Month: April 2018

Money vs. boots
by Tom Sullivan

Let’s talk money.

Politics is a rich person’s pastime. The money involved for the highest-profile races is staggering. The personal commitments are a burden. It leaves many of us feeling impotent to do anything more than yell at the TV. Public financing — “getting money out of politics” — is the standard answer, and a good one, but it is not the only one.

Sarah Jones examines the costs and opportunities for The New Republic and finds a slow, but growing movement towards public financing. “Campaign finance reform is not typically framed as an inequality story, but it is one, she writes:

According to Demos, 27 states, counties, and cities now implement public financing of some kind. Public financing doesn’t necessarily keep big donors or outside money from influencing a race. But it does make it easier for low-income people to participate in the democratic process by supporting candidates who represent their interests. Candidates who opted into Seattle’s program ran on strong, progressive platforms that supported the city’s $15 minimum wage and brought attention to the city’s housing crisis. Two Latinx candidates eventually won election.

In races for other seats, however, candidates from low-income backgrounds find themselves stymied by other roadblocks. It takes time to run a campaign, and that’s something many low-income people can’t afford. In most states, employees aren’t protected from termination if they take time off work to run for office, and even if they win office, the salary varies wildly from state to state. “Sometimes these positions are part-time as well, and it’s not always feasible for folks who are living paycheck to paycheck to not only get that job as a legislator, but also to campaign,” Boldt explained. The situation is particularly complicated for candidates with children. “For example, people with small children need to provide care for their kids. And in a lot of places, campaign funds can’t be spent on childcare,” she added.

The hurdles are formidable, but not insurmountable.

Kerri Harris, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Delaware, works a full-time job as a community organizer in addition to campaigning for office. She has, at various points in her working life, cut grass and fried chicken at a convenience store. She told me that her experiences with financial hardship both motivate and complicate her campaign. “I actually had a look in running last summer. We put out feelers, had a number of meet-and-greets, people were excited about it. But when October came, I had to sit down and really re-evaluate,” she said. “I am a parent and I have responsibilities and I don’t make a lot of money.”

Eventually, Harris built a volunteer team for her challenging incumbent Senator Tom Carper in the September primary.

“At the same time I’m running this campaign, saying people shouldn’t be struggling, I’m not saying it as if it’s those people. I am those people, and they see it,” she tells Jones. Harris the candidate now attends fundraisers she could not afford to, let’s face it, as a commoner.

In politics, the wealthy wield money as a weapon to attack opponents and defend what they intend to keep. Campaign finance reform would even the playing field, but candidates such as Harris first need power to un-rig the money game and ungerrymander districts drawn to be uncompetitive. Short of being born with preternatural fundraising skills, the way to win that power is better organizing.

Directly and through groups he funded, Art Pope, North Carolina’s own mini-Koch brother, threw nearly a million dollars at state Sen. John Snow’s district in the western mountains in the 2010 election. They targeted Snow with two dozen mass mailings. One, Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker, reminiscent of the infamous Willie Horton ad from 1988:

“The attacks just went on and on,” Snow told me recently. “My opponents used fear tactics. I’m a moderate, but they tried to make me look liberal.” On Election Night, he lost by an agonizingly slim margin—fewer than two hundred votes.

After the election, the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation, a nonpartisan, pro-business organization, revealed that two seemingly independent political groups had spent several hundred thousand dollars on ads against Snow—a huge amount in a poor, backwoods district. Art Pope was instrumental in funding and creating both groups, Real Jobs NC and Civitas Action. Real Jobs NC was responsible for the “Go fish!” ad and the mass mailing that attacked Snow’s “pork projects.” The racially charged ad was produced by the North Carolina Republican Party, and Pope says that he was not involved in its creation. But Pope and three members of his family gave the Davis campaign a four-thousand-dollar check each—the maximum individual donation allowed by state law.

Snow, whose defeat was first chronicled by the Institute for Southern Studies, a progressive nonprofit organization, told me, “It’s getting to the point where, in politics, money is the most important thing. They spent nearly a million dollars to win that seat. A lot of it was from corporations and outside groups related to Art Pope. He was their sugar daddy.”

Yet even after all that Pope money, the last Democratic senator standing in the far west, lost his seat by 161 votes in a district spanning 8 rural counties. If Democrats in those rural counties had mounted effective, coordinated get-out-the-vote programs, they might have turned out 200 more votes among those 8 counties to deny Pope his prize and hold that seat for Democrats. Snow could not compete with Pope’s money. But he might have had local Democrats had “game.”

Coincidentally, the district’s Democrats are working on that with a series of trainings, including one starting as this post goes live. Organizers from South Carolina have come over the border to join them.

The point of the “For The Win” primer (below) is that winning tough races needn’t require Pope-sized pockets or candidates with Obama-level charisma. Better organizing and planning can get the job done. It does right here:

With so many new post-November 2016 progressive activists in the campaign mix this year, and with so many Democrats running in normally uncompetitive districts, Democrat cannot afford for them to learn in the traditional way, by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. They need those skills NOW.

A poll from Quinnipiac University of registered voters shows Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke within single digits (47-44) of catching incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz in the Texas U.S. Senate race. (CNN has more detail here.) But registered voters is one thing. Turning out Democrats and independents is an other. That takes not just money, but skills. The redder the state, the more urgent the need and, likely, the larger the skills deficit among under-resourced counties.

After sending links to 210 Texas county chairs in December (I could find no contact info for the rest), over 50 downloaded “For The Win” within 48 hours.

Hi, Ted!

* * * * * * * *

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

by digby

Kitten time!

A rare Fishing Cat kitten is being hand-reared after he was born by cesarean delivery at Oklahoma City Zoo.

The baby was born on March 31 after his mother, Miri, surpassed her expected due date. The gestation period for Fishing Cats is between 63 and 70 days. Eleven-year-old Miri was five days past her due date and showed no signs of entering labor. The zoo’s veterinary and carnivore teams chose to intervene to ensure that her pregnancy was viable. Although the first-time mother was closely monitored by her caretakers throughout the entire pregnancy, the risks associated with waiting for a natural birth became far too great for Miri and her kitten.

This was the first cesarean delivery of a Fishing Cat in the zoo’s history. The entire procedure lasted three hours and consisted of an ultrasound, radiographs, bloodwork, a physical exam and the cesarean delivery, which resulted in the birth of a male kitten. The kitten is the first offspring of Miri and 3-year-old Boon.

For approximately 1 hour after his birth, the kitten, weighing 164 grams (0.4 pounds), needed help breathing. After two days in the animal hospital, the kitten’s health was stable, and his care team decided that he could be introduced to mom Miri.

Unfortunately, when the kitten was placed with Miri, she displayed no signs of maternal care. The veterinary and carnivore teams began hand-rearing the kitten.

Because hand-rearing a Fishing Cat kitten requires around-the-clock care, the staff works in shifts to bottle-feed the kitten every four hours. To provide comfort and warmth, the care team placed two stuffed animals, scented with Miri’s urine, inside his habitat. The kitten has a healthy appetite and is meeting developmental milestones. Once he is weaned from bottle-feeding and begins consuming solid foods exclusively, the care team will move him next to Miri and Boon so he can see and hear his parents.

The zoo participates in the Fishing Cat Species Survival Plan (SSP) through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), a managed breeding effort that promotes the sustainability of this species. The SSP strives to ensure a healthy, genetically diverse and demographically varied population through breeding programs among AZA-accredited zoos. This kitten is the first Fishing Cat born at the Zoo since 1997. Fishing Cats are solitary animals and live an average of 10 to 12 years in human care.

Fishing Cats hunt for fish and other prey from the banks of streams and rivers. Native to the wetlands of India and Indonesia, Fishing Cat populations are declining due to habitat fragmentation and destruction, excessive hunting, and the exotic pet trade. Fishing Cats are listed as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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This story about the latest wingnut conspiracy really illustrates just how looney tunes they’ve become:

The right-wing conspiracy theory internet has gone wild over the past week with a new conspiracy theory that’s so wild, Michael Flynn Jr. can only hint at it in a tweet:

For weeks now, various conspiracy types, including adherents of the bizarre QAnon saga, have been eagerly awaiting an “HRC video” that would bring down Hillary Clinton. The rumored video — supposedly found on Anthony Wiener’s laptop — was thought to be so damning, QAnon said in one cryptic post, that it would be “impossible to defend.” 

That chatter went into overdrive last weekend after hoax site YourNewsWire published an article describing a purported video showing Clinton and aide Huma Abedin engaging in violent criminal acts with a child:

An “extreme snuff film” featuring Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin raping and mutilating a prepubescent girl is circulating on the dark web, according to sources familiar with the material. 

The picture above of a masked woman, supporters of the video claim, is actually Abedin herself. Pizzagate and QAnon enthusiasts went wild with talk about the grainy video — dubbed “Frazzledrip” — saying that this was proof of the high-ranking pedophile rings they’ve been talking about all along.

I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for a video purporting to show child abuse, and I wouldn’t recommend you do, either. Fortunately, Snopes did some commendable legwork and confirmed that this is all fake. Of course!
For example: the masked picture that supposedly represents Abedin engaged in some Yellow King-type crimes is, in fact, just an image from a D.C. restaurant website:

For now, the idea of the video itself has proven too hot for most right-wing outlets, making their stories about the supposed reemergence of Wiener’s laptop awfully confusing if you aren’t already plugged in. Gateway Pundit, for example, lead its site with a story about something disgusting found on the laptop — but wouldn’t say exactly what that thing was supposed to be.

Even some diehard QAnon types are pushing back on the supposed video with a theory of their own. They don’t believe the video is real, they say, because it’s actually a deep state psy-op meant to discredit their own theories.

This is what people like Michael Flynn, the one-time national security adviser, were tied into. 

Comey gets the Clinton treatment

by digby

This is exactly what Clinton is supposed to be jailed for:

At least two of the memos that former FBI Director James Comey gave to a friend outside of the government contained information that officials now consider classified, according to people familiar with the matter, prompting a review by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.

Of those two memos, Mr. Comey himself redacted elements of one that he knew to be classified to protect secrets before he handed the documents over to his friend. He determined at the time that another memo contained no classified information, but after he left the Federal Bureau of Investigation, bureau officials upgraded it to “confidential,” the lowest level of classification.

In other words, it wasn’t classified when he gave it to a friend but they later went back and classified it. This is what Clinton was accused of doing with the handful of emails that were later classified and which Comey determined was “careless.”

The thing is that all this stuff is over-classified. It’s ridiculous. And the the right wing using this as their cudgel even as they defend Petraeus who was the CIA director and handed his unhinged girlfriend folders full of classified memos is just precious.

Or this guy:

Around dusk on March 21, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — head of the House Intelligence Committee and its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — was riding in an Uber with a staff member. Suddenly, he looked at his phone and got out of the car without saying where he was going.

The next afternoon, he made a statement to reporters on Capitol Hill.

“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” he said. He added, “I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked.” He meant that after people working on President Trump’s transition were included in surveillance of foreign actors (communication from them was “incidentally collected”), intelligence agencies removed the protection of anonymity that usually protects Americans when that happens.

Nunes’s allegation gave weight to an argument that Trump had been making for weeks, after the president spontaneously alleged on Twitter one Saturday morning that President Barack Obama had tapped the phones in Trump Tower. That claim wasn’t true, as intelligence officials later testified under oath. So the argument morphed into one about how the intelligence community had instead improperly focused on Trump staffers in their surveillance, an argument bolstered by Nunes’s sudden announcement.

Trump wasted no time celebrating Nunes’s allegations. Nunes spoke at about 1 p.m. on March 22; by 1:30 p.m., Trump was telling a reporter from Time to check out what Nunes had said — even before Nunes had arrived at the White House to brief the president on what he’d learned.

Two things later emerged about Nunes’s statement. The first was that there was a Trump transition team member whose communication was unmasked: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn. His conversations with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016 led to his lying to the FBI about what he’d said. Those lies led to his leaving the administration and, eventually, to pleading guilty to a charge from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team investigating Russian meddling.

The other thing that emerged was how Nunes had learned about this unmasking. When he got out of that Uber, he went to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building within the White House complex. Multiple White House officials orchestrated his visit, during which he was shown classified information about unmasked surveillance.

The GOP House ethics committee cleared him, natch. But then he didn’t use emails so …

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He favored Corey over Mikey  #badnewsforTrump

by digby

For those of you who don’t do the twitter thing, here’s your official presidential statement of the day:

He’s so inspiring.

Meanwhile:

For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Mr. Trump. For years Mr. Trump treated Mr. Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.

“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Mr. Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.

Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Mr. Cohen’s way. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Mr. Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Mr. Trump.

Last week federal agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel room and seized business records, emails and other material as part of what Mr. Trump has called a “witch hunt” by his own Justice Department. The trove included documents dating back decades, as well as more recent ones related to a payment in 2016 to a pornographic film actress who has said she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, which Mr. Trump denies.

Although Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen last Friday, four days after the raid, to “check in,’’ according to people familiar with the call, he and Mr. Cohen have spoken little since Mr. Trump entered the White House. The two men did have dinner together at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, a few weeks ago, but since the raid Mr. Cohen has told associates he feels isolated.

Mr. Trump has long felt he had leverage over Mr. Cohen, but people who have worked for the president said the raid has changed all that.

“Ironically, Michael now holds the leverage over Trump,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who worked with Mr. Cohen and Mr. Stone. Mr. Nunberg said that Mr. Cohen “should maximize” that leverage.

“The softer side of the president genuinely has an affection for Michael,” Mr. Nunberg said. “However, the president has also taken Michael for granted.” Mr. Nunberg added that “whenever anyone complains to me about Trump screwing them over, my reflective response is that person has nothing to complain about compared to Michael.”

Mr. Stone recalled Mr. Trump saying of Mr. Cohen, “He owns some of the finest Trump real estate in the country — paid top dollar for it, too.” In Mr. Trump’s worldview, there are few insults more devastating than saying someone overpaid.

Trump treated him like a doormat which explains why Trump is so shaken by this event.

Over the years, Mr. Trump threatened to fire Mr. Cohen over deals that didn’t work out, or snafus with business projects, people who were present for the discussions said. He was aware that Mr. Cohen benefited in other business projects as being seen as affiliated with the Trump Organization, and it irked him.

“He clearly doesn’t think that Michael Cohen is his Roy Cohn,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, referring to Mr. Trump’s former mentor and the president’s ideal for a pit bull-like defender. “I think his abusive behavior to Michael is animated by his feeling that Michael is inadequate.”

Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Cohen did little actual legal work for Mr. Trump and instead focused on extensive political, media and real-estate dealings for the president.
[…]
He has also scouted business opportunities for Mr. Trump in the former Soviet bloc, including a 2010 trip to Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Mr. Cohen has been active in Mr. Trump’s political ventures. When Mr. Trump pondered running for president in 2012, it was Mr. Cohen who went on an early trip to Iowa to meet with Republican operatives and who set up a website called ShouldTrumpRun.org. He even initially sought to pay some of the costs for the site with money raised for his own abortive run for New York State Senate.

Mr. Trump never ran in 2012, but Mr. Cohen raised $500,000 in four hours for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign that year during one of their “national call days” — and had campaign officials credit it as money that his boss had raised, one former Romney official recalled. When Mr. Trump ran for president in 2016, Mr. Cohen was given no official role on the campaign.

He fought with the initial campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, later blocked him from coming on board. Mr. Trump never ordered his aides to make a place for Mr. Cohen.

Some of Mr. Cohen’s efforts to help only led to embarrassing rebuffs in front of those in charge. A month before the election, Mr. Cohen approached Mr. Trump outside his Trump Tower office with photographs of Bill Clinton and a mixed-race man alleged — without any evidence — to be the former president’s illegitimate son. Mr. Trump knocked the papers away, angrily telling Mr. Cohen to “get that out of my face,” said one former campaign official who witnessed the incident.

Particularly hurtful to Mr. Cohen was the way Mr. Trump lavished approval on Mr. Lewandowski in a way he never did for Mr. Cohen. When Mr. Cohen told Mr. Trump that he believed that Mr. Lewandowski had been behind a negative story about Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump dismissed the comments as simple jealousy, and didn’t pay attention, according to two people familiar with the incident.

A compulsive liar and fraud from the very beginning

by digby

This story and audio of Trump pretending to be an alter-ego named “John Barron” to get on the Forbes 400 richest list is just … astonishing. We knew he did this.But t goes back to 1984, just showing that it isn’t that Trump is slipping. He’s always been a freak who lied to people’s faces without compunction and dared them to call him on it:

In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.
The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. 

When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire. 

At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research. 

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

He’s always been a pathological liar and a delusional con man:

There’s more at the link. It’s fascinating.

I’m watching Republican shills say this doesn’t sound like him and it’s old and meaningless, but this man has been conning people for decades, committing fraud and going bankrupt, refusing to show his tax returns. More than 60 millions people voted for this criminal because they were deluded into thinking that he was some kind of genius businessman who would make all the deserving people like them rich.

It’s always been bullshit but he had all the trappings, the golden penthouse, the airplanes, the TV show and the model third wife. But it was an elaborate hoax.

I have seen this sort of thing a few times in life with seniors being duped out of their nest egg by slick conmen who told them what they wanted to hear. And they wanted it so badly that even those who knew better ignored their instincts to live the dream for a little while. I think a lot of Trump voters were like that. Trump told them it was ok to hate mexicans, Muslims and blacks. That it’s normal to think of women as only sex objects, mothers or uppity bitches. That big city elites take all the goodies and then look down on them. And that Trump would make them rich like him because he’s just like them and look how rich he is.

It was all bullshit from beginning to end. But they are enjoying the dream.

You know how it is when you buy Powerball ticket the day before the drawing and sit around thinking about what you’d do with all that money if you won? That’s what voting for Trump

Trump’s Putin delusion

by digby

This happened:

Yes, this is a genuine official comment from the Kremlin: Putin did not tell Trump Russia has the most beautiful hookers in the world, says Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “President Putin could not say such things and did not say it to President Trump,” Peskov said.

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 20, 2018

Comey wrote that Trump told him Putin had told him that Russia had the most beautiful hookers in the world.

This is what the addled orange miscreant was saying that Putin “told him:”

“The president brought up the ‘Golden Showers thing’ and said it really bothered him if wife had any doubt about it. He then explained, as he did at our dinner, that he hadn’t stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip. … The president said ‘the hookers thing’ is nonsense but that Putin had told him ‘we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.’ He did not say when Putin had told him this.”

He lied about staying overnight. We know he did. His bodyguard Keith Schiller testified to that.

At the time he told Comey that Putin had “told” him this he had had a phone call with the Russian president but it’s unlikely they chatted about hookers on that call. We don’t know whether there were *(or are) back channels that they use to communicate. But this probably explains what Trump was talking about which just shows how he lies and brags about everything:

Comey says that on February 8, 2017, Trump told him that Putin had told him that Russia had the best hookers in the world.

On January 17, 2017, at a press conference, Putin said Russia had the best hookers in the world. pic.twitter.com/xg4XK6Uh75— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 20, 2018

Lying ab out staying overnight is the most curious part of this story. But the other is the most revealing of how Trump’s mind works. He’s a pathological liar.

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I’m a criminal? No YOU’RE a criminal.

by digby

I wrote about the memos, the referrals and the long list of political enemies the Republicans want locked up for Salon this morning:

If I had read this opening paragraph of a CNN story four years ago I would have assumed it was actually an excerpt from a bad movie script:

A week after the tell-all book from James Comey exploded onto the scene, President Donald Trump is telling aides and confidants something he rarely does: He’s pleased at how Republicans and the White House led the charge to try and discredit the former FBI director.

Setting aside the ridiculous notion of Donald Trump being president, I would have said the stuff about the White House and Republicans openly celebrating a campaign to discredit an FBI director, much less a stalwart Republican like Comey, would be absurd and no one would believe it. They were the “law and order” party. They love FBI directors.

There’s no need to belabor this little time-travel exercise. It’s just that sometimes you have to acknowledge the strangeness of what’s going on. This is just one small example, but it’s a significant one. The president and his minions in the media and, more significantly, in the Congress are working overtime to discredit witnesses in a counterintelligence investigation involving … the president. And they are bragging about their success to the news media.

On Thursday night the Department of Justice finally relented and released the long-sought “Comey memos,” which the former FBI director had written to document his meetings with Trump and other members of the White House during those first few months of the Trump administration. Just like the infamous “Nunes memo,” they are basically duds as far as new information is concerned. This should come as no surprise: Comey testified at length before Congress and wrote a book about all this that he’s currently appearing on every TV show in the known world to promote. Apparently, Trump’s allies hoped or believed these would prove Comey was lying and instead they have now proved to everyone that he wasn’t. They’re reduced to making absurd observations that Comey never once wrote that he “felt obstructed.”

Still, it was a thrilling day for Trump. His Justice Department referred former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for possible criminal charges. Finally, one of his perceived political enemies was getting what was coming to him.

McCabe was referred on the basis of the FBI inspector general’s report finding that he had shown a “lack of candor” about an unauthorized leak to the Wall Street Journal confirming that the FBI was still investigating the Clinton Foundation. You’ll recall that McCabe was fired in a highly unorthodox fashion for this infraction, just hours before he was to officially retire and weeks before the report was released in full.

According to former FBI counter-intelligence official Frank Figliuzzi, who recently discussed all this on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” this referral is unusual:

If it is true that the charge that is being referred is for a lack of candor during an internal inquiry, I cannot recall that ever happening in my 25-year FBI career. I also headed the office of professional responsibility adjudication unit. I was the chief inspector of the FBI during my career and that’s a new one on me. So, what I was thinking is that the referral would be for an unauthorized leak — that McCabe actually conceded that he did allow his subordinates to talk to the media and disclosed the existence of a case. That sounded more prosecutable than lacking candor during an internal inquiry. I don’t know if he was under oath or not, but nonetheless the remedy for that is termination not criminal referral. So I’m troubled by this, if the reporting is correct.

James Comey told Rachel Maddow on Thursday night that there were two people in the FBI who had authorization to provide such information to the media at the time: Himself and Andrew McCabe. So a criminal referral on that count would seem to be odd as well.

It appears that McCabe is facing potential criminal indictment for a so-called crime not easily found in the statute books (“lack of candor”) or over a leak he was specifically authorized to make. This is not the end of this story.

Still worried about the future
by Tom Sullivan

All these years after “The Graduate,” there are still plenty of reasons to worry about the future. The rule of law seems to balance on a knife’s edge. Nationalist sentiments threaten democracy here and across the globe. The Cold War threatens to rise from the grave. Plus, a lot of the people in the video below still influence too much of the present. They are warping our perceptions of it in ways reminiscent of Soviet Cold War disinformation and propaganda.

History Won’t Forget How @BarackObama Was Treated, nor should any of us. Remember this when they ask you to respect #DonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/PF7LegHCnl— Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) December 27, 2016

Adele Stan worries at the American Prospect about the media landscape in this country, beginning with this week’s news that Sean Hannity is the de facto White House chief of staff and shares an attorney (Michael Cohen) with Donald Trump. Hannity has repeatedly had Cohen as a guest on his program without disclosing their relationship:

Yes, this is all quite troubling, if not entirely surprising. The real problem, however, is much bigger than whether Hannity is in cahoots with the administration; it’s the total distortion of the media landscape by the big right-wing outlets: Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Breitbart News, all de facto propaganda arms of the White House. Although the structure of news media in the era of the internet and cable TV lends itself to the silo-ing of audiences with particular political leanings, that alone is not what has caused the distortion. Rather, the leveraging of that phenomenon into an authoritarian disinformation operation is the issue.

Add to that how financially leveraged the country will become under the continued rule of this authoritarian cabal. Catherine Rampell worries about that for the Washington Post. The International Monetary Fund projects that the United States, alone among the world’s advanced economies, is expected to see its debt burden grow worse over the next five years:

Every other rich country, including perennial fiscal basket cases such as Greece and Italy, is projected to lower its debt as a share of its economy. That is thanks in large part to the global economic recovery, which is bringing in more tax revenue and reducing the need for expensive automatic stabilizers such as unemployment benefits.

Here in the United States, though, we’ve taken our economic recovery and squandered it.

In December, Republicans passed massive, top-heavy tax cuts; this year, Congress oversaw a run-up in new spending. The result: trillion-dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see.

Where once we used to see America as a country to build and invest in, a country to grow, a future to create, now those in control see it as a failing business to hollow out and loot before it collapses. Investing in it, you know, through paying taxes, might accrue to the benefit of the hoi polloi. The rich and their vassals would rather cut off their own noses. Building is hard and requires vision and commitment. Plundering does not.

#Debt ratios are projected to decline in all advanced economies, but one. https://t.co/2IDPWhZZeh #FiscalMonitor pic.twitter.com/6JMDEm0CND— IMF (@IMFNews) April 18, 2018

If America and the rule of law is not too far gone, there is a fresh group of leaders demanding better and unwilling to put up with the BS, as Emma Gonzalez put it. And they are coming for the bullshit peddlers in 2018 and 2020.

President Barack Obama celebrates the arrival of future graduates for calling America to account in the wake of the Parkland shootings. He writes in Time:

The Parkland, Fla., students don’t have the kind of lobbyists or big budgets for attack ads that their opponents do. Most of them can’t even vote yet.

But they have the power so often inherent in youth: to see the world anew; to reject the old constraints, outdated conventions and cowardice too often dressed up as wisdom.

The power to insist that America can be better.

Seared by memories of seeing their friends murdered at a place they believed to be safe, these young leaders don’t intimidate easily. They see the NRA and its allies—whether mealymouthed politicians or mendacious commentators peddling conspiracy theories—as mere shills for those who make money selling weapons of war to whoever can pay. They’re as comfortable speaking truth to power as they are dismissive of platitudes and punditry. And they live to mobilize their peers.

Already, they’ve had some success persuading statehouses and some of the biggest gun retailers to change. Now it gets harder. A Republican Congress remains unmoved. NRA scare tactics still sway much of the country. Progress will be slow and frustrating.

But by bearing witness to carnage, by asking tough questions and demanding real answers, the Parkland students are shaking us out of our complacency. The NRA’s favored candidates are starting to fear they might lose. Law-abiding gun owners are starting to speak out. As these young leaders make common cause with African Americans and Latinos—the disproportionate victims of gun violence—and reach voting age, the possibilities of meaningful change will steadily grow.

Our history is defined by the youthful push to make America more just, more compassionate, more equal under the law. This generation—of Parkland, of Dreamers, of Black Lives Matter—embraces that duty. If they make their elders uncomfortable, that’s how it should be. Our kids now show us what we’ve told them America is all about, even if we haven’t always believed it ourselves: that our future isn’t written for us, but by us.

Get busy worrying or get busy writing. Your choice.

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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.

Pray for the planet, Trump thinks his “Great Man” moment has arrived

by digby

If you thought the cretin had hubris when he ran for president knowing that he’d left a trail of evidence about his criminal enterprises, sexual deviancy and confidence schemes all over the world and wouldn’t be found out, hold his beer:

President Trump views the North Korean crisis as his “great man” of history moment.

The big picture: He came into office thinking he could be the historic deal maker to bring peace to the Middle East. He’s stopped talking about that. There’s very little point. The peace deal looks dead and cremated. But Trump wants to sign his name even larger into the history books, and he views North Korea as his moment.

Sources close to him say he genuinely believes he — and he alone — can overcome the seemingly intractable disaster on the Korean Peninsula.

A source who has discussed North Korea with Trump: “He thinks, ‘Just get me in the room with the guy [Kim Jong-un] and I’ll figure it out.’”

His aides are much more skeptical, and some believe the idea of meeting with Kim Jong-un is naive and guaranteed to be fruitless.

Trump “definitely thinks it’s a duel of personalities,” says another source familiar with his thinking about North Korea:

“There are important strategic considerations … but he also very much conceives it as a test of wills and of a contest of one man and another. How they’re going to react, how they’re going to shadow box with each other, and ultimately how they’re going to choose to act.”

“During the war of insults between Trump and Kim last year, Trump’s tweets and ‘little Rocket Man’ were pretty carefully calibrated — in his mind, was more intentional, not just popping off.”

“He never clearly articulated what he was trying to do. But it seemed he wanted to demonstrate he and the U.S. were unafraid, prepared to take whatever steps necessary and were willing to be direct. He wanted to show dominance over Kim.”

“This was something he took a personal interest in and was personally invested in. I’m not sure people thought it was a coherent strategy, and certainly I don’t think the Pentagon signed off on it.”

Trump mostly projects strength internally. But there’s also been at least one quiet moment when a source saw Trump reflect on how he doesn’t know what Kim is capable of.

That happened during the escalating verbal sparring between Kim and Trump last year: “The stakes had moved so far beyond what he’s dealt with before, he definitely became aware of that.”

P.S. Trump on his planned summit with North Korea, speaking last evening at a joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe:

” If we don’t think it’s going to be successful, … we won’t have it. … If I think that it’s a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we’re not going to go. If the meeting, when I’m there, is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting.”

Right. He’ll just get up and “respectfully” walk out.

Oh my God.