Month: October 2015

It’s still hard out here for a One Percenter

by digby

I honestly don’t know what to say about this anymore. I think it’s the lack of embarrassment for being such insufferable putzes that really gets to me.

From the Bible to the Lannisters of Game of Thrones, it’s easy to argue that the rich have always been vilified, scorned and envied. But their counsellors argue things have only gotten worse since the financial crisis and the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 fair wage campaign.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. It’s an -ism,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. “I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but … it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.”

The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.

Yeah, I really feel as if the wealthy are hiding and feel ashamed. You hardly even know they’re there. Well except for their ostentatious whining, which is deafening and constant. Comparing themselves to the experience of people of color is a new one, but the sentiment isn’t. Recall this piece of work, billionaire Tom Perkins, who compared his plight to the Jews in the Holocaust.

Well, he’s not alone:

“You can come up with lot of words and sayings about inheritors, not one of them is positive: spoiled brat, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, trust fund babies, all these things,” she said, adding that it’s “easy to scapegoat the rich”.

“Sometimes I am shocked by things that people say. If you substitute in the word Jewish or black, you would never say something like that. You’d never say – spoiled rotten or you would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealth holders.”

“Inheritors”, “wealth holders”. What nice phrases. Do you suppose they describe people like this? (The following is from a previous post of mine from 2014.)

Let’s check in with the Rich Kids of Instagram. It’s been a while and since I’ve recently been informed that the future of the world depends on their largesse it’s a good way to see what they’re interested in so we can all tailor our hopes and dreams around their hopes and dreams.

Basically, kids, don’t go to college, go to butler school:

Christopher Ely is prone to philosophizing about his life’s work. “You should be invisible, to a certain point,” he explains carefully, wearing a navy blue pinstriped suit and well-polished shoes. “You exist, of course, but you don’t.” Ely, of course, is describing the secrets of the manservant trade. As one of New York’s most famous butlers, he’s enjoyed a storied career that began as a footman at Buckingham Palace and led to a job as the butler and estate manager for philanthropist and power widow Brooke Astor. Ely, 48, does not use the term “manservant.” The word, he says, “has such connotation to it.”

This is one of the many tips Ely is preparing to pass on to the next generation of butlers, housekeepers, chauffeurs, governesses, housemen, personal assistants, laundresses, and chefs. This week he and Manhattan’s French Culinary Institute inaugurate the Estate Management Studies program. Tired of hearing people tell him, “We couldn’t get good staff,” Ely says, he set out to reinvigorate the entire domestic-service industry with a curriculum that combines its ancient hallmarks—efficiency, decorum, and discretion—with what the institute calls the “contemporary skills necessary to manage modern-day residences.”

Update: Also too, apparently this peek inside the lives of the rich and shameless “old money” of Charleston South Carolina has the old guard all in a tizzy. They don’t like to have their (lazy children’s) dirty laundry exposed on national TV. 

Frankly my dear, these heirs to Antebellum gentility really don’t give a damn. 

It reminds me of this earlier peek into the rich and shameless youth of New York City, featuring PC Peterson, the worthless heir to Pete Peterson, the man who openly admits he’s trying to save the country for his grandkids. He doesn’t tell us that his plan is to turn the nation into a feudal state. 

Peter Cary “PC” Peterson, 18 years old and a senior at Dwight, is sitting at Philippe on the Upper East Side, talking about the way the world works, based on his extensive experience. “Everything in New York City is about connections,” he explains, his eyes glinting and head lolling back. “It’s who you know and how much money you have. It’s really sad. And I am not saying I’m like that. But that’s what New York is: money and power.”

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Do you want to build a progressive bench?

by digby

Blue America’s been working it for along time. And slowly but surely that bench is growing.

Alan Grayson sent this to his supporters today.

Dear Friend,

I was swapping e-mails with Blue America’s Howie Klein today, and the subject of a GOP Congressional seat in the Northeast came up. He knew both Democratic challengers. Knew all about them, in fact. And the same thing would be true of House candidates in the other 434 districts. Howie knows all about them, too.

There are people who actually are paid to know all about Congressional campaigns – Stu Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, etc. I’ve read their stuff. Howie knows more than they do.

But Howie doesn’t sell what he knows. Instead, he uses that knowledge to cultivate and nurture progressive candidates all over the country. Blue America will not be supporting those two challengers that Howie knows in the Northeast, because – because — they’re not blue. But other candidates are true blue, and those are the ones who get Howie’s help. The only ones. With Howie in charge, Blue America PAC is the manager of the Progressive Farm Team.

Go Progs! Give me a “P”! Etc.

Join me and Howie Klein now in turning America blue in 2016, by contributing $9 or more to the Blue America PAC >>

You might think that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) might be doing this. Mais non, as the French would say. Despite having $100 million a year to spend, they don’t know what Howie knows. And for sure, they don’t care the way that Howie cares. Ever since the Rahm Emanuel regime, the DCCC has had a strong built-in bias against progressive candidates. And the DSCC? Don’t get me started. They can’t find their derriere with deux mains. Just look at their record last year.

So progressives really need Blue America PAC. Which is why you should help.

Politics is a team sport. Show your support for progressives all over the country by donating $9 or more to the Blue America PAC >>

At an earlier time in his life, Howie Klein was the Vice President of Warner Reprise records. He knows countless top performers (which is why he sometimes holds contests giving away great stuff like platinum records). He doesn’t have to work anymore. He helps progressives for one reason and one reason only: because he cares.

And if you contribute to Blue America PAC, you not only have Encyclopedia Howie working for you, but you also enlist the support of the pioneering blogger Digby, and John Amato of the website “Crooks and Liars” (dot-com, of course). Because they all share the Blue America dream of making America blue. Not purple. Blue.

Chip in $9 now, and Help Make America Blue

Courage,

Rep. Alan Grayson

Candidate for U.S. Senate

A brand name in a suit, nothing more

by digby

Heh. The Donald is funny:

Bill Clinton wants to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Oct 20, 2015 at 11:57am PDT

Clinton says something important there which I don’t think has been properly understood about Trump. Most of his money has been made through “branding.”

It’s not just vanity that requires Trump to claim that all his deals make gazillions: his current business requires it. Even when his projects fail – his golf course in Aberdeenshire, to take one example, has lost £3.5 million over the last two years – he makes money through letting other people put his name on their projects: no risk, little work, just a licensing fee upfront or a share of the profits. He doesn’t actually own the Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Palace or Trump Place or Trump Plaza or Trump Park Avenue or Trump Soho, or the many Trump buildings throughout South America, Turkey, South Korea and the Caucasus. Developers buy the use of his name because enough customers believe in it: ‘It’s not even a question of ego. It’s just that my name makes everything more successful,’ he says. And so there have been Trump board games and phone contracts, credit cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars that look like gold bars, cologne sold only by Macy’s (‘Success by Trump’). He made $200 million over 14 seasons by being the star of The Apprentice, playing ‘Donald Trump’, the richest, tycooniest man in the world. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump made more than $40 million from thousands of students who enrolled in entrepreneurship classes at ‘Trump University’. Some say it was a scam, and many of them have joined class action lawsuits to get their money back (one says that ‘for my $35,000+ all I got was books that I could have gotten from the library’). The attorney general of New York has filed a lawsuit against Trump for fraud.

That’s a legitimate business — lot’s of celebrities do this. Jessica Simpson, Gwen Stephanie, Kanye West, Michael Jordan — all those people who license their names are master branders. Trump’s one of the best, no doubt about it.

But it doesn’t make him a Titan of Industry, an Entrepreneur, a Master of the Universe. It doesn’t even make him a master negotiator. He’s negotiates licensing contracts. These are not the Treaty of Paris or the Peace of Westphalia. They aren’t deals to build a manufacturing plant or a corporation that offers a good or service to millions of people. He simply makes contracts to exploit his name for big money.

He’s a brand name in a suit with a very big mouth. Period. In our ridiculous economy that’s enough to make you obscenely wealthy but it doesn’t make you a great businessman.

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Trump is not a political leader, he’s a cult leader

by digby

I wrote about the allure of his magical thinking for Salon this morning:

Please click over to read the rest. There’s a lot more. If any when Trump starts to lose his lustre, there’s another candidate lurking who can at least give them the fight they’re looking for.

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Until Republicans sober up, the myth of Tipnronnie is a joke

by digby

Here’s some interesting polling on the House speaker’s race:

Overall, the three GOP candidates who have never held political office continue to command amajority of support among Republican voters – combining for 52% in the current poll. Ted Cruz, while a U.S. Senator, could also be considered more of an outsider than insider. That leaves the “establishment” candidates with just 25% support among them.

In this context, then, it is not surprising that more Republican voters say that the national
Republican Party does a bad job (50%) representing their concerns than say it does a good job (41%).One problem for the national GOP is that this attitude spans the ideological spectrum, including Republicans who call themselves very conservative voters (51% bad job to 39% good job), somewhat conservative (48% to 43%), and moderate to liberal (51% to 41%). Tea Party supporters (59% bad job to 32% good job) are even more likely than Republicans who have a neutral or negative view of the movement (46% bad job to 46% good job) to feel the national GOP does not represent their concerns.

This attitude extends to the base’s view of the party leadership in Washington. A majority of 57% are dissatisfied with the Republican leaders in Congress – including 29% who are very dissatisfied and 28% who are somewhat dissatisfied. Only 42% are satisfied, including just 5% who are very satisfied and 37% who are somewhat satisfied. Majorities of all ideological groups are dissatisfied.

“The turmoil over selecting a new Speaker of the House reflects an unhappy party base. Because this disaffection reaches every corner of the GOP electorate, there is no clear indication about which route the party should take to right this ship,” said Murray.

The conservative Freedom Caucus stymied a smooth transition after John Boehner’s surprise resignation announcement last month. However, somewhat more Republican voters say that the Freedom Caucus and similar conservative members of Congress have too little (39%) rather than too much (25%) power, with another 21% saying they have the right amount of influence.

The poll offers some contradictory advice for party leaders on how to handle this group – 39% of GOP voters say the Republican Congressional leadership should stand up to the Freedom Caucus more, while 35% say it should do more of what the Freedom Caucus wants. Not surprisingly, there is a strong ideological divide in this opinion – 47% of very conservative voters say the GOP leadership should give Monmouth University Polling Institute 10/20/15 in more to the Freedom Caucus while 52% of moderate to liberal Republicans say the leadership should stand up to the caucus.

A slight majority (52%) of Republican voters believe that the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party in Congress will be able to work together in the coming year – but only 7% say this is very likely, with most (45%) saying it is just somewhat likely. More than 4-in-10 say the two wings working together is either not too likely (30%) or not at all likely (13%).

Barely half of Republicans believe the moderate and conservative wings of the GOP will be able to work together. On what planet does anyone think there is a chance of Democrats and Republicans coming together in comity and compromise?


Meanwhile, we have Jim Webb dropping out because he thinks the Democrats are too ideological and don’t reflect the American people’s desire for someone who can meet Republicans halfway. And Joe Biden is electrifying the Village with his comments that he considers Republicans to be his friends and implying that he’ll be able to work with them.

I don’t have the answer for how to fix this. But there is no “working with” these people. They cannot work with each other much less the Democrats and if there is one unifying theory among them it’s that Dems are their enemy. There is no chance in hell that Joe or Jim or any other big swinging Democratic Daddy’s going to be able to change that by back slapping and glad handing or even knocking heads together. It is impossible.

These Republicans need their own people need to sober up. Until that happens, it’s going to be grim trench warfare with Democrats needing to hold the line and be creative about moving the forward country in the face of an insane opposition. There is no good reason to sugar coat that.

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QOTD: Joe Biden the Deal Man

by digby

Via Vox:

“I don’t consider Republicans enemies. They’re friends.”

I’ve said it before, if you liked the 2011 budget deal, you’ll love a Joe Biden presidency.

It turns out Obama made a critical if underappreciated mistake in the final hours of the back and forth: sending Joe Biden to haggle with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell once McConnell’s talks with his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, had broken down.

From my after-the-fact discussions with Democratic aides in the House and Senate leadership, it’s clear that Reid had a plan for resolving the cliff and considered the breakdown of his talks with McConnell very much a part of it. By involving Biden, Obama undercut Reid and signaled that he wanted a deal so badly he was unwilling to leave anything to chance, even when the odds overwhelmingly favored him. It suggested that even if Obama plays his cards exceedingly well in the run-up to the debt-limit showdown, he could still come away with a worse deal than he deserves because of his willingness to make concessions in the closing moments.

and

Mr. Cantor said he hoped the president would engage Mr. Biden more, recalling when the vice president negotiated a deal with presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, to head off the so-called “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and spending cuts at the end of 2012.

“Hopefully, I think the president may see the light and say if you want to get a deal done, bring in the deal man, Joe Biden,” he said.

That’s nice. Of course, the Tea Partyers aren’t quite as impressed with his skills at capitulation. They dumped Cantor so it’s unlikely they’re going to welcome Biden in with open arms except to toy with him, and make him sell out his own Party before they close the door. It’s never enough for them. After all, for all his trouble, they decided that as much as Joe aims to please them by giving away the store, they prefer not to make deals with Democrats.

But who knows? Maybe Joe can find the magic formula to make the Freedom Caucus happy. They have a list of demands, after all. If he wants to make deals with his friends the Republicans, he knows what to do.

And by the way, Clinton didn’t say she considered the Republicans her enemies — she said they considered her their enemy which is simply objective truth. They consider all Democrats their enemies even their ol pal Joe and the fact that he is still deluded that the old days of Tipnronnie are possible is truly alarming. I certainly don’t get the feeling that Obama is under any such illusion any longer.

Unfortunately, according to the polls, a lot of Democratic voters still believe it’s possible to “compromise” with these radical freaks, at least in the abstract, so Biden might have an argument here. As much as the GOP voters don’t seem to understand how our government system works, the Democratic voters don’t seem to have recognized that we are dealing with a bunch of extremists. So, who knows? They might just think old Joe, the experienced white guy is just the ticket.

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Bill McKibben arrested at an Exxon Station in Vermont

by Gaius Publius

I swear, the first political campaign to say “As president, I will RICO the fossil fuel companies” will make a hell of a splash. (More on that below.)

The news is that climate advocate Bill McKibben has gotten himself arrested in protest because, as his Tumblr site says, “Exxon Knew.” But the biggest takeaway, for you, is this, from the middle of McKibben’s explanation (my emphasis):

[Exxon’s] silence and their lies—driven by nothing more than the desire to keep making money—helped disrupt the earth’s most critical systems. When people ask, how could our species have wrecked our planet, the memos and internal documents uncovered by these reporters offer a huge part of the answer. We wrecked the planet, in no small part, because we were lied to by the most powerful institutions on that planet.

Please ponder that.

Except “institutions” don’t lie; people do. This is the face of the man who runs Exxon, CEO Rex Tillerson.

Here’s what he looks like when he’s facing you.

Exxon — the collection of buildings, oil fields, office equipment and legal documents — doesn’t make decisions. Humans do, led by this man, Rex Tillerson. He’s not a building or a legal entity. He’s a person and a perp. Please ponder that.

Here’s how we know they knew — and have known since 1977:

• “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” (the source exposé)
• “What Exxon knew about the Earth’s melting Arctic” (LA Times)
• “Exxon’s Climate Concealment” (LA Times)

My write-up is here. A look at the RICO implications is here. Now the news.

McKibben Arrested at an Exxon Station

The bare facts are, he tried to get arrested in a one-person protest in his home town, and he succeeded. The Burlington Free Press:

Climate activist and author Bill McKibben was arrested Thursday afternoon in Burlington after blocking access to a downtown gas pump.

McKibben, a Ripton resident, said he hoped his protest at the Simon’s Quick Stop and Deli Mobile station on South Winooski Avenue would draw attention to recent evidence that suggests that Exxon Mobile knew about fossil fuel’s role in global warming several decades ago — and shaped drilling strategies accordingly.

“I don’t want this story to disappear in all this media clutter,” McKibben told journalists and a dozen or so supporters. “We need to let people know what we now know about ExxonMobil.”

Now the explanation. Why did he do this?

Exxon Knew

I’ll give the rest of the floor to McKibben. Here’s the piece he wrote for his Tumblr site, ExxonKnew (emphasis in original):

ExxonMobil Knew

At the moment I’m sitting in front of an ExxonMobil station in Burlington Vermont waiting to be arrested and feeling, frankly, a little silly.

But I’m doing it because I want people to read and share two news stories, and I figure this small gesture might be enough to move a few people to do so. The stories come from teams of reporters at the Los Angeles Times, the Columbia Journalism School, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, and they demonstrate—exhaustively, undeniably, and appallingly—that ExxonMobil, the biggest and most powerful company on earth, knew all about climate change in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The company had sophisticated computer models demonstrating exactly how fast the globe would warm, and its highest levels of management were clearly aware that this would be a severe problem for the planet. They even used this knowledge to bid on oil leases in the rapidly melting Arctic.

But they didn’t tell anyone. Instead, they lied—they helped fund institutes devoted to climate denial, and bankrolled politicians who fought against climate action. Their CEO—who had overseen much of the research—told Chinese leaders in 1997 that the globe was cooling and that they should go full-steam ahead with fossil fuel.

This is not just one more set of sad stories about our climate. In the 28 years I’ve been following the story of global warming, this is the single most outrageous set of new revelations that journalists have uncovered. Given its unique credibility—again, it was the biggest corporation on earth—ExxonMobil could have changed history for the better. Had it sounded the alarm—had it merely said ‘our internal research shows the world’s scientists are right’—it would have saved a quarter century of wheel-spinning. We might actually have done something as a world before the Arctic melted, before the coral reefs were bleached, before the cycles of drought and flood set fully in.

Instead, their silence and their lies—driven by nothing more than the desire to keep making money—helped disrupt the earth’s most critical systems. When people ask, how could our species have wrecked our planet, the memos and internal documents uncovered by these reporters offer a huge part of the answer. We wrecked the planet, in no small part, because we were lied to by the most powerful institutions on that planet.

And so here I sit. I don’t have any great hope this action of mine will change anything practical. I fear that no one is likely to prosecute Exxon—they’re too big and too powerful. And for that matter it wouldn’t undo the damage. I know that we can’t rally enough Americans to boycott Exxon to make more than a token dent in their endless profits, and that even if we did those profits would flow to some other oil giant whose deeds are yet to be uncovered. Indeed, I know that most of the gas stations that say Exxon or Mobil on the sign aren’t even owned by the company. I know that none of this is the fault of the local franchisees—I gave the folks who run this station a hundred bucks before I sat down in hopes that my small protest won’t cost them too much in income.

I also know that there are clever and cynical people who will wave off these stories by saying, ‘of course, we knew that all along. That’s just how the world works.’ Or they will say, ‘it’s not Exxon’s fault; we all use fossil fuels.’ These clever people are the cousins of the cynics who worked at ExxonMobil; their knowingness is a cover for inaction. Exxon didn’t act when its actions could have changed the course of history; that’s not true of the rest of us.

My only real hope is that this gesture of mine will lead a few more people to read these pieces of reporting before they disappear into what my wife correctly and despairingly called the overwhelming clutter of our digital culture. I don’t want you to sign a petition, add your name to a mailing list, send money to a kickstarter. Just to read. I guess I figure that some people will say: if it’s important enough to someone to get arrested, I can spare ten minutes to read the story.

Perhaps this understanding will lead more people to join in the movement for fossil fuel divestment, or to oppose giant new oil projects, or to take away government subsidies from dirty energy. That would be good—I’ve spent much of my life on those battles, and will keep at them with my colleagues at 350.org and throughout the climate justice movement. It would help in every battle that matters if the Exxons of the world had less credibility and less power.

But even if these stories simply lead to more understanding without any practical consequence, that seems worthwhile. People are dying already around the world from the effects of climate change, people who never burned a gallon of oil in their lives. Everyone who comes after us will inhabit a planet much less vibrant than the one we were born into. My daughter graduates from college this spring, and she inherits this world that Exxon did so much to break. They—and all of us–deserve at least to know the truth.

Here are the stories I’ve been referring to:

http://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/
http://insideclimatenews.org/content/Exxon-The-Road-Not-Taken

Sincerely,

Bill McKibben

P.S.—if others elsewhere want to repeat this small gesture, please do it peacefully, and respectfully.

Exxon knew, and then they lied to you for money.

Which Democratic Candidate Will Stand with the People and Say “RICO”?

Thank you, Bernie Sanders, for making the point as strongly as it needs to be made. Will Bernie Sanders promise to RICO the fossil fuel companies if he’s elected? Will climate champion Martin O’Malley? Will Hillary Clinton?

The first one of these three who says so will get a hell of a boost, judging by the cheering of the crowd in this debate segment:

If you’d like to sign a petition aimed at RICO’ing the bones off Exxon, you can do it here.

And if you want to say thank you to Bernie Sanders for what he’s done so far, you can do it here. Adjust the split any way you want at the link.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Swing to the left
by Tom Sullivan

Political dynasties are not unheard of. The U.S. presidency went from Adams to Adams and from Bush to Bush. It could go from Clinton to Clinton next fall. On the other hand, Jeb! might be a Bush too far.

Yesterday, Canada went from Trudeau to Trudeau in a swing to the left:

Canadians voted for a sharp change in their government Monday, resoundingly ending Conservative Stephen Harper’s attempt to shift the nation to the right and returning a legendary name for liberals, Trudeau, to the prime minister’s office.

Justin Trudeau, the son of late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, became Canada’s new prime minister after his Liberal Party won a majority of Parliament’s 338 seats. Trudeau’s Liberals had been favored to win the most seats, but few expected the final margin of victory.

Well, that’s promising, and perhaps catching. Maybe that’s why Scott Walker proposed building a wall on our northern border.

“I didn’t make history tonight, you did,” Trudeau told supporters. Stephen Harper stepped down as head of the Conservatives:

The tone was set by an early Conservative attack ad that claimed Trudeau wasn’t ready to be the country’s next prime minister and took aim at his looks with the comment, “Nice hair, though.”

“What Trudeau did was surprise the field, and he stiffened the spine of a lot of liberals who were wavering,” said Nelson Wiseman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

Trudeau also touted a path for Canada that he said was more ambitious than his opponents’. His slogan “Real Change” echoes Barack Obama’s successful “Hope and Change,” and Trudeau admires how, in his view, Obama transformed grassroots democracy.

What, no nastiness and xenophobia?

In his victory speech, Trudeau said the Liberal Party won because it put forward an optimistic message. “This is what positive politics can do,” he told supporters. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together. Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less.”

Hmm. “America shouldn’t be satisfied with less” doesn’t exactly sing as a 2016 campaign slogan, but it’s got the sentiment about right.

G-men agenda


by digby

I wondered if this would go unnoticed:

MSNBC’s Morning Joe failed to disclose the right-wing ties of Ron Hosko when pointing to his criticism of President Obama. In an October 16 report, The New York Times allowed retired F.B.I. senior official Ron Hosko to criticize President Obama over his recent comments concerning the F.B.I. investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server without explaining that Hosko is the president of a right-wing organization. On the October 19 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Mika Brzezinski quoted Hosko’s criticism of Obama in The Times without disclosing that Hosko is the president of The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), a right-wing organization whose funding has primarily gone to leadership salaries and to “prop[ing] up” conservative groups.

This refers to front page New York Times story about anonymous FBI agents being fit to be tied that President Obama “interfered” with an investigation by declared that he had seen no evidence that Clinton’s email server had endangered National Security. My immediate reaction to this was a sense of deja vu from a time when the media took lots and lots of selective leaks from wingnuts in federal agencies (and there are tons of them — it’s law enforcement) to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton. Apparently, the old boys trained the new boys, in both the FBI and the NY Times, in the way this game is played.

When I read this story, the first thing that came to mind was this:

Was Hanssen a Spy for the Right Wing, Too?

By Joe Conason | 08/06/01 12:00am

Should the national media ever manage to transcend the current preoccupation with the personal affairs of a certain Congressman, perhaps the time will come when attention turns again to an equally intriguing topic: the twisted politics of confessed F.B.I. traitor Robert P. Hanssen.

Emerging almost unnoticed in recent weeks were three strange but significant stories about the Hanssen case. What they suggest-along with other information unearthed previously about the longtime Soviet spy-is that he may have simultaneously functioned as a right-wing operative at the highest level of American law enforcement. If that sounds outlandish, consider the evidence.

The question of Mr. Hanssen’s political affiliations first arose following his arrest, when it became clear that his treason had been motivated by money rather than ideology. He was no leftist but instead, as Newsweek reported in early March, a devout member of the secret, controversial and ultraconservative Catholic lay order known as Opus Dei. Liberal Catholics have frequently accused Opus Dei, which answers directly to the Vatican, of pursuing secular political influence and quashing modern reforms in the Church.

Now it appears that Mr. Hanssen once held a key bureaucratic position from which he may have promoted these objectives. On July 29, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy investigation of his role as a top F.B.I. overseer of domestic counterintelligence operations. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, many of which bear his handwritten initials, the Times discovered that Mr. Hanssen spent several years directing the bureau’s notorious Reagan-era probes of American liberal and peace organizations. Such groups were deemed inimical to the objectives of the conservatives then in power, who tended to regard dissent over the nuclear-arms race and war in Central America as Soviet-influenced and subversive.

According to the paper, those redacted files refer repeatedly to the bureau’s Soviet Analytical Unit, where Mr. Hanssen served as deputy chief. Among the unit’s responsibilities was “to digest raw intelligence reports regarding alleged subversion.” Its analysis would then be provided to “the White House, Congress, and occasionally, the public.”

As later Congressional investigations would show, what this often meant in practice was the harassment and sometimes the smearing of Americans engaged in lawful political activity. Among the many groups under surveillance by the F.B.I. in those days were the Gray Panthers, nuclear-freeze advocates associated with SANE-and the left-leaning Catholic adversaries of Opus Dei who opposed the American-backed repression in Central America.

What the L.A. Times story doesn’t explore is how the raw intelligence data reviewed by Mr. Hanssen may have been misused-and whether he was ever in direct contact with anyone at the White House, in Congress or in the news media regarding alleged liberal subversion.

That certainly seems possible in light of another revelation, under the venerable byline of Robert Novak. The conservative columnist admitted on July 12 that Mr. Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column attacking Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for supposedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals. Although Mr. Novak still believes that the information offered by Mr. Hanssen was valid, even he cannot help wondering whether Mr. Hanssen was “merely using me to undermine Reno.”

(Adding another dimension to this curious confession is Mr. Novak’s reportedly close relationship with a prominent Washington cleric who works in Opus Dei’s offices near the White House.)

Apparently Mr. Hanssen would have been eager to use Mr Novak against the Clinton administration, if a June 16 cover story published by Insight magazine is to be believed. The author, Paul Rodriguez, obtained numerous e-mails allegedly written by the spy in recent years, some of which include venomous invective against President Clinton and his appointees. The messages are full of speculation about subjects ranging from Mr. Clinton’s personal behavior to the Elián González and China fund-raising affairs. One of the Hanssen e-mails concludes sardonically, “I guess from this you can determine that I am not a big fan of Clinton.” The article omits the names of the recipients of those messages. Perhaps the magazine was protecting the privacy of innocent persons-or its own sources. It ought to be noted, however, that Insight is a conservative publication, put out by the same outfit that publishes the Washington Times .

All these stories, taken together, are merely pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle that may or may not ever be completed in public view.

There is considerable irony, of course, in the news that a confessed Soviet agent was responsible for spying on innocent American citizens in the name of patriotic vigilance. But Mr. Hanssen, who avoided the death penalty by agreeing to reveal everything he knows and did, may have some truly troubling stories to tell about the American side of his double life.

He may have been the only dual spy for Russia and right wing crank in the FBI during that period, but he wasn’t the only right wing crank.

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It’s almost Halloween

by digby

And here’s a scary thought:

It began as whispers in hushed corners: Could it ever happen? And now, just three months from the Iowa caucuses, members of the Republican establishment are starting to give voice to an increasingly common belief that Donald Trump, once dismissed as joke, a carnival barker, and a circus freak, might very well win the nomination.

That’s from National Review … eeeeeeeeek!!!!

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