Today's Orwell

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself.

Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments ... of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.

--George Orwell, 1984

A Closer Look

tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Pundits have told us since that fateful day when Comrade Preznint Stupid won the election, a large number of white, working class Dims had changed lanes. The Villagers told us that these voters so hated Crooked Killery (“but her E-MAIL!!1!) that they voted for Hair Führer. The very serious media people told us that these voters were deserters and that they must be appeased for the Dims to ever win anything again.

Looks like that might be BS.

Shocking, I know.

BTW - tengrain is so good, he inspires his blog followers to come up with the bestly brilliantest nicknames.

Everybody - say hello to Pee Wee Goebbels:

Today's GIF

Maybe this is what they're talking about. Is this when America was great?

Today's Quote

"There has always been a section of the left, which I call the Whiny Party - the party that really doesn't wanna win. They just wanna be pure. And if they go down swinging purely, then that's fine. Well, the problem with that is it leaves behind the people who really need their help. If we're gonna have a single-payer or Medicare For All or whatever we're gonna have in healthcare, then we all have to pull together. And people who sit out or crank on some candidate because they did this or that that wasn't to their purity test are basically turning their back on the very people they pretend to represent. So I don't have a lot of patience with this wing of the progressive party." 

--Howard Dean

Redefined

Irony is when it takes a liar like 45* to reveal the truth about what the GOP has become.

Today's Tweet

We can hope.

Orange Is The New Black, White House Edition pic.twitter.com/uJ4fcbLEKR

— Cogito Ergo Sum (@dezzthehumanist) August 6, 2017

Over-Privileged Phony

John Ford illustrated some heroic American ideals by making movies that asked a few important questions:

• "How far out of your way are you willing to go to stand up for what's right?"
• "What if it means having to stand up for somebody else, and it could get your ass killed?"

Stephen Miller is asking: "How far out of your way can I make you willing to go to play the victim, so I can convince you to give me the power to rule over you?"

Vid: "sick & tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us" Trump Adv Stephen Miller pic.twitter.com/cpoSGAdOGv

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) August 5, 2017

Near Quote

(paraphrasing a tweet)

45*'s lawyer to Bob Mueller: 

"OK, you can give him the speeding ticket, but you're not allowed to look any further, even though the stench of rotting flesh kinda makes it obvious there's a dead body in the trunk."

Today's Pix

 

Adult Supervision

It's particularly appalling and altogether galling to know this is where we are now.

It really should be a fairly simple concept:

We have to learn how to live our lives without needing a cop, or mommy, or Jesus looking over our shoulder the whole fucking time.

On the other side is the little red flag that's gone up in the back of my brain clutter that wants me to ask why Mad Dog Mattis feels the need to put this out now. In a system with built-in Checks-n-Balances, why does the boss at the most powerful government agency on the planet think it's necessary to remind people to behave appropriately? - as though the reins were being removed.

Today's Political Fuckery

Straight out of the Daddy State Playbook:

If everyone is guilty, then no one can be held to account.

Dallas Morning News, Ruth May:

Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.

During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonid "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.

The shit is apparently wider than I thought, and it runs way deeper. 

Some probables:

• It'll take a good long time to get it sorted out and squared up
• we won't ever know but maybe half of the real story
• the loudest voices will belong to the dirtiest culprits

And don't forget there's a (continuing) concerted effort coming out of the Wingnut Dis-Infotainment Complex to gloss it over.

Fox Politics:

WOULD YOU EVEN CARE IF HE WAS GUILTY?

The stock market is up, unemployment is down and the economy seems to be picking up some steam. The streets are mostly safe, the nation is mostly secure and the world is mostly at peace.

So does it matter to you whether or not the president is a crook? The answer for a lot of Americans may be no.

With the revelation that a grand jury is looking at evidence against members of President Trump’s 2016 campaign team, we move closer still to the possibility that someone could be in very big trouble.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his squad are moving fast, and the likelihood that some charges will be brought can no longer be ignored. It is not hard to imagine a moment in the very near future where some associate of the president is in the dock, charged with misdeeds relating to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But, again, we ask: Would it matter to you?

Episode 400

Episode 400 - The podcast that's lasted more than 275 times longer than The Mooch's gig at the White House. That's something worth celebrating.

The Professional Left

podcast

Every week for more than 7 1/2 years.  Every week.

Crime And Punishment

Sturm und Drang abounds over the "Murder-by-Text" trial (and as of yesterday the sentencing) of Michelle Carter.

The Hill, David Shapiro:

With the news in that a Massachusetts judge sentenced homicide-by-text defendant Michelle Carter to fifteen months in prison and six years on probation, many are outraged at the perceived leniency of the sentence.

They may have a point, but only because brutally harsh sentences have become the norm in American criminal justice, and with devastating effects. The past decades have witnessed massive “sentencing inflation” as periods of incarceration have become longer and longer.
In the past 40 years, the incarceration rate in the United States skyrocketed by 500 percent. The United States now locks up more of its people than Russia and China — some 2.2 million of us. According to the Sentencing Project, “Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase.” 

If Carter’s sentence seems short, it is because we are weighing it on a broken scale.
Increasing rates of incarceration at best has a minimal effect on crime, and may have no effect at all. In other words, mass incarceration is all about politics, not public safety.


We've been through a long and damaging period of "Law-n-Order" that's done little but make real the grotesque Dickensian villainy of the Prison Entrepreneur, and a Coin-Operated Justice System.

Maybe we're seeing something of a backlash now.

But we still have to contend with certain Daddy Staters, per Charlie Pierce:

Were you wondering if Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was still the prickly authoritarian yahoo that he's always been, now that he has gotten on the bad side of the president*? Wonder no longer, says The Washington Post.

Dots

It starts to look like the dots are connecting themselves.

Listen to Bob Cesca and Jackie Schechter (sorry, unable to embed)...

The Bob Cesca Show, presented by Bubble Genius - 08-03-17

...and then go sign up for Investigate Russia

BTW - it's time to take the whole "smoke but no fire" thing and put it to bed.

Ask any firefighter what happens to your house if you wait until you see flames before you call 911.

President Capone

While we don't get to see 45*'s tax records right now, we can learn part of what we need to know by looking at the tiny sliver of information they do allow us to see.

It ain't sexy - it won't excite anybody outside a relatively small circle of Numbers Nerds - but this is how these things get done.

WaPo, David Herzig and Bridget Crawford


It’s possible the president filed the right paperwork. But without a full release of his tax returns, the available evidence suggests he hasn’t. According to New York City property records, Trump paid $13,000 in state and local transfer taxes for these two sales. That is the correct amount for a sale between strangers. But if he paid state and local transfer taxes, that means he didn’t treat the transfers as gifts. And on the real estate forms filed in New York, Trump didn’t check any of the boxes indicating that these were sales between relatives or sales of less than the entire property. It would seem, then, that he treated the transactions as if they were sales for fair market value to a stranger.

-snip-

Since Trump did not cast the transactions as gifts for state and local tax purposes, it is almost certain that he did not do so for federal gift tax purposes, either. In our combined 40 years of experience as tax lawyers, we are unaware of a situation in which a taxpayer would report a transaction as a fair market value between strangers on the state level (and thus incur real estate taxes) but treat it as a gift at the federal level (and thus incur an additional tax). It’s fair to infer that Trump didn’t follow the rules.

And just in case you're looking for work in a field that's almost perfect for keeping you busy for decades to come as we try to unravel the shit blanket that's been thrown over our heads, it's worth considering a career in Forensic Accounting (yes - that's a thing). And if we're going to have any real chance to fix a tax system that's totally FUBAR, we'll be in dire need of some very good Numbers Nerds.