Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer in WaPo:

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

You don't have to rob the liquor store. 

Conspiring to rob the liquor store is a crime and you go to jail.

Today's Quote

The first amendment is like a vagina. It's beautiful, and complicated, and angry guys on the internet have no idea how it works.

--Jim Jeffries

Today's Pix

Nailed it

driftglass lands a big one on Matthew Dowd.

I just want to really know from Trump apologists, what could the President or WH do that would cause you to no longer support them?

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) July 12, 2017

Says a man who proudly pissed his vote away on a vanity candidate because he was just too fucking pure to sully himself by voting for the only candidate who could have actually stopped Trump.

So I just want to really know from all the Purity Angels including Mr. Dowd what could President Stupid or the White House do that would cause you to admit that you fucked up. Bigly.

Where The Fuck Are We?

Colbert's question - Have we come to the point where colluding with a foreign power in an attempt to effect the outcome of our elections is a Left vs Right thing?

It's of some import to remember that while 45*'s approvals are in the mid- to high 30s overall, for people self-identifying as Republican, that approval number is still in the mid- to high 80s.

We can cheer and feel hopeful as more "rock-ribbed establishment" Repubs bail on the party and squawk about it, but 45*'s core constituency (as low-life and bottom-of-the-barrel as we know them to be) will likely stay with him for as long as they see him as the guy who went up there to Washington and showed all them buttheads a thing or two.

Because: The point of the exercise for an awful lot of "conservatives" is simply to make liberals mad enough to cry. There's almost literally nothing else to it for some of these mooks.

Corollary: If their guy does something that makes you mad or scared or whatever, then you're a liberal, and nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be the truth because you're a liberal, and liberals are always wrong, and we win again. All this winning!

But the real kicker is that we can't go on trying to see any of this thru our filter of the Presumption of Regularity.

45*'s hardcore supporters aren't really the ones who put him there, but they're convinced they did exactly that, so they're the ones who have to be convinced he has to go. And we can't sway people who are Fact-Hostile to the point where they've become immune to reason. We have to fight the mechanisms that propagate that hostility - and I don't know how to do that.

"Turbo-Fucked" is a pretty apt descriptor for what we are right now.

Lining It Out

Dunno about the rest of y'all, but I'll have to hear the 45*/Russia timeline several more times and several more ways and from several more people before I can get my think soupy brain wrapped around just what a ginormous shitball this thing is becoming.

Ezra Klein at Vox:

I think I've said before that I was in front of our crappy little black-n-white portable TV in the kitchen of my parents' house all thru the summer of 1973 - like my ass was bolted to the chair.

Watergate moved pretty slow compared with this shit.  And we kinda had some time to kick back for few minutes each day and cogitate on "what the fuck just happened here!?!"

We don't have that luxury now.  And it makes me wonder what all we're going to miss as we rush thru, trying to get it to just fucking stop already.

This is gonna hurt pretty bad for a while.

Today's Tweet

Why does everyone involved with Trump look like a scene-stealer in a Coen brothers movie? pic.twitter.com/BOoJx0DOL4

— Jason Sinclair (@jlsinc) July 11, 2017

It Gets Worse

The ever-widening Circle Of Fuckery is about to include Kellyanne Conway and possibly Chris Kobach as well.

Peter Stone and Greg Gordon at McClatchy:

By Election Day, an automated Kremlin cyberattack of unprecedented scale and sophistication had delivered critical and phony news about the Democratic presidential nominee to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of millions of voters. Some investigators suspect the Russians targeted voters in swing states, even in key precincts.

--and--

One source familiar with Justice's criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently "known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states."

All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is confidential.

Top Democrats on the committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election have signaled the same.

Schiff said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160803619.html#storylink=cpy

Today's Quote

If we came from god, why is there still a god?

--@iamAtheistGirl

It Gets Worse

As if the fuckery of cult45* isn't bad enough - and I've mentioned this shit before - we have to keep one good eye on what the Congress Weasels are up to that we don't get to see very well because the 45*/Russia thing is such a very useful smoke screen.

Fuck up healthcare coverage
Fuck up the water and the air and the food
And make prescription medications too expensive for most anybody not living 3000% over the fucking poverty line
And
And
And
And privatize the fuck outa everything that moves or doesn't move; or might evolve into a moving thing sometime down the road (not that any of the dumbass rubes will even guess what that "evolving" thing might mean because they keep electing Coin-Operated Politicians who think Betsy DeVos is the new Moritmer Fucking Adler) - and by the way, let's create a Futures Market so somebody can own every-goddamned-thing there is or ever will be. 

And let's not forget Net Neutrality.

Trae Crowder:

A New(ish) Wrinkle

Ol' Doc Maddow lined this out quite a while ago, talking about conflicts of interest and such.

And then, boom - there it is.

Abha Bhataria at WaPo:

Guests at 14 Trump properties, including hotels in Washington, New York and Vancouver, have had their credit card information exposed, marking the third time in as many years that a months-long security breach has affected customers of the chain of luxury hotels.

The latest instance occurred between August 2016 and March 2017, according to a notice on the company’s website, and included guest names, addresses and phone numbers, as well as credit card numbers and expiration dates. The breach took place on the systems of Sabre Hospitality Solutions, a reservation booking service used by Trump Hotels, but did not compromise the Trump Hotels’ systems.

1. The (Russian?) mob loves credit card shit - it's easy pickin's
2. Why 45*'s hotels specifically?
3. Is this an attack on the hotels, or is this an attack on US interests?
4. How do we tell the difference?
5. If there's a response, what will that response be?
6. If there's no response - or a nominal/weak shit response - what can we reasonably surmise from that in itself?

BTW - remember that F-35 bullshit I posted about earlier? It seems we're not addressing a pretty important question - 

When we know the Russians are attacking us in Cyberspace, why the fuck are we beefing up on hardware to fight a battle in Meatspace?

- and it seems we're avoiding that question with increased vigor since January 20th this year.

Today's Tweet

Even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

Fox News gets it right: pic.twitter.com/mBk2PDK49J

— Alt EEOB (@AltEEOB) July 12, 2017

Don and Jared

Don Jr can go to prison for violations of a whole raft of shit - espionage, treason, campaign restrictions, etc.

Jared might go for about the same reasons, but his function now is to take the hit in order to provide plausible deniability for 45*, which serves to shield the rest of cult45*.

But at the very least, those two jokers.

One thing - the Circle Of Fuckery widens almost daily.  So remember that the first point in this kinda shit is to make sure everybody's guilty so nobody can be held accountable.

And also too, there is no honor in anyone involved in this, so let's not count on Bob Mueller's Witness Whisperers to produce a good ol'-fashioned John Dean. We'd best be expectin' we'll hafta do this the hard way.

Here's A Tho't

Wondering why Congress is being so stealthy as they try to strip away everything the "conservatives" hate about this country instead of addressing the Trump/Russia thing?

Wonder no more:

1. Know what's coming
2. Get outside - disobey
3. Know your history
4. Follow the money
5. Have a Counter-Plan ready

This is not governance - this is a fucking robbery.

And BTW - what's the big hurry, Mitch?  Is 45* in greater jeopardy than you can admit?

The Big Turnaround

Here's the visual from the Rachel Maddow thing I posted yesterday - worth repeating a few times.

Watch for it starting at about 6:50 - Rachel lays out the probability that the GOP will use the very heavy layers of guilt as a shield. DumFux news has already started putting up the "Don Jr is the real victim here" defense.

Cult45* is employing a variation on a basic tactic of the Daddy State: Accusation = Confession.

It can work the other way as well. You can use your confession as a weapon against your opponent - turning it into an accusation.

The shitty part is that the rubes will buy it.

The really shitty part is that the Press Poodles will give the rubes reason to think it's legit by covering it in that Both-Sides bullshit way.

The really really shitty part is that this is fucking dangerous.

And the really really really shitty part is that this is prob'ly not as dangerous as it gets.

Fake Lord have mercy.