriot in the Oval office just said "A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. They appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all." Meanwhile, no one is doing any work in the White House, unless you count sleuthing for Trump's latest enemy "work." Trump also wants Congress to get involved with the hunt for what he refers to as a "traitor." Ryan just rolled his eyes and thought about how he only has a few more months to go before he's out of this horror, but the neo-fascists in Congress, like fringe lunatic Mark Meadows (NC) want a go at it. This is what a Trump government looks like. Putin:Pam and Russ Martens over at Wall Street on Parade made a good case that whoever wrote the OpEd was a Koch loyalist.
Parsing the phrasing in the OpEd, there is a clear pattern of right-wing ideology-- the kind that comes from Charles Koch, CEO of the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, and the sprawling network of tax-exempt front groups that are funded with Koch foundation money. There is this telling phrase in the OpEd: “…the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” This is the jargon of the Koch-brand of the libertarian movement which tortuously attempts to equate freedom with the right to pollute the environment with fossil fuels without government interference.Then there is this sentence in the OpEd: “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” The Koch manifesto is that gutting regulations makes America more “prosperous” thus its heavy funding of the front group Americans for Prosperity. This is how the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch describes Americans for Prosperity: “Americans for Prosperity is a right-wing political advocacy group founded by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, the owners of Koch Industries. AFP serves as the Kochs’ ‘grassroots’ operation, also known as astroturf. AFP spends millions on TV ads in election cycles.”Embedded in the writer’s effort to sell the idea that “many” of the Trump administrations’ policies have “made America safer and more prosperous” is the fact that Koch money, operating through its front group, Freedom Partners, dictated in writing what it wanted the Trump administration to accomplish and got many of those demands met. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord-- done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy-- done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency-- much accomplished.There is one other telling word in the OpEd: the word “republic” as used in this sentence: “But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” A person operating separate and apart from the Koch network might have said the “health of our democracy” or the “health of our nation” but a libertarian would have chosen the word “republic.”There’s another reason why we believe this is the handiwork of a Koch-connected “senior official.” Numbers are simply on our side. In November of last year, the watchdog group, Public Citizen, reported that 44 Trump administration officials have been plucked from the Koch network. As of April of this year, SourceWatch reports that 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners are working in the Trump administration. Until last month when he stepped down, that included Marc Short, who went from being President of Freedom Partners to Director of Legislative Affairs for Trump, pushing through many items on that list of written demands from Freedom Partners. (As of July, eight of the nine Board Members of Freedom Partners is a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners is Mark Holden, the General Counsel of Koch Industries: this at a taxpayer subsidized organization.)Then there is the fact that Koch Industries’ long-time law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its lawyers to the Trump administration all on the same day-- January 20, 2017, the day Trump was inaugurated. That includes White House Counsel Don McGahn (who will be leaving this Fall) and his Chief of Staff, Ann Donaldson. Both McGahn and Donaldson previously represented Freedom Partners....It is now just 61 days until the midterm election. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week showed that “more than 6 in 10 Americans say Trump and the Republican Party are out of touch with most people in the country,” and that “registered voters say they favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate in their district by 52 percent to 38 percent.”That poll had to set off fire alarms within the Koch network. How can they complete the dismantling of Federal regulations and Federal agencies if their hand-picked Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate.
This is the kind of thing that drives the Kochs and their destructive network off the wall-- and this ad just started running this week in southeast Wisconsin. They won't be able to fulfill their dreams without puppets like Bryan Steil and this isn't some ineffective DCCC ad; this is the Bryce campaign's own work. Watch closely: