Trump-Russia

One of the hardest things to accept about the Trump-Russia saga is how transparent it is. So much of the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and somehow that has made it harder to accept.

That's the big take-away from a piece by Sean Illing at Vox, talking about Craig Under's new book House of Trump, House of Putin.

Sean Illing:
I’ll ask you straightforwardly: Do you believe the Russian government successfully targeted and compromised Trump?

Craig Unger:
Yes, absolutely. But let’s go back in time, because I think all of this began as a money-laundering operation with the Russian mafia. It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when traditional banks won’t, so it was a win-win for both sides.

The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”

And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.

- and -

Sean Illing:

Okay, to play devil’s advocate, can we say definitively that Trump knew who he was dealing with or what he was getting into? Or did he just naively have his hands out?

Craig Unger:

Look, I can’t prove what was in Trump’s head, or what he knew or when he knew it. But I document something like 1,300 transactions of this kind with Russian mobsters. By that, I mean real estate transactions that were all cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies that were quite obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations. And this represents a huge chunk of Trump’s real estate activity in the United States, so it’s quite hard to argue that he had no idea what was going on.

Americans have been taught that the rich guys are all really smart and hard-working and pretty honest about most things - honest enough anyway - and willing to "tell it like it is".
(In case you've missed it, 45* puts that shit right out front every chance he gets)

And while these "captains of industry" can be ruthless and calculating and petty enough to fuck everybody over trying to boost their quarterly dividends by a few extra pennies, we're mostly convinced that at least they're on our side when it comes to national unity and loyalty to the USofA.

We are being rather abruptly disabused of this dangerous misperception - finally.

A Thought

When referring to the past, we think of people being young, but things being old.

Today's Pix

Click 'em

Today's Tweet

45* is a petty tin-plated strutting martinet. He has no confidence in his own ability to deal with much of anything unless he believes he has some kind of absolute power to force you into going along with whatever he wants to do.

And every day, he makes it clear that his feelings of inadequacy are perfectly justified.

He is The Daddy State.

When I asked the President if he would sign spending bills unrelated to the border wall, he repeatedly demanded to know if that is what I would do. It may be tempting to answer such a question, but that is not my job. pic.twitter.com/8HxsSep5eV

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) January 9, 2019

And A Bag Of Cheetohs

NY Daily News:

Porn star Stormy Daniels folded clothes on Instagram Live Tuesday night while President Trump went on live television to try and sell Americans on the idea that it’s necessary to build a wall on the nation’s southern border. Both broadcasts started at 9 p.m. and lasted 10 minutes. Daniels, who filmed the skit in her underwear, played Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall" while doing her chores. She said she attracted 100,000 viewers.

A Little History

How Wall Street got its name.

First, the local tribes just walked around it.

Then, when the British were about to land their forces from the water side, the Dutch had sense enough to know they were cooked, so they gave up.

"Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity." -- George S Patton

A wall - didn't work for New Amsterdam, or Hadrian, or the GDR, or the Chinese, or or or.

Daddy State Update

Amy Siskind's podcast on Stitcher.

This is a companion for Siskind's posts at Medium.



We're starting to accelerate the normalization of some pretty bad shit.

On Climate Recently

Elasticity is a thing. 

We can get a spike in prices long after supply has caught up with demand.

We can see unemployment drop even after the economy starts to go south.

Etc

So 45* can crow about how US carbon emissions have been nice and low - surprising everybody by saying something that's more or less true - even as his "cabinet" and "policies-makers" are busily pulling shit on us that all but ensure a worse-than-normal outcome down the road.

And that down-the-road thing can come up pretty fast - there's always a Snap-Back.

Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, WaPo:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions rose an estimated 3.4 percent in 2018, according to new research — a jarring increase that comes as scientists say the world needs to be aggressively cutting its emissions to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.

The findings, published Tuesday by the independent economic research firm Rhodium Group, mean that the United States now has a diminishing chance of meeting its pledge under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to dramatically reduce its emissions by 2025.

The findings also underscore how the world’s second-largest emitter, once a global leader in pushing for climate action, has all but abandoned efforts to mitigate the effects of a warming world. President Trump has said he plans to officially withdraw the nation from the Paris climate agreement in 2020 and in the meantime has rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing the country’s carbon emissions.

“We have lost momentum. There’s no question,” Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor who studies emissions trends, said of both U.S. and global efforts to steer the world toward a more sustainable future.

The sharp emissions rise was fueled primarily by a booming economy, researchers found. But the increase, which could prove to be the second-largest in the past 20 years, probably would not have been as stark withoutTrump administration rollbacks, said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium.

“I don’t think you would have seen the same increase,” Houser said, referring to the electric power sector in particular.

Today's Beau

Beau Of The Fifth Column

There are very few people outside of Cult45 who think he has the authority to use a Declaration of Emergency to build his wall.

And there are plenty of people who are pretty confidant that he doesn't have the actual balls to follow thru on his threat - to claim he has that authority.

One great Take-Away: 

Even if you support what he wants to do, if you support the way he wants to do it, then you're betraying American democracy.

There is no middle ground on that one.

14 Characteristics Of Fascism

We'll see what we see.

I'm going to stay with my thinking that it's a fool's errand trying to predict what this particular Ass Hat POTUS is going to do - because that's his basic game. 

He sets it up with, "Maybe I will and maybe I won't", and once you've predicted he'll go one way, he'll almost always go some other way - usually, picking something he never mentioned before, which catches us more or less off guard, which is how he wants it.

The thing I try to keep in mind is that there are no guiding principles in place with Donald J Trump.

There are principles. They do exist. They're lofty-sounding and noble and familiar. But everything is fungible. Everything is situational. Every "principle" can be bent and shaped in order for it to be smash-fitted to whatever immediate need presents itself.

Maybe it's because I've been binge-ing The Sopranos on HBO the last few days, but holy crap - 45* has come into pretty sharp focus for me.

Sophie Scholl

August Landmesser

About That Stoopid Name

There's an NFL team in Washington DC, and there's a controversy that kinda comes and goes concerning the name of that team - a name that I try not to use, so I'll go with "Taters".

Anyway, the controversy is always about what the name is intended to mean by the people who use the name in normal conversation. Which is pretty sly. It's a tactic that deflects the criticism by trying to flip the script in order to put the one who's objecting to the word on defense, having to explain why its use is insulting.  (remember: when you're explaining, you're losing)

This is, of course, a cop out that's no different from the bullshit excuses that get thrown around whenever we have to argue about Confederate memorial statuary and the battle flag of the Army Of Northern Virginia and various other really stoopid shit that should never even pop up on the social radar.

Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave us a good way to illustrate the point on how to convince someone that the NFL needs to pressure Dan Snyder to change that name.

There's a very simple test available to anyone in the DC area.

All you have to do is walk up to this woman - US Rep Sharice Davids...

...and say, "Hey, Redskin, congratulations on being elected to Congress!"

Now, I think you'll survive this encounter - survive physically anyway - but assuming she resists the perfectly reasonable urge to stomp your ass til there's nothing left of you but a greasy spot on the rug, I'm betting you'll come away with a slightly different perspective on the subject.

Sharice Davids D-KS03