Month: April 2018

Disrespecting the Bing

by digby

omg this is amazing pic.twitter.com/TOlAIKvPl5

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 14, 2018

You can’t make this shit up:

President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen has been under criminal investigation for months by federal prosecutors who empaneled a grand jury to probe his business dealings beyond his law practice, according to a new court filing.

Prosecutors revealed the new details about the Cohen investigation after his lawyer appeared in court seeking to temporarily bar prosecutors from reviewing materials that FBI agents seized in a search this week of Cohen’s office, home and hotel room.

After three separate hearings on the matter Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Kimba Wood indicated that she did not have enough information to issue any ruling on that request. She ordered the lawyers — including Cohen personally — to return to court Monday afternoon with more details, including a list of Cohen’s clients.

The Justice Department’s 22-page filing states that the recent searches resulted from a “months-long investigation into Cohen, and seek evidence of crimes, many of which have nothing to do with his work as an attorney, but rather relate to Cohen’s own business dealings.”

The government’s motion also reveals that prosecutors examined a safe-deposit box used by Cohen — carrying out the searches in part because they feared evidence might be destroyed if they had simply served him with a subpoena. Officials redacted a section in the document explaining why they thought they could not trust Cohen to turn over records willingly.

The filing, signed by acting U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami in the Southern District of New York, also says that while the current investigation was referred by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the New York investigation “has proceeded independent” of Mueller’s work.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether any crimes were committed as part of an effort by Cohen to squelch damaging stories about Trump when Trump was a presidential candidate, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Among the materials sought by investigators in the search were records relating to payments made to adult-film star Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, two women who allegedly had sexual liaisons with Trump years ago.

Prosecutors also say that the president’s own statement that he did not know Cohen had paid Clifford may negate any claim of attorney-client privilege on that matter. Authorities revealed that they searched a number of email accounts used by Cohen.

“The results of that review . . . indicate that Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero emails were exchanged with President Trump,” the filing states.

The president does not use email, according to associates.

Todd Harrison, an attorney for Cohen, urged the judge to issue a temporary restraining order to let either Cohen’s lawyers or a court-appointed special master review the materials seized by FBI agents.

But Cohen’s lawyers could not immediately say how many clients — or how many documents covered by attorney-client privilege — were at stake, and prosecutors accused Cohen of trying to stall the investigation.

“This has clearly been a delay tactic from the outset,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas McKay. Cohen’s team, he said, was “delaying a government investigation because they can’t come up with the facts to justify their case.”

Harrison’s assertion that Cohen’s documents included privileged communications involving Cohen as both an attorney and a client did not, McKay argued, validate that claim. “He’s walking back those assertions which were the premise of their motion,” McKay said.

Wood declined to dismiss Cohen’s attorneys’ request.

“I expect that in return,” she said, “there will be a good-faith effort on counsel’s part to answer the court’s questions.”

She told Cohen’s lawyer to be able to give her by Monday morning a list of Cohen’s clients and evidence of their lawyer-client relationships.

“You need to be prepared to substantiate that the relationship was an attorney-client relationship,” she said.

The unusual, high-stakes court hearings Friday also featured an appearance by an attorney representing Trump, Joanna Hendon. She argued that materials obtained from Cohen had to be handled carefully because some could relate to a sitting president.

While Trump had the “utmost interest” in ensuring that the process of preserving attorney-client privilege was respected, so did the public — and anyone who has ever sought legal counsel, Hendon said.

Whatever the judge decided, Hendon said, would have to “withstand scrutiny for all time.” Her client, the president, “as the privilege-holder, has an acute interest in this issue,” she said.

She added that she was worried about the “appearance of fairness,” given the stakes. “He is the president of the United States,” she emphasized at one point.

McKay replied that the president’s attorney-client privilege “is no stronger than anyone else who seeks legal advice.”

Friday’s court hearing was marked by multiple private conversations between the lawyers and the judge. Wood also heard arguments on how to keep the names of “innocent individuals” out of the public legal fight.

Another lawyer also sought to make his case during the later hearing: Clifford’s attorney Michael Avenatti.

In an interview after the morning session, Avenatti said he wants to make sure “that the integrity of the documents, whatever was seized, is maintained.”

“We want to ensure the documents do not disappear or that there’s a control set that’s maintained regardless of who reviews the documents,” he added. Avenatti said he thinks that some of the documents obtained from the Cohen search relate to his client.

Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen, said in a statement this week that the searches of Cohen’s office and residences were unnecessary and that the materials seized are protected by the attorney-client privilege.

Searches of lawyers’ offices are rare but not unheard of, and prosecutors use what is called a “taint team” to review the material and exclude any documents that are covered by the attorney-client privilege.

If they find material that does not involve legal advice between a lawyer and a client, or is exempted from attorney-client privilege because it contains evidence of a crime, that material can be turned over to investigators.

Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and violations of campaign finance laws, according to people familiar with the matter.

In their search Monday, investigators also sought to obtain records relating to Cohen’s ownership of taxi medallions — high-value assets that are often used as collateral for loans, according to people familiar with the matter.

So far, the smear isn’t working

by digby

Here’s the latest polling on the Mueller probe:

The public by a broad 69-25 percent supports Mueller’s initial thrust, to investigate possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian government attempts to influence the 2016 election. Support extends to half of conservatives and more than four in 10 Republicans.

Backing for Mueller’s work goes further: Americans by 2-1, 64-32 percent, also support his investigating Trump’s business activities. And by 58-35 percent, a 23-point margin, they support investigators’ latest apparent direction, looking at allegations that Trump’s associates paid hush money to women who say they had affairs with him.

Notably, women are a non-significant 5 points more apt than men to support the Russia investigation and 8 points more apt than men to support Mueller looking into Trump’s business dealings — but 15 points more likely than men to support the hush-money investigation. Sixty-five percent of women support it, vs. 50 percent of men.

There’s a similar gap on the perceived importance of whether or not Trump has engaged in a pattern of sexual misconduct. The public overall divides, 51-46 percent, on whether this is or is not an important issue. Fifty-eight percent of women say it’s important, vs. 44 percent of men in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates.

Partisanship informs many of these views. Ninety percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents support Mueller investigating possible campaign collusion with Russia, vs. 43 percent of Republicans. (That’s still a substantial number within the president’s own party, notable especially given the Republican National Committee’s criticisms of Comey, including a website titled “Lyin’ Comey.”) Forty-two percent of Trump’s own approvers also support the Russia investigation by Mueller.

Similarly, support for the Russia investigation ranges from 89 percent of liberals, 73 percent of moderates and 58 percent of “somewhat” conservatives to just 39 percent among Americans who call themselves “very” conservative (14 percent of all adults). [You have to love these people …]

Compared to support for the Russia investigation, support for Mueller investigating Trump’s business dealings drops by 9 points among Republicans and 11 points among strong conservatives, while holding steadier in other groups. In the same comparison, support for investigating alleged hush money payments drops by 9 to 14 points across political and ideological spectrums, while maintaining majority backing overall. Support for investigating alleged hush money falls in particular among Trump approvers, by 18 points.

The good news for Trump is that he doesn’t seem to have had any bad email management so his support among his voters, especially conservative evangelicals, remains strong. Because it’s one thing to be a traitorous womanizer who’s subject to blackmail by hundreds of people, it’s quite another to have a personal email server. Let’s not assume these people have absolutely no principles, morals or standards.

Cohen’s Prague vacation

by digby

If this is true, it could be the whole enchilada:

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.

Trump’s threats to fire Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, grew louder this week when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, hotel room and office on Monday. The raid was unrelated to the Trump-Russia collusion probe, but instead focused on payments made to women who have said they had sexual relationships with Trump.

Cohen has vehemently denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment for this story.

It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen actually met with a prominent Russian – purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague during 2016. Earlier this month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians hit with stiff U.S. sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.

But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016 as the ex-spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential. He wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the so-called Schengen Area in which 26 nations operate with open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation as to why no record of such a trip has surfaced.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, declined comment.

Unconfirmed reports of a clandestine Prague meeting came to public attention in January 2017, with the publication of a dossier purporting to detail the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia – a series of reports that former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele gathered from Kremlin sources for Trump’s political opponents, including Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Cohen’s alleged communications with the Russians were mentioned multiple times in Steele’s reports, which he ultimately shared with the FBI.

When the news site Buzzfeed published the entire dossier on Jan. 11, Trump denounced the news organization as “a failing pile of garbage” and said the document was “false and fake.” Cohen tweeted, “I have never been to Prague in my life. #fakenews.”

In the ensuing months, he allowed Buzzfeed to inspect his passport and tweeted: “The #Russian dossier is WRONG!”

Last August, an attorney for Cohen, Stephen Ryan, delivered to Congress a point-by-point rebuttal of the dossier’s allegations, stating: “Mr. Cohen is not aware of any ‘secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.’”

However, Democratic investigators for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which are conducting parallel inquiries into Russia’s election interference, also are skeptical about whether Cohen was truthful about his 2016 travels to Europe when he was interviewed by the panels last October, two people familiar with those probes told McClatchy this week. Cohen has publicly acknowledged making three trips to Europe that year – to Italy in July, England in early October and a third after Trump’s November election. The investigators intend to press Cohen for more information, said the sources, who lacked authorization to speak for the record

One of the sources said congressional investigators have “a high level of interest” in Cohen’s European travel, with their doubts fueled by what they deem to be weak documentation Cohen has provided about his whereabouts around the time the Prague meeting was supposed to have occurred.

Cohen has said he was only in New York and briefly in Los Angeles during August, when the meeting may have occurred, though the sources said it also could have been held in early September.
[…]
The dossier alleges that Cohen, two Russians and several Eastern European hackers met at the Prague office of a Russian government-backed social and cultural organization, Rossotrudnichestvo. The location was selected to provide an alternative explanation in case the rendezvous was exposed, according to Steele’s Kremlin sources, cultivated during 20 years of spying on Russia. It said that Oleg Solodukhin, the deputy chief of Rossotrudnichestvo’s operation in the Czech Republic, attended the meeting, too.

Further, it alleges that Cohen, Kosachev and other attendees discussed “how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers in Europe who had worked under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.”

U.S. intelligence agencies and cyber experts say Kremlin-backed hackers pirated copies of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta during 2015 and 2016, some politically damaging, including messages showing that the DNC was biased toward Clinton in the party’s nomination battle pitting her against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Mueller’s investigators have sought to learn who passed the emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency group, which published them in July and October, causing embarrassment to Clinton and her backers.

Citing information from an unnamed “Kremlin insider,” Steele’s dossier says the Prague meeting agenda also included discussion “in cryptic language for security reasons,” of ways to “sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connection could be fully established or proven.” Romanians were among the hackers present, it says, and the discussion touched on using Bulgaria as a location where they could “lie low.”

It is a felony for anyone to hack email accounts. Other laws forbid foreigners from contributing cash or in-kind services to U.S. political campaigns.

If Cohen met with Russians and hackers in Prague as described in the dossier, it would provide perhaps the most compelling evidence to date that the Russians and Trump campaign aides were collaborating. Mueller’s office also has focused on two meetings in the spring of 2016 when Russians offered to provide Trump campaign aides with “dirt” on Clinton – thousands of emails in one of the offers.

There is a lot more at the link but that’s the gist of it. Here’s what Natasha Bertrand at The Atlantic tweeted yesterday:

The noose around Cohen is getting very tight. I wrote last week about the various reports of Mueller investigating him for months and asking witnesses what they know about him. He’s almost certainly a subject of the Russia investigation. He may be a target.

His problems aren’t just about payoffs to porn stars although that may very well put him in jail. This is out there too. And it’s the meat of the Mueller investigation.

.

No puppet, no puppet

by digby

Trump got his distraction but he didn’t get the full-scale war he supposedly wanted:

Mr Trump called his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron earlier in the day. The two leaders have been coordinating very closely joint responses and actions on Syria and Mr Macron called the Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of speaking to Mr Trump.

But in Washington, the debate on US options intensified amidst reports that Mr Trump is at odds with his defence chief over the military options in Syria.

The US President “is prodding his military advisers to agree to a more sweeping retaliatory strike in Syria than they consider prudent, and is unhappy with the more limited options they have presented to him so far,” reported the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Unlike Mr Mattis who is concerned of retaliatory measures against the US and has been advocating a limited strike, Mr Trump “has been pushing for an attack that not only would punish the Syrian regime but also exact a price from two of its international patrons, Russia and Iran,” US officials told the paper.

“He wants Mattis to push the limits a little bit more,” the official said.

The National reported on Thursday that Mr Mattis presented limited strikes options to the US President yesterday, and none of them debilitate the Assad regime airpower.

Mr Trump was not happy with the options presented, prompting his defence secretary to cancel a trip to New York and hold meetings at the Pentagon to expand the list of potential responses.

Mr Mattis’ caution is largely driven by fear of retaliation from Russia or Iran or both, and being dragged into the Syrian civil war.

The Wall Street Journal revealed that “over the past two days, the Pentagon has had two opportunities to launch attacks against Syria in reprisal for a suspected chemical weapons attack, but Mr. Mattis halted them.” One of the attacks was scheduled for Thursday night.

According to the same report, Mr Trump is preoccupied with the Syria attack and response. “He has asked for briefing materials and was moved by images of children with foam bubbling from their mouths, symptoms of chemical weapons poisoning, aides said.”

Mr Trump’s view on broader strikes is supported by most of his cabinet including his new national security adviser John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan. Mr Bolton, who is known for his hawkish foreign policy record, “favours an attack that would be “ruinous,” crippling some part of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s government and national infrastructure” the paper said.

Nicholas Heras, a defence fellow at the Center for new American Security, told The National that the divisions over policy options within the Trump team implies that “there is an extraordinarily intense debate within the administration about the timing, and how hard to strike Mr Assad.”

According to CNN, the questions of whether to strike at all was moot once Trump tweeted his tweet:

The resistance has upset Trump, who wanted to take quick action and feels like the options being presented to him don’t go far enough, according to the officials.

Nevertheless, there is a view among Trump’s national security team that the President’s tweets earlier this week — including one threatening US missiles “will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart’ ” — forced their hand and made some type of strikes inevitable. But there is an effort to calibrate the response, even as Trump is pressing his team to act.

“Once the President tweeted what he tweeted we have to go forward,” one senior administration official said.

This is how we conduct military affairs now.

I suspect that Trump wants more than anything a chance to demonstrate that he isn’t Putin’s puppet and they leaked the notion that he wanted to hit him for that purpose. If he had really wanted to do it, he would have.

So, Mattis gets a win against Bolton, which will not be forgotten I’m sure, and Trump gets to look like he’s standing up to Putin. This is not the end.

Meanwhile, bombs fall for symbolic reasons mainly because Trump impulsively tweeted that they were on their way. The people of Syria are even more terrified than they already were. It will have zero effect on the course of that hideous war.

And so it goes. Horrifyingly complicated problems with few solutions, at least by Americans who, more often than not, make things worse. But there is one thing we could do: allow Syrian refugees to settle in America. But that’s off the table. We have allowed only 11 Syrian refugees into the United States this year.

Trump is moved by pictures of children frothing at the mouth but not enough to allow them and their families into this country. He says they might be terrorists. But we know the real reason. They aren’t white. (Even if they were Christian he wouldn’t want them here, buhleeeme.)

So it’s symbolic bombing to allow Trump to fulfill his tweet promises and then whateves. And that’s assuming Bolton doesn’t decide that it’s time to “take out” Kim Jong Un, which Trump would be thrilled to do since Russia isn’t involved. That could be next.

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What else have they gotten wrong?
by Tom Sullivan

As damage assessments roll in on our sitting president’s military strike against (empty?) bases in Syria, there are early reports Donald Trump’s America-first believers fear they’ve been sold out. Politico examines early fallout in which Ann Coulter cracks wise about “stupid wars” and a writer for Gateway Pundit laments, “After Trump’s first year we have: 1.3 trillion omnibus, no wall, war in Syria. Is Clinton secretly President?”

They were betting on Donald Trump’s commitment to their agenda? Well, it is not as if reading oneself into a new president’s plans is unfamiliar on the left. It is just coming home hard for the hard right.

Where political belief is more faith than facts, that is always risk.

This month, Washington Monthly looked at a libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. Tabarrok went looking for the effects of federal regulation on “economic dynamism” expecting to find support for the conservative dogma that government regulation harms the economy. He found none. What is remarkable is he published the paper anyway.

Fellow researchers at Mercatus had developed a public-use database called RegData that, linked with artificial intelligence techniques, allowed a more finely tuned examination of the effects of regulations over time on individual industries.

Economic dynamism, defined as “the rate at which new businesses launch and grow, and at which people switch jobs, lose jobs, or migrate for work,” has been in decline for the last several decades. Tabarrok wanted to see what role federal regulation played:

“I was pretty surprised that we just kept coming up with nothing,” Tabarrok told me. “I’m a free-market type of person, so it wouldn’t have at all surprised me to find that government regulation is causing decline in dynamism. Ideologically, it fits my priors of the way I would see the world, so, yes, I was expecting to find something.”

But no matter how he and former grad student Nathan Goldschlag sliced and diced the data, they found no evidence for it.

Indeed, the new paper undermines one of the most deeply held convictions of the American right, one that unites libertarians like Tabarrok with mainstream conservatives: that regulations inevitably impose “deadweight loss” on the economy and are therefore an enemy of economic growth. This idea has been a mainstay of Republican politics since the Reagan era, and the Trump administration has taken to deregulation with missionary zeal. In fact, it’s probably the policy objective that the administration has pursued most successfully—rolling back the Clean Power Plan, repealing net neutrality, freezing the fiduciary rule, and on and on.

The negative impact of government regulations is such an article of faith that even many liberals adhere to it, albeit to a lesser degree.

Rachel Cohen writes:

If federal regulation isn’t behind the dynamism die-off, then what is? Tabarrok’s paper suggests that economists need to look elsewhere. Eli Lehrer, head of the pro-deregulation think tank R Street Institute, argues that some of the most burdensome regulations are state and local—zoning, building codes, occupational licensing, and the like. Tabarrok and Goldschlag agree that more attention should be paid to the potential effects of non-federal regulations.

But a more likely explanation—one that has been gaining purchase among both think tanks and elected Democrats—is rising corporate concentration. (See Gilad Edelman, “The Democrats Confront Monopoly,” November/December 2017.) The trend of declining dynamism since 1980—along with wage stagnation, rising inequality, and a host of other ills—has tracked a parallel rise in monopolization, as the economy becomes increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few giant businesses. As New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter put it recently, “By allowing an ecosystem of gargantuan companies to develop, all but dominating the markets they served, the American economy shut out disruption. And thus it shut out change.”

This hasn’t happened by accident, but is, rather, the result of deliberate decisionmaking, beginning under Reagan, to dial down the enforcement of antitrust law. In other words, it is a consequence of deregulation, not overregulation.

Blasphemy.

Another Washington Monthly article considers the flaw in the Republican approach to controlling health care costs. They insist putting more of patients’ “skin in the game” is key to holding down health care spending. Make them consumers instead of patients and they will become more prudent about how they consume services. They will become more savvy shoppers as well, search out better deals and increase competition among providers.

Shannon Brownlee sees it differently:

Republicans are right about the desperate need to control health care spending, which is eating away at both the federal budget and the livelihoods of individual Americans. But their theory of change rests on a peculiar vision of human nature, which, not to put too fine a point on it, assumes that most Americans are hypochondriacs. While we all know somebody who fits that description, most of us are actually not eager to hand our bodies over to be punctured with needles, probed with instruments, and cut open with scalpels. We do so only when the pain gets bad enough or when our doctors say we should. And when it comes to making health care purchasing decisions, our own judgment isn’t necessarily the best guide. A recent study of workers whose Fortune 500 employer switched them to a high-deductible health insurance plan found that employees never learned to do price comparisons, and while they reduced their health care spending, they did so not only by cutting back on wasteful services like unneeded CT scans, but also by forgoing necessary care, such as a follow-up visit after a diagnosis of diabetes.

Cue Inigo Montoya on how “skin in the game” actually works. In a profit-based, fee-for-service model, it is not simply sick patients driving up costs, but rather providers who have the incentive to provide more care, not better care. In a series, Washington Monthly examines four innovative health care programs that have abandoned that broken system rather than try to patch it on the backs of patients. That is, they questioned the standard assumption and found it wanting, just as testing his theory made Tabarrok question his.

One former roommate, now an Episcopal priest in Georgia, suggests it is intellectually healthy from time to time to spit on your own idols. One story that went around our university was of a religion professor who co-authored the Introduction to the Bible course text. On the first day of class, he would hold it up and extol at length the virtue of its rigorous scholarship. “And this?” he’d say, holding up a gilt-edged, morocco-bound, King James red-letter edition. He would then let it fall into the trash can below to the astonishment of freshmen straight out of First Baptist Church of Anytown south of the Mason-Dixon.

But Tabarrok’s study takes me back to an informal one undertaken by another roommate. The future seminarian kept hearing from peers that Christians shouldn’t drink alcohol. Just why was never clear, what with the whole Jesus turning-water-into-wine thing. Drinking hurts your Christian “witness” because Christians don’t drink, went their circular reasoning. So he tested the theory by abstaining for what he deemed a sufficient trail period. At the end of it, noticing no effect on how others perceived him, he went back to his occasional beer. He is now a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania.

This week, Donald Trump announced an executive order designed to make it even harder for recipients of food stamps and other low-income support to receive aid. He wants to apply more pressure for them to find work in the full-employment job market of which he brags. That what jobs are left may be nowhere near recipient’s communities nor match their skill sets makes no impact on the policy. The Republicans’ unshakable theory is such programs promote dependency on the government and keep poor people poor. Do they? Really?

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother — baby otter time

by digby

I think we all need this, don’t you?

Although the Asian Small-clawed Otter (Aonyx cinerea syn. Amblonyx cinereus) is only listed as “Vulnerable” by the IUCN, the species is seriously threatened by rapid habitat destruction for palm oil farming and by hunting and pollution. They are considered an “indicator species,” meaning their population indicates the general health of their habitat and of other species.

The species is the smallest Otter in the world and lives in freshwater wetlands and mangrove swamps throughout Southeast Asia, including southern India and China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula. They prefer quiet pools and sluggish streams for fishing and swimming.

Unlike Sea Otters, they spend more time on land than in water, but they are skillful, agile swimmers and divers, with great endurance. They can stay submerged for six to eight minutes.

Asian Small-clawed Otters are about two feet long and weigh less than ten pounds (half the size of North American River Otters). Their claws do not protrude beyond the ends of the digital pads, thus their names, and their feet do not have fully developed webbing and look very much like human hands.

They are one of the few species of Otter that live in social groups. The bond between mated pairs of Asian Small-clawed Otters is very strong. Both the male and female raise the young and are devoted parents. In the wild, Asian Small-clawed Otters live in extended family groups of up to 12 individuals. The entire family helps raise the young, which are among the most active and playful of baby animals.

“Stamina and strength”

by digby

Every woman leader has brain damage as far as they are concerned:

Pelosi suffers face spasms, says wrong words during brief appearance

But here’s their stable genius Dear Leader:

We did the tax cuts. We thought you’d have to wait until February. But you started seeing them very early because hundreds and even, actually, thousands of companies were giving massive numbers of whatever you want to call it.

What would you call it, Mike? The thousands of dollars; what would you call that? We can’t say it’s a gift because they’re workers. We can’t say it’s a tax because it’s not a tax. But they were getting a lot of money and every — I mean so many — and a lot of companies didn’t want to do it and the people working for the companies said, “What about us?” And they did it. They had no choice.

The word he was looking for was “bonus”.

How about this:

But hey, he’s a virile man with huge hands so there’s no need to concern ourselves with his mental state.

Who Pays For Armed Teachers’ Gun Accidents?
By Spocko

Last Sunday a Stoneman Douglas teacher left a loaded gun in a public restroom.  A drunk, homeless guy found it and fired it. Luckily nobody was hurt, but police found a bullet embedded in the restroom wall.

Sean Simpson, Parkland teacher, told MSNBC host Katy Tur last February some teachers are willing to carry guns in schools.  On April 11 Simpson left his gun in a restroom at the Deerfield Beach Pier.

The teacher, Sean Simpson, was arrested and “charged with failing to safely store a firearm, a second-degree misdemeanor.”

The homeless guy, Joseph Spataro, 69, was charged with trespassing and firing a weapon while intoxicated.

This is an important story because it raises questions about who pays for the damage caused when there is an accident involving a gun that was legally carried into a public building, business, church or school that chose to allow the gun inside.

I’m sure someone will dismiss this incident because “technically it didn’t happen in a school.” But incidents just like this happen all the time, there is even a “guns in bathrooms” tumblr page.  With more guns, and new concealed carriers, more of these type of incidents will happen in schools.  However, no gun, no gun accident. But for the gun, there would be no gun left in the bathroom. 

(Technically I should use the word negligence, as in negligent storage, handling or discharge of a firearm, but I use accident because people search for “How many teachers have had gun accidents? Or which states have had gun accidents in schools?” Hopefully they will find the Gunviolencearchive.org to get details )

School districts, school boards, sheriff’s departments and insurance companies all need to look at the problems, costs, risks and liabilities when more guns are legally brought into schools. Before I went to a #TownHallForOurLives I would want to know the answers to these questions. (See the Townhall Project page for one near you.)

For me this incident brought up some specific questions about guns in schools that do not focus on some possible active shooter event in the future, but focuses on the dangerous reality of guns every single day of the school year.  What are the ongoing  costs and liabilities? What is covered by insurance? What is exempt?  What about accidents with people carrying guns to and from school, outside school and at after school events? Who pays for all of this?

Some states try to get around the unspoken, continuous liability issue by putting the insurance burden on the teacher who volunteered for the program. Other states vote immunity for some groups or put on caps for payouts. But talk to a smart attorney about these cases, they will reach an entity with deep pockets. Will your school district be the one left holding the bag?  And with settlements in the $2.5 to 3 million dollar range, personal injury lawyers have already established programs and incentives to make it so. 

We don’t know the whole story about Mr. Simon, the chemistry teacher. A few questions to ask:

School boards and local elected officials need to know the costs and availability of insurance for these situations.  To fail to do so is a failure of their fiduciary responsibility to their board and citizens.

School districts in Florida got a partly funded mandate from the state for school security.  It didn’t provide money  for insurance to cover the armed teachers, so who pays? Will school districts and cities raise property taxes to pay for this? They are fighting over this now. (After Parkland legislation, Brevard school board struggling to find money for armed officers, Caroline Glenn, FLORIDA TODAY)

Note to School Boards:  No guns, no need for gun insurance. 

In Florida the state provided money to the department of education for a training program for the teachers, most of that money goes to the sheriff’s departments. But how good are these departments in training?  Are the law enforcement insurance providers ready for this? Who pays those premiums?

In Tennessee, they passed a law to allow armed teachers a few years ago. But the law enforcement agencies  authorized to do the training found they couldn’t get insurance (or the premiums were high and there wasn’t any money.)

In Brevard county Sheriff Ivey was gun ho on training teachers. He even told the vice chairman of the school board that his insurance would cover the trained teachers.

Following his calls to arm school staff, Sheriff Ivey tells school board to drop marshal program

This week he suddenly changed his tune telling the school board to drop the marshal program. Could it be insurance problems? Did he see he didn’t have the budget to pay those premiums? Or is it because he doesn’t want money for the training program to cut into HIS budget for School Resource Officers?  SROs mean he gets a steady stream of money and increased headcount. The program to train teachers to shoot to kill means headaches and liabilities.

Negligence can lead to gun accidents by anyone with guns. Cops, weapons instructors, highly trained concealed carry owners and new carriers. I’m glad that nobody was hurt in this instance. I’m sorry that Simpson felt the need to be armed, but his mistake can be a useful story to share at all the upcoming Town Halls.

As Stoneman Douglas student Lex Michael said in a tweet,

“My (environmental science) teacher just gave another example of why we shouldn’t arm teachers!! Thanks Simpson. Love you.”

Bring me mah smellin’ salts Miss Mellie!

by digby

… that horrible man Mistuh Comey is bein’ so rude to that nice President Trump and ah like to faint dead away! — the Village

Seriously. They are all clutching their pearls because Comey made some rude observations about Trump’s looks.  Trump. The nasty piece of shit who did this:

And this (just one of hundreds of slams against women’s looks)

Just two of literally thousands of nasty, personal insults this miscreant has publicly hurled at people.

I’m not a defender of James Comey but this is one thing I actually admire him for doing. He’s not afraid of that fucking asshole and he’s giving him as good as he gets.

This is a preview of what the Villagers will do to any Democrat who tries to fight Donald Trump. They will essentially side with Trump by condemning the person who doesn’t stand there and take his crap. It’s how the Village works.

Trump’s toxic malignancy goes far beyond any personal insults by James Comey. And yet they will equalize it — or worse, condemn him more because they have normalized Trump to the extent that they don’t even really notice his grotesque bullying anymore.  They’re just waiting for their chance to be “fair and balanced” and the way they’ll do it is by rending their garments at anyone who fights fire with fire.

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