Creole in a Red Headdress; painted by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans;ca. 1840; oil on canvas, The Historic New Orleans Collection
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Today, I’d like to explore some dimensions of the healthy expression of a good “fuck you” to the powers that be coming from a variety of sources because, you know, we all want to do it every day these days. Resistance frequently comes in the form of art, music, culture, and language in support of socio-economic-political change. The form can be a joyous yet angry expression necessitated by the powerless situations of those most oppressed by the dominant culture, ruling class, religion, and economy. The wink wink nod nod of art can save one from jail or worse.
It may seem disparate but I’ve got some examples that demonstrate that the complaints coming from diverse communities may represent the same undercurrent of dissatisfaction. The dominant socio-economic-political culture wants to silence and remove us which is why we must support and understand the concept of intersectionality. What they can do to one group, they can do to all given enough time and power. Together, we are the many. Separate and apart, they can cut us off like livestock to separate and unequal slaughterhouses.
This is why they are trying to stack the courts, gerrymander congressional districts, suppress voting rights, and shut up the press. It is also why they scream “lock her up” to attack Hillary Clinton and “build the wall” at folks of Mexican heritage”. It is why they still describe our first black President as a “Kenyan-born Muslim” and panic dial 911 on black people just living their lives. It is why they dilute “black lives matter” to “all”. It is why they won’t bake cakes for all weddings.
It is also why they want to set us against each other and we must not let that happen.
Daisy Patton’s “Would You Be Lonely Without Me?” runs through August 3 at the Art Gym Gallery. ( Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post)
Quirky and perky, with a face full of determination, it’s hard not to get a quick crush on Vivian Grant the way that Daisy Patton paints her, circa 1960, in a series of women’s portraits on display at Denver’s Art Gym Gallery.
With her emerald green dress, dangling earrings and precision-plucked eyebrows, Grant radiates the kind of organic optimism that could carry her far in her burgeoning career in New York’s publishing world.
But the accompanying text tells a story with a different ending. At 23, she found herself showing signs of pregnancy and sought to terminate it.
Abortion was illegal in those days, and dangerous, the stuff, as we say, of back alleys and shady practitioners and Grant, like many others, was one of its victims, dying from complications of the procedure. An autopsy later showed it was a false pregnancy.
Tragedy on top of tragedy. That’s the narrative arch of Patton’s “Would You Be Lonely Without Me?,” which captures in oil paint on paper the images of 15 women who died as a result of botched abortions in the era before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortion legal, and raised the medical standards around the procedure.
Yes, the exhibit is political. Patton’s portraits are rich in physical and emotional detail. They raise sympathy for women who make the difficult decision to end their pregnancy — and their sale could raise money for national organizations that support the ability for all women to make the choice.
In her artist’s statement for the show, Patton, writes of a time when an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 women died each year from abortion-related injuries that were caused by unskilled doctors or self-inflicted by those, fearing no where else to turn, who treated themselves with knitting needles or drank bleach or other chemicals.
She notes, citing published research, how things have changed in the last four decades: “Now it is statistically more dangerous to
birth than to have an abortion.”
Many of these stories draw me in even though they are not my stories, or stories I would likely hear had I not gone looking for them or most likely, stories I would not have seen if I didn’t have friends who have stories that connect them deeply to these voices. I am drawn in by our shared humanity and vulnerability.
In this case, it was a neighbor who watched a woman die of a botched abortion as a 10 year old in a South Chicago Beauty Salon her mother used. She later, at 13, joined the underground railroad to help women seeking abortions. She was the same age as me when I listened to a panel of women who shared the stories of women in their lives who had died of botched abortions in the fellowship hall of my West Omaha Presbyterian Church. I think that was about the first moment that I realized I had a name and it was “feminist”. My neighbor’s story is more compelling than mine though and I’m glad she put up the link and said share this woman’s art.
I don’t remember her name, but she bled to death from a back alley abortion in the spare bedroom of Jackie, the lady who did my mother’s hair on Saturday’s when I was 10. I was sent to go keep an eye on her while my mother was getting her hair done. I was the last person to see her alive, because she was moaning softly and crying while Jackie was shampooing. I asked her if she needed anything and she said she needed something for her bleeding.I went back down the hall and told Jackie. Jackie went into the bathroom and got then to back bedroom and then she came back into the kitchen. Jackie gave me some towels and told be to bring them to her. I could tell when I went back in the room that she was gone, and lying in an incredible pool of blood.It was the same week a woman my Mother worked with, who was white and had money, had a “procedure” at her gynecologist’s office to take care of her unwanted pregnancy.
I learned about Jane the underground to help women when I was 13. I started donating money, and volunteering. I let women into our apartment to sleep on the couch after everyone had gone to bed and then got them out before anyone got up in the morning, on their journey to Canada to have their abortion there, or if they had enough money to the private clinic on the North side of Chicago.
The story of Louisiana’s Tignon laws has always intrigued me. I’ve been seeing renewed interest in them as it appears they are now part of a discussion on cultural appropriation.
Louisiana had slavery but with some vital differences that eventually disturbed the American colonizers who bought the French Colony. The Catholic church insisted that slaves not work on Sundays and that they be allowed to buy their own freedom. This created an entire community of free people of color in New Orleans. It was inevitable that as the traditional model of American Slavery moved towards Louisiana and New Orleans it would create dehumanizing experiences for its Creole communities.
The Tignon laws passed in 1789, however, were enacted by a Spanish governor who was also critical of the French behavior towards free people of color. Tignon laws were enacted to restrict the fashion, dress and hair styles appropriate in public dress for female gens de couleur in colonial society. Black women could not show their hair in public under the law.
“We cannot discount how enslaved Black women used dress as a form of resistance [and] how even finding different ways of tying the headscarf acted as a form of resistance against the trauma of diaspora and being cut off from Africa,” says Winters. “Or how [African-American] people have drawn inspiration from African traditions as a source of empowerment.”
I'm ecstatic to share my first story for @BitchMedia about how Black women in New Orleans subverted the original intention of the 18th-century tignon laws, which were meant to humiliate and silence them.https://t.co/xHqW8LzwDO
— PRINCESS👑♌️👩💻🎥🎵🪩🦄 (@PrincessGabbara) July 24, 2018
The tignon remains an important symbol of resistance even today It is essentially a piece of cloth fashioned into a headress to cover the hair of black women. It became much more when styled with bold patterns and color and adorned with jewels.
Even when Louisiana stopped enforcing the laws in the early 1800s, free women of color continued wearing the tignon. It’s a testament to their resilience: The women of New Orleans refused to allow a piece of cloth to humiliate them, erase their status, or diminish their femininity. Instead, they reinterpreted the tignon as a symbol of empowerment. (And Black women in Louisiana weren’t the only women of color to use clothing to resist oppressive laws: In 1773, free women of color in Saint-Domingue were prohibited from wearing shoes, so they wore sandals, adorned their toes with diamonds and continued to do so after the laws were lifted.)
More than 230 years later, remnants of the tignon laws still linger: Traditional hairstyles, such as dreadlocks, are still seen as unprofessional in the workplace; women who wear them are subject to false assumptions—like Giuliana Rancic’s now-notorious snark about Zendaya’s faux locs smelling of “patchouli oil” and “weed.” The military recently lifted its longtime ban on cornrows, Afros, locs, and other protective hairstyles, but we regularly hear stories about Black girls being suspended from school for rocking natural hair.
A number of black women have incorporated the look and statement in their performances.
Pop culture, however, is the most reliable place to look for Black women who still resist the policing of their hair.
The first time we see Beyoncé in Lemonade, her musical celebration of Louisiana’s Afro-Creole women, she’s rocking a tignon while kneeling on a stage. Nina Simone also incorporated the tignon into her signature look, and Lauryn Hill, India.Arie, and Erykah Badu followed her lead in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Badu even wore a headwrap on Sesame Street). Outside of pop culture, the headwrap is now largely considered a fashion staple. Nnenna Stella travels from Brooklyn to Ghana and Morocco to select the most impeccable textiles for her handcrafted headwraps. Afro-Colombian designer Angelica Balanta’s vibrant headwraps reflect her rich Colombian culture, while Paola Mathé’s collection is inspired by her Haitian heritage.
Nina Simone & her daughter Lisa Celeste Simone | 1965 photo by Brian Duffy
People laugh at me when I tell them my Draq Queen friends would most likely be my spirit animal. My mother even knew that I was not one to be put in ruffles and lace with hair like Shirley Temple. It was not me at all. I basically look over the top in anything girlie which is probably why I can totally relate to a lot of drag.
Cross dressing and lip-syncing is entirely different from the insensitive nature and intention of blackface. In queer and feminist communities, drag tends to be widely accepted. It makes sense, counter cultures allowing each other to thrive and experiment. It is the concept of “gender roles” that forces us to so closely associate femininity with women, so when someone who is clearly not a woman performs femininity, it is still thought of to be a reflection on women.
A lot of drag queens get their names and character traits from pop culture, and the media loves to portray women as, to use Mary Cheney’s words, bitchy, catty, dumb, and slutty. Indeed, these are not great attributes for a person to embody, so when drag queens perform those characteristics while dressed and made up like a woman, it could be read as disrespectful or an insult to woman. Drag queens also tend to be hyper sexual, sometimes with a crude sense of humor. When people over sexualize femininity, it dehumanizes women by turning them into an object of sex as opposed to a complex human being.
Many supporters of drag culture argue that the femininity being performed by drag queens is their own form of self expression and has little to do with people who live their daily lives as women. Judith Butler argues that traditional gender roles are exhaustingly heteronormative, and that they attempt to define a norm that gives a sense of “otherness” to queer culture and drag. If we broaden our lense to not view heterosexuality as “having a claim on naturalness and originality” (Butler 384), gender can be scene as a performance for everyone and therefore not so different from drag. Basically, most people view drag as an imitation, but that implies that gender has a norm in which to deviate from. It’s like personality, there isn’t a set way to be an individual, so there isn’t a set way to be feminine.
I want to bring up art history in this exploration of gender because drag so connected with self expression and the artistry around makeup and fashion. Drag is an experiment gender, makeup, performance, fashion, comedy, parody etc… There is a million different ways to “do” drag, as seen by the assortment of characters who have won RuPaul’s drag race all with varying intensities in the femininity of the character.
Wedding Cakes aside, I grew up in an age when you read Oscar Wilde and knew it was indeed ‘the love that dare not speak its name”. I’ve found these expressions of resistance shared by friends that relate to oppression in a way I can only take in as a listener and human being, But, i can still relate. I knew there were jail sentences and death penalties when I was a child as much as I was aware of Jim Crow Laws separating black from white Americans in the South. Only now, is much of the pre civil rights culture of resistance being documented.
“And Gloria cackled, let there be sparkle; and there was sparkle.” It’s a passage from the Bible, but not as we know it: this is a familiar line from the Book of Genesis as spoken in Polari. The secret language became a kind of verbal wink between gay men in Britain during the early 20th Century – allowing them to hide and to reveal at the same time.
“One of the things that makes Polari so powerful is that it is simultaneously about disguise and identification,” the artist Jez Dolan tells BBC Culture. “You would be hiding what you were talking about from people who didn’t know it, but also if you were in a bar and you liked the look of somebody, you’d pop it into conversation and they’d either go ‘ah’ or they’d look blank and you’d be on your way.” Polari is rarely spoken today. Yet in the years when homosexuality was illegal, it was a way of communicating in public without risking arrest – as well as a chance to challenge the status quo.
Divine in a publicity photograph from the 1980s
This form of resistance, identification and survival has a fascinating history.
Baker has found it difficult to untangle a clear history of the lexicon. “Polari has a long and complicated provenance, and not all of it is fully known because it was spoken by marginalised groups who didn’t usually have their voices or stories recorded,” he says. While ‘bona’ (meaning ‘good’ or ‘attractive’), which pops up frequently, was first recorded in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II, some of the earliest words in Polari come from 18th-Century ‘Molly Slang’. “Mollies were men who were camp and had sex with other men,” says Baker. “These men were sometimes imprisoned and so some words of the criminal slang Cant would have crept into their language use.”
Baker describes how another form of slang, Parlyaree (from ‘parlare’, the Italian for ‘to talk’), was used by buskers, travelling circus and fairground people, market stall holders, prostitutes and beggars. Derived from Italian, it began to be used in music halls in the late 19th Century, and became known as Palarie. “There were influences from Lingua Franca… used by sailors, as well as cockney rhyming slang and Yiddish which were found particularly in the East End of London.” Some of the words are what’s been called ‘backslang’ – hair is ‘riah’, and face is ‘eek’ (from ‘ecaf’)
British comedian Kenneth Williams often spoke Polari in his performances on BBC radio and TV programmes in the 1950s and 60s, some of which had up to 20 million listeners at a time, introducing the language to a much wider audience.
Normally, Lafayette Park is one of those pretty, history-drenched spots in Washington, where you walk around wondering whose footsteps you might be following. You’re right across from the White House, close enough that you can practically see into the front windows. Now, though, the most important thing to know about this D.C. spot is what Occupy Lafayette Park is — because the square might just be full of anti-Trump protestors.
Because of its sight line straight to the White House, Lafayette Park is a frequent spot for rallies and gatherings when people want to protest something that the Trump administration has done, like for example the travel ban. Now, the country seems to be at a fever pitch after Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which has gained the name “Treason Summit” on Twitter. Occupy Lafayette Park is an impromptu, grassroots rally set up to protest Trump’s actions in Helsinki, where the meeting was held, and demand his impeachment.
We are now at one of those points. With the revelation on CNN Thursday night that, according to the network’s sources, Michael Cohen is ready to testify that the president* knew in advance of the now-legendary meeting in June of 2016 at which individuals connected to the Russian government offered to ratfck Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for him, we stand as a self-governing republic at a stark, unclouded moment—either you believe the president* of the United States is utterly illegitimate, having conspired with a hostile power to gain the office he now holds, and that every act he has taken in that office, up to an including swearing the oath of office, is equally illegitimate, or you do not. It is now a binary. If Cohen is willing to testify to that effect, then the president* conspired with the regime of Vladimir Putin in order to gain control over the executive branch of government in this country—which includes not only the military, but the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus as well. We are now at yes-or-no.
It’s time, as artfully as possible, to tell this administration to get the fuck out of the people’s house.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I watched quite a bit of Mike Pompeo’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. I have to say, Pompeo is as rude and obnoxious as Trump; his personality seems highly unusual for someone who is supposed to be a diplomat. It was obvious from Pompeo’s vague responses to questions from Democrats and Republicans alike that he has no idea what Trump and Putin talked about in their more than two hour private meeting in Helsinki.
“You come before a group of senators today who are filled with serious doubts about this White House and its conduct with American foreign policy,” said Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in one of the sharper exchanges.
“The administration tells us, ‘Don’t worry, be patient, there is a strategy here.’ But from where we sit, it appears that in a ‘ready, fire, aim’ fashion, the White House is waking up every morning and making it up as they go,” he said.
The senators focused their criticism on Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Putin in Helsinki on July 16, details of which remain murky even to administration insiders.
They also took Pompeo to task for the apparent lack of progress in nuclear negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, more than a month after a summit meeting that Trump hailed as a resounding success.
Pompeo returned fire during more than three hours of testimony—his first open exchange with lawmakers since Trump’s meetings with Putin and Kim.
“I understand the game that you’re playing,” he told Sen. Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the committee, during a line of questioning about Trump’s private meeting with Putin, which raised deep concerns among lawmakers and national security experts.
Menendez cut him off and shot back: “No, no, Mr. Secretary. With all due respect, I don’t appreciate you characterizing my questions. My question is to get to the truth. We don’t know what the truth is.”
SHAPIRO: What did you learn from Secretary Pompeo about what happened in that closed-door meeting in Helsinki?
MENENDEZ: Not very much. I learned that the reason that there is such concern is because no one has a clear readout of what transpired between President Trump and President Putin for over two hours. What we have is what took place at the press conference in Helsinki. And that was alarming to members on both sides of the aisle, which is why we were trying to pierce an understanding of how far he had been briefed and what elements of a conversation for over two hours were being pursued.
And, you know, it’s interesting that, you know, Secretary Pompeo, when it seems to be of benefit to the administration, will suggest that he knew something. But when if not, he says it’s a private conversation. It only seems to be a private conversation for President Trump because Putin and the Russian defense and public relations ministry is telling all about it. So it obviously has a much different view….
SHAPIRO: It seems like you were trying to ask Secretary Pompeo, in so many words, do you even know what was discussed in that room? And Secretary Pompeo got a little bit indignant and kind of scoffed at the question. But do you think he does know what happened in that room?
MENENDEZ: No. I don’t think he knows what happens in that room.
SHAPIRO: That’s kind of shocking. He’s the secretary of state, right?
MENENDEZ: It is. Well, it’s kind of shocking that you go into a meeting for two hours and you don’t have your secretary of state or your national security adviser or the director of National Intelligence with you because that allows the Russians to ultimately, you know, characterize the discussion as they are doing without a counter to it. And it’s interesting to see that we see no counter. Therefore, when members of the committee are citing the Russian ministry of defense, they’re doing it not because they believe the Russian ministry of defense, but they’re looking for counter arguments.
And when the administration is unwilling to be transparent and speak to it and let us know what actually transpired, it then gives credence to what the Russians are doing. And this is a major concern.
Read more at the NPR link.
As often happens, the Pentagon doesn’t seem to know anything about what Trump and Putin discussed either. That was another topic Senators asked about during the Pompeo hearing. Yesterday Buzzfeed published an article about how often those in charge of our troops are kept in the dark by Trump: New Emails Show What Happens When The Pentagon Has To Scramble To Catch Up To Trump. The article begins with a series of graphics depicting reports about Trump announcements that the Pentagon officials were completely unprepared for.
“The Pentagon was caught off guard” stories have become a staple of news coverage of the Trump administration.
It’s no secret that time and time again, officials in the Defense Department have been blindsided by sudden, often significant announcements and policy changes involving the US military coming out of the White House.
Trump administration officials have excused those moments as overblown, affecting news reports more than creating any real government dysfunction.
Now, however, internal emails released through the Freedom of Information Act offer an inside look at how chaotic it can be for Pentagon officials when they face an unexpected onslaught of questions in the wake of an alarming public statement from the White House. The confusion resonates not only in Washington but around the world, according to the emails, which were sought by a left-leaning watchdog group, Democracy Forward, and shared with BuzzFeed News.
The emails document two days of the aftermath of an unusual, and seemingly sudden, statement released by the White House late on the night of June 26 last year. It warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he and his military would “pay a heavy price” if they carried out another chemical weapons attack.
At a mid-July news conference at the Pentagon, AP reporter Lolita Baldor asked Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, about an attack in Afghanistan that had led to the death of an American soldier. But before he could reply, a Defense Department press officer cut in to say that Milley and the three officials flanking him would be answering questions only about the intended topic for the news conference: the announcement of the location of a new command.
The next question went to Jennifer Griffin from Fox News. Over the previous two days, President Donald Trump had roiled the NATO summit in Brussels with verbal shots at the alliance’s members, so Griffin, after opening with a question about the new command, added, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with Lita, we don’t have an opportunity to see you enough. Gen. Milley, have you reached out to your counterparts in Europe after the NATO summit to reassure them that the U.S. forces are staying?”
Again, the press officer cut off the question before Milley could answer.
The incident, which left Pentagon reporters furious, was the latest flash point in what has become an increasingly adversarial relationship between Defense Secretary James Mattis’ Cabinet department and the reporters who cover it. Chief among the complaints, according to defense reporters who spoke to POLITICO, are declining access to Mattis and other military officials, as well as a sense that reporters are not receiving the information they need to keep the public informed about America’s military activities.
Is this happening because Mattis and his team are out of the loop and don’t really know what Trump is up to? Or are they simply following Trump’s example? Read more at Politico.
Trump’s appeasement of Russia is unprecedented for an American president, despite his recent claim that he has been the toughest president on Russia. It is almost certainly driven in part by his desire to protect the credibility of his election victory at all costs, to promote an image of being the ultimate deal-maker, and because of his preference for strong-man leadership. A former KGB officer and skilled manipulator, Putin no doubt recognizes these traits and is leveraging them to manipulate Trump.
Putin publicly admitted at the Helsinki summit that he wanted Trump to win, confirming a key point of the IC assessment. Trump probably is willing to look the other way on Russian interference because it was aimed at getting him elected, even if that means ignoring the threat Russia poses and allowing Moscow to continue attacking the country.
Behavior consistent with blackmail:
Trump’s behavior on Russia is consistent with a recruitment tactic employed by intelligence services to turn a person into an asset using damaging information as black-mail. Several senior Obama-era national security officials have said they believe Putin has compromising information on Trump and is using it to make the president do his bidding. Trump and his political base have been undeterred by revelations about his personal life, such as his alleged extra-marital affairs or history of sexual abuse. This suggests that if Moscow does have comprising information, it is likely to be about his personal finances, business practices, or other information that would damage his business.
► We know that some Trump campaign officials discussed working together with Moscow during the election, suggesting Russia could also be holding additional proof of collusion over the president’s head.
Trump’s doubling down since the summit and his invitation to Putin to the White House almost certainly have emboldened Putin to continue or even escalate intelligence operations against the U.S.
There was some encouraging news yesterday. A federal judge ruled that one of the emoluments cases against Trump can go forward.
Today’s ruling by federal court Judge Peter Messitte in one of the three emoluments cases against President Trump was a big win for the plaintiffs—and a bigger win than many had expected. It sets the stage for potentially shutting down the Trump International Hotel in D.C. as a violation of the government lease and thus an unconstitutional emolument. The legal interpretation in this decision would force Trump to divest from the hotel entirely.
For a little background, recall there are two emoluments clauses in the Constitution: The Foreign Emoluments Clause provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The Domestic Emoluments Clause provides, “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
After the court ruled that the Foreign Emoluments Clause applies to the president, it adopted the plaintiffs’ definition of emolument as any “profit,” “gain,” or “advantage,” relying on the research of law professor John Mikhail (a co-author with me of our amicus brief in the case). The court acknowledged this historical purpose of the clauses: “the Court does not see how the historical record reflects anything other than an intention that the Emoluments Clauses function as broad anti-corruption provisions. … The Foreign Emoluments Clause was unquestionably adopted against a background of profound concern on the part of the Framers over possible foreign influence upon the President (and, to be sure, upon other federal officials).” The court cited many examples of the historical context from the founding, and discussed how the executive branch has applied the clauses in a manner consistent with that interpretation of the clauses. (The court acknowledged an exception for “de minimis” benefits, i.e., inconsequential minor benefits.)
Then the court applied this interpretation to the Trump Organization and the Trump International Hotel specifically.
Click on the link to read the rest at Slate.
Note: The illustrations in this post are by Myles Hyman. So . . . what stories are you following today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Hackers working for Russia claimed “hundreds of victims” last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, federal officials said. They said the campaign likely is continuing.
The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure, “air-gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies, said officials at the Department of Homeland Security.
“They got to the point where they could have thrown switches” and disrupted power flows, said Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS.
DHS has been warning utility executives with security clearances about the Russian group’s threat to critical infrastructure since 2014. But the briefing on Monday was the first time that DHS has given out information in an unclassified setting with as much detail. It continues to withhold the names of victims but now says there were hundreds of victims, not a few dozen as had been said previously.
It also said some companies still may not know they have been compromised, because the attacks used credentials of actual employees to get inside utility networks, potentially making the intrusions more difficult to detect.
If you can’t get to story from my link, try going to Shakeville and clicking the link there. That’s how I got past the paywall.
President Trump threatened on Monday to strip the security clearances of top former officials who criticized his refusal to confront Russia over its election interference, signaling a willingness to use the powers of the presidency to retaliate against some of his most outspoken detractors.
Among those who could lose access are John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser; and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary.
“The president is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearances because they politicized, and in some cases monetized, their public service and security clearances,” Ms. Sanders said.
The suggestion marked an unusual politicization of the security clearance process by a president who has routinely questioned the loyalties of national security and law enforcement officials and dismissed some of their findings — particularly the conclusion that Moscow intervened in the 2016 election — as attacks against him.
As Dakinikat wrote, this idea originally came from Rand Paul. People seem to be dismissing this threat, but on Twitter, former FBI agent Asha Rangappa pointed out that allowing the president to control who gets security clearances could endanger the Mueller investigation.
Dakinikat also wrote yesterday about Trump’s Twitter threat to Iran. Here’s a reaction from Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly: The Day We Ignored That POTUS Threatened to Annihilate Iran. LeTourneau is concerned that people in the media are telling us to just ignore Trump’s blustering. But should we really do that?
Jennifer Rubin actually wrote that we should ignore the president’s tweet. Apparently most people took her advice and spent more time yesterday talking about the president’s threat to strip security clearances from people who criticize him (even some who never had security clearances in the first place) than they did about his threat to annihilate Iran.
All of this has happened since former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman wrote that her fellow Republicans should call on the president to resign because he is unfit for office.
My concern is that there are almost daily examples of how Donald Trump is unfit for office. They happen so regularly that we have now started to ignore his threats to basically initiate World War III. I totally get why people do that. But it also scares the shit out of me when I take a moment to think about what’s happening.
Every now and then I imagine what it will be like in 10-15 years to look back on what I’ve written about during this Trump era. Honestly, I doubt that in the future I’ll feel guilty about over-reacting. But there is a very good chance that I’ll wonder why I wasn’t constantly screaming at the top of my lungs…”This president in absolutely bonkers, we can’t shut up until we get him outta there!”
IMHO, everyone should be listening to Christine Todd Whitman. Trump is dangerously unfit to be president, and he should resign or be impeached.
A person with knowledge of the Trump team’s decision making on the matter told Business Insider the president’s attorneys waived their privilege claims over all of the tapes because they claim Cohen had been discussing them with others, such as Michael Avenatti, the attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels, who is suing the president and Cohen.
The person said Trump’s legal team didn’t know “exactly what Cohen” has told others, but added that the lawyers “have the tapes” and “heard them all.” Trump’s attorneys “don’t have any problem with anybody listening to them,” the source said, adding that the remaining tapes disclosed Monday contain conversations between Cohen and a third party about Trump, not direct discussions between Trump and Cohen. This person told Business Insider they had heard the tapes.
Trump’s lawyers waived privilege so they could speak freely about the tapes, now that they claim Cohen is separately speaking about them, the person said. The person said waiving the privilege was “inevitable” and that they “didn’t know how it was coming out” but “knew Cohen was the source.”
Avenatti, who crossed paths with Cohen at a Manhattan restaurant last week, said Sunday that he has “continued to have a dialogue” with Cohen. Avenatti added he believes Cohen will “assist us in our search for the truth.”
So far, we have no idea what Trump discussed in his private meetings with Vladimir Putin. Can our intelligence agencies find out? At Politico, Josh Meyer says yes:
Privately, sources familiar with U.S. intelligence capabilities expressed confidence that the so-called Special Collection Service scooped up not only Putin’s readout of the two-hour meeting, but what the Kremlin’s top spymasters really think about it — and how they’re spinning it to their foreign counterparts.
That means the National Security Agency and CIA are at less of a strategic disadvantage than U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged publicly. But because they likely are missing the one critical piece of intelligence they need the most — a word-by-word account of what Trump and Putin said during the meeting — those officials appear to be flying somewhat blind when it comes to fulfilling their most important mission of helping U.S. policymakers figure out what comes next.
“Most of the questions about what happened in Helsinki — and about the risks the president created there — are skipping over a more fundamental concern: How can intel officers effectively support policy, at any level, when only the president knows what the policy is?” asks David Priess, a former CIA officer and daily White House intelligence briefer. “If, one-on-one with Putin, the president made or changed policy, and he refuses to tell anyone exactly what happened, how can the national security bureaucracy prepare the memos and talking points for future meetings to be held about those very policies?”
The gist is that Trump lied (big surprise!) when he claimed that Warbier had been beaten and tortured. This is based on the coroner’s findings. It appears that Warbier was taken to a North Korean hospital the next day after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor; and it appears that he received good care in the hospital. Clark writes that the North Koreans do not typically torture American prisoners and they are kept in safe houses, not in hell-hole prisons. It’s possible Warbier may have tried to commit suicide, as several other American prisoners have.
Despite how Trump and his administration boosted the narrative that Otto was physically tortured, however, the evidence was not clear-cut. The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been “systematically tortured and intentionally injured,” a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn’t previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers’ assertions.
Fred had described Otto’s teeth as having been “re-arranged” with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that “the teeth [were] natural and in good repair.” She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto’s brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma. “His body was in excellent condition,” Sammarco said. “I’m sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.” When asked about the Warmbiers’ claims, Sammarco answered, “They’re grieving parents. I can’t really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.” Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.
Basically Trump used Warmbier as an excuse to threaten North Korea.
When Otto finally opened his eyes again, he likely found himself at a guesthouse, which is where the State Department believed he was probably kept. At least five previous American detainees have been imprisoned in a two-story building with a green-tiled roof in a gated alleyway behind a restaurant in downtown Pyongyang, which is run by the State Security Department, the North Korean secret police. (Others have been kept at a different guesthouse, and at least three have stayed at a hotel.) The most used guesthouse is luxurious by local standards—detainees can hear guards using its karaoke machine into the wee hours—but Otto would have likely found its two-room suites roughly equivalent to those in a basic hotel. And no matter how nice his suite, it was also a cell, for he would have been allowed out only for an occasional escorted walk.
So how did he get his injury?
While some previous detainees were allowed letters from home, it seems that North Korea denied Otto any contact with the outside world. His only break from the interrogations was likely watching North Korean propaganda films. The psychic trauma of all this has sent previous detainees into crushing depressions, and even driven some to attempt suicide….
Fred and Cindy Warmbier, Otto’s parents
“The staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,” Dr. Flueckiger told me. “They had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.” As Yun, the negotiator who helped free Otto, said, “The doctors were clear that he had been brought to the hospital within a day of his trial, and that he had been in that same room until I saw him.” [….]
Without knowing about the revised time line of Otto’s injury, experts I spoke to overwhelmingly identified some kind of accident—for example, an allergic reaction—as the most likely cause for Otto’s unconsciousness. The likelihood that his brain damage happened immediately after the sentencing, however, raises the possibility that he may have attempted suicide.
Imagine what Otto must have been feeling after hearing that he would spend the next 15 years laboring in what he probably imagined to be a gulag. After two months of being constantly reminded that the American government couldn’t help him, he probably felt that his family, his beautiful girlfriend (who called him her “soul mate”), and his Wall Street future were all lost. What else could he look forward to but physical and mental suffering?
At least two Americans imprisoned in North Korea have attempted suicide. After failing to cut his wrists, Aijalon Gomes chewed open a thermometer and drank its mercury, later explaining that he had given up on America’s ability to free him. Despite eventually having his release won by Jimmy Carter, Gomes was unable to escape his post-traumatic stress disorder, and seven years later burned himself to death. An American official said that Evan Hunziker tried to kill himself while being held, and less than a month after returning home, he shattered his own skull with a bullet in a run-down hotel. Robert Park reportedly tried to take his own life on returning.
Even if North Korea didn’t beat Otto, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t tortured, as the mental suffering the regime inflicted on him constitutes torture under the U.N. definition. As Tomás Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea, said, “Otto’s rights were violated on every level.”
Obviously I can’t do this article justice with short excerpts. If you have the time, I recommend reading the whole thing. Clearly, Trump’s use of Warmbier’s family’s suffering is unconscionable.
Those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Once again, I’ve hit a wall. I simply can’t take it anymore. Has this been the worst week in the Trump administration? I don’t know. Every week is horrible. I don’t think I can write anything coherent today, so I’ll just share some random stories that caught my attention this morning.
For much of the White House, Mr. Trump’s conduct at the news conference with Mr. Putin on Monday was wholly unexpected. Administration officials ahead of the summit had crafted a plan for Mr. Trump to confront Mr. Putin on Russia’s electoral interference, officials said.
Before the summit, Mr. Trump had authorized the Justice Department to release an indictment of 12 Russians who allegedly hacked into Democratic computers during the 2016 campaign, agreeing it would strengthen his hand when he raised the issue of election interference, a White House official said.
Afternoon in the garden-Diane Leonard
In preparatory meetings, Mr. Trump and his aides discussed using the indictment to forcefully make the case. The plan was for Mr. Trump to invoke the indictment both in private meetings and in the public news conference afterward, a White House official said. The idea, the official said, was to “shove it in Putin’s face and look strong doing it,” depicting it as hard evidence of Russian crimes against America’s electoral process.
“He did the exact opposite,” the official said. During the news conference, Mr. Trump appeared to side with Mr. Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies, saying he saw no reason why Russia would have interfered in the election. On Tuesday, he said he meant to say he saw no reason why Russia wouldn’t have interfered….
“It was a well laid-out plan. Unfortunately, he didn’t execute on it,” the official said.
Mr. Trump’s performance at the summit and afterward complicates plans for the midterm elections, a White House official said.
White House aides had begun preparations to make Mr. Trump the public face of planned efforts by the administration to stop election interference in the midterms. Mr. Trump would be shown presiding over meetings and making announcements about an administration-wide commitment to safeguard the 2018 elections. In the wake of the Putin summit, Mr. Trump may struggle to credibly make the case that he is spearheading the effort to protect U.S. election systems, the official said.
Russia provided additional details Friday of what it said were agreements made at the presidential summit in Helsinki this week, shaping a narrative of the meeting with no confirmation or alternative account from the Trump administration.
Not surprisingly, the Russian story line tended to favor the Kremlin’s own policy prescriptions, at times contradicting stated administration strategy.
Lucy Hessel Reading – Edouard Vuillard, 1924
Russia already has sent formal proposals to Washington for joint U.S.-Russia efforts to fund reconstruction of war-ravaged Syria and facilitate the return home of millions of Syrians who fled the country, following “agreements reached” by President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, the three-star head of the Russian National Defense Management Center, said Friday.
Mizintsev, speaking in Moscow at a joint session of planners from the Defense and Foreign Ministries, said that Russia had already begun work I gon the ground in both areas but that additional resources and international coordination are needed.
Russia’s U.S. ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, said separately that Syria had been the primary topic in the Trump-Putin conversations, along with “the removal of the concerns that the United States has regarding the well-known claims about alleged interference in the elections.” [….]
Asked about Russian claims that agreements had been reached, a National Security Council spokesman said: “As President Trump stated, the two sides agreed that their national security council staffs will follow up on the presidents’ meetings, and these discussions are underway. There were no commitments to undertake any concrete action, beyond agreement that both sides should continue discussions.”
I guess Trump is still refusing to tell anyone what happened in the meeting. Maybe he can’t remember?
As much as official Washington has become numb to the daily offenses of Donald Trump, there was something uniquely disturbing about the president’s transgressions in Helsinki. After months of combating Trump’s attempts to align himself with Vladimir Putin, the president was alone and unguarded with the man he had long sought to meet. National Security Adviser John Bolton, among other Russia hawks, had traveled with Trump to Finland in preparation for the summit. But when Trump and Putin entered the gilded Hall of State at the Presidential Palace for a joint press conference, the result was a shocking display of servility. Repudiating the hardline positions of his aides and advisers, Trump exonerated Putin for hacking the 2016 election—and put the blame on “foolish” Americans for driving the United States and Russia apart.
Albrecht Samuel Anker
Days later, insiders who know Bolton are still struggling to explain how the man who’s advocated violent regime change in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea could have allowed his boss to bend the knee before one of America’s greatest geopolitical adversaries. “I’m stumped,” said a former high-ranking State Department official. “The John Bolton I remember from the past was a strong hawk. So either he’s changed, or the president isn’t listening to him or taking his advice on how to deal with Russia.” A second erstwhile colleague, also a former senior State Department official, concurred. “The John Bolton I know would have been more horrified than I am over what happened,” this person told me. “I mean, he must just be pulling his forelock practically out of his head in order to maintain the ‘Oh you’re so great’ and ‘Mr. President, oh you’re the best.’ That’s the only thing that works with this birdbrain, and he must be doing it over and over and over again.”
“Birdbrain.” I haven’t seen that synonym for “moron” lately.
Bolton isn’t the only senior Trump adviser who has been sidelined or subordinated. Defense Secretary James Mattis, an outspoken critic of Moscow, has not appeared in public or made any comments since Monday’s press conference, and the Pentagon has been unable to answer questions about the summit….
As the post-summit fallout continues, however, these foot soldiers of the Deep State are coming to a chilling realization: nobody has any control over Trump—including Trump himself. For the legion of national-security, diplomatic, and military officials trying to smile while white-knuckling through the Trump presidency, Helsinki was a wake-up call. As a current administration official explained, Trump seems to believe that he alone can sit down with dictators and strongmen like Putin and Kim Jong Un to remake the world order—and experts and advisers will only slow him down.
Hey, he told us at the GOP convention: he believes that he alone can fix it.
In the past few days, President Trump has given at least some Republicans reason to express displeasure over his relationship with Russia. First he performed a pathetic ritual of subservience before Vladimir Putin, standing beside the Russian leader — after a private meeting between the two, which no aides were permitted to attend — and dismissing the copious evidence of a Russian attack on the 2016 election in deference to Putin’s word.
Asta Nørregaard (1853-1933) Woman Reading, 1889
Then we learned that Putin had suggested that we make Americans available to the Kremlin for questioning, including Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, in exchange for allowing us to question some of the agents who carried out the cyberattack. Trump had called it “an incredible offer,” and the White House said he was considering it, before finally backing down after the Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the idea.
But look past the modest number of Republicans saying that Trump has gone a bit too far here or there, and you see a very different picture. The truth is that the entire GOP is well on its way to becoming a Russian asset.
A few weeks ago, while posthumously honoring a World War II hero, Trump gave the man’s family a report on their departed loved one. He was “looking down from Heaven, proud of this incredible honor, but even prouder of the legacy that lives on in each of you. So true.”
A few weeks before that, at what was billed as a celebration of patriotism at the White House, Trump reported to the crowd that fallen soldiers are pleased with his economic policies and increases in the stock market. “Many of them are looking down right now at our country, and they are proud,” he said.
Sometimes, Trump pinpoints the location of the deceased, using some psychic GPS. At an outdoor Medal of Honor ceremony in May for soldiers lost at a battle in Afghanistan, Trump pointed at a location in the sky and said, “They are looking down right now.” A week before that, outside the Capitol, Trump pointed to a point in the sky over his head and told the family of a slain police detective: “So she’s right now, right there. And she’s looking down.”
Long Liyou
Occasionally, something must get lost in the cloud and Trump receives a heavenly miscommunication. Speaking to a steelworker at the White House in March, Trump informed the man: “Your father, Herman, he’s looking down, and he’s very proud of you right now.”
I woke up last Sunday morning feeling anxiety in my chest as I checked the Twitter app on my phone, scrolling down to refresh, refresh, refresh. There was a comment I started to engage with — I opened a new post, tapped out some words, then thought better of it and deleted the tweet. The same thing happened repeatedly for the next two hours.
The evening before, I had complained to a close friend that I hated being on Twitter.It was distorting discourse, I said. I couldn’t turn off the noise. She asked what was the worst that could happen if I stepped away from it.
There was nothing I could think of. And so just after 6 p.m. last Sunday, I did.
After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way.
I really hope she just stays away. Haberman represents everything that is negative about the mainstream media and access “journalism.” I’ll keep right on ignoring her inane gossip columns whether she “reengages” or not.
That’s all I’ve got. I hope you all have a relaxing weekend.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
I’m not too with it this morning. My mother is in the hospital and we still don’t know what is wrong with her. A few days ago, she started feeling weak and tired and she suddenly was unable to tie her shoes. Her blood pressure has been too high and her oxygen levels are too low. At the hospital the physical therapist found that her left hand wasn’t working properly, so that might explain the shoe-tying problem.
Whatever is wrong, it doesn’t seem to be life-threatening, because she has had all kinds of tests that have so far shown nothing wrong. She had an MRI yesterday and today they are going to check for blockage in her carotid artery she will work more with the physical therapist. A neurologist told my sister and my niece that she doesn’t think it’s serious, but they still don’t understand why her blood pressure is so high.
Anyway, I’ve been very anxious about Mom, and between that and the Trump madness. I can’t really think straight.
Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.
The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.
Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.
So Trump saw specific information proving that Vladimir Putin ordered the interference into our election to help him win, and he has spent his entire administration so far attempting to cover up for what his buddy Putin did.
The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.
The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.
The briefing revealed that a highly sensitive source close to Putin had provided information.
Mother and child, Pablo Picasso, 1901
According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.
They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.
And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.
That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.
Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.
Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.
I was exhausted last night and fell asleep early. I woke up about 3:30AM and check Twitter. A number of people were saying that this story was likely leaked to the NYT in response to Trump’s performance in Helsinki and afterwards and that the highly placed source must have been burned–possibly by Trump–or the story would not have been leaked.
No one in a position to be the source for the NYT’s reporting tonight would have burned a sourced close to Putin. The only reason that detail would be included is because Trump, who was briefed in Jan 2017, burned the source to Russia just like he burned Israeli intelligence. https://t.co/93jKCXqjGn
At beginning of Presidency Trump received deep detail of Russian operation from intel brief, apparently including human intel very close to Putin. Who’s confident Trump didn’t share that with Putin either in Hamburg of Helsinki?
As others have noted, the article mentions a source close to Putin that you would expect to be redacted from the article unless U.S. intelligence was convinced that the source was already burned, perhaps by Trump himself.
Right after Trump was told about US assets inside Trump’s inner circle Putin sacked some of the cyber security people in his inner circle https://t.co/DUZlUxTbbnhttps://t.co/xnbevBLEeR
Next question @nytimes: How much of this intel was Mitch McConnell shown just before the ‘16 election when he single-handedly prevented the IC & Obama admin from going public with it? @Lawrence
No one except the interpreters knows what Trump gave away to Putin during their more than two hour meeting in Helsinki, and now Russia is claiming Trump and Putin made a number of deals.
Two days after President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian officials offered a string of assertions about what the two leaders had achieved.
Delfina Flores Y Su Sobrina Modesta, Diego Rivera
“Important verbal agreements” were reached at the Helsinki meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters in Moscow Wednesday, including preservation of the New Start and INF agreements, major bilateral arms control treaties whose futures have been in question. Antonov also said that Putin had made “specific and interesting proposals to Washington” on how the two countries could cooperate on Syria.
But officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday.
At the Pentagon, as press officers remained unable to answer media questions about how the summit might impact the military, the paucity of information exposed an awkward gap in internal administration communications. The uncertainty surrounding Moscow’s suggestion of some sort of new arrangement or proposal regarding Syria, in particular, was striking because Gen. Joseph Votel, who heads U.S. Central Command, is scheduled to brief reporters on Syria and other matters Thursday.
This is interesting:
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did not attend Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting with Trump and has not appeared in public this week or commented on the summit.
One thing Trump and Putin apparently discussed was allowing Russia to question 11 American citizens, including former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.
At this week’s summit in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed what President Trump described as an “incredible offer” — the Kremlin would give special counsel Robert S. Mueller III access to interviews with Russians who were indicted after they allegedly hacked Democrats in 2016. In return, Russia would be allowed to question certain U.S. officials it suspects of interfering in Russian affairs.
One of those U.S. officials is a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, a nemesis of the Kremlin because of his criticisms of Russia’s human rights record.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to rule out the Kremlin’s request to question McFaul and other Americans. Asked during the daily press briefing whether Trump is open to the idea of having McFaul questioned by Russia, Sanders said President Trump is “going to meet with his team” to discuss the offer.
Current and former American diplomats are expressing disgust and horror over the White House’s willingness to entertain permitting Russian officials to question a prominent former U.S. ambassador.
One serving diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was “at a fucking loss” over comments that can be expected to chill American diplomacy in hostile or authoritarian countries – a comment echoed by former State Department officials as well.
“It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s fundamentally ignorant with regard to how we conduct diplomacy or what that means. It really puts in jeopardy the professional independence of diplomats anywhere in the world, if the consequence of their actions is going to be potentially being turned over to a foreign government,” the U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast.
During President Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Putin pivoted a question about extraditing the 12 Russian intelligence officers whom Robert Mueller has indicted into a quid pro quo for going after longtime betes noire currently beyond his reach.
Putin singled out Bill Browder, whose exposure of widespread Russian tax fraud led to the passage of a U.S. human rights sanctions law Putin hates. Standing next to Trump, the Russian president accused Browder of masterminding an illegal campaign contribution to Hillary Clinton and alleging vaguely that he had “solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers guided these transactions.” Should Trump permit the Russians to question people around Browder, Putin hinted, he will let Mueller’s people be “present at questioning” of the intelligence officers.
We still do not know what hold Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump, but the whole world has now witnessed the power of its grip.
Russia helped Donald Trump into the presidency, as Robert Mueller’s indictment vividly details. Putin, in his own voice, has confirmed that he wanted Trump elected. Standing alongside his benefactor, Trump denounced the special counsel investigating Russian intervention in the U.S. election—and even repudiated his own intelligence appointees….
The reasons for Trump’s striking behavior—whether he was bribed or blackmailed or something else—remain to be ascertained. That he has publicly refused to defend his country’s independent electoral process—and did so jointly with the foreign dictator who perverted that process—is video-recorded fact.
And it’s a fact that has to be seen in the larger context of his actions in office: denouncing the European Union as a “foe,” threatening to break up nato, wrecking the U.S.-led world trading system, intervening in both U.K. and German politics in support of extremist and pro-Russian forces, and continually refusing to act to protect the integrity of U.S. voting systems—it all adds up to a political indictment, whether or not it quite qualifies as a criminal one.
America is a very legalistic society, in which public discussion often deteriorates into lawyers arguing about whether any statutes have been violated. But confronting the country in the wake of Helsinki is this question: Can it afford to wait to ascertain why Trump has subordinated himself to Putin after the president has so abjectly demonstrated that he has subordinated himself? Robert Mueller is leading a legal process. The United States faces a national-security emergency.
Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a nice Thursday!
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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.
My concern is that there are almost daily examples of how Donald Trump is unfit for office. They happen so regularly that we have now started to ignore his threats to basically initiate World War III. I totally get why people do that. But it also scares the shit out of me when I take a moment to think about what’s happening.
Trump’s lawyers waived privilege so they could speak freely about the tapes, now that they claim Cohen is separately speaking about them, the person said. The person said waiving the privilege was “inevitable” and that they “didn’t know how it was coming out” but “knew Cohen was the source.”
“Most of the questions about what happened in Helsinki — and about the risks the president created there — are skipping over a more fundamental concern: How can intel officers effectively support policy, at any level, when only the president knows what the policy is?” asks David Priess, a former CIA officer and daily White House intelligence briefer. “If, one-on-one with Putin, the president made or changed policy, and he refuses to tell anyone exactly what happened, how can the national security bureaucracy prepare the memos and talking points for future meetings to be held about those very policies?”
Fred had described Otto’s teeth as having been “re-arranged” with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that “the teeth [were] natural and in good repair.” She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto’s brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma. “His body was in excellent condition,” Sammarco said. “I’m sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.” When asked about the Warmbiers’ claims, Sammarco answered, “They’re grieving parents. I can’t really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.” Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments