Month: April 2018

Stormy’s secret

by digby

I’ve been wondering about this from the beginning:

On March 22, mere days before his client Stormy Daniels’ hotly anticipated 60 Minutes interview was set to air, attorney Michael Avenatti tweeted out a cryptic message, accompanied by an even more puzzling photo:

“If “a picture is worth a thousand words,” how many words is this worth?????#60minutes #pleasedenyit #basta“

Daniels, of course, is a renowned porn star who was paid $130,000 by President Donald Trump’s longtime attorney/fixer Michael Cohen to stay silent about an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2011, months after first lady Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron. In addition to the payoff, Daniels has subsequently claimed her life was threatened by a mystery man acting on behalf of Trump or Cohen. (The president has denied knowing about the payment.)

He’s since called the Twitter missive a “warning shot” to Trump—a sentiment he echoed on Friday night’s episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

During the “Overtime” segment, which only airs online, Avenatti was asked if he’d ever “release the contents of the warning-shot disc of evidence you tweeted about.”

“Possibly. It depends how the case progresses,” he replied.

Maher then pressed, “What’s on it?”

“Well, we took that picture and we tweeted it out and it was exactly that—it was a warning shot to Michael Cohen and the president that if they tried to claim that my client was a liar after 60 Minutes there was gonna be consequences, and it worked, and it worked perfectly because we heard nothing from them,” said Avenatti.”

I have no idea what they may have, if anything. But it is very telling that Trump apparently thinks they might have something. If I had to guess he probably thinks they have audio recordings of something incriminating. And we know his lame little fixer liked to record things.

Bu who knows? Avenatti is a canny player and it could be a bluff. But it sure seems that Trump is worried about something…

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Trump’s Red Line is disintegrating

by digby

This is an important op-ed from Peter Fritsch and Glenn R. Simpson, founders of the research firm Fusion GPS:

Put aside Russian collusion for a moment. Press pause on possible presidential obstruction of justice. Forget Stormy Daniels. The most significant recent development involving the president may be that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has subpoenaed Trump Organization business records as part of his inquiry into Russian interference in the presidential election.

Those documents — and records recently seized by the F.B.I. from the president’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen — might answer a question raised by the president’s critics: Have certain real estate investors used Trump-branded properties to launder the proceeds of criminal activity around the world?

We pored over Donald Trump’s business records for well over a year, at least those records you can get without a badge or a subpoena. We also hired a former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele, to look into Mr. Trump’s possible ties to Russia. In that 2015-2016 investigation, sponsored first by a Republican client and then by Democrats, we found strong indications that companies affiliated with Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, might have been entangled in foreign corruption.

A string of bankruptcies in the 1990s and 2000s may have left Mr. Trump’s companies largely unable to tap traditional sources of financing. That could have forced him to look elsewhere for financing and partners at a time when money was pouring out of the former Soviet Union.

Indeed, from New York to Florida, Panama to Azerbaijan, we found that Trump projects have relied heavily on foreign cash — including from wealthy individuals from Russia and elsewhere with questionable, and even criminal, backgrounds. We saw money traveling through offshore shell companies, entities often used to obscure ownership. Many news organizations have since dug deeply into the Trump Organization’s projects and come away with similar findings.

This reporting has not uncovered conclusive evidence that the Trump Organization or its principals knowingly abetted criminal activity. And it’s not reasonable to expect the company to keep track of every condo buyer in a Trump-branded building. But Mr. Trump’s company routinely teamed up with individuals whose backgrounds should have raised red flags.

Consider the Bayrock Group, a developer that once had lavish offices in Trump Tower. The firm worked with Mr. Trump in the mid-2000s to build the Trump SoHo in Lower Manhattan, among other troubled projects. One of its principals was a Russian émigré, Felix Sater, linked to organized crime who served time for felony assault and who later pleaded guilty to racketeering involving a $40 million stock fraud scheme.

Belgian authorities accused a Kazakh financier recruited by Bayrock of carrying out a $55 million money-laundering scheme (that case was settled without an admission of guilt). Civil suits filed in Los Angeles and New York allege that a former mayor of the largest city in Kazakhstan and several of his family members laundered millions in stolen public funds, investing some of it in real estate, including units in Trump SoHo. (The family has denied wrongdoing and says it is the victim of political persecution.)

Then there is Sunny Isles Beach, where over 60 individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought nearly $100 million worth of units in Trump-branded condominium towers in a part of South Florida known as Little Moscow. Among them were Russian government officials who made million-dollar investments and a Ukrainian owner of two units who pleaded guilty to one count of receipt of stolen property in a money-laundering scheme involving a former Ukrainian prime minister.ut half of his Trump condos to Russians, including some connected to the Russian mafia.

In 2006, the sale of condos in the first international hotel venture under the Trump brand, the former Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama, fell, in large part, to a Brazilian named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira. He worked with a Colombian who was later convicted of money laundering. Mr. Nogueira told NBC News last year that he sold about half of his Trump condos to Russians, including some connected to the Russian mafia, and that some of his clients had “questionable backgrounds.”

Three years later, as Reuters has reported, Panamanian authorities arrested Mr. Nogueira on charges of fraud and forgery unrelated to the Trump project. After getting out on bail, he fled to Brazil, where he faces a separate money-laundering investigation. In 2014,he fled Brazil, too.
[…]
The Trump Organization has said that it conducted an extensive due-diligence review of Anar Mammadov and that questions about the source of his wealth surfaced after they signed the deal. Presumably, Mr. Mueller will want to see evidence of that.

In Vancouver, the Trump Organization partnered with the son of Tony Tiah Thee Kian, a Malaysian oligarch who was convicted of providing a false report to the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange. That project, which was guided by Ivanka Trump and is one of the few Trump-branded properties to open since Mr. Trump took office, is now the subject of an F.B.I. counterintelligence inquiry, according to CNN. Mr. Garten, the Trump chief legal officer, told CNN: “The company’s role was and is limited to licensing its brand and managing the hotel. Accordingly, the company would have had no involvement in the financing of the project or the sale of units.”

It remains unclear whether Mr. Mueller will investigate these deals, or already is. But a comprehensive investigation could raise questions about the Trump Organization’s compliance with anti-money-laundering laws and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which — according to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice — makes it a crime for a United States company to act with willful blindness toward the corrupt activities of a foreign business partner.

The former Donald Trump insider Steve Bannon has hinted darkly about the Trump family’s exposure to money laundering. And Mr. Mueller has already secured the indictment of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, on charges of money laundering related to his work in Ukraine. Federal prosecutors are reported to be looking into Jared Kushner’s family firm over its use of a federal program that offered wealthy Chinese investors visas in return for investments. Kushner Companies has denied any wrongdoing.

The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.

Honestly, I don’t think Trump’s voters care at all whether he’s making foreign policy decisions on behalf of his companies. He could sell Yellowstone Park to Rodrigo Duterte to pay off a debt and they’d be fine with it. He is the state and the state is him.

These are the same people who have wrapped themselves in the flag and made a fetish of patriotism for decades.They have obviously always been phonies.

Don’t be too surprised if nothing comes of this. It is hard to track and prosecute and the political pressures to be extremely cautious are immense. He may very well get away with it.

Update:

President Donald Trump’s legislative affairs director said Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller has moved outside the sphere of his original investigation into election meddling — and declined to rule out the possibility of Trump firing him.

“We believe the scope has gone well beyond what was intended to be Russian meddling in the election,” Marc Short said on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

Short declined to rule out Trump firing Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, saying: “We don’t know how far off the investigation is going to veer.”

Has KellyAnne heard of Martha Mitchell?

by digby

“What is up with your husband’s tweets?” Bash asked, before reading off a few of them.

“It’s fascinating to me that CNN would go there, but it’s very good for the whole world to have just witnessed that it’s now fair game… how people’s spouses and significant others may differ with them,” Conway shot back. “That should really be fun.”

Bash informed the Trump adviser that she would have asked the same question if Conway was a man.

“No you wouldn’t,” Conway shot back

Conway then accused Bash of asking a question “meant to harass and embarrass,” and claimed it was possible for spouses have different opinions. She then took another jab at CNN, saying the network just had a “cross the Rubicon moment.”

I think this is a calibrated move by the Conways to preserve their Villager status despite her clear cut abdication of everything anyone could have ever called decency. They’re signaling that they “know” he’s a criminal and a cretin but she’s just doing to the job because someone has to.

As for the sexism, has she heard of Martha Mitchell? They threw her into a psychiatric hospital when she went against the regime. Now that was sexism. Also courage which George and KellyAnne have very little of. They want it both ways.

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On Earth Day, just one word
by Tom Sullivan

Besides alarming data about the rapidity of melting in Greenland and Antarctica, and the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic, Vox has a rundown of some significant environmental stories, both hopeful and not, you may have missed since last year. But Vox begins with a problem thought larger now than a year ago.

Punctuating the moment is the dead sperm whale that washed ashore in southern Spain last week with 64 pounds of garbage in its stomach. Most of it plastic, but also rope, netting and other junk.

Vox explains:

The plastic crisis is a truly global one, and the numbers are staggering: A 2015 study found that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic makes it into the ocean from land each year. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by weight.

Since plastic is synthetic, there are few natural processes that break it down, allowing bags, straws, and packaging to linger for decades if not centuries. And we’re not very good at containing it to landfills. About 32 percent of plastics make out into nature, where it often end up in the bellies of fish, birds, and whales. And, as it turns out, potentially in our stomachs too.

The New Republic adds:

This threat demands the type of aggressive action that only certain groups and countries are taking. After the dead sperm whale was discovered in Spain, the government launched a widespread awareness and cleanup campaign. Canada is using its presidency of the G-7 this year to push for international action on plastic pollution. In America, nearly 2,000 restaurants and organizations have banned straws or implemented a straws-only-upon-request policy, according to a July report in The Washington Post.

Cleanup will take more than banning plastic straws, staff writer Emily Atkin found at a pre-screening of the final episode of BBC’s Blue Planet II. It’s focus was not about damage to undersea life:

It was about the vast damage humans are doing to the ocean. In one scene, a scientist comes upon the bloody carcass of an Albatross chick whose stomach was punctured by a toothpick. “Something as small as that has managed to kill the bird,” she said. “It’s really sad to see.” Later, the episode documented the story of a baby dolphin, discovered dead after drinking her own mother’s milk. Her milk, researchers found, was contaminated with microplastics.

Four years ago, the Guardian called microplastics “the biggest environmental problem you’ve never heard of.” Mary Catherine O’Connor, co-founder of Climate Confidential, wrote:

Ecologist Mark Browne knew he’d found something big when, after months of tediously examining sediment along shorelines around the world, he noticed something no one had predicted: fibers. Everywhere. They were tiny and synthetic and he was finding them in the greatest concentration near sewage outflows. In other words, they were coming from us.

In fact, 85% of the human-made material found on the shoreline were microfibers, and matched the types of material, such as nylon and acrylic, used in clothing.

It is not news that microplastic – which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as plastic fragments 5mm or smaller – is ubiquitous in all five major ocean gyres. And numerous studies have shown that small organisms readily ingest microplastics, introducing toxic pollutants to the food chain.

They also find their way into drinking water. Browne laundered a polyester fleece jacket through the wash and filtered 1,900 fibers from the wastewater (this writer types, looking over at the one hanging on the back of the door). In 2015, Patagonia commissioned a study:

The study, performed by graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that during laundering, a single fleece jacket sheds as many as 250,000 synthetic fibers—significantly more than the 1,900 fibers Browne first recorded. Based on an estimate of consumers across the world laundering 100,000 Patagonia jackets each year, the amount of fibers being released into public waterways is equivalent to the amount of plastic in up to 11,900 grocery bags.

Keeping us all living in the style to which we have become accustomed is seriously fouling the only habitable planet we have. Vox reports that researchers have discovered a batch of seven Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of dwarf star Trappist-1. MEarth Project found another Earth-like planet, LHS1140b, orbiting a nearby star a fifth the size of our own. But, “Trappist-1 is 40 light-years (12 parsecs) away from us. LHS1140b is also about 40 light years off. It would take eons to get there.” So let’s not foul the planet we have in the hand for one somewhere in the cosmic bush. Humans might need it a few years longer. The wildlife, longer still.

Google’s Earth Day 2018 doodle is a video featuring a well-regarded fan of wildlife, ethologist, conservationist, and activist, Jane Goodall:

“Every single individual matters. Every single individual makes some impact on the planet every single day,” Goodall believes. “And we have a choice as to what kind of difference we are going to make.”

We don’t have an alternative planet, but we do have a few alternatives right here, including alternatives this November to the people currently misleading us.

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

Dispatch from reality: no things are not normal

by digby

I keep hearing that there’s nothing to worry about, that Trump and the Republicans are full of hot air and that they are really no worse than Republicans have always been, just a little bit more flamboyant and they might tweet a little too much.

Sure thing:

He has a reputation as a principled lawyer. He has worked for both Republican and Democratic attorneys general. He has a jugular instinct in courtroom battles but a distaste for political ones.

Now Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, is confronting the political fight of his career. Amid sustained criticism by President Trump and rumors that he will be fired, Mr. Rosenstein is also maneuvering to defuse demands by Republicans in Congress that Democrats say are aimed at ousting him from his job — and from his role as protector of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

So far, he appears to be succeeding. But in trying to deflect those attacks, some say, Mr. Rosenstein has risked eroding the Justice Department’s historic independence from political meddling. The consequences could persist long after he and the rest of the Trump administration are out of power.

A small but influential group of House Republicans has demanded greater access to sensitive documents related to some of the F.B.I.’s most politically charged investigations into the Trump campaign and Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified emails. Should Mr. Rosenstein fail to comply, they have threatened to subpoena him, hold him in contempt of Congress or even impeach him.

The Republicans complain that Mr. Rosenstein and other Justice Department officials have slow-walked or outright stonewalled their requests for reams of documents and other information they need to conduct oversight. When they do receive documents, they say, too many are showing up with critical content blacked out.

“This is serious stuff,” said Representative Jim Jordan, a conservative Ohio Republican allied with Mr. Trump who voiced his complaints in a recent meeting with Mr. Rosenstein. “We as a separate and equal branch of government are entitled to get the information.”

If I might just take a moment to remind you who Jim Jordan is:

Mr. Rosenstein, 53, has staved off his attackers on Capitol Hill largely by appeasing them. Two weeks ago, he allowed key Republican legislators to review an almost completely unredacted F.B.I. memo on the opening of a still active investigation of the Trump campaign, a rare step. He later summoned two other Republicans, Mr. Jordan and Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, to his office to pledge that the Justice Department would be more responsive to their requests.

And on Thursday, threatened with a subpoena, he gave a relatively large group of lawmakers access to memos written by the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey about his interactions with Mr. Trump. The documents are considered to be important evidence in a potential obstruction of justice case against the president being weighed by Mr. Mueller.

But still other Republican demands remain unmet, and Democrats have warned that Mr. Rosenstein is being boxed into a corner where he has to choose between saving his job and setting disturbing precedents that chip away at the independence that the Justice Department has maintained since President Richard M. Nixon tried to thwart the Watergate investigation. “That independence keeps the country from sliding into a banana republic,” said Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
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Resolving such dilemmas is but one of the challenges Mr. Rosenstein faces. Mr. Trump claimed this month, without offering evidence, that he suffers from conflicts of interest and has criticized him for signing a warrant application to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign aide. Every week seems to bring a new rumor that Mr. Trump plans to fire Mr. Rosenstein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr. Mueller or all three.

What could go wrong? A lot. You give them an inch they will take a mile:

In an interview this month on Fox News, Mr. Nunes threatened to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt or even impeach him if he failed to turn over the complete copy of the F.B.I. memo justifying the initiation of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Mr. Rosenstein called him to the Justice Department and gave him and other Intelligence Committee members access the next day to a version of the memo that satisfied their concerns.

In a separate request, Mr. Goodlatte and others have issued a subpoena for hundreds of thousands of documents — an extraordinary number even for Congress — related to the Clinton inquiry, the firing of the F.B.I.’s former deputy director and other matters. When the lawmakers began complaining that the documents were coming slowly and with too much content blacked out, the Justice Department appointed a United States attorney in Illinois to oversee document review and production. The F.B.I. doubled the number of employees working on responses to a request for materials the Justice Department’s inspector general was using to 54 people working two shifts a day, from 8 a.m. to midnight.

But some Republicans are still unsatisfied and have said a contempt citation or even impeachment — exceedingly rare steps that would require votes in the House — are still possibilities. Democrats fear that, taken together, the Republican requests are meant to offer Mr. Trump cover or even cause to fire Mr. Rosenstein.

In a meeting with Mr. Rosenstein in recent days, Mr. Jordan and Mr. Meadows tried to impress upon him that they needed the documents they sought. Otherwise, Mr. Meadows said later, lawmakers would be left with no choice but to begin building a case to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt of Congress or to try to impeach him.

“Contempt is obviously still on the horizon,” Mr. Meadows said, “if there is not a substantial change.”

These are the crazies. The Freedom Caucus. And they are leading the GOP band behind that freakshow in the White House. People say that we should all relax and be happy knowing that nothing bad can come of a bunch of lunatics strong-arming the Department of Justice in order to protect their criminal president and punish his political enemies because they haven’t succeeded yet in doing anything but stealing some elections. For some reason I don’t find that comforting.

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Awash in BS 24/7

by digby

Is Facebook a malevolent new force for evil in this world? Yeah, actually it is:

Past the end of a remote mountain road, down a rutted dirt track, in a concrete house that lacked running water but bristled with smartphones, 13 members of an extended family were glued to Facebook. And they were furious.

A family member, a truck driver, had died after a beating the month before. It was a traffic dispute that had turned violent, the authorities said. But on Facebook, rumors swirled that his assailants were part of a Muslim plot to wipe out the country’s Buddhist majority.

“We don’t want to look at it because it’s so painful,” H.M. Lal, a cousin of the victim, said as family members nodded. “But in our hearts there is a desire for revenge that has built.”

The rumors, they believed, were true. Still, the family, which is Buddhist, did not join in when Sinhalese-language Facebook groups, goaded on by extremists with wide followings on the platform, planned attacks on Muslims, burning a man to death.

But they had shared and could recite the viral Facebook memes constructing an alternate reality of nefarious Muslim plots. Mr. Lal called them “the embers beneath the ashes” of Sinhalese anger.

We came to this house to try to understand the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world, whose markets represent the company’s financial future. For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

A reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s descent into violence, based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger, found that Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing. Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact.

I don’t know why people believe everything they read on Facebook but apparently a lot of them do. I get that there’s confirmation bias and information bubbles and tribalism. I get it. But there are always people who see through this stuff with strong bullshit detectors too. I think a lot of people are just looking for permission to be violent.

And it isn’t just Facebook. It turns out that Youtube’s algorithm guides many people inexorably to extremist videos. It gets the blood pumping. (My Youtube recommendations run to comedy, Jazz, household DIY stuff and animal videos despite the fact that I embed dozens of political videos each week. It’s weird.) And we all know how pernicious twitter is.

I live in this world and I have been tracked and trolled by Russian bots and alt-right haters and probably the NSA and the NRA. But it’s not all that hard to spot the bullshit. Maybe you have to have been around this stuff for a while, I don’t know. But in the meantime, these platforms are creating a global upheaval, some of which is good and some of which is downright terrifying. I don’t know where it all ends up.

Then again, I just came across this drivel on Fox News.com, so it’s not just the social media platforms. We are awash in bullshit everywhere:

“How long will I be allowed to remain a Christian?”

That was the deeply dismaying question posed to me by a friend with four young children as we discussed the plight of the Christian faith in America and around the world.

With each passing month, that shocking question becomes more relevant and even more disturbing.

To say that Christians and Christianity are under a withering and brutal attack in certain areas of the world would be an understatement.

In various parts of the Middle East, there is a genocidal cleansing of Christians being carried out. Women, men, and their young children are being slaughtered because of their faith and world leaders and most of the media turn their backs in bored indifference.

Here in the United States, Christians and Christianity are mocked, belittled, smeared and attacked by some on a daily basis. This is a bigoted practice that is not only increasing exponentially, but is being encouraged and sanctioned by a number on the left.

Too many of those who worship at the altar of political correctness have deemed that Christianity should no longer be respected. Rather, they assail it on a regular basis in a coordinated campaign to weaken the faith and its base.

The prevailing view in much of the media is that Christianity is aligned with Republicans, conservatives, or the views of President Trump – and therefore must be diminished and made suspect.

The New Yorker just described the opening of a few Chick-fil-A restaurants in New York City as “Pervasive Christian traditionalism,” and a “Creepy infiltration of New York City.”

Christianity is an “infiltration” to some on the left.

In college, they now teach about the evils of “Christian Privilege.” On Broadway and in theaters around the world, mocking Christians has become a massively profitable money-making venture.

In name, on the crucifix, and in art, Jesus Christ is desecrated in the most twisted and obscene of ways. In movies, on television and online, Christians are portrayed in the most dishonest, prejudiced and insulting of ways.

Across the country, Christian colleges are under constant assault from “social justice warriors” seeking to strip their accreditation and put them out of business.

Christian groups on campus are at times being persecuted, their offices and handouts vandalized, with members even being physically assaulted.

In a nation that is still majority Christian, those who follow the faith have been litigated or brow-beaten into being fearful to utter the words “Merry Christmas,” or to display a Nativity scene celebrating the one and only reason there is a Christmas Day.

Want to stay true to your Christian faith in the most innocuous and giving of ways?

To do so is becoming more perilous by the minute, when you stop to ponder just a sampling of the negative consequences. For example:

A high school football coach is fired for taking a knee in prayer. A teacher is fired for giving a Bible to a student who requested it. A Marine is cursed at and then court-martialed for not removing a Bible verse from her computer. Another Bible verse posted by sailors in a military hospital is labeled “extremism.”

For me personally, I continue to be ridiculed for writing and speaking about a vision I had regarding the 40 days after the resurrection.

If you are a practicing Christian in the United States and open about it, you, your congregation and your organization will become a target of some sort. It is only a matter of time.

Ironically, in some very real and ominous ways, it’s as if we are being transported back to ancient Rome.

Will we soon have to meet with fellow Christians in secret? Will we have to whisper our beliefs from the shadows? Will those Christians with “traditional” beliefs lose their jobs and livelihoods if discovered?

As more and more of the mainstream media, entertainment, academia and the hi-tech world continue to purge or discriminate against Christians, what future job fields will be open to young Christians?

Will those Christian children eventually be forced to renounce or deny their faith in order to get a job and provide for their families?

As a Christian, I truly do have the deepest respect for every faith. The vast majority of people of every faith are beyond good and do seek to follow the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Why do so many on the left, in the media, entertainment and academia not practice that most simple, loving and humane of rules when it comes to the Christian faith?

Yeah, It’s pretty much like Rome 64 AD around here.

By the way, that was written by a former Pentagon and White House official under Reagan and Bush I. Or at least he says he was.

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Pompeo’s “war” record

by digby

A nice Republican lady making fun of John Kerry’s war injury

It looks like Mike Pompeo might be exaggerating his military record a teensy bit:

The question was first raised on Twitter Friday morning by Ned Price, a former CIA officer who served under President Obama, and who very publicly quit the CIA rather than work for President Trump, announcing the decision in a February 2017 op-ed in the Washington Post. Price pointed out that among other places, Pompeo’s Wikipedia page suggests that he was deployed. It currently states that Pompeo “served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the 4th Infantry Division in the Gulf War.”

It’s correct that Pompeo was in the Army at that time, but that’s not the same as being deployed. And the claim that Pompeo was deployed or fought in the Gulf War has been repeated by, among others, 51 members of Congress, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy, voicing their support for his appointment as Secretary of State.

The claim has also been repeated in numerous media outlets, either due to sloppy writing or outright incorrect information. Here’s one: The Wall Street Journal:

There are many more examples at the link including a video of Marco Rubio saying the same thing on January 23, 2017 in support of Pompeo’s qualifications for CIA.

I wouldn’t expect that he would necessarily be aware of every news story that misstates his military record. But I know of no politician who doesn’t have someone closely monitoring his Wikipedia page. He knew. He didn’t say anything.

This isn’t a big deal when Republicans do it, never has been. Look at the current president who can’t even remember which foot had the “bone spurs” that kept him out of Vietnam. This sort of scrutiny is only applied to Democrats, particularly those who have a claim to be war heroes, so it won’t make a difference for Pompeo. Still, it’s worth noting for historical purposes, I suppose.

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“Don’t tattle on me!”

by digby

Can he be any more transparent? Seriously. It’s becoming downright pathetic now:

The story he’s referring to is the one that exposes the fact that Trump used Cohen as his doormat for years.

Also, it’s an open secret that one of Maggie “Trump whisperer” Haberman’s primary anonymous White House sources is …. Donald Trump. Maybe he calls himself John Barron.

Trump’s new theme song:

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Protocol for dummies

by digby

Donald Trump didn’t attend Barbara Bush’s funeral out of what the White House called “respect for the family.” Haha. Yes, that is the respectful thing to do considering what he’s said about Jeb and George…

But the truth is that president’s don’t attend the funerals of first ladies. I don’t know why, it just seems to be protocol. That didn’t stop the right wingers from having a meltdown when President Obama didn’t attend the funeral of Nancy Reagan.

Newt Gingrich on Thursday ripped into President Barack Obama’s decision to skip the funeral of former first lady Nancy Reagan as “sending his contempt” and “hostility” toward the presidency and ideology of Ronald Reagan.

“I think that you should never assume that Obama does anything by accident or by some shallow reason,” the former speaker of the House and 2012 presidential candidate said on “The Mike Gallagher Show.”

Instead of traveling to Simi Valley, California, with first lady Michelle Obama, the president will keep his plans for Austin, Texas, where he will attend the annual South by Southwest festival. Not since John F. Kennedy attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962 has a sitting president attended the service of a late first lady. Michelle Obama also attended the 2011 funeral of Betty Ford, and the president did not.

“He is sending his contempt for the Reagan presidency, his hostility to the Reagan ideology, and he is once again proving that he has never been president of all of the American people. He is president of his faction,” Gingrich said, adding that he would be attending Reagan’s service on Friday in California with his wife, Callista. “He does not do any of the ceremonial duties that the president of the American people would do, and it’s why he is the most destructive and most divisive president, I think, since James Buchanan in the 1850s.”

Gingrich also blasted Obama as “the man who refused to attend the funeral of a sitting Supreme Court justice because he disagreed with him ideologically,” referring to Obama’s non-attendance at the funeral of Antonin Scalia in February.

Vice President Joe Biden attended on behalf of the administration, and both the president and first lady met with Scalia’s family privately the previous day.

In making his point earlier, Gingrich also referred to past reports that Obama sent the bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill “back to the British Embassy as one of his first acts.” But in 2012, the White House rebuffed the notion that the bust went to the British Embassy, pointing out in a post on its blog that the bust is still in the executive residence, outside the Treaty Room.

Weirdly, he hasn’t said anything about Trump playing golf today instead of attending the funeral.

I really don’t think Gingrich’s special brand of assholishness gets enough credit for the rise of Trump. His disgusting nasty rhetoric paved the way.

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“Don’t make trouble”

by digby

All this handwringing over the DNC’s decision to file a lawsuit over the 2016 election is mind-boggling. Village conventional wisdom has congealed into one strong voice screaming the words “it’s a distraction!” I wish I knew what it was a distraction from, but nobody says. Trump’s tweets? Democratic congressional stump speeches? I honestly don’t know.

All I can conclude is that none of them have ever read a book about Watergate or they’d know that the DNC did this then and it was very successful:

The Democratic Party’s abrupt dropping of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit into the simmering cauldron that is the Trump-Russia affair took some folk by surprise.

Why risk complicating the life of special counsel Robert Mueller just when he may be getting to the endgame of his own investigation into all these allegations? Where did such a crazy idea come from anyway?

Watergate, that’s where. In fact, scholars of that especially dark time, which eventually forced Richard Nixon from office, were asking a different question. How come the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which filed the suit against the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russian Federation in a New York federal court on Friday, had taken so long about it?

They were a lot quicker off the mark last time. It was 17 June 1972 when burglars in business suits were arrested in the offices of the DNC at the Watergate complex in Washington DC, as they attempted to place bugging devices and photograph documents in the hope of gathering damaging information on Nixon’s opponents. Just four days later the DNC swung into legal attack mode.

On 21 June, Lawrence O’Brien, the then DNC chairman, announced a $1m lawsuit against the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. It would be a full two years before Nixon boarded Marine One for the last time, yet O’Brien even then spoke of “a developing clear line to the White House,” from the arrest of the five burglars. “This is not partisan, it’s patriotic … It is our obligation to the American people,” he declared. Nixon’s campaign chairman, John Mitchell, was, naturally, unimpressed and labelled the suit “another example of sheer demagoguery”.

This time the DNC is merely peddling “a left-wing conspiracy theory”, or so declared Roger Stone, a Trump associate and one of those named as defendants along with a now familiar cast of characters. They include former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “NO proof or evidence,” Stone wrote in a defiant email to Reuters.

It may not enlighten much, but the urge to compare Trump’s legal peril with Watergate has been irresistible almost since the moment he fired his FBI Director, James Comey, nearly a year ago. (We have been hearing a lot from Comey lately, as you know.) I was in the room on 16 May when Senator John McCain did exactly that at a Republican Party dinner in Washington. “We’ve seen this movie before. It’s reaching Watergate size and scale,” he said. “This is not good for the country.” Afterwards he told me he hadn’t meant to take the parallels quite that far.

But it’s always been hard not to recognise them. Both scandals began with burglaries and invasion of DNC property. Forty-five years ago, it was physical in nature – locks picked and door latches taped for easy escape. In 2016, as the new lawsuit makes clear, a cyber crime was reported. With “gleeful” enthusiasm, it alleges, the Trump campaign encouraged Russia and its intelligence community to break into the DNC’s servers and telephone systems, this time to dig up anything that could hurt Hillary Clinton and thereby assist Trump’s run for the highest office.

“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” Tom Perez, today’s DNC Chairman, asserted in a statement. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery.”
[…]
If Trump doesn’t care to pay attention to history, then clearly the DNC and Tom Perez are. The lawsuit filed by O’Brien all those years back may have come off as over-hasty and half-baked, but it worked. The DNC collected $750,000 from the Nixon campaign. On the day he left office.

I swear, sometimes I totally understand why people hate Democrats. The minute they try to defend themselves half the party turns on them and says “don’t make trouble.”

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