Month: May 2018

A sweet little super-hero

by digby

It’s going to be a long week full of the Trump and Rudy show and torture and lying and all the usual horror of this era. So, I thought I’d share a wonderful, good-news story to remind us that the world is not all dark and ugly:

He is faster than a speeding stroller, more adorable than a kitten, and able to get a stranger’s attention with a single courtesy. This is America’s latest superhero — and the only superhero with the power to feed the homeless.

By day, Austin Perine is a mild-mannered 4-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama. But once a week, he turns into this alter ego: a superhero set on feeding as many homeless people as possible. He likes to go by the name “President Austin.”

“That’s his idea of what the president is supposed to do,” said TJ Perine, Austin’s father. “I was like, buddy, you have no idea, but hey, I’m going along with it.”

TJ says this all began when they were watching a TV show about pandas. It showed a mama panda abandoning a baby, and TJ told his son the cub was now homeless.

“He says, ‘What’s homeless?’ I said, ‘It’s when you don’t have a home and sometimes you don’t have mom or dad around,'” said TJ.

That’s when Austin asked: are people homeless?

Watch the video. It will warm your heart and validate your belief that people are not born with hate in their hearts, they are taught to do it:

There’s a tiny superhero with a special gift for capturing the hearts of the homeless in Alabama

Steve Hartman caught up with the caped crusader @OnTheRoadCBS https://t.co/Wjjs1fbN9B pic.twitter.com/s3Lsh51a0L— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) May 4, 2018

Dad seems like a pretty cool guy too. 🙂

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Will Haspell withdraw?

by digby

Let’s hope so:

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. officials.

Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said. 

Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump learned of the drama Friday, calling officials from his trip to Dallas. He decided to push for Haspel to remain as the nominee after initially signaling he would support whatever decision was taken, administration officials said.

Haspel, who serves as the CIA’s deputy director and has spent 33 years in the agency, most of it undercover, faces some opposition in Congress because of her connection to the interrogation program, which was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In late 2002, Haspel oversaw a secret CIA detention facility in Thailand, where one al-Qaeda suspect was waterboarded. Another detainee also was waterboarded before Haspel’s arrival.

Three years later, Haspel was involved in the CIA’s destruction of nearly 100 videotapes that recorded the men’s interrogations, touching off an investigation by a special prosecutor who ultimately decided not to bring charges against those involved. 

“There has been a fascinating phenomenon over the last few weeks. Those who know the true Gina Haspel — who worked with her, who served with her, who helped her confront terrorism, Russia and countless other threats to our nation — they almost uniformly support her,” said Ryan Trapani, a CIA spokesman. “That is true for people who disagree about nearly everything else. There is a reason for that. When the American people finally have a chance to see the true Gina Haspel on Wednesday, they will understand why she is so admired and why she is and will be a great leader for this agency.”

Personally, I think anyone who was involved in that hideous program should have been fired at the very least and in a just world, prosecuted.This was a war crime perpetrated by the United States and people should have been held accountable. I don’t care how great a CIA operative any of them were.

But my God — making one of the torturers and a person involved in the destruction of evidence the Director of the CIA? It really could not be more of a signal that the US is no longer a civilized nation.

I’ll be surprised if she withdraws and even more surprised if she isn’t confirmed. After all the violent psychopath president of the United States ran on an explicitly pro-torture platform:

And he still loves it:

I will be shocked if she withdraws. But she should.

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Catching up with the cray


by digby

I’m just going to throw these up here in case you missed the latest.  It’s getting so surreal that I think we must be hitting a new phase. I don’t have any idea what it will be:

It’s all crazy. But Nunes threatening to hold Sessions in contempt for failing to turn over all the probable cause to investigate Trump and his associates to Nunes and the House Republicans.

The same Nunes who was caught red handed doing a big kabuki dance rushing up to the White House to inform them that he’d “discovered” un-masking of Trump officials only to be revealed to have been passed the information from the White House in the dead of night.

I don’t think I have to spell out what he would do with the evidence about the Mueller investigation.

KellyAnne was just outrageous this morning with the spin. I don’t know why anyone bothers to have her on frankly.

And Rudy. Oh dear. The petting his arm like a cat thing. I think he had a few too many Limoncellos before he went on the air.

Here’s the interview with Rudy on Stephanopoulos:

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QOTD: A Republican

by digby

That’s a pretty shocking statement from a Republican, wouldn’t you say? They have been so silent about Trump’s pussy-grabbing, lying and corruption.

That’s VP Mike Pence, talking about Bill Clinton.

One hopes that people will take this into account should Trump fail to complete his term or decide not to run again. Pence is his chief enabler and a man with no more of a moral compass than Trump.

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Now they notice?

by digby

It’s interesting that a number of Trump supporters have spoken out on the president lying about his payment to Stormy Daniels.

The recent collapse of Trump’s lies about his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels has prompted conservative media outlets to hit the panic button.

Several right-wing outlets and personalities have taken a quick break from helping to prop up Trump’s unpopular presidency to criticize how he and his team have handled the story.

Newly hired Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has created yet another slow-motion trainwreck for this administration, this time consisting of a series of television appearances and newspaper interviews in which Giuliani admitted Trump paid Michael Cohen to funnel money to Daniels in exchange for her pre-election silence.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto complained on-air in a commentary directed to Trump: “How can you drain the swamp if you’re the one who keeps muddying the waters?”

Citing Trump’s direct denials of the payments, in contrast to the evidence now known about the transaction, Cavuto said, “I’m having a devil of a time figuring out which news is fake.”

The criticism echoes some elements of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ press briefing, where she effectively admitted that Trump had lied about the details of the story when it first broke.

Cavuto told Trump “your own words” give “lots of pause.” He concluded, “I guess you’re too busy draining the swamp to ever stop and smell the stink you’re creating. That’s your doing. That’s your stink. Mr. President, that’s your swamp.”

An editorial from the Wall Street Journal called out Trump’s “public deceptions” and noted “the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have.”

The conservative newspaper highlighted the crisis of credibility that Trump has created as he repeatedly lied about the payoff, and now “wants everyone to believe a new story that he could have told the first time.”

In their conclusion, the Journal writes, “Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis,” and, “Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.”

This is what it took for them to become alarmed? Lying about when he knew about the Stormy payment?

He recently passed the 3,000 lies as president mark:

According to the Washington Post, which has been diligently noting down every single falsehood along with The Fact Checker’s database, Trump’s 3,001 untrue claims have come at a quicker rate lately. 

In the first 100 days, he told 4.9 lies, whereas in the last two months he’s told an average of nine a day. 

It isn’t just the frequency of his lying that’s a surprise either – it’s the repetition of old lies. The Washington Post found Trump repeated 113 untrue claims at least three times apiece.

He’s a pathological liar and they know it. But they seem to have decided that it’s time to step in and say something about it.  I wonder why?

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Every once in a while they just go nuts

by digby

I’m just going to leave this here:

Worth bearing in mind when reflecting on loyalty of DJT support:
– In 1932, in teeth of Great Depression, with discredited Herbert Hoover running against ascendant FDR, Hoover still got FORTY PERCENT of the popular vote!
There is, and always has been, such a thing as “the base.”— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 5, 2018

It is important to keep in mind that there has always been a right wing in America and there always will be. It is a large faction and every once in a while they get extreme, usually with hubris because they believe they are “tougher” and “braver” than the other side. Trump is the funhouse mirror of this line of thought.

They are not going anywhere. But they are nuts right now and they need to be blocked at all costs.

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“You can’t compromise with demography”
by Tom Sullivan

There was a time you couldn’t find a Republican in his county, Bob Kuppers told me last night. They existed in the western mountains, but wouldn’t admit to it. Now Democrats like him are the ones fighting to re-exert themselves. They won’t be cowed. Kuppers is running to reclaim the NC state senate seat lost in 2010 after Art Pope, North Carolina’s own mini-Koch brother, injected nearly a million dollars into the district, personally and through his independent political groups. It was “a huge amount in a poor, backwoods district,” Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker in “State For Sale.”

The district’s red shift is in part a reflection of the rural-urban divide. But that tension exists in part because, not unlike adopting abortion as a political weapon, conservatives see exacerbating the “divide” as electorally useful. Wherever they can drive the wedge deeper, they will so long as it wins elections.

I have argued abandoning rural America out of spite over Trump’s election is counterproductive. The map is the math. So long as state legislatures control decennial redistricting, Republican majorities there will have the power to cement themselves in power, privatize public infrastructure and schools, enact voting restrictions on minorities, and rig the rest to render government of, by and for the people a phrase reserved for talking mannequins in the Hall of Presidents. And they will control Washington, D.C. too.

There are only so many urban areas for the left to win and, in many states, not enough seats there to form a governing majority. Ignoring the rest is not an option. The alternative is not moral compromise, but victory.

Leonard Pitts is of no mood to invest energy in understanding Trump voters in such places. It is a mistake to try, he believes:

Long before Trump even existed as a political force, many of us noted with alarm the rise of a backlash among right wingers deeply angry and profoundly terrified by the writing on the demographic wall. Said writing foretold — and for that matter, still foretells — the declining preeminence of white, Christian America. As several studies now show, a sense of alarmed displacement among white, Christian America is the soil from which the weed of Trumpism grew.

A reflex for understanding opponents “bespeaks a great generosity of spirit,” Pitts writes. And in normal times, it might have merit. But these are not normal times.

No compromise is possible here for a simple reason Trump followers seem to understand better than the rest of us: You can’t compromise with demography, can’t order numbers to stop being what they are and saying what they say about the coming tide of change. But what you can do is seize the levers of power and change the rules of the game in hopes of blunting the force of that tide. That — again, look at the studies — is what Trump supporters elected him to do.

So while, it is admirable to think “understanding” can fix this country, it is also naive. Progressives should ask themselves: When’s the last time you heard any Trump supporters talking about the need to understand you? You haven’t — and that ought to tell you something.

They don’t need to be understood, Pitts concludes. They need to be defeated.

But that cannot be accomplished simply by winning statewide races by bigger margins in Los Angeles or Chicago. The fight is in rural areas less welcoming to progressive politics. Progressives have to compete there. They have to win state Senate and House seats there. It’s math.

Donald Trump brought his campaign to Duplin County in rural, eastern North Carolina, a campaign operative observed Friday over coffee. Kenansville, NC to be precise, quadrupling the town’s population.

“The whole county shut down. They closed the schools. The sheriff’s department provided an escort,” he said. Hillary Clinton visited the bright blue spaces and sent campaign surrogates there. Clinton won the cities. Trump won the state.

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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.

Trump’s lurid fantasies

by digby

At the NRA Convention yesterday:“Right in the middle is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds,” he said. “Yes, that’s right,” he went on. “They don’t have guns, they have knives. And it’s said that there’s blood all over the floors at this hospital. They say it’s as bad as a military-war-zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives.”

(This, btw, is just some wet dream of his. Nobody knows wtf he’s talking about.)

CPAC: “are animals, they cut people. They cut ’em. They cut ’em up in little pieces, and they want them to suffer.

In the White House: “They are killing people. Not necessarily with guns because that is not painful enough,” the president opined. “They want to do it more painfully… and slowly. So they cut them up with knives. They don’t use guns, they use knives because they want long, painful death.”

Harrisburg Pennsylvania: “They don’t shoot people because it’s too fast and not painful. They cut them up into little pieces.”

Long Island, New York: “They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.”

There was this one during the campaign:

And this:

Go to about 2:30 — “We’re gonna cut you up sir, we’re gonna cut you up…”

He has a lurid, violent imagination and he’s revealed it repeatedly in public. He gets off on it.

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The isolationist preps for a foreign regime change

by digby

Well sure, this is perfectly fine:

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observercan reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

Ben Rhodes was pn Chris Hayes last week and Chris asked him why he thought these people hated the Iran deal so much. He said, and I think he’s right, that they want an excuse to confront Iram militarily and potentially overthrow the government. After everything we’ve done in the past decade and a half, they still think real men want to go to Tehran.

I would normally point out the utter hypocrisy of this action in light of all the pearl clutching about the Fusion GPS campaign oppo but hypocrisy is not longer operative so I’ll refrain:

According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

You cannot make this shit up.

I mean, this is from today:

Call it impeccable timing: A federal judge in January tossed a lawsuit claiming Donald Trump was in violation of a constitutional ban against using the presidency for financial gain from foreign governments. Less than a month later, Qatar shelled out a cool $6.5 million for new digs in the Trump World Tower in Manhattan.

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“Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”

by digby

They’re calling in the whole posse:

Investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller have interviewed one of President Donald Trump’s closest friends and confidants, California real estate investor Tom Barrack, The Associated Press has learned.

Barrack was interviewed as part of the federal investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The specific topics covered in questions from Mueller’s team were not immediately clear.

One of the people who spoke to AP said the questioning focused entirely on two officials from Trump’s campaign who have been indicted by Mueller: Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s onetime deputy, Rick Gates. Gates agreed to plead guilty to federal conspiracy and false-statement charges in February and began cooperating with investigators.

A second person with knowledge of the Barrack interview said the questioning was broader, including financial matters about the campaign, the transition and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

Barrack’s spokeswoman, Lisa Baker, declined to comment.

Barrack has rare access and insight into Trump going back decades, since their days developing real estate. Barrack played an integral role in the 2016 campaign as a top fundraiser at a time when many other Republicans were shunning the upstart candidate. Barrack later directed Trump’s inauguration.

Barrack, a wealthy real estate investor with close ties to several Mideast leaders, met Trump in 1988 when he negotiated the sale of The Plaza Hotel in New York to Trump. Barrack’s publicist in 2016 described the men as having since “solidified a lifelong friendship between themselves and their families.”

Barrack employed Gates last year, wrapping up operations on the Presidential Inaugural Committee, before Gates was charged by Mueller.

This is downright creepy:

Barrack spoke glowingly of Trump in a CNBC interview in early 2016.

“He’s one of the kindest, and actually most humble, friends that I’ve had,” Barrack said. “I have so much respect for him because at this point in his career, wandering into the milieu was not easy, and he’s changed the dialogue of the debate.”

Barrack also was among the featured speakers at the Republican convention where Trump formally received the nomination.

Days after Trump’s victory in November 2016, Barrack told CBS’ “This Morning” that Trump was like an ultimate fighter during the campaign who used “whatever tools necessary to convey a really disruptive message.” Barrack said America would see “a softer, kinder” Trump now that Trump had won the presidency

Yeah, that’s worked out.

Barrack was the middle man to whom Manafort appealed to get a foothold in the Trump campaign. Barrack put him in touch with Trump. Then he took on Manafort’s butler, Rick Gates, and kept him for months even after the inauguration.

That whole thing was hinky.

Apropos of nothing, the septuagenarian Barrack is being divorced by his third wife, 30 year his junior and mother of his two little kids aged 5 and 3. He has sick money. He’s the guy Trump pretends to be … And Trump would be getting a divorce too if he hadn’t become president I’ll bet.

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