Donald Trump’s macho defenderby digby
Stephen Miller, ladies and gentleman, Trump’s favorite factotum.
Miller is also “a very stable genius” just like his boss.
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"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2018
Devin Nunes, Ron DeSantis and Russian trolls together againby digby
THE DENSE NETWORK of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts tracked by the group Alliance for Securing Democracy has spent the last year spreading chaos and discord about topics as diverse as NFL players refusing to stand during the national anthem and Al Franken’s alleged sexual misconduct. It was only a matter of time, then, before the troll army set its sights on special counsel Robert Mueller.
On the website Hamilton68, the Alliance tracks some 600 Twitter accounts it says are associated with a Russia-linked influence network. According to newly released figures, in the month of December, by far the most popular articles shared by the trolls aimed to undermine Mueller and the Department of Justice’s investigation into Russian interference.
In fact, 16 percent of the articles shared by those accounts between December 9 and December 31 were related in some way to the so-called deep state, the bulk of which aimed to discredit Mueller. That’s a lot of tweets, considering the site analyzes some 20,000 tweets a day. It’s a volume of conversation that, in late November, was reserved for the right’s favorite punching bag, Hillary Clinton. The Hamilton68 team keeps its list of suspected Kremlin trolls secret, but it consists of a balance between openly pro-Russia accounts, like Sputnik and RT, as well as bot accounts run by troll factories, and other accounts that consistently amplify pro-Russia themes.
Founded by former FBI agent Clint Watts and J.M. Berger, a researcher focused on extremist propaganda, Hamilton68 has been up and running since August. But December’s onslaught represents the biggest uptick in attacks on Mueller yet. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen as much concentrated activity on that topic,” says Bret Schafer, a research analyst with the Alliance. “It’s been trending steadily upwards since we started this.”
December’s onslaught represents the biggest uptick in attacks on Mueller yet.
That the Russian propaganda network would step up its battle with Mueller in December stands to reason. It coincides with a cascade of news stories about the investigation, beginning with former national security advisor Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI on December 1. Later that same month, news broke that two FBI agents associated with the investigation had called the President an “idiot” in a text message exchange, news Schafer says the Twitter troll network was quick to jump on.It also happens to track almost exactly alongside another infamous Twitter troll’s recent interest in Mueller. During the month of December—during which there was a major senate race in Alabama, a new tax bill, and a holiday—the President tweeted about the Mueller investigation in some form or another 17 times. That’s up from tweeting about it just three times in November.
Schafer acknowledges there “definitely, occasionally, is a correlation,” between the President’s tweets and the Hamilton68 network. As is often the case, though, it’s difficult to tell where the ever-circulating feedback loop between the President, the press, and the trolls begins. Maybe the media arouses the President’s sudden interest in a topic, which then rallies the Twitter trolls to action. Or perhaps the sudden uptick in online noise about a given subject seeps into the media, eventually inspiring the Presidential tweets. Wherever it starts, there’s no denying the synchronous relationship between the President’s account and this broader network.
It’s obvious why Russian trolls would be concerned about the Mueller investigation so I tend to think this is probably legit.
But it’s always so interesting how their interests, Trump’s and now the Republican Party’s always seem to converge.
Coincidence, I’m sure.
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Two minutes of hate plus eightby digby
This is a person Donald Trump considers an intelligent political observer. He had her into the White House to advise him:
“Never in the history of this country has a candidate for any major office skirted the law, pushed the legal envelope or been under criminal investigation as much as Hillary Clinton.”
My #OpeningStatement : pic.twitter.com/oAjvPlNNEJ— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) January 7, 2018
This adviser (whom Jake Tapper elegantly calls an obsequious factotum) is actually in the White House. He works very closely with the president:
If you can’t get through the whole cray-cray interview, just watch this for how it ended:
CNN’s Jake Tapper to annoying Trump White House aide Stephen Miller: “I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time” with you.
pic.twitter.com/5yNLRKoxIl— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) January 7, 2018
Stevie was a very good boy:
Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018
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Lindsay Graham is flattering and enabling Trump because he thinks he can control him.by digby
Lindsay Graham pretty much admitted today that his strategy is to flatter and enable the president, which means using the DOJ for his own purposes, so he, Lindsay, can control him on the issues he feels are important to him.
Graham has been seen as increasingly cozy to Trump recently, which Trump remarked on this week when he said Graham “used to be a great enemy of mine but now he’s a great friend of mine.” Graham ran against Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries.
“He’s the president of the United States,” Graham said of his new fondness for Trump.
“He’s going to make a decision about immigration I’ve been working on for a decade. He’s president of the United States – going to make a decision about North Korea, which is one of the biggest threats to the world at large. He’s going to decide whether or not to stay in the Iranian nuclear agreement. I’ve enjoyed his company. He beat me like a dog. I’ve said everything I have to say about him – I’ve used every adjective on the planet. I lost. He won.”
Graham believes Trump had a “very successful 2017” and wants to help him where he can.
Well, we know one thing: he’s as unprincipled,narcissistic and delusional as Trump.
He very energetically went after the Department of Justice on Meet the Press, spewing the utter nonsense the wingnuts have come up with to appease the base, clearly performing for Trump like a trained seal. He thinks he’s being clever by saying “well, I also support the Mueller investigation” but this inane gambit is so transparently authoritarian that I can hardly believe he said it without doing a Nazi salute.
This is a scary moment. Graham is the avatar of the current Republican “independents” in the congress. And they, along with the usual right wing toadies of course, have circled the wagons attempting to appease this lunatic, flattering themselves that by doing so they can get their agenda passed and keep him from doing his worst.
2018 is going to be the year of dangerous living for all of us. It could go very, very wrong.
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Meanwhile, somewhere outside Washington…
by Tom Sullivan
If you are about Trumped out after this week, here are a few things going on outside the Beltway.
Even as the East Coast groans in a deep freeze, the West is warmer than usual. East Coast temperatures are 20 degrees below normal averages while the West is 20 degrees above normal. They are playing hockey on ponds in St. Louis and ice climbing frozen waterfalls in North Carolina.
But temperatures from Texas to the Dakotas are “right on track,” reports the New York Times, “serving as a de facto thermal continental divide.”
While it is a deep freeze, back East, Colorado’s Western Slope is in drought. The snowpack as monitored in several areas of the state has shrunk to record-low levels. The Denver Post reports the levels have not been this low in three decades. Colorado’s snows feed some of the nation’s major rivers.
“We need to watch this very closely. If we don’t get the snow we typically do, there could be water shortages,” said Brian Domonkos, a snow survey supervisor with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.
1st thing you see is eternal beauty of the Sangres. 2nd thing you see is the temporal fact of almost no snow on Jan. 4. pic.twitter.com/nuek0WedPk— Michael Booth (@mboothdenver) January 4, 2018
The 9,000 wildfires that burned an area of California the size of Delaware, destroyed 10,800 structures and killed at least 46 people. The Thomas Fire was large enough to have consumed “much of the Washington metropolitan area,” per the Washington Post. On Wednesday, authorities announced it is now 92-percent contained, but will likely not be fully contained before the end of January.
The mudslides should arrive sometime after a judge hears the lawsuits filed against Southern California Edison for allegedly starting the Thomas Fire through negligence by one of its crews. One observer described the fire as “a real life apocalypse.”
The Houston Chronicle for some reason decided this week to revisit what a nuclear apocalypse might look like. “There’s no better time to be reminded of the threat posed by humanity’s most dangerous weapon than 2018,” the Fernando Ramirez writes to introduce a slide show on casualty count projections:
To understand why nuclear weapons aren’t anything to fool around with, nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein created an online tool that lets users see the devastating impact of the atomic tech.
The tool generates both the estimated casualties from the bomb as well as a point-of-view of the blast radius that brings the power of the terrifying weapons into perspective.
Finally, a December 29 Wall Street Journal report charts the growing gulf in health and well-being between urban and rural America. In the 1,800 counties outside metropolitan areas, the population is shrinking as well as aging. “Deaths by suicide and in maternity are on the rise” faster than in metro areas, the Journal reports. But violent crime in the cities (contrary to claims by a well-known, stable genius) has declined to the point that it has wiped out any “safety premium” from living in rural America.
“Men in rural areas are working less,” the report continues, but that trend, while worse for rural America, reflects a decades-long decline across the board in workforce participation. The decline in median household income is reflective of that trend. What is disturbing is that in a graph based on census data, household incomes (adjusted for inflation) peaked around the end of the Clinton administration and continue to decline.
Image via Wall Street Journal.
Half a century after Dustin Hoffman played one on screen, there are reasons new graduates — and plenty of others — are worried about their futures.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
Saturday Night at the MoviesA little meditation on realityby digby
Dennis is off this week so I thought I might look for a good movie to recommend to all of you folks who are shivering in the cold snap — and to anyone else who might get something out of a movie that examines the nature of reality in this strange surreal time.
Here’s Dennis’ capsule review of The Stunt Man:
How tall was King Kong?” That’s the $64,000 question, posed several times by Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), the larger-than-life director of the film-within-the-film in Richard Rush’s 1980 drama. Once you discover that King Kong was but “3 foot, six inches tall”, it becomes clear that the fictional director’s query is actually code for a much bigger question: “What is reality?”
That is the question to ponder as you take this wild ride through the Dream Factory. Because from the moment our protagonist, a fugitive on the run from the cops (Steve Railsback) tumbles ass over teakettle onto Mr. Cross’s set, where he is filming an art-house flavored WW I drama, his (and our) concept of what is real and what isn’t becomes diffuse. O’Toole chews major scenery, ably supported by a cast that includes Barbara Hershey and Allen Garfield.
Despite lukewarm critical reception upon original release, it’s now considered a classic. A 43-week run at the Guild 45th Theater in Seattle (booked by Rush himself, out of his frustration with the releasing studio’s lackluster support) is credited for building the initial word of mouth with audiences and eventually assuring the film’s cult status. Truly a movie for people who love the movies.
I love this movie. It’s an original meditation on the nature of movies and the nature of reality itself.
You can stream it on Amazon for ten bucks. Well worth the money.
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The enabling not only continues, it acceleratesby digby
I know the following is by David Frum and he has much to answer for for his part in laying the groundwork for this political crisis. (I mean… ) But I’m willing to set that aside for the moment and take it up with him when the emergency has passed.
Meanwhile, he’s right about this:
It may not be the newsiest—arguably it is the least newsy—but the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”
Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.
Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.
The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.
Before the Saturday morning tweets, what should have been the biggest story of the week was Trump’s success at mobilizing the Senate and the FBI to deploy criminal prosecution as a weapon against Trump critics. The Senate Judiciary committee—the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!—formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.
The Department of Justice can ignore such a referral. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The FBI has come under relentless abuse from Trump, who complains about its refusal to do his will. Is it now yielding?
We also learned this week from The New York Times that aides to the Attorney General sought damaging information on Capitol Hill about FBI director Comey, indicating close cooperation between the White House and Main Justice to exert political control over the country’s chief law enforcement agency.
Michael Wolff has drawn the most indelible picture yet of Donald Trump, the man. But the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.
In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.
What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.
This is a problem equal to the problem of Trump himself. I had thought that maybe there were some Republicans who actually cared about the nation or at least cared about the integrity of the constitution and the congress. There are not. A handful have said something but they voted with him and continue to help him expand his power by delivering that tax cut victory which, by the way, any of them could have stopped simply by saying that it raised the debt too much.
They didn’t have to do it. They really didn’t. They are all complicit.
It’s true that the Republican party has been complicit for years in creating a political environment that allowed an ignorant madman to become president. But they could redeem themselves in this moment and they are not doing it.
That scares me just as much as Trump. In order to enact their agenda the Republican party is enabling Trump’s authoritarian instincts. And that goes beyond the racism and xenophobia on which he ran. For most of them, that’s a very natural thing to do since they’ve always shared them. But I thought there might be a few elected officials whose paeans to freedom and the constitution were based upon some underlying principles. And I guess I assumed that a handful would be a tiny bit concerned about Russia interfering in the election and possibly compromising the president — even if he was a Republican.
It’s clear that every last one of them were full of shit.
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And Spicey and Reince helpedby digby
About that effort to stop Sessions from recusing so he could be Trump’s Roy Cohn:
More White House officials were involved in the effort to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions to not recuse himself in the Russia investigation beyond counsel Don McGahn, a senior administration official said Friday.
Among those who participated in calls between the White House and Justice Department were former chief of staff Reince Priebus and ex-press secretary Sean Spicer, the senior administration official said.
“I think it’s fair to call it pressure,” the official said about White House conversations with Sessions and his top aides about the matter.
Earlier Friday, Spicer said on Good Morning America that he wasn’t aware of the President’s reported request that McGahn urge Sessions to decide against recusal.
In one of the calls, Spicer said “he (Sessions) doesn’t need to recuse himself,” according to the official who has knowledge of the conversations. This official asked on one of the calls how Spicer, who is not an attorney, could reach such a conclusion.
Spicer told CNN he called Sessions’ office, but that it was about a news conference.
“For eight months the narrative was that I was out of the loop and now I’m part of it? I don’t think so,” Spicer told CNN.The official said Priebus and Spicer were also pressing Sessions staffers on how they would handle the messaging on the attorney general’s decision to recuse. The conversations were not just about recusal but also about how to explain the move to the public, the official said.
“It was just chaos,” the official said about the conversations with Sessions’ team.
Oh boy.
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Working Digitsby digby
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| Dear Leader and his “followers” |
One lens for understanding Trump’s whole career: a fabulously wealthy buffoon with no judgment or shame is going to be useful to a lot of nefarious actors: mobsters, white collar criminals, cynical media execs, foreign intelligence agencies, oligarchic political parties— David Klion (@DavidKlion) January 3, 2018
The oligarchical political party in question is certainly all in. Those that aren’t sincerely in thrall to Trump are cynically following the advice of their Grand Vizier Grover Norquist:
That Trump is also destroying the rule of law and the part of foreign intelligence that actually secures the nation is just frosting on the cake. Clearly, they never gave a damn about those things. They’re just weapons to use against their political rivals. Now that they have the tiny working digits of Donald Trump at their disposal, and wingnut toadies planted in every executive branch agency along with a court packing for the next generation, they are fine with rampant political lawlessness and foreign interference.
They may have to crack some heads before long if the opposition gets restless. But they’ve got plenty of heavily armed cops who love Dear Leader ready to do what has to be done.
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Peak Trump
by digby
On the Mueller probe:
“Because honestly it’s very, very bad for our country. It’s making our country look foolish. And this is a country that I don’t want looking foolish. And it’s not gonna look foolish as long as I’m here.”
I have written before that they’re all Fredos, but Trump himself keeps saying “I’m, like, smart” which very obviously echoes Fredos quote from Godfather II:
“I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”
Recall he said it at the CIA and on the stump, exactly that way:
Trust me, I’m like, a smart person.
How about this one? When asked why he thinks he doesn’t need an intelligence briefing every day he said this:
“I don’t have to be told – you know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years. It could be eight years – but eight years. I don’t need that.
“But I do say if something should change, let us know. Now, in the meantime, my generals are great, are being briefed. Mike Pence is being briefed, who is, by the way, one of my very good decisions. He’s terrific. And they’re being briefed. And I’m being briefed also.
“But if they’re going to come in and tell me the exact same thing that they told me, you know, that doesn’t change necessarily. There might be times where it might change. I mean, there will be some very fluid situations. I’ll be there not every day but more than that.
“But I don’t need to be told, Chris, the same thing every day, every morning, same words. ‘Sir, nothing has changed. Let’s go over it again.’ I don’t need that.”
“I went to the Wharton School of Business. I’m, like, a really smart person.”
I think it’s clear that he’s seen Godfather II and thought that Fredo really was smart, not like everybody says, like dumb. Which makes him dumb, like everybody says.
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