Today's Traitorousness

Overheard on the intertoobz:

It's like Beelzebub ate Stalin and Hitler and George Wallace; drank a coupla gallons of orange food coloring, then took a giant shit, and boom - Donald Trump.

Not unrelated, Aaron Blake, WaPo:

The theory that President Trump is or has been a Russian asset is a popular one among his detractors. But for the first time, we’re learning that it’s something the FBI suspected strongly enough to dig into.

The Washington Post has confirmed that the FBI launched a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump was working for Russia shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017. The news was first reported by the New York Times.

Practically speaking, this may not mean a whole lot. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed mere days later, meaning any evidence the FBI collected was likely limited. It was Mueller’s decision to continue the line of inquiry, and we don’t know whether he has. But practical concerns aside, it’s a shocking story: The nation’s leading law enforcement agency was looking into whether a sitting U.S. president was working for a hostile foreign nation. The decision was something the FBI reportedly struggled with for months, and it still has its detractors.

But what might have led to such an extraordinary step by the FBI? And what’s the state of the evidence?

Comey’s firing was obviously the tipping point. Investigators reportedly shed their previous reservations about the inquiry after Trump’s televised admission to NBC News’s Lester Holt that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he did it. Another red flag was Trump’s attempts to include a reference to the Russia investigation in Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s letter justifying the firing.

We already know that these few days contained a central event in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, but the idea that it also warranted a counterintelligence inquiry is notable. It’s one thing to deliberately hamper the investigation; it’s another to suspect Trump might have done so on behalf of Russia. Were this to ever lead to any concrete conclusions, that Holt interview will apparently have been an extraordinary misstep by Trump, who has often seemed to blurt out unhelpful statements about his true motivations.

I need to push back on that last point - the one about the "extraordinary misstep". It's not a misstep when it's intended - when it's part of the plan to do all this shit more or less out in the open. I think they do that because we're more likely to think they wouldn't do it out in the open if it's not OK.

Our conditioning is that the bad guys do their bad things under cover - that they wouldn't do those bad things in full view if those bad things were really bad.

If they just keep at it, and keep doing things little-by-little, then little-by-little, they can do whatever they want, and because we've never really objected all that much, we have everything we need to resolve our cognitive dissonance. We shrug it off - accepting their rationalizations as our own.

Dude - What's Up With Your Hair?

In case you weren't feeling sufficiently freaked-out lately.

(BTW, this is BuzzFeed, so we recommend grains of salt)

Anthony Courmier and Jason Leopold, BuzzFeed:

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

- and -

In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.

Every time we turn around, there's another gasoline fire.

About all I can think of to do is to try to be aware of as much as possible, so I can formulate a few options, and be as ready as I can be to make some judgment as to what I need to do in response to whatever unfolds on any given day.

And as I read that last sentence to myself, I understand a little more about just how fucked up all of this has gotten.

I have conversations with myself, and I keep coming back to: "Y'know, I'm pretty good at thinking my way thru a lot of this shit, but I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore".

I do know this much: None of this can even be addressed until we start the removal of the Cult45 infestation.

This shit's gotta stop.

Like A Boss

I'm not a Nancy Pelosi fan. She takes a back seat to no one when it comes to that weird and semi-phony politician thing they all do on occasion.

But she delivers in the clutch. And given a chance in the oval office the other day, she put an epic bitch slap on that big orange fuck that I hope portends what he can expect from all of us from now on.

Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

For all those Americans who have pined for moments when someone would say to President Trump, “That’s just false, Mr. President” or “Excuse me, but you’ve been fact-checked on that repeatedly,” Tuesday brought moral vindication. If you’ve found yourself defending the concept of objective truth or furious that the conservative movement has entered some postmodernist moment when facts are whatever you say they are, soon-to-be-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) delivered in a face-to-face confrontation over funding for Trump’s border wall. (As an aside, I’m at a loss to understand how any Democrat could oppose literally the only elected Democrat who has publicly called out the president to his face, scoring a direct hit.)

She ferociously held her ground in an Oval Office showdown, daring him to make good on his boast that he had the votes in the House for his wall. Pelosi declared that “there are no votes in the House, a majority of votes, for a wall — no matter where you start.” Trump insisted that he’d have the votes if he wanted them. " Well, then go do it. Go do it," she said confidently. Wham!

- and -

Nevertheless, it was Pelosi who did what the media has not done — interject, fact-check to his face and refuse to allow him to operate in a parallel reality. It’s not just that Trump has blurred the difference between facts and lies, but that so few have stood up to him in the moment for all the public to see. Perhaps Pelosi will start a trend.

She managed to get under Trump’s skin. Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times later reported, "It sort of spiraled out of control, and when the President left the Oval Office after Pelosi and Schumer left, a number of people saw him, he stormed out of the Oval, walked into an anteroom just off the Oval Office, and had in his hand a folder of briefing papers, and he just scattered them out of frustration, threw them across the room and expressed frustration to the people who were present.”

It would seem The Once And Future Speaker has taken my advice and brushed up on her Sun Tzu:

When your adversary is of choleric temperament, aggravate him.

Bait him until he becomes arrogant and he overreaches - then crush him.

She set the bar back where it belongs - like a fuckin' boss.

A Sight To See

For some, it's a day of want - a day spent hoping for something better; wishing to feel something other than the bleak and barren oncoming of winter.

For most of us, luckily, it's a day of feasting, and reflection, and thinking how good it is to be in the midst of loving friends and family who are glad to be there, and happy to share our good feelings with us.

And then there're these other miserable fucks.

 

We will get through this. We will outlast them. We will make it better - somehow.

Years Late

...but maybe not too late - he mused, wistfully.

Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.

Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.

So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.

However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.

PoliticusUSA:

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.

Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”

It's kind of a bold move - calling his bluff.

45* has blustered about how "the press" can't survive without him. And he's been pushing hard, using a very old tried-n-true method that assholes like him have used forever - often with great success - to manipulate people. ie: exploit the self-doubt that often grows out of a dedication to being open-minded.

So, Nicolle Wallace announces a new policy of fact-checking his statements instead of just airing whatever he has to say. 

(BTW - fact-checking is kinda what you were supposed to be doing in the first place, dummy)

Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.

All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.

We'll see.

Respite

Seems like everything really sucks right now, so here's an otter juggling rocks.

In Court Yesterday

Julia Marsh, NY Post:

Trump picked up the infamous painting — now at the center of a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general who alleges suspect spending by the charity — during a 2014 auction benefiting The Unicorn Foundation at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida.

“So Mr. Trump donates $10,000 to start the bidding, and then when the bidding goes on and no one else bids, they’re stuck with the painting,” his attorney Alan Futerfas told Manhattan Supreme Court.

And so the “Art of the Deal” author got the raw end of the deal and wound up having to plunk down $10,000 on the portrait. But rather than fork over the dough himself, Trump billed his own Donald J. Trump Foundation for the cost.

Nature Bats Last

While we're having to waste time arguing over stoopid shit that should be obvious to a cave snail, we've got a problem that is fast-becoming truly unsolvable.

Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland just registered a temperature of +6 C (43 F).

Here is a map of the parts of Europe that are currently colder than the northernmost weather station on Earth. pic.twitter.com/8LoJjSxGxL

— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) February 24, 2018

 

Live Science, Mindy Weisberger
During the Arctic winter, when the sun hides from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around a bone-chilling minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). But this year, the Arctic is experiencing a highly unusual heat wave.

On Feb. 20, the temperature in Greenland not only climbed above freezing — 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) — it stayed there for over 24 hours, according to data from the Danish Meteorological Institute. And on Saturday (Feb. 24) the temperature on Greenland's northern tip reached 43 degrees F (6 degrees C), leading climate scientists to describe the phenomenon on Twitter as "crazy," "weird," "scary stuff" and "simply shocking."

Weather conditions that drive this bizarre temperature surge have visited the Arctic before, typically appearing about once in a decade, experts told Live Science. However, the last such spike in Arctic winter warmth took place in February 2016 — much more recently than a decade ago, according to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And climbing Arctic temperatures combined with rapid sea-ice loss are creating a new type of climate feedback loop that could accelerate Arctic warming, melting all Arctic sea ice decades earlier than scientists once thought.

Last week, it was warmer at Cape Morris Jessup in Greenland than it was in Paris.

45* Speaks

NYT ran Michael Schmidt's interview with 45*, and here's a little taste:

Is that how your average not-guilty guy talks - or is it something else?

Charlie Pierce has an interesting take (as usual):

On Thursday, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago sat down with Michael Schmidt of The New York Times for what apparently was an open-ended, one-on-one interview. Since then, the electric Twitter machine–and most of the rest of the Intertoobz–has been alive with criticism of Schmidt for having not pushed back sufficiently against some of the more obvious barefaced non-facts presented by the president* in their chat. Some critics have been unkind enough to point out that Schmidt was the conveyor belt for some of the worst attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton emanating from both the New York FBI office and the various congressional committees staffed by people in kangaroo suits. For example, Schmidt’s name was on a shabby story the Times ran on July 23, 2015 in which it was alleged that a criminal investigation into HRC's famous use of a private email server was being discussed within the Department of Justice. It wasn’t, and the Times’ public editor at the time, the great Margaret Sullivan, later torched the story in a brutal column.

Other people were unkind enough to point out that the interview was brokered by one Christopher Ruddy, a Trump intimate and the CEO of NewsMax, and that Ruddy made his bones as a political “journalist” by peddling the fiction that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered, one of the more distasteful slanders that got a shameful public airing during the Clinton frenzy of the 1990’s. Neither of those will concern us here. What Schmidt actually got out of this interview is a far more serious problem for the country. In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.
Just because you're paranoid about a president who might lose it completely at any minute and get us all incinerated - that doesn't mean we're not in danger of being incinerated because we have a president who might lose it completely at any minute.

Amendment 25, Section 4.

What We've Always Suspected

...even known to a certain extent. Now we get further confirmation.

IBT headline:

Senator Bob Corker Said He Hasn’t Read The Tax Bill, Denies Changing His Vote In Exchange For Personal Tax Breaks

Josh Keefe and David Sirota:

In a series of rapid-fire telephone interviews, Corker asked IBT for a description of the provision, and then criticized it. But minutes later, he called back to walk back that criticism, saying he wanted to further study the issue, and that it was more complex than he initially understood it to be. Despite potentially holding the fate of the entire tax bill in his hands, Corker told IBT that he has only read a short summary of the $1.4 trillion legislation.

“I had like a two-page summary I went through with leadership,” said Corker. “I never saw the actual text.” Despite not reading the bill -- and having time to read it before the final vote scheduled for this week -- he reiterated his support for the bill to IBT, support he announced hours before bill’s full text was publicly released on Friday.

Corker called IBT to respond to a series of IBT investigative reports showing that he switched his vote to “yes” on the tax legislation, only after Republican leaders added in a provision reducing taxes on income from real-estate LLCs. Federal records reviewed by IBT show Corker, a commercial real estate mogul, made up to $7 million last year from such income. President Donald Trump's financial disclosures listed between $41 million and $68 million of the same income. 

After the report, Corker called IBT and asked for a detailed description of the provision, insisting he did not know about. After the provision was described, he said: “If I understand what [the provision] does, it sounds totally unnecessary and borderline ridiculous.”

A few minutes later, however, Corker called back, and tried to back off that criticism.

So, it seems we get to decide which is worse - Corker trading his vote for personal gain, or that he doesn't know what's in the bill he says he's going to vote for.

At first blush - What the fuck is wrong with these people!?!

The only ray of hope here is that maybe Corker (and Collins, et all) are just stringing them along(?), and they plan on torpedoing the bill, as well as their fucked up leadership, and and and.

Here's an idea, disgruntled Repubs - switch sides.  Or at least caucus with the Dems for a while.

Or better yet - if you're going to trade your votes, trade them for some Honest-to-Pete Campaign Finance Reform.

The problems associated with Corker being so totally in the dark about this legislation are not limited to Bob Corker. Nobody seems to know what's in these things anymore, especially when Repubs are running the joint.

And I think it's because Congress Critters are over-worked. Not over-worked because they spend so much time and energy getting prepped and up to speed on bills and resolutions and stuff (they obviously aren't), but because they have to expend the majority for their efforts on the phones trying to raise enough money to get re-elected. That's an old one, but I think we're seeing a shitload of confirming evidence.

They have to find ways to put more hours into the day.  So basically, they're outsourcing (this is also an oldie but a goodie).  They "hire" staffers from the Lobbying firms or from the industry groups themselves, and hand the project over to them while their office management team oversees the thing - Management Staffers, btw, also often hired from the business interests they're supposed to be policing.

So weirdly, 45* and Bannon are right in saying "The Swamp" and "Deep State", but they're pointing at the wrong people. The professionals doing the real work of governance aren't the problem. The real problem lies in the process whereby we put people in charge of the government who're trying really hard to drive the rank-n-file bureaucracy (the parts that actually work) into the same fucked up swamp as the White House and Congress.

And while I'm at it, Grover Norquist is right too - unfortunately, he's got way too many people supporting his efforts to drown the wrong goddamned thing in that bathtub.

Remember though - it ain't easy. It's complicated and twisted and confusing; and for every difficult gnarly problem there's a solution that's simple and elegant and wrong.

But if we start with the money, the rest of gets a little smoother.

End Citizens United

It's Late

...but I'm hoping against hope that Doug Jones pulls it off.

Cuz too many of these fuckin' goobers really are just that stoopid.

Crime And Punishment

Sturm und Drang abounds over the "Murder-by-Text" trial (and as of yesterday the sentencing) of Michelle Carter.

The Hill, David Shapiro:

With the news in that a Massachusetts judge sentenced homicide-by-text defendant Michelle Carter to fifteen months in prison and six years on probation, many are outraged at the perceived leniency of the sentence.

They may have a point, but only because brutally harsh sentences have become the norm in American criminal justice, and with devastating effects. The past decades have witnessed massive “sentencing inflation” as periods of incarceration have become longer and longer.
In the past 40 years, the incarceration rate in the United States skyrocketed by 500 percent. The United States now locks up more of its people than Russia and China — some 2.2 million of us. According to the Sentencing Project, “Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.” 

If Carter’s sentence seems short, it is because we are weighing it on a broken scale.
Increasing rates of incarceration at best has a minimal effect on crime, and may have no effect at all. In other words, mass incarceration is all about politics, not public safety.


We've been through a long and damaging period of "Law-n-Order" that's done little but make real the grotesque Dickensian villainy of the Prison Entrepreneur, and a Coin-Operated Justice System.

Maybe we're seeing something of a backlash now.

But we still have to contend with certain Daddy Staters, per Charlie Pierce:

Were you wondering if Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was still the prickly authoritarian yahoo that he's always been, now that he has gotten on the bad side of the president*? Wonder no longer, says The Washington Post.

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.

All Eyes On Mr Mueller

Bloomberg:

The U.S. special counsel investigating possible ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia in last year’s election is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe.

The president told the New York Times on Wednesday that any digging into matters beyond Russia would be out of bounds. Trump’s businesses have involved Russians for years, making the boundaries fuzzy so Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to be taking a wide-angle approach to his two-month-old probe.

FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said.

As always, when we're talking about power, we're talking about money. The one thing that gets clearer in this whole mess is that it revolves around Money Laundering.

Agents are also interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary, as well as the efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and White House aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real estate properties. The information was provided by someone familiar with the developing inquiry but not authorized to speak publicly.

The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie in a wide-ranging money laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara last year, according to the person.

The noose gets tighter as the net gets wider, and we can prob'ly expect 45* to get even wackier.

Yes - wackier than this (WaPo):

Trump appears worryingly unable to contemplate his own role in bringing about the special counsel. The firing of FBI Director James B. Comey led to reports that Trump allegedly demanded Comey’s loyalty and to Trump’s admission that he fired Comey over the Russia probe. This revealed that the Justice Department’s memo providing Trump his initial rationale for the firing (Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton probe) was bogus. Which led to the special counsel.

No Way Out

No good way anyway.

If the Repubs continue to go it alone (against the polling) on a variety of issues they've decided they need to pursue based on their arrogant assumption they can continue bamboozling the rubes, then they lose the broader popular support they have to have. Especially if they keep fuckin' up the  Healthcare thing.

If they decide to negotiate with the Dems, then they're in danger of the hardcore base assuming they've caved, and they'll lose primaries to more radical candidates, who're more likely to lose in the general.

Which makes me think they were really counting on not having to pay a political price for all their fuckery, which makes me think we have to keep pushing back hard against GOP Voter Suppression efforts in the next 15 months or so.

Joining Up

For a good long time, Bloody Bill Kristol has been a big factor in getting us to the point where we'd actually be ready to elect somebody as venal and dangerously empty-headed as 45*.

Just look at some of the guys who have been the beneficiaries of his most ardent cheerleading: Ronnie Rayguns, Dan (Mr Potatoe-Head) Quayle, Bush43, and Alan-Fucking Keyes.

("They are going to cull the herd, so that instead of having billions, we'll only have hundreds of millions of human beings on the face of the planet."  -Alan Keyes, warning what's behind President Obama's gun control proposal)

William Kristol is not in the running for America's Favorite Librul.

But while he has much to atone for - and I'd rather share my toothbrush with a leper than give that asshole a pass - at least he continues to line up Conservatives to push back against the hostile takeover of the GOP.

Mona Charen in NRO:

One column cannot accommodate the list of things you must believe if you trust that Donald Trump is truly the victim of a baseless witch hunt. Consider this a mere stab.

1) That Donald Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner did nothing wrong by meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian offering dirt on Clinton. The emails requesting the meeting specifically mentioned a “Russian government attorney” and added that the requested meeting concerned “very high level and sensitive information” that “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” That doesn’t prove a willingness to collude.

2)  That concern about Paul Manafort’s extensive links with Putin’s former puppet in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, including at least $12.7 million in payments, is, to quote Manafort’s words, “silly and nonsensical.”

3) That Jared Kushner’s attempt, during the transition, to secure a back channel with the Russian government using their secure communications equipment in the Russian embassy was not alarming/inexplicable.

-and-

14) That it’s unremarkable that presidential spokeswoman Sarah Sanders refuses to say whether Russia is an adversary, a friend, or a nation about whom we should be wary.

Coupla notes:

First, it's interesting to read the comments from people who still insist on trying to deflect everything with "Yeah, but Hillary".

Second, we still don't know that those commenters aren't trolls, or even that they're all real - some could just as easily be RuskieBots.

President Lowlife

Sometimes, if it was any less tragic, it wouldn't be funny.

Alexadra Petri, WaPo:

I stand with my colleagues in Congress to say: The president’s tweet is beneath the dignity of the office.

This is not making America great.

The president has at last done the unthinkable: He has insulted a morning television personality in crude and ghastly terms and I must — in consequence of this hideous and vile breach of the dignity of the office — withdraw none of my support from his legislative agenda. (If you can call it a legislative agenda and not a ragtag collection of bad ideas quickly stapled together with a dead pigeon in the middle.)

--and--

I am shocked and appalled by his behavior. And I am not afraid to say so. At a fundraiser. For him. Before asking for more donations.

Everything else the president has done is fine — the continued attacks on the media’s legitimacy, the carelessness toward history and diplomacy, the harmful rhetoric about Muslims, the — well, it is all fine. This is too much, though, and I am putting my foot down, here, on my way to vote against icebergs.

A quick observation: the Grossitude Factor of any given diversionary scandal increases proportionally to 45*'s perception of the Bigly Threateningness of the Russia Thing. So it must be pretty fuckin' bad now.

Is It Ever Enough

The president has a sworn duty to protect the United States. We have been attacked, folks. Trump is failing his fundamental responsibility. pic.twitter.com/1nsQnOavAb

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 22, 2017

I recall an awful lotta noise from the Repub side about how the first duty of POTUS is to keep us safe - inviting the inference (and sometimes raving loudly) that Obama wasn't doing that. Which of course means they were using that bullshit criticism trying to reclaim the National Security issue.

And btw - I'm still hearing "Yeah, but the Democrats". A lot. And I get the feeling that's because people seem to want the Dems to get after those rotten ol' Repubs, and say some strong things in strong language, and take 'em down no matter what.

In other words, we want the Dems to start acting like Repubs, while we sit back and snipe about how "They're all the same" and "Both Sides Do It" and "two sides of the same coin" and blah blah blah.

Dems are taking all of this a step at a time. It frustrates the fuck outa me too, but taking as much time as it takes to make sure we get as many snakes as possible is actually the proper way to go about this.  

It's also the Conservative thing to do. On this and other issues, the Libruls are now behaving far more conservatively (in keeping with the rule of law) than most "conservatives".  

Use that one in conversation some time.

Pushing Back

WaPo:

A new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that while people may be broadly unhappy with the mainstream media, they still think it's more credible than Trump. The president regularly accuses the press of “fake news,” but people see more “fake news” coming out of his own mouth.

The poll asked who registered voters “trust more to tell you the truth about important issues.” A majority — 52 percent — picked the media. Just 37 percent picked Trump.

The poll did find that registered voters by a narrow margin think the media has treated Trump unfairly, with 50 percent saying they disapproved of the coverage of Trump and 45 percent approving. But voters are even more critical of Trump's treatment of the media, with 61 percent disapproving and 35 percent approving.

Even 23 percent of Republicans say Trump is mistreating the media, and independents disapprove 59-35.

And in case you missed it, WaPo quietly added a little something to it's banner:

 

Which brings us to Three Things About The Daddy State

1. Every government needs to do certain things without telling us about it, but the Daddy State needs the dark more than any other. There are way too many things they can't afford to let us see - a lot more than in anything resembling a democracy. Leakers and the Press are light-shiners; Daddy Staters hate them, and spend a shitload of time and energy covering their own asses and fighting disclosure - because they're always up to no good, and they know it.
2. The greatest threat to the Daddy State is anybody with a functioning memory. 45* is always carping about the Press because they write things down and compare what he says today with what he said before - sometimes moments before.  Creating the illusion of near-infallibility is a key element in any cult. Pointing out mistakes and contradictions makes you their enemy. And boy oh boy do they love having enemies.
3. Citizens who insist on being involved in the decision-making process comprise the best possible preventative measure and the best remedy.

That last one sounds like a very old and very tired cliché because we always assume we get to make up our minds and freely express our opinions and go out and vote once in a while.

But we've internalized the Rent-Seeker's ambition - sit on your ass enjoying the benefits while everybody else does the work.  Anywhere from 40% to 60% of the people who could vote don't vote.

Because we've also internalized the bullshit (fed to us all the time) that government sucks; they're all the same anyway; both parties are corrupt; the major candidates are just two sides of the same coin so why bother blah blah fuckin' blah.

Get past it.

You want better choices? Get your ass out to a Caucus; or vote in the primary.  And take somebody with you. And stop being so damned polite to people who won't help. When you refuse to be part of the solution you become part of the problem. ie: If you think it's shitty but you refuse to make even the simplest effort to improve it, then you're helping the buttheads who're making it shitty. Silence implies consent.

Or you could run for office yourself.  Have you not seen some of these bozos? Look who's in the White House right now.  It is - for all practical purposes and by every modern standard - impossible for you to be any worse than what we've got now.

Cutting to the chase: Bullet point 3a is real simple. When everybody votes, the Daddy State loses - by definition the Daddy State loses and Democracy wins when we all take part in this little experiment called Self-Government.

We Were Warned

Paul Krugman, NYT, July 2016:

If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House? This should be a ludicrous, outrageous question. After all, he must be a patriot — he even wears hats promising to make America great again.

But we’re talking about a ludicrous, outrageous candidate. And the Trump campaign’s recent behavior has quite a few foreign policy experts wondering just what kind of hold Mr. Putin has over the Republican nominee, and whether that influence will continue if he wins.

I’m not talking about merely admiring Mr. Putin’s performance — being impressed by the de facto dictator’s “strength,” and wanting to emulate his actions. I am, instead, talking about indications that Mr. Trump would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.

That’s not to deny that Mr. Trump does, indeed, admire Mr. Putin. On the contrary, he has repeatedly praised the Russian strongman, often in extravagant terms. For example, when Mr. Putin published an article attacking American exceptionalism, Mr. Trump called it a “masterpiece.”