About That Wall Thingie

45* insists on getting money for his wall, and has taken 800,000 hostages, trying to force us into going along with it, saying he made a promise to his Red Hats and he needs to come through for them.

First, keeping a promise is a totally foreign concept to that clown, so we all know this is about something else.

I think the "something else" has everything to do with putting the US into a chaotic state so he and his minions can further loot the treasury, and consolidate their power.

Repubs in congress are standing by letting him do all this because he's furthering their intentions of moving us away from the model of democratic self-governance towards the Daddy State.

We're fixated on 45*'s antics, while the GOP believes they're using him as a cat's paw, planning to dump him once they're done with him.

There are of course, a jillion other threads tangled up in this ridiculous knotted snarl, but I think it always comes back down to a fight between people who just want a fair shake for as many as possible, versus people looking for an unfair advantage for themselves.

Which brings me back to the wall.

The wall is not the point - he didn't promise to build a wall. He promised to get Mexico to pay us to build the wall.

He promised the rubes they'd get something for nothing. They voted for free stuff.

And the kicker: the wall as metaphor means they've completely bought into the notion that the policies they support have no cost attached, and that their personal bigotry - their animus towards anyone "different" from them - will never exact payment from them.

The depth of depravity to which the rubes have fallen can be gauged in simple terms:

They sit passively, watching their family and neighbors - and sometimes they themselves - being ordered back on the job where they're forced to work for nothing.

Mandatory labor without compensation - seems like we've tried that before, and it didn't pan out so good.

A Closer Look

Seth Meyers and Senator Kennedy's wangdoodle.

Today's Tweet

From an interview in 1999.

David, this internet thing will never catch on... 🤦‍♀️ #davidbowie @timberners_lee pic.twitter.com/XKoSBVqZGU

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) January 13, 2019

In Our Faces

Were you continuing to wonder what Cult45's corruption actually looks like?

I knew you were, so here ya go.

John LeGere, CEO T-Mobile

Jonathan O'Connell and David Fahrenthold, WaPo:

Last April, telecom giant T-Mobile announced a megadeal: a $26 billion merger with rival Sprint, which would more than double T-Mobile’s value and give it a huge new chunk of the cellphone market.

But for T-Mobile, one hurdle remained: Its deal needed approval from the Trump administration.

The next day, in Washington, staffers at the Trump International Hotel were handed a list of incoming “VIP Arrivals.” That day’s list included nine of T-Mobile’s top executives — including its chief operating officer, chief technology officer, chief strategy officer, chief financial officer and its outspoken celebrity chief executive, John Legere.

They were scheduled to stay between one and three days. But it was not their last visit.

Instead, T-Mobile executives have returned to President Trump’s hotel repeatedly since then, according to eyewitnesses and hotel documents obtained by The Washington Post.

By mid-June, seven weeks after the announcement of the merger, hotel records indicated that one T-Mobile executive was making his 10th visit to the hotel. Legere appears to have made at least four visits to the Trump hotel, walking the lobby in his T-Mobile gear.

These visits highlight a stark reality in Washington, unprecedented in modern American history. Trump the president works at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump the businessman owns a hotel at 1100 Pennsylvania.

Countries, interest groups and companies like T-Mobile — whose future will be shaped by the administration’s choices — are free to stop at both and pay the president’s company while also meeting with officials in his government. Such visits raise questions about whether patronizing Trump’s private business is viewed as a way to influence public policy, critics said.

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.