And so we begin another Week of America Held Hostage with more news about the connections between the the current Presidential Usurper and his handlers in Moscow.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) leveled serious charges against the Trump White House on Sunday, saying U.S. policies toward Russia are being driven by what she called the “Kremlin clan” more interested in oil and personal business than U.S. needs.
Appearing on MSNBC with host Alex Witt, the California congresswoman said Trump’s recent attacks on the media are a way to delegitimize their reporting on his Russian connections.
Waters’ claims came just before the New York Times released a bombshell report stating that Trump insiders and associates were working on a plan to blackmail Ukraine President Petro O. Poroshenko in an effort to make the Obama-era sanctions disappear.
“Donald Trump is so outrageous that he thinks he can get away with saying anything,” Waters explained. “And he’s trying to get his supporters to believe that the media is lying on him because the facts are going to come out about him, his involvement with Russia, his involvement with Russia during the campaign and the connection between those around him and Putin and the Kremlin. And he’s trying to get his supporters to believe that when they hear this, it’s going to be a big lie because the media cannot be trusted, that somehow they are against the people.”
According to Waters, Trump is worried his supporters will start to put two and two together as more Russia revelations come out, including those involving the people he has surrounded himself with.
“They see that Flynn, who he had to fire, was talking with Russia about sanctions with the Russian ambassador,” she explained. “I believe that [Secretary of State] Tillerson, who was the CEO of Exxon, has as his highest priority getting rid of the sanctions. Don’t forget, he is the one who negotiated the deal with Russia to drill in the Arctic and that was stopped because Obama placed sanctions on them and they couldn’t proceed with that. And so Tillerson, who has this great relationship with Putin, is going to do everything that he can to lift those sanctions and that’s going to be their Achilles heel.”
Waters then said that Tillerson is just one part of what she calls the “Kremlin clan,” and that it begins at the top with Trump.
“Why does he like Putin so much?” Waters asked. “Why does he defend them? And I think it’s all connected to what I call the Kremlin Klan. All of these people around him that are connected to oil and gas in the Kremlin and Ukraine. It’s all about them. Just think about it. Manafort, his campaign manager, and who had to leave because it was determined that he had connections to the Kremlin and to the Ukraine and whether you’re talking about him or Roger Stone or some of the others, they are all about oil and gas and they thought that if they elected Trump, that somehow they were going to have someone friendly to them that would help lift these sanctions and this Kremlin clan are all going to benefit from it.”
What we have instead are a lot of small, unanswered questions. Questions about Flynn’s behavior and the circumstances of his firing. Questions about the behavior of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the circumstances of his firing. Questions about enigmatic remarks made by longtime Trump associate and veteran political operative Roger Stone. Questions about an obscure American businessman named Carter Page who maybe — or maybe not — worked for some time with the Trump campaign.
But there are also longstanding questions about the opaque financing of the Trump Organization, and about why its founder and owner has been so reluctant to engage in normal levels of financial disclosure. And most of all, there are questions about Trump’s highly unorthodox attitudes toward Russia, its government, and its leader, Vladimir Putin.
If Josh Marshall has read the tea leaves correctly, Sater may soon become a household name. Sater, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the Putin government have been hammering out a Ukraine peace plan, which Sater gave to General Flynn just before his resignation. Why is this shocking? Because — as indicated above — Sater is a shady, sleazy character, and Trump has been trying to pretend that he has no real links to the guy.
What’s really triggered the new intrigue was a Time magazine article that dropped the name Felix Sater. The article cited by Cannon on TPM. Josh Marshall has a good deal of questions on a guy who may become a household world for sleazeball. There’s no doubt in my mind that T-Rump sees himself as some kind of global oligarch in the Russian model. Putin is thought to be the wealthiest man on earth. Is Kremlin Caligula looking to set up self up similarly by pilfering US assets?
After the lawyers got involved, Trump said he barely knew who Sater was. But there is voluminous evidence that Sater, a Russian emigrant, was key to channeling Russian capital to Trump for years. Sater is also a multiple felon and at least a one-time FBI informant. Bayrock Capital, where he worked was located in Trump Tower and he himself worked as a special advisor to Trump. Again, read the Timesarticle to get a flavor of his ties to Trump, the Trump SoHo project and Russia. For my money there’s no better place to start to understand the Trump/Russia issue.
On its own, Trump’s relationship with Sater might be written off (albeit not terribly plausibly) as simply a sleazy relationship Trump entered into to get access to capital he needed to finance his projects. Whatever shadowy ties Sater might have and whatever his criminal background, Trump has long since washed his hands of him. (Again, we’re talking about most generous reads here.)
But now we learn that Sater is still very much in the Trump orbit and acting as a go-between linking Trump and a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian pitching ‘peace plans’ for settling the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. (Artemenko is part of the political faction which Manafort helped build up in the aftermath of the ouster of his Ukrainian benefactor, deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.) Indeed, far, far more important, Cohen – who is very close to Trump and known for dealing with delicate matters – is in contact with Sater and hand delivering political and policy plans from him to the President.
Here’s something astounding from WAPO. This certainly makes Watergate look like a Piker’s Ball. You have to wonder what kind of stuff the Kremlin hackers got from the RNC and exactly who’s little gonads are swinging in the wind if it’s released.
President Trump’s personal lawyer and a former business associate met privately in New York City last month with a member of the Ukrainian parliament to discuss a peace plan for that country that could give Russia long-term control over territory it seized in 2014 and lead to the lifting of sanctions against Moscow.
The meeting with Andrii V. Artemenko, the Ukrainian politician, involved Michael Cohen, a Trump Organization lawyer since 2007, and Felix Sater, a former business partner who worked on real estate projects with Trump’s company.
The occurrence of the meeting, first reported Sunday by the New York Times, suggests that some in the region aligned with Russia have been seeking to use Trump business associates as an informal conduit to a new president who has signaled a desire to forge warmer relations with Russia. The discussion took place amid increasingly intense scrutiny of the ties between Trump’s team and Russia, as well as escalating investigations on Capitol Hill of the determination by U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin intervened in last year’s election to help Trump.
The Times reported that Cohen said he left the proposal in a sealed envelope in the office of then-national security adviser Michael T. Flynn while visiting Trump in the White House. The meeting took place days before Flynn’s resignation last week following a report in The Washington Post that he had misled Vice President Pence about his discussions in December of election-related sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Cohen, speaking with The Post on Sunday, acknowledged that the meeting took place and that he had left with the peace proposal in hand.
But Cohen said he did not take the envelope to the White House and did not discuss it with anyone. He called suggestions to the contrary “fake news.”
“I acknowledge that the brief meeting took place, but emphatically deny discussing this topic or delivering any documents to the White House and/or General Flynn,” Cohen said. He said he told the Ukrainian official that he could send the proposal to Flynn by writing him at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
A controversial and unverified dossier assembled by a former British intelligence agent alleged that Cohen had discussed Russia’s hacking of Democratic Party computer systems with a Russian official in Prague during Trump’s campaign, but Cohen and the Russian official have both denied that allegation. Sater had apparently been working on a plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow that was halted on account of Trump’s presidential campaign. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, for what it’s worth, thinks Sater’s inclusion in the report is a very big deal, since Sater was at the center of the Trump Soho development project in Manhattan, which Marshall notes was the Trump project with the most Russia-linked shadiness.
Every time we turn around, there’s something new linking Trump to Russia. Just a few days ago, FBI Director James Comey briefed the Senate Intelligence committee about the ongoing investigation of Team Trump and its ties to Russia, and all the chatter afterward was about how the senators seemed kind of shaken by what they heard.
Who knows? Maybe it all turns out to be nothing. But there sure is a lot of smoke out there. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a fire too.
Economic Gain? Blackmail? Affinity for fellow thugs? Who knows what the motivations are for all of this. All I know is that our country is on the losing end of all this and I would hate to for us sell our allies out for rubles.
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Time evidently doesn’t simply fly when you’re operating with daily emotional shock and awe and the chaotic actions of a mad king. It zooms at super sonic levels leaving stinky vapor trails and maddening sonic booms. It also seems like it never ends. The national nightmare continues after 30 days of hyper Alt Right policies and an Administration creating havoc and chaos what ever they do and where ever they go. Welcome to the 10 second news cycle. We are all ADD and PTSD now.
We’re nationally exhausted. The entire civilized world is exhausted. We’re in constant need of spiked hot chocolate, a warm blanket, and a long nap. Exactly what is it going to take for the Republicans to eliminate this massive onslaught of threats to life as the planet and country has known it? How much more of this are they going to foist on us so that their theocrats and plutocrats can tear down their pet institutions and feel secure for the time being in their enclaves of privilege?
Will this entire Democratic experience die on a cross of religious bigotry and greed while Hair Furor parties on in his Florida Resort Bunker surrounded by leaking oozing hack-able incompetents??
The Democrats and even few Republicans are questioning this so-called President’s mental health. What more does it take to send up the call for a series neuropsychological tests on the s0-called President? Can any one really tell us that Kremlin Caligula is functional in any standard sense of the word? How can we get Trump to a psychiatrist or psychologist? The man is in obvious need of help!
“Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) in a floor speech this week called for a review of the Constitution’s procedures for removing a president. He warned the 25th Amendment of the Constitution falls short when it comes to mental or emotional fitness for office.”
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) during a weekend interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” said that “a few” Republican colleagues have expressed concern to him about Trump’s mental health.
And Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) plans to introduce legislation that would require the presence of a psychiatrist or psychologist in the White House.
The Democrats justify their questions by pointing to Trump’s habit of making demonstrably false claims. At a press conference Thursday, he said he’d had the biggest Electoral College win since President Ronald Reagan, for example, when his margin was lower than either of President Obama’s wins.
Blumenauer told The Hill he started taking another look at the 25th Amendment because Trump had casually repeated easily disproven claims, such as stating that it wasn’t raining during his speech on Inauguration Day when it was.
“It’s not normal behavior. I don’t know anybody in a position of responsibility that doesn’t know if they’re being rained on. And nobody I work with serially offers up verifiably false statements on an ongoing basis,” he said in an interview steps from the House chamber.
But suggesting the president has a mental health problem invites criticism that Democrats are going too far.
“It’s divisive. The bottom line is, if Trump doesn’t succeed, we all fail. It’s time to give the guy a chance,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.).
Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) both burst out laughing when told some Democratic colleagues were questioning Trump’s mental health.
“Are you serious?” Hunter asked. “Yeah, I don’t care what they say.”
That’s the entire deal. The Republicans keep acting like this is their new normal. This nightmare is their opportunity to gut every reform since The Gilded Age and maybe even before that. We have a daily constitutional crisis. It’s evident our election had serious issues and that Congressional oversight is needed on many levels. But hey look! HER EMAILS!! AGAIN!!! “Chaffetz seeks charge of ex-Clinton aide in email inquiry.” Did he ignore that extended live performance yesterday where our president did everything but literally froth at the mouth?
The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has refused Democratic requests to investigate possible conflicts of interest involving President Donald Trump, is seeking criminal charges against a former State Department employee who helped set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday asking him to convene a grand jury or charge Bryan Pagliano, the computer specialist who helped establish Clinton’s server while she was secretary of state.
Pagliano did not comply with two subpoenas ordering him to appear before the oversight panel. The GOP-led committee later voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.
Earlier this month, Chaffetz met with Trump at the White House and agreed not to discuss oversight. He has rebuffed calls for his panel to look into Trump’s businesses and possible conflicts.
Chaffetz said in a statement that allowing Pagliano’s conduct “to go unaddressed would gravely harm Congress’ ability to conduct oversight.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said pursuing charges against Pagliano would be a waste of time and money.
On Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump’s staff corralled the White House press corps into the East Room of the White House so that he could sing the praises of his new Labor Secretary pick, Alexander Acosta.
This was the case only for first few minutes during which the president, visibly bored, read from a sheet of notes, sounding like he had just woke up from a power nap.
For the remainder of the marathon press conference, which lasted one hour and 17 minutes, Trump perked up and did what he has the most fun doing: beating up on the press.
He shouted about Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Russian intelligence. He vented about how unfair and nasty “the media” was to him, but took time to specifically praise friendly outlets such as Fox News. He tried to settle old scores in public. He touted the single national poll that showed a favorable approval rating. He continued to protest too much about charges of racism, and even anti-Semitism in his ranks. And President Trump revived Candidate Trump’s favorite campaign-rally applause line about how he has “never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media.”
It was like he had never left the campaign trail or all the old talking points, pugnacity, and vitriol that came with it. The only thing that was missing was a jab at “Crooked Hillary.”
And as the official White House press conference disintegrated further into unhinged criticism and belligerent sniping, reporters seated in the East Room could hardly contain themselves. There was an awkward mix of laughing with Trump, and chuckling at him as the president kept venting and sneering. The reporters present couldn’t stop quietly gossipping about Trump.
“What is going on?” one journalist whispered to another. “This is insane” and “What the hell?” were other popular refrains in the room.
Given that we’ve got this nightmare partially due to the inability of the media to discern the Pandora’s Box of Trump’s Psyche early on, it only seems fitting they get the abuse straight in their faces. Embedding in the White House Press Corps should come with war zone pay and counselling for ongoing trauma. Still, the Republicans just appear to be hiding and doing what weasels usually do. They’re busy destroying stuff in their own little way. Krugman has a great op ed about the silence of the weasels. Well, he calls them hacks. But then he has to get it published on the NYT and I just press a button here!!!
The story so far: A foreign dictator intervened on behalf of a U.S. presidential candidate — and that candidate won. Close associates of the new president were in contact with the dictator’s espionage officials during the campaign, and his national security adviser was forced out over improper calls to that country’s ambassador — but not until the press reported it; the president learned about his actions weeks earlier, but took no action.
Meanwhile, the president seems oddly solicitous of the dictator’s interests, and rumors swirl about his personal financial connections to the country in question. Is there anything to those rumors? Nobody knows, in part because the president refuses to release his tax returns.
Maybe there’s nothing wrong here, and it’s all perfectly innocent. But if it’s not innocent, it’s very bad indeed. So what do Republicans in Congress, who have the power to investigate the situation, believe should be done?
Nothing.
Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, says that Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador were “entirely appropriate.”
Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, angrily dismissed calls for a select committee to investigate contacts during the campaign: “There is absolutely not going to be one.”
Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House oversight committee — who hounded Hillary Clinton endlessly over Benghazi — declared that the “situation has taken care of itself.”
Just the other day Republicans were hot in pursuit of potential scandal, and posed as ultrapatriots. Now they’re indifferent to actual subversion and the real possibility that we are being governed by people who take their cues from Moscow. Why?
Well, Senator Rand Paul explained it all: “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.” Does anyone doubt that he was speaking for his whole party?
Just three weeks into his term, Democrats, in and out of the media, smelled blood. Many already were going for the kill.
They won’t get it, at least now. Trump bought himself time yesterday.
In what universe was yesterday’s display of insanity a time buyer? We’re all getting used to gasping for air in 10 second or maybe minute news cycles. I guess if you were black, a woke woman or Jewish you heard a totally different set of dog whistles. This CNN headline says it all “Trump tells Jewish magazine’s reporter to ‘sit down,’ blames anti-Semitism on ‘the other side'”
He settled on a reporter who identified himself as Jake Turx, a reporter with Ami Magazine, which bills itself as “a new standard in Jewish media.” Turx prefaced his question by saying he did not see evidence the President or his staff were anti-Semitic. He even mentioned Trump’s Jewish grandchildren.
He then launched into the thrust of his question about bomb threats to dozens of Jewish Community Centers last month.
What we are concerned about, and what we haven’t really heard being addressed, is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it,” Turx said.
As Turx continued, Trump interrupted, “See, he said he was going to ask a very simple, easy question, and it’s not.”
The reporter said, “It’s an important one.”
“Not a simple question. Not a fair question. OK, sit down. I understand the rest of your question,”
Trump said. “So here’s the story folks. No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism. The least racist person. In fact, we did very well relative to other people running as a Republican.”
Turx raised his hand again and spoke up.
“Quiet, quiet, quiet,” Trump replied. “See he lied about — he was going to get up and ask a very straight, simple question. So, you know, welcome to the world of the media.”
Turx shook his head, and Trump continued as if he himself had been accused of anti-Semitism, despite Turx’s preface.
“But let me just tell you something: I hate the charge. I find it repulsive. I hate even the question because people that know me — and you heard the Prime Minister, you heard Benjamin Netanyahu, did you hear him, Bibi? He said, ‘I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time,’ and then he said, ‘Forget it.’ So you should take that instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question like that.”
Trump can make anything into something about directly related to his EGO by his screaming ID. Even I can see that and I’m not the Psych PhD blogger on the blog. I’m just the humble economist trying to deal with a continual onslaught of abusive, gas lighting insanity.
I just don’t know how much longer anything can take this constant assault. It’s an assault on our sanity. It’s national gaslighting. It’s destroying or nation’s rule of law and institutions! And just to prove yesterday’s rant about leaks was true and news being fake we got a wag the dog leak this morning. The AP dropped a story about using the National Guard for deportation efforts. Media outlets got told it was false AFTER the AP made the accusations. Then, there’s this …
Very good point. AP says White House & DHS didn't respond to requests for comment before publishing. Then WH/DHS quickly denied—only after. https://t.co/ZTo7K5aMbZ
This seemed like an attempt to gaslight the AP to me. They probably think they’re “Winning!” “Tiger Blood!” It comes off as Machiavellian which means President Bannon is doing nefarious things again.
To me, this David Corn Tweet says it all. Would you believe this administration if it told you a terrorist attack was imminent?
The first of our new theocratic, Putin-loving, grifter overlords is sitting in front of a Senate committee with absolutely no vetting being grilled and testified against by his peers. Neoconfederate radical christianist Senator Jeff Sessions can sure tell some whoppers and he sure does whistle Dixie.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker is set to testify against Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions Wednesday in an unprecedented move during his attorney general confirmation.
This would be the first time in Senate history that a sitting senator will testify against another sitting senator for a Cabinet post during a confirmation.”I do not take lightly the decision to testify against a Senate colleague,” Booker said. “But the immense powers of the attorney general combined with the deeply troubling views of this nominee is a call to conscience.”
Sessions’ confirmation hearings, which started Tuesday, are expected to raise additional questions on old allegations of racism from his past. When Sessions was a 39-year-old US attorney in Alabama, he was denied a federal judgeship because the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony during hearings in March and May 1986 that Sessions had made racist remarks and called the NAACP and ACLU “un-American.”
Booker told CNN on Tuesday morning shortly before Sessions’ hearing started that it was “consequential moment.”
“This is one of the more consequential appointments in American history right now given the state of a lot of our challenges we have with our policing, a lot of challenges we have with race relations, gay and lesbian relations,” Booker said.
Several other prominent African-American figures in addition to Booker also plan to testify against Sessions, including two members of the House: Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, a leader of the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-Louisiana, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The NAACP has also strongly opposed Sessions’ nomination, calling him “a threat to desegregation and the Voting Rights Act.”
Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions did not disclose his ownership of oil interests on land in Alabama as required by federal ethics rules, according to an examination of state records and independent ethics lawyers who reviewed the documents.
The Alabama records show that Sessions owns subsurface rights to oil and other minerals on more than 600 acres in his home state, some of which are adjacent to a federal wildlife preserve.
The holdings are small, producing revenue in the range of $4,700 annually. But the interests were not disclosed on forms sent by Sessions to the Office of Government Ethics, which reviews the assets of Cabinet nominees for potential conflicts of interest.
He is currently up on the stand doing things like telling Dianne Feinstein that he really thinks Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and badly decided but it’s established law. He’s explaining his vote against laws to protect women victims of violence as being against the establishment of the rights of Native Americans to hold trials against accused rapists in their own courts. He’s just a big ol’ bug hiding nasty fangs and a poison sac right out there for every one to see.
You may want to read the story of Sessions and his role in prosecuting the Klan to really understand how deep his southern roots go. Sessions has also testified he loathes the clan today. Sessions apologists hold this case up as proof he’s really not all that racist.
letter from 23 former assistant attorney generals cited the fact that he had “worked to obtain the successful capital prosecution of the head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan” as evidence of his “commitment to the rule of law, and to the even-handed administration of justice.” The Wall Street Journal said that Sessions, “won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial,” a case which “broke the Klan in the heart of dixie,” and The New York Post praised him for having “successfully prosecuted the head of the state Ku Klux Klan for murder.” Grant Bosse wrote in the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leaderwrote that “when local police wrote off the murder as a drug deal gone wrong, Sessions brought in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and brought Hays and the Klan to justice.”
Sessions himself recently listed the case as one of the “ten most significant significant litigated matters” he had “personally handled” on his Senate confirmation questionnaire. And in 2009, Sessions told National Review that there had been a campaign to “smear my record,” whereas in fact, he had “prosecuted the head of the Klan for murdering somebody.”
No one involved in the case disputes that Sessions lent his support to the prosecution. “Not all southern United States attorneys welcomed civil-rights division attorneys into their districts back then,” said Barry Kowalski, a former civil-rights division attorney who was one of the main lawyers on the investigation, and who defended Sessions in his 1986 confirmation hearing. “He did, he cooperated with us completely.”
However, in seeking to defend Sessions from charges of racism, Sessions’s allies, and even Sessions himself, seem to have embellished key details, and to have inflated his actual role in the case, presenting him not merely as a cooperative U.S. attorney who facilitated the prosecution of the two Klansmen, but the driving force behind the prosecution itself. The details of the case don’t support that claim.
You can read the details in the feature I’ve linked to which came for The Atlantic.
The Sessions hearings are on CSPAN if you want an uninterrupted view of it all.The Hillhas a list of five things to watch. This first one is as important as questions on policing and voting rights.
Does he detail Trump’s plans on immigration?
Sessions is known as the foremost immigration hawk in the Senate, so you can bet he’ll be pressed on an issue that has liberals on edge in the age of Trump.
Expect Democrats to come armed with statistics challenging the notion that illegal immigrants are flooding across the southern border; that crime is out of control among illegal immigrants; and that President Obama has not done enough to deport those in the country illegally who have committed other crimes.
In addition, while it won’t necessarily fall under his purview at the Justice Department, Democratic senators will likely look to score political points by challenging Sessions on the complications of building a border wall.
And they’ll likely look to get him to say that he won’t move to deport, en masse, the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, and in particular the estimated 700,000 young undocumented immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
As president, Trump could do away with that program by executive order.
I have to work and grade today but will try to follow comments on Twitter. They are plentiful.
I could use a few donations if you have a few bucks to spare. Our TypeKit subscription is up in January. It’s not a lot, but every little bit you can help me defray would be great. It basically keeps our nice logo up there in its cursive glory
So, anyway, I’ve got to go warp minds and grade papers. BB’s successfully moved to her new apartment too! She’s patiently waiting for the cable guy. JJ is still with her mom in the facility and is having up and down days. We’re just happy to have you all here for breaks in our mundane lives!!!
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I’m going to try to put up some interesting links prior to the “you’ll never guess what the Corrupt Russian Puppet is doing now” stories. Believe me, ethics in Washington DC are headed for an all time nadir and that’s saying a lot.
One of the giant sequoias that has graced postcards and family photos for well over a century has fallen. Pioneer Cabin Tree–known for being a “drive through”–likely fell when record levels of rain flooded the area.
It’s not clear why the tree fell, but probably had to do with the giant sequoia’s shallow root system — the roots only go about two or four feet deep — and the fact that the trail around the tree was flooded due to rain.
“When I went out there (Sunday afternoon), the trail was literally a river, the trail is washed out,” Allday said. “I could see the tree on the ground, it looked like it was laying in a pond or lake with a river running through it.”
The tree had been among the most popular features of the state park since the late 1800s. The tunnel had graffiti dating to the 1800s, when visitors were encouraged to etch their names into the bark.
Joan Allday, wife of Jim Allday and also a volunteer at the park, said the tree had been weakening and leaning severely to one side for several years.
“It was barely alive, there was one branch alive at the top,” she said. “But it was very brittle and starting to lift.”
Meryl Streep received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, and she slammed Donald Trump’s “performance” in her acceptance speech.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts,” she said tearfully and with a faint voice upon accepting the career-spanning honor.
She echoed Hugh Laurie’s comment about how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is part of “the most vilified segments in American society right now” — Hollywood, foreigners and the press. “But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places,” she explained, outlining her New Jersey upbringing, plus the non-Los Angeles backgrounds of Sarah Paulson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, Ruth Negga, Viola Davis, Dev Patel and Ryan Reynolds. She asked sarcastically, “Where are their birth certificates?”
Streep then noted that one “performance” stood out this year: that of Donald Trump when he publicly mockedThe New York Times‘ Serge Kovaleski, a disabled reporter. “There was nothing good about it, but it did its job,” she said. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same.”
Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence,” she continued. “When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
After stressing the importance for the press to stand up to Trump — “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage … We’re going to need them going forward and they’re going to need us to safeguard the truth,” she said of journalists — Streep concluded her speech by quoting Carrie Fisher: “As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, ‘Take your broken heart, make it into art.’ “
When she graduated from college, Brown worked at the Greenwich Village progressive Bank Street Cooperative School, which sought a more child-centric approach to teaching. Here, Brown discovered her gift for engaging children under the age of 5 with her prose. She contributed to the school’s textbooks and published stories under the school’s literary arm. Soon after she sold her first manuscript to a major publisher.
The ideas came quickly. “The Runaway Bunny,” for example, popped in Brown’s head while she was skiing — she wrote the whole story, start to finish, on her ski receipt. Perhaps because it all came so easily, she spent her money with an almost pathological frivolity. She bought the entire contents of a flower cart with her first advance check and sold full rights to a story to buy a gray fox coat.
Despite her growing success, she harbored a deep insecurity about her career and wished to write “real” literature.
“I hope to write something serious one day as soon as I have something to say. But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on,” she said.
And like many of the great children’s authors (Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak come to mind), she had a conflicted relationship with her young fans. She told a Life reporter in 1946, “I don’t especially like children . . . At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he’s little.”
Brown never married or had children and didn’t seem to bemoan that fact. In a letter to her college alumni newspaper in 1945, she wrote derisively: “How many children have you? I have 50 books.”
“I finally thought by the end of the ‘80s we lived through this horrible experience and it’s behind us,” Perry said. “When I was secretary, I fully believed it was behind us.”
After leaving the Pentagon, he accepted an assignment from Clinton to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear development program—and seemed agonizingly close to a breakthrough as the last days of the president’s term expired.
Now, he sees his grandchildren inheriting a planet possibly more dangerous than it was during his public career. No one could doubt that the Sept. 11 terrorists would have gladly used nuclear bombs instead of airplanes if they had had them, and it seems only a matter of time until they try. Instead of a retreating threat in North Korea, that fanatical regime now possesses as many as eight nuclear bombs, and is just one member of a growing nuclear club. Far from a new partnership with Russia, Vladimir Putin has given old antagonisms a malevolent new face. American policymakers talk of spending up to $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear arsenal. And now comes Donald Trump with a long trail of statements effectively shrugging his shoulders about a world newly bristling with bombs and people with reasons to use them.
There’s no need to dwell on the particular character of Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20th. But it is worth examining what remedies exist if any President is too careless, inattentive, or impulsive to deal sensibly with questions affecting the nation’s survival. What could be done if a President behaves in a way that directly threatens to turn the planet into radioactive dust? And who could do it? Or, to rephrase that for a super-partisan era, who would be brave enough even to cross party lines, if taking that step were required to stop someone who, acting on a whim or in a tantrum, seemed ready to start a nuclear war? It might not take much to arrive in such a scenario; after all, it didn’t take much, recently, for Pakistan’s defense minister, reacting to a loony fake-news dispatch, to threaten nuclear retaliation against Israel.
The Constitution does provide certain remedies, foremost among them being impeachment, though that requires a high crime or misdemeanor, a House bill, a Senate trial. But there is another path, also complicated, and possibly impractical. President Obama, the other day, addressed some of the charming creakiness that the Founders left for their descendants, such as the compromise that gives equal senatorial representation to California, with thirty-eight million people, and to Wyoming, with little more than a half-million. That disproportionate inheritance is not likely to be changed, just as the Electoral College is unlikely to be changed—at least not any time soon; the Founders made it difficult to tamper with their extraordinarily durable, imperfect document.
But what if it were a matter of imminent peril, having to do with Presidential instability, or even insanity?
and on to the latest ethics “fracas” where the Republicans and T-Rump have decided that no one needs to be vetted.
There are 9 Cabinet hearings this week, 5 on Wednesday alone. GOP would rather appease Trump than do what's right. https://t.co/tZUArjkMyV
Donald Trump’s Cabinet parade marches to the Capitol this week, as Republican leaders are vowing to plow ahead with a slew of confirmation hearings despite a sharp warning from the government’s top ethics watchdog.
Nine of Trump’s Cabinet picks are slated to come before Senate committees for vetting at 10 hearings (Attorney general pick Jeff Sessions is expected to face questions over two days): two on Tuesday, five on Wednesday and three more on Thursday. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is encountering resistance not only from Democrats but the chief of the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics, who said over the weekend that some of Trump’s nominees have yet to complete required financial disclosures and ethics documentation.
I’ve never been so disoriented before in my life. It feels like were living through a junta that just overthrew our democracy. How can our institutions withstand this? How can our planet withstand this?
“If Trump reneges on the one-China policy after taking office, the Chinese people will demand the government to take revenge. There is no room for bargaining,” said the Global Times.
Here’s a tidy summary of this week in Destroy US Democracy.
1. Trump fires all Ambassadors and Special Envoys, ordering them out by inauguration day.
2. House brings back the Holman rule allowing them to reduce an individual civil service, SES positions, or political appointee’s salary to $1, effectively firing them by amendment to any piece of legislation. We now know why they wanted names and positions of people in Energy and State.
3. Senate schedules 6 simultaneous hearings on cabinet nominees and triple-books those hearings with Trump’s first press conference in months and an ACA budget vote, effectively preventing any concentrated coverage or protest.
4. House GOP expressly forbids the Congressional Budget Office from reporting or tracking ANY costs related to the repeal of the ACA.
5. Trump continues to throw the intelligence community under the bus to protect Putin, despite the growing mountain of evidence that the Russians deliberately interfered in our election.
6. Trump breaks a central campaign promise to make Mexico pay for the wall by asking Congress (in other words, us, the taxpayers) to pay for it.
7. Trump threatens Toyota over a new plant that was never coming to the US nor will take jobs out of the US.
8. House passes the REINS act, giving them veto power over any rules enacted by any federal agency or department–for example, FDA or EPA bans a drug or pesticide, Congress can overrule based on lobbyists not science. Don’t like that endangered species designation, Congress kills it.
We’re so fucked.
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I’ve been trying to get myself together to write the post today but it’s just one “what fresh hell is this?” moment after another. The man who is supposed to be the next President at this point continues to praise Russia for hacking our election and has basically lost the popular vote by a greater margin than any other President at any other time and he’s still taking every critic out there on Twitter like a petulant toddler.
In today’s NYT, two scholars of authoritarian movements, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, weigh in. It’s an important article.
Readers, recall that my main purpose in running this site was not simply to aggregate polls. I also wanted to help direct efforts and resources. Presidential polls were off (watch my entomophagy, which I made as substantive as I could), but the top six Senate races split 2-to-4, which is about right.
Now, with democratic institutions under threat, the question is: what can everyday citizens do? Recently, former Congressional staffers have prepared an excellent guide. Read it, print it, save it.
In addition, I offer three ideas, whose impacts range from long-term to immediate. These are meant for all Americans who want to save institutions – whether they are liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.
Donald J. Trump’s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America’s ever has. Yet past stability is no guarantee of democracy’s future survival.
We have spent two decades studying the emergence and breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America. Our research points to several warning signs.
The clearest warning sign is the ascent of anti-democratic politicians into mainstream politics. Drawing on a close study of democracy’s demise in 1930s Europe, the eminent political scientist Juan J. Linz designed a “litmus test” to identify anti-democratic politicians. His indicators include a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.
Mr. Trump tests positive. In the campaign, he encouraged violence among supporters; pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton; threatened legal action against unfriendly media; and suggested that he might not accept the election results.
It represents an effort by Trump — one that is going to continue — to construct an alternative narrative to replace the increasingly substantiated one in which Russia may have in fact tried to interfere in our election to help him, which would obviously carry enormous significance on many levels.
But Friday, Trump send out a new tweet that accidentally reveals that he knows this entire narrative is a lie:
Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?
Trump is referring here to news that broke in late October: That a hacked email showed that interim DNC chair Donna Brazile may have leaked a Democratic primary debate question to Clinton’s campaign in advance. Brazile publicly blamed this leak on Russian hackers who were out to divide Democrats by feeding the perception among Bernie Sanders supporters that the DNC was putting its thumb on the scales for her. This built on a formal statement that the intelligence community put out earlier in October declaring itself “confident” that Russia was trying to interfere in the elections by hacking into DNC emails.
The respected political journalist Julia Ioffe’s tenure at Politico has come to an end after she posted an unfortunate — and straight-up vulgar — tweet about Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka. Ioffe was already wrapping up her time as a contributor to Politico and moving to a new job at The Atlantic when she posted the ill-advised tweet, but now Politico is accelerating the process, bringing her contract to a premature close.
Ioffe, who also contributes a column to Foreign Policy, had a decidedly “adult” reaction to the news that Ivanka would be taking an office in an area of the White House traditionally reserved for the First Lady. She wrote:
But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story. As recent reporting by The Times makes clear, bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media.
Let me explain what I mean by saying that bad guys hacked the election. I’m not talking about some kind of wild conspiracy theory. I’m talking about the obvious effect of two factors on voting: the steady drumbeat of Russia-contrived leaks about Democrats, and only Democrats, and the dramatic, totally unjustified last-minute intervention by the F.B.I., which appears to have become a highly partisan institution, with distinct alt-right sympathies.
Does anyone really doubt that these factors moved swing-state ballots by at least 1 percent? If they did, they made the difference in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and therefore handed Mr. Trump the election, even though he received almost three million fewer total votes. Yes, the election was hacked.
Indeed. The Hamilton electors have grown larger in number and are being begged to do their Hamiltonian duty by many including the a ggggg grandson of the man himself.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The saga of the Glasnost Menagerie continues.
Kremlin Caligula has a lot of explaining to do but was probably too wrapped up by his angry tirades and Swedish conspiracy theories to think he may be subject to any inquiry. 
What’s really triggered the new intrigue was a Time magazine article that dropped the name Felix Sater. The article cited by Cannon on TPM. 
New York Magazine points this interesting thing out amid all the spooks and spies.
Time evidently doesn’t simply fly when you’re operating with daily emotional shock and awe and the chaotic actions of a mad king. It zooms at super sonic levels leaving stinky vapor trails and maddening sonic booms. It also seems like it never ends. The national nightmare continues after 30 days of hyper Alt Right policies and an Administration creating havoc and chaos what ever they do and where ever they go. Welcome to the 10 second news cycle. We are all ADD and PTSD now.
Will this entire Democratic experience die on a cross of religious bigotry and greed while Hair Furor parties on in his Florida Resort Bunker surrounded by leaking oozing hack-able incompetents??
That’s the entire deal. The Republicans keep acting like this is their new normal. This nightmare is their opportunity to gut every reform since The Gilded Age and maybe even before that. We have a daily constitutional crisis. It’s evident our election had serious issues and that Congressional oversight is needed on many levels. But hey look! HER EMAILS!! AGAIN!!! 
Journalists aren’t likely to forget yesterday’s presser for some time. 
Given that we’ve got this nightmare partially due to the inability of the media to discern the Pandora’s Box of Trump’s Psyche early on, it only seems fitting they get the abuse straight in their faces. Embedding in the White House Press Corps should come with war zone pay and counselling for ongoing trauma. Still, the Republicans just appear to be hiding and doing what weasels usually do. They’re busy destroying stuff in their own little way.
In what universe was yesterday’s display of insanity a time buyer? We’re all getting used to gasping for air in 10 second or maybe minute news cycles. I guess if you were black, a woke woman or Jewish you heard a totally different set of dog whistles. This CNN headline says it all “Trump tells Jewish magazine’s reporter to ‘sit down,’ blames anti-Semitism on ‘the other side'”
The first of our new theocratic, Putin-loving, grifter overlords is sitting in front of a Senate committee with absolutely no vetting being grilled and testified against by his peers. Neoconfederate radical christianist Senator Jeff Sessions can sure tell some whoppers and he sure does whistle Dixie.
He is currently up on the stand doing things like telling Dianne Feinstein that he really thinks Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and badly decided but it’s established law. He’s explaining his vote against laws to protect women victims of violence as being against the establishment of the rights of Native Americans to hold trials against accused rapists in their own courts. He’s just a big ol’ bug hiding nasty fangs and a poison sac right out there for every one to see.
You can read the details in the feature I’ve linked to which came for The Atlantic.
I have to work and grade today but will try to follow comments on Twitter. They are plentiful.
I’ve never been so disoriented before in my life. It feels like were living through a junta that just overthrew our democracy. How can our institutions withstand this? How can our planet withstand this?
Meanwhile, two premier scholars on authoritarianism have written that Donald Trump is an extant threat to Democracy. 
Donald Trump is a threat to Democracy and we all should be concerned and prepared to take action.
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