Month: August 2017

Arpaio’s soul mate

by digby

If they had souls, that is. This is from June of last year:

Joe Arpaio was standing in his top-floor office looking down on a summer cityscape baked semolina-loaf brown waiting for Donald Trump to call, or even email, a “Happy Birthday” message.

“Did he get in touch?” the 84-year-old Maricopa County sheriff asked his assistant, who replied, “no,” but a Trump aide had sent a really sweet email. A few days later, at a rally in the city in a 109-degree Saturday, Arpaio introduced a mellower-than-usual Trump who, in turn, delivered his requisite “I love Sheriff Joe!”

It is cosmic coincidence that the fiery Arpaio, the stocky Italian populist prototype for the burlier Scotch-German GOP nominee, was born on the very same day, June 14 — but 14 years earlier, two states away in Massachusetts, and far poorer than silver-spooned baby Donald in Queens.

Sheriff Joe endorsed Trump early and describes him as his one true political soulmate. They share a boot-on-throat rhetorical style, a focus on kicking out illegal immigrants and kicking the ass of America’s enemies, and both love bashing the whiny “political correctness” of minority groups. Arpaio hit on the formula first — adding a Korean War veteran’s fondness for accumulating .50-caliber machine guns and other military ordnance — but he is too media-smart to walk into the trap I set by suggesting Trump is stealing his shtick. “I don’t like people to say, ‘He’s copying you,’” Arpaio said during an hourlong interview for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

As a rule, Arpaio is loath to criticize anything Trump says or does  [I wonder why?] — but he did allow himself one point of significant divergence.

During his 23 years as sheriff, did he ever ban a news outlet from his events and press conferences, as Trump has done with POLITICO, The Washington Post and others?

“Why would I bite the hand that feeds?” he said, shaking his head in disapproval.

In Arpaio’s view, controversy is a useful tool, a way of elevating the causes he cares about (guns, law and order, immigration, the epidemic of wimp-ism), but it’s also not just a means but an end, the only way to grab the attention of a national media and political establishment that would otherwise ignore him. “I’m controversial,” he added with a shrug. “You wouldn’t be here talking to me if I was a nothing, I don’t think.”

(In reality, Arpaio not only bit the hand that fed — he had the medical bills. In 2013, the county board of supervisors paid $3.75 million to a pair of New Times editors who said they were falsely imprisoned after writing about the sheriff’s real estate transactions.)

Trump was born with a famous name, a fortune and direct access to New York’s tabloids. Arpaio had none of these advantages and he talks freely about how being “controversial” was the best way for an outsider like him to break into the national conversation. Put another way, in the half-joking words of a longtime Arizona critic, he’s “strictly a self-made madman.”

He’s easier to detest at a distance than up close, and there’s a Rat Pack madcap to his patter that gets lost in the sound-bite outrage culture of cable news. He was a cop in Vegas in the 1960s, when the Mafia ran everything, he’s fond of saying, and you know, it wasn’t so bad (“there wasn’t that much crime when the mob — now, I’m not saying that’s good or bad, but the mob had its own ethics too. … They will never kill a child or a cop, OK?”).

He knew I was Jewish, so I got this: “Israel is a great country for examples on how to do security. I really love how Israel operates, and I love the Jewish people. I’m not just saying that because you’re Jewish.”

Then, instantly, he linked the Vegas point with the Israel point to make a whole new point. “The only Jewish guy that the mob hired is Meyer Lansky,” he added. “I don’t know how he sneaked in there, but he knew how to count the money. Actually, I’m the only one that ever busted that guy. Do you know that?” (I did not.)

[…]
In the early 1990s, Arpaio parlayed a successful but relatively low-key federal law enforcement career into fame (and infamy): Arpaio is the guy who slapped those pink undies on inmates in front of the national TV crews (he hands out autographed bloomers to visitors from a storage nook behind his desk), houses prisoners in a hotter-than-Hades tent city and feeds them crappy high-calorie meals, and remains the subject of an Obama Justice Department suit alleging his department systematically discriminated against Hispanics.

Oh, and he used county resources to fruitlessly pursue Barack Obama’s “fake” birth certificate. (An Arpaio-allied group later tried to reimburse the county for the expense but was rebuffed by the board of supervisors.) That’s what got him his first give-’em-hell letter from part-time birther Trump. “That’s not dead as far as I’m concerned,” he told me. […]

Twenty years before Trump pulled off the biggest outsider coup in the history of the Republican Party, Arpaio was tapping that same, deep vein of post-Reagan distrust, loss and anger among working- and middle-class whites. Maricopa, with its 4 million people, is one of the biggest and fastest-growing counties in the country — a sprawl of predominantly Republican suburban subdivisions emanating from the Democratic-dominated city of Phoenix, with lots of disaffected ethnic northern emigrants like himself.

The county is about 78 percent white, but about a third of households identify as Latino — a recipe for long-term tensions and polarized politics. In the early 1990s, at the height of the crack epidemic and crime wave, the county was ripe territory for a candidate running on what, in retrospect, amounted to a “Make Maricopa Great Again” campaign. Arpaio captured big majorities (in the five elections between 1992 and 2008, he netted from 55 percent to 66 percent) with a hard-edged, law-and-order message that made Rudy Giuliani look like an ACLU lawyer.

New racist xenophobia same as the old racist xenophobia. Through good times and bad.

Arpaio was an enthusiastic enforcer of Arizona’s now-voided 2010 immigration law, and he ran afoul of a federal judge in 2013 after telling a group of supporters he’d locked up 500 suspected illegal immigrant drivers his deputies had pulled over “out of spite.” He flat-out refused to talk about that case or the Obama administration’s racial profiling case — he not only dismissed the idea that his department acted prejudicially, but also cast doubt that anti-black or anti-Latino discrimination exists at all in 2016 America.

“I think it’s overstated,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of hype. Unfortunately, in our country today, you have to be very careful what you say. We do have freedom of speech, but if you say the wrong word, it looks like it makes headlines. So everybody has to be very careful.”

“You don’t think that there is systematic discrimination in this country against Latinos and blacks at this point?” I asked.

His answer: “No. No. No, I really don’t.”

When I pointed out that many critics had called him “a racist,” he waved dismissively.

“When they can’t get you for anything else, it’s a famous word, ‘racist,’” he said. “Do you think it bothers me? It doesn’t really bother me. I know in my heart what I am, so they can call me anything they want. … [I’m] probably one guy that really doesn’t [discriminate], you know, and I’m not going to say my best friend is black. … No, no, no. And even in my family, I have a black and I have Mexican. I got all these family — but I’m not going to say that. I guess you could still have that and say you’re a racist, you know, but no. I know what I am. Come on.”

He really likes Trump, gave him a souvenir or two (“he’s got my underwear”) was touched when the developer reached out to comfort his ailing wife, and buys his candidate’s claim of a “silent majority” that will pop up in November to confound the pundits and the pollsters…

“If there’s anybody that should be shying away from Trump, it’s me, with all the heat I’m taking, right?” he said. “Any smart guy would do that, but I’m not a smart guy, maybe.”

He’s pretty smart. At the end of his life he’s a convicted racist hero, in the mode of Bull Connor, who just got pardoned by the president of the United States after ignoring a federal court order to stop profiling. All in the name of Law and Order. In 2017.

He is what Trump sees as law and order. With a little NRA vigilantism as back-up.

Bad Dog

by digby

Just read it:

At the risk of belaboring things, dogs are animals that introduce themselves to their peers by assertively investigating those peers’ b-holes; their brains are the size of nectarines and in many cases not significantly more brain-like. They are just about the best creatures on this earth, but if you or my father believe that dogs are embarrassed by the protective cones that veterinarians place on them, then you or my father are overthinking it.

The dogs are inarguably inconvenienced by these cones, which is their purpose: the cones are prescribed by veterinarians because saying things like “I’ll need you to try avoid licking these stitches for a week” or “I’m going to ask you to stop gnawing on that bacterial infection on your ass” is not going to work. The dogs do not like this, and they also may not like engaging with their peer-dogs while wearing a goofy blunderbuss that keeps them from their habitual introductory b-hole assessments and self-administered kamikaze junk ablutions. But at some point there’s no real sense in guessing.

You have probably gathered that this is about Donald Trump.

Sad!

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Why are we being polite?
by Tom Sullivan

When does America start calling bullshit on bullshitters? Yes, it’s impolite, but aren’t we beyond polite at this point? How long do we the people let shysters and mountebanks game the courts, the press, and the legislative process the way they game elections?

Herewith some further thoughts on the court ruling on voter ID this week in Texas, and the NCGOP redistricting foot-dragging in North Carolina, and the Richard Spencer interview mentioned on Tuesday.

HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

In issuing her ruling Wednesday, United States District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos came as close to writing that as we’ve seen in some time. The Texas voter ID law is irredeemable, she wrote. It is discriminatory not just in effect, but in intent. No number of cosmetic tweaks can change that (emphasis added):

First, the Court’s finding of discriminatory intent strongly favors a wholesale injunction against the enforcement of any vestige of the voter photo ID law. Second, the lack of evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud in Texas belies any urgency for an independently-fashioned remedy from this Court at this time. There is no apparent harm in the delay attendant to allowing the Texas legislature to go through its ordinary processes to address the issues in due legislative course. Third, making informed choices regarding the expansion of the types of IDs or the nature of any DRI would require additional fact-findings on issues not currently before the Court. These matters, regarding reliable accuracy in photo ID systems, are better left to the legislature.

Consequently, the only appropriate remedy for SB 14’s discriminatory purpose or discriminatory result is an injunction against enforcement of that law and SB 5, which perpetuates SB 14’s discriminatory features. With respect to the VRA § 2 discriminatory purpose finding, elimination of SB 14 “root and branch” is required, as the law has no legitimacy.

Thank you. That’s about as close as a federal judge comes to telling politicians they are full of it.

Except perhaps the March 2012 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd District:

During the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Democratic National Committee and the New Jersey Democratic State Committee filed suit against the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee for alleged intimidation of minority voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The RNC allegedly created voter caging lists in minority precincts and, allegedly, hired off-duty law enforcement officers to stand outside minority precincts wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, some bearing firearms. The settlement the RNC signed with the DNC — applicable nationwide — limited the RNC, its agents’ and employees’ ability to engage in voter fraud prevention efforts without prior court approval. There were successful enforcement actions against the RNC in 1987 in Louisiana and in 1990 in North Carolina. Wikipedia has a list of references to alleged RNC voter suppression actions that never made it to court.

In 2008, the RNC sued to have the 1982 Consent Decree voided, only to lose in New Jersey district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

As in the Texas case, the RNC made a number of (if I may say so) disingenuous arguments for why the agreement should be voided, including citing the race of the President, his Attorney General, and the by-then former chair of the RNC, and cited the increase in black voter turnout as proof “minority voters are not being suppressed,” none of which addressed past behavior enjoined by the decree. The RNC’s lawyers complained that the decree prevented them from mounting legitimate voter protection efforts. Judge Joseph Greenaway reminded the RNC’s attorneys that modifications to the original decree had already addressed their complaints and they were free to do just that. Furthermore (emphasis added):

The District Court rejected the RNC’s argument that the Decree must be vacated or modified because the risk of voter fraud outweighs the risk of voter suppression and intimidation. As the District Court correctly points out, the Decree only requires preclearance for programs involving the prevention of in-person voter fraud. Furthermore, the District Court has never prevented the RNC from implementing a voter fraud prevention program that the RNC has submitted for preclearance, at least in part, because the RNC has never submitted any voter fraud prevention program for preclearance.

Greenaway must have smiled at writing that, but he wasn’t done:

Additionally, the District Court did not abuse its discretion by finding that the RNC had not produced evidence demonstrating a lack of incentive for the RNC to engage in voter suppression and intimidation. The racial and ethnic background of this nation’s political leadership, the RNC’s leadership, and the electorate do not decrease the likelihood that the RNC will suppress minority voters such that prospective application of the Decree is inequitable. If the RNC does not hope to engage in conduct that would violate the Decree, it is puzzling that the RNC is pursuing vacatur so vigorously notwithstanding the District Court’s significant modifications to the Decree.

Now get the hell out of my courtroom, federal judges are too polite to say. Decorum and all that. The longstanding consent decree is set to expire this December. Would that the courts had more like Ramos and Greenaway.

In GOP legislators passing vote suppressing laws, in gerrymandering districts “with surgical precision,” in pursuing the sham of widespread voter fraud, and in blowing racial dog whistles as loud as foghorns, what is infuriating is how readily their peers, legislators, and the rest of us play along politely with the sham that they are not up to exactly what we know they are up to.

Perhaps Greenaway remembered his Harry Frankfurt:

The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he
misrepresents what he is up to.

Personal responsibility for that lies with the bullshitter. How the rest of us respond is on us. After the litany of vote suppression measures nominally aimed at preventing voter fraud, after the growing list of expired rationale given for passing voter ID bills, after the insincere efforts at complying with court-ordered redrawing of racially gerrymandered districts, and after the bald-faced way agents of the right look America in the eye and misrepresent their intentions (which the federal court in Texas found this week), how long will we abet them by treating them seriously? We are not talking about political spin, but outright dishonesty. We are seeing in Texas and in North Carolina — Ramos cites North Carolina in her ruling — is abuse of the courts to rope-a-dope political opponents in a strategic attempt to run out legislative and electoral clocks, bankrupt adversaries, and delay, delay, delay.

Thankfully, as Rick Hasen observes, the other shoe has yet to drop in the Texas case. He writes, “[A] finding of intentional discrimination can be the basis, under section 3c of the Voting Rights Act, to put Texas back under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for up to 10 years, at the court’s discretion. The court has scheduled further briefing on the section 3c issue for the end of the month.” Perhaps a court whose patience has run out will finally call Texas Republicans to account. Recidivists being recidivists, they will immediately look for other avenues for gaming elections and suppressing political adversaries. But notice will have been given not only to them but to North Carolina as well. Whether the current Justice Department will do its job is another rant for another day.

There are laws against frivolous lawsuits and malicious prosecution. Yet none of which I am aware that enjoin or penalize politicians who repeatedly pass malicious legislation to harm those who would not vote with them or to “exact revenge” upon rivals in order to expand their own powers.

To call it that, or to call out such women and men out for it is thought the height of vile partisanship. The press will not do it. The courts, only in a courtly manner. So we go through the motions of treating bullshit as statesmanship, then wonder why America holds both major parties and Congress in contempt. We demand plain, unfiltered talk without demanding what is unfiltered is also true and not subterfuge. Honesty from the Republican camp these days comes as likely as not in the form of Kinsley gaffes.

Be they statesmen or polarizing personalities such as Richard Spencer, practitioners of bullshit react to those who challenge them with feigned hurt. Moi? In Coulteresque fashion, they figuratively (if not literally) toss their hair, rolls their eyes and sigh. The fault is ours in having misunderstood what they plainly said and plainly meant. How dare we question their motives, which are only honorable. As honorable as the men depicted in statuary erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in support of Jim Crow.

So are they all, all honorable men.

* * * * * * * *

Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother: Harvey edition


by digby

It’s not exactly soothing, but it’s necessary. Right now we’re all hoping fervently that this hurricane doesn’t result in loss of human life. But humans aren’t the only ones in danger:


Via Bustle:

As Hurricane Harvey storms through the Gulf of Mexico, residents in areas along its targeted path are preparing for intense rainfall and flooding. Meteorologists expect the hurricane to strengthen to Category 3 (Hurricane Sandy was a Category 2, for comparison) by the time it hits the South Texas and Louisiana coast. While humans have the option to hunker down indoors or flee, stray animals do not. But there are ways to help stray pets and wild animals survive Hurricane Harvey.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, abandoned dogs and their offspring have been roaming New Orleans, a city that already had a high population of wild dogs before the hurricane. Pet owners evacuating in a rush had assumed they would return home soon enough. Hurricane Katrina resulted in more than 600,000 animals dead or stranded in the end. Even the smaller-scale Hurricane Sandy trapped animals on the East Coast, requiring rescue operations and emergency care for hundreds of animals.

Now Hurricane Harvey has the potential to leave the next devastating and permanent mark on homeless animals. If you live in an area where Hurricane Harvey will strike, take precaution by bolstering your home or preparing your escape plan if an evacuation order has been issued in your city or council. If you also want to help stray animals, the sometimes forgotten victim in natural disasters, here’s what experts advise.

I assume that most of the local animal rescue and advocates have done what they can to lure stray dogs and provide flood shelters for feral cats. But the rest of us can still help:

If you are unable to foster an animal yourself, make a financial donation to an animal shelter in areas that will be affected by Hurricane Harvey, or offer any much-needed resources like crates, trash bags, pet food, and pet beds.

if you’d like to help @austinpetsalive and #Texas dogs/cats stay safe during #HurricaneHarvey, please share/donate. https://t.co/GfB0S3kWA8 pic.twitter.com/FMVQFZ6o5u

— Sarah Gray (@heysarahgray) August 25, 2017

This is a web site for San Antonio Pets Alive. I would imagine there will be lists of various animal rescue organizations soon and I will post them when I find them.

If you are in the area after the storm has passed, this is some good advice:

The potential carnage left behind after Hurricane Harvey passes could include massive flooding and stranded strays. Check with organizations operating rescue efforts if you can be of any help. If you spot a stranded animal, don’t assume someone else will come and take care of it. You can be resourceful like the Louisiana man who used an air mattress to ferry dogs to higher ground. Unfortunately, hurricanes can exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases, including ones transmitted by cats and dogs, so proceed with caution. If you’re uncomfortable or unable to approach the animal, contact an animal rescue team.

Godspeed to all the humans AND all the critters on the Gulf coast this week-end.

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Getting serious about cyber-security


by digby

Marcy Wheeler has a fascinating look in the New Republic at the new cybersecurity bill proposed in congress. It appears to be pretty tough. I trust Wheeler’s analysis about the civil liberties implications, which exist, but she seems to think that with some exceptions (particularly the Wikileaks provision) the bill is necessary and reasonable, the main question being whether Trump will sign it. And that’s not just because he almost certainly wants Russia’s help in upcoming elections:

Russia and WikiLeaks are not the bill’s only targets. It also includes two provisions that would constrain any plans Trump might have to cozy up to the Russians. One would defund any scheme to partner with Russia on cybersecurity, which Trump has pledged to do. The second would impose a review of the risks of returning diplomatic compounds seized from Russia in December under the Obama administration, which was retaliating against Russia’s interference in the election. Russia has put heavy pressure on Trump to give the compounds back.

The intelligence authorization includes a range of other measures to fix known weak points. It establishes a task force that will identify risks to the government’s supply chain, such the widespread use of software produced by Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky. It establishes a working group to develop a national strategy to protect energy infrastructure, especially its industrial control systems. That effort comes in the wake of reports that Russian hackers were targeting engineers with access to the control systems of energy facilities, including nuclear power plants. And finally, the bill mandates a review of whether the intelligence community had the information it needed on the Russian threat and shared it effectively.

All told, the Intelligence Authorization mentions Russia 34 times, and includes a number of other provisions, such as the supply chain review and the energy infrastructure task force, that don’t name Russia but respond to U.S. vulnerabilities that Russia is suspected of exploiting. While neither the intelligence community nor the White House have weighed in on the bill yet, in its current form it represents a focused response to a threat to the U.S., and a concrete effort to improve America’s security generally.

That’s important for two reasons. First, it’s a tangible response to the Russian hack, and it comes as the president and House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes continue to undermine the investigations of four congressional committees and Robert Mueller’s special counsel team.

Just as importantly, the bill makes a number of common-sense changes—like higher salaries for top cybersecurity positions at NSA, congressional oversight over the vulnerability equities process, and a strategic plan to make the most of bounties paid to “white hat” hackers who find weaknesses in government systems—that will likely have a real impact on cybersecurity. These were all pitched back in 2015, when Congress focused instead on information-sharing between various intelligence agencies, an effort that still hasn’t shown great returns.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is by no means perfect. It rushed through the confirmation of CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who in April came up with the term “non-state hostile intelligence service” that Wyden now objects to. The Senate confirmed Pompeo even though he, like the president, cheered this non-state hostile intelligence service when it served his purposes. But the committee has at least shown where it stands on the issue of Russian interference in U.S. elections, which is more than we can say for Pompeo and Trump.

It’s a good read, I highly recommend it.

I think it’s worth noting that as weak as the Republicans have been in dealing with the narcissist in chief, they have taken some pretty strong action with respect to this Russian interference in the election and other possible cyber-threats. And in the process they have revealed, once again, Trump’s weird obsession with stopping them from doing it.

I imagine that this bill will get a strong bipartisan backing which, like the sanctions bill, would be a serious constraint on the president who insists that what happened in 2016 was no big deal and that it’s all Democratic sour grapes. It will be interesting to see if he calls up GOP senators and curses at them about this one too.

And, more importantly, it will be interesting to see if he signs the bill.  It took him days to sign the sanctions bill which was passed with an overwhelming bipartisan voter. And he did it grudgingly. In secret. Maybe he thought the Russian government wouldn’t notice.

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Mitch in the crosshairs

They’ll probably make a lot of money. After all, most of the Trump voters aren’t actually hurting economically. They just don’t want people who don’t look like him to get ahead as well.

Fellow Conservative: Senator Mitch McConnell’s failed leadership is killing President Trump’s conservative agenda and there is no sign this will change. President Trump asked for funding for the border wall, but Mitch McConnell said no. President Trump campaigned on term limits for Members of Congress, but Mitch McConnell said no. President Trump proposed budget cuts for foreign aid, but Mitch McConnell said no. And now President Trump has called on Senate Republicans to renew their efforts to repeal Obamacare, but yet again, Mitch McConnell has said no, “it’s time to move on.” Even worse, Mitch McConnell is now blaming the president for setting “excessive expectations” when he was the one who set these expectations with years of empty promises!!! Please make a contribution to help us put grassroots pressure on Senate Republicans to replace Mitch McConnell. It’s time for Senate Republicans to elect a new leader who will fight to save our country! Mitch McConnell is a creature of the swamp who never wanted President Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton. It’s why he told Senate Republicans they should drop Trump “like a hot rock.” It’s no surprise that McConnell is calling the president stupid now and sending his political allies out to attack the president in the press. Help us tell Senate Republicans: “Ditch Mitch NOW!” The president is right to question Mitch McConnell’s leadership because he is responsible for electing all of the liberal Republicans who are now blocking the president’s agenda. And there’s no sign that is going to change. McConnell is already taking steps to re-elect liberal Republicans who oppose Trump’s agenda and to defeat conservative candidates who pose a threat to the status quo. In fact, his super PAC recently vowed to defend Senator Dean Heller from a primary challenge after he flip-flopped on Obamacare and voted against repeal. Mitch McConnell doesn’t want President Trump to drain the swamp. He wants to keep rewarding his cronies with liberal policies and continue business as usual.  Please help us fight back by making a contribution to Senate Conservatives Action today. Your support will help us get Americans across the country to call and write their senators on this critical issue. We can’t allow this career politician to blow our best chance to make America great again. McConnell is simply unwilling to fight for President Trump’s conservative agenda and he needs to go. Thank you for standing strong for freedom. Thank you for taking action to promote conservative leadership in Washington. Sincerely, Ken Cuccinelli II President, Senate Conservatives Action Former Attorney General of Virginia P.S. Please forward this email to your family and friends so they can help us expand our campaign to replace Mitch McConnell.

Pompeo is the only man he wanted

by digby

There have been many partisan CIA directors in the past working the levers to advance the president’s agenda from within. But we’ve never had a president who is a suspect in a counter-intelligence investigation before. So this is very troubling:

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo has taken a special interest in an agency unit that is closely tied to the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, requiring the Counterintelligence Mission Center to report directly to him.

Officials at the center have, in turn, kept a watchful eye on Pompeo, who has repeatedly played down Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and demonstrated a willingness to engage in political skirmishes for President Trump.

Current and former officials said that the arrangement has been a source of apprehension among the CIA’s upper ranks and that they could not recall a time in the agency’s history when a director faced a comparable conflict.

[…]

The Russia issue has complicated Pompeo’s effort to manage a badly strained relationship between the agency and a president who has disparaged its work and compared U.S. intelligence officials to Nazis. Amid that tension, Pompeo’s interactions with the counterintelligence center have come under particular scrutiny.

The unit helped trigger the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia by serving as a conduit to the FBI last year for information the CIA developed on contacts between Russian individuals and Trump campaign associates, officials said.

The center works more closely with the FBI than almost any other CIA department does, officials said, and continues to pursue leads on Moscow’s election interference operation that could factor in the probe led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director.

Pompeo has not impeded that work, officials said. But several officials said there is concern about what he might do if the CIA uncovered new information potentially damaging to Trump and Pompeo were forced to choose between protecting the agency or the president.

“People have to watch him,” said a U.S. official who, like others, requested anonymity to speak frankly. “It’s almost as if he can’t resist the impulse to be political.”

A second former CIA official cited a “real concern for interference and politicization,” saying that the worry among some at the agency is “that if you were passing on something too dicey [to Pompeo] he would go to the White House with it.”

Pompeo has attributed his direct supervision of the counterintelligence center to a desire to place a greater emphasis on preventing leaks and protecting classified secrets — core missions of the center that are also top priorities for Trump.

This is a serious problem. Pompeo has access to everything. We already know that the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, who is ostensibly recused from the investigation because he worked on behalf of Donald Trump in his investigative role, is still seeing classified information that he’s undoubtedly sharing with Dear Leader. But this is a whole different level.

Pompeo’s interference should not be allowed. But I think the only way to stop it would be for him to recuse and Trump has made it very clear with his treatment of Jeff Sessions that he expects his toadies to stay in the job and protect him regardless of appearances. He’s not going anywhere. That means the agency is forced to operate outside the normal channels. And that’s not good either.

What a mess.

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Last year at just about this time Louisiana flooded

by digby

This was what Trump did:

On Friday morning, freshly-minted Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told ABC News that Trump and running mate Mike Pence would be traveling to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to “help people on the ground” in a “decidedly nonpolitical event” with “no press allowed.”

As it turns out, though, there actually weremembers of the press allowed, and the candidate did use the occasion to attack his political opponent, and there were opportunities for photographs, but true to his word, Trump did “help out.” Pool cameras trailed Trump for his entire visit, and over the course of those several hours, Trump “helped out” by unloading a truckload of toys for 49 seconds, these 49 seconds:

After that, it was into the fire house, out the back door, and back to the Trump plane.

Let’s hope the dreaded bureaucrats of the FEMA Deep State are allowed to do their jobs in Texas over the next few days.

Stay safe and dry Texans. Good luck.

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The Russia investigation is coming

by digby

I wrote about the latest for Salon this morning:

It’s been another wild ride this week with President Trump holding one of his serious teleprompter speeches announcing that he has a secret plan to win in Afghanistan that he can’t tell us anything about, and then turning around to hold a raucous campaign rally in Phoenix reminding the world that he’s really an undisciplined narcissist. More than one pundit observed that Trump is more clever than he seems with his crazed behavior, because as long as he’s giving succor to Nazis and neo-Confederate racists nobody’s talking about the Russia investigation.

That’s giving Trump way too much credit. He is an impulsive person who has shown no sign that he’s that strategic about anything. And even if his frantic efforts this week were attempts at misdirection, it was to no avail. There have been quite a few developments in the Russia story, none of which are good news for the president.

The first big revelation was in the blockbuster New York Times story on Tuesday about Trump’s deteriorating relationship with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump has been tweeting his disappointment with McConnell for some time, so it was no big secret that he is unhappy with him over the health care vote. But apparently the two men had an angry confrontation over the phone on Aug. 9, in which Trump cursed at the majority leader over his inability or unwillingness to “protect” Trump from being investigated over Russia.

Trump doesn’t seem to understand that the Congress is an equal branch of government, endowed with oversight responsibilities. But if there was ever any chance that congressional Republicans could provide cover it went out the window when Trump fired the FBI director and then reassured the Russian ambassador the next day in an unpublicized meeting in the Oval Office that he’d relieved the “pressure” by doing it. Everything in his behavior since then, including his incessant whining about Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the probe as a personal betrayal, has made it more impossible.

Perhaps we might excuse Trump’s argument with McConnell as a general temper tantrum; maybe he threw in the complaint about Russia as an afterthought. But Politico followed up the Times story with more reports of phone calls with Republican senators in which the president requested that they abandon their plans for Russia-related legislation. He reportedly tried to convince Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee that the bipartisan bill sanctioning Russia was unconstitutional and damaging to his presidency. Corker didn’t listen and the bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which is not something you see every day.

Trump also called up Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina to complain about the latter’s bill designed to protect special counsel Robert Mueller from a presidential firing. Unsurprisingly, Trump is not a fan of the legislation or of the legislative branch exercising its oversight responsibilities over his administration when it comes to Russia.

As one GOP aide told Politico, “It seems he is just always focused on Russia.”

Meanwhile, there was some intriguing news about the investigation this week. ABC News reported that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 operative who compiled the notorious “dossier” about Trump’s Russian ties has spoken to Mueller and turned over all his sources. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising, but Steele had reportedly gone underground for his own protection and was unreachable by investigators.

Another key figure behind that oppo research report on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia reportedly testified for 10 hours before Senate Judiciary Committee investigators. Glenn Simpson is a former reporter who is now a principal in Fusion GPS, the company hired to compile the information. He has supposedly turned over 40,000 documents to the committee. We don’t know what was said, obviously, but on Wednesday the committee chair was quizzed by an astute constituent at a town-hall meeting and told him that if the committee voted to release the testimony and Simpson agreed, it might be made public. Simpson’s attorney released a statement saying they have no objection to making the transcript of the testimony public.

Ghen CNN reported on an explosive new tie between the Trump campaign and Russian government, right around the same time as the infamous Donald Trump Jr meeting meant to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Congressional investigators have unearthed an email from a top Trump aide that referenced a previously unreported effort to arrange a meeting last year between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

The aide, Rick Dearborn, who is now President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin, the sources said.

It is unclear where this request went and CNN reports that Dearborn was “skeptical” of it. But Dearborn was formerly chief of staff to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, and investigators are said to be interested in whether or not he had anything to do with arranging meetings between his boss and former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — the meetings Sessions failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation hearings.

This new email is in addition to reports from earlier this month that yet another Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, had tried to arrange meetings between Trump and Russian officials.

One might ask whether meeting with Russian emissaries and leaders is a normal function of presidential campaigns. It’s not. Nobody in that business can think of another instance. In fact, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt — who worked on George W. Bush and John McCain’s presidential bids — had this to say back on Aug. 4 to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, also a former GOP strategist who worked on the same campaigns:

We worked on two presidential campaigns at high levels and there weren’t any Russians around. I don’t think there were Russians around the Obama campaign or the Kerry campaign either. 

This campaign had Russians all over the place!

All of this is circumstantial. But between Trump’s increasingly manic insistence on discrediting the press, resisting any sanctions or pushback for Russian meddling, and demanding the Congress cease exercising its oversight duties it’s hard to escape the suspicion that he’s getting ever more nervous about something. He must be going against his lawyers’ advice, since he is clearly feeding suspicions of obstruction of justice, which is one of the charges the special counsel is investigating.

Common sense says that normal people who have nothing to hide don’t act this way. Of course, nobody ever said Donald Trump was normal.

“Our country had changed.” Uh-huh.
by Tom Sullivan

Some of us really believe in government of, by, and for the people. In democracies, that means we believe in the people choosing their own leaders through the democratic process. Some of us believe in that strongly enough to walk away from our paying jobs from September to early November in even-numbered years to help that process along, to ensure it is administered fairly, and to defend our neighbors’ right to vote. Some of our political opponents don’t see it that way.

Take Texas, just to pick a state at random. Texas has had three of its voting laws struck down for discriminating against minority voters in the last ten days, Ari Berman writes in Mother Jones:

On August 15, a three-judge federal court in San Antonio ruled that Texas’ 2013 congressional redistricting maps were enacted with “racially discriminatory intent” against Latino and African American voters.

On August 17, the Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ restrictions on assistance to non-English-speaking voters violated the Voting Rights Act.

On August 23, a federal district court in Corpus Christi ruled that Texas’ voter ID law, amended by the state legislature in 2017, had a “discriminatory purpose” against minority voters.

Berman notes that Wednesday’s decision striking down S.B. 5 is the eighth finding of intentional discrimination against Texas since 2011. Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk adds that S.B. 5 is the fifth iteration of the Texas voter ID law struck down in federal court for having discriminatory intent:

Perhaps hoping that the sixth time will be the charm, Texas legislators who wrote S.B. 14 and S.B. 5 do seem likely to appeal their case. What’s at stake is suddenly greater than their ability to implement voter ID requirements. In her ruling Wednesday, Ramos stated that one possible remedy the court could consider could be “continued supervision of Texas election laws under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act.” That is, the court could force Texas to go back to the requirement of having all of its elections laws cleared by the Department of Justice, a requirement implemented by the Voting Rights Act on all former strongholds of Jim Crow, and one effectively stripped away by the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Josh Marshall adds, “Section 3, allows for states to be put under pre-clearance if they are found to have passed voting laws with a discriminatory intent.”

Shelby County v. Holder was the Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in striking down the preclearance provision in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”Preclearance was no longer needed. But the ruling left Section 3 in place.

Roberts got it wrong. Congress passed no remedy to address “current conditions.” The Voting Rights Act may have changed our country’s voting laws, but Texas didn’t change.

Nor did North Carolina, just to pick at random another state with a Republican-controlled legislature from the eastern fringe of the old Confederacy. North Carolina’s voter ID law also got slapped down in the federal courts for being racially discriminatory. As in Texas, that doesn’t mean the GOP legislators behind it won’t try again and seek other means to game elections.

After federal courts threw out Republican-drawn federal and state redistricting maps as racial gerrymanders, and after getting strongly criticized in public comments this week, legislators in Raleigh argued last night over new legislative districts redrawn by court mandate. As in Texas, the changes were cosmetic.

Wendy Weiser and Daniel Weiner of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law write about legislative moves North Carolina Republicans made last December to prevent Roy Cooper, the newly elected Democratic governor, from appointing members to the State Board of Elections:

Seventeen days before Cooper was to take office, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a package of sweeping changes designed to limit his authority, which the outgoing Republican governor signed into law. The centerpiece of this effort was a plan to ensure continued Republican dominance of powerful state and county boards of elections, which are responsible for running elections in the state and have been controlled by appointees from the Governor’s party for more than a century. (The original law was struck down by a state court in March but then reenacted over Cooper’s veto with only minor changes.)

The new law extends the tenure — indefinitely, for all intents and purposes — of the sitting Republican-appointed Executive Director of the State Board of Elections, North Carolina’s leading election official. She would otherwise have been supplanted by a new Democratic appointee. The law also awards half the seats on state and local election boards to Republicans, which allows them to block any changes to voting rules adopted by the previous Republican-controlled bodies. The law even says Republicans get to chair all election boards during every crucial election year when the President, Governor and all statewide officials are on the ballot.

These changes leave little doubt as to who would really be in charge of North Carolina’s election process — and that is the point. Some legislative leaders openly admitted that one of their main goals of the election board law was to keep Republicans in power.

North Carolina began seeing county-level fallout from these moves this week. For decades, custom has been for the chief of three judges in each precinct to be from the party of the governor. In my county this week (as well as in others, I hear), the county Board of Elections proposed splitting the precinct chief judges between the parties, mirroring the even split described above for state and county boards.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State overseer of the president’s voter fraud commission, oversaw “a Kansas election system that threw out at least three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state did,” according to AP:

Only six states ” all among the top 10 in population ” discarded more votes during the 2016 election than the 33rd-largest state of Kansas, according to data collected by the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that certifies voting systems. Kansas’ 13,717 rejected ballots even topped the 13,461 from Florida, which has about seven times as many residents.

Critics of Kansas’ election system argue its unusually high number of discarded ballots reflects policies shaped over several elections that have resulted in many legitimate voters being kept off voter rolls in an effort to crack down on a few illegitimate ones.

Kobach knew in advance of last November of a problem with Kansans being notified online they were properly registered when they were not. His elections staff failed to notify the public. The exact number who had their votes thrown out is “unclear.” So is the fate of your democracy.

Your name doesn’t have to be Rorschach to see a pattern here. What does Chief Justice Roberts see today?

Russell Walker filed a lawsuit in York SC, demanding confederate flags be returned to the main courtroom @SpecNewsCLT pic.twitter.com/MVDYSEBIEe— Yoojin Cho (@Yoojin_Cho) August 24, 2017

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.