There's No Tea Party

...never was - that was the GOP rebranded.

And there's no Tea Party Of The Left - because there's no fucking Tea Party.

It is not the responsibility of "the left" to help the Obama-to-Trump voters get their shit straight and find their way home.

"No - grow the fuck up and vote like an adult human being."

Some goodly quotables this week from ProLeftPod

The Professional Left

Hit the GoFundMe thingie

Today's Tweet

I'd make one small change and call it "Presumed but Counterfeit Herd Immunity".

But yeah - that's pretty much it.

Political herd immunity has nearly killed American democracyhttps://t.co/EWll9JCBoc@frangeladuo @StephMillerShow pic.twitter.com/2muZSK8Joq

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) June 29, 2018

Service

You don't have to wear a uniform and carry a gun to serve your country.

In case you were wondering what that occasionally looks like, here's the front page of The Capital Gazette (Annapolis, MD) the morning after some asshole with a gun and a grudge murdered 5 people because he felt aggrieved, and blamed the newspaper for his troubles.

Fuck yeah they published the next day. The bad shit people do to each other never takes a day off - so the news can't take a day either. Way to go, guys.

I bitch a lot about Press Poodles. I'm not sorry for most of that - sometimes I show my love by poking you with a stick - but that's got nothing to do with what happened yesterday in Annapolis.

Every day we get a new batch of horrors. It's not unreasonable to attribute some of them directly to Cult45, while others have a more tenuous connection.

Sometimes though, out of these horrors, we get a new hero.

Selene San Felice (Capital Gazette survivor) is that hero. Because the truth must be spoken.

About That Anthony Kennedy Thing

This whole mess just gets worse.

Josh Marshall, TPM, cites an email he got from a former federal public corruption prosecutor …:

I am deeply concerned that the Kennedy retirement will put the rule of law and our democratic institutions at graver risk than ever before. The President of the United States is the subject of a serious federal criminal investigation into (1) whether he conspired with a foreign adversary to help him win a narrow electoral college victory; and (2) whether he has obstructed that very investigation by, among things, firing the FBI director in charge of the investigation. The President will now be able to choose the person who, in a very real sense, may be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not he and others are ever held accountable.

Consider that the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide, for example, whether the President can pardon himself or others to protect himself, whether a sitting President can be indicted, whether a sitting President can be compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, whether the appointment of the Special Counsel somehow violated the Appointments Clause (as some conservatives absurdly assert), and whether a President can ever obstruct justice. Even beyond the Mueller investigation, the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide whether the President’s acceptance of significant foreign funds through his businesses violates the Emoluments Clause. We have no idea how Justice Kennedy would have ruled on these questions (he hasn’t exactly distinguished himself in the last two days). But we have no doubt how a Trump appointee will. Never before has the selection of a Supreme Court nominee been so thoroughly compromised by the President’s profound personal interest in appointing a judge the President can count on to protect the President. This is DEFCON 1 for the rule of law in this country.

Democrats in the Senate seem to have missed this point, or are too feeble to effectively prosecute the basic conflict of interest case. Instead, they have fallen back on the “McConnell rule” as a justification to delay a vote. Make no mistake, the treatment of Judge Garland and the theft of President Obama’s nomination power was an outrage and a terrible precedent. But Democrats should not endorse it. They should not let McConnell’s mendacity become the norm. It should stand on its own in history as the flagrant abuse of power that it was. In any event, Democrats have a much stronger case to make: no vote should be taken until after the Special Counsel has submitted a report to Congress, or closed the investigation of the President. A President under federal criminal investigation for stealing an election should not be able to nominate the person who may decide his fate. There will be a cloud over the legitimacy of this nomination unless and until the cloud of the Mueller investigation has been lifted.


Wondering why Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan (et al) are trying so hard to turn up the heat - trying get Mueller to wrap it up right now, &/or branded as the bad guy?

Then there's this too - Say Hello to Your Boy. A Special Guy.

The Times has a fascinating article tonight on the Trump White House’s courtship of Justice Anthony Kennedy, building a relationship and rapport to make Kennedy comfortable retiring on Trump’s watch and ahead of the 2018 midterm election. One particular detail grabbed my attention: Justice Kennedy’s son Justin was the global head of real estate capital markets at Deutsche Bank and a key lifeline of capital to President Donald Trump.

Here’s how the Times tells it …

But they had a connection, one Mr. Trump was quick to note in the moments after his first address to Congress in February 2017. As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.

“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”

Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.

During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.

As many of you will remember, Deutsche Bank isn’t just any bank. As I noted in the first post I wrote about Trump’s ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin back on July 23rd, 2016, by the mid-90s, every major US bank had blackballed Donald Trump. as the Times put it in 2016, “Several bankers on Wall Street say they are simply not willing to take on what they almost uniformly referred to as ‘Donald risk.'” None would do business with him. With one big exception: Deutsche Bank.

So it may not be quite as sinister as I'm prone to think it is, but we're constantly learning about shit going on that Cult45 needs to hide, and that justifies a pretty high level of cynicism, if not outright paranoia.

Don't Get Factionalized

Trees will vote for the axe if they can be convinced to see themselves in the handle.

Finally found a clean copy - YouTube is a fine thing.

We've got a lot - and a lotta guys are staying up late to figure out ways to take it away from us, while working just as hard to make us believe they're providing for us.

The big lie.

Dark Money

There is such a thing as a Reasonable Republican - honest there is. I know it's a little jarring these days to think those two words could be contained in the same thought without causing real damage to your brain, but some Repubs really are pretty reasonable.

Or rather they were pretty reasonable until they started to realize how fucked they're going to be as we find out that a good bit of the blood money they've collected as campaign contributions over the last several years has been coming from Russian oligarchs and laundered thru the NRA.

Vanity Fair:

The F.B.I. and special counsel Robert Mueller are investigating meetings between N.R.A. officials and powerful Russian operatives, trying to determine if those contacts had anything to do with the gun group spending $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—triple what it invested on behalf of Mitt Romney in 2012. The use of foreign money in American political campaigns is illegal. One encounter of particular interest to investigators is between Donald Trump Jr.and a Russian banker at an N.R.A. dinner.

The Russian wooing of N.R.A. executives goes back to at least 2011, when that same banker and politician, Alexander Torshin, befriended David Keene,who was then president of the gun-rights organization. Torshin soon became a “life member,” attending the N.R.A.’s annual conventions and introducing comrades to other gun-group officials. In 2015, Torshin welcomed an N.R.A. delegation to Moscow that included Keene and Joe Gregory, then head of the “Ring of Freedom” program, which is reserved for top donors to the N.R.A. 

Among the other hosts were Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month was the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov,head of the Saint Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, one of Russia’s wealthiest philanthropies.

It’s possible that the men were merely bonding over a shared love of firearms. Mike Carpenter, a Russian specialist who worked in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, laughs at the notion. “The Russian state is run by a K.G.B. elite that wants nothing less than to have an armed citizenry,” Carpenter says. “Rogozin is a heavyweight in Russian politics. . . . Torshin has a direct line to Putin . . . and also has possible ties to organized crime. Rudov is the right-hand man of Konstantin Malofeev, who is sort of a paleo-conservative, ultra-nationalist figure who bankrolls a lot of projects involving mercenaries in Ukraine.” Carpenter sees how a dark money trail could connect the Kremlin to the gun lobby. “Those three would only meet with N.R.A. officials if there were some concerted effort by senior members of the Russian government to try and co-opt the N.R.A. politically,” he continues. “And they are all money men. They can throw tens of millions around.” (Efforts to reach Torshin, Rogozin, Rudov, and Malofeev were unsuccessful. Malofeev has denied aiding the invasion of Ukraine.)

There are some very nervous politicians in Washington.

If there was ever a time to get serious about turning Citizens United upside down, this is it.

In Search Of Consensus

Charlie Pierce:

By all accounts, the most civil action taken in L’affaire Poule Rouge was the way Stephanie Wilkinson handled her refusal to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. She first consulted with her staff, several members of which were gay and were angry at the administration*’s policies in that regard, and everyone was outraged by what was going on at the border. Wilkinson then took a vote on whether or not to serve Sanders. When the staff voted not to do so, she politely informed Sanders and her party that they would not be eating at the Red Hen that night. She even comped them the cheese plates they’d already ordered.

She did not use an official government Twitter account to discuss the episode, as Sanders did later. She did not use the power of the Oval Office to try and destroy someone’s business, as the president* found time to do later. She asked the staff what they wanted to do. She took a vote. She abided by their wishes. If there’s a more civil way of saying “no” to someone, I don’t know what it would be.

But some Press Poodles insist that we can't call complete assholes complete assholes.

Right on cue, Fred Hiatt’s Washington Post editorial page, which has no compunction about publishing the words of torture-enthusiast Marc Thiessen, blurted out the most embarrassing single paragraph written about the events at the Red Hen. 

To wit:
We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

For the benefit of those people also living in Fred Hiatt’s Land Without History: abortion providers have been stalked. Their children have been stalked. Their places of business have been vandalized. And, lest we forget, doctors who perform abortions have been fucking killed! They’ve been gunned down in their clinics, in their kitchens, and in their churches. They have not been allowed to live peaceably with their families, Fred, you addlepated Beltway thooleramawn. They haven’t been allowed to live at all. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly sure that a bullet in the head is far more uncivil than a complementary fucking cheese plate. What is wrong with these people?

- and -

This debate is stupid. It’s also dangerously beside the point. SarahHuck is the lying mouthpiece of a lying regime that is one step away from simply hauling people off in trucks. That she was politely told to take her business elsewhere is a small step towards assigning public responsibility to public officials that enable a perilous brand of politics. There are bigger steps to be taken, but everyone in official Washington is too damn timid to do what really needs to be done about this band of pirates.

Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune:

Sorry, no, I won’t suffer lectures about civility from members of a party led by a swaggering, unrepentant bully who relentlessly attacks his detractors with schoolyard insults.

The GOP was revived in the furious swamps of Tea Party rallies starting in 2009 and sustained by a campaign of hatred and lies against President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Today's Tweet

Bernie Sanders on his way to take credit for Ocasio-Cortez’s election even though he didn’t endorse her~ pic.twitter.com/GGwPMUiPqy

— 𝙋𝙖𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙠 𝙆𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙨𝙨𝙤𝙣 ⚡️ (@Patrickesque) June 27, 2018

Today's GIF

Today's Pix

This Just In

...Cult45 is lying.

A coupla versions of Immigration Reform were passed (by the Democrats, if that's how your little ego wants it) - once in 2006, and again in 2013.

Somehow, both times, those rotten old Dems put something together in the Senate that wasn't killed by the filibuster.

Of course, it died in the House both times because the Republican majorities refused to take it up - they wouldn't allow a vote on the Senate versions, and they wouldn't conference with the Senate to try to work things out.

PolitiFact:

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 passed in the Senate on May 25, 2006, along a 62-36 vote. The bill included provisions to strengthen border security with fencing, vehicle barriers, surveillance technology and more personnel; a new temporary worker visa category; and a path to legal status for immigrants in the country illegally if they met specific criteria.

Then-President George W. Bush commended the Senate "for passing bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform" and said he looked forward to working with both chambers.

But the bill was never taken up by the House. The House in December 2005 passed a separate bill with greater focus on border security and enforcement, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. That proposal narrowed in on employment eligibility verification; immigration fraud; and immigration enforcement authority at state and local levels. It did not include a guest worker program or the legalization of immigrants.


The House passed its own version in 2006, but:

Lawmakers from both chambers never formed a conference committee to iron out the details in both bills and the proposals expired at the end of the 109th Congress.


So then, in 2013:

Backed by Democrats and 14 Republicans, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act passed the Senate on a 68-32 voteon June 27, 2013.

The bill directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit two reports on border security strategy, including one on where fencing, infrastructure and technology should be used; authorized the use of the National Guard to help secure the border; called for an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents at the southern border, and other border security measures.

It also included provisions to allow immigrants in the country illegally to adjust their immigration status, if they met certain criteria.


- but -

...House Republicans again opposed the Senate immigration proposal, arguing that border security needed to be addressed first before legalizing the status of millions of immigrants.

"I’ve made it clear and I’ll make it clear again, the House does not intend to take up the Senate bill," then-House Speaker John Boehner said July 2013. "The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill."

He reiterated his position in November 2013: "The idea that we’re going to take up a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not going to happen in the House," Boehner said. "And frankly, I’ll make clear we have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill."


So look, guys, if you're going to "reach across the aisle" only intending to grab the Dems by the collar so you can yank them over to your side - and then bitch about how unreasonable they're being when they won't give you exactly what you want - well, you should go fuck yourselves with that one instead.

Today's Tweet

The Daddy State needs us to forget easily.

2009-10 saw regular death threats against Congresspeople & our staff - esp people of color. We were spit on, kicked and called N-lovers. NO good journo should compare those tactics then or current bullying by POTUS to a citizen civilly refusing to serve a sr public official. None https://t.co/WhCkYEDl6a

— Tom Perriello (@tomperriello) June 26, 2018

It Occurs To Me

John Oliver - Last Week Tonight, HBO:

Cult45 keeps fucking things up. And not just the stuff they intend to fuck up - ACA, Medicaid, SNAP, National Parks, Water, Air, Food, et cetera, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera.

But every time these bug brains try to do something - when they actually make an attempt to implement policy - they Stooge the fuck out of it.

How long have we heard the Anti-Gubmint Rubes sneering at even the thought of getting decent functionality out of any level of government? 

How long have they been harping about how it just takes is a little common sense, and the whole thing will be purring along like a brand new Mix Master?

Well, there they are, kids - the geniuses who think a simple 10-word answer solves everything - fucking up everything they touch.

So, if "all it takes is a little common sense", then how little of it they must have.

Monday Music

Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop:

"Sailor To Siren"
"Know The Wild That Wants You"
"Every Songbird Says"

Overheard

Politico carried this tasty morsel:

SEN. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) hosted a dinner Friday night for more than 100 guests at his house on Martha’s Vineyard as part of the DSCC’S annual Majority Trust retreat.

OVERHEARD: Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joking to the crowd: “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”