A New One

I've not met this lady, but we've been chatting online for a short bit and I think she's the real thing.  And she talks about real things too.

I've linked to her site on my "Places I Go" list - click on the little stack of lines in the upper left of the main page. 

Intrigue At The Palace

Vox:

On Friday, January 6, FBI Director James Comey met with President-elect Donald Trump. His task was awkward; he needed to inform Trump that the FBI’s counterterrorism unit was investigating claims that Russia had embarrassing blackmail material on the billionaire real estate developer.

Something in Trump’s reaction disturbed Comey. “I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo,” he recalls in testimony prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The compulsion to record the conversation was fierce and immediate; Comey didn’t even wait to get back to his hotel. “I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting.” From then on, Comey began documenting all his meetings with Trump. “This had not been my practice in the past,” he says.

On January 27, Comey again found himself in a strange situation with the president, caught by surprise when a dinner invitation that originally included his family turned into Comey having dinner with Trump, alone, in the White House’s Green Room. Trump immediately asked if Comey wanted to remain in his job, and said many other people would want it — a request Comey found strange, as Trump had already asked him to stay on as FBI director, and Comey had already accepted.

“My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Comey says. Trump would soon make that perfectly clear. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” the president told his FBI director.

In subsequent meetings, Trump would ask Comey to “lift the cloud” Russia was casting over his presidency, to announce publicly that Trump was not being investigated, and to squelch the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s activities. In their final conversation, Trump asked for Comey’s cooperation, saying, “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.” Comey says he did not know what “that thing” was. Shortly thereafter, Comey was fired.

Everybody's expecting a big show today when Comey testifies, but the smart money seems to be on Big-Nothing-Burger.  Why does the guy telegraph his moves by releasing a kind of script before he shows up?  He doesn't think anybody's going to confine themselves just to the points he outlined, does he?  But then again, it's not likely for him to drop the big one in open session. But then again again, this guy has pulled some pretty horrendous shit in the not too distant past.  

And wouldn't it be nice if one of the Press Poodles could manage to ask the question - Is any of this to be considered "usual and customary"?

So anyway, we see what we see today. And what we do know to be "usual and customary" is that we can count on the Poodles to sell us gigundous piles of car insurance and boner pills. This is USAmerica Inc - it's what we do.

Manage the expectations, and keep pushing Congress to do something honorable.

It's A Ladder, Einstein

Dear @realDonaldTrump: Here's a friendly reminder from @VicenteFoxQue that Mexico will not pay for your wall. pic.twitter.com/Osg8ZUYLlG

— Super Deluxe (@superdeluxe) June 7, 2017

Today's Quote

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

--James Baldwin

Today's Tweet

Kinda looks like the President stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charity for kids with cancer? https://t.co/BRUqF8jzc4

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 6, 2017

The Unraveling

Wanna know what's really weird?  In working so hard to consolidate power and to achieve that ever-elusive Unitary Executive, 45* is actually in the process of stripping The Executive Branch of all the power gains it's made in the last 35 years.

Politico:

A top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, Jack Goldsmith, unleashed a 17-entry Tweetstorm arguing that Trump’s ongoing attacks on his own lawyers and his apparent effort to disclaim responsibility for reissuing his “watered down” order are further eroding judicial deference for the executive branch.

“Given POTUS’s instability, it is not just courts that have reason to relax the presumption of regularity for this Prez,” wrote Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School. “We all have reason to do so about everything the Executive branch does that touches, however lightly, the President....One thing DT behavior entails...is many losses in court and not just on the immigration EOs....Everything else Executive would normally win—reversing Clean Power Plan, terminating treaty, new regs, etc.—will be much, much harder.”

Leaves me to wonder - when the GOP begins the inevitable Trump Rehab Project (and you bloody well know they will), just how trippy-flippy will it get trying to rationalize giving Trump credit for "Rebalancing The System Of Checks And Balances In Order To Save The Republic"?

Yeah, well - ya heard it here first.

Ain't No Drip Drip Drip

NYT:

An intelligence contractor was charged with sending a classified report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to the news media, the Justice Department announced Monday, the first criminal leak case under President Trump.

The case showed the department’s willingness to crack down on leaks, as Mr. Trump has called for in complaining that they are undermining his administration. His grievances have contributed to a sometimes tense relationship with the intelligence agencies he now oversees.

The Justice Department announced the case against the contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, 25, about an hour after the national-security news outlet The Intercept published the apparent document, a May 5 intelligence reportfrom the National Security Agency.

The report described two cyberattacks by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U. — one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.

These leaks lately are not bad things. And (like the most recent one from NSA) they're coming from patriots not criminals.

Of course, I don't know anything about Ms Winner, but I think I can draw a line between her and (eg) Ed Snowden, and make a pretty good case to the effect that Ms Winner did it trying to help us, while Snowden and Assange did it trying to help Vlad Putin, and to line their own pockets.

People like Ms Winner are putting themselves at great personal risk to get info out to us that we need to see.

They can't push that info up thru channels because they know the White House gang will do anything to keep us from knowing what kinda shit they (and their Russian buddies) were up to during the election process last year. 

And since there's practically no one in Congress who isn't scrambling to cash in on Trump's trouble in one way or another (or just to cover his own ass), about the only way they can get the truth out to us is to break the law.

This looks to be in the finest American traditions of civil disobedience. These people are fucking heroes.

Wanna know how I'm more or less sure of what I just said?  I feel pretty confident believing the leakers are heroes because 45* and his gang are adamant about calling them traitors.

Daddy State Basics:

1. Every Accusation is a Confession.
2. Every boast is an Admission of Inadequacy and/or an attempt to take credit for someone else's work.
3. Every warning of some tragic event that's coming our way is a Statement of Intent - either they're currently, actively, and directly causing the tragedy, or they're planning to cause it in order to punish us if we don't go along with whatever shitty policy they're proposing.
4. Every day is upside-down-n-backwards day in the Daddy State.

Keith

Keith Olbermann at GQ

Vox Explains

Lying Liars

WaPo calls 'em out (from 5-24-17)

The Congressional Budget Office will release its score of the GOP health-care bill today, and whatever the details, it will confirm once again that the Republican plan would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, leaving many millions uncovered. This, plus continued discussion of President Trump’s budget — which would heap a whole array of other cuts on top of that — will demonstrate that Trump is fully committed to a truly transformative downsizing of social programs that help lower-income people, packaged with an enormous tax cut for the rich.

But the evidence is mounting that Trump’s economic blueprint — whatever considerable harm it would do to people who didn’t vote for Trump — is also likely to hurt untold numbers of people who did vote for him.

Trump’s budget would transform the structure of Medicaid and cut spending on the program by hundreds of billions of dollars on top ofthe GOP health-care plan’s hundreds of billions in cuts to the Medicaid expansion over 10 years. This would chop down the program by nearly half. It’s hard to know how many Trump voters would be hit by these cuts, but judging by Kaiser’s polling, we’re talking about a lot of them.

--and--

The White House has an explanation for Trump’s reversal on Medicaid. Asked by John Harwood to explain the flip, budget director Mick Mulvaney claimed the promise was supplanted by Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. This is nonsense: As Brian Beutler explains, Mulvaney “layered a lie of his own on top of Trump’s,” because Trump’s budget cuts to Medicaid “go hundreds of billions of dollars beyond phasing out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”

I’d go further still: There are numerous Trump lies being forced out into the open right now. Trump claimed he would not touch Medicaid and simultaneously that he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better for all. It was a lie for Trump to claim he wouldn’t touch Medicaid; it was a lie to suggest preserving Medicaid and repealing Obamacare were compatible; it was a lie to claim that his repeal-and-replace plan would result in better coverage for everybody. If anything, the White House’s justifications only throw the scale and audacity of these intertwined scams, lies and betrayals into even sharper relief.

Classic John Cleese

Today's Tweet

alt-right weeps https://t.co/a2rD0lr09G

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) June 4, 2017

It'll Happen

Like a big earthquake or a bad hurricane, a terrorist attack inside USAmerica Inc is a matter of when not if.

When it happens, it's likely we'll see a big push towards the Daddy State - a massive transference of power to the Executive.

And keep in mind these few tidbits from Andrew Restuccia at Politico:

Top ranks at the State Department remain largely unfilled, as are some key ambassadorships. Trump has not named anyone to lead the Transportation Security Administration, which screens people at airports, or to run the Homeland Security office charged with protecting the country's physical and cyber infrastructure. His choice to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency is awaiting Senate confirmation, but Trump has not named a deputy.

At the Justice Department, Trump has not nominated an assistant attorney general for the national security division. And he has not nominated a deputy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or a director of the office's National Counterterrorism Center.

And, perhaps most crucially, Trump has not yet named a permanent leader of the FBI, which plays a central role in combating domestic terrorism. The president has continued to interview candidates for the job nearly a month after he fired James Comey.

It's possible the Press Poodles are right, and working for 45* has become such a Career-Killer that it's a simple matter of nobody worth hiring is willing to work for the guy.

It's just as possible he's using that as an excuse for not filling the positions necessary for us to have a better chance to prevent the attack or at least minimize the damage.

And hey - I may be paranoid, but that don't mean the guy ain't out to fuck us over.

Yeesh

There can be nothing more representative than this picture of the totality of fucked-up-edness this "president" is causing - on purpose, btw.

Yes, he's an incompetent mushbrain when it comes to governance. And he has no clue about history or language or science or anything else that makes for a decent human being, let alone a good POTUS. 

But he knows exactly what to do to advance an agenda that benefits nobody but himself - and his little band of thieves (for as long as they prove useful to him).

So the point of the exercise is to cause as much confusion and uncertainty as possible in order to exploit whatever opportunity presents itself because of it, or to cover whatever heist is in progress at any given time, and to have some plausible-sounding way to leave everybody else holding the bag when it all blows up.

The "saving grace" here may lie in the way 45* feels compelled to operate. To wit: his fucked up worldview makes it impossible for him to think he can win unless he can make everybody else lose - and eventually, it'll come down to everybody having to decide between themselves and him. Which is when the supremely venal Repubs in congress will suddenly remember swearing an oath not to do exactly everything they've been doing.

Because that's how this kinda shit always ends.

Let's keep hoping this one ends before the shooting starts.

Some Hard Truth

The fight for what's right continues apace.

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
--and--

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

To describe this man as American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility towards the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’ integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans; there are no statues of Longstreet anywhere in the American South. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6’2” Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.