Zaid Jilani — Trump the Outsider Outsources His Budget to Insider Think Tank

President Trump’s budget proposal, released on Thursday, echoes none of the populist, anti-establishment themes of candidate Trump’s campaign for higher office. Instead, it calls for a large increase in defense spending while reducing spending for a variety of popular domestic programs.

That’s not surprising considering where those ideas came from. Rather than bringing in new ideas from outside of the Beltway, many of its proposals are lifted straight from the recommendations of an elite ultra-conservative D.C. think tank: the Heritage Foundation.

Founded in 1973, Heritage has served as a sort of a watering hole for the Republican establishment, providing policy papers and staffers for GOP members of Congress and presidential administrations. Its 2015 annual report listed almost $100 million in revenues — drawn from conservative mega-donors and corporations — which it uses to facilitate the spread of its ideas across Washington, D.C.

And those ideas have found a home in the Trump administration, which leaned heavily on Heritage advice during the transition period. Many of the White House proposal’s ideas are identical to a budget blueprint Heritage drew up last year.

Here are just a few examples….

Jim DeMint is smiling.

The Intercept
Trump the Outsider Outsources His Budget to Insider Think Tank

Zaid Jilani

See also

New York Magazine
Remember Jim DeMint? His Fingerprints Are All Over the Trump Transition

Ed Kilgore

Jonathan Swan — Bannon set up Trump-Gabbard meeting

Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon contacted Tulsi Gabbard to arrange Monday’s meeting with the president-elect, according to a source close to Bannon.

“He reached out to her, not vice versa,” the source told The Hill on Monday.Many in the media raised their eyebrows when the news broke that Trump was meeting at Trump Tower Monday morning with Hawaii’s Democratic congresswoman.

But for those who know Bannon best, there was no surprise at all.

Bannon, who hates the entrenched two-party system, has long admired Gabbard. She’s an Iraq War veteran with an independent streak. Bannon, a navy veteran, was drawn to her when she began publicly excoriating the Obama administration over its plan to defeat ISIS.

“He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” a second source familiar with Bannon’s thinking told The Hill. “Wants to work with her on everything.”...

The Hill
Bannon set up Trump-Gabbard meeting

Jonathan Swan

Before anyone gets all excited about "bipartisanship"….

As we go into the long Thanksgiving weekend, shell-shocked by events surrounding the presidential transition getting more surreal by the day, it’s almost comforting to read a piece of news that sounds even slightly like familiar political activity. It’s the kind of thing that would have made for screaming headlines and much gnashing of teeth on the left just a few months ago, but now seems almost quaintly normal. I’m speaking of the news that Donald Trump’s transition team has outsourced much of the lower level government staffing to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which is in the hands of right wing extremist Jim DeMint. According to Politico:

Heritage is “absolutely the fulcrum, and essential to staffing the administration with people who reflect Trump’s commitments across the board,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent group that opposes abortion rights. “I can say it’s been a source of great confidence during the election to know that principled people were planning for a Trump administration.”

Salon
Is Donald Trump’s transition being outsourced to the Heritage Foundation? That’s not good news

Heather Digby Parton

Eric Zuesse — Final Proof The Tea Party Was Founded As A Bogus AstroTurf Movement

Eric Zuesse traces the history.

The Huffington Post
Final Proof The Tea Party Was Founded As A Bogus AstroTurf Movement
Eric Zuesse

Elias Isquith — GOP’s true leader is Jim DeMint

The former senator isn't just the head of the right's premier think tank -- he's now running the Republican Party

...what’s most striking about DeMint is his boundless optimism. He’s not only utterly convinced that there’s a silent majority of conservatives dotting the American landscape, but he also believes that Republicans’ failures in 2008 and 2012 were the product of the party not being conservative enough....

 ... a lot about the way Jim DeMint sees the world that would strike many as odd. He’s not so sure gay people or sexually active unmarried women should be allowed to teach. He’s convinced that the Republican Party can win on cutting social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security. He thinks Obama is turning the U.S. into a country of “national socialism.” His chosen method of political persuasion is to inflict “pain.”

For most folks outside of the GOP base, this is a bizarre and unfortunate combination of right-wing libertarianism and an authoritarian spirit....

Some would say that being a libertarian and being an authoritarian are incompatible and that a libertarian authoritarian is an oxymoron. However, that depends. Classical liberalism had a conservative side holding that while all are created naturally equal, only some deserve to be free through their meritorious action evidence in worldly power and success. Social liberalism was only added decades later.

Social liberalism was never adopted by many classical liberals. Nor was it by neoclassical liberals, who see liberalism in terms of free markets and utility maximization. Free markets means no government "intrusion" since exchange is "natural," and "utility" maximization signifies acquisition of power and property as being "rational." The best from of government is "meritocracy" as shown by acquisition of power and wealth. The privilege of political power (authoritarianism) and economic freedom (libertarianism) is hard won and deserved and therefore should be inheritable.

Salon
Boehner’s sorry reality: GOP’s true leader is Jim DeMint
Elias Isquith

Travis Gettys — GOP Senate ‘lynch mob’ targets Ted Cruz in closed-door meeting

GOP Senate ‘lynch mob’ targets Ted Cruz in closed-door meeting (via Raw Story )

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was the target of a “lynch mob” of angry Senate Republicans during a closed-door meeting earlier this week. The New York Times reported that Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) asked Cruz at Wednesday’s meeting to renounce attacks by…

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Bill Black — The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular” [Where? Ecuador]

Heritage Foundation is run by Jim DeMint, the former Tea Party legislator. Heritage promptly demonstrated the impact of its new leadership with its purported study of the benefits and costs of immigration that ignored the benefits and inflated the costs. Even other conservative groups were appalled – and that was before one of the co-authors of its studies’ past writings on the inferiority of certain minorities that purportedly made assimilation fail became public. Heritage is one of many anti-think tanks where anyone with a progressive thought is shown the door.

I wondered how the new Heritage was handling Ecuador. Ecuador is a particular problem for entities like Heritage. Heritage has an “economic freedom index.” “Freedom” has a specialized meaning to Heritage – financial regulation and regulation to protect workers’ health and safety tends to be treated as a decline in freedom. Simply having the government spend money – even if the spending dramatically increases health, safety, and education – can be treated by the index as making a nation less “free.” Like the competitiveness indices created by the World Economic Forum, the Heritage indices represent faux empiricism in the service of ideological dogmas.

New Economic Perspectives
The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular”
William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics, UMKC

McClatchy — Sen. Jim DeMint to resign to run the Heritage Foundation

Kick off of the DeMint for President campaign?

McClatchy
Sen. Jim DeMint to resign to run the Heritage Foundation
James Rosen | McClatchy Newspapers