Month: November 2017

Where’s the MacGuffin?
by Tom Sullivan

Roger Thornhill: I see you’ve got the pumpkin.

Computer break-ins, stolen emails, troll farms, Russian mobsters, money laundering, and a foreign intelligence service.

It goes on: shady wire transfers, a mysterious professor, multiple passports, perjury by government officials, an eastern European model, and a grandiose madman with nuclear launch codes.

Surely, there is a MacGuffin in there somewhere.

Even if the plot is already wildly implausible, someday it’s going to make a terrific thriller with an all-star cast. If we survive the reality. If truth survives the propaganda.

But let’s look at a few headlines driving the plot this morning:

Russia probes spotlight ‘deniable’ Kremlin intelligence tactic

Current and former U.S. officials say the Trump-Russia case is spotlighting the way Russia’s intelligence services rely on a worldwide network of shadowy figures — some undercover agents, others paid accomplices in fields like academia, activism and even journalism — to infiltrate and influence western politics and government.

Trump and Sessions Denied Knowing About Russian Contacts. Records Suggest Otherwise.

For months, journalists have revealed evidence that associates of Mr. Trump met with Russians during the campaign and the presidential transition. But the court documents represent the first concrete evidence that Mr. Trump was personally told about ties between a campaign adviser and Russian officials.

Exclusive: Carter Page testifies he told Sessions about Russia trip

During more than six hours of closed-door testimony, Page said that he informed Sessions about his coming July 2016 trip to Russia, which Page told CNN was unconnected to his campaign role. Page described the conversation to CNN after he finished talking to the House intelligence committee.

Sessions’ discussion with Page will fuel further scrutiny about what the attorney general knew about connections between the Trump campaign and Russia — and communications about Russia that he did not disclose despite a persistent line of questioning in three separate hearings this year.

Franken Blasts Sessions: Papadopoulos Docs Show ‘You Failed To Tell The Truth’

“Once again, developments in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election have brought to light evidence that you failed to tell the truth about your interactions with Russian operatives during the campaign, as well as your awareness of Russian contacts by other members of the Trump campaign team,” Franken wrote.

He called it “another example in an alarming pattern” in which Sessions “apparently failed to tell the truth, under oath, about the Trump team’s contacts with agents of Russia—a hostile foreign power that interfered in the 2016 election.

Finally, artist Amy Finkel decided to celebrate Halloween by carving a pumpkin in the likeness of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and leaving it outside Paul Manafort’s townhouse in Manhattan. But someone else had commemorated the address before her :

When she arrived, Finkel said a plaque was already there, which read “The House That Brought Down a President.”
“377 Union Street will forever be known as the building that lead (sic) to the collapse of the presidency of Donald J. Trump,” the plaque read.

Finkel’s creation makes a great place for hiding government documents, and it’s a good likeness. Except the color reminds me of someone else.

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

The apostates are getting agitatedby digby
Former GOP operative Nicole Wallace and her guest Steve Schmidt went off on a lying Trump surrogate today on her show. It was quite something:

Fmr. Pence Spokesman @marc_lotter on the Mueller investigation
w/ @NicolleDWallace + @EliStokols @SteveSchmidtSEShttps://t.co/TlWO55j0Hy— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) November 2, 2017

Over at Vox, Sean Illing interviewed another Never Trumper, former talk radio host Charlie Sykes who had some interesting, if frightening, insights into what’s happening with the tens of millions of GOP voters in this country:

Sean Illing
Obviously the news Monday was bad — for Manafort, for Trump, for the Republican Party. But will any of it matter to Republican voters?

Charlie Sykes
Well, we’ve been asking that for the last year and a half. How many times have we thought, “Well, this is going to be the breaking point.” So far, I think the answer is no. But also, I think what you saw is how serious this investigation is, how deep they’re going to go, and the possibility that they may come up with lots of stuff that we did not anticipate. There’s still a question mark there, I suppose.

But look, the conservatives’ resistance to negative information is truly awesome.

Sean Illing
Is that protective bubble impenetrable?

Charlie Sykes
That’s the question. I honestly don’t know whether it’s impenetrable, but it hasn’t been penetrated so far, and I don’t see any sign of cracks to it. This is the problem with an alternative reality silo that really does completely shape scenarios. If you’ve been watching over the last seven days, the conservative media is presenting an entirely different universe of facts and narratives than you would get anywhere else.

It is two different worlds right now.

Sean Illing
What does the conservative world look like right now amid all the news about the Mueller investigation? What are they selling?

Charlie Sykes
It’s what I’d call whataboutism on steroids. The narrative is that the Russia investigation is not only a hoax, but that the real story is Hillary Clinton and that we ought to be going back to Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton’s alleged non-scandal with Uranium One.

These were the tactics used to great effect during the campaign: Trump would face an allegation and deflect it by turning it back on his opponent. That appears to be the playbook right now, and the conservative media is happily complicit in this.

No matter what happens with Trump, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him, it’s always, “What about Hillary?” or, “What about the liberals?” or, “What about the Dems?” They treat this like a battlefield, and it’s always about defending their side no matter what.

Sean Illing
Is it about getting people to believe things that aren’t true, or is it about overwhelming the conversation with bullshit in order to distract from what’s actually happening?

Charlie Sykes
That’s a really good question. The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It’s to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people.

Which, from Trump’s point of view, is a win.

Sean Illing
To borrow a question from John Oliver, does anything matter anymore?

Charlie Sykes
I don’t know. This is what a post-truth culture looks like. This is what post-factual politics mean. I think we’re coming to grips with the full implications of that. Now, having said that, we are moving into the realm of the legal process, which does take facts more seriously, which does take lies more seriously. And you wonder whether that’s going to start sowing doubts.

To think that it will, however, is to bet against everything we’ve seen so far.

“CONSERVATIVE MEDIA HAS CHANGED THE NATURE OF CONSERVATISM”
Why conservatives are so good at peddling alternate realities
Sean Illing
But it seems like the echo chamber is airtight, no?

Charlie Sykes
I was thinking about why it’s so effective. Part of it is that the conservative media has done a really great job of convincing conservatives that they’re under siege, and that they’re victims and that there’s this effort to bring down their guy. So the resistance is so strong to anything that poses a threat. It’s not just a set of facts. It’s an emotional reaction to these kinds of stories.

I’m sure you watched the way Monday morning played out. How incredibly fast the spin went out that the Manafort indictment was not about Trump, not about the collusion, that it was a complete nothingburger that had nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.

And that lasted for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, until the next shoe drops. Then there was the Papadopoulos thing. But it seemed like there was no period in which they were rocked back on their heels by the fact that we actually have indictments of some major players in Trumpworld.

It’s like it never happened in the conservative world.

Sean Illing
In the safe space that is conservative media, it kind of didn’t happen, right?

Charlie Sykes
Many Trump voters get virtually all of their information from inside the bubble. I mean, there was a time when you would get the conservative point of view, but it was a counterpoint to what you heard elsewhere. Now the conservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told that they don’t have to believe anything that’s uncomfortable or negative. A safe space where they’re convinced that Hillary Clinton is the real criminal, that the Clinton scandals are what we really ought to be following.

What’s remarkable, and what I’ve never seen before, is the way that Trump sends out the dog-whistle signals to the media, which picks up themes with almost Pavlovian enthusiasm. He’ll tweet out, “The real scandal is Hillary,” and suddenly you’ll see it explode across conservative media, starting with Fox News, but other outlets as well.

I mean, when is the last time you saw a president with that kind of an ability to shape and deflect criticism?

Sean Illing
I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like this. But I want to linger on a point you just made, which is really important. The persecution mania on the right, the victim mentality that conservative media preaches, has engineered a base that is primed to dismiss uncomfortable facts as attacks on their identity. This is something that has been happening long before Trump entered the arena, but it seems like Trump is only possible because of this conditioning.

Charlie Sykes
That’s absolutely right. And again, that suggests that a lot of this is very emotional. It’s a visceral resistance. It’s a visceral loyalty. Mere facts have a hard time penetrating something like that, because it’s an attack on a member of your tribe. It’s an attack on a member of your family.

The details are less important than the fact that you’re being persecuted, you’re being victimized by people that you loathe and fear.

Sean Illing
I’m not a conservative, and anyone who follows my work knows that. And I readily admit that there are partisan media outlets on the left as well. But I still find myself wondering why conservatives have an easier time constructing and spreading fantasy narratives. Do you think it has something to do with the conservatism itself, or is it something else entirely?

Charlie Sykes
It’s an interesting question. I have to say that this does feel new in some degree. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, there really was not much of a conservative media. That was before almost all the modern conservative media infrastructure. There was no Fox News when Reagan was president. There was no Breitbart.com, and yet a lot of conservatives think that was the golden age of conservatism without the media.

Sean Illing
So what happened?

Charlie Sykes
Conservative media has changed the nature of conservatism. It’s changed the thought leadership rather dramatically. But going back to your points, as we’re getting a little bit deeper here, there is that paranoid string, there’s a paranoid thread that’s run through politics, including conservative politics, for a very, very long time.

I think you saw the weaponization of that in 2016.

Sean Illing
You say conservative media has changed conservatism. Has it killed it?

Charlie Sykes
That’s certainly possible. I mean, look where we are right now. What is conservatism right now other than anti-liberalism? People like Rush Limbaugh have essentially acknowledged that. He used to call his show “The Limbaugh Institute for Conservatism” and now it’s “The Limbaugh Institute for Anti-Leftism” — or something like that.

I’m not sure we can identity what’s left of conservatism other than a hatred for leftism.

Sean Illing
I still wonder why the liberal media hasn’t had an equivalent effect on the left. Any theories?

Charlie Sykes
I think the left has had less success in hermetically sealing off their base from other sources of information — that’s a major factor.

And look, this is deeply unfashionable for me to say as a conservative, but I think the education gap is not irrelevant. I used the term Vichy Republican the other day to describe Republicans who are basically collaborators, and I was a little taken aback by the number of people who had no idea what I was talking about.

Sean Illing
David Frum had a great line a while back. I may be butchering it a bit, but it was something to the effect of, “We thought Fox News worked for us, but it turned out that we worked for Fox News.”

I took that to mean that Fox has redefined conservatism by redefining what the base pays attention to, what it cares about. Consequently, you have Republican politicians who now reflect those changes in the base.

Charlie Sykes
That’s exactly right. Frum has another line about that. He said something like, “Republicans have a crisis of followership.” The Republican leadership in Congress sees all of this. They’re horrified by it. But they’re not willing to do anything about it because their base won’t allow it.

Sean Illing
Let’s wrap this up by circling back to the Mueller story. How do you see this playing out in the coming weeks and months in conservative media?

Charlie Sykes
I think this is going to be a test of the strength of that bubble, and we’re going to see how far the conservative media is going to go in providing that kind of air cover to Donald Trump. I wish I could say I was optimistic, but based on past experience, I’m not.

And by the way, most of the conservative media will justify their support for Trump on the basis of conservative issues. They’ll say, We’re backing him because of the judges, or because of tax cuts. But what you’re going to see is that they’re going to support and rationalize the corruption that has nothing to do with any of those conservative values or ideas.

I think the next several months will go a long way in defining conservatism.

Now go grab yourself a drink and read this. You’re going to need it.

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Bannon’s Daddy Warbucks on the hot seatby digby

So, this happened today:

Robert Mercer, a hedge fund executive and GOP mega-donor, is stepping down as co-chief-executive of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and selling his stake in the conservative website Breitbart News to his daughters, he announced Thursday.
In a letter to investors reviewed by The Washington Post, Mercer noted he has come under intense scrutiny for his financing of Breitbart, his relationship with former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and his backing of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

“Of the many mischaracterizations made of me by the press, the most repugnant to me have been the intimations that I am a white supremacist or a member of some other noxious group,” Mercer wrote. “Discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, creed, or anything of that sort is abhorrent to me. But more than that, it is ignorant.”

Mercer and his middle daughter, Rebekah Mercer, have been two of the most influential donors in President Trump’s orbit. During the 2016 presidential campaign, they financed and ran a super PAC supporting Trump. A data science firm that Mercer invested in, Cambridge Analytica, worked for Trump’s campaign.

Since 2009, Mercer, a former IBM language-recognition specialist, has been at the helm of Renaissance Technologies, one of the most successful hedge funds on Wall Street. The fund manages more than $50 billion in assets using complex mathematical equations to make bets on the markets.

On Jan. 1, Mercer plans to step down from his position as co-chief-executive and resign from the fund’s board of directors, but he intends to remain a part of its technical staff, he wrote.

The 71-year-old, who eschews media attention, has been thrust into the spotlight because of his backing of Breitbart, the pugilistic conservative website run by Bannon. Before Bannon served as a top adviser to Trump, he functioned as the Mercers’ political strategist and advised them on investments, according to people familiar with their relationship. Together, they built a power base aimed at sowing distrust of big government and eroding the dominance of the major news media.

He claimed that he and Bannon are not necessarily aligned politically and that he’s appalled by Milo, the right wing provocateur and sometime alt-right Nazi. Uh huh. You’d think he’d want his daughters to sever their ties as well if he was so disgusted.

Ok. But then there’s this:

The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world’s most profitable hedge fund, whose boss’s wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House.

Suddenly, the government’s seven-year pursuit of Renaissance Technologies LLC is blanketed in political intrigue, now that the hedge fund’s reclusive, anti-establishment co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, has morphed into a political force who might be owed a big presidential favor.

With Trump in the Oval Office, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who has become his public voice, seem armed with political firepower every which way you look – and that’s even though presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, their former senior executive and political strategist, appears to have recently lost influence.

Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.

The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, also has donated millions of dollars to conservative nonprofit groups that have called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an Obama administration holdover whose five-year term expires in November.

One of them, the Heritage Foundation, received $1.5 million from the Mercer foundation from 2013 through 2015, according to its most recent public tax filings.

IRS leader Koskinen has said publicly that he intends to finish his term. On his watch, the agency hasn’t been cowed by the Mercers.

The IRS recently released a little-noticed advisory stating that its top targets in future business audits will include so-called “basket options,” the instruments that Renaissance and some other hedge funds have used to convert short-term capital gains to long-term profits that have lower tax rates.

But Renaissance, with assets estimated at $97 billion on Dec. 31, 2016, has shown no signs of buckling to the IRS’s demands.

Nor has there been a hint as to whether Trump, a real estate developer who has refused to make his tax returns public, will intercede. The White House declined to respond to questions about the matter.

Richard Painter, chief White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said the optics surrounding the Mercers’ political connections and the IRS case “are terrible.”

“The guy’s got a big case in front of the IRS,” said Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor who is also vice chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “He’s trying to put someone in there who’s going to drop the case. Is the president of the United States going to succumb to that or is he not?”

If I had to guess, I’d say … yes, he will succumb.

Mercer is a true wingnut kook who believes in all kids of weird stuff, probably including anything Steve Bannon tells him. But he’s not so nuts he wouldn’t back a candidate he could count on to fix this little problem.

Keep you eye on this story. It could be very, very interesting.

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So, is Trump’s justice department part of Hillary’s scam to excuse her election loss too?by digby

Russian foreign minister Lavrov and Trump at the White House

Oh look. It appears that the Department of Justice believes it has enough evidence to charge Russian government officials with the hacking of the DNC. Maybe it’s overreaching, I don’t know. And I’m being facetious when I suggest that this will have any effect on Trump. He is unhinged from all reality and will continue to say “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” whenever he needs to:

The U.S. Justice Department has gathered enough evidence to charge six members of the Russian government in the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the investigation.

Federal agents and prosecutors in Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco have been cooperating on the DNC investigation and prosecutors could bring the case to court next year, it said.

By identifying individual Russian military and intelligence hackers with charges, U.S. authorities could make it difficult for them to travel, but arrests and jailing would be unlikely, according to the Journal report.

The hacking investigation, conducted by cybersecurity experts, predates the appointment in May of federal special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Mueller and the Justice Department agreed to allow the technical cyber investigation to continue under the original team of agents and prosecutors, the Journal said.

U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian intelligence agencies were behind those cyber attacks, which resulted in thousands of emails and other documents being made public by WikiLeaks last year. The intelligence community concluded in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the campaign to sway the election in Trump’s favor.

Russia has denied it meddled in the election and Trump has denied that his campaign colluded with the Russian government.

If the case is brought by federal prosecutors, it would pinpoint the specific Russian military and intelligence hackers behind the attack on the DNC and the emails of John Podesta, who was campaign chairman for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It won’t matter. For some reason Trump and the Republicans believe the Russian government will always help them get elected so they’re fine with it. I continue to wonder why they make that assumption?

A president with total contempt for the rule of lawby digby

Presidents are not supposed to weigh in on legal cases. But if he has no respect for the rule of law and believes that terrorist suspects should be tortured and summarily executed with bullets dipped in pigs blood, such legal niceties are irrelevant:

During a news conference three days after an alleged neo-Nazi drove his car through a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia — killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others — President Trump didn’t rush to condemn the white supremacists who gathered in Charlottesville. Instead, he infamously said there “were very fine people on both sides.”

Trump justified his equivocating response by insisting he was simply being responsible.

“I want to make sure when I make a statement that the statement is correct and there was no way of making a correct statement that early,” Trump told reporters. “I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters… I didn’t know David Duke was there, I wanted to see the facts.”

Fast forward two and a half months, after a Uzbekistan national named Sayfullo Saipov allegedly drove his vehicle onto a bike path in New York City, killing eight and injuring 11 more.

This time, Trump isn’t waiting for the facts to come in. On Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the president went as far as to repeatedly call for Saipov’s execution before his trial has even begun.

NYC terrorist was happy as he asked to hang ISIS flag in his hospital room. He killed 8 people, badly injured 12. SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017

…There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017

This is just how he roll and has always rolled:

Manafort’s pumpkinby digby

Just thought I’d share with you non-tweeters out there.
Manafort is still under house arrest at least over the week-end. You can imagine that someone found with “several passports” might be considered a flight risk. Who knows how many others he might have stashed somewhere?

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Only the best peopleby digby

The latest Trumpie to be caught in the maw is campaign supervisor Sam Clovis, Iowa politico who thought meeting with Russians was a-ok:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s senior White House adviser, Sam Clovis, who withdrew his nomination as the agency’s chief scientist this week after being linked to the special counsel’s ongoing Russia probe, confirmed in an Oct. 17 letter obtained by The Washington Post that he has no academic credentials in either science or agriculture.

But the former Iowa talk radio host and political science professor contended in the letter to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee’s top Democrat, Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), that his time teaching and running for political office in the Hawkeye State steeped him in the field of agriculture.

Clovis informed Trump Wednesday that he would no longer seek the post given the controversy surrounding the fact that he was one of the top officials on the Trump campaign who was aware of efforts by foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos to broker a relationship between the campaign and Russian officials.

In a letter to the president Wednesday, Clovis explained that he did not think he could get a fair consideration from the Senate, which was slated to hold a hearing on his appointment on Nov. 9.

“The political climate inside Washington has made it impossible for me to receive balanced and fair consideration for this position,” wrote Clovis, who currently serves as USDA’s senior White House adviser. “The relentless assaults on you and your team seem to be a blood sport that only increases with intensity each day.”

Clovis said he would stay on at USDA, writing, ““I will remain a devoted and loyal supporter and will continue to serve at the pleasure of you and the Secretary of Agriculture.”

The post for which President Trump had nominated his campaign co-chair — USDA undersecretary for research, education and economics — has traditionally been held by individuals with advanced degrees in science or medicine. The 2008 farm bill specifies that appointees to the position should be chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics,” given that the official is “responsible for the coordination of the research, education, and extension activities of the Department.”

Clovis, who possesses a bachelor’s degree in political science, an MBA degree and a doctorate in public administration, repeatedly acknowledged his lack of background in the hard sciences when responding to Stabenow.

“Please list all graduate level courses you have taken in natural science,” the second of 10 questions requested.

“None,” Clovis replied.

“Please list all membership and leadership roles you have held within any agricultural scientific, agricultural education, or agricultural economic organizations,” the third question read.

“None,” Clovis replied.

“Please describe any awards, designations, or academic recognition you have received specifically related to agricultural science,” the fourth question read.

“None,” Clovis replied.

Then came the fifth question, which asked, “What specialized training or significant experience, including certifications, do you have in agricultural research?”

He answered: “I bring 17 years of agriculture experience integrated into both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses throughout my teaching career as reflected in my curriculum vitae as well as the Committee’s questionnaire.” And having twice run for statewide office, he added that “one cannot be a credible candidate in that state without significant agricultural experience and knowledge.”

Clovis, who has said the consensus scientific view that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have driven recent climate change is “not proven,” has published and taught extensively about homeland security and foreign policy. He lists 17 examples of publications and scholarly activity on those two topics since 1992 on his CV, along with six teaching stints that cover those issues along with business administration.

He does seem to have some credentials for political work but I think you can guess why Trump stuck him at the Department of Agriculture. He has very strict requirements about how people around him should look.

I’m guessing he’ll be resigning from the job he’s doing now soon to spend more time with his lawyers.

Trump in a corner, talking to Bannon. What could go wrong?by digby

My column for Salon this morning is about reports of Trump venting, fuming, and whining while his staff thinks about impeachment:
According to The New York Times, the president is cool, calm and collected in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of three of his close associates this week. He called up a reporter to say “I’m actually not angry at anybody. I’m not under investigation, as you know. . . . Even if you look at that, there’s not even a mention of Trump in there. . . . It has nothing to do with us.” He also said, “I just got fantastic poll numbers” and that he’s “really enjoying” the job. Sure he is.

He didn’t tell the Times reporter what poll numbers he was looking at, but whatever they were, they weren’t anyone else’s definition of fantastic. His best job approval numbers at the moment are in the low 40s, and most have him languishing in the 30s. Gallup’s daily tracking poll hit a new low this week: 33 percent. Trump’s longtime friend and adviser, Sam Nunberg, told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, “You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

Indeed, it may have been that article, as well as a few others, describing Trump as intensely frustrated and venting in private to friends that made him call up the Times reporter and at least pretend to be unconcerned. Sherman quotes one Trump friend anonymously saying, “He thinks it’s unfair criticism. Clinton hasn’t gotten anything like this. And what about Tony Podesta? Trump is like, When is that going to end?” That certainly does sound like him. Infantile petulance, attempts to cast blame and whining about the unfairness of others are his trademarks.

The president is also borderline-delusional when he insists that he isn’t under investigation. The Washington Post reported last June that Mueller is investigating Trump for obstruction of justice for his attempts to shut down the Michael Flynn investigation and for the firing of former FBI director James Comey, among other things. Ironically, one of the main reasons Trump fired Comey was the fact that the latter refused to announce publicly that the president was not under investigation. It backfired on him spectacularly.

As for there being no mention of Trump in the indictments, that’s not exactly true either. He didn’t mention that foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about meeting with Russian emissaries, who told him they had thousands of hacked Hillary Clinton emails long before anyone else knew about it, and who apparently wanted to set up a meeting with Trump during the campaign.

We already know that Trump blames Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and therefore somehow failing to protect him from the Mueller investigation. Sherman reports that Trump has also turned on Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and White House adviser, and has vented about Kushner to his pal Steve Bannon, who can be counted upon to twist the knife into his old nemesis. Trump’s friend Nunberg is quoted saying, “Jared is the worst political adviser in the White House in modern history. I’m only saying publicly what everyone says behind the scenes at Fox News, in conservative media, and the Senate and Congress.”

I’m guessing that Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago is going to be just a little tense this year.

According to Sherman, Bannon and Roger Stone are both pushing Trump to take the fight to Mueller, which obviously appeals to Trump’s own instincts. Even Bannon understands that firing Mueller at this point would be a political disaster, however. He has apparently suggested that Trump should hire some tougher lawyers to work above Ty Cobb in the White House and should persuade Congress to defund Mueller’s investigation (which isn’t going to happen.)

Stone, on the other hand, is convinced that flogging the ludicrous notion that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to sell them uranium seven years ago is a “bank shot” that will push Mueller aside without having to fire him. In Stone’s version of the universe, Mueller would supposedly have to be informed that he and everyone else in the Justice Department and FBI are under investigation. Or something. It’s not quite clear.

The chances of Sessions naming a different special counsel to investigate Clinton — one of the right’s cherished dreams — may have diminished this week with the news that Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russians, says he mentioned them at a meeting of the Trump campaign’s “national security and foreign policy advisory committee” in 2016. Since Sessions was the chairman of that committee, this would represent yet another discussion of Russian interest in the Trump presidential campaign that the attorney general neglected to mention during his confirmation hearing. Maybe Sessions needs to up his dose of Ginkgo Biloba, because his memory seems to be failing. At this point, Sessions has enough personal legal exposure that he will likely be careful about slandering Robert Mueller.

All this is reportedly leading to people within the White House beginning to consider impeachment as a real possibility. Sherman claims that some high-level advisers now leave the room when Russia-related topics come up, to spare themselves future appearances before a grand jury. Bannon is said to be worried that “establishment Republicans” are just waiting for an opportunity to impeach Trump, which raises the question of why Bannon is going out of his way to turn them into his sworn enemies. Maybe Jared Kushner isn’t the worst political strategist in Trump’s orbit after all.

So far, Trump is following his lawyers’ advice as best he can, which means tweeting out his angry thoughts as he watches Sean Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” but then calling up The New York Times to proclaim how calm he is about the whole thing. Who knows how long he’ll be able to keep it together?

The president is soon leaving town for a couple of weeks for his big Asia trip, which reportedly has his aides beside themselves, since they know that his unpredictable and ill-mannered behavior could easily cause an international incident in a region where protocol is extremely important.

According to Politico:

“You never know what he’ll say,” an administration official said, adding that the grueling schedule could heighten the risk of mistakes. An outside adviser to the administration concurred: “The potential for error is huge.”

That could be said about any occasion when the president opens his mouth. But with the Korean crisis at a boiling point, an unforced error in Asia could be catastrophic. Let’s hope Trump’s advisers can keep him away from Fox for most of the trip. Maybe it will calm him down a little bit to focus on his job as supposed leader of the free world for a few days, instead of obsessing over what people say about him on TV.

What, me worry?
by Tom Sullivan

Republicans on the #NeverTrump team are meeting either to plan for removing him, for moving beyond him, or else for lamenting that their party has moved beyond them. The Meeting of the Concerned sent a letter to Congress yesterday urging Republicans not to allow anyone to interfere with the Mueller investigation on “trumped-up grounds,” their only oblique reference to whom they mean by anyone. In their name, one cannot but hear echoes of “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.”

We hereby call on House Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell to make clear, both publicly and privately, that they support the Mueller investigation and regard any interference with that investigation, including dismissal of the special counsel or preemptive pardons of investigation targets, as completely unacceptable. We further urge all Republican members of Congress to issue public statements on these issues as well.

Dave Weigel reports on the Meeting of the Concerned:

Evan McMullin, the “Never Trump” presidential candidate, was in the room. So was Bill Kristol, co-founder of the Weekly Standard, who had drafted McMullin to run. The meeting grew to include conservative columnists like Mona Charen, Max Boot and John Ziegler, and former U.S. House members such as South Carolina’s Bob Inglis and Florida’s David Jolly.

The Last Meeting of the Knights of the Concerned has plenty to be concerned about, it’s true. For instance, Dana Milbank reports, take the “best people” the president hired for his administration. Please:

A group called American Oversight had the foresight to make records requests for résumés of those hired by the Trump administration, and the group searched for those who worked on the Trump campaign. Among the “best” Trump hires American Oversight found:

●Sid Bowdidge, assistant to the secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Before working for the Trump campaign, Bowdidge, from 2013 to 2015, was manager of the Meineke Car Care branch in Seabrook, N.H. He previously was service and branch manager for tire shops. I don’t know what qualified Bowdidge for his position, but I do know this: He is not going to pay a lot for that muffler. (He had to hit the road, losing his job after it was discovered he had called Muslims “maggots.”)

●Victoria Barton, congressional relations for Regions II, V and VI, Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to working for the Trump campaign, Barton was an office manager and, between 2013 and 2015, a “bartender/bar manager.” The expertise in housing policy possessed by Barton is no doubt invaluable to HUD Secretary Ben Carson, a retired brain surgeon.

A confidential assistant at the Agriculture Department was a cabana boy at the Westchester Country Club from 2009 to 2015. There must have been tremendous, tremendous fawning involved. There are more of the best at the link, if you care to ruin your morning.

If the administration didn’t already ruin your sleep.

The Hill cites a new poll by the American Psychological Association that reveals respondents believe this is “the lowest point in the nation’s history that they can remember.” The APA’s press release says:

More than half of Americans (59 percent) said they consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember — a figure spanning every generation, including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

When asked to think about the nation this year, nearly six in 10 adults (59 percent) report that the current social divisiveness causes them stress. A majority of adults from both political parties say the future of the nation is a source of stress, though the number is significantly higher for Democrats (73 percent) than for Republicans (56 percent) and independents (59 percent).

[…]

The most common issues causing stress when thinking about the nation are health care (43 percent), the economy (35 percent), trust in government (32 percent), hate crimes (31 percent) and crime (31 percent), wars/conflicts with other countries (30 percent), and terrorist attacks in the United States (30 percent). About one in five Americans cited unemployment and low wages (22 percent), and climate change and environmental issues (21 percent) as issues causing them stress.

With the health care provider-in-chief having cut off subsidies to the Obamacare system and working to collapse the it, insurers are jacking up rates to compensate. In my case, BCBSNC dropped my grandfathered private policy and offered instead a shiny, new one with a 377% premium increase and a 1/3 rise in the deductible. And yours?

People say there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats know how to build things. And Republicans? Not since Eisenhower.

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

Sickening disrespect from Donald Trumpby digby

He hates America in so many ways:

We also have to come up with punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now,” Trump told reporters. “They’ll go through court for years. And at the end, they’ll be — who knows what happens.”

He added: “We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughing stock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place.”

I’m guessing he’s entertaining himself with beheading videos again. That’s what he means when he says “strong justice.”

He only feels that way about violence perpetrated by non-white people though:

One prompted a sombre tone, quotation from scripture and prayer for unity. The other brought a barrage of tweets, peppered with capital letters and exclamation marks and bent on divisiveness and blame.

Donald Trump had sharply contrasting responses to the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the terrorist attack in New York that bookended the month of October.

The morning after Stephen Paddock fired hundreds of rifle rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, killing 58 people at a country music concert, Trump was at his most presidential, stating from the diplomatic room at the White House: “In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one – and it always has.”

But when it came to solutions, the president offered little more than looking at gun control laws “as time goes by”.

Eight people were killed and 11 wounded when motorist Sayfullo Saipov, 29, originally from Uzbekistan, allegedly ploughed a pickup truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson river in Manhattan on Tuesday, before being shot by a police officer. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in New York since September 11 2001.

Trump rattled off several tweets in the immediate aftermath and, on Wednesday, went highly personal and political, raising the prospect of sending the suspect to Guantánamo Bay and taking aim at the Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and an immigration lottery programme he helped design.

“The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty,” the US president posted at 7.24am ET. “I want merit based.”

The the other war mongers got in on the act:

The Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have advocated that Saipov be held as an “enemy combatant” and taken to the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Asked about this possibility, Trump replied: “I would certainly consider that, yes. Send him to Gitmo. I would certainly consider that, yes.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said at a press briefing later on Wednesday: “The point he was making is that he supports – or would support that, but he wasn’t necessarily advocating for it,” she said.

Sanders added: “I believe we would consider this person to be an enemy combatant”.

Of the 775 detainees who have passed through Guantánamo, none of them have been arrested within the US for acts committed on US mainland soil.

On the campaign trail Trump used to bemoan the fact that we wasted time with trials. He would hold up and imaginary rifle and say “bing bong when we were strong.” Out justice system is a joke and a laughing stock, you see, with all this due process and what have you. Someone should alert Robert Mueller.

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