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Month: June 2017

A Qatar Primer

A Qatar Primer

by digby

If you have 20 minutes to listen to this podcast interview between Mark Goldberg from UN Dispatch and Middle east expert Marc Lynch, take the time to do it.

Saudi Arabia and its close allies in the region moved against Qatar, cutting off sea and air travel and moving to isolate their fellow sunni Gulf country.

Enter: the next big crisis in the Middle East.

Like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional group of erstwhile allies that coordinate security policies against Iran and other common threats. But tensions have been brewing for many years between Qatar and other countries on the Arabian Peninsula and these tensions have apparently come to a head in the wake of Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

Qatar is home to both Al Jazeera and the region’s largest US military airbase — which is currently the strategic nerve center of the US air campaign against ISIS. This fact did not apparently stop President Trump for issuing statements in support of Saudi allegations that Qatar is a nemesis that supports terrorist groups.

On the line with me to unpack this situation and explain the roots of these regional rivalries is Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University.

Marc is the author of The New Arab Wars, Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East. He is and someone I have long relied on to help me make sense of tangled middle eastern politics. You can–and should follow him on Twitter at @AbuAardvark.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn about why this spat between Qatar and its neighbors is so profoundly consequential to global politics, then have a listen.

Let’s hope this is just a blip and we don’t have to get too immersed in this stuff. But just in case, and considering that we have an imbecile running the world’s only superpower, it’s probably a good idea to get up to speed on what happening.

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Doesn’t anyone remember Trump’s catch phrase? #yourefired

Doesn’t anyone remember Trump’s catch phrase?

by digby

Of course he would …

Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department last month to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. And on Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Trump attorney Jay Sekulow whether the president would pledge not to interfere or order the attorney general to fire Mueller.

“Look, the president of the United States, as we all know, is a unitary executive,” Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week.” “But the president is going to seek the advice of his counsel and inside the government as well as outside. And I’m not going to speculate on what he will, or will not, do.”

Sekulow said he “can’t imagine” the issue would arise, but “that, again, is an issue that the president with his advisers would discuss if there was a basis.”

Most of Trump’s troubles have stemmed from his hiring and firing, the thing he was known for on his reality TV show that many of his voters apparently believed was actual reality.

Of course he’ll fire Mueller if it gets to that. Does this man have respect for the office, the constitution, the country? I don’t see any evidence that he does. He’ll fight all the way.

A word from a feminist

A word from a feminist

by digby

This is by Paulina Porizkova an immigrant who has an interesting perspective on the subject:

I used to think the word “feminist” reeked of insecurity. A woman who needed to state that she was equal to a man might as well be shouting that she was smart or brave. If you were, you wouldn’t need to say it. I thought this because back then, I was a Swedish woman.

I was 9 when I first stepped into a Swedish school. Freshly arrived from Czechoslovakia, I was bullied by a boy for being an immigrant. My one friend, a tiny little girl, punched him in the face. I was impressed. In my former country, a bullied girl would tattle or cry. I looked around to see what my new classmates thought of my friend’s feat, but no one seemed to have noticed. It didn’t take long to understand that in Sweden, my power was suddenly equal to a boy’s.

In Czechoslovakia, women came home from a long day of work to cook, clean and serve their husbands. In return, those women were cajoled, ignored and occasionally abused, much like domestic animals. But they were mentally unstable domestic animals, like milk cows that could go berserk you if you didn’t know exactly how to handle them.

In Sweden, the housekeeping tasks were equally divided. Soon my own father was cleaning and cooking as well. Why? He had divorced my mother and married a Swedish woman.

As high school approached, the boys wanted to kiss us and touch us, and the girls became a group of benevolent queens dispensing favors. The more the boys wanted us, the more powerful we became. When a girl chose to bestow her favors, the lucky boy was envied and celebrated. Slut shaming? What’s a slut?

Condoms were provided by the school nurse without question. Sex education taught us the dangers of venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancy, but it also focused on fun stuff like masturbation. For a girl to own her sexuality meant she owned her body, she owned herself. Women could do anything men did, but they could also — when they chose to — bear children. And that made us more powerful than men. The word “feminist” felt antiquated; there was no longer a use for it.

When I moved to Paris at 15 to work as a model, the first thing that struck me was how differently the men behaved. They opened doors for me, they wanted to pay for my dinner. They seemed to think I was too delicate, or too stupid, to take care of myself.

Instead of feeling celebrated, I felt patronized. I claimed my power the way I had learned in Sweden: by being sexuality assertive. But Frenchmen don’t work this way. In discos, I’d set my eye on an attractive stranger, and then dance my way over to let him know he was a chosen one. More often than not, he fled. And when he didn’t run, he asked how much I charged.

In France, women did have power, but a secret one, like a hidden stiletto knife. It was all about manipulation: the sexy vixen luring the man to do her bidding. It wasn’t until I reached the United States, at 18, and fell in love with an American man that I truly had to rearrange my cultural notions.

It turned out most of America didn’t think of sex as a healthy habit or a bargaining tool. Instead, it was something secret. If I mentioned masturbation, ears went red. Orgasms? Men made smutty remarks, while women went silent. There was a fine line between the private and the shameful. A former gynecologist spoke of the weather when doing a pelvic exam, as if I were a Victorian maiden who’d rather not know where all my bits were.

In America, a woman’s body seemed to belong to everybody but herself. Her sexuality belonged to her husband, her opinion of herself belonged to her social circles, and her uterus belonged to the government. She was supposed to be a mother and a lover and a career woman (at a fraction of the pay) while remaining perpetually youthful and slim. In America, important men were desirable. Important women had to be desirable. That got to me.

In the Czech Republic, the nicknames for women, whether sweet or bitter, fall into the animal category: little bug, kitten, old cow, swine. In Sweden, women are rulers of the universe. In France, women are dangerous objects to treasure and fear. For better or worse, in those countries, a woman knows her place.

But the American woman is told she can do anything and then is knocked down the moment she proves it. In adapting myself to my new country, my Swedish woman power began to wilt. I joined the women around me who were struggling to do it all and failing miserably. I now have no choice but to pull the word “feminist” out of the dusty drawer and polish it up.

My name is Paulina Porizkova, and I am a feminist.

“The American woman is told she can do anything and then is knocked down the moment she proves it.” 


Sounds right to me.

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This is how wars start by accident

This is how wars start by accident

by digby

From the New York Times email this morning:

A deepening diplomatic crisis surrounding Qatar has been complicated by the inability of top United States officials to get on the same page.

On Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, above, called for “calm and thoughtful dialogue” among Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, while the Pentagon reaffirmed Qatar’s role as a military partner. But hours later, President Trump accused Qatar of being a “funder of terror.”

He says whatever comes into his mind, which holds only a few stray “facts” he gleans in some conversation where someone flattered him one time.

If only he could be persuaded to not talk about anything, ever, besides his electoral college win and all of his fake accomplishments. He’s almost there already but every once in a while he says something that could start a war or otherwise destroy the planet. It’s a problem. Yuge.

QOTD

QOTD

by digby

That’s from former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo  talking about an upcoming photo-op between Trump and tech executives to pretend like he’s talking about emerging technology and “creating jobs.”

It also accurately describes how I feel whenever I have to sit through a whole Donald Trump speech.

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Trump’s loyalties by @BloggersRUs

Trump’s loyalties
by Tom Sullivan


AP Photo by Alex Brandon via Twitter.

Among the puzzling aspects of the Trump/Russia inquiry is why President Donald Trump would put himself in legal jeopardy for former national security adviser Michael Flynn. According to former FBI chief James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday, Trump had Attorney General Jeff Session and others leave the room when he tried to get Comey to drop the Flynn investigation.

The party line is that Trump is simply incompetent, which Republicans think is no big deal for one of their presidents. But also puzzling is why Trump seems unmoved or uninterested in Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

HEINRICH: Did the president in any of those interactions that you’ve shared with us today ask you what you should be doing or what our government should be doing or the intelligence community to protect America against Russian interference in our election system?

COMEY: I don’t recall a conversation like that.

HEINRICH: Never?

COMEY: No.

Think Progress is reporting that Session has abruptly cancelled his scheduled Tuesday appearances before House and Senate appropriations committees:

In letters to the chairmen of the committees, Sessions writes that he will send his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, to the hearing instead. In explaining the cancellation, Sessions writes that he believed that members of the committees were planning on asking him about “issues related to the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election.”

That’s a good guess, given Comey’s hints Thursday that Sessions may be compromised and/or under FBI investigation himself. Plus, reports from the closed hearing Thursday afternoon reveal say Sessions had a third undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower hotel in Washington during the campaign last April. While a Justice Department spokesman denied the story, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Al Franken of Minnesota believed there was more to the Mayflower event than acknowledged:

“It had been characterized one way, but we had some reason to believe that wasn’t the case,” Franken said on MSNBC. “It was described in a way that he could plausibly say, ‘I don’t remember that.’”

Leahy responded sharply to Sessions’ cancelling:

On Friday, Paul Waldman pondered why Donald Trump was so intent on protecting Flynn in the first place:

One thing we can say for sure is that Trump was not going to this trouble — including what looks a lot like obstruction of justice — just because he thought Flynn was a “good guy,” and Trump is such a mensch that he’ll do anything for a good guy. No one who is familiar with Trump could believe that.

As Waldman summarizes, Flynn lied about his Russian contacts, accepted payments from Russia for speeches (without prior authorization and probably in violation of law), and acted as a paid foreign agent for Turkey while advising Trump, among other peccadilloes.

Given all that, you’d think that Trump would not only have kicked Flynn to the curb, but that he would have kept kicking him once he was down there. And yet not only did he not do that, he seems to have been doing everything in his power, even to the point of potentially committing the crime of obstruction of justice, to protect Michael Flynn. He has even reportedly been sending Flynn encouraging texts. Why would that be?

I don’t have a good answer. But the idea that it’s just because he likes Flynn is impossible to believe. What we’re left with then is Trump’s own self-interest.

Republican smoke bomb throwers are sure to suggest that simply because we see lots of smoke that doesn’t mean there is necessarily a Trumpster fire. If they do, perhaps they’d find it within themselves to admit that, well okay, maybe there wasn’t one with Secretary Hillary Clinton either. But these agents aren’t going to winning any gold stars for equanimity.

Sessions lives up to his oath of fealty

Sessions lives up to his oath of fealty

by digby

Now we know how Uncle Jeff probably proved his loyalty and finally got the president to say he still has faith in him

Lawyers for the Justice Department are arguing that President Trump isn’t violating a Constitutional provision that bars federal officials from accepting payments from foreign governments because the clause doesn’t apply to certain transactions.

In a new brief asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against Trump by ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), DOJ lawyers contend that the foreign emoluments clause doesn’t apply to “fair-market commercial transactions” like payments for hotel rooms and golf club fees, according to Bloomberg.

Trump administration lawyers also argue that CREW and other plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case against Trump and that Congress, not the court system, should determine whether Trump is in violation of the emoluments clause.

CREW filed the lawsuit during Trump’s first week in office “to stop President Trump from violating the Constitution by illegally receiving payments from foreign governments.”

“We did not want to get to this point. It was our hope that President Trump would take the necessary steps to avoid violating the Constitution before he took office,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said at the time.

“He did not. His constitutional violations are immediate and serious, so we were forced to take legal action.”

Nice that Trump doesn’t have to use his incompetent personal lawyer for this and instead the US Taxpayers are footing the bill for his defense. Sweet.

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Yes, he is a liar

Yes, he is a liar

by digby

This piece by the Washington POst’s David Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr. from August of last year is worth reading again in light of recent events:

The lawyer gave Donald Trump a note, written in Trump’s own handwriting. He asked Trump to read it aloud.

Trump may not have realized it yet, but he had walked into a trap.

“Peter, you’re a real loser,” Trump began reading.

The mogul had sent the note to a reporter, objecting to a story that said Trump owned a “small minority stake” in a Manhattan real estate project. Trump insisted that the word “small” was incorrect. Trump continued reading: “I wrote, ‘Is 50 percent small?’ ”

“This [note] was intended to indicate that you had a 50 percent stake in the project, correct?” said the lawyer.

“That’s correct,” Trump said.

For the first of many times that day, Trump was about to be caught saying something that wasn’t true.

. LAWYER: Mr. Trump, do you own 30 percent or 50 percent of the limited partnership?TRUMP: I own 30 percent.
It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.

Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.

For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.

The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.

Thirty times, they caught him.

Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.

That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.

“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” the lawyer asked.

“I try and be truthful,” Trump said. “I’m no different from a politician running for office. You always want to put the best foot forward.”

In his presidential campaign, Trump has sought to make his truth-telling a selling point. He nicknamed his main Republican opponent “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz. He called his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!” in a recent Twitter message. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly,” he said in the opening of his speech at the Republican National Convention. “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”

Trump has had a habit of telling demonstrable untruths during his presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios — the maximum a statement can receive — 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable — and wrong.

Read on. It’s amazing. Of course Comey documented his one-on-one conversations with Trump. Trump was a documented liar.

This stuff was out there. But because he’s a rude and nasty SOB a lot of people saw him as a guy who “tells it like it is.” Well, that’s not true. He’s not honest. He’s just an asshole who says whatever he thinks makes him look good. He’s the opposite of “tells it like it is.” He’s a con artist.

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It’ll only take 500 years

It’ll only take 500 years

by digby

Here’s a little factoid to think about:

Compared to other nations, the United States is losing ground. America now ranks ninety-eighth in the world for percentage of women in its national legislature, down from 59th in 1998. That’s embarrassing: just behind Kenya and Indonesia, and barely ahead of the United Arab Emirates. Only five governors are women, including just one Democrat, and twenty-four states have never had a female governor. The percentage of women holding statewide and state legislative offices is less than 25 percent, barely higher than in 1993. Locally, only twelve of our 100 largest cities have female mayors.

The reality is that at the current glacial rate of progress, “women won’t achieve fair representation for nearly 500 years,” says Cynthia Terrell, chair of FairVote’s “Representation 2020” project, which has released a new study on women’s representation.

That’s from a couple of years ago. It’s actually getting worse. The US now ranks 100th.

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Nothing to see here folks, nothing at all

Nothing to see here folks, nothing at all

by digby

Another long read for a lazy Saturday. This one is about Michael Cohen, Trump and the Russian Connection written by Josh Marshall:

There’s a very interesting article published this morning about Michael Cohen in Buzzfeed. Like many articles on Cohen, Trump, Russia and related matters, it’s a bit of a jigsaw piece. There’s a lot of information the full import of which is hard to make sense of without knowing a lot of other information about broader story.

Let’s review a few points.

Michael Cohen seems a lot like another Trump loudmouth lawyer. But he’s actually quite a bit more. Cohen first came to Trump’s attention and interest because of his access to capital from Ukraine and Russia and as well as from emigres from those countries. That brought Cohen – who you might have thought hadn’t the slightest connection to or even a clue about the countries of the former Soviet Union – into the Trump Organization. Cohen is also a very, very wealthy man in his own right. He has extensive real estate holdings in the New York City area – not just apartment units but entire buildings. He is also a major player in the New York City taxi business and appears to have made his first money there. Again, his business partners are emigres from Russia and Ukraine. Without saying specifically what business role Cohen has had in these area of commerce, they are ‘industries’ that are notorious for bringing money from unstable or kleptocratic parts of the world to places where it can be safely stowed.

Cohen also has family from Ukraine and his own business interests there. Cohen is married to a Ukrainian immigrant and his brother Bryan is too. They set up an ethanol business in Ukraine with family about a decade ago – just before Cohen entered the Trump Organization.

Cohen was also the intermediary who met with mafia-linked Trump business partner, Felix Sater and a Ukraine parliamentarian, Andrii Artemenko at the Loews Regency hotel in Manhattan in the first days of the Trump presidency. They were there to discuss Ukraine. Artemenko gave Cohen a sealed packet of documents to hand deliver to Michael Flynn, then still Trump’s National Security Advisor. Cohen did so, though he later claimed that he didn’t.

The dossier purportedly contained a ‘peace plan’ and documents detailing bad acts by the current leadership of the government of Ukraine. (We still do not know what was in that dossier or what became of it, though there is now ample evidence that at just this time members of the Trump entourage were trying to establish secure channels of communication to Russia.) After the meeting was first reported in The New York Times, Artemenko told Ukrainian press that he’d been discussing Ukraine with Cohen since early 2016 or possibly as early as late 2015 and indeed had known Cohen for years since back when Cohen and his family set up the ethanol business in Ukraine (roughly a decade ago).

This is more or less the story as we currently knew it in advance of this new article. Here are some of the new details.

I highly recommend that you click over to read those details. They are FASCINATING. He concludes with this:

As regular readers know, I’ve always thought this meeting was a big deal – a bigger deal than most people seem to think, even though it got a lot of attention back in February. We keep getting more information confirming what makes it seem like a big deal. As I wrote a few days ago, the meeting takes on a new significance knowing as we now do that the Trump inner circle was trying to find secure modes of communication with people in Russia at this time. Few things are as secure as hand delivered packets of paper documents. From the Buzzfeed article we now have more information confirming Artemenko’s perhaps injudicious comments about a longterm relationship with Cohen. If we were are looking for channels between the Trump Organization and people in the former Soviet Union in which a collusion may have occurred, it’s not Putin having a secret meeting with Trump at a safe house in New Jersey. It’s far more likely in settings like this. We have dossiers of physical documents, apparently a longterm discussion of the core issue on which the Kremlin wants relief from the US, what has been in the past – through Cohen and Sater – a channel of money from the countries of the former Soviet Union to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. It seems hard to imagine that the FBI’s/Special Counsel’s Russia probe is not looking at this or, if they’re not now, soon will be.

Michael Cohen is one of Trump’s closest associates. Maybe this deep and intimate connection with Ukraine is irrelevant. But under the circumstances you can’t blame anyone for being suspicious.

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