Busting-the-Filibuster Friday

Posted: April 5, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: , , , , , , | 20 Comments

It’s been 2 Fridays since our Last Mueller Friday (March 22nd).

Where’s the damned report?

Every day we don’t see the report represents an obstruction of justice.  But then, that’s what Bill Barr was hired to do, right?   From The Guardian: “Barr invited to meet DoJ officials on day he submitted memo critical of Mueller. Revealed: The attorney general, then a private lawyer, called the special counsel’s obstruction of justice inquiry into Trump ‘fatally misconceived’”

William Barr was invited to meet justice department officials last summer, on the same day he submitted an “unsolicited” memo that heavily criticized special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into obstruction of justice by Donald Trump.

Barr, who was a private attorney at the time, met the officials for lunch three weeks later and was then nominated to serve as Trump’s attorney general about six months later.

The revelation about the meeting, which was arranged by Steve Engel, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, and which has not previously been publicly disclosed, raises new questions about whether the White House’s decision to hire Barr was influenced by private discussions he had about his legal views on Mueller’s investigation.

None of this surprises me. I’m sure the right. chair of the right committee–most likely oversight and Rep. Elijah Cummings–will get to the bottom of this.  Every appointment Trump makes to anything just drips of cronyism.

Today, a Federal Court of Appeals court shortened the time that a decision will be made by the judiciary.  This is via Politico and Josh Gerstein:  “Appeals court narrows path for disclosure of grand jury info in Mueller report. Court splits, 2-1, in a closely watched case that could affect the release of the special counsel’s review.”

A Federal appeals court on Friday tossed an obstacle in the way of grand jury information in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report being released directly to the public, but the decision may not slow disclosure of that material to Congress.

The decision from a divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did not directly address Mueller’s report, but involved a grand jury investigation more than six decades ago into the disappearance of a Columbia University professor and political activist, Jesús Galíndez.

In the new ruling, the panel majority concluded that federal district court judges lack the authority to order the release of typically secret grand jury material except in situations specially authorized in a federal court rule.

While there is no exception that covers cases of intense political or historical interest, courts have repeatedly held that they have “inherent authority” to make such disclosures in unusual cases.

However, the D.C. Circuit decision Friday sided with a long-standing Justice Department position that those rulings were mistaken and a formal change to the grand jury secrecy rule would be needed to give judges that power.

“We agree with the Government’s understanding of the Rule,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote, joined by Judge Greg Katsas. “The contrary reading … which would allow the district court to create such new exceptions as it thinks make good public policy — would render the detailed list of exceptions merely precatory and impermissibly enable the court to ‘circumvent’ or ‘disregard’ a Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure.”

The impact of the new decision in the current battle over disclosure of the Mueller report could be limited, however, because the Democrat-controlled House is already demanding the special counsel’s full submission including grand jury information.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution authorizing Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to subpoena the full report and all supporting materials. Such a subpoena may be sufficient to give the House access to grand jury information under an existing exception covering material sought in connection with “judicial proceedings.”

I wanted to make sure we had a good look and discussion about the various ways that Mitch McConnell is changing the SOP of the Senate. To no one’s real surprise, the Senate did go Nuclear somewhat quietly on Wednesday on a 51-48 vote.  ABC and other media outlets covered it but not to the extent that it deserved.

The Senate has gone “nuclear,” voting 51-48 Wednesday afternoon to change its own rules and slash debate time for some nominees from 30 hours to two hours, paving the way to fast-track certain Trump picks. Republicans — led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — have long lamented what they have termed Democratic obstruction of the president’s nominations, particularly judicial nominations.

All Republicans vote for the rule change except Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Susan Collins, who voted with Democrats, and no Democrats voted with Republicans.

This is what Senator Elizabeth Warren has to say about that even though she her last vote did not reflect this discussion.  It’s something to thing on.  I really appreciate Warren’s bringing the beef to the hamburger.  It’s the women that are discussing actual policy and it’s time they all get some air time and ink.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is expected to issue the strongest indictment of the Senate filibuster of her campaign for president thus far during a speech at the National Action Network convention on Friday morning.

“Last year the Senate passed a bill that would make lynching a federal crime,” Warren will say, according to prepared remarks viewed by The Daily Beast. “Last year. In 2018. Do you know when the first bill to make lynching a federal crime was introduced? 1918. One hundred years ago. And it nearly became the law back then. It passed the House in 1922. But it got killed in the Senate—by a filibuster. And then it got killed again. And again. And again. More than 200 times. An entire century of obstruction because a small group of racists stopped the entire nation from doing what was right.”
Warren goes on to say that the filibuster has been used in recent years “by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything.”

“I’ve only served one term in the Senate—but I’ve seen what’s happening,” she says, according to the remarks. “We all saw what they did to President Obama. I’ve watched Republicans abuse the rules when they’re out of power, then turn around and blow off the rules when they’re in power.”

Democrats running for president in 2020 have been debating Senate rules for months, as activists push for a change that would not necessitate a 60-vote supermajority to pass sought-after legislation like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, both of which have been endorsed by a large share of the Democratic candidates currently running. But many of the same candidates, including the senators in the race, have been resistant to institutional changes. The one candidate who has affirmatively campaigned on its elimination in order to address climate change is Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Many others, like Warren before Friday, had said they’d consider it, and she previously said “all the options are on the table.”

Schumer believes other wise. This is from CSPAN. “Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell debate the GOP’s decision to make a change to rules reducing the length of post-Cloture debate time of federal district court judges and sub-Cabinet nominations from 30 hours to two hours. ” It happened on April 3rd, the day of the vote.

From Vox and Li Zhou: “Senate Republicans have officially gone “nuclear” in order to confirm more Trump judges.
It’s a win for Republicans in the short term, but Democrats could also capitalize on the change in the future.”

Senate Republicans have officially gone nuclear again this week.

Once more, they’ve changed Senate rules so they can confirm President Donald Trump’s nominees more expeditiously — a string of actions first kicked off by Democratic leader Harry Reid in 2013. It marks the third time in less than a decade that the Senate majority has used the so-called “nuclear option” — a term used for parliamentary procedure that sets a new precedent with only a simple majority of lawmaker votes.

This time, Republicans have amended Senate rules in order to further limit the amount of time lower-level nominees could be debated on the floor. Previously, if lawmakers voted to limit debate on a nominee, that back-and-forth would still be able to continue for 30 hours. Practically speaking, because there is only so much time the Senate is in session, this meant that there were a finite number of nominees that Republicans could get through — and that’s something they wanted to change.

Republicans argued that this rules change is necessary because Democrats have gone out of their way to slow-walk consideration of Trump’s nominees. Democrats, meanwhile, say that Republicans have gutted other processes, like “blue slips,” that would enable them to otherwise vocalize their concern with different nominees.

“Senate Democrats spent the first two years of the Trump administration dragging out the confirmation process to not only deny the president his team, but also to waste hours of floor time that should have been spent focusing on the American people’s priorities,” Republican Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said in a statement. “This has been nothing more than obstruction for the sake of obstruction and it is outrageous.”

That assertion, however, is laughable to many Democrats, who have noted that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s supposed outrage over the way Democrats have blocked Republican nominees is hypocritical, given the lengths he went to in order to prevent President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland from even getting considered for a Supreme Court seat.

Nancy Pelosi threw some serious shade at a reporter who evidently wasn’t aware that there is a law that says the IRS will hand over tax returns of whoever certain chairs of congress request.

Donald Trump is doing his usual hold it up routine. “All the way to the Supreme Court, Alice!!!”

And, I’m giving the last word today to my “I’m just a country lawyer” Senator who just can’t seem to keep the folksy routine sounding sane.

With that, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Tuesday Afternoon Reads

Posted: April 2, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | 25 Comments

Candidates for President in 2020. I’m already sick and tired of this campaign.

Good Afternoon!!

The 2020 presidential primaries are nearly a year away, and I’m already sick and tired of the whole ugly mess. There are four well-qualified women running for the Democratic nomination, and the media is largely ignoring them in favor of two white men in their late 70s, and two young white men whose qualifications are negligible. And have you heard that 77-year-old Mike Bloomberg is still thinking about running?

I have already decided that I am going to vote for woman in the primary (assuming they haven’t been driven out of the race by Super Tuesday). Right now I like Kamala Harris, but I’m softening toward Elizabeth Warren.

I’m really troubled by the way the women candidates have been largely ignored in the media coverage. The media bros seem to adore Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and the man of the moment Pete Buttigieg. Buttigieg’s claim to fame is being mayor of South Bend, Indiana. O’Rourke served in the House for three two-year terms. How is either of these men qualified to be President of the United States?

Last night Kamala Harris’s campaign announced that she had raised $12 million. Check out these reactions from media bros:

Please note that Ryan Lizza was fired from The New Yorker for sexual misconduct.

Sam Stein (The Daily Beast) and Jonathan Allen (NBC News) tweeted similar claims.

And then there’s the other old guy, Joe Biden. Young people don’t seem to know his history. They just know him as Vice President under Barack Obama. But if he runs, it’s going to be a real mess. In fact it already is getting really ugly. This is from a longer thread on Biden.

Everyone but the youngsters is surely aware that Biden has already tried to run for president twice and failed, that he’s a gaffe machine, and that he often behaves in a creepy way with women. Is it really worth taking a chance on him, especially since he’s 76 years old? But here’s something I hadn’t heard about until recently.

The Hill: Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived.

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Remember this embarrassing photo?

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

But why did Biden want the prosecutor fired? More from the article:

But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

Joe and Hunter Biden

The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

From The New York Times in 2015: Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch, by James Risen.

When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.

Read the rest at the NYT. Tell me this wouldn’t be an issue if Biden runs.

BTW, Hunter Biden was also kicked out of the Navy for using cocaine and had an affair with his brother’s widow.

I’ll leave you with links to a few more articles on Biden’s baggage.

Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: The Wrong Time for Joe Biden. He’s not a sexual predator, but he is out of touch.

Molly Roberts at The Washington Post: It doesn’t matter what Joe Biden meant to do.

Maureen Callahan at The New York Post: ‘Gropey Uncle’ Joe Biden has always been creepy and should stay out of 2020 race.

Rebecca Traister at The Cut: Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer.

Katherine Miller at Buzzfeed: Everyone Already Knows How They Feel About Joe Biden Touching Women.

And it’s not just women that Joe touches inappropriately. Check out the expression on that guy’s face.

 

I want to call attention to this important piece by Irin Carmon at New York Magazine about how The Washington Post backed off an investigation of sexual harassment and assault at 60 Minutes: What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?

The afternoon of March 7, 2018, was go time, or so we believed. Inside a glass huddle room at the Washington Post, its walls covered with headlines from journalistic coups of the past, we began dialing numbers on a speakerphone and pressing send on carefully drafted, bullet-pointed emails. For nearly four months, investigative reporter Amy Brittain and I, then a freelancer, had been working on a follow-up to our November front-page story about sexual-harassment allegations against Charlie Rose. In the wake of our story, Rose had been fired from his gigs as a CBS This Morning anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent, and his PBS show had been canceled.

This new article had 27 additional allegations against Rose and three instances in which CBS management had been warned about him, but it went further. Our editor, Peter Wallsten, had encouraged us to ask who had known about Rose’s conduct and protected him, and whether he’d been enabled by a culture — assuming we had the reporting to back it up, of course. Answering that question had led to the then–60 Minutes boss and former network chairman Jeff Fager, who had repeatedly championed Rose at the network. That was awkward because 60 Minutes had been the Post’s partner for a just-wrapped yearlong investigation of the roots of the opioid crisis.

Jeff Fager

The Post had nonetheless kept both Amy and me on the story and, to ensure the integrity of the process, reassigned us to editors on the national desk who had never worked with Fager. So the isolation of the huddle room wasn’t just to bar distraction. It was a firewall — between us and the reporters and editors who’d just spent months in the trenches with the very men we had found ourselves investigating.

By that day in March, our draft had passed muster with layers of editors all the way up to the Post’s legendary executive editor Marty Baron and his deputy, Cameron Barr, as well as the paper’s lawyers. Now it was time for Amy and me to find out what Fager and other CBS brass had to say about the fruits of our reporting.

The material about Fager was never published by the Post, but Ronan Farrow later wrote about the allegations at the New Yorker and Fager was fired. It’s a long article, but please read the whole thing it if you have time.

The White House is ramping up attacks on Puerto Rico. Check out this video:

The Washington Post: White House spokesman twice calls Puerto Rico ‘that country’ in TV interview.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley twice referred to Puerto Rico as “that country” during a television appearance Tuesday in which he defended a series of tweets by President Trump lashing out at leaders of the U.S. territory.

In two bursts of tweets — one late Monday night and another Tuesday morning — Trump complained about the amount of federal relief money going to the island and called its politicians “incompetent or corrupt.”

He also claimed that Puerto Rico “got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane,” a figure that actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs. Only a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.

As he pressed to defend Trump’s contentions, Gidley sought to make the case that the leaders of the territory, whose residents are U.S. citizens, have mishandled the aid they’ve received thus far.

“With all they’ve done in that country, they’ve had a systematic mismanagement of the goods and services we’ve sent to them,” Gidley said. “You’ve seen food just rotting in the ports. Their governor has done a horrible job. He’s trying to make political hay in a political year, and he’s trying to find someone to take the blame off of his for not having a grid and not having a good system in that country at all.”

Talk about blaming the victim!

I have a few more links to share, but I’m going to end now and get this posted. I’ll post more in the comment thread. I’m sorry this is so late! What stories are you following today?

Friday Reads: Toddler Talk Time with Little Trumpy Dumpkins

Posted: March 29, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: | 11 Comments

It’s Friday!

Can we just find a good way to tell all those Republican Cavemen to stop their crusade against the rest of us?  And then, can we ask them to send their Child of Perpetual Grievance, Greed and Ignorance back to the nursery for a forever nap?  I’m down with giving a Mouse a cookie, but what happens when you give a toddler a microphone?  From The Hill:  “Trump says Great Lakes have ‘record deepness’

President Trump said the Great Lakes have “record deepness” during an unusual moment in his boisterous rally Thursday night in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Trump often likes to use hyperbole to describe the places he visits, and in this case it led him to make a statement in the Great Lakes State that left some people scratching their heads.

“I support the Great Lakes. Always have,” Trump said during his speech. “They’re beautiful. They’re big. Very deep. Record deepness.”

While the Great Lakes are big and many would describe them as beautiful, they are not among the deepest lakes in the United States, let alone the world.

The deepest lake in the country is Crater Lake, a volcanic crater in southern Oregon with the deepest measured depth of 1,949 feet, according to Geology.com.

Lake Superior is the Great Lake with the largest surface area in the U.S. at 31,700 miles. Its maximum depth is 1,332 feet, but it doesn’t make the record books.

Trump’s comments were getting some chuckles on Twitter the morning after.

A parody Twitter account with the name “Lake Superior” tweeted: “I hate to admit this, but … no, not record deepness. Not in the world or in the United States.”

 

This week has pulled out all the stops to demonstrate just how miserable the next two years of relentless campaigning and rallying will be for us all.  I am going to need elephant tranquilizers just to sleep at night at this rate.  Susan Glasser–writing for The New Yorker–characterizes him thusly “Our President of the Perpetual Grievance”.  That’s pretty much what his cult is like too. They’re a bunch of whiny ass white titty babies who want it all and want it now.

What’s been remarkable, this week, is how much Trump triumphant has sounded like Trump at every other point in his Presidency: angry and victimized; undisciplined and often incoherent; predictable in his unpredictability; vain and insecure; prone to lies, exaggeration, and to undercutting even those who seek to serve him. Sure, he appears relieved, but the Barr letter, with its welcome news for Trump, did not come with magic fairy dust that could suddenly transform the seventy-two-year-old President into someone else entirely. The new Time cover shows Trump under an umbrella, smiling in the rain, with the headline “The Trump Reboot,” but that misses the point. There is no reboot, no Trump 2.0—nor will there be. Even without the existential peril to his Presidency that Mueller posed, Trump is still Trump, the same as he ever was.

Before his rally on Thursday, Trump had made eight public appearances after Barr released his summary of Mueller’s findings, most of them short responses to shouted questions from reporters and one long interview with his favorite Fox News host, Sean Hannity. I went back and listened to all of them. There was no new Trump, no moving on. What was striking was how little celebration there was from the President, although he did talk a few times about the “beautiful” outcome. The same was true for Trump’s always-active Twitter feed, which combined the usual fevered mix of insta-punditry, peremptory demands(The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries must “increase the flow of Oil… Thank you!”), and score-settling (“the Fake News Media is going Crazy!”) that has become familiar, if no more Presidential, by now. The main news of Trump’s post-Mueller week, in fact, was the undercutting of his own party, another Trump trademark, as his Administration decided to support a court ruling that would eliminate the Affordable Care Act. Trump declared a new slogan for Republicans as “the Party of great health care,” although G.O.P. leaders on Capitol Hill view the issue as a political loser that cost the Party control of the House last fall.

Trump appears to have been freed from the fear of impeachment and removal from office, but he remains the public figure he has always been: a weird combination of perpetual victim and perpetual bully, whose one constant is to remain on the attack. In case the President’s plan wasn’t already abundantly clear, on Thursday morning he tweeted out a Fox commentary segment: “Now is the time for President Trump to Counter Punch.” And counterpunch he did. The closest thing to an overture to Democrats in his rally on Thursday night was when he called on the Party “to decide whether they will continue defrauding the public with this ridiculous bullshit . . . or whether they will apologize to the American people” and work with Trump on priorities like fixing “broken trade deals” and building a wall on the southern border. As political overtures go, it wasn’t much of one.

More Toddler Talk with Trump and his nutty Fox Pal Sean Ham-it-up   (From Mary Papenfuss at HuffPo.)  “Trump To Sean Hannity: Wind Energy Won’t Work Because Wind ‘Only Blows Sometimes’.  Hey, he’s a very stable genius, you know.

Wind power won’t work because wind “only blows sometimes,” he explained to Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Trump also insisted Thursday evening at a rally in Michigan that he “knows a lot about wind. If it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night,” he said.

Wind energy can be stored in a variety of ways, including in something called batteries. Most power grids combine energy provided by different sources — as the Trump administration’s own Energy Department explains on its website for anyone who cares to look. “The wind does not always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine,” the site helpfully notes. Yet the power grid “can accommodate large penetrations of variable renewable power without sacrificing reliability.”

Trump shared his energy insights during a rambling, often repeated point that he is the toughest president ever on Russia. That apparently has resulted in a boost in U.S. fossil fuel use and sales, he said in the Wednesday phone interview with Hannity.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch

I Like to sing a little song when he does shit like this … it goes like this.

Little Trumpy Dumpkins

Head just like a Pumpkin

and his little wiener

neener neener neener

Because, damn the man brings out the pre-schooler in me some times.  It’s got more verses but I’ll spare you.

As for that doing well with women thing ….  Not gonna happen… wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.  Not gonna happen with GLBT community and certainly not the POC.  Not now. Not two years from now. Not EVER.

From NPR: “Nominee For No. 3 At Justice Department Withdraws After Backlash From GOP Senators.”

 

Two sources told NPR that the attorney general got into a “shouting match” with Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, a key figure in opposing Liu’s bid. A spokeswoman for Barr declined comment on the heated conversation with a lawmaker from his own political party. For his part, Barr issued a statement filled with praise for Liu and insisting, “We will all benefit from her universally-regarded expertise and dedication to public service” in her role as an adviser to him.

Four lawyers familiar with the matter said the stumbling block for Liu was a broader concern about her conservatism — specifically, her stance on women’s reproductive rights. Interest groups had begun drafting letters to senators about their fears that Liu would not support restrictions on abortion. Another key factor: Earlier in her career, Liu had an affiliation with the National Association of Women Lawyers, which sent a letter opposing the nomination of Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Philip Alito, a son of the justice, works for the antitrust subcommittee in the Senate, a subcommittee that is chaired by Lee.

And of course, Trumpy Dumpkins and his little playmates were all for equal wage for equal work for women right? From ABC News “House Democrats pass equal pay for equal work act. Women earn just 80 cents to the dollar a man makes for the same work.”

Ten years after President Barack Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, House Democrats voted Wednesday to approve the Paycheck Fairness Act, delivering one of the cornerstone pieces of their “For the People” agenda to the Republican-led Senate.

The vote passed 242-187, primarily down partisan lines, as the full Democratic caucus voted in favor of the bill and seven Republicans crossed the aisle to support it.

Can’t wait until the Senate passes it and the stable genius-who thinks he’s got the women’s votes–signs it!  Lies Lies and more lies!  Every Trump rally and interview is Lyingpalooza.

 

Anyway, you can read and listen to more at the links. Frankly, my old heart and brain can’t take any more..  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

Lazy Caturday Reads: The Mueller Report So Far

Posted: March 23, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, just because, U.S. Politics | 36 Comments

A Girl with a Cat – Robert Braithwaite Martineau, 1860 British painter 1826-1869

Good Afternoon!!

I don’t know what to think this morning. I’m still suspicious that AG Bill Barr may have ended the Mueller investigation prematurely. I guess we’ll learn more over the weekend. Reportedly, Barr is in his office today and CNN says we could get an update sometime today.

I’m reserving judgment for now, but I can help but be disappointed that Mueller didn’t charge anyone in Trump’s inner circle. Of course there are still multiple other investigations going on, but it looks like the Russia probe will now have be pursued in the House committees.

Some media reactions to check out:

Natasha Bertrand: What Mueller Leaves Behind.

After one year, 10 months, and six days, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has submitted his final report to the attorney general, signaling the end of his investigation into a potential conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Mueller’s pace has been breakneck, legal experts tell me—especially for a complicated criminal investigation that involves foreign nationals and the Kremlin, an adversarial government. The next-shortest special-counsel inquiry was the three-and-a-half-year investigation of the Plame affair, under President George W. Bush; the longest looked into the Iran-Contra scandal, under President Ronald Reagan, which lasted nearly seven years. Still, former FBI agents have expressed surprise that Mueller ended his probe without ever personally interviewing its central target: Donald Trump.

The content of the special counsel’s report is still unknown—Mueller delivered it to Attorney General William Barr on Friday, and now it’s up to Barr to write his own summary of the findings, which will then go to Congress.

While aspects of the central pieces of Mueller’s investigation—conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and kompromat, the Russians’ practice of collecting damaging information about public figures to blackmail them with—have been revealed publicly through indictments and press-friendly witnesses, the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and Mueller’s own legacy, still hang in the balance. Did Trump’s campaign knowingly work with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton and win the election? And how much was Mueller actually able to uncover?

Bertrand breaks down the knowns and unknowns in each of the three categories above. Read it all at The Atlantic.

Arsen Kurbanov, man and cat

Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel: After Mueller: An Off-Ramp on Russia for the Venal Fucks.

We don’t know what the Mueller report says, though given William Barr’s promise to brief the Judiciary Committee leaders this weekend and follow it with a public summary, it’s not likely to be that damning to Trump. But I can think of five mutually non-exclusive possibilities for the report:

  • Mueller ultimately found there was little fire behind the considerable amounts of smoke generated by Trump’s paranoia
  • The report will be very damning — showing a great deal of corruption — which nevertheless doesn’t amount to criminal behavior
  • Evidence that Manafort and Stone conspired with Russia to affect the election, but Mueller decided not to prosecute conspiracy itself because they’re both on the hook for the same prison sentence a conspiracy would net anyway, with far less evidentiary exposure
  • There’s evidence that others entered into a conspiracy with Russia to affect the election, but that couldn’t be charged because of evidentiary reasons that include classification concerns and presidential prerogatives over foreign policy, pardons, and firing employees
  • Mueller found strong evidence of a conspiracy with Russia, but Corsi, Manafort, and Stone’s lies (and Trump’s limited cooperation) prevented charging it

As many people have pointed out, this doesn’t mean Trump and his kin are out of jeopardy. This NYT piecesummarizes a breathtaking number of known investigations, spanning at least four US Attorneys offices plus New York state, but I believe even it is not comprehensive.

Read the rest at the link.

The New York Times: As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York.

Even as the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, submitted his confidential report to the Justice Department on Friday, federal and state prosecutors are pursuing about a dozen other investigations that largely grew out of his work, all but ensuring that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency.

By Francsco Ubertini

Most of the investigations focus on President Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates, according to court records and interviews with people briefed on the investigations. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, with about half of them being run by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.

Unlike Mr. Mueller, whose mandate was largely focused on any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan take an expansive view of their jurisdiction. That authority has enabled them, along with F.B.I. agents, to scrutinize a broader orbit around the president, including his family business….

At this point, it is unclear whether anyone will be charged with a crime. Some of the investigations involve allegations that may be too old to be prosecuted. Yet taken together, the investigations show that the prosecutorial center of gravity has shifted from Mr. Mueller’s office in Washington to New York.

“The important thing to remember is that almost everything Donald Trump did was in the Southern District of New York,” said John S. Martin Jr., a retired federal judge who was the United States attorney in the Southern District during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

“He ran his business in the Southern District. He ran his campaign from the Southern District,” Judge Martin said. “He came home to New York every night.”

Newsweek: Robert Mueller’s Report is “Just the Beginning” of Donald Trump’s Legal Troubles, Experts Say.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has finally completed his nearly two-year investigation into Russian election interference, handing off his highly anticipated report to the attorney general on Friday. But legal experts warn that even though Mueller’s probe has stopped, there are still plenty more legal woes facing President Donald Trump.

Federico Andreotti (1847-1930, Italian) – The Great Cat

“The Mueller investigation is but a fraction of the president’s troubles. If anything, it’s just the beginning,” Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer and former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek….

“I think that [the Mueller report] certainly is not the end-all, be-all for legal problems and ethics problems for the president,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Newsweek.

“There’s just a lot of really problematic conduct that is being investigated, and that’s not to say that what special counsel Mueller found is not going to be incredibly important…but there’s some danger to looking at whatever he produces as the definitive statement on whether or not this president did anything wrong,” he said.

Bookbinder added that Mueller has a “very narrow mandate” as the special counsel, but “there’s a whole lot more out there.”

Read more at Newsweek.

The Washington Post: At the center of Mueller’s inquiry, a campaign that appeared to welcome Russia’s help.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has concluded his investigation without charging any Americans with conspiring with Russia to interfere in the 2016 campaign and help elect Donald Trump.

But hundreds of pages of legal filings and independent reporting since Mueller was appointed nearly two years ago have painted a striking portrayal of a presidential campaign that appeared untroubled by a foreign adversary’s attack on the U.S. political system — and eager to accept the help.

When Trump’s eldest son was offered dirt about Hillary Clinton that he was told was part of a Russian government effort to help his father, he responded, “I love it.”

Hans Asper (1499-1571) – Portrait of Cleophea Holzhalb, 1538

When longtime Trump friend Roger Stone was told a Russian national wanted to sell damaging information about Clinton, he took the meeting.

When the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks published documents that the Democratic National Committee said had been stolen by Russian operatives, Trump’s campaign quickly used the information to its advantage. Rather than condemn the Kremlin, Trump famously asked Russia to steal more.

Even after taking office, Trump has been hesitant to condemn Russia’s actions, instead calling the investigation a “witch hunt” and denouncing the work of federal investigators seeking to understand a Russian attack on the country he leads.

Neal Kumar Kaytal: I wrote the special counsel rules. The attorney general can — and should — release the Mueller report.

The public has every right to see Robert S. Mueller III’s conclusions. Absolutely nothing in the law or the regulations prevents the report from becoming public. Indeed, the relevant sources of law give Attorney General P. William Barr all the latitude in the world to make it public.

Those regulations, which I had the privilege of drafting in 1998 and 1999 as a young Justice Department lawyer, require three types of reports. First, the special counsel must give the attorney general “Urgent Reports” during the course of an investigation regarding things such as proposed indictments. Second, the special counsel must provide a report to the attorney general at the end of the investigation, which Mueller delivered on Friday. And third, the attorney general must furnish Congress with a report containing “an explanation for each action … upon conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation.”

Nikolai K Bodarevski (Rusia, 1850-1921). La petite fille au chat.

The regulations anticipated there would be differences among these three. Generally speaking, the final report the special counsel gives to the attorney general would be “confidential,” and the report the attorney general gives to Congress would be “brief.” We wanted to avoid another Starr report — a lurid document going unnecessarily into detail about someone’s intimate conduct and the like. A subject of such a report would have no mechanism to rebut those allegations or get his or her privacy back.

But the mentions of “brief” and “confidential” in the regulations and accompanying commentary were just general guidelines for each type of report. The text of the regulations never required the attorney general’s report to Congress to be short or nonpublic. Rather, that text expressly included a key provision saying the “Attorney General may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest,” even if the public release may deviate from ordinary Justice Department protocols.

Read the rest at The Washington Post.

That’s all I’ve got. I just hope we learn more soon, because I’m not feeling good about this sudden end to the investigation. I’ve heard that the report is extensive, so that may be a good sign. We’ll just have to wait for more information.

Have a nice weekend Sky Dancers! Hang in there. This is an open thread.

Mueller Friday Reads: Republicans Know no Shame

Posted: March 22, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: , , | 37 Comments

KTIV viewer Aaron Voss shared these photos taken from the air over Ponca, Nebraska. Voss said he took them on March 13.

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

Every one seems to be on Mueller Watch today as more rumors fly about the investigation’s report.  My issues appear to be more directly related to the absolute breakdown in the rules of how to be a polite person in a society of jerks when the jerks win the Presidency and Senate. Where ever you find a Trump supporter, you find filth, hatred, and calls to violence and I’m tired of it.

I actually dreamed last night that I met Cindy McCain at a convention/festival aimed at Anime fans that some how sprung up near my flooded out back yard of my last house in Omaha.  I felt like I had to apologize to her over and over and over.  My sleeping brain was obviously trying to figure out a lot of things.

One of my nuttiest hypereligious hyperTrumpy high school acquaintances was just regurgitating the Trump/Right WIng Party line on the late Senator John McCain on a mutual friends Facebook Thread on why attack the late Senator John McCain?  I had my issues with “Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran” John McCain but I’m not about to pretend that a man whose father faked a bones spurs deferment is a hero compared to a guy that had a chance to get out of the Hanoi Hilton early and let others go before him.

Former Senator and Nebraska Governor Bob Kerry actually said it best yesterday  (via HuffPo).  See, I keep coming back to my childhood/young adult days.

Kerrey, a former Navy SEAL who lost part of his right leg during the war, said on Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” that “you don’t grow out of bone spurs.” If Trump had them in the 1960s, Kerrey said, he’d still have them now (unless he underwent surgery, which Trump has never mentioned).

The challenge followed Trump’s latest disparaging remarks about the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years. McCain, who had been diagnosed with brain cancer, died in August.

“While John McCain was flying combat operations in Vietnam, you were, I think, falsifying that you had bone spurs in order not to go to Vietnam,” said Kerrey, a 1992 presidential candidate who retired from the Senate in 2000. “Now, I know lots of people who avoided the draft, but this isn’t what he’s saying. He said ‘I physically couldn’t go.’ Well, Mr. President, get your feet X-rayed and let’s see those bone spurs. I don’t think he has them.”

Kerrey said he also believed Trump “sees all of us who went to Vietnam as fools. We were the suckers. We were the stupid ones. We were the ones that didn’t have the resources to be able to get out of the draft.”

Wahoo Fire & Rescue @WahoofireEMS Water is over the road. City will be closing Chestnut Street (Old Hwy 77) at the Wahoo Creek. Water is continuing to rise. March 13, 2019

My childhood stomping grounds are surrounded by floods.  Our home was way up in the hills of Council Bluffs and later way up on the hill my Dad found in West Omaha.  And, as you know, I’m on high ground here in the kathouse in New Orleans.  Grandad taught all of us to buy on the high ground when he and Nana lost everything to floods in Ohio back in the 20s.  That lesson stuck with me.

Farmland floods.  That’s what happens.  Towns on rivers experience floods all the time. They are getting worse but not a single person who gets flooded out doesn’t need a lot of help.  No one. No matter who they are or how they vote.  But, racist Republican Congressman Steve King just keeps at it with the inference that flooded Iowans take care of their own but flooded New Orleanians beg only for government handouts.  Why is every Republican these days such a hateful, horrid bigot and nut?  (Via The Hill)

Who endlessly speaks ill of a dead  Senator, Veteran, and former POW who certainly made policy gaffs but certainly his family shouldn’t have to endure this.  What kind of person can’t recognize the absolute wreckage and death brought by Hurricane Katrina and the weeks that folks were not allowed near their homes?  Banks were closed.  It took me until December to get my damned paycheck from the University of New Orleans.  I desperately needed that FEMA debit card and the help of a lot of people from St Charles, Louisiana, up through Texas, and well into Nebraska that included friends and strangers and yes, the government programs I used by heading to the Omaha Red Cross! I was raised in Steve King country.  I haven’t seen any difference in how Americans respond to flood if either victim or helping neighbor.

Huge disasters require huge responses on all levels..  Why are you dancing on the graves of dead New Orleans and all of us that suffered, and still suffer from that event?  What is wrong with you? I don’t like my tax money going to subsidizing noncompetitive businesses but I’ll write a check any day to rescue an American from a disaster over which they have no control.

Republican Rep. Steve King (Iowa) contrasted Iowans as being willing to help one another compared to victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.“Here’s what FEMA tells me: We go to a place like New Orleans and everybody’s looking around saying ‘who’s gonna help me?’ ” King said at a town hall event in a video posted to his Facebook page.

He said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told him that an Iowan, however, would say “wait a minute, let me get my boots, it’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him.”

“They’re just always gratified when they come and see how Iowans take care of each other,” he added.

In this Monday, March 18, 2019, photo taken by the South Dakota Civil Air Patrol and provided by the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, shows flooding along the Missouri River north of Blair, Neb. (Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management via AP) (Associated Press)

This WAPO article really brings home the headline :  “Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes”. The Republican Party should be delegated a hate group.

Does Trump’s political rhetoric have a measurable link to reported hate crime and extremist activity?

We examined this question, given that so many politicians and pundits accuse Trump of emboldening white nationalists. White nationalist leaders seem to agree, as leaders including Richard Spencer and David Duke have publicly supported Trump’s candidacy and presidency, even if they still criticize him for not going far enough. The New Zealand shooter even referred to Trump as a “renewed symbol of white identity.”

So, do attitudes like these have real world consequences? Recent research on far-right groupssuggests that they do, especially when these attitudes are embraced and encourage by peers. Specifically, the quantity of neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups active in a state leads to increased reports of hate crimes within that state.

How we did our research

Using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data (HEAT map), we examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months.

To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred.

We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.

Floodwaters on the southwest side of Hamburg, Iowa, Sunday, March 17, 2019. Residents in parts of southwestern Iowa were forced out of their homes Sunday as a torrent of Missouri River water flowed over and through levees (Photo: RYAN SODERLIN / AP)

These folks are even cannibalizing their own.  From Raw Story: “Trump fans launch all-out attack on ex-Navy SEAL GOP lawmaker for defending McCain: ‘You’ll be a one-term wonder’”

Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Dan Crenshaw — who now serves as a Republican congressman — defended former Navy Captain John McCain on Thursday. Supporters of President Donald Trump quickly suffered an online meltdown.

Crenshaw is a former Navy SEAL who earned two Bronze Stars and a purple heart for his service in Afghanistan, where he lost his right eye from an improvised explosive device explosion. He was subsequently elected to represent Texas in Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.

“Mr. President, seriously stop talking about Senator McCain,” Crenshaw suggested.

This did not go over well with some of Trump’s most fervent supporters.

His twitterfeed became a toxic wasteland of very sick and disturbed people. That’s just about what’s going on with both Meghan and Cindy McCain too.

Cindy McCain shared with the world on Tuesday an aggressive message she received that attacked her late husband, Sen. John McCain, and her daughter, “The View” co-host Meghan McCain. 

Cindy McCain posted a screenshot of the message that called the former Arizona Republican “traitorous” and “warmongering.” Peppered with profanity, the message reads, “I’m glad he’s dead.” The writer said she hopes Meghan McCain “chokes to death.” 

Cindy McCain said she posted the message so the poster’s “family and friends could see.” 

“I want to make sure all of you could see how kind and loving a stranger can be,” McCain wrote.

How long can we maintain a veneer of civilization if these people keep getting hyped about by mentally ill President who can’t seem to behave like a normal, polite, responsible adult?  It’s impacting all of us and I keep wanting to scream “think of the children!!”.  Well, some one did (Via WAPO): “An online threat of violence shuts down all Charlottesville schools”

Public school campuses in Charlottesville will be shuttered Friday for a second straight day — and more than 4,300 students will be kept out of classrooms — after a threat of racial violence surfaced online.

In a message to families, Rosa Atkins, superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, said an investigation involving state and federal authorities remains active, necessitating the unusual step of keeping schools closed.

“We would like to acknowledge and condemn the fact that this threat was racially charged. We do not tolerate hate or racism,” Atkins said.

“The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color — and with people who have been singled out for reasons such as religion or ethnicity or sexual identity in other vile threats made across the country or around the world. We are in this together, and a threat against one is a threat against all.”

I am so worn down over this daily display of the worst of humanity parading around with threats of guns and violence, nasty attacks on every one for no other reason than disagreeing with this disagreeable President, and just plain rudeness and discourteousness.  Can we return to some concept of disagreement on things without an entire section of the republican base behaving like poo flinging  rage baboons and the rest ignoring them?

Meanwhile, I’m just tired and I’ve got grading to do so I’ll leave you to figure out how we best get rid of all this. I’ll probably choose one of the Democratic Primary candidates and work my ass off for them.  Just again, none of the Bad News B’s for me.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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