Thursday Reads: Happy Valentine’s Day

Posted: February 14, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Les Pivoines 1907 par Henri Matisse

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sky Dancers!!

Andrew McCabe’s book The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump will be released on Tuesday, and he will be interviewed on 60 Minutes on Sunday night. This might be one 60 Minutes I decide to watch.

McCabe was deputy director of the FBI under James Comey and he became acting director after Trump fired Comey. Trump attacked McCabe repeatedly, and eventually succeeded in driving him out of office. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe one day before he could have retired with his full pension.

Today The Atlantic published an article adapted from McCabe’s book: Every Day Is a New Low in Trump’s White House.

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017, my first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI, I sat down with senior staff involved in the Russia case—the investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. As the meeting began, my secretary relayed a message that the White House was calling. The president himself was on the line. I had spoken with him the night before, in the Oval Office, when he told me he had fired James Comey.

Bouquet on a Bamboo Table (1903) Henri Matisse

A call like this was highly unusual. Presidents do not, typically, call FBI directors. There should be no direct contact between the president and the director, except for national-security purposes. The reason is simple. Investigations and prosecutions need to be pursued without a hint of suspicion that someone who wields power has put a thumb on the scale.

The Russia team was in my office. I took the call on an unclassified line. That was another strange thing—the president was calling on a phone that was not secure. The voice on the other end said, It’s Don Trump calling. I said, Hello, Mr. President, how are you? Apart from my surprise that he was calling at all, I was surprised that he referred to himself as “Don.”

The president said, I’m good. You know—boy, it’s incredible, it’s such a great thing, people are really happy about the fact that the director’s gone, and it’s just remarkable what people are saying. Have you seen that? Are you seeing that, too?

He went on: I received hundreds of messages from FBI people—how happy they are that I fired him. There are people saying things on the media, have you seen that? What’s it like there in the building?

McCabe describes the reaction of FBI employees as one of shock and dismay. Trump then said he wanted to come to the FBI and “show all my FBI people how much I love them.” McCabe thought that was a terrible idea, but agreed to meet with Trump about it. Next, Trump:

Flowers and Fruit by Henri Matisse

…began to talk about how upset he was that Comey had flown home on his government plane from Los Angeles—Comey had been giving a speech there when he learned he was fired. The president wanted to know how that had happened.

I told him that bureau lawyers had assured me there was no legal issue with Comey coming home on the plane. I decided that he should do so. The existing threat assessment indicated he was still at risk, so he needed a protection detail. Since the members of the protection detail would all be coming home, it made sense to bring everybody back on the same plane they had used to fly out there. It was coming back anyway. The president flew off the handle: That’s not right! I don’t approve of that! That’s wrong! He reiterated his point five or seven times.

I said, I’m sorry that you disagree, sir. But it was my decision, and that’s how I decided. The president said, I want you to look into that! I thought to myself: What am I going to look into? I just told you I made that decision.

The ranting against Comey spiraled. I waited until he had talked himself out.

After that Trump taunted McCabe about his wife’s losing campaign for the Virginia Senate, asking McCabe, “How did she handle losing? Is it tough to lose?” and later saying “Yeah, that must’ve been really tough. To lose. To be a loser.”

I once had a boss who was a monstrous whack job like Trump. It was crazy-making. The entire department under this man functioned like an alcoholic family with an unpredictable, out-of-control father. You never knew what horrible thing would happen next. It was total chaos, as the White House seems to be. I’m glad McCabe is telling the truth about what he experienced.

Two more articles based on the McCabe book:

CBS News 60 Minutes: McCabe Says He Ordered the Obstruction of Justice Probe of President Trump.

The New York Times: McCabe Says Justice Officials Discussed Recruiting Cabinet Members to Push Trump Out of Office.

Bouquet of Flowers in a White Vase, 1909, by Henri Matisse

I expect Trump will be ranting about McCabe on Twitter and in the Oval Office, but he can’t do anything to shut McCabe up anymore.

Soon we’ll have a new U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, and already the corruption surrounding him has a very bad odor. CNN reports that Barr’s daughter and son-in-law are leaving the Justice Department for new jobs at FinCEN and the White House Counsel’s office respectively.

Mary Daly, Barr’s oldest daughter and the director of Opioid Enforcement and Prevention Efforts in the deputy attorney general’s office, is leaving for a position at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit, a Justice official said.

Tyler McGaughey, the husband of Barr’s youngest daughter, has been detailed from the powerful US attorney’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, to the White House counsel’s office, two officials said.

It’s not clear if McGaughey’s switch is a result of Barr’s pending new role, and the kind of work he’ll be handling at the White House is not public knowledge.
Daly’s husband will remain in his position in the Justice Department’s National Security Division for now.

Henri Matisse: Les Anemones

The moves were by choice and are not required under federal nepotism laws, but Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, called them “a good idea” to “avoid the bad optics that could come from the appearance of them working for him.”
However, Shaub added that McGaughey’s detail to the White House counsel’s office was “concerning.”

“That’s troubling because it raises further questions about Barr’s independence,” Shaub said.

Read more at the CNN link.

If you listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast about Spiro Agnew (or even if you didn’t) you should read this op-ed at The Washington Post by three attorneys who were involved in that corruption case: We should demand high standards from William Barr. Spiro Agnew’s case shows why, by Barnet D. Skolnik, Russell T. Baker Jr., and Ronald S. Liebman.

In the winter of 1973, 46 years ago, the three of us were assistant U.S. attorneys in Baltimore starting a federal grand jury investigation of a corrupt Democratic county chief executive in Maryland. That investigation ultimately led to the prosecution of his corrupt Republican predecessor — the man who went on to become the state’s governor and then President Richard M. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew.

On Oct. 10, 1973, Agnew entered a plea to a criminal tax felony for failure to report the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d received in bribes and kickbacks as county executive, governor and even vice president. All paid in cash, $100 bills delivered in white envelopes.

And he resigned.

Henri Matisse. Vase of Irises. 1912

From the beginning of our investigation, months before we had seen any indication that he had taken kickbacks, Agnew, along with top White House and administration officials and even Nixon himself, repeatedly tried to impede, obstruct and terminate the investigation in nefarious ways. Some of those efforts were unknown to us then and have come to light only now thanks to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and her “Bagman” podcast.

When newspapers began to report that he was under criminal investigation in the summer of 1973, Agnew aroused his base by screaming “witch hunt” and launching a vicious assault on the “lying” press, the “partisan” Justice Department, and the “biased” and “liberal Democrat” prosecutors in Baltimore.

If Agnew and Nixon had succeeded in derailing our investigation, the most corrupt man ever to sit a heartbeat away might have become the president of our country when Nixon was forced to resign less than a year later. But our investigation was protected — first, by our staunch and courageous boss, the late George Beall, the U.S. attorney for Maryland and a prominent Maryland Republican, and second, by the man who had become the new U.S. attorney general that spring, Elliot L. Richardson.

The authors then go on to explain why Barr should not be confirmed unless he commits to releasing Robert Mueller’s findings to the public. Read the whole thing at the WaPo.

There is so much more news! Here are some links to check out:

Flowers by Henri Matisse

Just Security: Who is Richard Burr, Really? Why the public can’t trust his voice in the Russia probe. (This is an incredibly important story. Corruption is all around us.)

NBC News: ‘Whistleblower’ seeks protection after sounding alarm over White House security clearances.

Politico: Judge rules Manafort lied to Mueller about contacts with Russian.

The New York Times: House Votes to Halt Aid for Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen.

Gulf News: Trump backer Tom Barrack defends Saudi Arabia.

The Washington Post: Trump confidant Thomas Barrack apologizes for saying U.S. has committed ‘equal or worse’ atrocities to killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The New York Times: Maria Ressa, Philippine Journalist Critical of Rodrigo Duterte, Is Released After Arrest.

HuffPost: I Wish I’d Had A ‘Late-Term Abortion’ Instead Of Having My Daughter. (Trigger warning for rape description)

Vice: Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.

The New York Times: Ryan Adams Dangled Success. Women Say They Paid a Price.

Contemptor: Fox News Rejects Commercial for Documentary that Says Nazis are Bad.

So . . . what stories have you been following?

Tuesday Reads: Trump’s Big Lies Are Getting Bigger and More Outrageous

Posted: February 12, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | 52 Comments

Good Morning!!

Trump’s lies are getting worse. It’s difficult to believe, I know; but it’s true. Here are just two of the outrageous claims Trump made at his El Paso hate rally last night.

As usual, Trump told fantastic lies about the number of cult followers he attracted to his hate rally.

Politico: El Paso Fire Department denies Trump’s crowd claim at rally.

During his rally at the El Paso County Coliseum, Trump touted his base supporters, saying “there has never been anything like this in the history of our country.”

“If you would say as an example that tonight 69,000 people signed up to be here,” he said. “Now the arena holds 8,000. And thank you, fire department. They got in about 10,000. Thank you, fire department. Appreciate it.”

The El Paso Fire Department, however, said Trump’s statement was untrue.

Fire public information officer Enrique Aguilar told the El Paso Times on Monday that Trump did not receive any special permission to exceed the limit and confirmed that there were 6,500 people inside the building during the president’s rally. The coliseum holds about 6,500 people. There were also thousands more watching Trump’s speech on big screens outside the facility.

Aguilar added that “it might be 10,000 with the people outside,” but said that the fire department didn’t specifically track the number of people outside of the coliseum, the El Paso Times reported.

During the rally, Trump repeatedly attacked the media, and one supporter physically attacked them.

Buzzfeed News: A Trump Supporter Attacked Journalists After The President Blasted The Media At His Texas Rally.

A man wearing a Make America Great Again hat barreled into the press pit at Trump’s rally in El Paso, Texas, Monday night and started shoving reporters, knocking over their equipment, and yelled “fuck the media,” minutes after the president had lashed out at journalists.

About half way through his lengthy, campaign-style speech, Trump ridiculed the media for “refusing to acknowledge” his administration’s successes, invoking loud boos and jeers from the crowd.

“I guess 93% of the stories are negative. No matter what we do, they figure out a way to make it that,” the president said, rattling off topics, such as North Korea, the economy, and manufacturing, which he feels that the media has unfairly skewed.

As Trump went on touting how his successes, a man in a red MAGA hat suddenly burst toward the group of reporters and photographers who were covering the speech, pushing them over, knocking their cameras and tripods, and repeatedly yelling, “fuck the media.”

Trump saw the attack and asked if everyone was OK before going back to his blatant lying. But who made sure there was no protection for reporters and camera people at the hate rally? More from the Buzzfeed story:

Several reporters told BuzzFeed News that there were no security guards or police officers near the press arena until “after the photographer got shoved.”

“I am calling bullshit on the way that and the way he got escorted out,” said Jorge Salgado, a photographer who captured part of the incident. “He was violent. He was pro-trump and wearing a ‘Fund the Wall’ shirt’ and he came out of nowhere.”

For a moment, Rene Delgadillo, a producer with Telemundo 48 in El Paso, said she thought the man “was going to hit us.”

She and a reporter were taking notes when she said heard a man scream and then start pushing other reporters down as he “made his way through the space designated for media.”

“People went crazy during that moment,” she said of the crowd around them.

Howard Dean tweeted about the rally this morning.

https://twitter.com/GovHowardDean/status/1095310799004987393

I think Trump has sounded like Hitler for a very long time, but it’s still good to see someone like Dean calling attention to it.

Shortly after the incident in the press pen, Trump again attacked the media. From Vox:

Trump’s speech on Monday was his first at a rally in 2019. He set the tone by attacking the media just seconds into it, saying, “Look at all the press back there, can you believe that? This is like the Academy Awards used to be. They’ve gone down a long way since they started hitting us a little bit, right? That was a long fall, but there they are.”

The crowd responded with loud boos.

About 10 minutes after Skeans was attacked, Trump laid into the media again while deflecting from the notion that his campaign colluded with Russia.

“There’s also collusion between the Democrats and the fake news, right here,” he said, prompting more “CNN sucks!” chants….

As was the case both during his presidential campaign and the recent midterm cycle, attacking the media was one of Trump’s central themes on Monday night. At one point, he called fact-checkers “some of the most dishonest people in media.” He also mockingly mimickedreporters who try to cover him.

Responding Trump’s lies about abortion (see video above) Vox’s Anna North writes that we’d better pay attention to the way Trump and his gang are lying about abortion: Trump’s misleading comments about Gov. Ralph Northam and infanticide…may be part of a broader strategy.

At a rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday, President Donald Trump accused Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, of supporting infanticide.

“The governor stated that he would even allow a newborn baby to come out into the world,” Trump told the crowd, “and wrap the baby, and make the baby comfortable, and then talk to the mother and talk to the father and then execute the baby. Execute the baby!”

Unfortunately Northam and a VA lawmaker contributed to the confusion around a VA bill.

Kathy Tran

The controversy started when Del. Kathy Tran, the bill’s sponsor, was asked in a committee hearing if the bill would allow an abortion when a woman is showing signs of labor.

“My bill would allow that,” Tran said.

Tran later said that she “misspoke” in the committee hearing, and that “I should have said: ‘Clearly, no, because infanticide is not allowed in Virginia, and what would have happened in that moment would be a live birth.’”

But the controversy had already begun. On January 30, Gov. Northam was asked on the Virginia radio station WTOP to give his thoughts on Tran’s response.

“Do you support her measure?” reporter Julie Carey asked. “Explain her answer.”

“This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved,” Northam said. “When we talk about third-trimester abortions,” he went on, “it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable.”

“If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” he added. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Obviously, the point is that some babies are born with no chance of survival. Doctors and parents will decide how to handle these tragic cases. No one supports “executing” babies. The bill has now been tabled, but Trump and the GOP will keep hammering this lie indefinitely.

I don’t really understand the Beto O’Rourke craze; maybe I’m just too old and jaded to get excited about another great white hope. I’ve tried watching his speeches and they leave me cold. But he did try to fight back against Trump last night.

Politico: Beto takes on Trump in tale of 2 mega-rallies.

EL PASO, Texas — The showdown between Donald Trump and Beto O’Rourke Monday night over the president’s border wall unfolded at competing rallies with thousands of people in venues barely a block apart.

But the events practically took place in parallel universes: One with rowdy MAGA-gear wearing Trump backers chanting “USA, USA!”; the other serenaded by a mariachi band before O’Rourke took the stage for a lengthy takedown — at times in Spanish — of the president’s signature project….

O’Rourke was mobbed by thousands of supporters as they marched to a baseball field so close to Trump’s rally that the loud speakers from Trump’s event could be heard at O’Rourke’s.

“With the eyes of the country upon us, all of us together are going to make our stand, here in one of the safest cities in the United States of America,” O’Rourke said. “Safe not because of walls, but in spite of walls. Secure because we treat one another with dignity and respect.”

He said, “We are the example that the United States of America needs right now.”

Read more details at the link above.

I’ll end with something truly unbelievable–the GOP has stolen Hillary’s 2016 slogan! And she noticed.

Unreal.

What else is happening? What stories have you been following?

Monday Reads: of Honey Traps and AI

Posted: February 11, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , | 32 Comments

Good Morning Sky Dancers!

I actually was present on a  day that UCLA/MIT/Stanford and other institutions opened a computer connecting node to more than just a few places during an expansion of what was to become the world wide web.. This would eventually be the internet/world wide web beyond something than connecting a few universities and government entities. The original turn on in happened in 1969.  My high school math department got a grant and one of those huge printers that came to life when they started expanding it to a few more places around 1970. They undoubtedly wanted to show us our future.

Again, it was just a big printer with huge green bar paper rolls that hooked us to an out of state university (Michigan, I think) and it printed some welcome message that didn’t impress me.  We all stood there and watched it kind’ve like the first time in junior high when a guy from bell labs turned on a projector with a small red beamed called a laser.  They had no idea if it would be the future of communications but that was the dream. The next time I saw that bean at university was its planetarium with Pink Floyd playing in the background.  Now, both my eldest and her husband use them for operations in their respective medical practices.

I started actually using the world wide web in graduate school back in 1978 and eventually got a computer and modem around 1980 and hooked in with a phone line.  Back then, all you saw were green lines of characters but it was still quite fascinating  and the best thing was finding all those nerds beyond Nebraska.

I now sit here as an old lady on a small computer typing all kinds of things to you and posting pictures and knowing that my old skills at FORTRAN and BASIC are worthless. Needless to say, I think any technology developed during the Nixon administration must’ve been funded with war and political sabotage in mind.I also know that the internet and lasers have morphed from dream of benign and useful communications to a whole lot more.  

A whole lot more. But, then you know that or you wouldn’t be reading this here from me down here.  The fascinating science of 40 plus years ago is also highly weaponized and aimed at nearly all of country’s endeavors.  This from today’s New Yorker and written by Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow.

https://twitter.com/RonanFarrow/status/1094965637699551232

Psy-Group stood out from many of its rivals because it didn’t just gather intelligence; it specialized in covertly spreading messages to influence what people believed and how they behaved. Its operatives took advantage of technological innovations and lax governmental oversight. “Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with their minds,” Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said. “You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted. There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.”

In recent years, Psy-Group has conceived of a variety of elaborate covert operations. In Amsterdam, the firm prepared a report on a religious sect called the Brunstad Christian Church, whose Norwegian leader, Psy-Group noted, claimed to have written “a more important book than the New Testament.” In Gabon, Psy-Group pitched “Operation Bentley”—an effort to “preserve” President Ali Bongo Ondimba’s hold on power by collecting and disseminating intelligence about his main political rival. (It’s unclear whether or not the operations in Amsterdam and Gabon were carried out. A spokesperson for Brunstad said that it was “plainly ridiculous” that the church considered “any book” to be more important than the Bible. Ondimba’s representatives could not be reached for comment.) In another project, targeting the South African billionaire heirs of an apartheid-era skin-lightening company, Psy-Group secretly recorded family members of the heirs describing them as greedy and, in one case, as a “piece of shit.” In New York, Psy-Group mounted a campaign on behalf of wealthy Jewish-American donors to embarrass and intimidate activists on American college campuses who support a movement to put economic pressure on Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians.

This is one fascinating story.  There’s also a lurid one regarding Jeff Bezos and his totally public affair and craziness with AMI.  Bezos, head of Amazon and WAPO has his own internet toils, tribulations, and amassed wealth. And now we venture forth to the land of billionaires, grudges, and honey pots.  No one certainly hinted at any of this on that huge print out on green bar paper the day I met the world wide web.

The brother of Jeff Bezos’ mistress, Lauren Sanchez, supplied the couple’s racy texts to the National Enquirer, multiple sources inside AMI, the tabloid’s parent company, told The Daily Beast.

Another source who has been in extensive communication with senior leaders at AMI confirmed that Michael Sanchez first supplied Bezos’ texts to the Enquirer.

The leaked texts, published last month, included notes from Bezos like, “I want to smell you, I want to breathe you in. I want to hold you tight.”

AMI has previously refused to identify the source of the texts, but a lawyer for the company strongly hinted at Sanchez’s role during a Sunday morning interview on ABC.

“The story was given to the National Enquirer by a reliable source that had given information to the National Enquirer for seven years prior to this story. It was a source that was well known to both Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez,” attorney Elkan Abramowitz told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Asked directly whether Sanchez was the source, Abramowitz said, “I can’t discuss who the source was. It’s confidential within AMI.”

An AMI spokesperson declined to comment for this story. Asked directly more than a half-dozen times whether or not he supplied the texts to the Enquirer, Sanchez declined to respond.

 

Depending on whom you believe, the Enquirer’s exposé on Bezos’s affair was a political hit inspired by President Trump’s allies, an inside job by people seeking to protect Bezos’s marriage, or no conspiracy at all, simply a juicy gossip story.

The saga might have been easily dismissed as little more than tabloid fare, but it has taken on a more serious cast in recent days. A volley of charges and countercharges about how and why the Enquirer launched its investigation has emerged for several reasons, including the history of the Enquirer, which has acknowledged taking actions during the last presidential campaign that benefited Trump politically. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly lodged attacks on The Post’s coverage of him and on Bezos, who bought the news company in 2013. And Bezos, the head of a retail giant that is famously loath to comment to the media, has authorized his security chief to speak about his investigation.

Bezos’s longtime private security consultant, Gavin de Becker, has concluded that the billionaire was not hacked. Rather, de Becker said in an interview, the Enquirer’s scoop about Bezos’s relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez began with a “politically motivated” leak meant to embarrass the owner of The Post — an effort potentially involving several important figures in Trump’s 2016 campaign.

As the Daily Beast first reported last week, de Becker has publicly named only one subject of his investigation, Michael Sanchez, Lauren’s brother and a pro-Trump Hollywood talent manager who is also an acquaintance of provocative Trump backers Roger Stone and Carter Page.

Hit me with your laser beams.  Will Bunch–writing for the Philadelphi Inquirer connects dots this way: “Bezos, the National Enquirer, the Saudis, Trump, and the blackmailing of U.S. democracy.”

And what if I told you something else: That the Bezos scandal is ripping away the curtain on a secret world that’s been hiding in plain sight: That a nation founded in the ideals of democracy has been increasingly fallen prey to a new dystopian regime that melds the new 21st century dark arts of illegal hacking and media manipulation with the oldest tricks in the book: blackmail and extortion.

Pull up a chair.

You probably know by now the basics about Bezos and the National Enquirer: In January the Amazon mogul announced that he and his longtime wife MacKenzie are divorcing, hours ahead of a report in the National Enquirer laden with the content of racy texts between the billionaire and his mistress. On Thursday, Bezos — who’d hired a well-known investigator to find out how the supermarket tabloid got his private communications — took to Medium with a post accusing the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, whose CEO is David Pecker, of threatening to publish embarrassing photos of Bezos and his lover if he didn’t drop his investigation and state (falsely, Bezos asserts) that its coverage was not politically motivated. 

Ironically, the Bezos-AMI affair sucked all the oxygen out of another big scoop published at almost exactly the same time. The New York Times reported American intelligence had learned that the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (commonly referred to as “MBS”) had railed to an associate against the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who’d moved to the United States and was writing anti-MBS op-ed columns for the Washington Post. MBS allegedly said he’d personally put “a bullet” into Khashoggi.

Then, of course, we’re learning more about the Russian interference in our elections.  Today’s NYT has this: “In Closed Hearing, a Clue About ‘the Heart’ of Mueller’s Russia Inquiry”.

Comments by one of Mr. Mueller’s lead prosecutors, disclosed in a transcript of a closed-door hearing, suggest that the special counsel continues to pursue at least one theory: that starting while Russia was taking steps to bolster Mr. Trump’s candidacy, people in his orbit were discussing deals to end a dispute over Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and possibly give Moscow relief from economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.

The theory was offered almost as an aside by the prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, during a discussion of contacts between Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a longtime Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom investigators have linked to Russian intelligence.

A closer look at the transcript, released late Thursday, shows that the prosecutors have been keenly focused on discussions the two men had about a plan to end the conflict that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Persuading the United States to ease or end the American-led sanctions imposed to punish Moscow for its aggression has been a primary goal of Russian foreign policy.

According to the transcript, which was heavily redacted, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik repeatedly communicated about a so-called peace plan for Ukraine starting in early August 2016, while Mr. Manafort was still running Mr. Trump’s campaign, and continuing into 2018, months after Mr. Manafort had been charged by the special counsel’s office with a litany of crimes related to his work in the country. The prosecutors claim that Mr. Manafort misled them about those talks and other interactions with Mr. Kilimnik.

All this just in time for this:

Artificial intelligence is the 60-year-old quest to make machines capable of mental or physical tasks seen as emblematic of human or animal intelligence. In the past seven years a technology called machine learning, in which algorithms gain skills by digesting example data, has allowed computers to become markedly better at understanding the world. That technology has birthed software able to read medical scans, virtual assistants that answer shouted trivia questions, and become the heart of every major tech company’s product strategy.

One element of the Trump administration plan would open some stocks of government data to academics and companies doing AI research. Tech companies such as Google parent Alphabet have plenty of 1s and 0s logging consumer habits stashed inside their data centers; but in other areas, such as health care, they struggle to amass the data needed to fuel AI projects.

The White House says it will ask agencies in areas such as health and transportation to release data that could advance AI research, using mechanisms that protect privacy. The results could resemble a project of the Veterans Administration, which developed a way to provide Alphabet temporary access to hundreds of thousands of anonymized health records to train AI software to predict kidney problems.

The plan awaiting Trump’s signature also directs federal agencies to prioritize AI when allocating their R&D budgets. It asks them to support training and fellowship programs that will help workers adjust to jobs changed by AI, and train future AI experts and researchers.

The administration strategy also acknowledges that artificial intelligence may cause unwelcome effects.

Is this another fine mess they’re getting us into?

Well, get a laugh at this part that he actually signed from Futurism.

During a conference call with press, a senior administration official noted that the order will include five “key pillars” on which agencies should focus their AI efforts.

These pillars include the creation of a set of ethical guidelines for AI development and implementation, as well as the prioritization of AI research and development. The administration also wants agencies to make it easier for AI researchers to access federal data, create fellowships and apprenticeships that will help workers prepare for automation, and find ways to collaborate with other nations without compromising U.S. “values and interests.”

Yeah, and call me when the administration does anything ‘without compromising U.S. “values and interests”‘.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Lazy Caturday Reads: Crazy is Our Daily Reality Now

Posted: February 9, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Paul Newman and his Burmese caat

There are four Democratic women running for president and the media is working overtime to take them all down. Meanwhile, elderly white males Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders get kid glove treatment.

Let me see if I can get this straight: Elizabeth Warren believed her family when they told her she had a Native American ancestor. Kamala Harris was a prosecutor (horrors!), she dated an older black man but married a white man. Amy Klobuchar is mean to her staff. Kirsten Gillibrand is “too transparently opportunistic.”

Each one of these women has now been assigned a “her emails” story that will dominate her campaign if reporters are successful. But two elderly white men with problematic political records and a younger man with few qualifications (Beto O’Rourke) are treated as viable candidates.

Sigh . . . Will I live to see a woman president? I’m still hoping.

In other news, Trump had his physical and surprise! He’s in perfect health!

The Washington Post: Trump’s doctor says he is in ‘very good health’ after exam by 11 specialists.

President Trump is “in very good health” and is expected to remain healthy for “the duration of his Presidency, and beyond,” the president’s doctor reported Friday after a physical exam that lasted nearly four hours and included 11 specialists.

Carole Lombard with black cat

The White House did not release details of the exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and did not say whether more details would be released.

Trump was seen by a “panel of 11 different board certified specialists,” Sean P. Conley wrote in a brief memorandum released by the White House.

The memo did not include the disciplines of any of the specialists. Typically, a physical exam includes checks of height, weight, blood pressure and other standard measures. Trump said last year that he takes a statin drug to manage his cholesterol.

Trump did not undergo any procedures requiring sedation or anesthesia, Conley reported.

I wonder if he is still 6’3 and 239 pounds? The doctor doesn’t say. Maybe his height increased again–so rare for a 72 year old man, but possible for a wannabe dictator.

Let’s see, what else is happening?

The New York Times: Trump Defies Congressional Deadline on Khashoggi Report.

President Trump refused to provide Congress a report on Friday determining who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, defying a demand by lawmakers intent on establishing whether the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was behind the grisly assassination.

Steve McQueen and friend

Mr. Trump effectively bypassed a deadline set by law as his administration argued that Congress could not impose its will on the president. Critics charged that he was seeking to cover up Saudi complicity in the death of Mr. Khashoggi, an American resident and a columnist for The Washington Post.

“Consistent with the previous administration’s position and the constitutional separation of powers, the president maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate,” the Trump administration said in a statement. The statement said the administration had taken action against the killers and would consult with Congress.

But Democrats said Mr. Trump was violating a law known as the Magnitsky Act. It required him to respond 120 days after a request submitted in the fall by committee leaders — including Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — a period that expired Friday.

The illegitimate “president” of the U.S. is protecting a foreign despot who ordered the brutal murder of a Washington Post journalist. And there are suggestions that the “president” used Saudi Arabia and his pals at The National Enquirer to get revenge on Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post.

CNN: Bezos flags ‘Saudi angle’ in alleged AMI extortion attempt.

Jeff Bezos’ stunning accusation that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him mentioned the close ties between the paper’s publisher, David Pecker, and President Donald Trump — and a second, less well-known connection.

Lucille Ball with cat

Bezos flagged the link between the New York tabloid’s parent company, American Media, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, returning to it several times.

While Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir denied any connection between his country and AMI to CNN, Bezos said in his Thursday statement that the link between the Kingdom and the media company is not yet fully understood. He carefully laid out a web of connections.

The trigger for Bezos’ post was his decision to hire a respected investigator to find out how texts to his girlfriend were obtained and published by the National Enquirer — and to determine why the paper and Pecker, the AMI chairman, had made him a target.

“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our investigation,” Bezos wrote. “For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve,” he continued.

A couple of articles on the National Enquier story to check out:

The Washington Post: Federal prosecutors reviewing Bezos’s extortion claim against National Enquirer, sources say.

The Daily Beast: Private Eyes Detail Inner Workings of National Enquirer ‘Blackmail’ Machine.

Marlon Brando and his cat

The illegitimate “president’s” fake attorney general made an ass of himself in front of the Congressional committee and the world yesterday and the “president” is very pleased. Natasha Bertrand at The Atlantic: Matthew Whitaker Plays to an Audience of One.

It took about five minutes of questioning for the acting attorney general to provoke gasps and jeers in the congressional hearing room. “Your five minutes are up,” Matthew Whitaker, an ex-U.S. Attorney-turned toilet salesman, told the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic chairman Jerry Nadler. Nadler cracked a smile, but from that point on the rules of engagement seemed clear: Whitaker, just days remaining in his legally dubious role as the interim head of the Justice Department, appeared to be playing to an audience of one…..

Despite the lingering questions about his resume and suspicions about why he was appointed over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would have  been Sessions’s natural replacement, Whitaker presented himself to Nadler, a 13-term congressman, with the same aloofness and disdain for tradition that often seems typical of the Trump White House. And that may have been on purpose. Whitaker, whose tenure ends when Bill Barr is confirmed as attorney general next week, will need a new job. He has reportedly been considered for the role of Trump’s chief of staff. And though he testified under oath that he had “not interfered in any way with the special counsel’s investigation,” he repeatedly declined to contradict Trump’s claims that Mueller is on a “witch hunt.”

Marilyn Monroe

Chuck Rosenberg, a former senior Justice Department official who resigned in 2017, said it would have been “easy” for Whitaker to say that Mueller’s investigation is legitimate, as Barr did during his recent confirmation hearings. “I don’t know how somebody could be that cowardly,” he added. But doing so would have undermined what is arguably his boss’s most important talking point—and that would not have been a good move for Whitaker if he was, in fact, auditioning for his next position.

Instead, Whitaker had a boilerplate response prepared for the myriad of questions posed by Democrats about the Mueller probe: “It would be inappropriate for me to talk about an ongoing investigation,” he said. Democrats, though, found that disingenuous—Whitaker had discussed the probe publicly earlier this month, going as far as to speculate that it would be wrapping up soon.

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

Here’s a Trump/Whitaker/Russia scandal that is new to me. Raw Story:

Taking to Twitter on Friday night, Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) hinted that there will be an investigation into a donor who gifted the Judicial Network with $18 million to steal the Supreme Court seat belonging to Merrick Garland.

As part of his observations on the Matt Whitaker hearing where he was confronted about a mysterious $1.2 million donation that funded his salary, Whitehouse said Democrats shouldn’t stop there.

Meryl Streep

‘Whitaker did political hit work for a front group called FACT that does not reveal its donors. Today he admitted that its donor was Donors Trust, an entity that hides the identity of right-wing donors. That means the unknown real donor hid behind two entities,” Whitehouse tweeted….

Whitehouse then put conservatives on notice that he expects an investigation into the dark money that was used to fund a campaign to keep Judge Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing — only to see his seat go to conservative Neil Gorsuch after Donald Trump was elected.

I found this on Twitter.

Could this be true? I don’t know, but I hope Whitehouse finds out. At this point, nothing about Trump, Republicans, and Russia would surprise me.

I’ll end with something more hopeful from The New York Times: John Dingell: My last words for America.

John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who served in the U.S. House from 1955 to 2015, was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history. He dictated these reflections to his wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), at their home in Dearborn, on Feb. 7, the day he died.

Mary Tyler Moore

One of the advantages to knowing that your demise is imminent, and that reports of it will not be greatly exaggerated, is that you have a few moments to compose some parting thoughts.

In our modern political age, the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.

And much as I have found Twitter to be a useful means of expression, some occasions merit more than 280 characters.

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Click on the link to read Dingell’s final thoughts. How amazing that he chose to speak out publicly from his deathbed. He was a true public servant.

That’s all I have for today. I hope you all enjoy the weekend in spite of the insanity that surrounds us.

Friday Reads: Sins of the Fathers

Posted: February 8, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Black Lives Matter, morning reads, racism | 44 Comments

A photo from the Delta Kappa Epsilon page in the Tulane University 1987 yearbook depicted members in blackface.

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

I struggled yesterday and today about sharing my experience Thursday morning with you. I had to go in for labs at the clinic of the hospital I’ve used for years. It’s a regional hospital and attracts people from all over SE Louisiana. It also sits within blocks of where Orleans Parish becomes Jefferson Parish. As such, it’s part of Congressman Steve (‘David Duke without the baggage’) Scalise who appears quite cozy in today’s Republican Party.  You can never crawl away from history here. It’s a lesson I relearn frequently.

Now, I had the usual orders of not eating or drinking before these tests and I was loopy from lack of coffee. The minute they were done I headed straight for coffee at the snack bar.  Relieved, I sat down, drinking, snacking on a cinnamon roll, and just sort of watching people come and go.  Mostly,  I saw a lot of elderly people being attended by a lot of what Mr Roger’s would call “the helpers”. This quote has stayed with me a long time.  It’s always wonderful watching how nurturing people can be and how many take jobs where they patiently nurture and help all day.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

You can’t help but notice that the helpers in a hospital these days are quite diverse but in a big city you get to see all of humanity.  I was sitting next to a helper whose job it is to see to any one needing assistance to get their destination.  She was also watching every one come in the clinic door. At one point, an elderly white woman came in the door with her daughter who was probably a bit younger than me but could’ve been a lot younger.  It was hard to tell.  She immediately grabbed a wheel chair and began the process of getting her mother situated.

It was then I saw the black t shirt with white lettering and an equally white image.  The top of shirt displayed “Get Bent” boldly.  It was easy to read.  The bottom lettering I never managed to get to because the image caught my eye and I started going through the “No, it can’t be. I can’t be seeing that” exercise in my head.  “It’s a spoon!”  I thought!  “Yup. Bent spoon ! That makes sense right?”  But, no matter how much I tried to talk myself out of seeing what I was seeing I had to admit my eyes were not lying to me.  There was the twine of a rope. The twisted knot. The telltale loop.  It was definitely a noose.

As that woman began pushing her mother’s chair by me, I turned to the black woman beside me, the helper, mouthing “Do you see that?”  Again, I was hoping she could tell me I was seeing things.  She said what?  By that time the woman and chair were well behind us and I fought the urge to go snap a picture just so I could tell myself over and over that my eyes weren’t lying. “There’s a noose on her t shirt. A noose”.

The woman said, “Well that’s the sort’ve thing that is looking to start something.” She could tell I was fighting my instincts to chase down that wheel chair for a reason I cannot yet figure out.  She saw me and suggested I take a few deep breaths and she started actually taking me through that process. She was a professional helper in patient care who was used to calming down nervous people in a clinic. She repeated my story to two other people while I was there and they looked at me.  I told them, yes that’s what I saw and I am so sorry because I really have no idea why any one could be so openly cruel.  My mind silently added, so openly cruel in a place where your mother needs help from every one whose job here is to give it to her and this is how you thank them.  Every one employed at a hospital clinic is in the helping profession.  Every person.

Today, I woke up to doing my usual coffee and reading of the newspapers in my own bed. The NYT had that picture of Tulane that’s up top there. I immediately recognized it but again, kept trying to tell myself that I’m just seeing things.  I wasn’t. The date is 1987 and that’s clearly Tulane University.  Again, Tulane kicked this frat out a long time ago but the students continue to join and go to school there and some subset of “grown ups in the room” let that picture get posted to a yearbook.

“Black people in general have had to deal with a lot of these things that have happened,” said Dr. David Randolph Sr., an oncologist in Richmond, Va., who graduated from Mr. Northam’s medical school in 1983 and recalled going to a party in the early 2000s and seeing a white couple dressed in full blackface as Venus and Serena Williams. “Everybody except me and my wife kind of looked at them as a matter of course.”

The frantic apology that Dr. Randolph received from the couple underscores what seems obvious: Blackface now and from its beginnings has been known to be offensive, “the filthy scum of white society,” as Frederick Douglass called it in 1848. That did not hamper its popularity. For more than a century it was in the mainstream of American pop culture, in Broadway plays and in Bing Crosby movies, before receding as the civil rights movement ascended.

But blackface has lingered, withdrawing into certain white settings cordoned off from public view.

Henrietta Hilton, front left, and her fellow students in their ninth grade classroom in Summerton, S.C., in 1954. The classroom was at the center of a controversy which led to one of four cases involving “separate but equal” facilities.

I’m struggling with how I can best play a role in alleviating and eliminating racism in our society. Today, I feel like I’m clueless and inept.  I guess my best response right now is to just turn to the black person next to me, let them know what I see and what I feel which is basically awful. I will let them tell me how best to respond or if I should respond.  I just apologize endlessly a lot which really seems empty. I need to listen more.

Here’s some news headlines. I’ve been following including the Bezo/Pecker thing.

This link is from Allyson Chiu and Kayla Epstein at The Washington Post: “Ronan Farrow says he also received ‘blackmail’ threat over reporting on the National Enquirer and Trump”.

Last April, Farrow published a story in the New Yorker about the Enquirer’s “catch and kill” practice — in which stories are buried by paying off sources — that benefited Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

AMI did not immediately return a message from The Post about Farrow’s claim.

The allegations from Bezos and Farrow have since prompted other journalists and media outlets to come forward with claims that they too had been targeted by AMI for reporting on the Enquirer.

In response to Farrow, former Associated Press editor Ted Bridis tweeted a similar story.

https://twitter.com/tbridis/status/1093694924527190016

Bridis claimed in a separate tweet referencing Bezos’s Medium post that AMI, the Enquirer and its lawyers “tried to shut down public interest reporting on tabloid’s work on behalf of Trump.”

The Daily Beast also reported that attorneys for AMI responded aggressively to two stories published last week that detailed Bezos’s investigation into the Enquirer. In its story about Thursday’s Medium post, the Daily Beast disclosed that during the process of that reporting, the publication “and a member of its staff were threatened by AMI’s attorneys.”

From The Boston Globe Op Ed page and Margery Eagan: “Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right”.

Here are some facts that might surprise you.

In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the biggest white evangelical group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, supported its legalization. The group continued that support through much of the 1970s. And the late Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, did not give his first antiabortion speech until 1978, five years after Roe.

Though opposition to abortion is what many think fueled the powerful conservative white evangelical right, 81 percent of whom voted for Donald Trump, it was really school integration, according to Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at Dartmouth. The US Supreme Court ruled public school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. In 1976 it ruled against segregated private schools. Then courts went after the tax exemptions of these private all-white Southern schools, or so-called segregation academies, like Falwell’s Liberty Christian Academy.

The late Paul Weyrich, whom Balmer called the organizational genius behind the religious right, had long tried to mobilize evangelical voters around some hot-button issue: feminism, school prayer, pornography, abortion. But nothing lit a fire like the federal government’s threat to all-white schools. Only in 1979, a full six years after Roe, did Weyrich urge evangelical leaders to also crusade against abortion, Balmer said in an interview. That was, after all, a far more palatable, acceptable crusade, one with a seeming high moral purpose, unlike a race-based crusade against black children.

Louis Armstrong, in ZULU blackface, as King of the Zulus on, Mardi Gras Day, 1949

The powers that be always work to divide us.

From the Washington Post: “‘My whole town practically lived there’: From Costa Rica to New Jersey, a pipeline of illegal workers for Trump goes back years”.  We continue to find out that Trump’s fascination with undocumented works seems to be purely political and purely related to race baiting.

At his home on the misty slope of Costa Rica’s tallest mountain, Dario Angulo keeps a set of photographs from the years he tended the rolling fairways and clipped greens of a faraway American golf resort.

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

Now the 34-year-old lives with his wife and daughters in a sturdy house built by “Trump money,” as he put it, with a porch to watch the sun go down.

It’s a common story in this small town.

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

So, if you’re really into farce, turn on the TV and watch what passes as an Acting Attorney General discuss what’s supposed to pass for a President of the United states.

https://twitter.com/Maryroyal4E/status/1093915025281073157

So, I hope you have a great weekend. Remember to do something nice for the Helpers if you get a chance.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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