Dots

So okay - are we looking at the first indication of what Trump says he'll deliver for the billion-dollar "donation" he solicited from the Dirty Fuels Cartel?

Maybe we're getting a hint at why Elon Musk's breath smells of Trump's asshole - because Trump is giving him a plausible-sounding excuse for when Tesla goes tits up (?)

I'm not asking for Boy Scouts and a world painted in soft pastels, but I'd like to get back to thinking that people will at least try to deal above board and with some honor. 

Donald Trump Says He'll Stop All Electric Car Sales

"You won't be able to sell those cars," says the legally embroiled former president

Former United States President Donald J. Trump, currently facing 34 felony counts in criminal court, is campaigning for re-election this fall by taking shots at the increasingly popular electric car industry. Trump has already called for oil and gas industry executives to donate significant campaign funds in exchange for a reversal of Biden administration climate policies. If elected this November, Trump would roll back tailpipe emissions targets and dramatically slash EV tax credits. These policies may prove unpopular even among Republican voters, as electric vehicle production has spurred job growth and investment in southern states.

The automotive landscape is a far different place than it was in 2016 when Trump gained the presidency. Despite his best efforts, the EV market has grown significantly in the last eight years. Just 159,139 electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. in 2016, and that number is expected to exceed 1.5 million (or 10 percent of U.S. new car sales) in 2024. Even if Donald Trump were to be elected and hit the brakes on EV tax credits, the market may already be at a tipping point of growth. The electric car market has jumped the chasm between early adopters and mainstream consumers. Analysts predict widespread EV adoption will continue to develop regardless of Donald Trump’s actions, though perhaps at a reduced pace.

William Clay Ford Jr., executive chair of Ford Motor, told the New York Times: “Our time frame as a company, our planning time frame, is a lot longer than election cycles,” Mr. Ford said at an event organized by the Detroit Free Press last month. “When we’re whipsawed back and forth by politicians that becomes really difficult for us.”

Investment in U.S. manufacturing spurred by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will continue apace even with a second term for Donald Trump. Hyundai, for example, is investing $13 billion on electric vehicle production in Georgia, a state Donald Trump narrowly lost by 12,000 votes in 2020. By threatening the livelihoods of blue collar American workers, Trump may be doing more harm than good for his case in these manufacturing-reliant states.

New Cybertruck Sends Owner to the Emergency Room Before He Even Gets a Chance to Drive It

With billions of investment on the books from automakers, charging companies, dealership networks, and advertising, it seems unlikely that Donald Trump can stop the rolling bolder that is the EV market. Republican strongholds Texas and Florida are increasingly adopting electric vehicles as their chosen mode of transport, trailing only California in terms of EV registrations. Electric vehicles seem to be equally popular among Republican and Democrat consumers. Alienating regular working-class Americans in an appeal to his fervent base seems to be Donald Trump’s raison d’etre, so we’ll have to wait until November to see if it actually works.

Dots

An awful lot of talk goes on about 45* and "the base"

In Arabic,

"the base" translates to "al qaeda"

Birds of a radical feather

Another Dot To Connect

This one's going to be kinda all over the fucking map. I just want to get a coupla extra points in that I think are useful as we try to knit the whole thing together.

Or maybe the metaphor is more like:

"This Trump-Russia thing is a malignant tumor with some very irregular margins. We know we won't get it all because the tendrils have grown wide and deep into a lot of little nooks and crannies. We have to take our time and make sure we get as much of it as possible."

So I guess we can start with the update on Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was indicted for Obstruction last week.

Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker:

Veselnitskaya, of course, is most widely known as the lawyer who met with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower, in June, 2016, after a Trump business partner suggested that she could offer documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. But the reason she was in the United States at the time was for hearings in a case launched by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York against a longtime client of hers, a Russian man named Denis Katsyv.

The details quickly get complicated, but suffice it to say that the investigation against Katsyv was opened in response to a letter filed with prosecutors in New York by Bill Browder, an American-born hedge-fund manager who, in the past decade, has become the chief advocate for sanctions against Russian government officials and other individuals. In 2009, a tax adviser working for Browder, Sergei Magnitsky, testified to Russian investigators that Russian officials had stolen two hundred and thirty million dollars in tax-refund payments. He was arrested and died in pretrial detention, leading Browder to launch a worldwide justice campaign, including lobbying for the passage of U.S. sanctions. In 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which has sanctioned dozens of Russian officials and which became a particular obsession of Vladimir Putin’s.

Another prong of Browder’s efforts was his letter to prosecutors claiming that Katsyv and his investment company, Prevezon, received a portion of the ill-gotten funds and used them to buy millions of dollars’ worth of Manhattan real estate.

- and -

What ultimately is the point of this indictment? Veselnitskaya is unlikely ever to return to the United States. This means that U.S. prosecutors are probably less interested in this particular, narrow matter than in what filing charges allows them to do going forward. “If the government wants on record that Natalia is a Russian government agent, this indictment serves this purpose,” the former member of the Prevezon defense team told me. That is to say, if and when charges are filed in relation to the Trump Tower meeting, prosecutors now have a building block on which to argue that, in her actions in the United States, Veselnitskaya did not represent merely herself and her client but the interests of Russian officials. That should worry Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner, who attended the meeting with Veselnitskaya, and, in turn, the President himself.

It's the Russian mob - which is the Russian government - and the Russian money. These things are not separable, and 45* is in bed with all of it.

Sue Halpern, The New Yorker:

On Tuesday, when news broke that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort had shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate with ties to Russian intelligence, the through line between the campaign and the Kremlin began to look incontrovertible. The revelation came in an inadvertently unredacted court document, which was filed by Manafort’s lawyers in response to charges made by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Manafort had lied to investigators. According to the Times, some—but not all—of the data was already in the public domain. The rest came from the campaign’s own polling operation.

And let's be sure to look at our questions about why so many Repubs are so reluctant to call 45* on his shit.

But, even more significant, it was Paul Manafort who decided to hire Tony Fabrizio as the campaign’s chief pollster. Their friendship dates back to the nineteen-nineties—Fabrizio and Manafort worked together on the Presidential campaign of Bob Dole. Fabrizio also worked for Manafort in Ukraine, earning $278,500 for the same type of work he would later do for Trump—polling and surveying to help elevate Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in the 2012 parliamentary elections. During the same period, Manafort disbursed five hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars to Kilimnik, his translator and fixer in Ukraine, for “professional services.” According to a report in Bloomberg about Manafort’s Ukrainian ventures, Fabrizio is included in e-mail chains with Manafort and Kilimnik.

Fabrizio, a native New Yorker who now lives in Florida, has worked for dozens of Republican candidates, including Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst, and Rand Paul, and is a senior counsellor at Mercury Public Affairs, which Mueller referred to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, for failing to register as a foreign agent for its lobbying work on behalf of Ukraine. Fabrizio’s company, Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, bills itself as “one of the leading survey research and campaign strategists in the nation.” “We were honored to have the privilege to serve as Chief Pollsters for President Donald J. Trump’s historic upset victory,” the company’s Web site declares, at the top of its home page. But the firm also had the experience of many people who have worked for Trump: for a time, it was reported that Trump stiffed the company three-quarters of a million dollars for its services on the Presidential campaign. If nothing else, Fabrizio was familiar with both principals in this story. (Fabrizio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

There are many dots that connect without a lot of stretching, and others that seem like they go together, but don't. I want to make sure we're not stampeding ourselves. We don't need to knee-jerk our way into some stupid Purity Quest where we shit on anyone with even the most tenuous connection to the bad guys - assuming we can be at all sure who the bad guys are.

Overall, I think we have to assume the Russians are the bad guys (duh), and qualify that with "Russians expressing an interest in getting involved with American politics".

American politicians need to be made to understand that voters are actually waking up a little; we're pissed off; and we're less likely now to accept some spinny version of the polling data that tells us we're not really pissed off about what we're pissed off about - that somehow we don't know what we're pissed off about, and we need some asshole to tell us what we think.

And not to get too whip-lash-ey, but this whole thing leads right back to Citizens United, and the fact that solving our democracy problems requires us to concentrate on getting those very large piles of dark money out of our political processes.

Because every time we have to go through this kinda shit, money is at the root of it all. 

Every. Fucking. Time.

Some Dots For Connecting

Golf pro Lee Trevino said:

"If you're caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron."

Even when he says shit like that, Franklin Graham is never seen holding a 1-iron.

In light of that simple truth, there can be no god.

Buzz

Buzz Burbank's wrap-up from last Thursday:

It takes a while to sort through all the shit - sometimes I have to listen to this kind of thing 2 or 3 times because there's so much to grok, my brain overheats and shorts out.

Buzz helps me connect some of the dots and keep it more or less organized.

Two really big ones:

• The Kennedy retirement
• NRA laundering Russian money for 45* and the GOP

Eerie Parallel

From Wonkette:

Sixteen-year-old Jaelyn Rose Willey was taken off life support last night after having been shot in the head by Austin Rollins, a boy described by police as a “lovesick teen.”

Police described Austin Bomber Mark Anthony Conditt as a “very challenged young man” who was dealing with “challenges” in his personal life. “Challenges” that he was unable to find a way to deal with that did not involve killing two people and injuring five others. People he’d never met, who very likely did not have a thing to do with his “challenges.”

Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz was abusive to his girlfriend and was so obsessed with her that he threatened to kill her new boyfriend. He killed 17 people.

Guns are a problem. I’m not saying they’re not. We need gun control. But what we also need is for men, as a people, TO STOP FUCKING MURDERING PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET LAID.

Women are also rejected. Women also spend their teen years pining after dreamy boys who will never love them back. You don’t see us going around murdering people over it. You don’t see us setting up internet communities for the purpose of talking about how evil and shallow men are for not taking us to pound town.
It suddenly occurs to me that sometimes, this American shooting shit looks a little too much like the "Honor Killings" that everybody loves Islam for.

For The Record

These assholes came to my home town

Killed one of my neighbors

No incident in itself will change anything, of course. But we have to write it all down so we can piece it together - connect as many dots as possible - and remember it. Because we have to remember. Because once in a while, somebody has to lay it all on the line - and it's our turn now.

SPLC:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) counted over 100 people killed or injured by alleged perpetrators influenced by the so-called "alt-right" — a movement that continues to access the mainstream and reach young recruits.

On December 7, 2017, a 21-year-old white male posing as a student entered Aztec High School in rural New Mexico and began firing a handgun, killing two students before taking his own life.

At the time, the news of the shooting went largely ignored, but the online activity of the alleged killer, William Edward Atchison, bore all the hallmarks of the “alt-right”—the now infamous subculture and political movement consisting of vicious trolls, racist activists, and bitter misogynists.

But Atchison wasn’t the first to fit the profile of alt-right killer—that morbid milestone belongs to Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who in 2014 killed seven in Isla Vista, California, after uploading a sprawling manifesto filled with hatred of young women and interracial couples (Atchison went by “Elliot Rodger” in one of his many online personas and lauded the “supreme gentleman,” a title Rodger gave himself and has since become a meme on the alt-right).
I don't know exactly how this next bit from Jeff Sessions factors in, but I get a bad feeling when it looks a whole lot like The Malignant Leprechaun is on his knees again, with his nose way up the ass of nitwits like the Sovereign Citizen gangs - eg: Cliven Bundy et al.



And the Press Poodles kinda went out of their way to make sure they missed the main point, even though they were dutiful in picking up on the racism bit.

It's important to call it out, but we react to the racist shit, and that actually provides some cover for the bigger issue of the Autocracy being built right in front of us.

WaPo:

Organizations such as the NAACP deemed Sessions’s language his latest act of racism. Lawyers, however, have been quick to point to the term’s regular appearance in case law, saying that “Anglo-American law” — also known as common law — is a widely used term in the legal system that refers to the shared legal roots of England and the United States.

Sessions’s use of the term appears to have been impromptu, as it does not appear in his prepared remarks, which imply that he was supposed to say, “The sheriff is a critical part of our legal heritage.”

To those unfamiliar with the term’s legal context, “Anglo-American heritage” sounded offensive, especially considering the accusations of racism that have nearly derailed Sessions’s career. A Senate committee in 1986, for instance, denied Sessions a federal judgeship, as his former colleagues testified that Sessions used the n-word and joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana,” according to The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips.
It's not like we haven't known about these assholes for a while.

The Center For Public Integrity - April, 2016:

Sheriff Nick Finch let a pistol-packing local man out of the Liberty County, Florida, jail shortly after taking office, a decision that brought him admiration, donations, and speaking requests from anti-government activists across the country. It put him at odds with state authorities, who charged him with a crime, but also thrust him into the vanguard of a radical and growing movement among sheriffs in rural communities who assert they can ignore state and federal laws they decide are unconstitutional.
- and -

What’s unique about his group is not that it opposes gun controls but that its ambition is to encourage law enforcement officers to defy laws they decide themselves are illegal. On occasion, some of his group’s sheriffs have found themselves in curious agreement with members of the sovereign citizens’ movement, which was also founded on claimed rights of legal defiance and is said by the FBI to pose one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats.
It's not simple coincidence that this idiot has become a shining star in the Daddy State Movement:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed most of a civil rights lawsuit against former Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. over an incident at Milwaukee's Mitchell airport last year.

But a claim that Clarke retaliated on Facebook for Daniel Black's exercise of his First Amendment right to shake his head at Clarke survives, and is now set for trial Jan. 22.
Black and Clarke were on the same flight from Dallas to Milwaukee on Jan. 15, 2017. Black saw Clarke wearing Dallas Cowboys gear and asked if he was David Clarke. Clarke said he was, and Black shook his head and walked away to his seat in coach.

When the plane landed in Milwaukee, Black was greeted by six sheriff's deputies who had been directed by Clarke to take Black aside and question him. They then escorted him from the airport.

This shit is happening. See it. Remember it.

An Observation

First - why the fuck do we still have to worry about Catholic Clergy?

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." --Thomas Paine
I think if anybody gets around to declaring a Word Of The Year, we'll have to default to "Abuse".

White people abusing their power over Brown people.

Men abusing their power over Women.

45* abusing his power over the government.

"Conservatives" abusing their power in general - even now, when they're clearly in the minority.

"When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women." --Sally Kempton

It boils down to the same old bit that can be expressed a variety of ways:

Men fear Gender Equality because they're afraid women will treat them the same as they've treated women.

White people fear Minority Rights because they're afraid POC will treat them the same as they've always treated POC.

The Christian Majority claims persecution because they're afraid they'll be treated the same as they've always treated everybody.

Same goes with LGBTQ, and Unions, and Immigrants and and and.

It's not about Red vs Blue; it's not about Gay vs Straight; it's not about Men vs Women - it's not about any of that except as a means to serve the interest of someone looking to gain and/or maintain power.

Because it's always about the power first.

Confirming Evidence

45* and the GOP lie. A lot. I keep thinking, eventually that's not going to come as any kind of news to anybody. And as soon as I think that, I remember the rubes will never hear anything but what The Ministry of Dis-Infotainment tells them.

WaPo:

• “The entire purpose of this is to lower middle class taxes.” — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)
• “Primarily, and priority number one, is middle-class Americans.” — White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
• “The theme behind this bill is to get middle-class tax relief for most people in the middle class.” — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Fox News on Tuesday

President Trump was so excited about passing his first major piece of legislation Wednesday that he blurted out that the Republican Party had misrepresented the entire bill, handing Democrats some potentially troublesome talking points for the 2018 midterm elections.

Speaking at the White House just before the House prepared to sign off on the tax-cuts bill one last time, Trump reveled extensively in his win before turning things over to Vice President Pence to heap praise upon him continuously for a few minutes. It was a thoroughly unique spectacle, even as victory dances and Trump Cabinet meetings go.

But along the way, Trump basically admitted that the GOP's talking points on the bill weren't exactly honest in two major ways.

While talking about the corporate tax rate being cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, Trump said, “That's probably the biggest factor in our plan.”

President Trump says GOP tax plan will lower tax on businesses: “That’s probably the biggest factor in this plan.” pic.twitter.com/ntTtnnD55b

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 20, 2017

Oops

This one's worth tracking:
"these companies...will start pouring into the country..." (jobs jobs jobs - and raises for everybody - yeehaw)

Trump's second admission was about the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate being repealed in the bill. Apparently eager to argue that this constituted his having cut taxes and slain Obamacare in one fell swoop (after Congress came up short on Obamacare this year), he argued that repealing the individual mandate was basically the same as repealing Obamacare.
So we have enormous corporate powers being given more money to spend on Coin-Operated Politicians, who are increasingly obliged to strip out protections of the law in order to accommodate the avarice of the American Aristocracy - at the expense of everyone else.

(And BTW - wanna talk about what happens with expanded Corporate Power, together with no ACA, together with HR 1313, proposed in March 2017, that says companies can require DNA - and health info on all family members - from all of it's employees? Wait til you see what that one costs ya.)

In the First World of Industrialized Nations:
Every country except the US has some form of Single Payer
Every country except the US has a sizable Labor Faction in government
Every country except the US has Anti-Climate Change policies in place
Every country except the US has sensible Gun Safety laws
And on and on and on

American Exceptionalism just ain't what it used to be.

More Fuckery

In case you were wondering why 45* has been kind of impatient with "his" generals about Afghanistan, wonder no more.

Raw Story, Sarah Burris:

During a panel discussion on President Donald Trump’s many conflicts of interest, Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump, blasted his financial surplus in the wake of his presidency. 

According to the Financial Times, Blackwater founder Erik Prince — who happens to be Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother — has proposed a two-year plan to supply 5,000 mercenaries and close to 100 aircraft, bringing the total cost of the U.S. effort to turn round a failing war to less than $10 billion a year.

I liked it a lot better when the only guys with private armies were Bond villains.

Dots

It starts to look like the dots are connecting themselves.

Listen to Bob Cesca and Jackie Schechter (sorry, unable to embed)...

The Bob Cesca Show, presented by Bubble Genius - 08-03-17

...and then go sign up for Investigate Russia

BTW - it's time to take the whole "smoke but no fire" thing and put it to bed.

Ask any firefighter what happens to your house if you wait until you see flames before you call 911.

Dots

... sometimes they lead to some interesting places.

45* ... The Mooch ... BayRock ... Felix Sater ... Russian Mob.

BTW - Nicolas Maduro moves Venezuela into the Asshole Dictatorship column, and 45* himself has nothing to say one way or another.  So maybe that can be seen as 45* making some kind of "progress" cuz at least he isn't standing and cheering for the prick - the way he's done with almost every other Asshole Dictator.

WaPo:

Citing Maduro’s “outrageous seizure of absolute power,” the U.S. government froze any American assets he may have and banned Americans from doing business with him. The move came after Maduro heralded the Sunday vote creating a new super-congress made up entirely of government backers. The newly cast legislators included his wife and son. The body will have sweeping powers to rewrite the constitution and redraw Venezuela’s governing system.

“Maduro is not just a bad leader,” said President Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster. “He is now a dictator.”

But BTW BTW - Where the fuck is Rex Tillerson?

Keith

Dot, meet Dot - Dot, this is Dot.

Today's Good News / Bad News

It gets clearer and muddier at the same time.

Clearer that there was an Olympian amount of fuckery going on.

Muddier because the Circle of Fuckery gets wider with each new bit revealed.

Four reporters and 3 different sources - Boston Globe:  (beware the pay wall)

WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an e-mail that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the e-mail.

The e-mail to the younger Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement Sunday, Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Clinton, but he gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.
E-mail.  An e-mail cracks it open and takes 'em all down?

But then:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump’s eldest son during the presidential campaign said she was summoned to Trump Tower and asked if she had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, painting a very different picture of the encounter from the one that Donald Trump Jr. has described.

Trump Jr. has said his June 2016 meeting with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was arranged through an acquaintance so that he could hear information helpful to the Trump campaign. Distancing himself from the source of the information, he has said he didn’t even know the name of the person he was to meet with in advance.

The dueling depictions of the meeting, arranged just after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, come as congressional committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigate whether Trump campaign associates and Russia coordinated to tip the election in Trump’s favor. Though neither Veselnitskaya nor Trump Jr. has described the meeting as fruitful, it'll likely be dissected by investigators trying to determine whether collusion took place.

This New Thing

This counter-terrorism expert believes the Trump campaign and Russian propaganda were synchronized pic.twitter.com/Y3rZhKb1tz

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 3, 2017

Since it's pretty obvious Putin is waging war against us in Cyberspace, somebody needs to explain to me why 45* is pushing us so hard to waste our time energy and money increasing our capability for fighting wars in Meatspace.

What was that thing we were supposed to remember about stuff like this? 

Oh yeah.

Politicians and generals always insist on starting out by fighting the previous war

Dots

The federal budget is a statement of our values. And our values are now nothing but the kind of Friedmanesque "Rational Self-Interest" that says as long as I get what I want everybody else can take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' donut.

John Oliver:

This is not a philosophy of governance. This is a fucking robbery.

Dots

There's nothing solid, of course, but there could be something between this:

and this:

Reuters:

Thousands of Russians marched through the center of Moscow on Sunday to honor opposition leader Boris Nemtsov two years after he was gunned down near the Kremlin walls, and to call for further investigations into his killing.

The 55-year-old Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin late in the evening of Feb. 27, 2015, as he walked home with his girlfriend from a restaurant.

Investigators have charged several Chechen men with the murder, but lawyers for Nemtsov's daughter said the investigation had failed to uncover who ordered the shooting.

Putin has said that he supported the investigation into Nemtsov's murder.

"We gathered here to demand bringing of Boris Nemtsov's killers to justice, not only its performers but also its organizers and those who ordered it," Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition activist and an organizer of the march, told Reuters.

"We gathered here to demand political reforms and release of political prisoners."

They Never Go Away

Authoritarians are always there.  And they're forever trying to pull the same shit.

In this case, we can look at Voter Fraud and Intimidation and violence against the innocent perpetrated by Democrats at the direction of the Clinton campaign - as hypothesized by none other that Carter Page.

For anybody who's been paying attention, we know that when you're dealing with 45* and his minions, every accusation is a confession.

A piece by Jon Schwarz at The Intercept:

CARTER PAGE, briefly a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”

Page is reportedly one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.

This move - fuck with the election, and then proclaim loudly that the election's been fucked with - is straight out of the School of the Americas training the CIA used to provide for people in Central and South American countries in order to get "our guys" into power and keep them there.

You may recall, it was widely presumed that Manuel Noriega was a prize pupil, and became such a sore spot that Poppy Bush felt compelled to invade Panama in an effort to clean up a mess he helped create.

But anyway. It should seem really clear now that the initiative to investigate voter fraud is a setup. Once they splash the inevitable hyped up scary scenario across DumFux News and Breitbart, and it bounces around in the echo chamber for a while - even though it'll be practically nothing but unsupported assertions and rumors the states will have all the "justification" they need - cuz hey, it's coming from the FBI so it's gotta be official - and the Voter Suppression efforts will balloon.

And those new restrictions will include (buried in the amendments language) the legal structure to wipe those 3 million Hillary voters off the rolls.

Now, those last coupla paragraphs are almost pure speculation. Obviously, I think there's a better than even chance I'm right about what's coming (or what they intend to try), but that's not evidence. So grains of salt, even when you're here reading your favorite blogger's outstandingly noble and awesomely righteous bullshit.

The Trump Scampaign®

Aside from a few - Jeb, Kasich, McCain, and some others - Repubs "running" for POTUS have had a distinct aroma. Take it, John:

It's been said before, by people smarter than me - and as such, bears repeating as long as the grass grows and the wind blows - Trump is not some kind of weird anomaly. Trump is doing what the GOP has spent 30 years telling their voters to look for, and prodding them to vote for.

And BTW - try not to think about the fact that Nu-Skin is very much the reason Jason Chaffetz is in office:

Accused in several states of operating an illegal pyramid scheme, the Provo-based multilevel marketing firm has decided to mount an offensive. Nu Skin takes issue with the way national and local media have portrayed the company."Enough is enough," said Jason Chaffetz, Nu Skin administrative assistant for public relations. "We're frustrated and disturbed that a number of inaccuracies continue to be perpetuated."

Good Cop, Bad Cop (updated 9-27)

There's a good reason Invisibility is considered the ultimate super power.  It removes all possibility of being held to account.  If there's no evidence, ie: if nobody can see what you're doing, there's no way to hold you responsible for what you've done.

So WTF, Danville cops?

I called the Danville (Virginia) Police Dept to ask for comment, and left a message. I'll try to update as soon as possible.

hat tip = FB friends MM-M & VW-E


Update:

Says purpose of lifting hood is to cool engine. Some cars have good vents, some don't. @ABC13News pic.twitter.com/pccPPVoWtz

— Valerie Bragg (@ValB_WSET) September 26, 2016

Seems more or less reasonable to me - the local citizens' bunch will continue to keep on eye on this stuff.  Way to go, guys.