Today's Quote

A blast from the past - Driftglass ages well.

Most newly minted "Independents" seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want to believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead, they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they've stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

-- Driftglass

Toxic Masculinity

The Trigger:

The Emotional Reaction:

If I say: "There's too many assholes being assholes - we need assholes to stop being such assholes"

And you respond: "How dare you call me an asshole!?!"

Then it's not unreasonable for me to conclude that you've self-identified as one of the assholes who need to stop being such assholes.

And the Man-splaining aspects of the reactions? Don't get me started.

The sensible perspective:

One Good Sign

Charlie Pierce, Esquire Magazine:

So Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader of the House, moved on King, which gives us another chance to toss an elbow at former Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin. Ryan was perfectly fine with having an outright white-supremacist in his caucus for more than a decade because Ryan never found the political gumption to bring the wild kingdom there under control.

As Charlie points out, some Repubs have decided - finally - to get on that little bandwagon, and say something about the once and future white nationalist always known as Steve King.

And may I add - this doesn't happen if we don't put Dems back in charge of at least part of the legislative branch.

Repubs are no longer in full command, so their need for the support of a Steve King and his hordes of racist assholes is outweighed by their need to cut their losses - pretty much proving the Blue Wave was in fact a wave; that those "hordes" were fictitious to begin with, and if they don't do something quick and rather drastic, people will see what a fucking sham "the Republican Majority" has been for at least 7 or 8 years.

I'm also betting dollars to dingleberries that Nancy Pelosi told McCarthy that he needed to stomp King's ass or she'd do it for him.

You don't fuck with Aunt Nancy.

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.

Today's Tweet

A slight change in perspective.

replaced Fox News chyrons with "look at this dumb motherfucker right here" and they all make much more sense now pic.twitter.com/jXOAEhajnv

— Born Miserable (@bornmiserable) January 13, 2019

Randy

Randy Rainbow just gets better.

Today's Tweet

13 seconds of permanent joyfulness.

This baby has brought me unspeakable joy! pic.twitter.com/dZtF5iJ4oG

— Allie Mac Kay (@alliemackay) January 14, 2019

hat tip = @BlueGal

A Minor Pivot

I'm not growing any fonder of "Make America Great Again", but I'd like to think we could go back to where the President Of The United States and the dumbest fuckin' jerk in the country weren't the same guy.

It's Here

Notice: I will not continue my efforts at self-restraint - I will not resist saying, "I told you so".

Alex Harris (w/ Jenny Staletovich), Miami Herald:

Miami-Dade has tens of thousands of septic tanks, and a new report reveals most are already malfunctioning — the smelly and unhealthy evidence of which often ends up in people’s yards and homes. It’s a billion-dollar problem that climate change is making worse.

As sea level rise encroaches on South Florida, the Miami-Dade County study shows that thousands more residents may be at risk — and soon. By 2040, 64 percent of county septic tanks (more than 67,000) could have issues every year, affecting not only the people who rely on them for sewage treatment, but the region’s water supply and the health of anyone who wades through floodwaters.

“That’s a huge deal for a developed country in 2019 to have half of the septic tanks not functioning for part of the year,” said Miami Waterkeeper Executive Director Rachel Silverstein. “That is not acceptable."

- and -

Sea level rise is pushing the groundwater even higher, eating up precious space and leaving the once dry dirt soggy. Waste water doesn’t filter like it’s supposed to in soggy soil. In some cases, it comes back out, turning a front yard into a poopy swamp.

High tides or heavy rains can push feces-filled water elsewhere, including King Tide floodwaters — as pointed out in a 2016 study from Florida International University and NOAA — or possibly the region’s drinking supply.

The loonie lefties have been warning us about this for 40 years.

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.