Monday, November 05, 2018
Friday, November 02, 2018
Today's Podcast
Liberal Redneck
Trae Crowder
And it's not "do you wanna be perfect or do you wanna win?"
It's, "Do you want a chance to make things a bit more perfect - cuz your little world ain't fuckin' perfect, cupcake - or do you want some schmuck to make your decisions for you, which you know will make your world, and mine, shittier?"
Stop letting that schmuck make my world shittier.
And it's not "do you wanna be perfect or do you wanna win?"
It's, "Do you want a chance to make things a bit more perfect - cuz your little world ain't fuckin' perfect, cupcake - or do you want some schmuck to make your decisions for you, which you know will make your world, and mine, shittier?"
Stop letting that schmuck make my world shittier.
Years Late
...but maybe not too late - he mused, wistfully.
Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.
Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.
So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.
However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.
PoliticusUSA:
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.
Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”
Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.
All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.
We'll see.
Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.
Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.
So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.
However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.
PoliticusUSA:
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.
Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”
It's kind of a bold move - calling his bluff.
45* has blustered about how "the press" can't survive without him. And he's been pushing hard, using a very old tried-n-true method that assholes like him have used forever - often with great success - to manipulate people. ie: exploit the self-doubt that often grows out of a dedication to being open-minded.
So, Nicolle Wallace announces a new policy of fact-checking his statements instead of just airing whatever he has to say.
(BTW - fact-checking is kinda what you were supposed to be doing in the first place, dummy)
Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.
All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.
We'll see.
Thursday, November 01, 2018
Accusation As Confession
Daddy State Awareness
Rule 1: Every accusation is a confession
Empty Wheel:
WHY DID REBEKAH MERCER AND STEVE BANNON START PREPARING AN ACCUSATION THAT HILLARY HAD CORRUPT TIES WITH RUSSIA STARTING ON MARCH 14, 2016?
October 30, 2018
Amid a lot of noise regarding the eight month investigation into Roger Stone (including that his assistant Jason Sullivan has been asked for the complete recordings of some conference calls he gave in 2016 and that he has passed two polygraphs that may not be asking the right questions), the WaPo has a detail of real interest. Mueller brought Steve Bannon back in for questioning Friday.
Amid a lot of noise regarding the eight month investigation into Roger Stone (including that his assistant Jason Sullivan has been asked for the complete recordings of some conference calls he gave in 2016 and that he has passed two polygraphs that may not be asking the right questions), the WaPo has a detail of real interest. Mueller brought Steve Bannon back in for questioning Friday.
On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief campaign strategist, about alleged claims Stone made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails allegedly hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.I say that’s particularly interesting because of Bannon’s role in a series of events that come as close as anything to hint that Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi not only had advance knowledge that Wikileaks would release John Podesta’s emails, but may have known and planned for what those emails included.
STONE AND CORSI SEEMED TO EXPECT THAT THERE WOULD BE PODESTA EMAILS RELATING TO JOULE
As I noted in these two posts, Stone’s evolving public stories explaining his knowledge of the stolen documents seem to attempt to do three things:
As I noted in these two posts, Stone’s evolving public stories explaining his knowledge of the stolen documents seem to attempt to do three things:
- Provide non-incriminating explanations for any foreknowledge of WikiLeaks — first pointing to Randy Credico and now to James Rosen
- Offer explanations for discussions about Podesta that he may presume Mueller has that took place around August 14
- Shift the focus away from Joule and the remarkable prescience with which the right wing anticipated that WikiLeaks would be able to advance an attack first rolled out on August 1
Basically, over the course of August, several key events happened: Stone first started publicly claiming foreknowledge of what WikiLeaks would drop, tried to launch a counterattack against public reporting on Paul Manafort’s sleazy ties to Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian oligarchs, and then warned that it would soon be John Podesta’s time on the barrel. Those events came amidst two separate oppo research efforts: An early one initiated by Bannon and (Clinton Cash author) Peter Schweizer that accused Hillary of corrupt ties to Russia, largely through John Podesta’s role a company called Joule Unlimited. And then a later one (starting at 39), written by Corsi, trying to impugn Hillary because her campaign manager’s brother was so corrupt he had worked with Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and at Manafort’s instructions not properly declared the work. Stone seems to have wanted to conflate those two efforts, in part to suggest his August 21 tweet (and an August 15 one that may end up being just as interesting) referred to both brothers, not just John, and therefore not the earlier oppo effort.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that We The People will probably never learn more than about a third of the shit that Bob Mueller is digging up.
If the point of the exercise for Putin is to degrade our democratic processes - to strike at the confidence we have to have in order to proceed with "free and fair elections" - then our government has a built-in incentive not to tell us how deeply effective the Russians have been. Because full disclosure runs the risk of doing Putin's work for him.
And along those lines, I think it's worth considering easing up on the Dems a bit, because (as hard to believe as this may be) they're prob'ly smarter than they seem - they know they have to criticize, but they have to do it without helping us think the elections aren't legit, which is what too many of us think already, which is the goal of Cult45 and the GOP and their Russian allies.
I'll go out on a limb here and say that We The People will probably never learn more than about a third of the shit that Bob Mueller is digging up.
If the point of the exercise for Putin is to degrade our democratic processes - to strike at the confidence we have to have in order to proceed with "free and fair elections" - then our government has a built-in incentive not to tell us how deeply effective the Russians have been. Because full disclosure runs the risk of doing Putin's work for him.
And along those lines, I think it's worth considering easing up on the Dems a bit, because (as hard to believe as this may be) they're prob'ly smarter than they seem - they know they have to criticize, but they have to do it without helping us think the elections aren't legit, which is what too many of us think already, which is the goal of Cult45 and the GOP and their Russian allies.
It's The Money, Stoopid
Jamie Ross, The Daily Beast:
Arron Banks, the biggest individual donor in British political history and a major source of money behind the Brexit campaign, has been placed under criminal investigation for several suspected offenses that took place during the referendum.
Britain’s election watchdog says there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Banks committed several crimes in the run-up to the dramatic vote, and that they suspect he wasn’t the true source of £8 million ($10 million) in loans made to Better for the Country—a company he used to finance the Leave.EU campaign group whose public face was Nigel Farage.
The investigation by the National Crime Agency, which has the expertise to trace illicit cross-border money trails, will seek to find the true source of the money that funded Brexit.
Banks—one of the self-christened “bad boys of Brexit” who met Donald Trump in late 2016 with Farage—has long been a controversial figure with business links to Russia. He is known to have been offered three Russian business deals during the Brexit campaign, including one that gave him the chance to make huge profits from a Russian gold company.
Too much money in politics.
We have to get back to a decent level of transparency - where we can learn every name associated with every dollar "donated" to every political entity.
A coin-operated political system is inherently corrupt.
Today's Tweet
Follow the thread.
TRUMP: "I've decided to eat babies."— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) October 30, 2018
PEOPLE: "He can't eat babies, that's super illegal."
TRUMP, on TV, eating babies, not even cooking them first: "People are saying that I really am the best baby-eater, folks."
NYT: "Trump Vs. Babies: The Rhetoric On Both Sides Must Stop"
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