Biden dropped 9 points to 17 percent after his dismal performance in Iowa, followed close behind by former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who rose 7 points to 15 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who dropped 1 point to 14 percent.
Tuesday Reads: New Hampshire Primary and Barr’s Injustice Department
Posted: February 11, 2020 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bill Barr, Injustice Department, New Hampshire primary 32 Comments
Je Suis Un Gourmand, by William Logsdail
Good Morning!!
Last night MSNBC reported on primary results in three small towns in New Hampshire where voting starts at midnight. Not that it means anything yet, but Amy Klobuchar came out on top.
WMUR: First results of 2020 New Hampshire Primary are in. Amy Klobuchar, Donald Trump lead.
Dixville Notch kicked off the primary festivities Tuesday as they have done for decades, and the result was described as “interesting.”
Michael Bloomberg got three write-in votes, one of which was a write-in vote in the Republican primary. It’s a rarity in Dixville Notch for write-in votes. Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders each got one vote….
Sen. Amy Klobuchar was the popular choice in Hart’s Location, receiving six votes in the Democratic race. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in second with four votes. Andrew Yang and Sanders followed with three votes and two votes, respectively. Former vice president Joe Biden, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Steyer each received one vote….
Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Girl with doll
In Millsfield, Klobuchar took home the win in the Democratic race with two votes. Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders each got one vote. Trump received 16 votes from Millsfield. Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld got one vote.
It’s not looking good for Joe Biden. Axios summarized the results of the latest Quinnipac poll:
“Biden no longer dominates on the key question of electability,” with 27% of national Democratic or Dem-leaning voters giving Biden the best chance of beating President Trump — a steep drop from 44% just two weeks ago.
- Sanders was second with 24%. Bloomberg was third with 17% — up from 9% in late January, and ahead of Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar.
- Among black primary voters, the poll found Biden’s lead has dropped to 27% from 51% in December, with Bloomberg jumping to the second spot, at 22%, slightly ahead of Sanders.
Meanwhile, the oddsmakers see Bloomberg in second among Democrats right now, behind Sanders.
Here are results of a Morning Consult poll of black voters:
Amy Klobuchar also got 1%.
Politico on the Quinnipac poll: Biden plummets in new national poll, ceding top spot to Bernie.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has plummeted in a new national poll out Monday that also shows Bernie Sanders with a clear lead among Democratic voters heading into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin – Girl with doll, 1890s
The new Quinnipiac University poll, conducted after Sanders’ strong showing in the Iowa caucuses a week ago, has the Vermont senator boasting the support of 25 percent of Democratic voters, making an 8-point lead over Biden and a 4-point increase over the last national survey taken before the caucuses.
While former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg got a 4-point bump after appearing to narrowly edge Sanders out for first place in the Iowa state delegate count — results which Buttigieg and Sanders are both challenging — Buttigieg came in at fifth place nationally in the Quinnipiac poll, with 10 percent of the vote. Sen. Amy Klobuchar rounds out the top six with 4 percent, a drop of 3 points, while no other candidate broke 2 percent in the poll.
So it’s beginning to look like another primary crash and burn for Biden. A few more opinion pieces to check out:
Ryan Lizza at Politico: This Democratic field is so flawed that even Biden still has a chance.
Karen Tumulty at The Washington Post: There are two Joe Bidens. The wrong one is running for president.
Ben Terris at The Washington Post: On the trail with Joe Biden: What happens when the ‘electability candidate’ starts to lose?
It’s not looking good for Elizabeth Warren either. She’s from Massachusetts and she should be doing well in New Hampshire. I always assumed she would come in second to Bernie Sanders; but that’s not happening–at least according to the polls. She isn’t picking up enough of the black voter either.
Matt Flegenheimer at The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren Is Running Her Race. The Real One May Be Passing Her By.
Two days before a once-mission-critical primary in a state she neighbors, Senator Elizabeth Warren — typically exceptional at holding a room — had not finished speaking when something unusual happened: Dozens of voters began filtering out of the middle school gym she had reserved.
John White Alexander. Portrait of a Young Girl with Her Doll
Campaign staff strained to enlist prospective volunteers on their way to their cars. “Someone, anyone,” one organizer called out as departing guests stepped around him.
And when Ms. Warren wound toward her big finish, the go-out-and-get-’em kicker in these urgent final hours, her mind wandered accidentally to home.
“It’s up to you, Massachusetts, to decide what to do,” Ms. Warren instructed.
Supporters looked back at her, murmuring. She realized why. “And to the people of New Hampshire!” she amended.
On the eve of a contest she had hoped to win (and probably will not, according to polls) — one week removed from a caucus she had hoped to win (and certainly did not, according to Iowans) — Ms. Warren has arrived, almost imperceptibly, at a precarious stage.
In a primary adjoining her own state, it is Senator Bernie Sanders, another New Englander, and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who are leading sin polls.
Warren’s campaign also appears to be struggling financially.
What about Amy Klobuchar? Is she really surging in New Hampshire? Stranger things have happened. New Hampshire voters have a tendency to pull off surprises.
Buzzfeed News: Amy Klobuchar’s New Hampshire Surge Might Really Be Happening.
Pundits have been predicting the moderate Minnesota senator’s rise in the Democratic primary since October, as she racked up supposed debate wins and endorsements and built a campaign on her own “electability” in the states Democrats desperately need in 2020. For months, though, there was little sign among voters of that surge. Polls remained stagnant, and small, quiet crowds often tailed her in Iowa.
But this time, after the latest Democratic debate and just before New Hampshire votes in the nation’s first primary, there’s serious evidence that the Klobuchar is becoming a threat to the other moderates in the race: record-sized crowds, impressive fundraising hauls, and polls that suddenly show her in third place, ahead of Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
Louis Adolphe Tessier (1858-1915) — Girl with Doll, 1901
Her delight at this fact, at a succession of diners and packed rallies across New Hampshire, is palpable.
“And by the way, I’ve got a plan for the Midwest — and we can include New Hampshire as well,” Klobuchar told Sunday’s middle school gym crowd. “We’re going to build a beautiful blue wall around these states, and we’re going to make Donald Trump pay for it.”
Click the Buzzfeed link to read the rest.
Vox: Klobmentum could be happening in New Hampshire.
A string of strong polls over the weekend have shown the Minnesota senator overtaking Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden to reach third place in New Hampshire, which votes Tuesday. Over the weekend, her campaign reported $2.5 million in post-debate fundraising — an impressive two-day number in the context of the $11.4 million she raised in the last three months of 2019.
It’s a change for Klobuchar, whose national polling has been mired in the low single digits since she entered the race in February 2019. Nationally, she’s in sixth at 4.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, 4 percentage points behind former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But Biden’s weak performance in Iowa seems to have given Klobuchar, who came in just behind him in fifth place, an opening. And a strong performance in New Hampshire could bolster her candidacy going into Super Tuesday.
Like Buttigieg and Biden, Klobuchar has positioned herself as a moderate. On the debate stage, she has emphasized practicality, party unity, and a uniquely Midwestern case for electability: She’s mentioned repeatedly that she’s one of the only candidates who’s never lost a race — and that she outperformed Hillary Clinton in multiple Minnesota counties in 2016.
By framing her candidacy in this way, Klobuchar is targeting voters who may still be making up their minds — including some who are searching for a moderate alternative to the white male frontrunners. And recent polls indicate her message might be resonating in New Hampshire.
Read more at Vox.
The problem for both Warren and Klobuchar is that so far they are not winning the black vote. But I suppose that could change if one of them starts looking like she could beat Trump.
The Washington Post: Barr acknowledges Justice Dept. has created ‘intake process’ to vet Giuliani’s information on Bidens.
Jan Sluijters – Portrait of a girl, 1935
Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged Monday that the Justice Department would evaluate material that Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about former vice president Joe Biden and his family — though Barr and other officials suggested Giuliani was being treated no differently than any tipster.
At a news conference on an unrelated case, Barr confirmed an assertion made Sunday by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that the Justice Department had “created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”
Barr said he had established an “intake process in the field” so that the Justice Department and intelligence agencies could scrutinize information they were given.
“That is true for all information that comes to the department relating to the Ukraine, including anything Mr. Giuliani might provide,” Barr said. He did not provide any other specifics.
A Justice Department official said Giuliani had “recently” shared information with federal law enforcement officials through the process described by Barr. Two people familiar with the matter said the information is being routed to the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh.
This could all be a waste of time for Trump and Barr if Biden’s campaign continues to go downhill. I wonder what foreign countries they will ask to help if the nominee is someone else? I guess they could get a lot from Russia on Bernie Sanders.
Raw Story: Barr declares war against sanctuary cities – expert says he’s targeting democratic jurisdictions.
Attorney General Bill Barr has launched an all-out attack against sanctuary cities, claiming they are endangering national security. The AG says he will allow the Dept. of Homeland Security to issue “federal subpoenas to access information about criminal aliens in the custody of uncooperative jurisdictions,” Fox News reports.
Barr says the DOJ is targeting the State of New Jersey and King County, Washington, and will be “reviewing the practices, policies, and laws of other jurisdictions across the country. This includes assessing whether jurisdictions are complying with our criminal laws, in particular the criminal statute that prohibits the harboring or shielding of aliens in the United States.”
Miss Winifred Hudson as a Young Girl, 1888 — by Nicholas Chevalier (Australian, 1828-1902)
In addition to targeting certain state and local governments, Barr appears to be making the targeting personal, declaring, “we are meticulously reviewing the actions of certain district attorneys who have adopted policies of charging foreign nationals with lesser offenses for the express purpose of avoiding the federal immigration consequences of those nationals’ criminal conduct. In pursuing their personal ambitions and misguided notions of equal justice, these district attorneys are systematically violating the rule of law and may even be unlawfully discriminating against American citizens.”
Read more at the link.
One more from The Daily Beast: The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism.
The FBI is expanding its focus on domestic terrorism, and that includes pro-choice violence—even though such violence is so vanishingly rare, it’s all but nonexistent.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray disclosed that the bureau has recently “changed our terminology as part of a broader reorganization of the way in which we categorize our domestic terrorism efforts.” It’s part of a much-heralded reinvigoration of the bureau’s domestic terrorism focus after a rising tide of mostly white-supremacist terrorism.
Among four broad categories of domestic terrorism that the FBI confronts, Wray said, is “abortion violent extremism.”
But Wray wasn’t only talking about the pro-life extremism that murders abortion providers in their churches, he hastened to add, but “people on either side of that issue who commit violence on behalf of different views on that topic.”
His questioner, Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), was puzzled at Wray’s seeming equivalence: “People on either side of that issue don’t commit violence.” In fact, the FBI pointed The Daily Beast to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.
I just don’t know what to say about all this. We are in big trouble as a country. Hang in there Sky Dancers! As always, this is an open thread.
Lazy Caturday Reads: Unleashed Trump Begins Purge
Posted: February 8, 2020 Filed under: just because 25 Comments
Good Morning!!
Have you heard? Good ol’ Susan Collins “says she opposes any retribution against impeachment witnesses.”
Sen. Susan Collins on Friday defended her decision to vote to acquit President Trump during his Senate impeachment trial this week, but she declined to respond to questions later in the day about the sudden ouster of two key impeachment witnesses who testified against the president.
In her first public appearance in Maine since the trial ended Wednesday, Collins spoke at a chiefs of police conference in South Portland before answering questions from the media in which she condemned the notion of retribution against witnesses who came forward and defended her voting record.
By the end of the day, the Trump administration had removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, both of whom worked for the National Security Council in the White House. Later Friday, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland announced that he was being recalled to Washington. Sondland and Alexander Vindman testified during the House impeachment hearings against Trump.
“I think it’s important to understand that when you’re in an impeachment trial, you consider the evidence that is before you,” Collins, a Republican, said after an event in South Portland. “You don’t try to make predictions. You consider the evidence that’s before you. In this case, the evidence did not meet the high bar that’s established by the Constitution for immediate removal of the president from office. So that was the basis for my decision.”
She then added: “I obviously am not in favor of any kind of retribution against anyone who came forward with evidence.”
Poor Susan. How was she supposed to know that Trump would act like Trump? Read more at the Portland Press Herald link above.
Trump’s push to remove Sondland and Vindman — and to exact punishment on other figures involved in the nearly five-month impeachment process — underscored how his fixation with settling scores is outweighing any effort to move on to less divisive issues in the wake of his acquittal.
Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, was also removed from his job at the National Security Council, where he worked as a lawyer, and was escorted off the grounds Friday afternoon.
The firings of Sondland and Alexander Vindman amounted to a post-impeachment bloodletting of key figures who complied with congressional subpoenas and testified in a process that Trump sought to delegitimize as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
“I’m not happy with him,” Trump said earlier Friday when asked about Vindman’s future. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not.”
There was little resistance from within the Republican Party to the idea of punishing Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient and Ukraine expert, after The Washington Post reported Thursday night that he could soon be removed from his White House job. Some GOP lawmakers egged the president on — a sign of how much Trump has asserted his influence on the party.
And get this: Trump wants to fire the inspector general who accepted the whistleblower complaint about the Ukraine call along with purging the NSC.
The president and his advisers have also discussed removing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, though no final decision has been made, officials said. Trump has expressed frustration that Atkinson allowed a whistleblower report documenting Trump’s alleged misconduct toward Ukraine to be transmitted to Congress.
Some advisers have also counseled the president to remove Victoria Coates, the deputy national security adviser, who has told others in the White House that she fears her job is in jeopardy.
Trump has regularly asked aides to continue slashing the size of the NSC, and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has said he plans to do so, telling NPR in an interview last month that the policy staff, which he put at about 180 people when he took over in September, was bloated.
By the end of February, O’Brien said, he hoped to have cut it by a third. A senior administration official said there will be widespread departures at the NSC in the next week.
At NBC News, Sharon Pettypiece writes that Trump appears to be planning to avenge himself on House Democrats.
President Donald Trump said Friday that his impeachment should be invalidated, and he gave an ominous warning when asked how he’ll pay back those responsible, saying, “You’ll see.”
“Should they expunge the impeachment in the House? They should because it was a hoax,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing on Marine One.
When asked about his press secretary’s comments that the president was suggesting in his remarks Thursday on impeachment that his Democratic political opponents “should be held accountable,” Trump said, “Well, you’ll see. I mean, we’ll see what happens.”
Trump showed little sign of wanting to mend fences with the Democrats, saying they suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” and that there is “a lot of evil on that side.” When asked how he was going to unify the country following his divisive impeachment, Trump said he would do it by “great success.”
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Friday Night Massacre’s Just the Beginning for Acquitted Trump. On the firings of the Vindland brothers and Sondland, Rothkopf writes:
Their firings and forced departures from their jobs are, by any definition, retaliation against witnesses in the case against the president. That’s a crime. But of course, that crime will never be enforced because the U.S. government agency responsible for enforcing such laws, the Department of Justice, has been taken over by an attorney general who has perjured himself before Congress, violated his oath and placed the protection of the president ahead of the interests of the American people to whom he owes his highest duty. This week, just after the Senate’s “total acquittal,” Barr issued a memo saying that no further investigations into any presidential or vice-presidential candidate or his staff could be issued without his express approval.
Between Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump has been given free rein to be his worst self. And Trump never disappoints those who expect the worst of him. In the past few days he used a prayer breakfast to attack his enemies and question their faith. He awarded a racist the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of a rambling, vapid State of the Union that had more in common with a television game show than with anything the Capitol building had ever seen before him. He held a press event to celebrate the Senate vote that was by turns vituperative against his opponents and so deranged that you expected the men with the butterfly nets to burst into the East Room of the White House and escort Trump to a quiet place where there were no sharp objects.
As the week drew to a close, a chilling realization settled in on the nation. Our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history. He has been told he is above the law, incapable of committing a crime. He has been told that Article II of the Constitution grants him unlimited powers. He has been told he does not have submit to the oversight of the Congress.
He is, in other words, free to be himself. And we all know who that is—except perhaps Senator Susan Collins and the other Senate suckers who expected that somehow our felon-in-chief had learned a lesson from this impeachment ordeal. Trump is a man who thinks the law is for little people, that the rich can buy their way out of any legal predicament. He thinks character and courage and duty, the traits displayed by Yovanovitch and the Vindmans, are for suckers.
There’s more, but it’s behind the paywall.
Yesterday afternoon, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Nancy Pelosi: McConnell and the GOP Senate are accomplices to Trump’s wrongdoing.
For more than 200 years, our republic has endured, not only because of the wisdom of our Founders and the brilliance of our Constitution, but because of the generations of patriotic Americans who have had the courage to risk their lives to defend it.
But, tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish.
The House impeachment managers, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), presented to the Senate and the public an incontrovertible truth that the president himself has admitted: President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election. And when he was caught, the president launched an unprecedented coverup to block Congress from holding him accountable. The president’s actions undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections and violated the Constitution.
The Democrats in the Senate under the leadership of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) patriotically voted unanimously to honor the oath to support and defend the Constitution. They, along with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), deserve our gratitude for their moral courage.
The president’s lawyers all but concede his misconduct. Their argument was only that Congress and the American people have no right to stop him from using his power to cheat in our elections. With their vote, Senate Republicans embraced this darkest vision of power: that if the president believes his reelection is good for the country, he can then use any means necessary to win, with no accountability or consequences.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
One more story before I sign off. The Washington Post: Meet the 71-year-old staging a one-man protest in his Trump-loving retirement community.
“When Trump won, it changed the whole ballgame for me,” McGinty told The Washington Post. “I thought to myself, ‘This was supposed to be a joke. What’s wrong with these people?’ ”
In the three years since then, the once-quiet political observer has transformed into the best-known Trump protester in The Villages, a sprawling, meticulously planned and maintained retirement community that lies about 45 miles northwest of Orlando. McGinty’s daily vigil with signs blasting the president as a “SEXUAL PREDATOR” (among other things) has drawn ire in the Trump-loving Florida town he has called home since 2016. It has also brought viral fame.
For his one-man protest against the president, McGinty has been berated as a baby killer and a “dumb a–,” decried in letters to the editor of a local news site and hit with an anonymous, handwritten threat — a sign that even a town that is described as Disney World for retirees and markets itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown” is not immune to the divisiveness of this political era.
“There was always a divide, but we coexisted,” said Chris Stanley, president of The Villages Democratic Club. “There would be some good-natured back and forth, but your neighbors were your friends. You’d have dinner with the Republicans because it wasn’t a big deal. … These days, the division in the country shows up best in The Villages because now the Republicans, they won’t golf with you anymore, or you don’t want to golf with them.” [….]
These days, McGinty devotes about two hours a day to protesting, crashing rallies planned by the Villagers for Trump group and parking his golf cart in well-trafficked areas where people are most likely to see his signs: “TRUMP BIGOT AND RACIST,” “TRUMP IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR” and “TRUMP COMPULSIVE LIAR.” He said he rotates between about 30 posters carrying various anti-Trump sentiments. He sits in his cart reading while he puts them on display, enjoying the confrontations that follow.
Have a nice weekend, Sky Dancers! As always, this is an open thread.
Thursday Reads: Trump Unleashed
Posted: February 6, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 28 Comments
Good Morning!!
I had almost no sleep last night, and I’m not thinking that clearly. Trump has been “acquitted” by the GOP Senate, and he is now free to threaten his political opponents and sic his cult followers on them, bribe people for votes, and threaten foreign countries into helping his reelection campaign. He is also suffering from obvious dementia and yet he’s in charge the U.S. military and the nuclear codes. We are in big trouble as a country.
Here’s the latest:
Trump spoke at the the “national prayer breakfast” this morning, and he sounded like a lunatic. He began by holding up newspaper headlines about his “acquittal.” His speech was slow and halting as he issued thinly veiled threats to Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney.
The audience stood clapped in unison at the beginning like Kim Jong Un’s audiences. It was frightening.
Luppe B. Luppen at Yahoo News: Treasury Department sent information on Hunter Biden to expanding GOP Senate inquiry.
The U.S. Treasury Department has complied with Republican Senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely-held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.
For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.
Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the US government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from cabinet departments and agencies, including the Department of State, the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Archives, and the Secret Service.
Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement–highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.
The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic Senator on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican Senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
Brian Barrett at Wired: Trump’s Ukraine Server Delusion Is Spreading.
Where does this malignant conspiracy theory come from in the first place? Maybe Paul Manafort. Probably 4chan. Regardless, it has since stuck in the president’s brain like a Ceti eel placed by a wrathful Khan, burrowing deeper until it consumes whatever remains of rational thought. The story, as Trump recently posited on a marathon call-in to Fox and Friends, goes something like this:
“A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting. They have the server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee. The FBI went in, and they told them, ‘Get out of here, we’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
The conspiracy appears to have metastasized.A light edit for coherence: Trump believes—and by all indications this is true belief, not posturing—that after the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016, the DNC gave a physical server to Ukrainian cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and refused to let the FBI see the evidence. Trump further argues that the server in question now physically resides in Ukraine. Inside that server, Trump suggests, one would find evidence, gleaming like a Pulp Fiction briefcase, that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC in 2016….
Almost every aspect of this is demonstrably wrong. CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company. Its cofounder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, was born in Russia and has lived in the US since his teenage years. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California, and went public this summer. As is standard in this sort of incident response, CrowdStrike never took physical possession of any DNC server. Its analysts instead captured an “image” of the hard drives and memories of affected machines, exact replicas that it could examine for signs of malfeasance. It handed all of that forensic evidence over to the FBI, which Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general Adam Hickey confirmed just last month. And if the logical contortions required to view CrowdStrike as somehow partisan in all of this aren’t already enough, know that the company counts the Republican National Congressional Committee among its clients.
So: Not Ukrainian. No physical server. Not only was the FBI directly involved, but the DOJ indicted the Russian hackers responsible and laid out in exquisite detail how they did it—and how CrowdStrike fought them off. You can read the indictment for yourself here. Start on page 10; CrowdStrike is Company 1.
But it doesn’t matter what the truth is anymore. Trump’s idiotic propaganda is working.
Trump is going to give another “speech” at the White House soon, so he can gloat about his “great victory” over the Democrats and threaten retaliation against anyone who dares to cross him.
The Washington Post: Trump impeachment live updates: President lashes out at Democrats as ‘corrupt people’ at National Prayer Breakfast, in his first public remarks after acquittal.
Watch more of Pelosi’s press conference on C-Span’s Twitter feed.
From The Washington Post: ‘I feel very liberated,’ Pelosi says.
At her weekly news conference, Pelosi defended her decision to rip up Trump’s State of the Union address and told reporters she feels “liberated” in the wake of the speech.
“I feel very liberated,” Pelosi said. “I feel that I have extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect. I say to my members all the time, there is no such thing as an eternal animosity.”
She described her decision to tear up the speech as “a dignified act” and took aim at Trump on a personal level, noting that the president “looked to me like he was a little sedated” during the speech.
And she questioned Trump’s decision to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.
“When he started talking about someone with cancer, we thought he was going to talk about John Lewis, a hero in our country,” Pelosi said, referring to the Georgia congressman and civil rights icon, who revealed in December that he has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Pelosi also criticized Trump’s choice of venue for granting the medal to Limbaugh. “Do it in your own office! We don’t come in your office and do congressional business,” she said.
Of Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, Pelosi added that the president is “talking about things that he knows little about — faith and prayer.”
“I don’t know if the president understands about prayer or people who do pray. … I pray hard for him because he’s so off the track of our Constitution, our values, our country,” she said.
Concluding her news conference, she added: “He has shredded the truth in his speech. He’s shredding the Constitution in his conduct. I shredded his ‘state of his mind’ address.”
Trump is speaking now. I feel sick. I know this isn’t much of a post, but it’s all I can muster today. I’m grateful for this blog and for all you Sky Dancers. I don’t know how I would manage without you.
Terrible Tuesday Reads: Iowa’s Chaotic Meltdown, Clusterf#ck, Sh#tshow
Posted: February 4, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2020, Bernie Sanders, David Enrich, DeMoines Register poll, Deutche Bank, DNC, Donald Trump, Iowa Caucuses 34 Comments
Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston, by Frederick Child Hassam
Good Morning!!
Can we please stop letting Iowa go first now?
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine: R.I.P. the ‘First-In-the-Nation’ Iowa Caucuses (1972-2020).
The “first-in-the-nation” Iowa caucuses died Monday night after a protracted battle with advanced-stage omnishambles.
DeMoines Skyline by Buffalo Bonker
Or so we can hope. Iowa’s eccentric, endearing — and wildly anti-democratic — nominating contest has always been an indefensible institution. There is no reason why the most politically-engaged and/or time-rich citizens of America’s 31st most populous state should have the power to veto presidential candidates before anyone else in the country has a say. And yet, few of Iowa’s bitterest critics ever dreamed it would subject the country to something like this.
As of this writing, we are one hour into Tuesday morning and only a small fraction of Iowa precincts have reported their results. Officials currently say that they hope to have the numbers by “some time Tuesday.” The ostensible reasons for this are twofold. 1) This year, for the first time ever, the Iowa Democratic Party was required to report three distinct sets of results — the vote tally on “first alignment,” the vote tally on “final alignment” (when backers of candidates who lack 15% support redistribute their votes to higher-polling candidates), and the final delegate tally. In the past, the party was only on the hook for that last metric, which is much easier to tabulate. 2) To ease the burden of logging all this information from more than 1,600 precincts, the party developed an app for reporting results — which many precinct chairs could not figure out how to use. Thus, they began calling in the results on a telephone hotline. Much waiting on hold ensued.
Guess who pushed for the changes in the vote counting and reporting?
Politico: ‘It’s a total meltdown’: Confusion seizes Iowa as officials struggle to report results.
No results had been reported by midnight Eastern, and two campaigns told POLITICO that after a conference call with the Iowa Democratic Party, they didn’t expect any returns until Tuesday morning at the earliest.
Candidates stepped into the void. Pete Buttigieg went first by claiming victory — misleadingly, in the view of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign responded by releasing unofficial figures showing his strength. Amy Klobuchar also joined in by citing unverified results she said demonstrated a robust performance.
Edward Hopper cityscape
The biggest “winner” might have been Joe Biden. According to the Iowa entrance poll, he was hovering close to the viability threshold of 15 percent statewide. But the questions surrounding the vote-counting served to obscure a potentially poor performance. The former vice president, facing potentially ugly headlines going into New Hampshire and beyond, couldn’t get out of Iowa fast enough.
“We’re going to walk out of here with our share of delegates,” Biden declared to a packed room on the Drake University campus. “It’s on to New Hampshire!”
Conversely, it might have delivered a blow to Sanders and Buttigieg, who appeared on track to do well in the state. Whether the victor turns out to be Sanders or Buttigieg or someone else, that candidate was denied the chance to give an election night victory speech to a nationwide audience — a springboard heading into New Hampshire.
Read more at Politico.
The New York Times:
The app that the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned to tabulate and report results from the caucuses on Monday was not properly tested at a statewide scale, said people who were briefed on the app by the state party.
It was quickly put together in just the past two months, said the people, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Life in the Suburbs, by Leonard Koscianski
And the party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials, according to David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.
And let’s not forget what happened with the final Iowa poll. Ben Smith at Buzzfeed News: This Iowa Poll Was Never Published. It’s Still Influencing What You Read.
The Des Moines Register spiked its poll Saturday night, but by the next day it seemed most reporters here had seen the numbers — or something purporting to be the numbers.
Here’s what happened: As the Des Moines Register readied a cover story and CNN prepped for an hourlong special about the time-honored poll, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained that his name hadn’t been offered to some poll recipients. The pollster, Ann Selzer, quickly discovered the glitch in a Florida call center that triggered the error. It seemed likely to be just a minor error — but everyone involved cares about their reputation for trustworthiness, and they quickly decided to pull the poll rather than publish with doubts.
But the news organizations had already been preparing to publish the numbers, and a version of them began to circulate almost instantly. I won’t print those numbers: I haven’t been able to confirm that the numbers I’ve seen are the already-questionable official ones.
And yet, most veterans of coverage here trust Selzer’s surveys. So many acknowledged to me last night that they’d quietly taken the unreleased and possibly wrong numbers into account.
“Nobody was talking about Elizabeth Warren and now everybody thinks she has a shot because of those numbers,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive political consultant who supports Warren. (It’s not the only reason, I should note: Other polls this week also showed Warren in a strong position, as did the last published Selzer poll in January.)
Read more at the link.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: Iowa Might Have Screwed Up The Whole Nomination Process.
In trying to build a forecast model of the Democratic primaries, we literally had to think about the entire process from start (Iowa) to finish (the Virgin Islands on June 6). Actually, we had to do more than that. Since the nomination process is sequential — states vote one at a time rather than all at once — we had to determine, empirically, how much the results of one state can affect the rest.
By Ron Francis
The answer in the case of Iowa is that it matters a lot. Despite its demographic non-representativeness, and the quirks of the caucuses process, the amount of media coverage the state gets makes it far more valuable a prize than you’d assume from the fact that it only accounts for 41 of the Democrats’ 3,979 pledged delegates.
More specifically, we estimate — based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls — that Iowa was the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday. It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, about 20 times its actual number.
Everything was a little weird in Iowa this year, however. And there were already some signs that the Iowa bounce — which essentially results from all the favorable media coverage that winning candidates get — might be smaller than normal….
But we weren’t prepared for what actually happened, which is that — as I’m writing this at 3:15 a.m. on Tuesday — the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn’t released any results from its caucuses. I’m not going to predict what those numbers will eventually be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results. The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses is now — and will forever be — the colossal shitshow around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.
In other news, The New York Times Magazine has published an article adapted from David Enrich’s forthcoming book about Trump and Deutche Bank: The Money Behind Trump’s Money. The inside story of the president and Deutsche Bank, his lender of last resort. It’s very long and involved, but here’s a brief excerpt:
George Grosz, Street Scene
Last April, congressional Democrats subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for its records on Trump, his family members and his businesses. The Trump family sued to block the bank from complying; after two federal courts ruled against the Trumps, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with oral arguments expected in the spring. State prosecutors, meanwhile, are investigating the bank’s ties with Trump, too. The F.B.I. has been conducting its own wide-ranging investigation of Deutsche Bank, and people connected to the bank told me they have been interviewed by special agents about aspects of the Trump relationship.
If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.
One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, Deutsche Bank would probably know.
Also, Trump will give his fake state of the union address tonight, and I won’t be watching. What are you thinking and reading today?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Seek Comfort In Simple Things.
Posted: February 1, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 19 Comments
Merchant’s Wife Drinking Tea (in the company of her cat) 1920, Boris Kustodiev
Good Morning!!
As we grieve over the potential death of American democracy, Bernie Sanders and his supporters prepare to dance on its grave.
Alongside Tlaib, Rep. Pramila Jayapal laughed at the hilarious joke. We need to do everything we can to ensure that Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination. If the choice is between two nasty authoritarians, I will have to stay home on election day. As long as there is an electoral college, my vote doesn’t matter anyway–not in the blue state of Massachusetts.
This weekend I’m going to focus on calming and de-stressing.
One way to do that is to drink tea and read a novel that takes me to another place and time.
Did you know that tea contains a rare amino acid that reduces stress?
This amino acid is called theanine. There are numerous studies showing that people who take theanine supplements consistently have lower levels of stress. And when you combine theanine with caffeine, it helps to boost your brain activity as well as your mood.
Cooper&Gorfer, Niza and the White Cat, 2015
It is this boost in mood and brain activity that gives us this sense of relaxation and well being that only tea can provide….
Theanine is only found in tea and a very rare species of mushrooms that people do not regularly eat. So, if you are into getting your supplements naturally, tea is the only common way to get a good dose of theanine….
When we are sick our immune systems need a bit of a boost, especially at the onset of a cold. Tea is packed with antioxidants that help our immune systems fight off different viruses that love to make us feel terrible. In addition, theanine has been shown to help boost our white blood cell count, which is another way to prevent illness.
Another way to find comfort is with animal friends. BBC: Your cat can pick up on how you are feeling.
New research has found the first strong evidence that cats are sensitive to human emotional gestures.
Moriah Galvan and Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US studied 12 cats and their owners. They found that the animals behaved differently when their owner was smiling compared to when they were frowning.
May and the Cat by Valentine Cameron Princep, British, 1838-1904
When faced with a smiling owner, the cats were significantly more likely to perform “positive” behaviours such as purring, rubbing or sitting on their owner’s lap. They also seemed to want to spend more time close to their owner when they were smiling than when the owner was frowning.
The pattern was completely different when the 12 cats were presented with strangers, instead of their owners. In this setup, they showed the same amount of positive behaviour, regardless of whether the person was smiling or frowning.
The results suggest two things: cats can read human facial expressions, and they learn this ability over time.
Anyone who has ever had a cat knows this from experience. Having a cat cuddle up to you when you’re sad can provide a great deal of comfort.
Here are a few news and opinion articles to check out today.
The New York Times Editorial Board: A Dishonorable Senate. Republican legislators abdicated their duty by refusing to seek the truth.
Alas, no one ever lost money betting on the cynicism of today’s congressional Republicans. On Friday evening, Republican senators voted in near lock step to block testimony from any new witnesses or the production of any new documents, a vote that was tantamount to an acquittal of the impeachment charges against President Trump. The move can only embolden the president to cheat in the 2020 election.
Leonore Fini, Argentine, 1907-1996
The vote also brings the nation face to face with the reality that the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal — and stupid — power politics. Faced with credible evidence that a president was abusing his powers, it would not muster the institutional self-respect to even investigate.
The week began with such promise, or at least with the possibility the Senate might not abdicate its constitutional duty. Leaks from John Bolton’s forthcoming book about his time in the White House appeared to confirm the core of the impeachment case against Mr. Trump: his extortion of Ukraine by explicitly conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid on the announcement of investigations into his political rival.
For a moment, it seemed that enough Senate Republicans would come to their senses, listen to the overwhelming majority of Americans, and demand to hear testimony under oath from Mr. Bolton and maybe even other key witnesses to Mr. Trump’s Ukraine scheme.
I never really expected that.
The Washington Post Editorial Board: The cringing abdication of Senate Republicans.
REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.
Carol Willink, Wilma with her cat, c.1940
The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she weighed supporting “additional witnesses and documents, to cure the shortcomings” of the House’s impeachment process, but decided against doing so. Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.
So cowed are most of those “lots and lots” of Republicans that few of them dared to go as far as Mr. Sasse. Some have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post: What Democrats must do when impeachment is over.
Not long after you read this, Republicans in the Senate will likely complete their task, enact their profile in cowardice and close down the impeachment trial of Donald Trump with a proclamation that the president, should he be a Republican, can betray his office in any manner he pleases without consequence.
Woman with Cat by Lilla Cabot Perry, (1848-1933)
So now Democrats have a choice to make. They can slink off miserably and await Trump’s reelection, or they can keep fighting to create the accountability that impeachment was supposed to be about….
The first thing they can do is invite John Bolton to testify in an open hearing before either the Intelligence Committee or the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House (and if he declines the invitation, subpoena him). The fact that Senate Republicans stopped him from testifying in the impeachment trial doesn’t mean he’s barred from opening his mouth forevermore. So let’s hear what he has to say….
But that’s just the beginning. Democrats should also make it a top priority to finally get hold of Trump’s tax returns. Granted, this isn’t entirely in their hands — there are multiple cases in the courts in which Trump is trying to keep them hidden with all the desperation of a cornered mongoose. But the idea that we could go into a second Trump election without knowing where he’s getting money from, to whom he owes money, and what kind of possible tax fraud he might be engaged in is absolutely ludicrous.
So the tax return issue should be part of a broad initiative aimed at exposing and highlighting Trump’s personal corruption and self-dealing. For instance, why have there been no hearings on Trump’s aborted effort to award himself a multimillion-dollar contract to host the Group of Seven summit? Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney claimed that the Secret Service concluded that Trump’s faltering Miami golf club was “far and away the best physical facility for this meeting” in the entire country, which is almost certainly a lie. So let’s find out: Get whoever was running the planning under oath and start asking questions.
ABC reports on Mike Pompeo’s smirking visit to Ukraine: In Kyiv, Pompeo does not dispute allegations in Bolton’s book.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to directly dispute allegations reportedly contained in an unpublished manuscript of former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book, saying he would not comment on press reports “off in the lands of the hypothetical.”
John White Alexander, American, 1856-1915
The New York Times reported in recent days that Bolton’s unpublished manuscript contains allegations that President Donald Trump sought to withhold military aid to Ukraine as leverage to pressure Kyiv to announce investigations into the president’s domestic political opponents.
In Kyiv on Friday, Pompeo downplayed the report’s credibility — but did not explicitly deny its contents.
“So you’re now commenting on reports on an alleged book about notes that someone claims to have seen,” Pompeo said Friday during an interview with ABC News’ Kyra Phillips in Kyiv. “I don’t engage in that. I’ve said everything I have to say about what took place.”
We’ll just see about that won’t we Mr. Smirky.
Miami Herald: Opera singer danced on an SUV, then crashed through Mar-a-Lago barricades. Cops opened fire.
A Connecticut woman chastised for dancing on her car at a Palm Beach hotel late Friday morning ended up driving away and crashing her vehicle through two security barricades outside Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private club and home, drawing gunfire from law enforcement officers, before leading a police helicopter on a chase that ended in her arrest.
Hannah Roemhild, 30, a trained opera singer, is now in the custody of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
“This is not a terrorist thing,” Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at a Friday afternoon news conference. “This is somebody that obviously was impaired somehow.”
Roemhild could face charges for assault on both federal and county law enforcement officers, Bradshaw said. No one was injured, although the situation might have easily ended differently, officials indicated.
By Dmitry Lisichenko
NPR: Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch Has Retired From Foreign Service.
Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until last spring when she was ousted following a disinformation campaign by the president’s private lawyer, is retiring — not resigning.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Some news tonight – NPR has learned that one of the key figures in the impeachment drama, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, is retiring from the foreign service. She was the ambassador to Ukraine until last spring, when she was ousted following a disinformation campaign by the president’s private lawyer. Yovanovitch testified before Congress about the moment that she got a call from Washington telling her, come home.
Read more or listen at the link.
Of course Trump’s crimes will continue to be revealed by the media. It’s already happening:
NYT: Trump Told Bolton to Help His Ukraine Pressure Campaign, Book Says.
WaPo: New emails show how President Trump roiled NOAA during Hurricane Dorian.
I’m off to find comfort in tea and books. Have a nice weekend Sky Dancers and I hope you seek comfort in any way that works for you.
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