Month: October 2015

Sunday funnies

by digby

You don’t want to miss this one …

And this:

I’m hearing a lot of chatter that a big Biden announcement is coming on Monday.  FWIW, which is nothing …

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Prosecutor Gowdy faking the evidence? Why yes he is!

by digby

Take a look at this:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

On October 7, 2015, you sent me a 13-page letter making a grave new accusation against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Specifically, you accused her of compromising national security and endangering lives.

The problem with your accusation—as with so many others during this investigation—is that you failed to check your facts before you made it, and the CIA has now informed the Select Committee that you were wrong. I believe your accusations were irresponsible, and I believe you owe the Secretary an immediate apology.

It appears that your letter was rushed out to the press to counter the public firestorm caused by Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s stark admission that Republicans are using millions of taxpayer dollars to damage Secretary Clinton’s bid for president. However, your letter only provided further evidence of this fact.

In your letter on October 7, 2015, you stated that Secretary Clinton received an email from Sidney Blumenthal on March 18, 2011, that included the name of someone who purportedly provided information to the CIA. You asserted that this information was classified, arguing that Secretary Clinton “received classified information from Blumenthal—information she should have known was classified at the time she received it.” You then alleged:

Armed with that information, Secretary Clinton forwarded that email to a colleague—debunking her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address.

In your letter, you went to great lengths to highlight the gravity of your accusation, stating:

This information, the name of a human source, is some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.

To further inflate your claim, you placed your own redactions over the name of the individual with the words, “redacted due to sources and methods.” To be clear, these redactions were not made, and these words were not added, by any agency of the federal government responsible for enforcing classification guidelines.

Predictably, commentators began repeating your accusations in even more extreme terms, suggesting in headlines for example that “Clinton Burns CIA Libya Contact.”

Contrary to your claims, the CIA yesterday informed both the Republican and Democratic staffs of the Select Committee that they do not consider the information you highlighted in your letter to be classified. Specifically, the CIA confirmed that “the State Department consulted with the CIA on this production, the CIA reviewed these documents, and the CIA made no redactions to protect classified information.”

Unfortunately, you sent your letter on October 7 without checking first with the CIA. Now that we have done so, we have learned that your accusations were incorrect.

As a result of your actions, the State Department yesterday asked the Select Committee not to reveal the individual’s name publicly, not for classification reasons, but to protect the individual’s privacy and avoid bringing additional undue attention to this person.

Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this Select Committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons. These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the Select Committee and the House of Representatives.

Sincerely,

Elijah E. Cummings
Ranking Member

I’m sure the NY Times and others will continue to eagerly swallow every little dribble Trey Gowdy gives them, but nobody should believe them.

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QOTD: Jeb Bush on presidential leadership during a crisis

by digby

On CNN this morning:

“It’s what you do after that matters.”

This is useful information. Evidently, it’s just fine to sit on your ass waving away all warnings. This explains the entire Bush presidency. Even Poppy’s, who was asked what his agenda was and replied, “I’ll handle whatever comes up.”

And if it’s all about how you respond, then starting a war with a country that had nothing to do with it might be a bit questionable as well. Stellar leadership there, And then, there was the awesome response to a crisis by letting an entire city drown while you sing happy birthday on an airplane tarmac.

This is not an area Jeb should want explored. Whether it was ignoring the warnings on 9/11 or starting a war with an uninvolved country or failing to see the financial crisis or failing to respond to a natural disaster.

If he feels compelled to defend that record I feel sorry for him.

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Final Jeopardy clue: ON 9/11 THIS MAN WAS PRESIDENT
by Tom Sullivan

I’m sorry, ‘He kept us safe’ is incorrect and was not in the form of a question. The correct response: Who is George W. Bush?

It is the Final Jeopardy clue that stumps Republicans every time. Even brother Jeb! has trouble with it.

Surprisingly, Donald Trump does not:

The controversy began Friday morning when Trump implied that the former president could share some blame for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, as he was in office at the time.

“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump said on Bloomberg TV.

Bloomberg anchor Stephanie Ruhle interjected, “Hold on, you can’t blame George Bush for that,” before Trump stood by his comments.

“He was president, OK? … Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign,” Trump said.

In what by now sounds like a Pavlovian response, brother Jeb! responded:

How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 16, 2015

“Prominent Republicans” are of course outraged by Trump’s statement, plus some not-so prominent conservatives:

This is absolutely the most ridiculous thing Donald Trump has ever said. I mean, I just can’t get over how imbecilic it is, and it’s not the conspiracy theory that we’ve been hearing for years. It’s Trump, in an attempt to build himself up, blaming George W. Bush for the twin towers falling simply because he was president at the time …

The gall of a Republican taking a government official to task for a deadly attack simply because it occurred on her/his watch!

Still, Judd Legum did a quickie, tongue-in-cheek investigation for Think Progress and determined, “Taking into account all the evidence, it seems more likely than not that George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001.”

As Digby pointed out yesterday, the evidence supporting “He kept us safe” is a mite thin, what with over a dozen attacks on embassies and consulates during Bush’s tenure. And the anthrax attacks that killed five people and infected 17 others. And the domestic terrorism that has killed dozens in the decade since 9/11.

“We recognize that, over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups,” Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin said in a speech last week.

All of which are buried like a stinker in the litter box by “He kept us safe.”

But perhaps the most stunning “response” to Trump was the question that led to Trump’s remark in the first place. Bloomberg’s Stephanie Rhule said, “Help us understand who Donald Trump is as a man. I need to know that you will make us feel safe and you will make us feel proud.”

You have a party filled with politicians who instill fear in voters as a means of staying in power, in fear of a T-party that now bites that hand that once fed it, and an audience in chronic fear of the threats the party relies on to remain in power.

Talk about co-dependency.

—Dennis Hartley

Scalps

by digby

Andrew O’Hehir has a nice piece today at Salon about Rathergate and the new movie about it. His thesis is that it introduced a new era in wingnut conspiracy mongering and I think he might be right:

Whether Rathergate actually won that election for Bush is debatable; in the great Democratic middle-road milquetoast tradition of Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, the dithery, soporific Kerry campaign did everything it could to ensure defeat. But that whole episode clearly boosted Republican morale and made Rove and his minions feel that they were in control of the narrative and had the power to transform any possible negative into a positive. Rathergate was certainly not the first counterfactual counterattack strategy in American political history, and was not quite the birth of the right-wing blogosphere (which had surfaced, in embryonic form, during the Clinton years), but it marked a crucial evolution on both fronts. From 2004 flowed many blessings, at least for those who sought to control political discourse and popular perception and in so doing alter the nature of reality.

Suddenly all things were possible, and America became an endless episode of “The X-Files,” brought to you by faceless men in nice suits who are eager to warn you about the ravages of government and the duplicity of the “liberal media.” Every delirious resistance hypothesis previously promulgated by retired pharmacists who hand out mimeographed screeds in the mall now became a conduit for sowing widespread bewilderment and disempowerment. Climate-change denialism and birth-certificate trutherism. Death panels. Benghazi and Planned Parenthood. Every single aspect of what was once Tea Party ideology and has now become Republican orthodoxy, especially the upside-down economics in which high taxes (which are at historic lows) and social spending (which has been slashed) are reducing Americans to poverty and misery, rather than, let’s just say, a pointless $4 trillion war or the intensifying concentration of wealth at the very top of the pyramid.

I cannot help but contrast that with this story:

There was very little about Dylan Davies’ eyewitness account of the 2012 Benghazi attacks that seemed plausible. Sure, he had the proper credentials – he was a security contractor responsible for training the guard force at the diplomatic compound, and was in Benghazi the night of the attacks – but his story was outlandish and conspicuously difficult to corroborate.

According to Davies, after the attacks began he and a Libyan associate drove into Benghazi and sneaked into the Benghazi Medical Center, where he was the first person to identify the body of Ambassador Chris Stevens. Consumed by rage and a determination to save anyone who might still be alive, Davies set off on foot through the city, scaled the walls of the compound, and sneaked past dozens of militiamen until he was standing just feet from the burning villa where Stevens had lost his life. There, confronted by an armed guard, he bashed the terrorist’s face in with his rifle butt.

After sneaking back out of the compound, Davies decamped for his home in Wales where a detachment of FBI agents and State Department officials came to interview him and, according to Davies, were moved to tears by his heroism.

Every word of Davies’ account was a fabrication, contradicted by the official record and by Davies’ own after-action report. It was so far beyond the realm of plausibility that anyone but the most credulous sap would have regarded it with extreme skepticism. CBS News’ Lara Logan made it the centerpiece of her now-discredited bombshell “60 Minutes” Benghazi investigation last October.

In a just and equitable world, a journalist’s complicity in such gross and opportunistic fraud would be met with consequences. CBS News apparently has other ideas. Lara Logan, after a six-month leave of absence, is coming back to “60 Minutes.”

No harm no foul. Why is that?

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Extolling the overlords

by digby

The word obviously went forth over at Fox last week that it was time to pay obeisance to the overlords. It started with Megyn Kelly’s obsequious interview with Charles Koch and then followed from there on every program.

Here’s just one example of the brown-nosing sycophancy that came after:

STEVE DOOCY: Charles Koch sat down for a very rare interview with Megyn Kelly. And why exactly does he seem to support Republicans more than Democrats and what is his theory on Hillary? Here it is in 44 seconds.

(CLIP) CHARLES KOCH: The reason we tend to support Republicans is they’re taking this toward the cliff at only 70 miles an hour and the Democrats are taking us 100 miles an hour. Putting aside all the things that are said about Hillary today, my main difference with her is on the vision of what kind of society will make people’s lives better. So this is a vision of society in which people are too evil or stupid to run their own lives but those in power are perfectly capable of running everybody else’s lives because they’re so much smarter. It’s what Hayek called the fatal conceit, or William Easterly called the tyranny of experts. Because that’s what it is. It’s tyranny.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: An excellent look at really the divide there. I thought that was so — and he’s approximately going to donate $300 million dollars in the presidential race and other campaigns during this election cycle. You get insight into his mind and heart. It’s incredible.

KILMEADE: It’s hard to vilify when he comes off like that. I saw the at length interview and I also saw it on another channel. Very impressive, very down to earth. He’s hardly the villain he’s been characterized as.

DOOCY: And see, that’s just key because by the political left he and his brother have been portrayed as these awful guys who are just out to help the Republicans. That simply is not true. You heard him say the Republicans are driving the car off the cliff 70 miles an hour, and he prefers that over the 100 mile an hour version of the Democrats. Just one other thing about him. You know, while he is incredibly rich, he was trained as an engineer. He’s from Kansas, he and his brother are from Kansas, go Sunflower State. And he was trained at M.I.T. So, not only is he a generous man but he’s a real smart guy, too.

KILMEADE: Megyn did a great job.

I’ve heard he’s a great kisser too.

This is the hard-hitting “fair and balanced” journalism of Fox News.

Update: They also like Trumpie.

JUDITH MILLER: Well, I’m not necessarily convinced that more time leads to a more scintillating or enlightening debate. I mean, you can get past two hours and not only are the candidates really tired standing up, but so is the audience. On the other hand, of course CNBC wanted a three hour debate if they could sell advertising at $150,000 for a 30-second clip, that’s the Wall Street Journal estimate.

But now we see what Donald Trump would be like in negotiation with Vladimir Putin. And I can just tell you that it appears that CNBC needed Trump more than he needed them and that gives you leverage and perhaps it shouldn’t be that way but this is the marketplace and the marketplace has spoken and Trump has won. [Fox News, Happening Now, 10/16/15]

Yes, that’s the Judith Miller. And she wasn’t alone in extolling Trump’s “negotiating skills” in this silly episode.

Trump complained after the last one. It was just too looooong. And it was clear it was because he was terribly uncomfortable standing up all that time. He was hanging on to that podium for dear life:

Winger mailbag

by digby

Yet another email from some corner of the wingnut welfare system.  This one’s kind of funny:

Each week, we ask our newsletter readers what they think about the issues facing our nation. Readers have been able to see the results of the previous week’s polls with each new edition of the newsletter. But we thought you might like to see the bigger picture.

What are people thinking? What are the trends?

So we decided to bring all that information together for you right here, in one place.

I won’t bore you with all of them. These are the highlights:

(Sure they have …)

In case you haven’t noticed, the Republicans are really eager to get their war on. It’s really what they love.

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Oh this makes me so sad

by digby

ON top of all the other sadness of senseless mass shootings and toddlers accidentally shooting people and getting shot themselves and the sadness of parents accidentally shooting their kids and all the fucking rest of the horrors caused by a certain portion of America’s insane love affair with guns, there’s this:

A retired military K9 who became his veteran handler’s service dog when they returned from Iraq together was shot and killed in front of his Wyoming home last week.

Retired Army Ranger Matthew Bessler said a bicyclist killed his beloved Belgian Malinois, Mike, on Oct. 18. The biker told cops he felt threated by the 9-year-old pooch.

“I just lost my family member,” Bessler told the Billings Gazette. “He was very laid back … He was happy. He was a happy-go-lucky dog.”

Mike — who earned the rank of Major while serving two tours of duty in Iraq alongside his Sergeant 1st Class handler — became the Bessler’s service dog when they returned to the U.S. together, both suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

“I raised him and trained him as a puppy, and the ability he has to sense some of the issues that I have with seizures, with my PTSD, my TBI (traumatic brain injury) and severe anxiety disorders,” Bessler said. “He can … help me calm down or relax me.”

Family friends set up a fundraising page to help pay for a military funeral and burial for Major Mike.

The 59-year-old cycling shooter has not been charged with any crime since he felt threated and was acting in self-defense, the Park County Sheriff’s Office told the Powell Tribune.

I guess he couldn’t have just cycled away. Because then he would be a wuss, right?

By the way, between cops shooting any dog they feel like shooting and nobody blinking an eye and all these yahoos carrying guns while they ride their bikes, I’d highly recommend that you never, ever let your dog out of your sight and always have him on a leash even if you live in Montana. That won’t stop them. People are shooting dogs on leashes and tied up in the yard too. But maybe it will help.

Shooting other people’s dogs is now a legitimate American hunting sport.

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So, Bush kept us safe?

by digby

Right.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Also too, any idea how many embassy attacks there were during the Bush administration?

As the U.S. House of Representatives was readying a new special committee to investigate the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, many Democrats were arguing that continuing to probe the Sept. 11, 2012, attack — which killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens — amounted to a political witch hunt.

On May 5, 2014, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., told MSNBC host Ed Schultz that there has already been exhaustive testimony and investigation of the incident.

“This thing is just going on and on to boredom actually,” Garamendi said. “The Armed Services Committee actually did a hearing and the result was there’s nothing here. That’s obviously a great tragedy, but Ed, during the George W. Bush period, there were 13 attacks on various embassies and consulates around the world. Sixty people died. In Karachi, there was a death of one of our diplomats, and those were not investigated during that period of time because it was a tragedy.”

Readers asked us whether it’s true that under Bush, “there were 13 attacks on various embassies and consulates around the world, (and) 60 people died.” …

Garamendi said that “during the George W. Bush period, there were 13 attacks on various embassies and consulates around the world. Sixty people died.” There are actually different ways to count the number of attacks, especially when considering attacks on ambassadors and embassy personnel who were traveling to or from embassy property. Overall, we found Garamendi slightly understated the number of deadly attacks and total fatalities, even using a strict definition. Garamendi’s claim is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.

I hope the Republicans keep screaming “four Americans died on Hillary Clinton’s watch!” because it will give all of us on the other side of the dial a chance to remind everyone what happened on the last GOP president’s watch. For contrast.

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