Month: January 2017

Smell test

by digby

I’m guessing that if you like the rancid smell of self-tanner and AquaNet you’ll love the smell of Trump-scented candles:

There are Donald Trump-shaped cookie cutters, “Drain the swamp” sweatshirts and candles meant to smell like the new president – a combination of “all of the classiest smells,” according to the product’s description. Keep searching among the Trump-inspired flasks, paperweights and peppermints and you’ll find coffee mugs that say “Build that wall” and a penny stamped with “Trump” selling for $2.75.

Online shops, street vendors and high-end boutiques around town said they spent weeks preparing for Friday’s inauguration with equal parts sincerity and snark in hopes of cashing in on fans and foes of the next president.

At Chocolate Moose, a novelty gift shop a half-mile from the White House, shelves were lined with Trump whoopee cushions and chocolate miniatures of the Capitol. The Trump mask, a Halloween favorite, was back in stock.

“Up to now, absolutely, it’s been all about the gag stuff,” said Michele Cosby, the store’s owner.

The best-selling item? Toilet paper emblazoned with Trump’s face. “We sold cases upon cases of it,” Cosby said. “And at $12 a roll, it wasn’t cheap.” (But, she added, she stopped selling the popular item once Trump became president-elect: “We didn’t want to cross the line.”)

At the Great Republic, which had inauguration pop-up shops at the St. Regis and Mandarin Oriental hotels in Washington, revelers could pick up pens made of wood from the White House and hand-painted with portraits of Trump for $1,950 each.

Over in Georgetown, local jeweler Ann Hand had sold nearly 1,000 inaugural pins bearing Trump’s name and a slew of pavé stones. She was also selling inaugural cuff links, charm bracelets and a limited number of mother-of-pearl pins with Swarovski crystals for $250.
[…]
“It’s been a very tough inaugural to buy for,” said Warlick, who began selling inauguration-related items in 1981. “Usually we only do pro-presidential items, but this time we also have ‘resistance products’ because people are so divided.”…

Meanwhile, the official inauguration shop funded by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, was selling sweatshirts bearing the inaugural seal ($55), Trump koozies ($20 for six) and red cap ornaments that say “Make America Great Again,” complete with 24-karat gold accents ($99).

But on Washington streets, vendors said they just hadn’t seen as much demand this year for president-related mugs, T-shirts, shot glasses and key chains as they as they did ahead of previous inaugurations. In a town where 91 percent of residents voted for Clinton, they said it has been difficult to sell Trump-related merchandise.

“We’re all dealing with the same dilemma: What quantity of shirts do we get?” said a vendor with a booth at Connecticut Avenue and K Street NW who declined to give his name. “. . . We cannot afford to get stuck with all this Trump stuff. People in Washington resent that fact that we even carry these shirts.”

Warlick said he expects to sell inauguration-related items through May. For now, a line of Michelle Obama merchandise continues to outsell both his Trump and Clinton inaugural lines.

“Sales have been nowhere near what they were with Clinton and Obama,” Warlick said, adding that he expects to sell about one-third the Trump merchandise as he did for Obama back in 2009. “Obama’s first inaugural was – to use Trump’s own words – yuge.”

There was a time when Trump would have been excited about how much money he was going to make selling his Trump branded merch. Now he’s selling the President of the United States brand which is worth so much more…

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A Trump Era Survival Guide

by Dennis Hartley

In anticipation of what may be in store for us, here are links to the resources likely to be more crucial than ever. Bookmark this post!

ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom

American Civil Liberties Union

Amnesty International

Center for Democracy and Technology

Committee to Protect Journalists

Electronic Privacy Information Center

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Human Rights Watch

Indivisible

League of Women Voters

Planned Parenthood

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Michael Flynn isn’t the only crazy one on the inside

by digby

Here’s a little tid-bit I hadn’t heard before about Trump and Giuliani’s little October Surprise. We knew that old Rudy had gone on TV bragging about how they had “something up their sleeves” and talking about all his friends in the FBI. I hadn’t heard about this interview with Breitbart on November 4th with the notorious former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince talking about how he was wired in with the NYPD on the same story.

Anyway, this is interesting:

Prince claimed to have sources within the Weiner investigation who were illegally leaking information to him. In Prince’s case, the sources were within NYPD, and the information he relayed from them to Breitbart News on November 4th—when it was not yet known that Comey, the next day, would reveal the “new” Clinton emails to be duplicates—turned out to be almost entirely false. The full extent of Prince’s lies on November 4th, all of which were Trump campaign disinformation delivered by an adviser and major donor to the campaign, are too numerous and spectacular to list here. Two brief quotes from Breitbart’s interview with Prince should suffice:

Prince claimed he had insider knowledge of the investigation that could help explain why FBI Director James Comey had to announce he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server last week….”[NYPD] found a lot of other really damning criminal information [on Weiner’s computer], including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than twenty times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” he said. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress, was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI, and they said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “I believe—I know, and this is from a very well-placed source of mine at One Police Plaza in New York—the NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making in this investigation, and they’ve gotten huge pushback, to the point of coercion, from the Justice Department.”

“So NYPD first gets that computer. They see how disgusting it is. They keep a copy of everything, and they pass a copy on to the FBI, which finally pushes the FBI off their chairs, making Comey reopen that investigation, which was indicated in the letter last week. The point being, NYPD has all the information, and they will pursue justice within their rights if the FBI doesn’t. There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to Special Access Programs….The point being, fortunately, it’s not just the FBI; five different offices are in the hunt for justice, but the NYPD has it as well….From what I understand, up to the commissioner or at least the chief level in NYPD, they wanted to have a press conference, and DOJ, Washington people, political appointees have been exerting all kinds of undue pressure on them to back down….This kind of evil, this kind of true dirt on Hillary Clinton—look, you don’t have to make any judgments. Just release the emails. Just dump them. Let them out there. Let people see the light of truth.”

All of this is bullshit, needless to say.

People are saying that fear of this is what made Comey make his big announcement. That makes no sense. His big announcement is what hurled this otherwise inane fever swamp story into the stratosphere.  And he wasn’t born yesterday. He certainly knew what the effect would be.

But this is another interesting little factoid that one would hope the FBI Inspector general would look into in his investigation.

By the way, Jeremy Scahill revealed this week that Prince has been an unofficial adviser to the Trump transition.

A former senior U.S. official who has advised the Trump transition told The Intercept that Prince has been advising the team on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the Defense and State departments. The official asked not to be identified because of a transition policy prohibiting discussion of confidential deliberations.

On election night, Prince’s latest wife, Stacy DeLuke, posted pictures from inside Trump’s campaign headquarters as Donald Trump and Mike Pence watched the returns come in, including a close shot of Pence and Trump with their families. “We know some people who worked closely with [Trump] on his campaign,” DeLuke wrote. “Waiting for the numbers to come in last night. It was well worth the wait!!!! #PresidentTrump2016.” Prince’s sister, billionaire Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s nominee for education secretary and Prince (and his mother) gave large sums of money to a Trump Super PAC.

In July, Prince told Trump’s senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.”

Prince also said that Trump would be the best force to confront “Islamic fascism.” “As for the world looking to the United States for leadership, unfortunately, I think they’re going to have to wait till January and hope Mr. Trump is elected because, clearly, our generals don’t have a stomach for a fight,” Prince said. “Our president doesn’t have a stomach for a fight and the terrorists, the fascists, are winning.”

He’s obviously very much on the inside. Great.

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Ready on Day 1?

by digby

The man who promised to run the country like he ran his businesses, including the four bankruptcies, has had the most disastrous transition in history. Most of his people have not been properly vetted or passed FBI background checks. His cabinet appointees are a mess. His staff is inexperienced, corrupt and extreme.

So what’s going to happen in the short run? A DC hand explains:

On the other hand, this is scary. Who ARE these people?

At 12:01 p.m. Friday, Donald Trump’s aides will deploy a team of temporary political appointees into federal agencies to begin laying the groundwork for the president-elect’s agenda while his nominees await Senate confirmation, sources familiar with the plan told POLITICO.

While the transition team has been building the so-called beachhead teams for months, they are taking on outsize importance because few of Trump’s nominees will be confirmed by the time he’s sworn in.

Trump’s transition has instructed members of the beachhead teams to skip the inauguration and be at their desks the moment he is sworn in, sources close to the transition said.

Trump transition spokeswoman Jessica Ditto disputed that beachhead members were given instructions that would require them to miss the inauguration.

“We have approximately 520 individuals on the beachhead teams and they have worked with the agencies to go in any time after 12:01 [p.m.] on Friday — each team has worked out their own timing,” she said in an email. “These individuals are honored to help the Trump Administration on Day 1 and are ready to serve our country.”

Beachhead members will get badges just like any other federal employee and begin to take over the agencies, said Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, which advises incoming administrations on transitions. The goal is to ensure a smooth transfer of power not just at the White House, but at crucial federal agencies as well.

“The beachhead team is a newish structure, built by the [Mitt] Romney transition,” Stier said. “The basic concept is a recognition that incoming administrations do not have the full confirmed team in place. How do you put people in to keep the agencies running?”

Reed Cordish, whom Trump recently tapped as his assistant for intragovernmental and technology initiatives, organized the agency beachhead teams — whose size varies agency to agency, anywhere from a few people to a dozen. However, the size of these teams has grown exponentially in the past two weeks, with Republicans around town emailing each other congratulatory notes about making it into these coveted slots.

Landing on a beachhead team may translate into a job at that agency, at least for the first four months or so of the new administration until a secretary can get confirmed and officially put together his or her team. “It means that you’re almost guaranteed a job if you want one in that department,” said a GOP strategist close to the transition.

Trump’s team has long worried that career federal workers and President Barack Obama’s political appointees will seek to undermine the president-elect’s agenda. The transition sees the beachhead teams, named after the line of defense that the military constructs as it lands in enemy territory, as a check on existing agency officials.

The transition team has also instructed the teams to begin collecting information and laying organizational groundwork so that Trump’s secretaries and undersecretaries can hit the ground running once they’re confirmed.

In addition, Trump’s team has identified a few dozen Obama political appointees who have been asked to stay on after Friday to help with the transition, sources said.

For example, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday that Trump’s team said U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals can stay past Friday.

As is customary when a new president enters the White House, all political appointees must submit resignation letters that take effect at noon on Inauguration Day. Many Obama administration officials had not heard until recently whether they would be asked to stay.

One Obama administration official said some people who have been asked to stick around are on the fence because they’ve already begun to line up jobs outside the government.

This feels like a coup.

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Pardon politics

Please pardon Don Siegelman, Mr President

Rick Perry: energy czar
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Among the political right’s weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise and ruthless othering. They love their othering. So much so that wingnuts were throwing down the commie card decades after proclaiming St. Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. During one of the recent political conventions (can’t find a link), Rachel Maddow was on an MSNBC panel with Pat Buchanan when Buchanan made some “socialist” or what-have-you remark about her. Maddow grinned, eyes wide like it was the highlight of her career. Pat Buchanan is red-baiting me!

President Barack Obama, the Kenyan-atheist-Muslim-socialist-usurper, leaves office tomorrow perhaps the most othered political figure in wingnut lore. Remember when “Obama’s czars” was the othering du jour over which the right wing got hot and bothered? Yeah, neither do they.

Ah, but I was so much older then.

But it all came back yesterday when I “red” about Gov. Rick Perry tackling the plum assignment he thought he’d lucked into in the Donald Trump administration. From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.

In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

Don’t laugh. Perry’s future boss, the man who tomorrow will have with his short finger on the nuclear trigger, is just as clueless as Governor Goodhair.

Mr. Perry, who once called for the elimination of the Energy Department, will begin the confirmation process Thursday with a hearing before the Senate Energy Committee. If approved by the Senate, he will take over from a secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, who was chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics department and directed the linear accelerator at M.I.T.’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Before Mr. Moniz, the job belonged to Steven Chu, a physicist who won a Nobel Prize.

Rick Perry: energy czar.

Perry joins a short parade of the unqualified auditioning on Capitol Hill this week for Trump’s newest reality show. Betsy DeVos: education czar. Tom Price: Health and Human Services czar. Scott Pruitt: environment czar. Yet there is precious little conservative alarmism about Trump’s czars. Isn’t that strange?

That’s probably just because so few of Trump’s czars have cleared vetting yet. Bloomberg:

Politico’s Michael Crowley has a nice piece explaining the missing National Security Council staffers, and the dangers that could cause if there’s an early crisis. Hundreds of briefing papers have been created by Obama’s NSC and sent to Team Trump, but the New York Times reports that no one knows if they’ve been reviewed.

[…]

And the same is true in department after department. Not to mention agencies without anyone at all nominated by the president-elect.

Overall, out of 690 positions requiring Senate confirmation tracked by the Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service, Trump has come up with only 28 people so far.

Good thing Trump has postponed any crises until Monday.

Charlie Pierce observes:

Remember, this is the administration that, in a break with tradition, is demanding that career diplomats leave their posts promptly when the Lincoln Bible bursts into flame beneath Trump’s hand on Friday. There are going to be an awful lot of phones ringing unanswered by Friday afternoon.

Unless, of course, they’ve all been outsourced to Lubyanka Square.

Post-inauguration Washington will be like that scene in Die Hard with a Vengeance when the candy-stealing kid says, “All the cops are into something. It’s Christmas! You could steal City Hall.” Almost as if that was the plan.

World Party:

We’re setting sail to the place on the map
From which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burned
Drawn by the promise of the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It’s the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip, baby
You will pay tomorrow
You’re gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow

Oh, oh, oh
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no
I want to run and hide right now

The Trump voters are in town

by digby

How politically correct of him not to use the “N” word:

I don’t mean to alarm you but …

by digby

I think the New York Times is trying to get our attention about something important:

Seems like something we should be concerned about but what do I know?

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New info on Trump’s Russian money connection

by digby

So, it’s been confirmed that even while FBI Director James Comey was blathering on about Hillary Clinton’s “recklessness” five years earlier by having a private email server which was never hacked and contained no information that did anything but show how boring government work actually is, he knew this was going on as he spoke:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said.

Trump addresses Russia accusations, business dealings in post-election press conference
President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday delivered his first press conference since the November presidential election. Trump addressed his relationship with Russia and how he will handle his business once taking office.

The informal, inter-agency working group began to explore possible Russian interference last spring, long before the FBI received information from a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry.

On Jan. 6, the director of national intelligence released a declassified report that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign to “undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process,” damage Hillary Clinton’s election prospects and bolster Trump’s. The campaign included the hacking of top Democrats’ emails and fake news distributed by Russian sources.

The president-elect, who will be inaugurated Friday, has said he believes Russia was involved with the hacking, and he has called allegations that he or his associates were involved a “political witch hunt” and a “complete and total fabrication.”

Trump has yet to say whether FBI Director James Comey will be retained. The rest of Trump’s newly appointed intelligence and law enforcement chiefs will inherit the investigation, whose outcome could create national and international fallout.

Trump’s presidential transition team did not respond to a request for comment about the inquiry.

There’s more here.

I don’t know if any of the charges are true. But it does appear that there have been suspicions for some time that the Russian government was helping Trump and his own behavior has fed into that suspicion. Certainly, soft and gentle way he is dealing with the sanctions issue and his loose talk about NATO, along with the boundless positivity toward Putin himself as a great leader, seem odd for a man who is usually all about “toughness” and personal competitiveness. The whole thing is strange and while I have no idea what the depth of Trump’s personal involvement in all this might be, it’s certainly worthy of investigation and it should be done by a special prosecutor. Trump’s IC leaders obviously cannot be trusted and James Comey should be banned from any involvement.

It’s early days so who knows where this will go. Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for all this. If Russia hacked the presidential campaign, that’s a big deal but it’s also not entirely surprising. What would be a shocker is if it turns out that Trump’s campaign was involved somehow. It appears there is some evidence out there that it was. This is uncharted territory.

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2017 gun violence statistics

by digby

Already:

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