Living In The Age Of Poe

Poe's Law: 

Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker: (from way back in Dec 2016)

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary year for the former television host, the Kremlin has named Donald J. Trump its Employee of the Month for December.

“No one has worked more tirelessly for the glory of the Fatherland than Donald Trump,” the Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an official statement. “He has set a high bar for all Kremlin employees, and for that, we salute him.”

To mark the honor, Trump’s name will be added to a plaque that hangs in the hallway outside the Kremlin’s H.R. office.

According to Kremlin sources, Trump faced tough competition in the Employee of the Month voting, besting both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ExxonMobil’s C.E.O., Rex Tillerson.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Florida, Trump called the award “a tremendous honor, just tremendous.”

“Obama was President for eight years and he didn’t win this a single month,” he said. “Loser.”

Dear Miss Lindsey

Today's Tweet

Billy - you got some 'splainin' to do.

pic.twitter.com/o0yfIcH4JR

— 🌊🗽RandomGirl🗽🌊 (@randomgirlx107) May 2, 2019

Milbank Gets One Right

Dana Milbank can sound just like Maureen Dowd - the jaded and cynically casual observer pretending to be above the fray; as if nothing as mundane as politics can ever touch them.

So maybe this is a sign that he's beginning to see what's what. (I'll not hold my breath. The guy is paid pretty well to pimp the balance-at-any-cost narrative)

Anyway - here's the Milbank, the whole Milbank, and nothing but the Milbank at WaPo:

Eight-year-old Liam Daly became an Internet sensation when he penned a letter to his grandfather, William Barr, while sitting in the front row at Barr’s confirmation hearing in January.

“Dear Grandpa,” he wrote. “You are doing great so far. But I know you still will.”

Alas for Liam, and for all of us, it was not to be. Now, just weeks on the job as President Trump’s attorney general, Grandpa has disgraced himself. The speed with which Barr trashed a reputation built over decades is stunning, even by Trump administration standards.

Before, Barr was known as the attorney general to President George H.W. Bush and an éminence grise of the Washington legal community. Now he is known for betraying a friend, lying to Congress and misrepresenting the Mueller report in a way that excused the president’s misbehavior and let Russia off the hook.

Three weeks ago, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) asked Barr about reports that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team complained that Barr’s four-page summary of their work didn’t “adequately or accurately” portray their findings. “Do you know what they’re referencing?” Crist asked.

“No, I don’t,” Barr replied under oath, speculating that they “probably wanted more put out.”

Grandpa was fibbing.

Thanks to The Post’s reporting, we now know that two weeks before Barr denied knowledge of the Mueller team’s displeasure, he received a letter from Mueller complaining that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions” and resulted in “public confusion.”

Barr, caught in flagrante delicto in his deception, told senators Wednesday that “the question was relating to unidentified members” of Mueller’s team, not Mueller himself — a technical answer that might get him off for perjury but doesn’t avoid the conclusion that he deliberately misled Congress and the public.

Three weeks ago, Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) asked Barr about reports that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team complained that Barr’s four-page summary of their work didn’t “adequately or accurately” portray their findings. “Do you know what they’re referencing?” Crist asked.

Why didn’t Barr disclose the Mueller letter when Crist asked the question? Barr replied that Crist had posed “a very different question.”

Um, right.

Of equal concern, Barr rejected Mueller’s requests to release more of the report to clear up the confusion. “At that point, it was my baby,” Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “It was my decision how and when to make it public, not Bob Mueller’s.”

It was his baby, and he smothered it — thus allowing Barr’s misrepresentation of Mueller’s report (characterized by Trump as “total exoneration”) to harden.

Barr’s mistreatment of Mueller is all the more appalling because, during his confirmation hearing, Barr boasted that the two men and their wives were “good friends” and would remain so. Barr reportedly told a senator privately that he and Mueller were “best friends,” that their wives attended Bible study together and that Mueller attended the weddings of Barr’s children.

If so, Barr’s betrayal reminds us: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. In addition to his unilateral clearing of Trump on obstruction of justice (something Mueller did not do), Barr also echoed Trump’s claim that there was “no collusion” (a question Mueller did not address) and that there had been “spying” against Trump’s campaign.

Barr continued undermining Mueller on Wednesday, calling Mueller’s letter to him “a bit snitty” and saying Mueller should have ended the investigation if he didn’t think it in his purview to say whether Trump committed a crime. And Barr eagerly played Trump’s defense lawyer.

Mueller’s finding that Trump repeatedly leaned on White House counsel Don McGahn to get Mueller fired?

Barr devised the implausible explanation that Trump only wanted Mueller replaced by “another special counsel.”

And Trump instructing McGahn to say publicly that Trump didn’t order Mueller fired? “Not a crime,” Barr argued.

Barr also defended his assertion that Trump “fully cooperated” with the investigation, even though he refused to be interviewed and tried to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself and shut down the inquiry.

“I don’t see any conflict between that and fully cooperating with the investigation,” Barr reasoned.

And what about Trump’s mob-style tactics to thwart cooperation with Mueller? “Discouraging flipping in that sense is not obstruction,” Barr declared.

Even Barr’s choice of pronouns — “we have not waived the executive privilege,” he said — showed he was Trump’s lawyer, not America’s attorney general.

Repeatedly, Barr said it didn’t matter that Trump had deceived the public. “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people,” he said. But now Barr, by misrepresenting his dealings with Mueller, has gotten himself into the business of lying to the American people.

Even an 8-year-old knows lying is wrong, whether it’s legal or not. Surely Grandpa Barr should have. The attorney general owed better to his “friend” Mueller, and to the rest of us.

Whoa

I'm thinkin' this Wizard Of Oz reboot is a little weird.

No God No How

Tim Wise - A God Unworthy Of Praise Or Worship:

Among the most intriguing things about Christian fundamentalists, for me, has always been the way they envision God and then seek to sell that God to others.

On the one hand, they profess to love the Lord “with all their hearts,” and insist that this God so loved the world that he sent his only son to offer everlasting life (though some conditions apply). On the other hand, they’re quick to proclaim how the same God causes natural disasters, violent crime, and other tragedies as a way to punish the U.S. for allowing abortion, or “taking prayer out of schools,” or some other perceived moral slight.
- and -

To believe that God can truly love the world while deliberately sending floods, earthquakes, and other forms of suffering to that world as punishment for supposed bad behavior, is tantamount to believing that the abusive husband loves his wife, even as he pushes her down the stairs for being “a little mouthy.” It would be akin to accepting that the parent who beats their child “for their own good,” and says it was because “the little shit was back-sassing me,” is something other than a sadistic monster deserving not of love but rather, contempt and confinement.
- and -

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

-- James Baldwin

Alrighty Then

According to my darling daughter (age 22), this is her generation's We Are The World:

Lil Dickey - Earth

Being eco-friendly requires us to think beyond ourselves and our own gratification, and I'll say it's a good thing that it's becoming fashionable again.

I'll take what I can get.

Back Off, Lady

Social media is a good thing - when it's a platform for good things to be done.

CNN:

About 1,700 decks of cards have been delivered to the office of a Washington state senator who said nurses "probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day," the senator said in a statement Wednesday.

Republican state Sen. Maureen Walsh apologized on Monday after facing a backlash for comments she made debating a bill, HB 1155, that would provide uninterrupted meal and rest breaks and mandatory overtime for nurses and certain health care employees.
Walsh said last Tuesday on the senate floor, "By putting these types of mandates on a critical access hospital that literally serves a handful of individuals, I would submit to you those nurses probably do get breaks. They probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day."

An open letter posted by Facebook user Shy Braaten called for people to send a deck of cards to the senator, and included her PO Box.
The letter reads, "I don't know any nurses who play cards, Senator Walsh. I know nurses who care for babies who were born with their spines on the outside of their bodies and brains that won't stop bleeding. I know nurses who hold infants that can't stop crying because they were born addicted to heroin and methamphetamines."

The letter is signed, "One of the millions of people who love a nurse."

Walsh issued a lengthy statement on Monday apologizing and said, "I was tired, and in the heat of argument on the Senate floor, I said some things about nurses that were taken out of context -- but still they crossed the line."

Gotta love the bullshit these "conservative" assholes are always willing to shovel when they issue the non-apology-apology for having said things that reveal what they really think: "...taken out of context..." - and - "...in the heat of the moment..."

If we check her donor list, do you suppose we might find a check from the hospital business group that stands to lose leverage over their nursing staff if things change a bit?

Maureen Walsh is too fucking typical of the system of Coin-Operated Politicians that we're allowing to kill our democracy.

https://ecuactionfund.org

The Big 5

Ben Wittes (Lawfare Blog) at The Atlantic:

I spent the week after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report going through it section by section and writing a kind of diary of the endeavor. My goal was less to summarize the report than to force myself to think about each factual, legal, and analytical portion of Mueller’s discussion, which covers a huge amount of ground.

Here are five conclusions I drew from the exercise:

1. The president committed crimes
2. He also committed impeachable offenses
3. The president was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy
4. Trump's complicity in the Russian hacking operation, and his campaign's contacts with the Russians, present a more complicated picture
5. The counter-intelligence dimensions of the entire affair remain a mystery

Some randomly selected takeaways:

No, Mueller does not appear to have developed evidence that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking operation itself. And no, the investigation did not find a criminal conspiracy in the veritable blizzard of contacts between Trumpworld and the Russians. But this is an ugly story for Trump.

The attempt to get McGahn to write an internal memo disputing the story (that 45* tried to get McGahn to fire Mueller) is the crucial fact here. The president’s conduct might otherwise be defended as a mere effort to lie to the press, but one doesn’t order the creation of false internal documents for purposes of denying a published story. So the question is, first, whether what Mueller described as Trump’s “repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel” would have “the natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility” if he told the truth. The second question is whether such a corrupt outcome was specifically intended by the president.

A third example is the president’s public dance with Paul Manafort, in which he dangled the possibility of a pardon and praised Manafort’s bravery for not “flipping,” and in which his private counsel allegedly suggested that Manafort would be taken care of. Notably, Trump got what he wanted in this case. Manafort did not end up cooperating to Mueller’s satisfaction. Indeed, Mueller concluded that Manafort had breached his plea deal by failing to cooperate and by lying to investigators. So the reality here may well be that the president’s obstructive conduct did, in fact, obstruct the investigation. The president hinted that Manafort should not “flip” and that he would take care of him—and Manafort acted in a fashion consistent with his relying on those assurances. I think this activity, assuming it can be proved, is criminal.

There is no way around it. Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to clear President Donald Trump, both in his original letter and in his press conference the morning of the report’s release, are wholly unconvincing when you actually spend time with the document itself.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I see in the story Mueller has told on Trump engagement with the Russians over the hacking. I see a group of people for whom partisan polarization wholly and completely defeated patriotism. I see a group of people so completely convinced Hillary Clinton was the enemy that they were willing to make common cause with an actual adversary power who was attacking their country to defeat her.

Today's Literacy

Here's an Oval Office group shot of the Baylor women's basketball team - 2019 national champions.

And The Urban Dictionary gains a new illustration for the term "underjoyed".