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Month: May 2018

Thoughts on Impeachment

Published by digby on May 11, 2018

Thoughts on Impeachment

 by digby

My Salon column today on the “I” word:

In Thursday night in Indiana, President Trump made another one of his “jokes” about extending his presidency beyond eight years. He was talking about how he had wanted to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and was told that might take 10 years.

It’s not the first time he has alluded to staying in office past 2024. (It goes without saying, in his world, that he will be re-elected in 2020.) Speaking before a group of GOP donors last March he talked about Chinese president Xi Jinping saying, “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.”

It’s always hard to know how to take Trump’s “jokes,” since he really doesn’t have a sense of humor beyond making fun of others. So these little quips feel freighted with more meaning than your average throwaway line. He’s not exactly serious, but it reveals his mindset. He may understand that “extending the presidency” isn’t in the cards but it’s pretty obvious he wishes it were.

Perhaps it’s the usual Trumpish upside-down logic at play, since he and the Republicans are actually running on the idea that he may not even finish out his first term if they don’t hold their congressional majority in November. He didn’t mention that in Indiana, but he’s made it clear in earlier rallies:

Last month Jonathan Martin of the New York Times reported that Trump’s advisers had finally gotten through to him that the House was in serious jeopardy of falling into Democratic hands in the midterms — and that impeachment was on the table, which would naturally galvanize him since the only thing that matters to Trump is Trump. But the strategy is really about motivating Republicans who have been showing less enthusiasm for the election throughout the first year of the administration.

The thinking goes that if Trump is threatened the party will rally to save him, because he’s much more popular than the GOP leaders in Congress. Midterm elections are always seen as a referendum on the president these days anyway, so Republicans are counting on their rabid Trump base to come out and support their man.

This exhortation from NRA TV makes the point clearly:

Maybe that “extending the term” thing isn’t so fanciful after all. And to think the NRA used to carry on about the tree of liberty needing to be watered with the blood of tyrants.

But the problem for the Republicans in November isn’t the loyal Trump cavaliers who are ready to die for their king. If they want to win legitimately, they need to persuade reluctant Trump voters who held their noses in 2016 to contemplate two years of impeachment drama and then come out and vote for him all over again rather than go through all that.

The argument that we wouldn’t want to distract the nation with an impeachment inquiry rings just a little hollow, however, amid the 24/7 reality show and tweet pageant we’re already witnessing. Those reluctant Trump voters know that’s not going to change as long as he’s in office. If anything, the shift of focus to the Congress might seem like a welcome change of the channel.

NeverTrumper David Frum made an interesting observation in the Atlantic about this strategy, which sounds plausible to me:

To survive, President Trump needs more than Republican votes, more than a Republican hold on one chamber or the other. He needs active Republican complicity in his future efforts to deflect investigations, whatever they may pursue. As his legal situation deteriorates, some Republicans from marginal seats may be tempted to drift away, to let justice take its course — possibly even to say or do something if justice is obstructed. Trump needs all of them bolted down, and the surest way to bolt them down is to force all Congress members to commit themselves early and fully to his protection. 

Removal from office requires 67 votes in the Senate — and a broad consensus in the country that the president must go. It cannot effectively be carried out on a party-line basis, as Republicans painfully discovered during the Clinton presidency. By forcing Republicans to disavow impeachment now, Trump narrows the risks of defection later. It’s not just about the midterm results. It’s about press-ganging every last Republican, down to the most reluctant, aboard Trump’s voyage of the damned.

But what of the Democrats in all this? It’s true that Rep. Maxine Waters of California, and a few others in the House, are calling for impeachment. That’s not surprising. Recall that during the early stages of the Whitewater investigation, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced a resolution directing the House Judiciary Committee “to undertake an inquiry into whether grounds exist to impeach William Jefferson Clinton, the President of the United States.” That was months before the Lewinsky affair became public knowledge. But even when the Lewinsky story was all over the media, House Republicans were reluctant to back Barr’s resolution. The Washington Post reported in February of 1998:

House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) said “I don’t think we have the kind of evidentiary basis to be talking about impeachment at this time. I don’t really think you should, when it’s such an important matter and it’s frankly still in the abstract.”

“An impeachment proceeding must be bipartisan in the final analysis. … It can’t be seen as a purely political, vindictive, partisan exercise,” says House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), who opposes Barr’s resolution as “premature” until independent counsel Kenneth Starr comes up with hard evidence. “There’s no need to leap before we know where we’re jumping.”

A few months later, Hyde was running the impeachment investigation.

The Democratic leadership is following the same playbook with Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., published an op-ed in the New York Times last weekend that made almost exactly the same points. By all accounts, very few Democratic candidates in the midterms are featuring impeachment as a prominent campaign issue. So far, the only people bringing up the “I word” are Republicans.

Nonetheless, Democrats would be foolish to try to pretend that Donald Trump’s metastasizing scandals don’t exist at all. They have voters too — who are motivated and energized in opposition to everything Trump is and everything he does. They’ve taken to the streets in massive numbers. They’ve organized grassroots groups all over the country. They’ve run for office. They’ve and created and enlarged mass movements around progressive issues. Indeed, they’ve done everything citizens can do short of revolution to oppose this president. The Democrats will have to respond in some way to this demand that Trump be opposed rather than appeased.

But they don’t need to run on impeachment. They can simply address the fact that the Republican leadership in Congress is refusing to exercise its constitutional duty of oversight, and promise that they will hold public hearings and get to the bottom of what happened in 2016. In other words, they should promise to do the job they are signing up for — and promise to let the chips fall where they may.

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Engage the fringe but wear gloves by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 11, 2018

Engage the fringe but wear gloves
by Tom Sullivan

Questioning orthodoxies is a perilous undertaking at any time. Nonetheless, as a priest friend says, it is a healthy thing, now and then, to spit on your idols.

Michelle Goldberg spends her column inches this morning searching for the line between debating taboo ideas and legitimizing them. It is a process akin to what the alt-right calls being “red-pilled” (see “The Matrix”) where “one reality seems to crumble in the face of another.”

Several trips to the West Bank left Goldberg questioning previous assumptions about Israel as the good guy in its dealings with Palestinians. “For my own part,” she writes, “I didn’t emerge as an anti-Zionist, exactly, but anti-Zionist arguments I’d previously dismissed began to make sense.” Immersion in taboo ideas helped her form a clearer understanding of the conflict.

Now encounters with the alt-right and the Intellectual Dark Web have Goldberg wondering if attempts on the left to suppress fringe ideas are working. That seems only to make forbidden ideas seem edgy, like “seductive secret knowledge.” Counter to the right’s culture of perpetual victimhood, it is not as if its views get no play in the press, she writes, but loud shaming by the left can act more like an accelerant than a suppressant:

Consider, for example, how an online mob turned a Utah teenager who wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom into a national news story. The sanctimony and censoriousness of the social justice internet is like a machine for producing red pills. It makes people think it’s daring to, say, acknowledge that men and women are different, or pick on immigrants, or praise the president of the United States.

Goldberg explains:

Countering right-wing movements that thrive on transgression is a challenge. One of the terrifying things about Trump’s victory is that it appeared to put the fundamental assumptions underlying pluralistic liberal democracy up for debate, opening an aperture for poisonous bigotry to seep into the mainstream. In California, a man named Patrick Little, who said he was inspired by Trump, is running for U.S. Senate on a platform of removing Jews from power; in one recent state poll 18 percent of respondents supported him. On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Juan Pablo Andrade, an adviser to the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, praised the Nazis at a Turning Point USA conference. ([Candace] Owens, [Kanye] West’s new friend, is Turning Point’s communications director.)

It’s a natural response — and, in some cases, the right response — to try to hold the line against political reaction, to shame people who espouse shameful ideas. But shame is a politically volatile emotion, and easily turns into toxic resentment. It should not be overused. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between ideas that deserve a serious response, and those that should be only mocked and scorned. I do know that people on the right benefit immensely when they can cultivate the mystique of the forbidden.

Debating toxic ideas might may risk legitimizing them, but refusing to “conveys a message of weakness, a lack of faith in one’s own ideas,” Goldberg writes, never having found where to draw that line.

As for entertaining fringe ideas, David Brooks suggests that Donald Trump’s immersion in the thuggish culture New York real estate might actually have better prepared him to deal with international thugs than diplomats schooled by our Foreign Service academies. Brooks considers that on China, North Korea and Iran, Trump’s lizard brain might be right:

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here. The world is a lot more like the Atlantic City real estate market than the G.R.E.s.

The problem with Trump is he’s a one-trick pony. His entire world is Atlantic City. Trump doesn’t do nuance.

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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.

Lower than low

Published by digby on May 11, 2018

Lower than low

by digby

John McCain was a prisoner of war, suffered egregious wounds and is now fighting cancer. You don’t have to be a Republican or a McCain supporter to think this is grotesque:

Obviously, the White House run by the sadistic psychopath who says he loves torture is also in on the act:

A White House official mocked Sen. John McCain’s brain cancer diagnosis at an internal meeting on Thursday, a day after the Arizona Republican announced his opposition to President Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel.

Special assistant Kelly Sadler made the derisive comments during a closed-door White House meeting of about two-dozen communications staffers on Thursday morning.

“It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway,” Sadler said, according to a source familiar with the remarks at the meeting.

The White House did not deny the account of Sadler’s remarks, which came amid a discussion of Haspel’s nomination and McCain’s opposition to it.

“We respect Senator McCain’s service to our nation and he and his family are in our prayers during this difficult time,” the White House said in a statement to The Hill.

Sadler did not respond to a request for comment and the White House did not make her available to The Hill.

The Thursday morning meeting was led by deputy press secretary Raj Shah. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was not present. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway showed up to the meeting after the remark was made, according to the first source.

A source who heard Sadler’s remarks could not confirm her exact wording, but agreed that Sadler made comments along the lines described by the first source.

Both sources said they believed the comment was intended as a joke, but that it did not go over well with others at the meeting.

There was “discomfort” in the room after Sadler’s comment and the conversation continued without addressing it, according to the second source.

Sadler is a former opinion editor for The Washington Times. At the White House, she focuses on illegal immigration, often sending out press releases to highlight stories about the issue to reporters.

The White House is engaged in a high-stakes nomination fight for Haspel, who faces opposition from many senators for her association with harsh interrogation techniques as a CIA agent after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, urged his Senate colleagues to oppose Haspel’s nomination, saying that “her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying.”

The president has long had a fraught relationship with McCain, who has been a sharp and unrelenting critic of Trump and his administration.

In a speech shortly after announcing his presidential bid in 2015, Trump responded to criticism from McCain by saying “he’s not a war hero” because he was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese.

“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said at the time.

McCain’s office declined to comment on Sadler’s remark.

I’m not one to idolize John McCain’s maverickyness.

These people have lost their souls.

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You work for Trump, you’re going to be humiliated

Published by digby on May 11, 2018

You work for Trump, you’re going to be humiliated

by digby


That’s just the deal:

Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told colleagues she was close to resigning after President Trump berated her on Wednesday in front of the entire cabinet for what he said was her failure to adequately secure the nation’s borders, according to several current and former officials familiar with the episode.

Ms. Nielsen, who is a protégée of John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, has drafted a resignation letter but has not submitted it, according to two of the people. As the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Ms. Nielsen is in charge of the 20,000 employees who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Trump’s anger toward Ms. Nielsen, who was sitting several seats to his left at the meeting, was part of a lengthy tirade in which the president railed at his cabinet about what he said was its lack of progress toward sealing the country’s borders against illegal immigrants, according to one person who was present at the meeting.
[…]
Mr. Trump’s anger about immigration has grown in recent weeks, according to several officials. He repeatedly claimed credit for the fact that during his first year in office, illegal border crossings dropped to their lowest levels in decades. But this year, they have risen again, robbing him of one of his favorite talking points.

In remarks to reporters before Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Trump hinted at the anger that would cause him to erupt once TV cameras were led out of the room.

“We’ve very much toughened up the border, but the laws are horrible,” Mr. Trump said. “The laws in this country for immigration and illegal immigration are absolutely horrible. And we have to do something about it — not only the wall, which we’re building sections of wall right now.”

One person familiar with Mr. Trump’s blowup at the meeting said it was prompted by a discussion about why Mexico was not doing more to prevent illegal border crossings into the United States. Another person said the president was primarily focused on the Homeland Security Department because he viewed Ms. Nielsen as primarily responsible for keeping illegal immigrants out of the country.

During the meeting, Mr. Trump yelled about the United States’ porous border and said more needed to be done to fix it. When members of his cabinet pointed out that the country relies on day laborers who cross the border each day, Mr. Trump said that was fine, but continued to complain, one person said.

The president also complained about the continued failure of his administration to find a way to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, two people familiar with the episode said.

Ms. Nielsen viewed the president’s rant as directed mostly at her, and she told associates after the meeting that she should not continue in the job if he did not view her as effective. One person close to Ms. Nielsen said she was miserable in her job.

Mr. Trump has clashed with Ms. Nielsen for weeks about his belief that more should be done to secure the border. In early April, the president repeatedly expressed frustration with Ms. Nielsen that her department was not doing enough to close loopholes that were allowing illegal immigrants into the country, according to one official familiar with those discussions.

During those discussions, officials had presented Mr. Trump with a list of proposals that would help border agents crack down on those trying to cross the border illegally and send them back more quickly. The president urged Ms. Nielsen to be more aggressive, the official said.

One persistent issue has been Mr. Trump’s belief that Ms. Nielsen and other officials in the department were resisting his direction that parents be separated from their children when families cross illegally into the United States, several officials said. The president and his aides in the White House had been pushing a family separation policy for weeks as a way of deterring families from trying to cross the border illegally.

God was an evil scumbag he is.

Anyway…

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has been increasingly focused on the obstacles to immigration changes, even in public speeches where he had planned to talk about other topics.

“We don’t have laws. We have laws that were written by people that truly could not love our country,” the president told members of the National Rifle Association last week in Dallas during lengthy remarks about immigration.

“We’re going to start defending our country. We’re going to start defending our borders,” he said with the same enthusiasm that he demonstrated when he talked about immigration during his campaign.

Neilson doesn’t like being yelled at by a cretinous asshole. I wonder how she’d feel if she was desperate to escape violence and poverty to protect her kids and a cretinous asshole declared that she could just go die in order to appease a bunch of racists? Probably not too good.

By the way, the reason he’s so angry is because Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham are screaming about his failure to rid the country of the Latino scourge. He feels impotent.

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Lickspittle leadership

Published by digby on May 10, 2018

Lickspittle leadership

by digby


The uncivil left is really getting out of hand these days:

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.

Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praised him as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

Henry Adams said that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. The audience for his praise of Arpaio was given to chanting “Build that wall!” and applauded Arpaio, who wears Trump’s pardon like a boutonniere.

Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years — December 1816 to March 1830 — in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

I’m sure you’re wondering which dirty hippie at the Washington Post wrote that perspicacious screed.

George F. Will.

The world has gone mad.

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Roundheads and cavaliers

Published by digby on May 10, 2018

Roundheads and cavaliers

by digby

It looks like the right wingers have literally become monarchists. Or at least they think Donald Trump is their king:

This is, of course, all about the GOP mid-term strategy to get the deplorables to the polls: do whatever you have to do to save your Dear Leader from having to answer for his crimes.

Of course they all pretend there were not crimes. But they know he’s dirty. They know. And a large number of them apparently admire him for it.

Pay-to-play? Sure. But that can’t be the whole story

Published by digby on May 10, 2018

Pay-to-play? Sure. But that can’t be the whole story


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton pretty much consisted of two messages. He claimed she didn’t have the “strength and stamina” to be president which was really a straight up sexist and ageist hit on her for being an older woman. The fact that he is older than she is simply wasn’t relevant and neither is the fact that we now know he felt the need to dictate his own medical report indicates he wasn’t sure enough of his own good health to undergo a real physical. And it turns out that Trump spends more time watching TV, golfing and enjoying “executive time” than any president in modern memory. He’s not exactly the energizer bunny

The other main theme, of course, was “crooked Hillary” in which he accused her of being corrupt, traitorous and criminal over and over again.

Recall this ad, which encapsulated that running theme:

Remember that Trump was the one who bragged about buying politicians and who was actually involved in a pay-to-play scheme during the campaign, when he paid off Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to drop the state’s suit against Trump University. She did so, became a top Trump supporter and was considered for a job in the Cabinet.

After the revelations this week about Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime Trump Organization executive Michael Cohen, it has become clear that pay-to-play was baked into his administration from the beginning. Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, released a document detailing a series of suspicious payments made to Cohen’s shadowy LLC, Essential Consultants, which was ostensibly created for the purpose of paying hush money to Daniels. The payments came from several companies, including AT&T and the drug company Novartis, which was surprising. What raised the most eyebrows was a payment of nearly half a million dollars from a company associated with one of the richest oligarchs in Russia. Several of these companies have admitted paying Cohen for his “insights” into the Trump administration and vague “consulting services,” all of which add up to one thing: pay to play. Michael Cohen is not a guy anyone would ever accuse of having insight into anything.

But he did have a close relationship with the president of the United States, and he was still helping him “fix” problems like Stormy Daniels. Apparently these companies thought he could fix something for them as well.

According to news reports, we are supposed to believe that Michael Cohen cold-called a major drug manufacturer’s CEO and pitched his services. The company, Novartis, agreed to pay $1.3 million over the course of a year for his services. Then, when some Novartis executives met with Cohen in person they concluded that “this was a probably a slippery slope to engage him” and decided not to bother asking him to do any work. But they paid him in full anyway because they didn’t want to anger the president.

You have to wonder where the Novartis brass got the idea that the president might take out his anger on the company if they canceled a contract with a guy who, at least officially, didn’t even work for Trump anymore. Did Cohen “suggest” that? He has certainly made veiled and not-so-veiled threats on Trump’s behalf in the past. In fact, that was a big part of his job description.

According to The Washington Post, companies were eager to work with anyone associated with Trump, and Cohen landed a cushy spot with the high-powered law firm of Squire Patton Boggs, which signed him to a $500,000 deal. They showed him off like a prize pony to impress clients with their own Trump insider. It’s not as bizarre as it seems that Cohen was able to work this pay-to-play angle with big-name companies, and if it doesn’t pass the ethical smell test, it also isn’t blatantly illegal.

But why in the world would Cohen accept large wads of cash for access to Trump from a Russian-affiliated company at the same time that the new president was the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation for possible conspiracy with Russia? The story is that Cohen happened to meet up with Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive, at the Trump inauguration. Intrater attended that event with his cousin, Viktor Vekselberg, who is one of the richest men in Russia and a close associate of Vladimir Putin. They claim they just wanted Cohen’s consulting expertise, but I think we know by now that’s absurd. The question for Special Counsel Robert Mueller is whether or not this was some kind of bribe and whether these guys knew they were sending money to a company that was paying off the president’s onetime girlfriend. That would have been a nice little bit of kompromat if they did.

The financial documents released by Avenatti also appear to show the byzantine payment scheme between Cohen and Elliott Broidy, the former Republican National Committee finance chair and major Trump donor. Broidy allegedly used Cohen to pay $1.6 million to his onetime Playboy Playmate mistress who had terminated a pregnancy, with Cohen getting $250,000 on top of that in installments. That one remains a curious case as well.

This analysis by Paul Campos in New York magazine puts together all the publicly available details and speculates convincingly that Broidy was actually fronting for Donald Trump, a man whose relationships with Playboy Playmates are well known. In fact, Broidy has done this sort of thing before:

Maybe the facts will prove that Cohen was simply selling access to the president and foolishly used the same Delaware LLC that he created to pay off Stormy Daniels and later used to pay off Broidy’s mistress as well. But that doesn’t seem likely, especially since the feds have come down on him like a ton of bricks for some reason. He may have scraped up a few corporate clients who thought it would be a good idea to grease the president’s old associate, but this scheme looks like it was really about porn-star payoffs and covering up potential scandal. After all, that’s Cohen’s real field of expertise.

Those documents also show that there’s a lot more cash that passed through Essential Consulting than can be attributed to these clients. The question is, who else was paying and for what? And where is all that money?

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That excellent Kim Jong Un

Published by digby on May 10, 2018

That excellent Kim Jong Un

by digby

The Baby President in full-effect:

President Trump’s tarmac greeting of the three American prisoners that North Korea released was a definite achievement for the White House ahead of the upcoming summit over North Korea’s nuclear program. As NBC’s Peter Alexander said on “Today,” it was a made-for-TV moment – even after 3:00 am ET.

“I think you probably broke the all-time, in history, television rating for three o’clock in the morning – that I would say,” Trump declared.

But the feel-good moment from the prisoners’ release also contained these words from the president: “We want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people. They are really three incredible people. And the fact that we were able to get them out so soon was really a tribute to a lot of things, including a certain process that’s taking place right now. And that process is very important.”

Kim Jong-un was excellent to those three Americans?

In the span of a few moments after 3:00 am ET, we saw the very best of Trump (a televised prisoner release), as well as the very worst (praise for a dictator who delivered something the president wanted).

He also said that Kim was “nice” because he let the prisoners go early, which means nothing since these meetings always feature such gestures and it has absolutely nothing to do with being “nice.”

He sounds like an ignorant child. But then, he’s a man who called Kim a short, fat “little rocket man” and is now saying he’s excellent because he thinks that will result in Kim giving up his nuclear weapons. His playground view of world politics is obvious.

What is clear is that Trump believes that by meeting Kim in person he is enhancing his own prestige, rather than the other way around. He just loves the attention and thinks he’ll win the Nobel Prize and make Obama cry.

The truth is that Kim is the one who has had his prestige massively enhanced because he’s got the president travelling around the world to meet with him and calling him excellent. Too bad about all that dictatory stuff but then Trump doesn’t care about that anyway. In fact, he admires it.

I still don’t know why they (and by they I mean Bolton and all the Republicans) thought it was a good idea to stage a big show of withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal just as he’s trying to forge this nuclear deal with North Korea unless they want this deal to fail. Bolton, of course, has made it clear that he thinks that regime change in Iran and North Korea is the only answer so perhaps it’s just that simple.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and something good will come of this chaos. The three prisoners being released certainly is. But if it does, it will be because others are playing a smarter game than Trump. As long as they flatter and fete him he’s putty in their hands. Let’s hope that Kim Jong Un really wants to give up his nuclear weapons.

Yeah, I know.

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They love that dirty water by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 10, 2018

They love that dirty water
by Tom Sullivan

It is increasingly difficult not to make this morning post a compendium of scandal and political chicanery. Consuming the daily news is no longer like drinking from a fire hose, but a sewer line.

The political swamp Trump promised to drain simply got slimier. International corporations saw Trump’s election as an invitation to a drunken pool party and jumped in to wallow fully clothed with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. They poured cash on Cohen claiming payments to this fourth-rate attorney from the country’s worst law school were for such transparently ludicrous services as “insights” on the administration (AT&T), health-care policy consulting work (Novartis), and “legal consulting concerning accounting standards on production costs” (Korea Aerospace Industries).

Naturally, Cohen funneled the payments through the very same LLC he set up to handle hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Some $500,000 arrived from Columbus Nova, a firm linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The United states sanctioned Columbus Nova last month over the Kremlin’s attempting to subvert U.S. elections and other western democracies. In a statement, Columbus Nova claims it paid Cohen $500,000 “as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.”

Lesser-known Trump donors and hangers-on set up lobbying shops in Washington after the election, reports Politico. Marquee Trump sycophants received Cabinet appointments.

Oleaginous is the sort of word that rolls off George Will’s tongue. He deploys it this morning in describing Vice President Mike Pence. Will writes, “with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness,” Pence is “America’s most repulsive public figure.” No perhaps about it, in Will’s view. Because Pence is “the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.”

That is, for Trump lackeys without a taste for red meat. Will’s Washington Post colleague Dana Milbank offers a competing candidate for Washington’s worst.

Sen. Tom Cotton’s performance during the Gina Haspel confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee had Milbank thanking the deities Cotton was not the one up for confirmation to lead the CIA. The Arkansas Republican had been on Trump’s short list for the post. Instead of questioning Haspel, Cotton used his time to take “gratuitous partisan swipes” at Democrats on the committee.

Cotton interrupted again as Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) gave closing remarks about former CIA director John Brennan’s views on torture:

Warner winced and looked over at Cotton. “Excuse me,” he said.

Cotton kept on heckling. “That would be the same Mr. Brennan who supports her nomination!”

Chairman Richard Burr (N.C.) hammered the gavel to silence his fellow Republican.

“The senator will suspend,” he ordered.

Cotton ignored Burr. “We need the full record on the record!” he continued.

“No,” Burr repeated. “The senator will suspend.”

Cotton still refused. “John Brennan supports her nomination!” he said, before quieting.

“And I regret,” Milbank writes, mocking a statement from Cotton as the embodiment of Trump’s Washington, “that this rage-filled man can’t understand that his opponents are not his enemies.”

The New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz “reported” yesterday that President Donald Trump plans to pull out of the United States Constitution, calling it “maybe the worst deal ever.” The whole branches of government thing has to go. But the Second Amendment can stay.

Plus, of course, the Fifth.

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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.

If it’s negative it must be fake

Published by digby on May 10, 2018

If it’s negative it must be fake

by digby

Because everything is going perfectly.

Another revelatory gaffe from the president:

He was spending his morning watching “Fox and Friends,” as he is wont to do, and up flashed a report from the Media Research Center stating that 91 percent of network news coverage of Trump from January through April was negative. The Media Research Center, we’ll note, is part of the conglomerate of conservative enterprises funded by Robert Mercer and his family, the folks that also funded Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart and former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

But they know their audience, and their audience was watching.

The important thing in that tweet is not the threat about the credentials, though rescinding White House credentials would certainly be a nuisance. The important part is that he makes explicit his view of what constitutes fake news.

It’s negative news. Negative. (Fake.)

He revoked credentials during the campaign so people shouldn’t be too sure that he won’t do it again.

I think he really believes he is the best president the world has ever seen and everyone loves him. His only problem is that the media is critical of him. This delusion is how he gets through the day.