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Month: March 2018

At least he isn’t a warmonger

At least he isn’t a warmonger

by digby

I know, I know. Democrats are just as bad if not worse and nobody should ever point out the fact that Trump is a violent, bloodthirsty psychopath because George W. Bush and his cronies started that misbegotten war for no reason.

But still:

The numbers are shocking — or at least they should be.

2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars.

That is an increase of more than 200 percent over the previous year.

It is far more if you add in countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and many others.

But the subject, considered a stain on President Barack Obama’s legacy even by many of his supporters, has almost dropped off the map.

Obsessed with the seemingly daily updates in the Stormy Daniels story or the impeachment potential of the Russia investigation, the American media is paying even less attention now to a topic it never focused on with much zeal.

“The media has unfortunately been so distracted by the chaos of the Trump administration and allegations of the president’s collusion with Russia that it’s neglected to look closely at the things he’s actually doing already,” said Daphne Eviatar, a director of Amnesty International USA.

That includes, she said, “hugely expanding the use of drone and airstrikes, including outside of war zones, and increasing civilian casualties in the process.”

Trump, of course, was a candidate who promised to “bomb the shit out of ’em [Islamic State],” and has since declared victory over the terrorist organization, while continuing to drop bombs.

It was always obvious that he would not restrain the military even a tiny bit when it came to killing foreigners. He hates foreigners, especially the ones who are not rich.

Recall:

“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us”.

He once asked a briefer three times why we can’t use nuclear weapons.

If anyone thinks that Trump hasn’t told his military leaders to “bomb the shit out of ’em” as they think necessary, they are kidding themselves.

The good news is that he hasn’t invaded anywhere. Yet.

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Trump holds his breath until he turns blue

Trump holds his breath until he turns blue

by digby

I wrote about the week-end tantrum for Salon this morning:

Attorney General Jeff Session fired former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the president couldn’t have been more thrilled. In a characteristic display of puerile mendacity he tweeted out his glee for the world to see:

These tweets were so full of lies that they required a full fact check by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.  The short version? The investigation started before there was a Steele dossier when one of Trump’s national security advisers got drunk and spilled to an Australian diplomat that the Russians told him they had dirt on Hillary Clinton. There’s no reason to believe the FISA court did anything improper and there have been a boatload of indictments and guilty pleas of Trump associates. And that’s not to mention that the Trump campaign and transition were bizarrely crawling with more Russians than the annual Red Square May Day parade and nobody can adequately explain it.

Michaels Isikoff and David Corn’s new book “Russian Roulette” gives one possible explanation as to why Trump insists on telling those lies to explain the Russia investigation. Recall that on January 6th of 2017 the heads of the intelligence agencies gathered to tell Trump about the Russia investigation. After the meeting was over James Comey had the unpleasant task of meeting with the president-elect alone to tell him about the contents of the Steele dossier. After Comey left, Trump apparently exploded and told members of his staff that this meeting was an FBI shakedown to blackmail him. In other words, the Fox News fulminating over the Deep State being out to get him originated with Trump himself.

His paranoia runs so deep that anyone in government who isn’t a loyalist cannot be trusted, especially Democratic career law enforcement employees who are all obviously in on the plot:

It is against the law for Mueller to ask the political affiliation of anyone he hires but such things are of interest to Trump who proved that last spring when he asked Andrew McCabe if he voted for him and told him “ask your wife what it feels like to be a loser.”

If there was any question about where Trump is headed, his lawyer John Dowd (who belatedly claimed he was only speaking for himself) came out after the announcement of McCabe’s firing and said:

“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.”

Let’s just say that if Dowd was speaking for himself he seemed to be channeling the thought process and phraseology of his client with perfect precision channeling his client. This was meant as an offer Rosenstein couldn’t refuse.

As agitated and manic as Trump’s tweets were this week-end, it seemed clear that he was testing the waters.  The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman explained,

She wrote a fuller analysis for the paper explaining that Trump is actually brimming with self-confidence now because he sees that there have been no dire consequences for his actions despite warnings to the contrary so he sees himself getting stronger and taking control. And from the quotes from Republicans in her story, his allies in the congress and elsewhere are impressed with his new take-charge attitude.

Congressman Peter King for instance, says he thinks the president is more relaxed now but he’s also been  “frustrated by the fact that he feels like a lot of what he didn’t succeed at, or what hasn’t worked, is that he wasn’t allowed to be Trump.” So he’s decided to be Trump.

In this instance, what Trump has realized is that if he humiliates a member of his cabinet, tweets that someone should be fired and makes it clear that he wants someone gone, at some point he will simply wear down institutional resistance. Recall that he humiliated Comey by making sure the FBI director only found out he’d been fired by seeing it on TV. Just last week, Rex Tillerson was totally demeaned as he was shown the door, with John Kelly even telling the press he informed Tillerson he was fired while the latter was on the toilet. By taunting McCabe about his scheduled retirement, and then waiting until just a day before that to fire him, Trump demonstrated to everyone else in the bureau that they’d better not cross him.


We don’t know whether there will be any fallout from the McCabe firing by congressional Republicans but if there is and it goes the way every other Trump assault on presidential norms has gone, it won’t last. Still there were a few more antagonistic comments than usual.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said if Trump fires Mueller “that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency.” He also called for public hearings to explain the firing and allow McCabe to defend himself. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said the Mueller probe should be allowed to continue and responded to Graham’s request for public hearings on the McCabe firing positively. Those two seem to be working in concert toward ends that are not entirely clear, what with their attacks on Christopher Steele and calls for a second Special Prosecutor, but perhaps this is on the up and up.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., took the position that McCabe should have been allowed to retire, echoing the analysis in this article at Lawfare which points out that while nobody can say whether the charges against McCabe are reasonable until the report is released, this process appeared overly punitive and vindictive.
Surprisingly, the scourge of Benghazi, Trey Gowdy, had the most stinging criticism saying to Trump what millions of Americans are thinking every day:

If the allegation is collusion with the Russians, and there is no evidence of that, and you are innocent of that, act like it…if you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.

House speaker Paul Ryan put out a tepid statement stating that Mueller and his team Mr. Mueller and his team “should be able to do their job” but there was no word from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  That’s about it from Republicans. It was hardly a stampede of outraged elected officials rushing to do their duty.

Trump is on a roll and he’s not likely to care in any case. The congressional Republicans have already shown their hand. Unless they’re willing to impeach him he knows he can do what he wants. And so he is.

The racial dimension of student debt, by @Gaius_Publius

The racial dimension of student debt

by Gaius Publius

Student debt is increasingly burdening everyone, but that burden disproportionately weighs on black households.
—Marshall Steinbaum (source)

As an interim addendum to our short series, “Killing a Predator — Cancelling Student Debt” — Part 1 here, Part 2 here
— consider the observation above by Marshall Steinbaum, one of the
co-authors (with Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fulwiler, and Catherine
Ruetschlin) of the Levy Institute paper on student debt cancellation we’ve been looking at. It comes from a more general piece
Steinbaum wrote for the Roosevelt Institute discussing his Levy
Institute paper. I’d like to focus here on just that observation.

Compare the two charts above. They show median wealth of households headed by black individuals (top chart) and white individuals (bottom chart) between the ages of 25 and 40 in successive waves of the triennial Survey of
Consumer Finances, with and without student debt. (Credit to Matt Bruenig for preparing these data from the SCF.)

Before we look at more of what Steinbaum wrote, please note three things about the charts above.

First, consider the differing degrees to which student debt subtracts from the wealth of young black households and white households. The takeaway from that should be: No, canceling student debt would not mainly benefit the rich. It actually disproportionately benefits black households when measured as a percentage of household wealth.

Second, look at the vertical scales of the two graphs, their Y-axes. The numbers are not the same.  The top charted point (peak of yellow line) for young white households is $80,000. The top charted point (peak of yellow line) for young black households is slightly more than $18,000. That’s a peak-to-peak wealth differential of greater than 4:1.

Worse, the actual wealth of these black households in 2016 is less than $4,000 (blue line, top chart), compared to more than $40,000 for white households in the same year (blue line, bottom chart). In other words, the 2016 wealth differential is more than 10:1.

Canceling all student debt would bring that differential down to “just” 5:1 — still shameful for a society like ours, but it shows what a great boon student debt cancellation would be for young black households.

Finally, note that from 2013 to 2016, white wealth for these households has recovered somewhat from the Wall Street–caused “great recession” while black wealth has recovered not at all

Now Steinbaum:

One thing that immediately becomes clear upon investigation of the student debt crisis is the extent to which it is a creature of this country’s legacy of racial discrimination, segregation, and economic disadvantage patterned by race. My prior research with Kavya Vaghul found that zip codes with higher population percentages of racial minorities had far higher delinquency rates, and that the correlation of delinquency with race was actually most extreme in middle-class neighborhoods. What this tells us is that student debt is intimately bound up with the route to financial stability for racial minorities.

In that work, we ascribe this pattern of disadvantage to four causes: segregation within higher education, which relegates minority students to the worst-performing institutions, discrimination in both credit and labor markets, and the underlying racial wealth gap that means black and Hispanic students have a much smaller cushion of family wealth to fall back on, both to finance higher education in the first place and also should any difficulty with debt repayment arise. The implication is that while higher education is commonly believed to be the route to economic and social mobility, especially by policy-makers, the racialized pattern of the student debt crisis demonstrates how structural barriers to opportunity stand in the way of individual efforts. Insisting that student debt is not a problem amounts to denying this reality.

Looking at the time series of median wealth for households headed by black and white people between the ages of 25 and 40 (what we refer to as “white households” and “black households”) in successive waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) [see charts above] reveals these racialized patterns. … By this measure, the racial wealth gap (the ratio of the median wealth of white households in that age range to the median wealth of black households in that age range) is approximately 12:1 in 2016, whereas in the absence of student debt, that ratio is 5:1.

Moreover, while overall net household wealth levels for the non-rich increased between the 2013 and 2016 waves of the SCF for the first time since the Great Recession did violence to middle-class wealth, rising student debt weighed in the other direction—especially for black households. The time trend from these charts is clear: Student debt is increasingly burdening everyone, but that burden disproportionately weighs on black households.

Steinbaum refers to another study to explain why this is the case (emphasis mine):

A 2016 paper by Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li offers clues, since it tracks the debt loads of black and white graduates with four-year undergraduate degrees. They find that immediately upon graduating, black graduates have about $7,400 more in student debt than their white counterparts. Four years after graduating, that gap increases to $25,000. The crucial difference is simply that white graduates are likely to find a job and start paying down their debt, more-or-less as the system is designed, but black graduates are not—they carry higher balances, go to graduate school (especially at for-profit institutions) and thus accumulate more debt, and subsequently earn no better than whites with undergraduate degrees.

What this suggests is that any given educational credential is less valuable to blacks in a discriminatory labor market (probably because they attended less well-regarded institutions with weaker networks of post-graduate opportunity, and also because even assuming they did attend the same institutions as their white counterparts, outcomes for black graduates in the labor market are mediated by racial discrimination). … The assumption that debt-financed educational credentialization represents constructive wealth-building and social mobility thus reflects a failure to comprehend the landscape of race-based economic exclusion.

The interaction of student debt with “race-based economic exclusion” provides a powerful argument for student debt cancellation all on its own. Something to keep in mind as this idea enters public discourse.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Future-crime and punishment by @BloggersRUs

Future-crime and punishment
by Tom Sullivan


General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper (Predator B) fitted with DB-110 surveillance pod.

Minority Report‘s PreCrime police unit was science fiction. Or was it?

From The Atlantic:

China is rife with face-scanning technology worthy of Black Mirror. Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she has been busted, then are cross-checked with the images in a regional police database. Within 20 minutes, snippets of the perp’s ID number and home address are displayed on the crosswalk screen. The offender can choose among three options: a 20-yuan fine (about $3), a half-hour course in traffic rules, or 20 minutes spent assisting police in controlling traffic. Police have also been known to post names and photos of jaywalkers on social media.

The system seems to be working: Since last May, the number of jaywalking violations at one of Jinan’s major intersections has plummeted from 200 a day to 20. Cities in the provinces of Fujian, Jiangsu, and Guangdong are also using facial-recognition software to catch and shame jaywalkers.

That’s creepy. But what about convenience? What about speeding up train or plane boarding? All well and good unless you’re a minority. NPR:

According to a report by the CAPA-Centre for Aviation, face-recognition software “is not so good at identifying ethnic minorities when most of the subjects used in training the technology were from the majority group.” Another problem are passengers who are wearing glasses, hats or scarves.

Rudolph says about 4 percent of travelers are wrongly rejected by the system.

Another concern he has: He says privacy protections are nonexistent.

The ultimate cost of convenience is creepier. Again from The Atlantic:

The technology’s veneer of convenience conceals a dark truth: Quietly and very rapidly, facial recognition has enabled China to become the world’s most advanced surveillance state. A hugely ambitious new government program called the “social credit system” aims to compile unprecedented data sets, including everything from bank-account numbers to court records to internet-search histories, for all Chinese citizens. Based on this information, each person could be assigned a numerical score, to which points might be added for good behavior like winning a community award, and deducted for bad actions like failure to pay a traffic fine. The goal of the program, as stated in government documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

We keep seeing this theme, don’t we? Captain America: The Winter Soldier might not have been so far from fact:

Jasper Sitwell: Zola’a algorithm is a program for choosing Insight’s targets.

Steve Rogers: What targets?

Jasper Sitwell: You! A TV anchor in Cairo, the Under Secretary of Defense, a high school valedictorian in Iowa City, Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange, anyone who’s a threat to HYDRA. Now, or in the future.

Steve Rogers: In the future? How could it know?

Jasper Sitwell: How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola told HYDRA how to read it. Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, emails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores! Zola’s algorithm evaluates people’s past to predict their future.

Steve Rogers: And what then?

Jasper Sitwell: Oh, my God. Pierce is gonna kill me.

Steve Rogers: What then?

Jasper Sitwell: Then the Insight helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few million at a time.

Which, of course, is silly. The Chinese have are no such things as helicarriers. But Reapers? We got those, and that’s how we use them abroad on a smaller scale. But not to worry. When we are not letting Facebook and Cambridge Analytica log psychological profiles of 230 million Americans, here on the home front (Syracuse, New York) we only use Reapers for “wide-area persistence surveillance” to collect “more than 10,000 square miles of imagery per hour“:

UTC Aerospace Systems was contracted by the Guard in 2017 to support the installation and assessment of the DB-110 on the 174th Attack Wing’s MQ-9 Reaper. Following the first Operational Assessment, the Guard is evaluating long-term solutions to field the next-generation sensor of the DB-110 family, the MS-110, in a new pod that will be compatible with both the MQ-9 Reaper and C-130 Hercules. The MS-110 will produce multispectral color imagery across 7 bands, thereby enhancing the long-range and wide-area attributes of the DB-110. For the Guard, the MS-110 would enhance the service’s ability to assess critical infrastructure during poor weather conditions, through smoke and below the surface of the water, while also helping to detect objects against a cluttered background.

“As the most advanced tactical-reconnaissance sensors of their kind, the DB-110 and MS-110 will greatly improve the Air National Guard’s ability to carry out its mission of saving lives and providing humanitarian assistance,” said Kevin Raftery, vice president of ISR and Space Systems at UTC Aerospace Systems. “The imagery they provide will enable the timely assessment of critical infrastructure such as power plants, energy corridors, roads and highways, and civilian domiciles. Collecting this information rapidly across wide areas and disseminating the data directly to incident commanders will help save lives and property during natural disasters and emergency situations.”

And won’t that be convenient?

* * * * * * * *

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

Politics and Reality Radio with Joshua Holland: radical justice reforms, white guys with guns and the left and Russiagate

Politics and Reality Radio: Philly DA’s ‘Radical’ Justice Reforms | Why Are White Guys Stockpiling Guns? | Katha Pollitt: Left Needs to Take #Russiagate Seriously

with Joshua Holland

Elections have consequences. This week, we kick off with Maura Ewing, a writer-in-residence at the Fair Punishment Project, talking about her piece for Slate on Philadelphia’s newly elected District Attorney Larry Krasner and the “wild” and “unprecedented” criminal justice reforms he’s been rolling out in his first few months in office.

Then we’re joined by Greater Good editor Jeremy Adam Smith, who wrote a piece for Scientific American this week about why white men are stockpiling guns.

Finally, Katha Pollitt returns to the show to talk about what #Russiagate skeptics get wrong and why the left needs to take the issue seriously.

Playlist:
The White Stripes: “I Think I Smell a Rat”
Prince Buster: “Shaking Up Orange Street”
Salt N Pepa: “None of Your Business”
Rolling Stones: “Not Fade Away”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

He made everyone sign NDAs

He made everyone sign NDAs

by digby

He wants to keep everyone from telling what they know. It’s not working since they’re leaking like a sieve. But then the real purpose is to keep any of them from making money by writing books, right? Trumpie wants to make sure he’s the only one allowed to get that big payday:

Back in April 2016, when the notion of Donald Trump in the White House still seemed fanciful, The Post’s Robert Costa and Bob Woodward sat down with Trump, and Costa, at one point, raised the subject of the nondisclosure agreements for employees of which the candidate was so fond.

Costa: “One thing I always wondered, are you going to make employees of the federal government sign nondisclosure agreements?”

Trump: “I think they should. . . . And I don’t know, there could be some kind of a law that you can’t do this. But when people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that. I mean, I’ll be honest. And people would say, oh, that’s terrible, you’re taking away his right to free speech. Well, he’s going in.”

Reader, it happened. In the early months of the administration, at the behest of now-President Trump, who was furious over leaks from within the White House, senior White House staff members were asked to, and did, sign nondisclosure agreements vowing not to reveal confidential information and exposing them to damages for any violation. Some balked at first but, pressed by then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the White House Counsel’s Office, ultimately complied, concluding that the agreements would likely not be enforceable in any event.

[T]his confidentiality pledge would extend not only after an aide’s White House service but also beyond the Trump presidency. “It’s not meant to be constrained by the four years or eight years he’s president — or the four months or eight months somebody works there. It is meant to survive that.”

This is extraordinary. Every president inveighs against leakers and bemoans the kiss-and-tell books; no president, to my knowledge, has attempted to impose such a pledge. And while White House staffers have various confidentiality obligations — maintaining the secrecy of classified information or attorney-client privilege, for instance — the notion of imposing a side agreement, supposedly enforceable even after the president leaves office, is not only oppressive but constitutionally repugnant.
[…]
“This is crazy,” said attorney Debra Katz, who has represented numerous government whistleblowers and negotiated nondisclosure agreements. “The idea of having some kind of economic penalty is an outrageous effort to limit and chill speech. Once again, this president believes employees owe him a personal duty of loyalty, when their duty of loyalty is to the institution.”

I haven’t been able to lay hands on the final agreement, but I do have a copy of a draft, and it is a doozy. It would expose violators to penalties of $10 million, payable to the federal government, for each and any unauthorized revelation of “confidential” information, defined as “all nonpublic information I learn of or gain access to in the course of my official duties in the service of the United States Government on White House staff,” including “communications . . . with members of the press” and “with employees of federal, state, and local governments.” The $10 million figure, I suspect, was watered down in the final version, because the people to whom I have spoken do not remember that jaw-dropping sum.

I don’t know if Rex Tillerson signed one of these but he’s rich enough that he could hand Trump the money and tell him to go fuck himself if he wanted to.

Michelle Goldberg made a good case this week-end that he should do just that:

Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing.

The success of this informal alliance is hard to gauge. Last August, after the president said there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., senior officials rationalized their continued role in the administration to Mike Allen of Axios. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall,” Allen wrote. Since then, we’ve had a government shutdown over immigration, albeit a brief one. A trade war appears imminent. Arrests of undocumented immigrants — particularly those without criminal records — have continued to surge.

Over the past 14 months we’ve also seen monstrous levels of corruption and chaos, a plummeting of America’s standing in the world and the obliteration of a host of democratic norms. Yet things could always be worse; the economy is doing well and Trump has not yet started any real wars.

Increasingly, however, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room aren’t in the room anymore… Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.

This month, Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, published a scathing open letter to Powell, the former security adviser. During her time in the administration, he wrote, she assured appalled onlookers that the adults were playing a stabilizing role: “You reached out to tell those of us on the outside you were saving us from a lot. You don’t understand, friends of yours conveyed to all of us, how bad it is.” Lovett wrote that he was skeptical of this argument but unable to dismiss it. The real test, he thought, would come when she and Cohn and others like them were no longer in the White House: “If you couldn’t speak out because you had to stay, when you left, you had to speak out.”

Of course, unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman, who confessed horror at her former boss’s presidency on “Celebrity Big Brother,” they haven’t. Their defenders among anti-Trump Republicans say it’s because some of them still have a role to play in staving off potential disaster. One Republican in regular contact with people in the White House told me that Powell and Cohn “need to protect their capacity to reach in and help manage in the event of any national crisis.”

I don’t find this entirely convincing. If these people see the administration as unequipped to handle an emergency, they owe the country a firsthand account of our vulnerability. But there is, at least, a certain logic to the argument made in their defense. That logic, however, only holds for those who remain on decent terms with Trump. Which means that if there’s one person who has no excuse for not speaking out, it’s Tillerson, once one of the most powerful private citizens in America, now humbled and defiled by his time in Trump’s orbit.

There’s little doubt that Tillerson holds Trump in contempt and disagrees with large parts of his agenda. After Charlottesville, Tillerson refused to say that the president’s words represented American values. (“The president speaks for himself,” he told Fox News.) In office, he struggled to save the Iran nuclear deal and opposed Trump’s — and Jared Kushner’s — support for a blockade of Qatar by other Arab states. After his ignominious firing, he gave a live address in which he didn’t even mention the president’s name.

“Rex is never going to be back in a position where he can have any degree of influence or respect from this president,” my Republican source said. Because of that, the source continued, “Rex is under a moral mandate to do his best to burn it down.” That would mean telling the truth “about how concerned he is about the leadership in the Oval Office, and what underpins those concerns and what he’s seen.”

In this case, patriotism and self-interest point in the same direction. Before entering this administration, Tillerson was a vastly more respected businessman than Trump; as chief executive of Exxon Mobil, he presided over what The Times described as a “state within a state.” Now the first line of his obituary will be about a year of abject failure as the country’s lead diplomat, culminating in a humiliation fit for reality TV.

The only way he will ever change that is by joining those who would bring this despicable presidency down. If Tillerson came out and said that the president is unfit, and perhaps even that venal concerns for private gain have influenced his foreign policy, impeachment wouldn’t begin tomorrow, but Trump’s already narrow public support would shrink further. Republican members of Congress like Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might be induced to rediscover their spines and perform proper oversight.

It’s a thin thread on which to hang the future of the country but it may be all we’ve got.

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Fatuous GOPer of the day

Fatuous GOPer of the day

by digby

It’s a hard choice but this has to take the cake:

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said Sunday the House Intelligence Committee was not tasked with investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, despite the committee issuing a report last week stating it found no evidence of collusion in the 2016 election.

“Our committee was not charged with answering the collusion idea,” Conaway said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

“So we really weren’t focused on that direction.”

Conaway led the committee’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election after the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.) recused himself.

Last week, Conaway announced the end of the committee’s probe and laid out a number of conclusions reached by GOP members in their initial report. Among those conclusions was the assertion that there is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The report drew strong criticism from committee Democrats, who said the committee came to no such conclusion.

Conaway on Sunday acknowledged the committee did not interview former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and other key figures, because he didn’t want to overlap with special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation.

“We’re trying to stay away from the Mueller investigation and not confuse that or hurt it one way or the other,” he said.

When asked if he regrets that the committee attempted to draw a conclusion on whether the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign, Conaway denied that the committee drew a conclusion at all.

“What we said is we found no evidence of it,” he said. “That’s a different statement. We found no evidence of collusion.

You wouldn’t let your 1st grader get away with something that patently dishonest and stupid.

This just gets more and more outrageous. How do these people live with themselves? They obviously have no moral center.

Conservative operative Amanda Carpenter has a new book coming out (worked for Cruz and DeMint, but is to her credit Never Trump at least) which was quoted in the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s supporters do not see deception, they see a commitment to winning. “Donald Trump’s lies and fabrications don’t horrify America,” says the publisher’s summary of her book. “They enthrall us.”

I’m not sure what “us” she’s referring to but I suppose if you are the sort of person who finds public executions entertaining you’d be “enthralled” by Donald Trump. But that isn’t the majority. It’s a lot of people, but it isn’t most. Yet.

But if she’s right it says everything about the (lack of) moral and ethical integrity of these people.

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He’s baaaack

He’s baaaack

by digby

And naturally he’s campaigning against Maxine Waters:

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, made his unlikely first public appearance since agreeing to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller at an event Friday night for California congressional candidate Omar Navarro.

Flynn made remarks and announced his endorsement of Navarro for Congress with the candidate and Joy Miedecke, the president of the East Valley Republican Women Federated — the organization that hosted Friday night’s event in La Quinta, California.

“What I’m not here to do is complain about who has done me wrong, or how unfair I’ve been treated, or how unfair the entire process has been — it is what it is, and my previous statements stand for themselves,” Flynn told the small group of attendees. “I’m here to talk about the future — your future, our future, the future of this country. If you feel passionate about something, and feeling sorry for yourself will keep you from achieving that destiny, then I can’t be a part of that. That’s partly why I’m here today, because I saw that passion in the eyes of Omar.”

A source close to Flynn had confirmed to ABC News earlier Friday that Flynn would be in attendance.

“He’s endorsing me,” Navarro, a small business owner, told ABC News earlier in the day Friday.

Navarro, who’s challenging longtime Rep. Maxine Waters, said he and Flynn had been communicating online and via email. They met in person in February when Navarro was in Washington, D.C. to attend Conservative Political Action Conference.

“We talked to each other for two hours. We got along really well,” he said, adding that Flynn agreed to endorse him at that time.

This is the first public appearance by Flynn since he left the White House, was charged with lying to federal authorities and began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. Despite agreeing to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 president election, Flynn was supportive of President Donald Trump on Friday.

I still cannot believe Republicans Republicans! are cheering and applauding a criminal and possible turncoat who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about interactions with Russia.

This is proof that nothing is impossible. So if you think that Trump is an anomaly and that there’s no way “it” can happen here, think again. Anything can happen.

By the way, Congresswoman Waters had some words:

Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters has gone on the offensive, firing back at the GOP candidate looking to unseat her following his endorsement from former Trump adviser Michael Flynn. 

Flynn’s endorsement of Omar Navarro at the 43rd District candidate’s event Friday was his first time speaking publicly since pleading guilty last year to lying to the FBI about conversations with a Russian diplomat. 

A tweet from Waters’ reelection campaign account Friday read, “Desperate, unstable, and convicted criminal Omar Navarro stoops low in soliciting help from another indicted criminal in a campaign against #MaxineWaters – what a campaign!”

Maxine isn’t playing.

She will win of course. But it’s sickening that the pocket of LA Trump supporters would come out for this nutcase. And he is certifiable.

Just like Trump, they seem to be feeling their oats. Here’s footage from Trump Jr, who’s been keeping a lower profile, of the ovation he received:

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“A lack of candor”

“A lack of candor”

by digby

We already know that Jeff Sessions had severe memory lapses about his meetings with the Russian ambassador and he’s broken his promise to recuse himself from anything to do with the Clinton foundation, which forms the basis of the McCabe firing for a “lack of candor.”

Now it turns out he’s had a “lack of candor” about something else …

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people who told Reuters they have spoken about the matter to investigators with Special Counsel Robert Mueller or congressional committees.

Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he “pushed back” against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team.

“Yes, I pushed back,” Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 14, when asked whether he shut down Papadopoulos’ proposed outreach to Russia. Sessions has since also been interviewed by Mueller.

Three people who attended the March campaign meeting told Reuters they gave their version of events to FBI agents or congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the accounts they provided to Reuters differed in certain respects, all threes, who declined to be identified, said Sessions had expressed no objections to Papadopoulos’ idea.

However, another meeting attendee, J.D. Gordon, who was the Trump campaign’s director of national security, told media outlets including Reuters in November that Sessions strongly opposed Papadopoulos’ proposal and said no one should speak of it again. In response to a request for comment, Gordon said on Saturday that he stood by his statement.

Sessions, through Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, declined to comment beyond his prior testimony. The special counsel’s office also declined to comment. Spokeswomen for the Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did not immediately comment.

IOKIYAAT

(It’s ok if you are a Trumpie)

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He’s testing the waters, bigly

He’s testing the waters, bigly

by digby



The toddler had another tantrum this morning:

President Trump appeared on Sunday to abandon a strategy of deferring to the special counsel examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, lashing out at what he characterized as a partisan investigation and raising questions about whether he might seek to shut it down.
Mr. Trump has long suggested that allegations that he or his campaign conspired with Russia to influence the election were a “hoax” and part of a “witch hunt,” but until this weekend he had largely heeded the advice of lawyers who counseled him not to directly attack Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for fear of aggravating prosecutors.
Now as Mr. Mueller extends his inquiry with a subpoena to the Trump Organization evidently in search of business ties with Russia, the president appears to be losing his patience.  

While his lawyers had reassured him that the investigation would wrap up by Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then early in the new year, it seems increasingly clear that Mr. Mueller is not about to conclude his inquiry any time soon.
“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday morning. “Another Dem recently added…does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!”

The attack on Mr. Mueller, a longtime Republican who was appointed F.B.I.director under a Republican president, George W. Bush, followed a statement by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer published Saturday calling on the Justice Department to end the special counsel investigation. Mr. Trump followed up that evening with a tweet arguing that “the Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”
Together, the comments raised the question once again about whether the president might be seeking to lay the groundwork to try to fire Mr. Mueller, a scenario that would almost surely set off a bipartisan storm of protest. Some Republicans expressed alarm on Sunday at the possibility that Mr. Trump would try to fire the special counsel.

“If he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency, because we’re a rule-of-law nation,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has been an ally of the president, said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “When it comes to Mr. Mueller, he is following the evidence where it takes him, and I think it’s very important he be allowed to do his job without interference, and there are many Republicans who share my view.” 

Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, said if the president was innocent, he should “act like it” and leave Mr. Mueller alone. Mr. Gowdy warned of dire repercussions if the president tried to fire the special counsel, which might require him to first fire his attorney general or deputy attorney general. 

“The president’s going to have a really difficult time nominating and having approved another attorney general,” Mr. Gowdy said on Fox News Sunday.” “I would just counsel the president — it’s going to be a very, very long, bad 2018, and it’s going to be distracting from other things that he wants to do and he was elected do. Let it play out its course. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.” 

The shift in tone comes just days after The New York Times reported that Mr. Mueller has subpoenaed records from the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump’s lawyers met with Mr. Mueller’s team last week and received more details about how the special counsel is approaching the investigation, including the scope of his interest in the Trump Organization specifically…Mr. Trump evidently has grown tired of the strategy of being respectful and deferential to the special counsel.

When Mr. Mueller assembled his team, he surrounded himself with subject-matter experts and trusted former colleagues. As the team filled out, Republican allies of Mr. Trump noted that some high-profile members had previously donated money to Democratic political candidates. In particular, Republicans have seized on donations by Andrew Weissmann, who served as F.B.I. general counsel under Mr. Mueller, as an example of bias. Mr. Weissmann is a career prosecutor but, while in private law practice, he donated thousands of dollars toward President Barack Obama’s election effort.

Can I just point out again that in the Clinton years it was considered a requirement that someone of the opposing party investigate?

Also, Mueller is a Republican as is Andrew McCabe. Not that any of that should matter. If we now only trust cops, prosecutors, lawyers and judges who belong to our preferred party our justice system is so far gone we might as well give up.

In his Sunday morning Twitter blasts, Mr. Trump also renewed his attacks on Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe, who like Mr. Mueller are also longtime Republicans. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey last May, at first attributing the decision to the F.B.I. director’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server but later telling an interviewer that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he made the decision.

Mr. Sessions, under intense public pressure from Mr. Trump, fired Mr. McCabe on Friday after the former deputy F.B.I. director was accused of not being candid with an inspector general about authorizing department officials to talk with a reporter about the Clinton inquiry in 2016.

“Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source…or known someone else to be an anonymous source…?’” Mr. Trump wrote. “He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”

Mr. Trump went on to dismiss reports that Mr. McCabe kept detailed memos of his time as deputy F.B.I. director under Mr. Trump, just as Mr. Comey did. Mr. McCabe left those memos with the F.B.I., which means that Mr. Mueller’s team has access to them.

“Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”

Mr. Trump, who admitted last week that he made up a claim in a meeting with Canada’s prime minister and who is considered honest by only a third of the American people in polls, stayed this weekend at the White House, where he evidently has spent time watching Fox News and stewing about the investigation. After his Twitter blasts on Sunday morning, he headed to his golf club in Virginia.

In suggesting that Mr. Comey lied under oath to Congress, Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a comment by Mr. McCabe that the former director had authorized the media interaction at the heart of the complaint against him. The president’s Republican allies picked up the point on Sunday and pressed their case for the appointment of a prosecutor to look at the origin of the Russia investigation.

“So we know that McCabe has lied” because the inspector general concluded he had not been fully candid, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on Fox News. “Now he’s saying about Comey — Comey may have lied as well. So I don’t think this is the end of it. But that’s why we need a second special counsel.”

Other Republicans, however, suggested that the Trump administration was going too far. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida criticized the decision to fire Mr. McCabe on a Friday night shortly before his retirement took effect, jeopardizing his pension.

“I don’t like the way it happened,” Mr. Rubio said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “He should’ve been allowed to finish through the weekend.” Speaking of the president, he added: “Obviously he doesn’t like McCabe and he’s made that pretty clear now for over a year. We need to be very careful about taking these very important entities and smearing everybody in them with a broad stroke.”

Have we ever seen marco Rubio and a bucket of lukewarm spit in a room at the same time?

Still, it’s a tiny step in the right direction. Trump is obviously feeling his power and is testing the waters on firing Mueller. So it’s helpful for Gowdy and Rubio to make a slightly critical comment. But with Trump losing his mind the way he is, I wouldn’t surprised to see him just fire off a tweet at 4am firing Mueller and that will be that.

In case you aren’t on twitter here are the latest: