Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!!

I am completely burned out on politics today. I can’t handle any more Trump madness. It makes me feel sick even to type his last name. I can’t stand anymore Hillary bashing. I don’t really care that much for Elizabeth Warren, but I’m fed up with the attacks on her family stories. I can’t stand the media focusing on these meaningless stories and ignoring the administration’s failures to help hurricane victims and it’s torture of immigrant children and their families.

Ever since the Kavanaugh confirmation, I can barely stand to watch cable TV. Reading about politics makes me angry and depressed. I really think this state of mind is going to be with me until election day at least. I wonder if there is any chance that we as a country can come out of this dark tunnel into the light of democracy?

Here’s what’s happening. A New York Times financial reporter posted this tweet:

https://twitter.com/FlitterOnFraud/status/1051965466732875779

So far the tweet has received 1.4K replies and only 33 retweets and 116 likes. At least this ratio shows that lots of people thought the tweet was offensive and ridiculous. But why are people still relitigating something that happened 20 years ago, and why are they blaming Hillary, who was actually the victim in the events? Why is it strange that a woman would refuse to attack the husband she obviously loves?

Here’s another one–also from a woman in the media:

Sigh . . . I can’t stand any more of this. When I finish this post, I’m going to read novel and pretend everything is OK, just for today.

From The Daily Beast: Trump Hangs ‘Tacky’ Fantasy Painting of Himself With GOP Presidents in White House.

President Trump’s latest addition to White House decor is a kitschy fantasy painting that shows him relaxing with Republican presidents of the past—an update to a best-selling image commonly found in tourist gift shops and online galleries.

The print, “The Republican Club” by Andy Thomas, could be seen in the background of a photo tweeted by 60 Minutes, which aired an interview with Trump on Sunday night.

It shows a slimmed-down Trump sandwiched between Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, directly across from Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes are also in the imaginary scene.

Amateur art critics sneered on social media that the artwork was “tacky,” “a travesty,” or “blasphemy.” Some said it looked like the political version of the famous “dogs playing poker” painting.

Here’s the painting:

Trump also has a framed map of his electoral college win hanging in the White House. He’s so embarrassing.

In more serious news, Trump is still defending the Saudis for murdering a Washington Post journalist. CNN: Trump suggests ‘rogue killers’ behind Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance.

President Donald Trump suggested Monday that “rogue killers” could be behind the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, after a phone call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman about the case.

Trump told White House reporters that Salman offered him a “flat denial” in relation to the disappearance of Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post who was last seen in public when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in Turkey on October 2.

Later Monday, the Saudis were preparing to admit that Khashoggi died during an interrogation that went wrong, one that was intended to lead to his abduction from Turkey, according to two sources.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Washington for Riyadh at around midday to meet with the Saudi King on Trump’s orders.

Previously, Saudi authorities had maintained that Khashoggi left the consulate the same afternoon of his visit, but have provided no evidence to support the claim. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting outside the consulate, says she did not see him re-emerge.

Pompeo is in Saudi Arabia right now, and judging by the photos I’ve seen and reports of his meetings with King Salmon and his son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Pompeo didn’t even give the Saudi rulers a stern talking to. In fact, they are both grinning ear-to-ear in all the pictures.

CNN: Pompeo meets Saudi King as Khashoggi family calls for inquiry into ‘death.’

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held talks with top Saudi leaders Tuesday as sources told CNN that the Kingdom is preparing to acknowledge that missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi died at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Pompeo had a short discussion with King Salman before a longer meeting with the King’s son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler. US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Pompeo “thanked the King for his commitment to supporting a thorough, transparent, and timely investigation” of the Khashoggi case and expressed “concern” about the case to the foreign minister.

Nauert described the meetings as “direct and candid.”

Pompeo meets King Salmon

CNN’s sources say Saudi Arabia plans to contend that the Washington Post columnist died when an interrogation went awry, but there was no public mention on Tuesday of any new Saudi explanation of Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey:

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkish officials, who searched the consulate for nine hours on Monday, are looking into “toxic” and “painted over material” as part of their investigation. “My hope is that we can reach conclusions that will give us a reasonable opinion as soon as possible, because the investigation is looking into many things such as toxic materials and those materials being removed by painting them over,” Erdogan told reporters.

Kashoggi’s family wants and international investigation. I doubt if Trump and Pompeo will support that.

Business Insider: Saudis reportedly preparing to claim Jamal Khashoggi was killed as a result of a botched interrogation.

The Saudi government is preparing to a release a report claiming that the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed as a result of a botched interrogation, CNN reported on Monday, citing two sources.

The interrogation was reportedly supposed to lead to Khashoggi’s abduction from Turkey. CNN described one source as saying the report is likely to claim that the interrogation was conducted without clearance or transparency.

In other words, he was tortured to death by “rogue” operators. Yeah, right.

The Washington Post Editorial Board points out that the U.S. really doesn’t need Saudi Arabia for anything –although Trump and Jared Kushner may be concerned about personal losses to their  businesses interests.

…it’s worth considering just how much the United States might have to lose if its relationship with Saudi Arabia ruptured. What about that oil, and the $110 billion in arms purchases Mr. Trump keeps talking about? What about the war on terrorism?

Start with the oil. Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, supplied 9 percent of U.S. petroleum imports in 2017, or about 960,000 barrels a day. But thanks to the shale revolution, the United States is essentially energy independent: It, not Saudi Arabia, is now the world’s largest crude-oil producer. Last year, U.S. daily oil exports averaged 6.38 million barrels, or nearly seven times the Saudi imports. If the Saudis cut back production or boycotted the United States, they could temporarily drive up prices, but the beneficiaries would be U.S. shale companies, which over time would fill the gap — and deal a devastating blow to the Saudi oil industry.

Jared and Ivanka with MBS

As for arms sales, someone needs to brief Mr. Trump on the actual results of the promises made to him when he visited Riyadh last year. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution sums it up, “The Saudis have not concluded a single major arms deal with Washington on Trump’s watch.” Moreover, an end to supplies of U.S. spare parts and technical support, something Russia cannot provide, would quickly ground the Saudi air force. That would have the welcome effect of ending a bloody bombing campaign in Yemen that a U.N. investigation concluded was probably responsible for war crimes.

Saudi Arabia does supply the United States with counterterrorism intelligence. But as Andrew Miller of the Project on Middle East Democracy points out, stopping it “would be a colossal error . . . when there’s already a strong perception in Congress and with Americans that Saudi Arabia has fueled extremism.” Mr. Miller notes that a law passed by Congress in 2016 opens the way for civil suits against the Saudi government for any terrorist acts it enables.

The reality is that Saudi Arabia, which, as Mr. Trump himself has crudely pointed out, would not survive without U.S. security support, has everything to lose from a break in relations, while the United States no longer needs the kingdom as much as it once did. Mr. Trump has overvalued the relationship and encouraged Saudi leaders to believe they can behave recklessly and even criminally without consequence.

So all the concern from the administration must be about Trump’s and Kushner’s private finances. That is just sickening.

One more story before I escape into my book.

The Washington Post: ‘Blue wave’ or ‘left-wing mob’? Anti-Trump fervor fuels a new movement aimed squarely at winning elections.

If the Nov. 6 midterm elections turn into what many Democrats hope will be a “blue wave,” swamping Republican majorities from Congress to state legislatures nationwide, it will have been powered in part by a new and sprawling network of activists on the left who, like Wilburn, have leaped into action over the past two years — energized by their deep desire to thwart the rise of Trump and his agenda.

Like the conservative tea party groups that rose up after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and that helped Republicans retake the House and gain power in state legislatures in 2010, this new liberal movement has emerged largely outside the traditional party structure.

It is led by hundreds of thousands of mostly white, college-educated, middle-aged women who trace their inspiration to the inaugural women’s marches in January 2017 and whose ambitions have only grown amid a succession of disagreements with Trump, including over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Read the rest at the link. If anyone saves this country from Trump it will be women.

What stories are you following today?

Tuesday Reads

Reading in the Valley of Arconville, Theodore Robinson, c. 1887

Good Morning!!

Can’t we ever have a day without Trump drama? Axios: Scoop: Trump has accepted Nikki Haley’s resignation.

President Trump has accepted Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN Ambassador, according to two sources briefed on their conversation. The timing of her departure is still unclear, the president promised a “big announcement” with her at 10:30 a.m.

What we’re hearing: Haley discussed her resignation with Trump last week when she visited him at the White House, these sources said. Her news shocked a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration.

The “big announcement” will come while I’m working on this post. Is he going to move her to another post? Surely it can’t be for corruption. Trump doesn’t care about that does he?

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1049617680104390657

Charleston Post and Courier: Watchdog wants investigation of Nikki Haley’s private jet flights to SC.

COLUMBIA — A federal government watchdog asked the State Department on Monday to investigate whether U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley broke any regulations by accepting seven flights on private jets from three South Carolina executives last year.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, also questioned how Haley values the flights on “luxury private aircraft,” most of which also included her husband, Michael.

By Dee Nickerson

The former South Carolina governor based the cost on first-class commercial airline tickets for the flights from New York to three South Carolina cities. Her total was $3,219.

But the four flights Haley took on a plane belonging to Jimmy Gibbs, chief executive of Gibbs International in Spartanburg, were alone worth up to $24,000 based on publicly reported operating costs of a private jet, CREW said.

“Ambassador Haley should have been conscious of the appearance concerns surrounding her acceptance of gifts of private luxury air travel at a time when her colleagues in the administration were making news with their own lavish air travel,” CREW wrote.

Commentators on MSNBC are saying she could be out because of conflicts with National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Hey, maybe she plans to primary Lindsey Graham. Graham has announced that he’s running in 2020 and has “zero interest” in being Attorney General.

So after the spectacle of Rod Rosenstein flying to Florida on Air Force One yesterday, and after the fake FBI background investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, and Rosenstein’s presence at the political rally Trump held for Kavanaugh last night, some of us are getting nervous about which side Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray are really on in terms of the Russia investigation. Former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa wants us to calm down.

The New York Times: The Mueller Investigation Is Bigger Than Rod Rosenstein.

On Monday, President Trump said he has no plans to fire [Rosenstein], and many Americans may have breathed a sigh of relief. But while it’s true that his departure would have been cause for worry for those who seek to protect the independence and integrity of Mr. Mueller’s investigation, at this stage of the inquiry, even a replacement dead set on shutting it down would find such a maneuver nearly impossible to accomplish — and with each day that goes by, it becomes even harder.

Claire Atwood, 1943

To begin with, there is no such thing as a single “Russia investigation.” The F.B.I. pursues cases against individuals and organizations, not topics — this allows each case to have the flexibility to go in the direction the evidence leads, regardless of what happens with other, related cases. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, “Pentbomb” was the umbrella name for hundreds of discrete cases on the hijackers, their networks and Al Qaeda.

Further, existing cases spawn new cases. This is especially true of counterintelligence and conspiracy investigations, where every newly discovered contact or association of a subject already under investigation could form the basis of a new case. That’s why the current Russia investigation, originally referred to in the F.B.I. as “Crossfire Hurricane,” isn’t just a single case on Russian election meddling. Rather, at this stage it is a spider web of tens or dozens of cases on intelligence officers, their agents and individuals and organizations helping Russia that are investigated independently, cross-referencing pertinent information to other cases as necessary.

Nor is an investigation of this magnitude limited to a single office. Each case generates leads — threads of inquiry, like an interview or surveillance of an intelligence officer who might be traveling to another state — that span the country. When this happens, F.B.I. agents don’t hop on a plane. Rather, the “home” office for the case (called the “office of origin”) will send a lead to the field office with jurisdiction over that area.

Lady with a Cat – Nikolai Yaroshenko

Mr. Mueller’s investigation is more closely held than most, but its tentacles have already clearly spread to other field offices — consider the investigation against President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, run out of the Southern District of New York office, or the plea deal of a California man, Richard Pinedo, who assisted Russia in executing its disinformation campaign on social media. Field offices are evaluated in part based on their success in following through on leads and making cases that result in arrests and convictions. No case agent worth their salt would remain quiet if their cases were closed in the face of a continuing threat. To “shut down” the investigation at this point would require not just a face-off with Mr. Mueller but also with special agents in charge of multiple field offices with a vested interest in seeing their responsibilities through, and possibly even a battle with the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray.

Read the rest at the NYT.

Well that nasty old Hillary Clinton has dared to speak up again, and the menfolks are in an uproar. This morning Lawrence Tribe tweeted that Clinton should “button it up” for the next month, and was surprised to get a backlash from people who love Hillary–didn’t he notice that she won the popular vote in 2016? I can’t post the tweet, because Tribe has now deleted it and others that criticized Clinton.

The Washington Post: Hillary Clinton says Trump turned Kavanaugh ceremony into a ‘political rally.’

“What was done last night in the White House was a political rally,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “It further undermined the image and the integrity of the court, and that troubles me greatly. It saddens me because our judicial system has been viewed as one of the main pillars of our constitutional government.”

Clinton’s comments referred to a boisterous event in the East Room on Monday night that began with Trump apologizing to Kavanaugh “for the terrible pain and suffering” he said they were forced to endure during a chaotic confirmation process.

Trump later praised Kavanaugh’s fortitude while facing allegations of decades-old sexual misconduct and profusely thanked Republican senators who advocated for him, culminating in a 50-to-48 confirmation vote largely along party lines on Saturday.

Among those Trump recognized was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who received resounding applause after the president asked him to stand up.

It was a disgusting partisan display, and Kavanaugh himself joined in with an embarrassing speech in which he thanked specific Republicans for putting him on the Court.

At the Guardian, Ian Samuel recommends fighting back by packing the Court: Kavanaugh will be on the US supreme court for life. Here’s how we fight back.

Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed, and he will serve as a justice on the supreme court for the rest of his life. This event assures rightwing dominance of the court for a generation – or so we are told. After all, at 53, he is not even the youngest conservative: Justice Neil Gorsuch is 51. The chief justice, who has been there for more than a decade, is only 63. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by contrast, is 85, and Justice Stephen Breyer is 80. We are in, it seems, for decades of misery for labor unions, voting rights, regulation of businesses and all the rest….

The ray of hope, if there is one, lies in contradiction of the first of those premises. Nothing in the constitution fixes the number of supreme court seats at nine. The size of the court is set by legislation, and has varied over time. We started with six. We’ve gone as high as 10 (when Abraham Lincoln was president, and Congress worried about a reactionary supreme court invalidating his wartime measures). Only recently, Republicans held the court to eight members for a year in the wake of Antonin Scalia’s death.

By Stan Moeller

So, then, the next time the left has some political power, why not just expand the size of the supreme court and add another handful of justices? Make Brett Kavanaugh a gifted and energetic member of a 10-to-5 minority. Don’t get mad, in other words: get even.

This is called “court-packing”. And although it enjoys a long and distinguished history in America, anyone who suggests it today will be met – swiftly – by serious and sober realists, all of whom who are eager to explain the reasons that this cannot possibly work.

Read the rest at The Guardian.

As Daknikat wrote yesterday, we’ve been seeing human rights violations increasing around the world lately, and the Trump administration seems unconcerned. Most recently, Saudi Arabia disappeared a journalist in Turkey and reportedly murdered him and dismembered the body; and China arrested the head of Interpol. Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: Trump Gives Dictators the Green Light.

In September 2017, the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had gone into exile, wrote a column in The Washington Post headlined, “Saudi Arabia Wasn’t Always This Repressive. Now It’s Unbearable.”

As of this writing, Khashoggi is thought to be dead. Last Tuesday, he went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up a document certifying his divorce so that he could remarry. He hasn’t been seen since. The Turkish government claims he was murdered inside.

“If the reports of Khashoggi’s murder are true, it’s so brazen, it’s so outlandish,” Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. Saudi Arabia has killed people before, and put dissidents and bloggers in prison. “But this is at a whole different level,” she said.

Ohan Krouthen, Three reading women in a summer landscape, 1908

It’s not surprising, however, that the Saudi government would think it could get away with it. The United States has long maintained a close strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s abysmal human rights record, and tacit American support for its brutal war in Yemen began during Barack Obama’s administration. But there’s never been an American president as enthusiastically pro-Saudi as Trump.

Sure, he sees the country as an ally against Iran. But it’s more than that: Trump seems to feel a real affinity for the gaudy kleptocratic opulence of the country’s leaders. And his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, appears to view M.B.S. as a kindred spirit; both, after all, are rich millennials making world-altering decisions thanks to extreme nepotism.

Read the rest at the link. Be warned though, Goldberg sees Bernie Sanders as part of the solution.

One more before I turn the floor over to you: a mom tries to support Trump/Kavanaugh and in the process humiliates her son before the world. The Washington Post: ‘This is MY son’: Navy vet horrified as mom’s tweet miscasts him as #HimToo poster boy — and goes viral.

Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to pull out his cellphone and find out what was going on.

Reading outdoors with cat above, by Marcus Stone, 1840-1921

Sure enough, something terrible had happened indeed: His mom accidentally turned him into a viral Twitter meme.

“This is MY son,” began his mom’s viral post, which featured a photograph of Hanson posing in his Navy uniform. “He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE. #HimToo.”

“Hey, Pieter, we want you to know that this is going on,” one friend texted him.

“We know this isn’t you,” said another.

It was all rather disorienting. The tweet, since deleted, had been widely shared, immediately casting Hanson as the poster boy for the #HimToo movement. The movement has more recently been seen by some as the antithesis of the #MeToo movement, suggesting in the wake of the Brett M. Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings that men are frequently victims of false sexual assault accusations and that many accusers are liars.

The problem: Hanson, a 32-year-old Navy veteran, doesn’t support this movement, considering himself an ally of the #MeToo movement, he told The Washington Post. Nor is he fearful of “solo dates.”

Wow. I wonder what Thanksgiving dinner will be like in that family?

So . . . what stories are you following today?