Tim Wise, at UC Santa Barbara 5 years ago.
Sep 4, 2022
Sep 3, 2022
Poodling
I guess they're saying they missed the speech?
Or maybe - as is too often the case with the WaPo editorial board - they just chose to miss the whole point.
Allow me a moment to translate:
"Yes yes, someone has spiked all the tires, and we can't get where we're going unless we change them out, and I suppose Mr Biden is getting it done, but does he have to get so sweaty and dirty? And maybe if he had just asked a bit more politely, those scalawag vandals would be on their way to the police right now to confess their atrocious behavior. Tut tut goodness gracious sakes alive. Are there any more of those delightful crab puffs? Cook does those so divinely..."
Stoopid fuckin' Press Poodles.
(pay wall)
Opinion
Democracy is in danger. Biden should invoke patriotism, not partisanship, to make that point.
It is a depressing reflection of the dangerous political situation in which the nation finds itself that President Biden felt compelled to deliver a prime-time address decrying political violence and election denialism and calling on Americans “to unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy.” Indeed, democracy is under assault in the United States. Rallying to its defense is an urgent task, and it does the nation no service to pretend that this is a problem of bipartisan dimensions. The leader of one party peddled the false belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, incited his adherents to storm the Capitol, and continues to stir anger and unrest. As Mr. Biden put it in Philadelphia on Thursday night, “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
The difficult, perhaps insurmountable, challenge that Mr. Biden confronted — just eight weeks before midterm elections that will determine the future course of his presidency — was how to convey the message of defending democracy in a way that summons patriotism rather than partisanship. Here, as much as we agree with the president about the urgency of the issue, is where he fell short, too often sounding more like a Democrat than a democrat. You don’t persuade people by scolding or demeaning them, but that’s how the president’s speech landed for many conservatives of goodwill.
Mr. Biden was wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called “the work of democracy.” You can be for democracy but against the president’s policy proposals to use government to lower prescription-drug prices and combat climate change. “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” Mr. Biden proclaimed. But many conservatives — not just “MAGA forces” — agree with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. It was disappointing that Mr. Biden chose to omit that the infrastructure, gun-control and burn-pits legislation he praised had passed with Republican votes. Pointing this out would actually have strengthened his effort to draw a contrast between “MAGA Republicans” and “mainstream Republicans.”
Moreover, Mr. Biden’s clarion call for democracy would carry more credibility if he were willing to call out his own party for its cynical effort to elevate some of the same “MAGA Republicans” he now warns will destroy democracy if they prevail in the general election. During the primaries, Democrats spent tens of millions helping dangerous election deniers defeat better-funded “mainstream Republicans,” including in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden, not coincidentally, chose to speak.
We offer these critiques of the president because we agree with him about the stakes involved. Mr. Trump announced during a radio interview just hours before Mr. Biden’s speech that, if he becomes president again, he will issue full pardons and a government apology to the Jan. 6 rioters. Mr. Trump also revealed that he met with Jan. 6 defendants in his office this week and that he is “financially supporting” some insurrectionists. “What they’ve done to these people is disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said. What’s truly disgraceful, and what formed the backdrop for Mr. Biden’s speech, is this: Mr. Trump’s continuing contempt for the rule of law; the complicit silence of the supposed leaders of his party, such as House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy; and the real threat that Mr. Trump could again be his party’s nominee in 2024.
Sep 2, 2022
Ukraine
From the Ukrainian Ministry Of Defense:
Even if we say the Ukrainians have inflated the numbers by 200%, it would still mean the Russians have lost more than a full division of warfighters - in a little over 6 months. A little over 6 months into a "special military operation" that was supposed be wrapped up in a few days.
Слава Україні
🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦
Time To Bail (?)
The stars are beginning to align.
Trump’s attorney general says no ‘legitimate reason’ for former president to have classified documents
In his sharpest critique of his former boss, former attorney general William P. Barr said there is no reason classified documents should have been inside Donald Trump’s personal residence in Florida after he was no longer president.
“No, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they could be taken out of government, away from the government, if they are classified,” Barr said in an interview with Fox News which aired Friday. Barr’s comment comes after federal officials entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and home last month with a court-issued warrant to retrieve classified documents, a move Trump said was improper and politically motivated.
“People say this was unprecedented,” Barr said Friday, “but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?”
Barr also dismissed the explanation advanced by Trump and his allies that the former president had declassified entire batches of the documents.
“If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse and show such recklessness that it’s almost worst than taking the documents,” Barr said.
“What people are missing,” Barr told Fox News, is that documents, regardless of whether they were classified, “still belong to the government and go to the archives.” The other documents that were seized, like news clippings, were, Barr said, “seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which the classified information was being held.”
Barr also said the government had gone to extraordinary lengths to work cooperatively with Trump’s team before entering his Florida home.
“They jawboned for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken,” he said, referring to false assertions made by Trump’s lawyers that all necessary material had been handed over. Then the government “went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel, and the record, the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around.”
“And so,” Barr asked rhetorically, “how long do they wait?”
Though Barr also said “it is clearly foolish what happened, and inexplicable,” he added that it was not clear whether the actions should be criminally prosecuted, considering, among other things, the documents were ultimately recovered.
The latest court filing Friday showed that Trump intermingled classified and unclassified materials in boxes at his Florida residence and had dozens of empty folders that bore a “classification” marking, according to an inventory list that described in more detail what FBI agents recovered when they searched Mar-a-Lago last month.
Barr’s comments on Fox News — one of the outlets Trump is known to watch closely — represents an escalation of Barr’s condemnation of his former boss’s behavior. Barr faced a backlash from Trump after telling him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. That created a deep rift between the nation’s top law enforcement officer and the president and ultimately led Barr to abruptly leave the administration. Since then, Trump and his allies have attacked Barr for not doing more to overturn the election results.
Later, Barr gave damning testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who tried to stop the certification of the presidential election. Barr testified that Trump was “detached from reality” and obsessed with fantastical notions of voter fraud.
I think the GOP has decided Trump has served his purpose. Now it's time to declare him "enemy" so they can regroup, assess their gains and costs, consolidate their positions, and plan the next move in their ongoing project to tear down our traditions of democratic self-government in order to replace it all with a corporate plutocracy.
Mr Barr has re-entered the chat.
(pay wall)
In his sharpest critique of his former boss, former attorney general William P. Barr said there is no reason classified documents should have been inside Donald Trump’s personal residence in Florida after he was no longer president.
“No, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they could be taken out of government, away from the government, if they are classified,” Barr said in an interview with Fox News which aired Friday. Barr’s comment comes after federal officials entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and home last month with a court-issued warrant to retrieve classified documents, a move Trump said was improper and politically motivated.
“People say this was unprecedented,” Barr said Friday, “but it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?”
Barr also dismissed the explanation advanced by Trump and his allies that the former president had declassified entire batches of the documents.
“If in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them, and said ‘I hereby declassify everything in here,’ that would be such an abuse and show such recklessness that it’s almost worst than taking the documents,” Barr said.
“What people are missing,” Barr told Fox News, is that documents, regardless of whether they were classified, “still belong to the government and go to the archives.” The other documents that were seized, like news clippings, were, Barr said, “seizable under the warrant because they show the conditions under which the classified information was being held.”
Barr also said the government had gone to extraordinary lengths to work cooperatively with Trump’s team before entering his Florida home.
“They jawboned for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken,” he said, referring to false assertions made by Trump’s lawyers that all necessary material had been handed over. Then the government “went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel, and the record, the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around.”
“And so,” Barr asked rhetorically, “how long do they wait?”
Though Barr also said “it is clearly foolish what happened, and inexplicable,” he added that it was not clear whether the actions should be criminally prosecuted, considering, among other things, the documents were ultimately recovered.
The latest court filing Friday showed that Trump intermingled classified and unclassified materials in boxes at his Florida residence and had dozens of empty folders that bore a “classification” marking, according to an inventory list that described in more detail what FBI agents recovered when they searched Mar-a-Lago last month.
Barr’s comments on Fox News — one of the outlets Trump is known to watch closely — represents an escalation of Barr’s condemnation of his former boss’s behavior. Barr faced a backlash from Trump after telling him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. That created a deep rift between the nation’s top law enforcement officer and the president and ultimately led Barr to abruptly leave the administration. Since then, Trump and his allies have attacked Barr for not doing more to overturn the election results.
Later, Barr gave damning testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who tried to stop the certification of the presidential election. Barr testified that Trump was “detached from reality” and obsessed with fantastical notions of voter fraud.
Moving Right Along
It seems obvious that Biden's fiery rhetoric last night was intended to draw that bright line between normal Americans and the dog ass MAGA clowns. And of course it was, cuz - duh.
But it's being floated now that maybe he was also trying to get us ready for something.
DOJ's Mar-a-Lago investigation appears to be moving toward criminal charges for Trump, former top counterintelligence official says
DOJ's Mar-a-Lago investigation appears to be moving toward criminal charges for Trump, former top counterintelligence official says
- A former senior counterintelligence chief at the DOJ commented on the Mar-a-Lago raid to Politico.
- "It seems to me it's moving in the direction of warranting criminal charges," David Lauftmann said.
- The DOJ believes Trump wrongly took highly classified info after he left office.
- The Justice Department appears to be moving toward criminally charging Trump in its Mar-a-Lago investigation, a former counterintelligence chief at the department told Politico.
"It seems to me it's moving in the direction of warranting criminal charges," David Laufman, former chief of the counterespionage section at the Justice Department's national security division, told the publication.
"I think [Trump] has significant criminal exposure. Whether they ultimately decide to exercise prosecutorial discretion in favor of prosecuting him is another question."
His analysis is significant given the division he used to head is playing a key role in the DOJ's investigation in whether Trump mishandled highly classified information after leaving office.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
New information has been made public about the strength of the case the DOJ believes it has against Trump in recent days.
In legal filings responding to Trump's request to have a special master appointed to examine the documents retrieved by the FBI, the DOJ alleged that Trump aides sought to obstruct its investigation and conceal documents, and that documents were kept in a haphazard way alongside Trump's personal belongings.
In a photo submitted as part of a filing Tuesday, highly classified documents were pictured alongside a box containing an old TIME magazine cover featuring Trump.
Trump has offered a shifting array of defenses in response to the search, claiming that he had broadly declassified the documents before leaving the office.
His lawyers have argued that many were protected under executive-privilege rules designed to ensure the privacy of presidential communications.
But legal experts have argued that the executive-privilege argument is highly unlikely to succeed in this case, and that Trump's declassification claims are unconvincing and may not protect him from criminal charges even if true.
The decision to pursue any sort of prosecution will ultimately rest with Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will have to weigh a number of factors in the decision whether to take the historically unprecedented step of filing charges against a former president.
"I think [Trump] has significant criminal exposure. Whether they ultimately decide to exercise prosecutorial discretion in favor of prosecuting him is another question."
His analysis is significant given the division he used to head is playing a key role in the DOJ's investigation in whether Trump mishandled highly classified information after leaving office.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
New information has been made public about the strength of the case the DOJ believes it has against Trump in recent days.
In legal filings responding to Trump's request to have a special master appointed to examine the documents retrieved by the FBI, the DOJ alleged that Trump aides sought to obstruct its investigation and conceal documents, and that documents were kept in a haphazard way alongside Trump's personal belongings.
In a photo submitted as part of a filing Tuesday, highly classified documents were pictured alongside a box containing an old TIME magazine cover featuring Trump.
Trump has offered a shifting array of defenses in response to the search, claiming that he had broadly declassified the documents before leaving the office.
His lawyers have argued that many were protected under executive-privilege rules designed to ensure the privacy of presidential communications.
But legal experts have argued that the executive-privilege argument is highly unlikely to succeed in this case, and that Trump's declassification claims are unconvincing and may not protect him from criminal charges even if true.
The decision to pursue any sort of prosecution will ultimately rest with Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will have to weigh a number of factors in the decision whether to take the historically unprecedented step of filing charges against a former president.
Today's Beau
Justin King - Beau Of the Fifth Column
We haven't seen an update on these programs in over 50 years because Republicans have been actively working against them.
Allowing government to work in any way runs counter to what Republicans want.
Today's Tweet
Biden declared war on fascism and Republicans took it as a personal attack.
— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) September 2, 2022
Today's Bidening
A farmer hears the guy on the radio saying there's a bad flood coming his way. He says to himself, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me."The water rises and the farmer retreats to his porch.A sheriff's deputy stops by as the road is beginning to flood and offers to take him to safety. The farmer replies, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." And the deputy drives away.The water rises and the farmer retreats to a room upstairs.A man comes by in a boat and offers to take him to safety. The farmer replies, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." The man in the boat motors away.The water rises and the farmer is up on his roof, barely hanging on. A helicopter appears with a rope ladder. The farmer waves them off, yelling, "I'm a god-fearing man - I go to church - I have faith that god will save me." The helicopter flies away.The water surges, destroying the farmer's house and washing him down river to a watery grave.The farmer arrives at the pearly gates to find god waiting for him. The farmer says, "I was a god-fearing man - I went to church - I had faith - why didn't you save me?"God replies, "I sent a car, a boat, and a helicopter - what the fuck you are doing here?"
First - not "half the country". Gotta admire a buncha numb-nuts who look at maybe 10 or 15 percent of the country, then turn around and try to sell the notion that it's actually "half".
(I'm not sure "admire" is the right word, but that's what I've got for now)
Second - if you're not among the fascist assholes Biden's talking about, then don't go gettin' any knots in your Underoos.
Third (and kinda the big one) - Biden keeps offering the "mainstream old guard GOP" a way out of the totally fucked up mess they've gotten themselves into (see car, boat, helicopter above).
But it's like they've become frozen in place, which is the basic problem with the kind of monumental ego some of these clods have always had, or develop over a career spent figuring out what ass to kiss and how deep into the shit they need to dive without blowing it all up or revealing to the world what craven, opportunistic, cynically manipulative transactional assholes they really are.
So here's the speech:
Sep 1, 2022
Today's Peter Pan
Ravil Maganov, the chairman of Russia's second-largest oil producer Lukoil (LKOH.MM), died on Thursday after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, two sources familiar with the situation said, becoming the latest in a series of businessmen to meet with sudden unexplained deaths.
The sources confirmed reports by several Russian media that the 67-year-old had plunged to his death, but the circumstances surrounding his fall were unclear.
Russian state news agency TASS reported the death as a suicide, citing a law enforcement source. It quoted the source as saying Maganov had been admitted to hospital after suffering a heart attack, and was also taking anti-depressants.
Reuters was unable to confirm those details. Three sources told Reuters that, based on their close acquaintance with Maganov, they did not believe he would have killed himself.
Another source close to the company said there was a belief inside Lukoil management that he had committed suicide, but the source had not seen evidence or documents to support that.
Moscow police referred Reuters questions about the death to the state Investigative Committee, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Lukoil is a private company that competes with Russian state energy giant Rosneft (ROSN.MM). It said in a statement that Maganov had "passed away following a serious illness".
"Lukoil's many thousands of employees mourn deeply for this grievous loss and express their sincere condolences to Ravil Maganov's family," it said.
At least six other Russian businessmen, most with ties to the energy industry, have died suddenly in unclear circumstances in the past few months. read more
The deaths were all in Russia apart from that of Sergei Protosenya, a former top manager of Russia's largest liquefied natural gas producer Novatek (NVTK.MM), who was found with the bodies of his wife and daughter at a villa in Spain. Catalan regional police, investigating the case, have said they believe he killed them and then took his own life.
Maganov had worked in Lukoil since 1993, shortly after the company's inception, and had overseen its refining, production and exploration, becoming chairman in 2020. His brother Nail is the head of mid-sized Russian oil producer Tatneft (TATN.MM).
Unusually among Russian companies, Lukoil took a public stand over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine. In a March 3 statement, the company's board of directors expressed its concern over the "tragic events" in Ukraine and called for the "soonest possible end to armed conflict" via negotiations.
Since 2014, Lukoil has been subject to sectoral sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control after Moscow's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
Lukoil is trying to expand its business in Africa and has refineries in Europe, including in Italy. It has for years faced speculation about being an acquisition target for Rosneft, which had bought numerous oil-producing assets across Russia. Both Lukoil and Rosneft have denied those rumours.
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