Hang 'Em All

I don't care when or where you worked in government, and I don't care who was in the oval office. I care about trying to get back to a time when there was a lot less shitty dishonorable behavior in government.

And yes, I know there's never been a time when there weren't assholes trying to grease the skids for someone in exchange for a nice fat paycheck. But there was in fact a time when more people than not were capable of maintaining some semblance of honor, and having a little respect for the public part of public service.

If this Craig guy was peddling influence to Ukranians, then there was somebody in the federal government who was willing to have his influence peddled for him - basically by a broker of sorts - like Mr Craig.

There's no such thing as a one-sided transaction.

WaPo:

Former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig faces trial Monday for allegedly lying to the Justice Department in a prosecution that has shaken up the capital’s billion-dollar foreign influence industry.

In charging Craig — one of Washington’s most prominent attorneys, in connection with his work for the Ukraine government at a leading law firm — the Justice Department signaled a new era for the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a once nearly dormant law that since 2017 has been invoked in more than 20 federal prosecutions aimed at combating foreign interference in U.S. politics.

Craig has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Washington. The charge against him stems from alleged public relations work, rather than lobbying, while with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He is accused not of failing to register as a foreign agent under the law, but with lying and withholding information from Justice officials seeking to determine whether he was required to register.

What We All Know

Karen Tumulty, WaPo reiterates it for us:

“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation — only to market himself and to build his wealth and power,” Michael Cohen told the House Oversight Committee. “Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ ”

In other words, what we have been living through for the past two years has been an alternate reality. It is far different from the one Trump envisioned when he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 and announced what was pretty much universally regarded as a preposterous bid for the presidency.

That was the point, and the plan all along. The networks and their advertisers and the pundits and the whole system of Wingnut Welfare moochers were supposed to make jillions of dollars by having the Press Poodles spend at least 4 years bashing Hillary (go to The Professional Left podcast every Friday evening to learn all about it).

And IMHO, the plan is to make government collapse, so the republic falls, so the Daddy State can prevail.

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.

Welcoming Some Chickens Back To The Roost

It seems obvious that Maria Butina is a key player in one of the many subplots in this whole Russia-Trump-GOP shit fest.

I've become pretty well convinced that one of the big reasons for the deafening silence coming from the Republicans in congress is that the NRA has been a major carrier for channeling Russian money into American politics.

Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast:

Maria Butina, a Russian national who cultivated relationships with powerful American conservative activists, agreed Monday to plead guilty to conspiring to violate laws prohibiting covert foreign agents. As part of her agreement, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, she has promised to cooperate with American law enforcement. 

As a result of the deal, Butina will become the first Russian national since the 2016 election to plead guilty to a crime connected to efforts to influence American politics. After running a gun rights organization in Russia, she moved to the United States, where she spent years building relationships with conservatives in hopes of influencing a future Republican presidential administration. During the campaign season, she questioned then-candidate Donald Trump about sanctions; built relationships in the upper echelons of the American gun rights community; arranged for NRA leaders to travel to Moscow; and bragged that she was a channel between Team Trump and the Kremlin, as The Daily Beast first revealed. 

She also struck up a romance with Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican gadfly close to NRA leaders. He sang Disney songs with her on camera, called her his “Siberian princess” in emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, and—since her July arrest—has visited her regularly in jail.

In March 2015, according to the plea deal, Butina worked with an unnamed U.S. person—known to be Erickson—to draft a proposal for a diplomatic endeavor. Given the fraught relationships between the governments of Russia and the United States, she “cast herself as a possible unofficial transmitter of communications” between the two countries.

This thing is very deep and very wide.

And every day is a new illustration of the immediate need to get a handle on the problems caused by allowing too much money into our political system. Particularly the unregulated dark money that always fucks up a good thing. Always.

Every chapter in the consolidated American Theme Book has a cautionary tale about the shitty things rich people do when they get to thinking they can do whatever the fuck they want because they're rich and they own everything.

I'm gob-smacked thinking the "conservatives" can't quite get their little pea brains to remember the message of every fucking one of those John Wayne movies they say they love so much.

Suddenly, all these idiots are siding with bosses paying Liberty Valance and Santa Ana and Ned Pepper.

Anyway -

45* kept saying he was really rich, and didn't need anybody's help financing his campaign, but we knew all along that 1) he's not as rich as he claims, and 2) his disclosure forms were always a little fuzzy, never really divulging where the money came from during his run in the primaries.

And we can leave aside the fact that the Press Poodles gave him many millions in unearned media, cuz that only gets him so far.

And I'm not taking about the RNC raising and spending a jillion dollars after he got the nomination.

The efforts on his behalf came from people and places of very dubious repute, and so the money that went into those efforts is (and has to be) invisible.

But anyway again, I also like thinking about the turnaround where Ms Butina is concerned. Most people want to be released on bail while they maneuver their defense. Maria Butina knows she'll need protection from her "friends" for the rest of her life - so the greatest threat Mueller can make against her is to let her out of jail. And that's kinda fun.

Also fun is the thought of the NRA going into austerity mode, possibly because all that Russian money dried up - kinda sudden-like.

Amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United

It's The Money, Stoopid

Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast:

Arron Banks, the biggest individual donor in British political history and a major source of money behind the Brexit campaign, has been placed under criminal investigation for several suspected offenses that took place during the referendum.

Britain’s election watchdog says there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Banks committed several crimes in the run-up to the dramatic vote, and that they suspect he wasn’t the true source of £8 million ($10 million) in loans made to Better for the Country—a company he used to finance the Leave.EU campaign group whose public face was Nigel Farage.

The investigation by the National Crime Agency, which has the expertise to trace illicit cross-border money trails, will seek to find the true source of the money that funded Brexit.

Banks—one of the self-christened “bad boys of Brexit” who met Donald Trump in late 2016 with Farage—has long been a controversial figure with business links to Russia. He is known to have been offered three Russian business deals during the Brexit campaign, including one that gave him the chance to make huge profits from a Russian gold company.


Too much money in politics. 

We have to get back to a decent level of transparency - where we can learn every name associated with every dollar "donated" to every political entity.

A coin-operated political system is inherently corrupt.

More Nancy McClean

Nancy McClean in Santa Fe - March 2018

Fuck, I'm Tired

Trying to keep up with the shit storm is exhausting. Which is partly the point - I get that - you get that - nobody doesn't get that.

Sometimes, ya gotta take a day or two and run the fuck away from it.

Here I am, back at it, and the truly worrying part for me right now is this:

Repubs don't care about anything but SCOTUS. They seem to believe that if they can get the courts, they don't really need their guy in the White House. They'll have him anyway - at least they'll have their Empty Vessel du Jour.  Reagan & Poppy Bush were proof-of-concept; Bush43 was the Beta Test, and now Cult45 is the Rig Roll-Out.

There are bugs, but once they're done pouring the foundation, they'll be able to install Grover Norquist's latest wet dream of a guy with just enough on the ball to sign his name to whatever bullshit gets the American Kleptocrats paid enough to hire the goons necessary to keep the rest of us in line.

Let's review briefly - SCOTUS reinforced Corporations-Are-People, and then decided Money = Speech. 

So now, we have exactly what the Big Bad Left warned us about.

If money is speech, then the biggest money is the loudest speech; and eventually, it becomes the only speech.

These 2 things:

Corporations are not people
Fuck Citizens United

And vote, dammit.

Dark Money

There is such a thing as a Reasonable Republican - honest there is. I know it's a little jarring these days to think those two words could be contained in the same thought without causing real damage to your brain, but some Repubs really are pretty reasonable.

Or rather they were pretty reasonable until they started to realize how fucked they're going to be as we find out that a good bit of the blood money they've collected as campaign contributions over the last several years has been coming from Russian oligarchs and laundered thru the NRA.

Vanity Fair:

The F.B.I. and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating meetings between N.R.A. officials and powerful Russian operatives, trying to determine if those contacts had anything to do with the gun group spending $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The use of foreign money in American political campaigns is illegal. One encounter of particular interest to investigators is between Donald Trump Jr.and a Russian banker at an N.R.A. dinner.

The Russian wooing of N.R.A. executives goes back to at least 2011, when that same banker and politician, Alexander Torshin, befriended David Keene,who was then president of the gun-rights organization. Torshin soon became a “life member,” attending the N.R.A.’s annual conventions and introducing comrades to other gun-group officials. In 2015, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to Moscow that included Keene and Joe Gregory, then head of the “Ring of Freedom” program, which is reserved for top donors to the N.R.A. 

Among the other hosts were Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month was the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov,head of the Saint Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, one of Russia’s wealthiest philanthropies.

It’s possible that the men were merely bonding over a shared love of firearms. Mike Carpenter, a Russian specialist who worked in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, laughs at the notion. “The Russian state is run by a K.G.B. elite that wants nothing less than to have an armed citizenry,” Carpenter says. “Rogozin is a heavyweight in Russian politics. . . . Torshin has a direct line to Putin . . . and also has possible ties to organized crime. Rudov is the right-hand man of Konstantin Malofeev, who is sort of a paleo-conservative, ultra-nationalist figure who bankrolls a lot of projects involving mercenaries in Ukraine.” Carpenter sees how a dark money trail could connect the Kremlin to the gun lobby. “Those three would only meet with N.R.A. officials if there were some concerted effort by senior members of the Russian government to try and co-opt the N.R.A. politically,” he continues. “And they are all money men. They can throw tens of millions around.” (Efforts to reach Torshin, Rogozin, Rudov, and Malofeev were unsuccessful. Malofeev has denied aiding the invasion of Ukraine.)

There are some very nervous politicians in Washington.

If there was ever a time to get serious about turning Citizens United upside down, this is it.

Some Homework For Ya

From The Atlantic via Soundcloud:



Don't be surprised by anything that happens to (or because of) Paul Manafort.

It's The History, Stoopid.

The Professional Left

Republicans delivered a tax cut to Sheldon Adelson worth about 3/4 of a billion dollars in a single quarter, and of course he writes a check to the House GOP SuperPAC for $30 million. But there's no quid pro quo.

And on the immigration thing - John Kelly points out that "most immigrants" coming to USAmerica Inc aren't gang members and criminals, but they are "rural" and "poorly educated". 

In other words, they're all potentially either Crooks or Rubes - aka: TRUMP SUPPORTERS.

So why are you trying to keep them out?

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

The Crux Of It All - Maybe

Arn Pearson, Salon:

Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s embattled EPA administrator, finds himself under attack this week after news broke that he had rented a Washington townhouse at below-market rates from the wife of a lobbyist who represents major fossil fuel companies. That was not the first time Pruitt has exercised questionable judgment around a property transaction, according to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog group.

In 2011, Pruitt and his wife, Margaret, bought a property in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just days before a court ruled that it had been fraudulently transferred by a Las Vegas developer who was on the hook for a $3.6 million loan default. Pruitt, who was then Oklahoma attorney general, apparently flipped the property for a $70,000 profit four months later, selling it to a dummy corporation set up by a major campaign contributor, Kevin Hern.

Money laundering seems to be the general theme. And not just for the Trump-Russia thing, but for a lot of shit that's been going on just under the surface in this little game of Fuck-Your-Buddy. It goes a long way to explain a few things about how some of these guys finance their campaigns, and it could be all the explanation we need for why so many Congress Critters are so reluctant to call any of it out, which would then explain why they're not jumping up and down trying to move on impeachment - there's a shitload of tracks to cover first.

If everybody's guilty, then nobody can blame anybody; so nobody can be held accountable.

Blood Money

Just spoke to Broward School Superintendent. Today is that terrible day you pray never comes.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 14, 2018

Rubio = $3.3 Million from NRA

I am heartbroken for the students & family of those involved in this horrible tragedy & I'm praying for our first responders as they act swiftly to contain the situation. https://t.co/rCn5lFYhHP

— Cory Gardner (@SenCoryGardner) February 14, 2018

Gardner = $3.8 Million from NRA

Heartbreaking news out of Florida. Jane and I send our prayers to the school, the community, and the victims of this tragedy.

— Rob Portman (@senrobportman) February 14, 2018

Rob Portman = $3 Million from NRA

Praying for the students, teachers and first responders affected by the tragic shooting in Florida. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families.

— Bill Cassidy (@BillCassidy) February 14, 2018

Bill Cassidy = $2.9 Million from NRA

Tragic news out of Florida. Please keep the victims, their families, first responders and the community in your thoughts and prayers.

— Senator Thom Tillis (@SenThomTillis) February 14, 2018

Thom Tills = $4.4 Million from NRA

I'm devastated to hear about the tragedy in Florida. Praying today for the students and all those impacted.

— Congressman Ken Buck (@RepKenBuck) February 14, 2018

Ken Buck = $800K

Please join me in praying for the students, faculty, and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as well as their loved ones. Let us also show our gratitude to the courageous first responders.

— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) February 14, 2018

Joni Ernst = $3.1 Million

My heart breaks for all the families, teachers, and students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Praying for all affected by the tragic shooting in Florida today.

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) February 14, 2018

RNC and GOP Candidates = $17.4 Million

My prayers and condolences to the families of the victims of the terrible Florida shooting. No child, teacher or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2018

45* = $21 million from NRA

BTW - take a look at The Dunblane Massacre, Scotland, 1996.

The Big Score

MapLight:

U.S.-based multinational corporations that stand to benefit from a system that gives preferential treatment to foreign income have spent more than $82 million on lobbying in Washington since the beginning of the year.

The arithmetic:

Each YES vote in Congress cost these guys an average of $295,000. 

And the really big ones could realize a tax windfall in the billions of dollars over the next 10 years.

It's not a bad idea to look like a single-issue voter - telling every candidate you're most likely to vote for the ones who want to push back hard against Citizens United.

These people have to spend hours on the phone every day begging for money - and most of them say they hate it.

So at least put it at or near the top of your list of issues, and mention it every time you say anything about politics.

Citizen's United

Gerrymandering

Voter ID

Take your country back from the Rent-Seekers and their Coin-Operated Politicians.

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.

Deep And Dirty

Nico Hines, Daily Beast:

Members of the team of Russians who secured a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner also attempted to stage a show trial of anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder on Capitol Hill.

The trial, which would have come in the form of a congressional hearing, was scheduled for mid-June 2016 by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a long-standing Russia ally who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe. During the hearing, Rohrabacher had planned to confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Rosie Gray, The Atlantic:

Paul Behrends, a top aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, has been ousted from his role as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that Rohrabacher chairs, after stories appeared in the press highlighting his relationships with pro-Russia lobbyists.

“Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee,” a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson said on Wednesday evening.

Behrends accompanied Rohrabacher on a 2016 trip to Moscow in which Rohrabacher said he received anti-Magnitsky Act materials from prosecutors. The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 bill that imposes sanctions on Russian officials associated with the 2009 death in prison of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had been investigating tax fraud. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney and lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last year, reportedly brought up the Magintsky Act during the meeting.

Seems like Russian fuckery via Congress Critter fuckery just gets wider and deeper at every turn.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

It's going to be about the money. It always was going to be about the money. There is something distinctly rotten at the heart of the president*'s family business, about which the president* and the rest of the Borgias don't want the world to know. The money is all that matters to these people. The money always has been all that matters to these people. The money is central to whatever arrangements the extended clan made with the Russian banks, which is to say with the Russian governments. The money is central to the absurd defense of Michael Flynn and the preposterous alleged double-naught escapades of the Dauphin with the Russian ambassador. The money may be the only thing of which the president* himself is consistently cognitively aware.

Not a big stretch - we're not going too far out on any limbs here - but it's OK to get reminded about who these Trump thieves are and why they do what they do.

And then we can remind ourselves to take a good long look at the Congress Critters who're trying to milk the situation for every last drop of power, so they can move the Daddy State agenda merrily along before they're forced to stand up and be shocked - shocked - to discover there are shenanigans afoot.

So Here We All Are

Right along with lots of others, I've been pissin' and moanin' about the Culture of Corruption and the fact that we've evolved a system of Legalized Bribery for quite a while.

Wilbur Ross will oversee #Trump's business patents. He'll help Trump profit from the presidency. #RiggedCabinet pic.twitter.com/uaRNzemZff

— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) January 18, 2017

They don't even bother to pretend they're trying to hide it from us anymore.

About Kellyanne

Just to be clear on who this lady is:

This is a fair look at what I mean when I bitch about how everything is fungible now.

As long as she was doing her free-lance thing, she was saying things she (prob'ly) thought might get her hired by one of the campaigns.  That's what she does and I'm not slagging her for that.

What I'm willing to slag her for is this: she was a Ted Cruz supporter when she said basically "Ted Cruz is pretty bad, but that Trump guy is way worse."

Or maybe we can infer a whole load of whatever we want from it. It's a pretty good prospecting pitch at the very least because it can mean many different things - that's kinda my point on that one.

Anyway, now she's pimping for Donald Trump. So here I am, slagging away - and happy to do it.

I get it - you have to make choices.  Sometimes it's like, "I'd rather share my toothbrush with a Leper than throw in with that guy".  And the bullshit about "none of the above" just takes you outa the process and leaves all the choices up to people you wouldn't put in charge of a high school carwash.  And then your guy drops out and you're left thinking, "Well - maybe if I gargle some Clorox...?"

But that's all about being a voter.  Kellyanne Conway's a pro.

I guess it just seems a little dirty that Ms Conway switches her loyalties to Trump because he's the guy willing to write her a nice fat check, so everything she was saying last spring that was wrong with him is suddenly everything that's right with him now.

Right or wrong; fact or fiction; true or false - doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the reward or the penalty.

And that's pretty fucked up right there.

Shoes-A-Droppin'

Not to get too Both-Sides-ery here, but now that Manafort's been dumped because of the Russian money thing, Hillary needs to come clean and at the very least get out in front of this thing and talk about her decision-making process regarding John Podesta (this links to RedState - don't say I didn't warn ya).

And maybe she could tell us a little something about that all-but-totally-fucked-up decision to put Ken (they call me Mr Frack) Salazar in charge of her Transition Team.

Bi-Partisan Fuckery isn't quite the Bi-Partisan thing most of us had in mind, guys.