Month: March 2018

Trump’s MAGA “just us”
by Tom Sullivan

Rush Limbaugh opened his programs during the years of William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency with “America Held Hostage: Day (Number of days in Clinton’s term).” It was Limbaugh’s twisted homage to Ted Koppel’s ABC coverage of the Iran hostage crisis over a decade earlier. At the beginning of Clinton’s term in 1993, Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be” was on the New York Times’ nonfiction best seller list. It remained there for months.

Clinton was some smarty-pants Oxford scholar with a lawyer wife who brought home more money and refused to stay home baking cookies and holding teas. Even decades after the tumultuous 1960s, for a sizable portion of the population (and Limbaugh’s fans) that was not the way things ought to be. Men were supposed to “wear the pants.” Women should have dinner ready when their husbands get home. Children were supposed to be seen and not heard. And the Negroes should have been glad whites gave them their own bathrooms and water fountains. The America Limbaugh’s fans felt most comfortable in was being held hostage by interlopers from an America they refused to recognize.

Those sentiments largely went underground or ignored in the latter part of the twentieth century, but never really went away. Now the fans of the way things ought to be have an avatar for their world view occupying the White House. Black people got to see themselves reflected in Barack Obama. A certain kind sector of white people sees themselves personified in Donald Trump. Trumpers really ought to relate better now to gay people coming out of the closet. “Trump country” now knows what that feels like.

America as a universal ideal was never universally accepted even by its most vocal boosters. The tensions surrounding the discussion of privilege in this country uncover deep fissures around how things ought to be, who is in charge, and what government is for. MAGA is the way things ought to be reduced to an acronym.

We find ourselves with a chief executive who personifies that, one who believes his office entitles him to use government for his own ends. Donald Trump believes it should serve his interests, bend to his will, benefit his friends, and punish his enemies.

His recent firings express that belief as he draws closer and closer to firing Robert Mueller to finally terminate the Russia investigation. Reports last week that Mueller had subpoenaed Trump Organization records likely fueled the president’s rage and paranoia that whatever truths he is desperate to conceal will become public. The firings will continue until the probe stops. Then pause for a time.

The editorial pages today are a flood of reactions to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on the eve of his retirement. John Dowd, Trump’s personal attorney, gave up the game in a statement to Daily Beast:

“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,” Dowd then wrote.

Reacting to a Trump tweet I won’t republish here, New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin writes, “Every sentence is a lie. Every sentence violates norms established by Presidents of both parties. Every sentence displays the pettiness and the vindictiveness of a man unsuited to the job he holds.”

But not only that. Trump puts on display his belief that the rule of law does not apply to him, only to those he wants targeted, writes Jonathan Chait at New York magazine:

All this effort has been expended either in support, or in studiously ignoring the existence, of Trump’s deep-rooted contempt for the rule of law. Whether or not McCabe filled out all the necessary memos when talking to a reporter, how fully the FBI disclosed its source material for its FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, or any other legal claims upon which Trump’s defenders have rested their case, are beside the point. Trump believes law enforcement should operate for his benefit, punishing his enemies and protecting his friends. He admires strongmen. His contempt for democratic norms is characterological. The notion that his own government would investigate him is as unfathomable to Trump as his being called to the carpet by a Trump Organization secretary. Trump is going to go after Mueller at some point because there is no other way for Trump’s febrile mind to make sense of the world.

Chris Hayes expands on Trump’s concept of law and order for the New York Times:

If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.

And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law. It shouldn’t have taken this long to see what has always been staring us in the face. After all, the last president to focus so intensely on law and order, Richard Nixon, the man who helped usher in mass incarceration, was also the most infamous criminal to occupy the Oval Office. The history of the United States is the story of a struggle between the desire to establish certain universal rights and the countervailing desire to preserve a particular social order.

We are now witnessing a president who wholly embraces the latter. America can have that kind of social order, or it can have justice for all. But it can’t have both.

Perhaps one reason Trump seems to feel such an affinity with Russian President Vladimir Putin is, besides being an authoritarian strongman, what appeal he has is built on being perceived as bringing “modest stability” out of chaos. The Independent reported:

Vladimir Putin’s team has long built electoral appeal on the idea of control and stability. It was a popular offer for a nation dizzied by the demands of post-Soviet upheaval – even though, often, it was more mirage than reality.

Trump promised during his “American carnage” inaugural speech to end the lawless chaos of his own imagining. The sector of Americans who feel their America is in upheaval embraced an unprepared and emotionally unfit leader who promised to bring back the way things ought to be, with them at the apex of the social (if not economic) ladder. It is a fundamentally anachronistic view of a future that resembles the past, and not a past that honors America’s best self.

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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 Movies

Setsuko doesn’t live here anymore: Oh Lucy! (***)

By Dennis Hartley

Writer-director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s dramedy Oh Lucy! (which earned her a “Best First Feature” nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards) is a bit like Lost in Translation; lonely hearts, urban isolation and linguistic confusion…all bathed in Tokyo’s neon lights.

Shinobu Terajima is Setsuko, a single, middle-aged office drone in Tokyo. She trudges through indistinguishable days with dour expression and existential malaise; barely noticing when somebody deliberately jumps in front of an oncoming train at her station.

Her young and vivacious niece Mika (Shirori Kutsuna) feels Aunt Setsuko needs to get out and mingle more, so one day she hands her a flyer with the address for an ESL class that she’s been attending, taught by an American named John (Josh Hartnett). Reluctantly, Setsuko acquiesces and gives it a go. John’s teaching methods are unconventional; in addition to doling out uncomfortably long hugs, he picks out a wig and Anglicized name for each student. Setsuko (he decides) is now a blonde named Lucy.

In spite of herself, Setsuko begins to enjoy the class; she may even be developing a little crush on John. However, much to her dismay, John unceremoniously quits his job; it seems he has fallen hard for a young Japanese woman, and has spirited her back to Los Angeles. Setsuko quickly discovers that the young woman is Mika. And so she and Mika’s concerned mother, her sister Ayako (Kaho Minami) hop on a plane to California.

What next ensues can be labeled equal parts road movie, “fish out of water” story, social satire, and family melodrama. Granted, it’s a stylistic mish-mash, vacillating between light comedy and dark character study, but director Hirayanagi manages to juggle it all with a deft hand. She also works in subtle observations on the evergreen “ugly American” meme. Fine performances abound, but the glue holding it all together is Terajima, who gives a wonderfully nuanced and layered performance as Setsuko/“Lucy”.

Previous posts with related themes:

Tokyo Pop
The Visitor

More reviews at Den of Cinema

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–Dennis Hartley

He’s getting stronger not weaker

by digby

It is certainly true that we don’t know all the facts underlying the firing of Andrew McCabe. Maybe he was leaking damaging information to the press about Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump and then blatantly lied about it. From what we understand his crimes so far, they are much more vague than that but we’ll have to wait and see.

However, all these pundits on TV who are insisting that there’s nothing political about this are being ridiculous. Of course it’s political. And we know this because the firing was rushed through in order to deny him his pension, which is highly unusual and obviously done for punitive reasons.

Lawfare spells this part of the story out:

There are, however, at least two features of the action against McCabe that warrant consternation, even if McCabe himself behaved badly enough to justify the sanction. The first is the timing, which is hard to understand. The only factor we can fathom that might justify it is the notion that if McCabe in fact had acted very badly, the window to punish him and thus make an important statement to the bureau workforce was closing.

But we are unaware of prior cases in which authorities rushed through the merits against a long-serving official in a naked and transparent effort to beat the clock of his retirement. Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing McCabe, described the process as follows:

The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part, its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.

Even allowing for a certain degree of lawyerly hyperbole in this account, the process described here seems highly irregular. McCabe, in his statement Friday, suggested one possible reason for the acceleration:

The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.

In an interview with the New York Times, McCabe said directly that his dismissal “is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness.”

We will refrain from speculating on the reason for the rush to fire McCabe before his retirement. But it is peculiar. Why, one wonders, could the Justice Department not have handled his misconduct—if there was misconduct—the way it usually does: by detailing it in the inspector general’s report and noting that the subject, who has since retired, would otherwise be subject to disciplinary action?

The timing seems particularly irregular in light of a second peculiarity unique to McCabe’s case—one probably singular in the history of the American republic: Trump’s personal intervention in the matter and public demands for the man’s scalp. Trump has not been shy about McCabe. He has tormented him both in public and in private, and he publicly demanded his firing on multiple occasions:

Trump developed an unwholesome conspiracy theory about McCabe’s wife, whom he told McCabe was a “loser.” He demanded to know whom McCabe had voted for. According to James Comey’s testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Trump attempted to use what he believed to be McCabe’s corruption as some kind of a bargaining chip against Comey, informing the director that he had not brought up “the McCabe thing” because Comey had told him that McCabe was honorable.

While we cannot evaluate McCabe’s protestations of innocence at this stage, we can evaluate the truth of much of the rest of his statement:

For the last year and a half, my family and I have been the targets of an unrelenting assault on our reputation and my service to this country. Articles too numerous to count have leveled every sort of false, defamatory and degrading allegation against us. The President’s tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all. He called for my firing. He called for me to be stripped of my pension after more than 20 years of service.

. . .

This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.

Whether or not McCabe’s conduct has been above reproach, all of this is true. And to make matters worse, the firing occurred when Jeff Sessions’s own job is clearly on the line. Sessions, remember, was mulling McCabe’s firing even as Trump himself was mulling Sessions’s firing.

In other words, even if McCabe’s firing proves to be justified on the merits, the question is what could have possibly justified breaking it off from the larger probe and rushing it to completion and adjudication in time to beat the deadline of McCabe’s retirement—particularly in context of presidential demands for his removal and Trump’s broader assault on independent and apolitical law enforcement.

Trump gleefully celebrating the firing is just icing on the cake.

This is how we know it was political:

Why, one wonders, could the Justice Department not have handled his misconduct—if there was misconduct—the way it usually does: by detailing it in the inspector general’s report and noting that the subject, who has since retired, would otherwise be subject to disciplinary action?

They could have done that if what they wanted was to make this whole thing look legitimate in the eyes of the public and undercut the credibility of McCabe without looking like vindictive pricks.They chose not to do that because they are sending a message loud and clear to federal law enforcement that they’d better not cross the king because he will come for them.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Trump wanted McCabe punished publicly and that’s what happened. He knows that all he has to do is humiliate his underlings, tweet out what he wants and nobody will stop him. Indeed, they will do exactly as he wants.

Now, it’s possible that Sessions and the OIG and maybe others all think they are letting the air out of the balloon a little bit here and feeding the King a tasty tidbit of human sacrifice to keep him happy. But Trump’s lawyer said this morning:

“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.”

He later said that he was speaking only for himself. Sure he was.

Trump is getting stronger every day. Don’t let the chaos fool you.

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QOTD: former CIA director John Brennan

by digby

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you. https://t.co/uKppoDbduj— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018

I could be wrong but I suspect he knows things.

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Big data is a small world

by digby

Well, lookee here.Facebook has banned the Trump affiliated data crunching outfit Cambridge Analytica from using its platform after the New York Times published this expose today, much of it based upon the evidence provided by a whistleblower:

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.

The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.

So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Guardian has more, here.

You need to read the whole thing to understand what happened. In a nutshell, the firm stole information from about 50 million Facebook users and used it to help Donald Trump get elected. Jared Kushner brought them into the campaign and Steve Bannon was on the board. It’s a complicated story which shows that the company is pretty much exclusively used for right wing nationalist causes.

Here is an interesting chart that lays out some of the connection that have authorities throughout Europe and America very interested. (Well, come authorities in America — the president certainly isn’t.)

I’m sure it’s all just another huge coincidence. No reason to suspect anything .. move along.

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Jessica Simpson is more qualified to be president

by digby

This Axios summation of General Kelly’s day yesterday gives a good flavor of what’s going on inside the White House right now:

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly started yesterday with prescient bravado.

The retired four-star Marine general told about 20 West Wing officials — including National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster — in the 8 a.m. senior staff meeting: This is on the record, since you’re all going to go out and tell the press, anyway.

On the Washington Post front page, above the fold, was the headline: “Trump plans to replace McMaster, maybe others.”

Kelly stunned the room by declaring: We all read the same newspapers and watch the same shows. Contrary to what’s been reported, H.R. and I are still here.

Kelly then told the silent staffers: The press’s worst day was when I came in. The press wants to take down the president. I stand between the press and the president. They have to take me down first.

Lindsay Reynolds, the first lady’s chief of staff, broke the tension by joking: “We thought this was Black Friday — everybody gets fired.”

Economic adviser Gary Cohn topped her: “I can’t get fired. I already resigned.”

During senior staff meetings, the staff goes around the room, and General McMaster usually makes several orderly, numbered points.
Yesterday, he passed when his turn came.

All of this was before Kelly called in reporters for an off-the-record meeting (Axios didn’t attend or make any agreement, so we’re able to share the contents with you) where he acknowledged that Trump himself was probably responsible for a significant number of the stories about staffing chaos.

As we reported yesterday, and we told you in Axios PM, Kelly said it’s likely that Trump is talking to people outside the White House, who then talk to reporters.

Kelly also said that past cocaine use by Larry Kudlow, named this week to succeed Cohn, won’t be a problem for his security clearance, as it is public knowledge. Kelly joked that the 1990s were “a crazy time.”

Staffers were shocked that Kelly revealed to reporters that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, during a diplomatic swing through Africa, was suffering from a stomach bug and was using a toilet when Kelly told him to cut the trip short and return to Washington.

Be smart: Kelly defended McMaster at the senior staff meeting — even though the chief is widely known to be casting about for a replacement.

Now you’ll better appreciate this bit in the WashPost story: “The mood inside the White House in recent days has verged on mania … White House officials have begun betting about which staffer will be ousted next.”

And kudos to Kelly for making the Tillerson firing even more humiliating than it already was. These people …

Some official was quoted yesterday comparing this to the “finale” of a reality show. Unless Trump is resigning, this show has another three seasons.

More importantly, this isn’t a reality show. It’s a real working organization something Trump pretended he knew about but didn’t. He just ran the little family business that he inherited from his father and turned into a celebrity brand which made some money. It’s not nothing but running that business would qualify Jessica Simpson to be president. In fact, her brand is much more successful than Trump’s and she earned the start up money herself so she’s actually more qualified. And she had a reality show even before he did!

The Washington Post surveyed some experts about what all this turnover means to an organization:

Those who track top executive branch moves say the dizzying number of changes really is different than past administrations. Turnover among the most senior staff members within the Executive Office of the President was 34 percent last year, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas — double the churn of Ronald Reagan’s first year and more than triple the rate of Obama’s. That figure has grown to 43 percent this year, not including Cabinet secretary changes, and Tenpas said there has been a change in seven of the top 12 staff positions since inauguration day. “In this administration the problems are exacerbated,” she said.

Yet Trump is not a conventional president, and he campaigned on his business experience. So it seems only fair to compare the amount of churn in his White House to senior teams in the private sector — and to examine the consequences management experts say can imperil teams when the revolving door spins too fast.

Though there isn’t a lot of data about turnover on top executive teams in corporate America, the figures that are available suggest the numbers aren’t even close. One 2014 study of executive teams in S&P 1500 companies put the average turnover at 11 percent. A Harvard Business Review article from 2004 put the average figure at only about 8 percent. Donald Hambrick, a professor at Penn State University’s business school who has studied executive team dynamics for years, says he’d estimate that typical senior team turnover is about 15 to 20 percent a year.

“I really can’t construct an argument why it would be more beneficial” to have as much turnover as Trump’s White House has had, he said. “Whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, there’s some kind of mismatch. It’s a sign that Trump is not very good at picking people — or sees it as a random draw of how loyal or agreeable people are.”

No organization wants high turnover — it’s costly, distracting and requires time to get new people up to speed. But management experts say turnover at the executive level is particularly damaging.

“At the mid-level and lower levels, things can be more programmed — there can be more rules and rulebooks about how to handle tasks,” Hambrick said. “But for executives, there’s a level of abstraction, the work is more implicit, and the interpersonal trust and relationships are all the more crucial.”

James Guthrie, a professor at the University of Kansas’s business school, studied the effect of executive turnover and found that too much turnover leads to subsequently worse financial performance. “If the White House was a company where you could measure [return on assets] and stock price, you’d start to see the same effects,” he said. “When teams have this level of turnover, they don’t work effectively. It’s really not a good sign.”

It’s also particularly important for executive teams to project a sense of calm about the organization’s stability in order to lead the rank-and-file.

“The one thing you don’t want is people around you panicked, and thinking this process is unpredictable,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “The real problem is the uncertainty of it.”

Another problem with too much executive turnover is that it tends to invite even more churn, whereas the departure of front-line workers typically doesn’t.

“Just as an example, you’ve got to figure when Tillerson goes, three to five senior people are going to go as well — his people,” Hambrick said. “It’s a cascade of chaos into the upper middle ranks. It creates and adds to the trauma.”

And by the way, this also means that nobody is doing their work. When this level of chaos is happening inside an organization it’s all anybody thinks about and talks about.

That’s our White House right now. And it’s all because of the man at the top.

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Mr Class

by digby

He couldn’t shut up. Of course.

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

Here are the first two comments to that tweet:

Who knows if they’re real people but it’s still a good representation of where we are as a country.

I feel as if firing McCabe shows an escalation to a new level. Again, now that he understands the scope of his power and the Republicans have shown that they will back him no matter what his actions over the past couple of weeks lead me to the conclusion that we aren’t at peak Trump yet. And it’s going to get weirder.

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Focus, focus
by Tom Sullivan

A reader from San Francisco wrote this week and said she was “wising up [and] watching local races more.”

That echoes the thoughts of Christopher Hooks. He writes in the Texas Observer that he believes local races matter. He has grown weary of the perennial chatter about Texas Turning Blue as if “we were monitoring a patient suffering from hypothermia.” The problem with “TTB” is it views Texas politics through the eyes of the quadrennial national race for president.

TTB is an all-or-nothing proposition that works for the standard horse-race narrative of media professionals with no stake in the balance of power in state legislatures or county government. Even the media buzz over the recent Texas primary presents a false picture of how things really change. The excitement was over the high Democratic turnout in the 15 most-populous counties that trend Democrat anyway. The Democratic turnout this year was certainly eye-opening:

But on election night, the statewide results, from across all 254 counties, were quite different — because of course they were. In the end, there were still more Republican ballots, 1.54 million, than Democratic ballots, 1.04 million.

Hooks wants to see TTB retired:

The thing is, the way the state goes on the electoral college map doesn’t mean very much at all for the way Texas is governed. And while it’s possible that the party jumps back to life with the shock of winning one or two statewide elections — that there will be a proof of concept, and then everyone suddenly gets serious — it’s more likely that things change slowly, over an extended period of time, and that small gains and positive signs feed bigger gambits. What’s most important in the long run is the overall composition and strength of the Texas Democratic Party at the local and state level.

Which is why I suppose a county chair from Alabama wrote this week to ask if “For The Win” 2018 is ready. (It’s not, but will be by the end of the month.) It is why a woman from Virginia, an activist as of November 9, 2016, wrote that she now finds herself a Democratic county chair looking for help to change the political trajectory of her county and state.

Republicans took over Texas slowly, Hooks writes. They had plenty of setbacks. That’s what is wrong with the all-or-nothing narratives of the national media. It was four decades between Republican John Tower winning his Senate seat in 1962 and Republicans winning the Texas House in 2003. The horse race elides those decades.

The idea of Texas Turning Blue embraces both kinds of that sloppy majoritarianism — that demographic groups will “flip” the state, and the state will become something other than what it is. We live in a majoritarian system, of course. But politics is about margins and incremental advantage. When possible, we ought to use language that reflects that, and shun that which doesn’t.

Choosing the right language is fine. But it was more than language that turned Texas red. And yes, conservative billionaires backed the conservative movement and conservative media for years. But it wasn’t just their money that won them ground. It was the years.

Those in control got there by being relentless, something for which many progressives are just now developing the patience. As I wrote about the last Republican president:

I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.

This how the right wins and we lose. The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.

The tortoise makes a better avatar.

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

Run Andy, run

by digby

The FBI has gotten a message. It remains to be seen what that is.

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Friday Night Soother: baby otters and more

by digby

I think this week requires some otter pups don’t you?

Via Zooborns:

The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium recently announced the arrival of seven babies, representing three at-risk species, born in late January and early February. The new additions are: five Asian Small-clawed Otter pups, a Silvered Leaf Langur baby, and a Humboldt Penguin chick. 

According to the Zoo, each new little one contributes to maximizing genetic diversity within their species and sustaining populations of those facing serious threats to their future in their native ranges. 

The baby boom began with the arrival of the five Asian Small-clawed Otter pups, born during the early morning hours of January 26. 

Native to coastal regions from southern India to Southeast Asia, Asian Small-clawed Otters (Aonyx cinereus) are often threatened by habitat destruction, pollution and hunting. These factors place them at risk in their native range, and they are currently classified as “Vulnerable” by the IUCN. 

The pups (three males and two females) were born to first-time parents, Gus and Peanut. Peanut was born in 2014 and arrived at the Columbus Zoo in April 2017 from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Father, Gus, was born in 2008 and arrived at the Columbus Zoo from the Bronx Zoo in 2014. 

According to staff, the young pups are thriving under the watchful eyes of both of their parents and are expected to be on view to the public later this spring.

The Columbus Zoo was also proud to welcome a female Silvered Leaf Langur baby on February 16. The female was born to mother, Patty, and father, Thai. Patty made her way to the Columbus Zoo from the Bronx Zoo in 2007 and has given birth to seven offspring. Thai arrived at the Columbus Zoo in 2015 from the San Diego Zoo and has fathered a total of four infants. 

Patty, Thai, and the newest Langur arrival are currently on view in the Zoo’s Asia Quest region. Staff reports that the baby is easy to spot as Langurs are born bright orange, as opposed to their adult counterparts with black fur and silvered tips. This difference in coat color is believed to encourage other female Langurs to assist in raising the young, a practice called “allomothering”. 

In their native ranges, Silvered Leaf Langurs (Trachypithecus cristatus) can be found in areas including Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia. The species’ populations in these countries are decreasing due to habitat loss as lands are cleared for oil palm plantations or destroyed by forest fires. Langurs are also hunted for their meat or taken for the pet trade. 

The Columbus Zoo’s pairing of Patty and Thai was based on an SSP recommendation, and the birth of the new baby will play an important role in helping manage this at-risk species. Silvered Leaf Langurs are listed as “Near Threatened” by the IUCN, due to population declines caused by habitat loss. The arrival of this Langur baby at the Columbus Zoo is an important part of sustaining the population among AZA-accredited zoos, certified related facilities and conservation partners. 

Have a drink, watch some Netflix. We will reconvene over the week-end to continue documenting the atrocities.  🙂

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