Month: September 2017

Friday night soother

by digby

Kittens in the hurricane:

A guy from a Houston neighborhood found a litter of three kittens under his porch without a mother during Hurricane Harvey.

He brought the kittens inside and went back out to search for their mama.

reddit/moak0

“This guy found three abandoned kittens under his porch and posted to a local message board asking how to take care of them. The mother was nowhere in sight,” reddit user moak0, the guy’s neighbor, shares with Love Meow.

He went back outside in an attempt to find their cat mother.

After a while of searching, he came across a calico cat wandering around.

reddit/moak0

The cat was friendly and the guy was able to bring her inside.

After drying her up with a towel, the kitty was thankful and happy with her tail held high.

Have you seen my kittens anywhere?

reddit/moak0

Not knowing if that was the mother, he took a few photos, hoping someone could help him.

The cat’s belly looked as if she had been nursing kittens.

“Of course all he had to do was put them in the same room. Mother and kittens reunited. She has the sniffles, but at least they are safe and warm,” moak0 said.

The sweet mama is so happy to have a safe place to raise her babies and humans to look after them.

Thank you, yes. These are them.

by digby

You knew there’d be something…

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will probably seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request. 

Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.
Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey and the White House’s initial inaction following warnings that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had withheld information from the public about his private discussions in December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, according to people familiar with the probe. 

The advisers are also connected to internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.

It’s getting closer and closer to him…

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Babies with guns

by digby

Here’s a horrible story that could have been prevented if we had a sane gun policy:

After a tragic series of events in South Carolina on Wednesday, a toddler and his dad are each dead from what police believe to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

“Our hearts are heavy at the tremendous loss of life,” Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said.

Police said they believe that Kyree Myers, 2, found a loaded gun and accidentally shot himself. His mother called 911.

When police responded, they found Kyree’s dad, 38-year-old Keon Myers, threatening to harm himself, according to a press release. Officers made several commands for Keon Myers to drop the weapon.

I couoldn’t figure out what happened with the father. Maybe he had warrants. Maybe he was overwhelmed with grief. Whatever it was, if there hadn’t been a loaded gun in the house none of this would have happened.

Why did they need a loaded gun in the house? Why do we encourage, celebrate, doing such a thing?

More on babies with guns here.

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QOTD: Bannon

by digby

You can’t make this up. No one would even try:

“Christie, because of ‘Billy Bush weekend’ … was not looked at for a cabinet position. The Billy Bush Saturday to me is a litmus test. Billy Bush Saturday showed me who really had Donald Trump’s back to play to his better angels.All you had to do, and what he did, was go out and continue to talk to the American people. People didn’t care. They knew Donald Trump was just doing locker room talk with a guy. And they dismissed it.”

His better angels. I can’t fathom what the hell he is talking about.

And he’s right. Tens of millions of people are fine with men grabbing women’s crotches against their will, including a whole bunch of women. It’s a non-issue. Not even when the man is running or president and is caught bragging about it like a 16 year old high school football player. It’s fine. Move along.

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Facebook, Google and Youtube “were our hands-on partners”

by digby

This is really something:

I don’t know how many people are on Mueller’s list to interview but I’m guessing she made like #17 pic.twitter.com/pN9qjXXId7

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) September 6, 2017

Trump spent 85 million dollars on Facebook ads.

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Rush rushes away

by digby

You’ll recall that the man with the 250 million dollar contract said the hurricane predictions were all bunk designed to make money for the corporate media greedheads and 7-elevens. Well:

Rush Limbaugh will be evacuating South Florida, just days after the popular conservative radio host claimed that Hurricane Irma would not hit the United States and that scientists and the liberal media were hyping up the hurricane as proof of their global warming “lie.”

“So there is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it. You can accomplish a lot just by creating fear and panic. You don’t need a hurricane to hit anywhere,” Limbaugh said on his show Tuesday. “All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.”

This May 14, 2012 file photo shows conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh speaking during a ceremony inducting him into the Hall of Famous Missourians in the state Capitol in Jefferson City,  Mo. CREDIT: AP Photo/Julie Smith, File
Prominent conservatives are becoming hurricane truthers
Just a week ago, VP Pence gave an interview to one of them.

But on the show Thursday, Limbaugh said he would be off the air for the next few days.

“May as well… announce this. I’m not going to get into details because of the security nature of things, but it turns out that we will not be able to do the program here tomorrow,” Limbaugh said Thursday. “We’ll be on the air next week, folks, from parts unknown.”

Limbaugh said the show will be back on the air Monday, but to be on the air Friday would be “legally impossible” for them do to the show out of South Florida.

Limbaugh did not recant his earlier statements about Irma, and he did not encourage his listeners in the area to evacuate. In fact, Limbaugh seemed to even double down on his earlier views.

“The views expressed by the host of this program [are] documented to be almost always right 99.8 percent of the time,” Limbaugh said right before announcing he would be leaving South Florida for parts unknown. “There is a reason for that because we engage in a relentless and unstoppable pursuit of the truth and we find and proclaim it and that happens to drive people crazy.”

On his show Tuesday, Limbaugh said he was reading the paths of the hurricane and was certain it would curve into the Atlantic, and even if it did so, Limbaugh said “official” meteorologists and the media would have accomplished their goal.

“If it ends up not hitting where you are, hits somewhere else, you might temporarily breathe a sigh of relief, but you’re still gonna think, ‘Man, there might be something to this climate change,” Limbaugh said. “Do not doubt me, with everything being politicized, of course it is an objective of some, not everybody, of course, but some of the people involved here.”

Even Big Water was in on the conspiracy, Limbaugh concluded, as people were stocking up on cases of bottled water for the storm that wouldn’t come when they could just use the water coming out of their taps.

It’s true that they could put water into empty bottles if need be. But a conspiracy between water bottlers and the National Weather Service is a stretch even in our corrupt neo-liberal world.

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You’ll never believe who they want to replace Paul Ryan with


by digby

My column for Salon today:

It’s not enough that there’s a historic Category 5 hurricane bearing down on Florida just a week after one hit Texas and brought biblical-level flooding. Apparently Congress and the White House have decided to stir up a maelstrom in Washington too, leaving every political observer in the country feeling even more disoriented than usual, and that’s saying something. Donald Trump actually did some governing this week.

In the face of an unprecedented legislative pileup, with emergency disaster funding and the debt ceiling becoming political footballs, Trump made a deal with the Democrats to pass the funding and extend the debt ceiling for three months to get both some essential items off the table and create some breathing room for the rest of the agenda. Republican leaders meekly went along, even though they had just been humiliated by the president, because they knew the crazier members of their caucus were about to turn the Congress upside down with their usual nonsense and there just isn’t room for that at the moment.

The only thing that ever matters to Trump is that he gets a “win” and that it produces good “coverage” and he got his wish. In fact he was so thrilled at what he saw on his TV on Thursday morning that he called up Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to bask in their shared glow and they got him to say that the debt ceiling hike should be permanent and tweet that DACA recipients are safe for the next six months. (That’s actually not true; some of them will have to trust this government again and reapply by October or they will lose their status.) There was all kinds of talk about the new bipartisan “Kumbaya” throughout the media all day, apparently under the assumption that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are now permanently out of service.

The one group that is disappointed about this cross-party love fest is the House Freedom Caucus, which was hoping to use the debt ceiling and disaster aid to stick it to some poor people. But those guys will get their chance soon enough. There’s still a budget to pass, so maybe they’ll get to do one of their favorite activities: a government shutdown. And Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., the kingslayer who took down former GOP Young Gun Eric Cantor, pointed out that as upsetting as this was, everyone would be soothed by the passage of the holy grail: tax cuts.

What the right-wingers all agree upon is that Donald Trump is not at fault for any of it. The GOP leadership under Ryan and McConnell and a handful of RINOs failed him by not passing the Obamacare repeal and so he had no choice but to turn to the Democrats. Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham said:

Time after time after time, Donald Trump trusted what was going on at Capitol Hill. They could not deliver a piece of legislation to his desk that actually could be signed. It wasn’t possible. So what does someone who’s a conservative populist do? When he wants to move the ball down the field? He’s gonna find, “OK, what other player can I throw to?” And the only one who’s on the field for him was gonna be Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs admires Trump for putting Ryan and McConnell in their places and suggests that the big man has finally knocked some sense into them.

Yes, the right wing is applauding the president for cutting a deal with the hated Pelosi and Schumer because they hate the GOP leaders Ryan and McConnell even more than they hate Democrats. Did I mention that everything is getting even more disorienting than it already was?

Well get ready for this. The Freedom Caucus is now so upset with Ryan that they are openly suggesting overthrowing him as House speaker. Rep. Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican who heads the caucus, has some experience with this. He was involved in a failed attempt to dethrone former Speaker John Boehner, who ended up stepping down less than a year later. Meadows has apparently been strategizing with former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon in private meetings at the “Breitbart embassy” in Washington. You’ll never guess who they are talking about installing in Ryan’s place.

Robert Costa of the Washington Post had the scoop. Right-wingers are actually floating the idea of recruiting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. (Fun fact: Anyone can be speaker of the House! The Constitution does not require that it be an elected member of Congress.) Costa writes that “the idea underscores [the Freedom Caucus’] desire to create trouble for GOP leaders if they believe their demands are not being addressed.”

It also underscores how depleted the GOP bench is. Both Gingrich and Santorum are throwbacks to the halcyon days when the conservative movement was on the rise and the whole country was bathed in the golden glow of Saint Reagan. Gingrich, of course, originally sat on the same back bench the Freedom Caucus occupies today, where he helped remake the Republican Party into the aggressively destructive party we now have to deal with.

But why anyone would want him to repeat his tenure as speaker is a mystery. It was an unalloyed disaster. He arrogantly strode into the chamber and picked up the gavel in 1995, announcing a new era of conservative leadership, and was deposed four years later after having led Republicans into an ill-fated impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton and a nearly catastrophic loss in the 1998 midterms. If they are looking for someone to fail miserably at being speaker, Gingrich certainly has the experience required for the job.

Rick Santorum represents a different faction of the old guard conservative movement: the hardcore Christian right. During their heyday, this group was extremely important and Santorum was one of their warriors. He had an undistinguished career serving for four years in the House and two terms as a Pennsylvania senator until he was turned out of office in the Democratic wave election of 2006. Since then he seems to have made a career of unsuccessfully running for president. Unfortunately for him, Santorum is best known for being against birth control because it allows people to have sex for pleasure and having his name turned into an obscene neologism. Again, if he is the best they can come up with to lead the House of Representatives, it says a lot about the poor state of the GOP.

It’s unlikely that these far right hardliners will be any more successful at enacting their agenda than they ever have been, even with Trump in the White House eager for any “win” he can get. But according to Costa, Bannon’s decision to join forces with them is largely about seeking to cast the blame for all these failures among the faithful on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and away from the president.

It’s early days, but if this week is any example, Bannon’s latest scheme actually has a chance of success.

Relief and partisanship
by Tom Sullivan

Hurricane Irma’s crosshairs are square on Florida. Most of the state will feel its winds. Arriving on the heels of the $15 billion disaster relief package Congress just passed to help victims of Hurricane Harvey’s unprecedented rains, Irma will have Florida knocking on doors on Capitol Hill by week’s end.

Money will be forthcoming. Because it is Florida, after all. (29 GOP electoral college votes in 2016.) Like Texas, after all. (38 GOP electoral college votes in 2016.) New Jersey? Congress argued about aid to New Jersey after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. (14 Democratic electoral college votes in 2012.) Conservative lawmakers balked at all the supposed “pork” that wasn’t there. Why?

Beyond the obvious partisanship in whose disasters matter more to whom, Eric Levitz at New York Magazine digs deeper:

Few House conservatives would argue that forcing people in landlocked communities to pay for hurricane relief in Galveston is socialism; or that we should trust the free market and faith-based groups to rebuild Houston; or that giving government handouts to people who chose to live in a flood-prone city undermines personal responsibility, and, thus, does them more harm than good.

But plenty would argue that forcing healthy people to subsidize the medical bills of the sick is slow-motion Stalinism; or that churches should be trusted with combating childhood poverty; or that giving food assistance and affordable housing to low-income families breeds a morally decadent culture of dependency.

It couldn’t be that government should only help the blameless, Levitz writes. (I mean, leukemia?) Or that we should rely on churches to rebuild cities. Or that it is mere hypocrisy. “[O]ne can’t quite argue that they’re welfare chauvinists.”

The most compelling explanation for why conservatives are comfortable with government intervening on behalf of disaster victims — but not on behalf of the poor, sick, or racially disadvantaged — may be this: In the first case, the victims’ suffering is the product of natural forces that conservatives feel no compulsion to downplay or defend; in the latter, their suffering is caused by racial and economic inequalities that can’t be remedied without the kind of downward redistribution that the modern GOP exists to oppose.

To allow that government has a duty to redress economic inequality indicts the morality of the free market for allocating to each according to her/his worth (presumably measured by economic output). Levitz hypothesizes, “Conceding that government can, and must, redress the harms wrought by Tropical Storm Harvey requires no such indictment.”

Levitz spends the rest of his essay examining the conservative response to a request by lefty activist Linda Sarsour for donations to the “#Harvey Hurricane Relief Fund.” In addition to addressing the physical needs of victims, like rebuilding housing for disadvantaged families, the fund helps low-income voters register to vote and organize to ensure they get the government assistance that flows more reliably to better-heeled communities.

“Ghoulish,” tweets one NRO contributor. “Pure political activism,” writes another. Donations to the Red Cross? No problemo.

But relief efforts in other disasters demonstrate that lower-income communities get short shrift because they have no access to the levers of power nor to those who can pull them. Information and the social resources to access aid are not readily available. And more assistance is available to home owners than to renters. The poorest and most vulnerable suffer most and may never fully recover. After Sandy, writes Janell Ross, “because decades of federal, state and local housing policy had made white residents far more likely than others to own their homes, the entire plan was poised to do more to meet the needs of the state’s disproportionately white, middle-class and wealthy homeowners than others …”

PRI’s Marketplace last night examined the complexity of disaster relief in the wake of Sandy and proved her point. It takes savviness and assertiveness to navigate bureaucracy designed for middle-income white people if you are not:

After Hurricane Sandy flooded Lisa Stevens’ home on the Jersey Shore in 2012, it took her until April 2016 to finalize her last repairs, including learning late in the rebuilding process that she needed to elevate her home.

It was a crash course in the bureaucracy of disaster recovery.

“We didn’t know what we were facing and how long the recovery process was going to be,” she said. “I’ve seen people come into programs literally with three ring binders and every piece of paper, every receipt, every document.”

Her advice for Harvey and Irma survivors: Document everything.

Who helps the disadvantaged with that? Helping people access the aid that is available to the better-connected isn’t what’s ghoulish.

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

The pussy-grabber backs his peeps

by digby

Oh look:

In a speech at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, on Thursday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos lit into what she called “the current failed system” for handling accusations of campus sexual assault, and she announced a period of public comment that could lead to significant changes. 

“There are men and women, boys and girls, who are survivors, and there are men and women, boys and girls who are wrongfully accused,”

I don’t have an opinion on whether Title IX protections have gone too far. I haven’t read anything to suggest they have done anything but force schools to take campus rape seriously. But Trump’s administration taking this issue up is really, really rich.

After all we know what advice he gives to young men on this topic:

Try and fuck her. Move on her like a bitch. Use tic-tacs in case you start kissing her.  And just start kissing her. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

The president himself was quoted saying he does all these things. If he can do it and get elected to the most powerful office in the world, there’s no reason the average all American boy should have his college career ruined for following his example, amirite?

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Dangling Don Jr

by digby

Josh Marshall unpacks the news from what we’ve heard about Jr’s testimony today:

Don Jr. says that he really had no idea what the meeting was about or more importantly who would attend the meeting in advance. In other words, someone said he might have dirt on Hillary, why not take a meeting?

This (no doubt intentionally) leaves out critical information that is in the plain text of the emails. In his emails Goldstone very conspicuously noted that this wasn’t just some information he could pass Trump’s way. He went out of his way to say explicitly that it came from the Russian government and was part of the Russian government’s support for and efforts to elect Donald Trump. He wrote: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

That makes all the difference in the world.

The specific identity of just who Trump was going to meet with is beside the point. The name would have meant nothing to him. The relevant point is that Trump Jr was told in advance that he was dealing with the Russian government and that the Russian government was supporting and trying to elect his father. I don’t care how naive you are. Unless you were raised by ferrets in the Catskills, you’re going to know this is a problem. Trump Jr took the meeting. This is the critical omission. My recollection is that Don Jr also forwarded those emails to Kushner and Manafort. So they knew that information too, or could have. We will return to the significance of this in a moment.

The next key is that Don Jr. says his phone records show “three very short phone calls” between Don Jr. and Emin Agalarov (the pop star son of the oligarch) over the two days (June 6th and 7th) just prior to the meeting on June 9th. He says he doesn’t remember those calls and that they may have traded voicemails. That seems dubious. Voicemails leave recordings and records. I’m not sure if the phone records reflect when a call goes to voice mail or not. But how short were the calls? This seems quite significant. Why are we hearing this? Almost certainly because you can’t hide the records that the phone calls happened. I don’t think investigators even need a warrant for those. What was discussed if anything was is another matter. There may be no record of that at all. So Don Jr. would be in the clear saying he didn’t remember.

Don Jr. also says that Jared Kushner left not long after the meeting began. What about Paul Manafort? As I wrote earlier, Kushner was not an experienced professional either in politics or intelligence work. Don Jr. is a buffoon. I’m willing to believe that they didn’t get the full significance of what was happening in this meeting. That doesn’t apply to Manafort. He’s been in politics for four decades. His foreign work – even if you assume zero bad acts of any sort – would routinely bring him into contact with spies, both American and foreign ones. That’s how it works. There’s no question Manafort knew what was happening in this meeting and that it was a problem. When did he leave? What did he do and say? Big questions.

Don Jr. also says he has no recollection that any dossier was left in the office or given to him. Again, dubious. But is there proof?

He says this looks like what the spooks call a dangle:

Let’s assume for the moment that the meeting went down more or less as described. Many intelligence professionals have noted that this looks like a classic ‘dangle’. The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, wasn’t there to do business or share information. She was there to test the campaign’s openness to doing business with the Russian government. Once Don Jr. and his colleagues showed they were very interested, her job was done. She is involved in the Magnitsky law lobbying. So she may have taken the opportunity to chat him up about that too. The point is that, as described, there’s nothing mysterious about the description of the meeting. Intelligence professionals say this is a standard gambit. The very specific reference to Russian government support in the original Goldstone email is likely part of the dangle. It’s too conspicuous and otherwise inexplicable.

Trump Jr also said this:

Donald Trump Jr. told Senate judiciary committee staffers Thursday that he did not recall the details of White House involvement in the public response to his 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and did not know much about the Air Force One meeting that allegedly led to the production of the statement, sources told CNN.

Trump Jr. was explicitly asked whether he either took any of the Russian participants in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to see his father — now President Donald Trump — or whether he told his father about the meeting after, sources said. He insisted he did neither. 

Asked why his father promised the next day that dirt was coming on Hillary Clinton, Trump Jr. told Senate staffers that’s just the way his father talks.

Yeah right. Now this:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has approached the White House about interviewing staffers who were aboard Air Force One when the initial misleading statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower was crafted, three sources familiar with the conversations said.

The special counsel’s discussions with the White House are the latest indication that Mueller’s investigators are interested in the response to the Trump Tower meeting. Mueller wants to know how the statement aboard Air Force One was put together, whether information was intentionally left out and who was involved, two of the sources said.
Mueller’s questions could go to the issue of intent and possible efforts to conceal information during an obstruction of justice investigation. The answers to Mueller’s questions also could illuminate the level of anxiety surrounding the meeting and the decision-making that followed.

The interviews with White House staffers who were aboard Air Force One have not begun, the sources said. They currently involve only a small number of people, but the sources cautioned that number could increase. At this time, Mueller has not asked to interview President Trump. Trump Jr. was on the Hill Thursday for an interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Trump Jr, Kushner anf Manafort colluded with the Russian government to receive “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Junior admitted it today. We already knew it from the emails, but if he had said that he never read the emails all the way through or misunderstood or something he would have denied collusion, however unbelievable that might have been. He didn’t do that.Whether that collusion resulted in information being exchanged we don’t know. But we do know that subsequent to the meeting, Wikileaks dumped a huge cache of DNC emails during the Democratic convention and later we saw releases of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

So there was “dirt” and it was disseminated. All that’s left to determine is what the president knew about this meeting and when did he know it. We do know that he tried to cover it up, which Jr pretended not to remember and which is not credible in the least. You would remember talking to Trump on Air Force One about what to tell the press about these emails.

After it was over Don Jr released a typically arrogant Trump statement:

No, it didn’t satisfy anyone, Donnie. Your torment is just beginning.

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