Month: April 2016

Prince doodling on the keys

by digby

Following up on jazz day, this is just awesome:

Prince playing piano over ‘Summertime’ at Soundcheck, Koshien, Hyogo Prefecture (1990)

He could do it all.

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UPDATE: ABC-TV is broadcasting “Jazz at the White House” tonight (Saturday, 8pm ET). The one-hour prime time special features highlights from an event taped Friday night, hosted by President and Michelle Obama. Billed as an “all-star global concert”,  artists include Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Sting, Diana Krall, Trombone Shorty, Pat Metheny, Al Jarreau, Wayne Shorter and more. How cool is that?

More on music from Den of Cinema

A political prisoner

by digby

I applaud all the attention going to government corruption.  It’s a systemic problem that is distorting out democracy. But there is another side to the story and it’s perfectly represented by the case of Don Siegelman, the former Governor of Alabama:

Former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman was sent to solitary confinement this week at the Louisiana facility in which he is imprisoned on political corruption charges, according to his son Joseph Siegelman.

Siegelman, 70, was quoted extensively in a Washington Post article this week on former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, whose 2014 conviction on public corruption charges was reviewed by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Siegelman was transferred to solitary confinement at the federal correctional institution at Oakdale, La., on Monday after the story was posted online, according to his son, who said he found the timing suspicious.

But Bureau of Prison officials, who refused to confirm that the former governor was in solitary confinement, said that there was no link.

“The allegation that Mr. Siegelman was punished for talking to a reporter is false,” a spokesman for the bureau said in an emailed statement. “Due to confidentiality concerns, we cannot speak specifically about disciplinary matters of a particular inmate.”

Joseph Siegelman said his father had told him he was being punished for three infractions: running a business from prison, misuse of the mail and a catch-all prohibition against behavior that is disruptive of prison operations.

An official at the prison said the incident report was about a T-shirt that Siegelman sold on eBay, which was mentioned in The Post article and had been reported on in Alabama media.

An unknown bidder paid $4,500 for it, and the proceeds are supposed to go toward completing a documentary about Siegelman’s case called “Atticus vs. the Architect.” According to the note Siegelman posted during the eBay auction, the T-shirts can be purchased at the prison commissary. Alabama media also reported on the sale.

The Post interviewed Siegelman by telephone April 22 after a request for an in-person interview was denied. The longtime state officer-holder has a substantial following who believe that vague federal corruption laws give politically ambitious prosecutors too much leeway in deciding what and whom to investigate.

Several Supreme Court justices expressed similar concerns during Wednesday’s hearing on McDonnell. The court, though, had turned down Siegelman’s request that it review his conviction.

That partisan majority gets the job done when it counts.

If you are unaware of Siegelman’s alleged crimes, here’s the story:

Siegelman’s long-running legal case began when he was indicted in 2004. The state’s last Democratic governor, he was convicted of appointing Alabama health-care executive Richard Scrushy to an important industry regulatory board in exchange for Scrushy’s $500,000 campaign contribution to a state referendum on a lottery, the proceeds of which would go to the state’s underfunded schools.

Siegelman’s many supporters say the prosecution was politically motivated — the “architect” in the documentary title refers to Republican strategist Karl Rove.

“There was no personal benefit, not a penny of any financial gain,” Siegelman said in the interview. “There wasn’t any self-enrichment scheme. There was no testimony of a quid pro quo, much less an explicit or express quid pro quo. And the contribution was not even to me but to a ballot initiative.”

That’s the “corruption” that landed him in jail for years and has him in solitary confinement for speaking to the press.

It’s important to keep in mind that when people rail against political corruption and want to make draconian criminal laws to prevent it, people like Karl Rove will often have to power to use them for political purposes.

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by digby

Via Crooks and Liars, here’s a look at a nice Trump supporter:

John Martin Roos, a 61-year-old from Oregon, has been charged with communication of a threat in interstate commerce, and additional charges are likely forthcoming. Roos first came onto the federal government’s radar after a “concerned citizen” brought Roos’ Facebook and Twitter postings to the FBI’s attention in February, according to an affidavit from Special Agent Jeffrey Gray. (Excerpts, below, from Roos’ postings contain explicit language.)

In one Jan. 31 Facebook post cited by the FBI, Roos referred to agents as “pussies” and wrote he would “snipe them with hunting rifles everywhere.” (Despite his threats to kill members of law enforcement, he also complained on Facebook earlier this month about the “liberal media … slamming police.”) In a post in November that was also cited by the FBI, Roos spoke out against accepting refugees and threatened to kill Obama.

“Obama you goat fffing fudgepacker, the refugees are men of fighting age. Black lives matter! Sure we need someone to pick cotton and wash cars. Paris, burn diseased muslim neighborhoods to the ground and start over with human beings. Obama you are on a hit list,” he wrote in a post that appears to have been removed.

Click over to C&L to see some more of his lovely tweets.

Update: Hookay

In a sit-down interview with a Richmond news station, the Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is his candidate for President. 

The KKK leader, identified by WWBT only as “Imperial Wizard,” also insisted his organization is not a hate group, telling the station’s black anchor, “We don’t hate anyone.” 

Asked who he was supporting in the 2016 race, the wizard replied: “I think Donald Trump would be best for the job.” 

“The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes in, we believe in. We want our country to be safe,” he said. 

The leader went on to say if Trump were to drop out, he would back Ohio Gov. John Kasich before Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), saying Cruz “is not an American citizen” because he was born in Canada. 

WWBT’s interview opens with anchor Chris Taylor, trailed by a sheriff’s deputy as a precaution, driving to meet with Klansmen in a remote location in a national forest, because Taylor said the leader would only be interviewed on “his turf.” 

The story was spurred by the group mounting a recruitment drive in the Richmond area, dropping fliers that read “I want you for the KKK” in mailboxes and front yards, Taylor said. 

While the Imperial Wizard said Obama’s presidency has been “a very good recruiting tool,” he said it’s because of Obama’s politics, not his race. 

“We are not white supremacists, we’re white separatists,” the leader said on camera. “We’re not the big bad hate group people think we are.”

Tweet ‘o the day

by digby

I’m sure Trump endorser David Duke was very upset by all of this too:

That’s from the man whose candidate likes to tweet white supremacists and insisted our African American president wasn’t a “real American.” You, know, the man whose white supremacist followers also hate mexicans, Muslims and Jews.

Damn this is an ugly campaign. And it’s getting uglier every day.

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Cynicism is easy. Changing the culture is hard.
by Tom Sullivan

At Political Animal, Nancy LeTourneau comments on Rebecca Solnit’s essay on cynicism in Harpers. She writes that when Barack Obama entered the White House riding on a message of hope and change, that “the Republican strategy of total obstruction was designed to dampen all that with cynicism about the political process.” Cynicism about the political process is not in short supply in 2016. Hope is. But let’s not give Republicans too much credit.

Solnit writes:

Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.

Anyone who dares venture onto Facebook or Twitter these days knows the posture. Solnit continues:

If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised — but also because the openness of hope is dangerous, and in war, self-defense comes first. Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.

Watching the Forward Together movement take on conservative retrenchment in North Carolina with its Moral Monday protests, one is struck by how cynicism has no place there. You take your victories where you can find them and take defeats in stride. People volunteer to be arrested by the dozens, by the hundreds. Nothing much changes week to week. Except one of those Moral Monday arrestees, Terry Van Duyn, is now a Democratic state senator and the Minority Whip.

The struggle is never over. The fight for justice is never complete. Moreover, the goal of the struggle is not necessarily winning every battle:

David Roberts, a climate journalist for Vox, notes that the disparagement of the campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline assumed that the activists’ only goal was to prevent this one pipeline from being built, and that since this one pipeline’s cancellation wouldn’t save the world, the effort was futile. Roberts named these armchair quarterbacks of climate action the Doing It Wrong Brigade. He compared their critique to “criticizing the Montgomery bus boycott because it only affected a relative handful of blacks. The point of civil-rights campaigns was not to free blacks from discriminatory systems one at a time. It was to change the culture.”

The Keystone fight was a transnational education in tar-sands and pipeline politics, as well as in the larger dimensions of climate issues. It was a successful part of a campaign to wake people up and make them engage with the terrifying stakes in this conflict. It changed the culture.

The Campaign for Southern Equality led by Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara led similarly “pointless” protests. Day after day, they led gay and lesbian couples in efforts to get marriage licenses in county offices across the South. It was never about this couple or that one. They meant to change the culture. The fight did not end with Obergefell v. Hodges. Now CSE has turned to fighting North Carolina’s HB2 (#RepealHB2). Later this year Beach-Ferrara will be sworn in as a Democratic county commissioner.

How do you change our politics? The same way you eat an elephant.

Solnit takes on cynics not just as defeatists, but as enablers of what they condemn, “The dismissive ‘it’s all corrupt’ line of reasoning pretends to excoriate what it ultimately excuses.”

Changing the culture is work, and change not always as rapid as with the marriage equality movement. Political change is the same. The two major parties are where they are, in part, because people who joined worked and built their organizations over many decades until they wrote themselves into the political structure of their states and set the rules that preserve their primacy. Cynics who don’t like that want things to be different, but few are willing to do comparable work to build rival organizations over time or to take over those already in place. But they’d love for someone else to custom-build a new party to their specifications and work for decades to make it viable for them, then deliver it to them on a platter. Then they’d join. Maybe. It’s why I keep around here somewhere a copy of the Little Golden Book version of “The Little Red Hen” to use as a prop. Florida’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Alan Grayson, used to prefer a rubber chicken.

Friday night soother: Remembering Cecil

by digby

The Dodo has the story:

Cecil

“Cecil’s Pride: The True Story of a Lion King” was written by Craig Hatkoff and his two daughters, Juliana and Isabella. While the barrage of coverage Cecil received last summer focused on his death, Hatkoff told The Dodo he was more interested in what came before it.

Cecil and a lioness

“Cecil’s death was a very dark moment that tapped into a zeitgeist of anger about our endangered species, and indeed our planet as a whole,” Hatkoff said. “The whole world knew how Cecil died; we wanted to tell the story about how Cecil lived.”

cubs

In order to do that, Hatkoff reached out to the people who studied Cecil’s pride at Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park.

We found Cecil’s ‘biographer,’ researcher Brent Stapelkamp, who kept watch over Cecil for nine years,” Hatkoff explained. “Brent had also taken stunning photographs of Cecil that we were able to use throughout the book.”

oh my God

The images illustrate the complexities of the relationships between the lions in the pride.

One relationship that stood out was that of Cecil and Jericho, an unrelated male who eventually became the coleader of Cecil’s pride. Instead of fighting each other for the seat as the dominant male, the lions decided to work together — a dynamic that persisted even after Cecil’s death.

Jericho and Cecil

“There was a big concern by researchers that, after Cecil’s death, Jericho would likely kill or abandon Cecil’s cubs,” Hatkoff said. “Instead Jericho has been raising them as his own for the past nine months. It was like the ‘Lion King’ story except Scar, Simba’s evil uncle, turns out to be the good guy and saves the day.”

Jericho and the step-cubs

I don’t want to ruin the story by discussing the creep who killed that magnificent beast for no good reason. Or mention that Donald Trump’s sons are also bloodthirsty big game killers who like to pose with dead African lions, elephants and others. It just. needs. to. stop.

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QOTD: Ted Cruz

by digby

When he’s right he’s right:

“I know it is surprising to Donald Trump, but tweeting ugly pictures at ISIS is not gonna cause them to go away. Yelling and screaming and cursing at them and telling them what big hands you have is not going to cause ISIS to go away.”

Benghazi will never die

by digby

Oh fergawdsakes:

In a letter he sent to Benghazi Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy today, Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Hedger lists a litany of abuses that have taken place during the course of the investigation of the 2012 attack.

Among these abuses, Hedger reports, is that the committee is requesting that the Defense Department track down callers to Sean Hannity’s radio show in order to call them as witnesses:

The Committee has requested to interview an individual identified as ‘John from Iowa’ who described himself as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) camera operator on a talk radio show, where he described what he allegedly saw in the video feed from the night of the attack. The Department has expended significant resources to locate anyone who might match the description of this person, to no avail. The Committee staff then expanded this initial request to include all RPA pilots and RPA sensor operators who operated in the region that night.

The May 2013 call to Hannity’s program was subsequently reported on by other conservative outlets, including Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

More at Right Wing Watch.

Update: Yep

Wayne Simmons, who presented himself as a national security expert and was a part of the conservative media push for a congressional investigation of the Benghazi attack, has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges.

In an April 29 press release the Department of Justice noted that Simmons “falsely claimed he spent 27 years working for the Central Intelligence Agency” and had pleaded guilty “to major fraud against the government, wire fraud, and a firearms offense.”

The release further noted, “Simmons admitted he defrauded the government in 2008 when he obtained work as a team leader in the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Systems program, and again in 2010 when he was deployed to Afghanistan as a senior intelligence advisor on the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team.”

Dana J. Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “Simmons admitted he attempted to con his way into a position where he would have been called on to give real intelligence advice in a war zone. His fraud cost the government money, could have put American lives at risk, and was an insult to the real men and women of the intelligence community who provide tireless service to this country.”

Simmons was a frequent guest on Fox News, appearing on the network dozens of times purporting to be a former CIA operative. In those appearances, Simmons regularly criticized Democrats on foreign policy and national security issues. In one instance, he said, “If the Democrats come into power in the United States and re-employ their vision of defense for this country, we will have 9-1-1s unabated.”

Lara Logan’s still got a job on CBS though so that’s good.

You’ll find Dan Rather on Axe TV.

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The establishment insider who ran “The Torturer’s Lobby” is Trump’s secret weapon


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s new political brain for Salon this morning:

Perhaps one of the most unnerving political developments to watch over these last few days has been the beginning of the reluctant acceptance of Donald Trump among the Republican establishment. Watching the like of Senator Bob Corker on television praising his “foreign policy” and seeing influential House members like Bill Schuster endorse him is more than a little bit unsettling. It stands to reason that this would happen now that Trump is looking more and more like the winner, but considering just how unpopular Trump is among the political establishment, it’s more likely due to the hard work of his recently hired senior adviser, Paul Manafort.

According to this fascinating, must-read profile by Franklin Foer in Slate,  Manafort “is among the most significant political operatives of the past 40 years, and one of the most effective. He has revolutionized lobbying several times over, though he self-consciously refrains from broadcasting his influence.”  He’s the most important Republican campaign consultant and lobbyist the general public has never heard of.

Manafort was mentored by Bush family consiglieri James Baker and partnered with the notorious political operative Lee Atwater. He ran Republican campaigns and conventions for decades, including Reagan’s legendary “Morning in America” convention in 1984. Everyone assumed he was hired by Trump to perform the specialized task of suppressing a convention insurgency, which he performed on behalf of Gerald Ford in the 1976 convention. But this man is so much more than that.

He went on to run Reagan’s southern operation in 1980, remembered for its clever racist dogwhistle of opening the campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi famously known as the murder site of three civil rights workers 16 years before. After the campaign Manafort and Stone (along with another successful GOP operative Charlie Black) then opened their campaign consultant/lobbyist firm perfecting the dubious business of electing politicians and then lobbying them on behalf of their corporate clients. Trump was one of them, using the firm to help him stave off the threat of Indian gaming. It was an ugly, racist campaign that culminated with Governor George Pataki fining Trump and Stone $250,000 and requiring a public apology.

So  Manafort and Trump are a match made in heaven for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is Manafort’s long association with oligarchs, despots and tyrants all over the world. As much as he’s been a GOP operative, his real business is selling evil men to American politicians and power brokers.

Joe Conason compiled a partial list of his greatest hits at the National Memo:

Manafort first drew public attention during the Reagan era, when he and his lobbying partners represented Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a world-class kleptocrat whose theft of enormous amounts from his country’s treasury I helped to expose in The Village Voice more than 30 years ago (with my esteemed colleague William Bastone, who later created The Smoking Gun website). Few official criminals in the 20th century were as audacious and greedy as Marcos and his shoe-fetishist wife Imelda, but when their image cratered after our investigation, Manafort gladly took nearly a million dollars to apply lipstick to those pigs. 

Not content with the tainted Marcos lucre, Manafort and company also advocated on behalf of international gangsters such as Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic dictator known as the “King of Zaire”; Jonas Savimbi, the reputed cannibal and blood-diamond purveyor who tried to seize power in Angola; Said Barre, the authoritarian crook who left the failed state of Somalia to pirates and jihadis; and Ukrainian overlord Victor Yanukovych, the corrupt, Kremlin-backed autocrat thrown out by massive street protests two years ago for fixing a national election.

Foer’s account of the Savimbi lobbying campaign is mind boggling:

On a Friday in 1985, Christopher Lehman left his job at the National Security Council. The following Monday, he was flying with Manafort, his new boss, to the bush of Angola to pitch the Chinese-trained guerilla Jonas Savimbi, who wanted covert assistance from the U.S. to bolster his rebellion against Angola’s Marxist government. Savimbi briefly left a battle against Cuban assault forces and signed a $600,000 contract. 

The money bought Savimbi a revised reputation. Despite his client’s Maoist background, Manafort reinvented him as a freedom fighter. He knew all the tricks for manipulating right-wing opinion. Savimbi was sent to a seminar at the American Enterprise Institute, hosted by the anticommunist stalwart Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a reception thrown by the Heritage Foundation, and another confab at Freedom House. (Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi, who conscripted soldiers, burned enemies, and indiscriminately laid land mines, as a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”)

That was some time ago. But Manafort’s more recent work in Ukraine with Victor Yanukovych and other former soviet bloc oligarchs is no less shocking. His relationship with Yanukovych wasn’t unique — Bernie Sanders’ consultant Tad Devine worked for him too — but Manafort became known as his closest adviser. Indeed, he apparently has an unusual affinity for leaders who are close to Vladimir Putin which may explain why he’s also such a good fit with Putin’s favorite American politician, Donald Trump.

Foer concludes his piece by explaining how Manafort’s special talents will be of use in this coming campaign:

Manafort has spent a career working on behalf of clients that the rest of his fellow lobbyists and strategists have deemed just below their not-so-high moral threshold. Manafort has consistently given his clients a patina of respectability that has allowed them to migrate into the mainstream of opinion, or close enough to the mainstream. He has a particular knack for taking autocrats and presenting them as defenders of democracy. If he could convince the respectable world that thugs like Savimbi and Marcos are friends of America, then why not do the same for Trump?

Donald Trump is a wealthy, proto-fascist demagogue who has hired the man whose firm the Center for Public Integrity once called “The Torturer’s Lobby” to get him to the White House. If anyone can do it Paul Manafort can.  It’s his specialty.

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