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Month: November 2016

The horror, the horror (not really… :)

The horror, the horror

by digby

The pres reading “Where the Wild Things Are” to the tots for Halloween

This may be the most fun interview with President Obama we’ve seen yet. Samantha Bee:

Also, just for fun (we need some fun, right????) The Obamas have always been fabulous on Halloween. This was no exception.

Now THAT’S fun!
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Who’s the corrupt one again?

Who’s the corrupt one again?

by digby

The fallout from FBI Director James Comey‘s bombshell announcement last Friday that the agency had found emails potentially relating to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information continued to shake up the presidential race on Monday. There were hours of excited speculation about how it was going to affect the race and whether Comey’s reputation was damaged. And there was lots and lots of breathless punditry about the “email scandal” without anyone perceiving a necessity to define it, since it’s taken on a life of its own.

If you do need a primer on why that issue is so compelling to the news media, this piece by Matthew Yglesias at Vox is a good place to start. In this study of the two campaigns’ media coverage during their respective party conventions by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Clinton’s email scandal was the single most reported issue, with CNN vastly outpacing any other network or newspaper in its overwhelming attention to the issue. And this was after the FBI had decided that no charges of mishandling classified information were warranted. Since Comey took it upon himself to publicly scold Clinton like an errant child, the news media naturally treated the event as if the words had come down from Sinai and condemned her as if she’d been found guilty anyway.

One of the major rationales for the ceaseless coverage of the issue is the prospect of a Clinton presidency burdened by the necessity of dealing with a full-blown witch hunt by Republican-led House committees investigating her alleged conflicts of interest. Oddly enough, the media can barely spare a moment to contemplate the overwhelming conflicts of interest and legal exposure that President Donald Trump would bring to the White House.

As Media Matters laid out on Monday, Trump is currently facing 75 different civil lawsuits for fraud, breach of contract, non-payment, sexual harassment, defamation, etc. He has three pending Trump University fraud suits and is suspected of perpetrating a “pay-for-play” scheme with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and possibly others to shut down a state investigation into the same fraudulent enterprise. Just last week, Trump was ordered to appear in federal court on Dec. 16 for a status conference in a civil lawsuit from a woman who accused him of raping her when she was 13. (According to the latest blockbuster investigative piece by Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek, Trump has destroyed emails and other documents in circumvention of court orders for decades.)

Everyone knows that last month Donald Trump was revealed on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women, and that shortly thereafter women began to come forward by the dozen to confirm it. A number of such women are now represented by legal counsel, a problem with which President Trump would surely have to deal. (The Supreme Court set that precedent with Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones case.) One can only imagine how many others might come forward.

And I have written before about the literal impossibility of Trump extricating himself from the Trump Organization’s foreign entanglements, he will have massive conflicts of interest all over the globe, no matter how much Trump and his family try to divest themselves from the business — which they have no intention of doing. American foreign policy would be held hostage to the president’s business interests, and that’s assuming we even knew what those interests were. The only thing we do know is that Trump has dealings with shady characters in various countries around the world that would greatly complicate American national security and its relationship to its allies. At the moment he has refused to give any information about his foreign holdings and the media has been strangely passive about asking him about it. This is all he’s said about this extremely important topic:

If I become president, I couldn’t care less about my company. It’s peanuts. I want to use that same — up here, whatever it may be — to make America rich again, and to make America great again. I have Ivanka and Eric and Don sitting there. Run the company, kids. Have a good time. I’m going to do it for America. . . I would put it in a blind trust. Well, I don’t know if it’s a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it. But — is that a blind trust? I don’t know. But I would probably have my children run it with my executives. And I wouldn’t ever be involved, because I wouldn’t care about anything but our country. Anything.

Now there’s this evolving issue of possible Russian involvement in the election on behalf of Trump’s candidacy. A flurry of conflicting stories came out yesterday, obviously leaked by warring FBI factions. One reported that the FBI had opened a preliminary investigation into the relationship between Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former adviser Carter Page and pro-Russian interests. Slate published an intriguing piece by Franklin Foer about computer experts who reportedly found possible direct connections between the Trump campaign and a Russian bank suspected of being a front for the government. David Corn of Mother Jones came out with a piece about a former intelligence officer finding evidence that Trump has been cultivated by the Russian government for years. And the Atlantic published a chilling report from Mike Lofgren about Russian influence on the far right in Europe and how their interference on behalf of Donald Trump was seen as a way of boosting the alt-right.

The New York Times quoted other anonymous FBI sources saying they’ve determined that the Russian government simply wanted to interfere with the election but had no preferred candidate. (This is an odd conclusion considering that the Russians appear only to have targeted the Democrats, so one has to wonder whether the Times’ FBI source is a Republican.) Coincidentally, a video has surfaced from 2013 surfaced in which Donald Trump says he knows Vladimir Putin very well, although he now says he’s never met the Russian president.

All of this raises a question the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman raised two months ago: How is it possible that Clinton’s email brouhaha has marked her as thoroughly corrupt and dishonest, while Trump’s monumentally nefarious past, present and future are overlooked? Waldman’s assumption is probably the correct one: The narratives were set early in the campaign cycle, with Trump being the bigoted, crazy one and Clinton being the corrupt one. That’s just how the media frames the contest.

They got it wrong. Yes, Trump is the crazy, bigoted one. He’s also a misogynist and worse. But he’s also the corrupt one, perhaps even more than most of us who had already understood that ever imagined. Considering that partial list of conflicts, misdeeds and legal entanglements I just laid out, President Trump is unimaginable.

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From Russia with love?

From Russia with love?

by digby

I don’t know what the hell is up with the Russia thing. But with Harry Reid accusing James Comey of a double standard by failing to inform the public of something to do with Russian interference in the election, the news that there is an inquiry into Paul Manafort and this latest from David Corn, it’s certainly something worth thinking about. Evidently a former intelligence officer tells Corn he was tasked with doing some oppo on Trump and found some startling information:

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, noted, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.” It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls.”

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was “shock and horror.” The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not immediately request additional material, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump’s inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. “It’s quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on,” he says.

“This is something of huge significance, way above party politics,” the former intelligence officer comments. “I think [Trump’s] own party should be aware of this stuff as well.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the memos. In the past, Trump has declared, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

The FBI is certainly investigating the hacks attributed to Russia that have hit American political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign. But there have been few public signs of whether that probe extends to examining possible contacts between the Russian government and Trump. (In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigationdetailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, “We don’t yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation.” In an email toMother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, “TheTrump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.”)

Again, I have no idea whether any of this is for real. But it is clear that somebody has been stealing Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s private communications and giving them to Wikileaks to put them online. There is some consensus that it’s got something to do with the Russian government. This may just be BS, but who knows? Trump has behaved very out of character toward Vladimir Putin in this election, treating him with more respect and deference than anyone else in the entire world, and it makes you wonder.

I put this up yesterday before I had read any of this stuff, feeling as if it was very strange when I saw it:

He was either lying then or he’s lying now.

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One week to go by @BloggersRUs

One week to go
by Tom Sullivan


By Schwede66 [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Over a week of early voting was behind North Carolina when James Comey made his infamous email disclosure. Over one and a half million votes already had been cast. Across the country, the New York Times reported yesterday, over 22 million votes are already in.

That won’t keep skittish Democrats from fretting about how it might affect the election in North Carolina. But a large block of early voting sites came online last Thursday in Guilford (Greensboro) and Forsyth (Winston-Salem) counties and Sunday was a “souls to the polls” voting day in many counties across the state. Hillary For America organizers from the western part of the state rushed into Forsyth for the weekend to get out the vote. Early voting has seen a spike since Thursday.

Politico reports:

Democrats are now ahead of Republicans by 13.5 percent in the early vote, he said, but it may not be enough: Republicans are overperforming their own 2012 early vote numbers.

“Until they actually exceed 2012 numbers,” McDonald said of Democrats, “I think they’re going to be very nervous about where they’re sitting with early voting in North Carolina.”

“Republicans tend to win on Election Day,” said Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, in a recent interview.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are expected in North Carolina to boost get-out-the-vote efforts on the heels of visits by Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Tim Kaine.

The Times reports that across the country early voting is up over 2012 numbers in eleven states, including among Hispanic voters. Voting by young people is down, however, in many of those same states. Voting among black voters is down as well.

Insightus, a North Carolina data analysis nonprofit, points to several reasons why voting in the black community is down in 2016. They contrast counties affected by hurricane damage with those impacted by reduced access to voting and “Suppressed Counties” where GOP-controlled county Boards of Election limited the first week of early voting to a single location, the board office:

These are the 17 counties whose Republican-controlled boards of elections drastically cut the number of Week 1 Early Voting sites for 2016. In the most egregious case (Guilford County, in north-central NC) that amounted to a cut from 16 sites in 2012 down to 1 site in 2016. But in terms of sheer numbers of black voters affected, Mecklenburg County (the state’s largest, and home to Charlotte) impacted the most black voters by far (nearly 15% of all the state’s African American voters).

The take-home lesson here is that Mother Nature hath no fury like a Republican pol scorned: while flooding of biblical proportions certainly hasn’t helped voter turnout, this year voter suppression appears to substantially outstrip Hurricane Matthew as a force depressing North Carolina’s African American vote. Of course, it still must be explained why black voting is also slightly down in the state’s unimpaired counties, and here a variety of factors are no doubt at play, ranging from mild voter disengagement to forms of voter suppression more subtle than locked polling place doors.

Politico adds:

Wake County, home to Raleigh, has been a brighter spot for Democratic early vote performance — in part due to nine early voting locations that opened two weeks ago and another 11 that opened Thursday. The county is crucial to Democratic prospects — it is the second-biggest county in the state, and Democrats must run up big numbers there in order to compensate for the redder rural areas. As of Saturday night, 54 percent of Wake County’s 2012 early total was already in, according to Bitzer’s calculations, and that number was expected to climb. Heavily Democratic Mecklenburg County, the biggest in the state, he said, was also showing signs of strength for Democrats.

For all its size and Democratic registration, Mecklenburg has not had the turnout performance of Wake in recent statewide elections. That makes it more of a deal-breaker than a deal-maker for Democrats. How much, we will know in one week. Key races for governor and U.S. Senate remain tight.

GOP Instincts

GOP Instincts

by digby

I guess they just can’t help themselves:

Sen. Richard Burr privately mused over the weekend that gun owners may want to put a “bullseye” on Hillary Clinton, according to audio obtained by CNN. 

The North Carolina Republican, locked in a tight race for reelection, quipped that as he walked into a gun shop “nothing made me feel better” than seeing a magazine about rifles “with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it.” 

“I was a little bit shocked at that — it didn’t have a bullseye on it,” he said Saturday to GOP volunteers, prompting laughter from the crowd in Mooresville, North Carolina. “But on the bottom right (of the magazine), it had everybody for federal office in this particular state that they should vote for. So let me assure you, there’s an army of support out there right now for our candidates.”

He apologized later. 

A Burr campaign official said that the senator’s remark about feeling “better” was in reference to other GOP candidates winning support from gun-rights groups — not from Clinton potentially being shot.

That’s a relief.