Moody Monday Reads: Bluesy News
Posted: September 23, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads 49 Comments
Improvisation 19;1911; by Wassily Kandisky
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
Time for our annual ad! The rent is due by the end of the month. It’s not a huge amount but we’d appreciate any donations you could send our way! Thanks!
Mr. Trump acknowledges that he asked Ukraine’s new President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden as part of his effort to clean up corruption. More on Mr. Biden later, but Mr. Trump’s request showed bad judgment. He was trying to draw a foreign leader into the middle of American presidential politics, which can only lead to political trouble. We learned that from the Russia fiasco of 2016.
The request to Mr. Zelensky is worse if it came with a threat to cut off U.S. military aid. Mr. Trump and others say there was no quid pro quo request. But we know the Trump Administration delayed U.S. aid to Ukraine in early July for unexplained reasons. The U.S. released the aid later after bipartisan criticism of the delay. Mr. Zelensky surely understood the potential risk of not complying with Mr. Trump’s request even if Mr. Trump wasn’t explicit.
What we know of the call underscores Mr. Trump’s greatest flaw as President, which is his political narcissism. Every decision boils down to how it affects him or his re-election prospects. Other Presidents have made similar calculations, but Mr. Trump lacks the basic filter to know when he is crossing a line that creates trouble for himself or the country.
There is this depressing list of Democratic Party attacks, which basically says the same thing they always say; but they do end with this, which should be rhetorical at best. I’d like to hear their damned answer.
Americans will have to add all this to their judgment in 2020 about whether Mr. Trump or his fanatical opponents are the bigger risk to American well-being.
Blue Nude, Pablo Picasso
Well, they should recognize their daily fanatical diatribes but you know, pots always call kettles black. But, that’s the media these days and the Trumpist Regime seems to have them all hornswoggled. This analysis is by Jonathan Chait writing for New York Magazine: “How the Media Helped Trump Carry Out His Ukraine Smear.”
Even at the the time, and especially in retrospect, it was an example of extremely bizarre journalistic judgment. One of the biggest presidential scandals in history had been dropped into the Times’ lap, and it relegated the news to a subplot to its main story of vague insinuations against Biden. The reporter, Ken Vogel, was too wrapped up in trying to nail the story he set out cover to notice that the actions of his sources, rather than the information they were promoting, was the real story.
The strange saga of the Times scoop also suggests something more disturbing: that Trump has hacked into the mainstream media’s ethics and turned them to his advantage. What’s more, even now that his conduct has been exposed, Trump’s gambit that he could abuse his power to discredit an opponent may yet succeed.
he alleged Biden scandal that the Times was attempting to plumb has been conclusively debunked. Biden’s call for firing a notoriously ineffectual Ukrainian prosecutor was in line with the stance not only of the Obama administration but the IMF, the World Bank, Western allies, and good-government types of all sorts. What’s more, the case against the Ukrainian firm that employed Hunter Biden had been dormant before the prosecutor’s firing.
Trump has presented his demands that Ukraine investigate Biden as high-minded opposition to “corruption.” This turns reality on its head. Biden was pushing Ukraine to root out corruption, and Trump and Giuliani are working hand in hand with the most corrupt elements in the Ukrainian polity — the actors who secretly hired Paul Manafort to elect pro-Russian kleptocrats. Trump, meanwhile, has displayed a notable indifference to foreign corruption. He has publicly disparaged the federal law preventing American businesses from bribing foreign officials, and enforcement of the law has plummeted under his administration. Trump is personally collecting large, undisclosed sums from domestic and foreign sources with a keen interest in currying his administration’s favor. And while it’s true that Hunter Biden was trading on his father’s name, all the Trump children are doing the same, and it barely attracts any attention given all the other scandals blotting it out.
The notion that Trump was legitimately interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine is a transparent farce. Even if he’d somehow developed a genuine interest in tamping down corruption — an interest that runs counter to his entire business career and functioning as president — his handing off the task to Giuliani exposes the ruse. There are actual diplomatic channels that can be used to encourage foreign countries to investigate legitimate crimes. The president’s personal lawyer is not one of them.
And yet the Times’ willingness to lend credence to Giuliani’s smear campaign is hardly unique. Vogel this weekend called Hunter Biden’s history “a significant liability for Joe Biden.” A Washington Post headline noted, “Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine Scandal May Also Complicate Biden’s Campaign.”
Blue Waterlilies, Claude Monet
This headline alone should be sending chills down the spines of all of our allies: “Giuliani Says He Can’t Guarantee That Trump Didn’t Threaten Ukraine Aid” writes Caitlin Weber for Bloomberg News.
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani didn’t rule out the possibility that the president threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine over calls for an investigation into largely discredited allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
Giuliani first said in response to a question on Fox Business Monday that Trump didn’t threaten Ukraine aid, but then added he “can’t say for 100%.”
Trump appeared to acknowledge on Sunday that he had discussed Biden — the 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner — in a July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that is the subject of a congressional investigation.
The episode is a preview of the kind of 2020 campaign the country will face if Biden becomes the Democratic nominee.
It’s also an effort by Trump to brush Biden with scandal and damage him as a potential general-election opponent. While Biden’s lead in Democratic primary polls has shrunk, he still leads on the question of which candidate could beat Trump next fall.
The Large Blue Horse, Franz Marc; 1911
The New Yorker calls the entire ordeal a “mounting scandal”. This is in an era where scandals are more common than acts of human decency. Here’s more on the background on “bother sides” of course.
It is well known in Washington that Trump has held a residual animus toward Ukraine dating back to the 2016 campaign, when the publication of a so-called black ledger of illegal payments, made under the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, helped bring about criminal charges against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort. (In March, Manafort was found guilty of failing to pay taxes on payments that he had received for his work as a consultant in Ukraine.) Now it seemed like Trump was raising the stakes further, asking the country’s President to open an investigation into unproven allegations against Biden and thereby lend credence to them.
That is an unwelcome, and potentially dangerous, scenario for any Ukrainian President, given the degree to which Ukraine relies on American diplomatic, economic, and military assistance. It is not just the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid that Kiev depends on but also American loan guarantees, economic sanctions against Russia, and diplomatic involvement in negotiating an end to the war in the Donbass. With that conflict continuing to boil, American military training and weaponry remains vital to Ukraine’s military. In 2018, the Trump Administration agreed to supply the country with anti-tank Javelin missiles.
Ending up as the open antagonist of an American President is not really an option for a Ukrainian leader. Since he took office, in May, Zelensky has made relations with the Trump Administration a priority. A forty-one-year-old comedian who played Ukraine’s President on television before entering politics, Zelensky and his advisers hoped to organize a personal meeting as soon as possible, and thought a bilateral summit in Washington might happen by the end of the summer. The fact that no such meeting materialized was the first sign that things were off to an uneasy start with Trump. The second came last month, when Trump personally held up two hundred and fifty million dollars in American aid for Ukraine and released it only under the threat of an embarrassing vote in the Senate that would have forced him to do so.
A decisive sticking point appears to be Trump’s political interest in resurfacing old allegations connected to the business dealings of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, in Ukraine. In April, 2014, Hunter accepted a lucrative seat on the board of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers, a decision that Hunter said he made without consulting his father. (Biden and Hunter had an informal arrangement that predated Hunter’s work with Burisma and was designed to insulate Biden from questions about his son’s private dealings: Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his business activities, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.)
At the time, Biden was the point person in the Obama Administration for Ukraine policy, and later, in 2016, he pressed the government of the President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to dismiss its general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was seen as covering up for corrupt officials and failing to pursue high-profile graft investigations. (A 2016 story for this magazine about a pair of young Ukrainian lawmakers touched on the Shokin affair.)
To pressure Poroshenko into removing Shokin, the Obama Administration withheld a billion dollars in loan guarantees. (Ukrainians began calling Shokin “the billion-dollar man.”) In 2016, a senior official in the Obama White House said in an interview that Biden spoke to Poroshenko by phone every few weeks and communicated to him that, as far as additional loan guarantees were concerned, “You can meet every single other condition, but until you replace this guy you are not getting this money.”
Yet there is no evidence that Biden’s insistence had anything to do with his son or with Burisma—Shokin was not pursuing a Burisma-related case at the time, and thus his firing didn’t affect Hunter Biden’s legal prospects in Ukraine one way or another. Instead, it was almost certainly a reflection of Shokin’s terrible reputation among Ukrainian reformers, anti-corruption activists, and Western partners, including officials at the E.U. and I.M.F.
Flower of life, Georgia O’Keefe,
This however, is the bottom line from Josha Yaffa’s reporting.
It’s clear that Zelensky and his team would like to stay as far away from this story as possible: if there’s a major scandal looming, it’s an American one, not a Ukrainian one, and standing too close to the blast wave when the scandal explodes will only hurt them. Zelensky came to office as a political outsider with the mandate to disrupt Ukraine’s entrenched political order, and getting caught up in an American political scandal would be distracting at best, disastrous at worst. He needs U.S. aid, not to mention diplomatic backing, if he is to have any chance of ending the war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country. Ending up at the center of a political fight, let alone U.S. congressional investigations, does little to advance those interests.
The whole story must be a dispiriting one for Ukraine. Zelensky, like previous Ukrainian Presidents, put great hopes on his personal relationship with his American counterpart, though it turned out that Trump was not so interested in Zelensky and his agenda; he was interested in his own agenda. If Trump did indeed try to link the promise of American aid to Ukraine to his own political goals, that would represent a remarkable about-face for the American-Ukrainian relationship. Across successive administrations in both countries, U.S. policy emphasized the importance of the rule of law and sought to minimize the politicization of the Ukrainian judicial system, which had, time and again, been used as an instrument of retribution or political expediency by Ukrainian Presidents.
So, Ukraine is a target for White Nationalist Terrorism from the US. Read this latest.
I’m not completely sure how much white male fragility and bunker mentality the world can take. We have tremendous challenges ahead in the US with gun violence and abroad with Climate Change. Here’s David Leonhardt’s opinion at the NYT. It’s more like the list I’ve been begging folks to send to Nancy Pelosi.
Sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the full picture.
He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.
He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.
He divulged classified information to foreign officials.
He publicly undermined American intelligence agents while standing next to a hostile foreign autocrat.
He hired a national security adviser who he knew had secretly worked as a foreign lobbyist.
He encourages foreign leaders to enrich him and his family by staying at his hotels.
He lied to the American people about his company’s business dealings in Russia.
He tells new lies virtually every week — about the economy, voter fraud, even the weather.
He spends hours on end watching television and days on end staying at resorts.
He often declines to read briefing books or perform other basic functions of a president’s job.
He has aides, as well as members of his own party in Congress, who mock him behind his back as unfit for office.
He has repeatedly denigrated a deceased United States senator who was a war hero.
He insulted a Gold Star family — the survivors of American troops killed in action.
He described a former first lady, not long after she died, as “nasty.”
He described white supremacists as “some very fine people.”
He told four women of color, all citizens and members of Congress, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”
He made a joke about Pocahontas during a ceremony honoring Native American World War II veterans.
He launched his political career by falsely claiming that the first black president was not really American.
He launched his presidential campaign by describing Mexicans as “rapists.”
He has described women, variously, as “a dog,” “a pig” and “horseface,” as well as “bleeding badly from a facelift” and having “blood coming out of her wherever.”
He has been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by multiple women.
He enthusiastically campaigned for a Senate candidate who was accused of molesting multiple teenage girls.
He waved around his arms, while giving a speech, to ridicule a physically disabled person.
He has encouraged his supporters to commit violence against his political opponents.
He has called for his opponents and critics to be investigated and jailed.
He uses a phrase popular with dictators — “the enemy of the people” — to describe journalists.
…
and there’s a lot more if you follow the links. Cut and paste this to your Senators and Representatives the entire list there at that link. Then, add only this: It’s time to Impeach this motherfucker! Too much is at stake to let him kill everything he touchs.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads: We Are Screwed
Posted: September 21, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2020 Democratic primaries, Beryl Cook, cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Iraq War, Jerry Nadler, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Media bias, Nancy Pelosi, off the table, Ukraine 24 Comments
Cat Lady Feeding the Cats, by Beryl Cook
Good Afternoon!!
This morning I’m having flashbacks to 2006. Democrats had just retaken the House and Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker. But even before she took the gavel, she announced that “impeachment is off the table.” Never mind that Bush and Cheney had lied us into an endless war.
The New York Times, November 8, 2006: Pelosi: Bush Impeachment `Off the Table.’
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.
“I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a news conference.
The Milk Man and Woman with Cat, by Beryl Cook
Pelosi also said Democrats, despite complaining about years of unfair treatment by the majority GOP, “are not about getting even” with Republicans.
She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
Now Pelosi is once again Speaker of the House and she’s doing a repeat performance with an even worse “president.” Until recently, I thought her arguments about “getting the facts” by holding hearings before rushing into impeachment made sense.
But the situation with Trump become an emergency. He is stonewalling any and all efforts to question witnesses in Congressional Committees. He is using mob tactics to force a foreign country into helping him get reelected. We can’t wait for the 2020 election to get rid of him, especially because there’s no guarantee that he won’t successfully win by cheating.
Please check out this piece by Tom Scocca at Slate: Someone Should Do Something.
After seeing the events of the past few days, in the light of the events of the days before those, in relation to the events that took place in the weeks, months, and years before that, I am strongly considering writing something that would address the question of whether Nancy Pelosi is bad at her job. If I did, I would argue that the House of Representatives, under Pelosi’s leadership, has come to function as a necessary complement to the corruption and incompetence of President Donald Trump—that a lawless presidency can only achieve its fullest, ripest degree of lawlessness with the aid of a feckless opposition party, which the Democrats are eager to provide.
Cats Eyeing a Lobster, by Beryl Cook
My editor thinks that I should write this article. I understand that in a week when one of the president’s most dedicated flunkies went before Congress to openly sneer at the idea that he should answer questions, making a show of obstructing what was supposed to be an investigation into obstruction of justice—a week now ending with reports, confirmed by the president’s jabbering ghoul of a lawyer on television, that the president tried to force a foreign country to act against the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate—there is good reason to feel that something needs to be written. It is certainly the sort of situation that someone could write about: the opposition party sitting on its hands and issuing vague statements of dismay while the entire constitutional order is revealed to be no match for the willingness of a president and his enablers to break the law.
At some point, in the future, it will probably be necessary to publish an article pointing out the terrifying mismatch between the ever-increasing speed with which our political system is falling apart and the slow trudge toward November 2020, when the Democratic Party hopes that voters will do what current elected Democratic officials will not do and take action to remove our visibly degenerating president from office. If someone did write an article like that, they could point out that by allowing Trump to remain in office unchallenged until the election, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are saying that, although they hope the voters decide Trump is disqualified from office, they themselves do not think he has done anything wrong enough to merit his removal. If he had, they would do something, and they have not.
Feeding the Tortoise, Cat Looking On, by Beryl Cook
Scocca continues in this vein for several more paragraphs, ending with this conclusion:
Everyone in our democracy—citizens and officials alike, voters and writers, marchers and starers-at-screens—has a role to play, or to consider playing. If I were going to write about this, I would say that it might be time to plan on doing something.
Meanwhile, Jerry Nadler is supposedly thinking about maybe holding Corey Lewandowski in contempt for his disgraceful “testimony” several days ago.
We’re screwed, folks.
Yesterday it became clear that the New York Times is likely to do to Joe Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton and other media outlets will follow suit. Trump actually tweeted a video that featured NYT reporters arguing that Trump’s and Giuliani’s charges about Biden are legitimate.
And Trump (and the media, especially the NYT) will do the same thing to any Democratic candidate who ends up running against him.
https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1175445312032444416
https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1175450571442139136
We can see the future right now. It’s 2016 all over again.
Look at what happened to Kamala Harris at a forum on LGBT issues. Tommy Christopher at Mediaite: WATCH: ‘Biased’ LGBTQ Forum Question for Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren Goes Viral, Not in a Good Way.
On Friday, Democratic candidates participated in an LGBTQ forum in Iowa, moderated in part by Cedar Rapids Gazette columnist Lyz Lenz. Her first question to Senator Harris was about a case in which, as attorney general of California, she defended the state corrections department against a lawsuit seeking gender reassignment surgery for a transgender woman inmate named Michelle-Lael Norsworthy.
“During your time as attorney general in California, you did send a brief seeking to deny gender-affirmation surgery for trans inmates,” Lenz said, adding “You stated that at the time you were just enforcing the existing law.:
By Beryl Cook
“But with this history, the question is, how can trans people trust you will advocate for them, and not just enforce discriminatory laws?” Lenz asked.
Harris responded by noting the support she has received from LGBTQ organizations in her home state, and said “When that case came up, it was because as attorney general, I had clients, and one of them was the California Department of Corrections, and it was their policy. When I learned about what they were doing, behind the scenes, I got them to change the policy.”
And here is how Lenz treat a nearly identical question to Elizabeth Warren:
But when Lenz brought up an arguably more damaging stance on the same issue with Elizabeth Warren, it wasn’t framed as a matter of trust, or even as something for which Warren should answer.
“In 2012, you wrote that you did not support gender-affirming surgery for trans inmates,” Lenz said — to a “Yeah” from Warren — then added “In January of this year, you reversed your opinion and said you had changed on this issue.”
But instead of asking Warren how she could be trusted on an issue that she just got right on (checks notes) 8 months ago, Lenz said Warren’s change “is great,” then asked “So you just said we have to get everybody on board, how do we even do that?”
“So, the way I think about this, and America, equal means equal,” Warren said, but did not address her prior comments in the remainder of her answer.
I guarantee you that if Warren is the nominee, she too will get the Hillary Clinton treatment from the media while Trump mocks her “Pocahantas” on an hourly basis.
Here is what the U.S. media should be doing about Trump.
Lenore Taylor at The Guardian: As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump’s press conference.
…watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.
The press conference I tuned into by chance from my New York hotel room was held in Otay Mesa, California, and concerned a renovated section of the wall on the Mexican border.
I joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced “concrete technology”. It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it.
There were inner tubes in the wall that were also filled with concrete, poured in via funnels, and also “rebars” so the wall would withstand anyone attempting to cut through it with a blowtorch.
The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 “world-class mountain climbers – That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains”, who had been unable to scale it.
It was also “wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through”, although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it”, which the president said was a “very good answer”.
The wall was “amazing”, “world class”, “virtually impenetrable” and also “a good, strong rust colour” that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was “hot enough to fry an egg on”. There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made.
By Beryl Cook
He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.
In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.
But instead of focusing on Trump’s obvious ignorance, incompetence, and actual psychopathy and dementia, the media with focus on tearing down whichever Democrat wins the nomination. If it’s a black woman it will be even worse.
Finally, here’s the latest on the Ukraine scandal.
The Washington Post: How Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the president’s rivals.
Politico: Trump tries to move Ukraine scandal’s focus toward Biden.
Three Republicans call for impeachment.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is.
George Conway III and Neal Kaytal at The Washington Post: Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.
Beryl Cook and her cat
Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below. Have a nice weekend Sky Dancers!!
Fresh Hell Friday Reads: How long can this lawlessness go on?
Posted: September 20, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Biden, blackmail, Kimpromat, quid pro quo, Ukraine 20 Comments
Sunset, Long Island by Georgia O’Keeffe
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I went to a meeting last night with neighbors and the mayor who is introducing a number of initiatives to breathe life back into New Orleans Neighborhoods. I came home rather hopeful at the ideas but somewhat skeptical that all of it will be seen to fruition given what usually comes out of City Hall. Maybe our energetic and bright Mayor LaToya will get it done and my skepticism will be misplaced but the City Hall is a slow working bureaucracy and it’s going to take a lot of energy and push to get it moving.
I decided to switch on the TV thinking I’d catch up with some of the Climate Conference presenters including an interview with Al Gore who we haven’t heard on the subject for awhile. I didn’t have long since I was lecturing too. I basically turned the TV on to the story that must wake the Republican party up to reality.
The whistle blower story first reported in the Washington Post is as bad as we thought it would be. I would hope the Republican party finally comes around to seeing that this regime of lawlessness and that its unconstitutional acts cannot go on any longer.
If–as Republican RIck Wilson says–“Everything Trump Touches dies” then Rudy Guilliani is definitely in some state of Zombiehood. I’m not sure why he decided to go do interviews last night but he definitely poured gasoline on the fire that threatens the rule of law in this country. This is from WAPO. “Giuliani admits to asking Ukraine about Joe Biden after denying it 30 seconds earlier”. Chris Cuomo is never on my must see TV watch list but I watched this clip just to see the dawn of realization hit Guilliani’s face that he is seriously and truly fucked. The byline goes to Coby Itkowitz
Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, contradicted himself when asked whether he personally asked Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, ranted about media bias and defended Trump amid new reports about an intelligence official’s whistleblower complaint, during a chaotic and fiery CNN interview Thursday night.
Immediately after anchor Chris Cuomo introduced him and summarized the latest news out of the whistleblower story, which had only broken about an hour prior, Giuliani went into attack mode.
“I’m glad I’m on tonight, because what you just said is totally erroneous,” Giuliani said. “Every single thing you just said is completely spun in the same direction you’ve been doing for two years!”
Giuliani spent the first half of the interview repeating the claim that Biden in 2016 pressured Ukraine to drop its top prosecutor, which at the time was also investigating a natural gas company where Biden’s son Hunter was on the board. World leaders, including the United States, reportedly wanted the prosecutor gone because he was ineffective at rooting out corruption. Biden threatened to withhold loan money from the country over it. There’s been no evidence found that Biden was trying to help out his son.
So, the whistleblower was disturbed about Trump’s conversations with Ukraine that was supposed to be getting a ton of military support from us but which was being withheld by the Trump administration in order to coerce them into doing a politically motivated investigation of what is perceived as the main threat to the Trump Rule of Lawlessness.
The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset, Claude Monet
It’s at these times I wish I had actually followed through with going to law school. Thankfully, there are plenty of lawyers in the chattering class. As I read these things I can’t help but wonder how many laws and clauses of the US Constitution Trump has breached. Some one needs to keep a list. Some one, like say, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Anna Nemtsova writes this for The Daily Beast:”Ukrainian Official: Trump is Looking for Dirt ‘To Discredit Biden’. Ukraine officials see no indication Biden or his son broke their laws. If Trump wants them investigated in Kyiv, his government will need to say why and what for.”
Ukraine is ready to investigate the connections Joe Biden’s son Hunter had with the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings, according to Anton Geraschenko, a senior adviser to the country’s interior minister who would oversee such an inquiry.
Geraschenko told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview that “as soon as there is an official request” Ukraine will look into the case, but “currently there is no open investigation.”
“Clearly,” said Geraschenko, “Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.” Among the counts on which Manafort was convicted: tax evasion. “We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so,” said Geraschenko.
His remarks last week came amid widespread speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump had made vital U.S. military aid for Ukraine contingent on such an inquiry, but had tried to do so informally through unofficial representatives, including his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s adviser on Ukraine, Sam Kislin.
But Geraschenko spoke before the appearance of a Washington Post story on Thursday that implied that an intelligence-community whistleblower may have reported the untoward quid pro quo was put forth directly by Trump in a phone call with Ukraine’s recently elected president last July.
Geraschenko reconfirmed his statements in a phone call on Friday.
Vincent van Gogh – Willows at Sunset 1888
Jared Bernstein reminds us in Bloomberg of just how enabling and complicit the entire Republican Party has been during the Trumpist Rule of Lawlessness. The courts are full trying to deal with it all. My assumption is they’ve bought and paid for several Justices on the Supreme Court and it should eventually pay off for them I suppose. However, most every one I know is pretty horrified by this unless they are completely ignorant of our rule of law and how our government is supposed to work. But,this implies that we have a lot more engaged and well educated people in the country than we currently have. Take Alabama, please.
We still have only limited information about the emerging whistleblower scandal. But we do know (from what Rudy Giuliani has bragged about) that the president’s lawyer has pressed another country to investigate a Democratic candidate for alleged corruption. That’s on top of the original Trump campaign’s dozens of contacts with a nation attacking U.S. democracy; several documented instances of the president obstructing the investigation of that attack; violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution and regular use of government resources to enrich the president’s businesses; and assertions of invented presidential privileges to prevent congressional oversight.
Republicans have been okay with all this, presumably because they’re getting what they want on policy. Or perhaps out of pure partisanship. Or maybe because they’re so deep in the conservative information-feedback loop that they’ve convinced themselves none of it is real. But they should be taking stock now of just how much lawlessness they’re willing to tolerate. At this point, it looks like the whistleblower’s story involves Trump attempting to offer U.S. policy favors to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
I’ve said all along that there’s a middle ground where the evidence may justify impeachment and removal of the president, but not demand it. Well, the evidence has long since established that impeachment is justified. Now we’re tiptoeing up to the line where it demands removal. At some point, we may wind up clearly over that line by any reasonable definition. If Republicans choose to stick with Trump then, he’ll correctly conclude that he’s above the law.
Democrats can’t do much about this by themselves. Sure, they can attempt to convince the public that Trump’s actions demonstrate that he’s unfit for office, and it’s reasonable to consider every method of doing so, including a partisan impeachment ending in a party-line acquittal in the Senate. They should also continue their investigations, even though much of the case against Trump has been public from the beginning.
Sunset at Eragny Camille Pissaro
Aaron Balke of WAPO argues that “Ukraine being the focus of Trump’s whistleblower complaint is particularly ominous.”. We knew Trump felt that asking other nations for help with his political aspirations was something he was still willing to do. He trusts other spy agencies over our own. He outright announced it in an interview for ABC back in June. Well, instead of putting himself in debt to some one like Putin, he’s blackmailing a struggling democracy into doing it like you would assume a Mafioso Don would do.
That phone call took place July 25, and for a host of reasons — and depending on the substance of the complaint — it could spell real trouble for Trump and his supporters.
The main reason is because we already knew about demonstrated and very public interest from the Trump team in what Ukraine could provide them when it comes to Trump’s reelection effort. Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has publicly urged the Ukrainians to pursue investigations that he has admitted would benefit Trump, and one in particular that could damage what appears to be Trump’s most threatening potential 2020 Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.
In May, Giuliani canceled a controversial planned trip to Ukraine that he had admitted was intended to apply pressure on its government to investigate Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his work for a Ukrainian gas company that had previously been of interest to investigators in the country.
Giuliani even acknowledged before the planned trip that it was intended to help Trump and that Giuliani was “meddling” in foreign affairs to that end.
“We’re not meddling in an election; we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani told the New York Times’s Kenneth P. Vogel. Giuliani added: “There’s nothing illegal about it. Somebody could say it’s improper. . . . I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
It was a remarkable admission at the time — particularly that it could be “very, very helpful to my client” and separating that from the idea that it might also happen to benefit the U.S. government. And it’s even more remarkable in this moment.
When Giuliani canceled the trip, he blamed the Ukrainian government and suggested Democrats had overblown the situation.
https://twitter.com/smotus/status/1174887007186644992
So, the military aid package was just okayed by the Trump administration. The UK’s Independent had this information yesterday: “Zelensky defends relationship with US after Trump accused of pushing Ukraine to meddle in 2020 election. Ukraine’s new president insists that relations are ‘very good’ with the US and that there will be a meeting ‘soon’” All I can say at this point is meeting? MEETING?
Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky was fulsome in expressing his gratitude to Donald Trump for the military aid package.
The former professional comedian insisted his relationship with the former reality TV star was “very good” and that he was “sure we will have a meeting in the White House”.
But the $250m (£280m) of arms for Ukrainian forces, which are confronting Russian backed separatists, has been enmeshed in a bitter battle between the US president and his opponents over accusations that he has tried to manipulate it for underhand political reasons.
The Trump administration had in fact suspended the “Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative”, only agreeing to unblock it after rising bipartisan clamour from congress.
The ostensible reason for the hold-up was to ensure that it tallied with US interests.
The real reason, claim critics, was to pressure the Ukrainian government to target Joe Biden – the possible Democrat candidate for next year’s election – through an investigation into corruption allegations against his son.
Members of the Trump administration have claimed that Mr Biden, then Barack Obama’s vice president, had pressured the Ukrainian authorities to drop an investigation into Burisma, an energy company operating in the country, on which his son Hunter was a board member.
The claims against Mr Biden have been denied to a number of news organisations, including The Independent, by Ukrainian and western European officials.
Three Democrat-controlled house committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Government Reform – have announced that they would investigate whether a host of ethical and legal rules have been violated
Sunset, Paul Klee
So, yet another hearing that the Trump Rule of Lawlessness will sputter along while the public will likely not view it. We thought it was likely being held up after Congress appropriated because it was to help Ukraine confront Russia and of course Trump’s still Putin’s fuckboi. But, it was even more venal than that and typical of what the head of a mobster family would do. Please, take care of this little problem first and then we’ll be glad to fund your little struggle against invasion dear ally.
So, I really did think I was going home last night to get information on today’s Climate Strike which is going on as planned.
https://twitter.com/UKMoments/status/1174846942649581569
I could go on about NY Mayor Bill DiBlasio who finally threw in the towel on his lifeless presidential campaign today. I did enjoy hearing him speak when I saw him in July but it took him this long to realize he was’t going anywhere.
But, I’ll end with a NYT op ed by the two Political Scientists who wrote the book “How Democracies Die”. It’s called “Why Republicans Play Dirty. They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.”
The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a Court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget — while most Democrats were told no vote would be held and so attended a 9/11 commemoration. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions only function when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win “by any means necessary,” politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Go read the rest. It’s worth your time.
So, I’m going to drink more coffee and try to figure out why about 1/3 of the US population has lost any sense of patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution. While Colin Kapernick kneeled during singing a song that not one Founding Father ever heard they got upset. While Donald Trump pisses away articles and clauses of the Constitution they wrote, this group of people acts like it’s no big deal.
I’m now at a loss for words.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thunderous Thursday Reads: What Did Trump Promise A Foreign Leader?
Posted: September 19, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Acting DNI Joseph Maguire, Adam Schiff, Andrew P. Bakaj, Dan Coats, Donald Trump, House Intelligence Committee, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, Vladimir Putin, whisleblower, William Barr 30 Comments
Gustav Klimt, Large Poplar II (Approaching Thunderstorm)
Good Morning!!
Last night The Washington Post broke a story on the mysterious whistleblower complaint that Trump and Cover-up General Barr are trying to keep secret from Congress: Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say.
Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.
Gustav Klimt, Landscape with Birch Trees
Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of “urgent concern,” a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.
But acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire has refused to share details about Trump’s alleged transgression with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public view and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president.
The dispute is expected to escalate Thursday when Atkinson is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee in a classified session closed to the public. The hearing is the latest move by committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to compel U.S. intelligence officials to disclose the full details of the whistleblower complaint to Congress. Maguire has agreed to testify before the panel next week, according to a statement by Schiff. He declined to comment for this article.
This seems like a very big deal. Atkinson is meeting right now behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee. And the Dotard is up and tweeting about it.
Yes, I’d say quite a few of us believe that the dummy in the WH would do that. Some background from the WaPo story:
The complaint was filed with Atkinson’s office on Aug. 12, a date on which Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey. White House records indicate that Trump had had conversations or interactions with at least five foreign leaders in the preceding five weeks.
Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House initiated on July 31. Trump also received at least two letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the summer, describing them as “beautiful” messages. In June, Trump said publicly that he was opposed to certain CIA spying operations against North Korea. Referring to a Wall Street Journal report that the agency had recruited Kim’s half brother, Trump said, “I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices.”
Trump met with other foreign leaders at the White House in July, including the prime minister of Pakistan, the prime minister of the Netherlands and the emir of Qatar.
The Swamp, Gustav Klimt
Most likely the call in question is the one with Putin. As you may recall, that was the call in which Trump supposedly offered Russia help with the wildfires in Siberia. The Russian readout of the call was very different. Putin claimed that Trump’s offer demonstrated that normalization of relations between the two countries was possible.
Putin, in response, expressed his “sincere gratitude” to Trump and said that if necessary, he will accept the offer, the Kremlin said on its website.
“The President of Russia regards the US President’s offer as a sign that it is possible that full-scale bilateral relations will be restored in the future,” the statement from the Kremlin read.
“The presidents of Russia and the United States agreed to continue contacts both in a telephone format and in person,” it added.
However, the two countries differed somewhat in their interpretations of the call.
As NPR’s Tamara Keith reports, “Russia announced the call first, saying President Trump offered Putin assistance fighting wildfires in Siberia. … Putin assessed the offer as a sign that relations between the two countries would be fully restored. Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and is still under U.S. sanctions.”
Speculation from Twitter about what happened:
Shugarman has posted a thread with timelines from other twitter users of events that took place during the time in question. Click on the above tweet to read the thread. More timelines:
Response from @swatkins109:
“Also Huntsman (Ambassador to Russia) resigns Aug 6 Sept 3 trump announces military spending for NATO countries canceled.”
Make of all that what you will. I can’t wait till the whole story comes out, and it will.
David Frum writes at The Atlantic: The Question Posed by Trump’s Phone Call: A whistle-blower complaint raises the possibility that President Trump has betrayed the duties of his office.
On the 20th of July 1787, Gouverneur Morris rose inside the stiflingly hot Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, to explain why he had changed his mind and now favored including a power of impeachment in the constitutional text.
Until that point, he and others had feared that an impeachment power would leave the president too dependent on Congress. He had thought that the prospect of reelection defeat would offer a sufficient control on presidential wrongdoing.
A Morning by the Pond, Gustav Klimt
But Morris ultimately changed his mind.
Foreign corruption inducing treason was the core impeachable offense in the eyes of the authors of the Constitution.
Which is why a whistle-blower report filed with the inspector general for the intelligence community, reportedly concerning an improper “promise” by President Donald Trump to a foreign leader, has jolted Congress.
Earlier in the constitutional debates—back when he still opposed an impeachment provision—Morris argued that a corrupt or treasonable president “can do no criminal act without Coadjutors who may be punished.” Trump is surrounded by coadjutors, yet so far all are acting with impunity, joined now by the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who is withholding from Congress the apparently explosive information.
Trump has been engaged in improper contacts with foreign governments for years, and built deep business relationships with foreign nationals. Russian assistance helped elect him. Money from wealthy Russians reportedly helped keep his businesses alive from 2006 to 2016. Since 2016, more and more foreign money has flowed Trump’s way. Trump literally has a hotel open on Pennsylvania Avenue to accept payments—there’s a big carpet in front, his name on the door, nothing even remotely clandestine about the flow of corruption. That corruption seeks returns. Again and again, Trump has acted in ways that align with the interests of foreign states, raising questions about his motives.
Exactly what was promised in this particular conversation, and to whom, America and the world wait to hear.
I certainly hope we learn something from Adam Schiff when he emerges from that private briefing with the Inspector General.
Gustav Klimt, The Marshy Pond
The New York Times just broke a story about the hearing: Watchdog Refuses to Detail Whistle-Blower Complaint About Trump.
The internal watchdog for American spy agencies declined repeatedly in a briefing on Thursday to disclose to lawmakers the content of a potentially explosive whistle-blower complaint that is said to involve a discussion between President Trump and a foreign leader, according to two people familiar with the briefing.
During a private session on Capitol Hill, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, told lawmakers he was unable to confirm or deny anything about the substance of the complaint, including whether it involved the president, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door conversation. The meeting was still underway.
The complaint, which prompted a standoff between Congress and Mr. Trump’s top intelligence official, involves a commitment that Mr. Trump made in a communication with another world leader, according to a person familiar with the complaint….
Few details of the whistle-blower complaint are known, including the identity of the world leader. And it is not obvious how a communication between Mr. Trump and a foreign leader could meet the legal standards for a whistle-blower complaint that the inspector general would deem an “urgent concern.”
Under the law, the complaint has to concern the existence of an intelligence activity that violates the law, rules or regulations, or otherwise amounts to mismanagement, waste, abuse, or a danger to public safety. But a conversation between two foreign leaders is not itself an intelligence activity.
And while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit, legal experts said.
The NYT has the name of the whistleblower’s lawyer.
Andrew P. Bakaj, a former C.I.A. and Pentagon official whose legal practice specializes in whistle-blower and security clearance issues, confirmed that he is representing the official who filed the complaint. Mr. Bakaj declined to identify his client or to comment.
Obviously this story will be making news all day today. As the Dotard likes to say, “we’ll see what happens. Please post your thoughts on this story or anything else you find interesting in the comment thread below.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: September 17, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 42 Comments
Louise Williams Jackson, Woman Reading a Book on a Sofa
Good Morning!!
For months now, we’ve been talking about the society-wide depression and anxiety that Trump’s “presidency” has caused. Speaking for myself, I managed to stay glued to the news for quite a long time, but lately I’ve tried to protect myself by stepping back as much as possible and finding ways to nourish my psyche in order to avoid falling into despair over what is happening to this country.
I’ve still paid close attention to the damage Trump is doing, and I’ve found that I can do that without watching cable TV constantly and reading every horrific article I encounter. I’m still experiencing “Trump depression” though and I know I’m not alone.
In light of that, I want to begin this post by highlighting this helpful article by Paul Rosenberg at Salon: The Trump depression (and we don’t mean the economy): Key symptom of autocratic regimes. It’s quite long, but I hope you’ll go read the entire thing. Some excerpts:
Reviewing “Trump’s Wacky, Angry, and Extreme August” on Twitter, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser said the experience “was exhausting, a dark journey to a nasty and contentious place.” But that’s hardly news: it’s a place we live in every day. We try to turn the volume down and ignore it, and that may work for a while. But it won’t last. It can’t. It’s getting worse, and we can all see where we’re headed.
We know who Donald Trump admires, who he wants to be like — “president for life” as he keeps on telling us — and the countries they rule. Even as Trump insulted Americans and allies with abandon, Glasser noted, he found time to praise North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
America is nowhere near as bad as Brazil or China, much less North Korea. But our democracy is eroding significantly. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) tracks hundreds of attributes of democracy for 202 countries, spanning more than two centuries. Its 2019 report found that “24 countries are now severely affected by what is established as a ‘third wave of autocratization,'” an erosion of democratic rights “that has slowly gained momentum since the mid 1990s. … Among them are populous countries such as Brazil, India and the United States.”
If Trump has his way — demolishing all restraints on his power — things will only get much worse, with the journey Glasser took as a tour book guide of what’s to come. And people are feeling it in their bones.
By Keith Gantos ( EUA 1957) óleo sobre madeira
I think we all acknowledge at this point that Trump wants to be a dictator in the mold of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He has managed to get rid of the so-called “adults in the room” and surround himself with sycophants, yes men, and acting cabinet members whose jobs are subject to his whims. On the “Trump depression,” Rosenberg quotes “physician and scholar” Frederick Burkle.
“In America under Trump there is a population-based depression taking hold. It is a very subtle, smoldering, pervasive and serious condition that people in autocratic countries chronically live with,” physician and scholar Frederick “Skip” Burkle told me in a recent interview. Burkle has any number of academic credentials: He was founding director of the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance at the University of Hawaii, and currently serves in advisory or research capacities at the Harvard School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University Medical Institutes, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and elsewhere.
It was Burkle who first described Trump as a schoolyard bully to me, as I described in July. His own first childhood encounter with a bully taught him that such people were driven by “not just the violence and intimidation, but the narcissist’s hallmark sense of impunity, backed up by effortless deceit, blame-shifting, and manipulation,” as I expressed it.
“When I did see young adults with sociopathy and narcissism, the depression among their caretaker parents was pervasive,” Burkle told me in our recent conversation. “They control the agenda and suck all the oxygen out of the room every day. They also sap all the energy out of their caretaker parents and staff later in life, and are quick to blame others for the consequences.” It’s not accidental, he observed, that Trump underlings like Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are the ones convicted of crimes.
Meanwhile, the wider public, overwhelmed by the Trumpian chaos, becomes depressed, disoriented and exhausted, as Burkle puts it.
Woman Reading In Bath by Chen Bolen
Rosenberg cites several other experts, including Elizabeth Mika who wrote a chapter in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
When I reached out to Mika…, she cited two concepts as particularly important for “understanding our sociopolitical situation” — both what’s driving the depression Burkle speaks of, and what points toward the way out.
“The first one is pathocracy,” Mika said. “which is the rule of pathological characters — specifically, people with entirely absent or severely compromised conscience — who, because of their character defect, are devoted pretty much exclusively to the pursuit of power by any means possible.”
Pathocracies spread into general populace like cancer, taking over and destroying organs of social and political life, along with individual human beings. People living under pathocracies become demoralized and despondent. Depression and despair, along with various social pathologies, are predictable consequences of being forced to adjust to immoral and inhumane socio-political systems based on lies and exploitation.
Yet “just as pathocracy spreads in a populace, so does a healthy resistance to it,” she explained.
Awakening to the reality of pathocracy, mobilizing against it and dismantling it, is a process of positive disintegration — the second concept I mentioned at the start — during which individuals come to realize the importance of higher values, and start implementing them, little by little, in their daily lives.
The way out is not a return to normalcy, since as Mika noted above, “The tyrant shows up in a society that is already weakened by disorder.”
I know I’ve quoted a lot, but there’s much more to read at the link. I hope you’ll check it out.
Fyffe Christie (1918-1979) – The artist’s wife reading (1953)
I don’t know why this story on Russian spying at Yahoo News isn’t getting more attention: Exclusive: Russia carried out a ‘stunning’ breach of FBI communications system, escalating the spy game on U.S. soil, by Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin and Sean D. Naylor.
On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.
The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.
Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.
It appears that Russian interference in our elections was only the tip of the iceberg.
“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.
Girl reading a book, (after 1930) by Bertold Piotr Oczko born 1910 in Bielsko, Poland died 1943 in Krakau, Poland
American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.
These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.
The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Once again, I’ve quoted a great deal, but it’s a very long piece that is both interesting and alarming.
A lady reading a book Ernst Liebermann born May 8, 1869 in Langemuss (Meiningen), Germany
This next story is horrific, and once again it began under Obama. The Washington Post: U.S. officials knew bomb-sniffing dogs were dying from neglect in Jordan. They sent more.
The State Department sent dozens of highly skilled explosive-detection dogs to Jordan, even after the agency assessed a high degree of mistreatment and failure to care for the animals in 2016, according to an inspector general report concluded last week. It ultimately led to their early deaths and crushed their spirits so brutally that the dogs “lost the will to work,” the report says.
At least 10 dogs provided to Jordan died of “various medical problems” out of at least 100 canines sent there between 2008 and 2016, the report found, and surviving dogs were starved in kennels smeared with feces and dirt. Dogs were overworked in the desert, suffered hip dysplasia and other conditions. Engorged ticks ringed their ears.
Zoe, [a] Belgian Malinois, died of heat stroke on the Syrian border in 2017, less than a year after her arrival. Veterinarians told investigators that such deaths are not accidental and pointed to negligence on the part of Jordanian handlers.
The report reveals an alarming and fast collapse of dogs that arrived healthy and strong in Jordan, only to be fighting for their lives in a matter of months….
Athena, a 2-year old Belgian Malinois, was found starved in Jordan by U.S. dog handling officials and evacuated to the United States for recovery.
Photos in Jordan show Athena’s malnourished body. Feces covered her kennel floor, her water bowl bone-dry. The State Department had two full-time dog handling mentors on the ground “during the entire time” Athena was in Jordan, the report found, but her condition did not set off any alarms until a site visit in April 2018.
By then, the State Department knew for two years — after an April 2016 site visit — that Jordan was unable to adequately care for and protect dogs carrying out dirty, hot and dangerous work to find explosives in violent places like the Syrian border.
Yet at least 60 dogs arrived in six waves through 2018 after the assessment, the report found
As the Brits say, bloody hell. This is intolerable!
Woman Reading, by Lex Veen
More reads, links only.
Vanity Fair: “They Played It Up Pretty Big”: Turmoil Engulfs The Times Over The Kavanaugh Debacle.
Mimi Rocah at USA Today: Confirmed: Powerful men ignored women in short-circuited Brett Kavanaugh investigation.
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: The New Kavanaugh Reporting Shows How Far Trump’s Control Goes.
Vox: Susan Collins is in the political fight of her life, and Brett Kavanaugh is a huge factor.
The Washington Post: Pentagon urges restraint after strikes on Saudi oil facilities.
Washington Post Editorial Board: Trump has dug himself into a hole with Iran.
Politico: Trump’s deference to Saudi Arabia infuriates much of D.C.
Buzzfeed News: Donald Trump Keeps Telling World Leaders The Same Bizarre Story About Kim Jong Un.
Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair: “Trump is Annoyed Pence Hasn’t Been Defending Him More”: Is Trump’s Long-Suffering V.P. in Danger of Getting Bounced?
Politico: Air Force crews stayed at Trump’s Turnberry resort for days at a time.
So . . . what stories are you following today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments