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Month: June 2018

Friday Night Soother: the harrowing climb

Published by digby on June 16, 2018

Friday Night Soother: the harrowing climb

by digby

This week people all over the country watched the saga of this poor little critter with our hearts in our throats. Vox helpfully put together the tick-tock:

Every once in a while, a story comes around that reminds us of the sheer power of grit and determination. This time, it is a raccoon that climbed a UBS Plaza building in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The saga of MPR Raccoon — or #MPRraccoon, as it became known on Twitter — began when people spotted a lonely raccoon stuck on the ledge of a building in downtown St. Paul, including employees of Minnesota Public Radio, who carefully documented his plight.

Tim Nelson, a reporter at MPR, said the building’s maintenance workers had tried to rescue the raccoon by building a makeshift ladder to try to lure it back down to the ground.

It didn’t work. Instead, the raccoon fled to a neighboring building — the 25-story UBS Plaza — and, in a high-stakes gambit, began scaling the side of the concrete tower with his little raccoon paws.

The raccoon made it about 20 stories, according to the New York Times, though it took a break along the way to stretch out and take in the views of downtown St. Paul.

The raccoon reportedly settled on the 23rd floor sometime late Tuesday afternoon for a nap. Animal control officials put food and a trap on the roof in hopes of enticing the raccoon a few stories up, according to MPR.

But otherwise, the raccoon just relaxed, impervious to (or maybe all too aware of?) the humans worried about the fate of a woodland creature best known for breaking into trash cans and having rabies. The hashtag #MPRraccoon began trending on Twitter, and parody accounts popped up. A local CBS affiliate set up a live stream, according to the Washington Post.

The raccoon finally stirred around 10 pm and began ping-ponging between stories, climbing up, then down, then back up.

Finally, the raccoon turned and climbed upward, reaching the top of the building in the early morning hours before dawn.

The confinement was temporary, however: The raccoon was released in a suburb of the Twin Cities, according to Wildlife Management Service, which posted the video of the animal’s scamper to freedom.

The raccoon, it turns out, was a 2-year-old female, whom officials described to the New York Times as “a little skinny but in good shape,” though apparently a bit tired from the climb.

Experts said raccoons climb when they’re stressed. “Raccoons don’t think ahead very much, so raccoons don’t have very good impulse control,” Suzanne MacDonald, a raccoon behavior expert at York University in Toronto, told the Associated Press. “I don’t think the raccoon realized when it started climbing what it was in for.”

Yay! (whew…)

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Believe in yourself

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

Believe in yourself

by digby

Just this …

I don’t know about you, but that weirdly makes me feel better.

Update: I guess this is fake. Boo.

But it is true that Einstein was dismissed for years and toiled in a patent office before he proved the theory of relativity. So… it’s still true. Believe in yourself.

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He knows what his people want to hear

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

He knows what his people want to hear

by digby

He knows. He does not care.

The right wing media are going to play this over and over again and 40% of the public who love this guy no matter what BS he spews on a daily basis will believe him:

Vox explains:

Lie 1: the FBI was working against him during the campaign
“They were plotting against my election,” Trump said, in perhaps the biggest of the four lies.

This is not true. Inspector General Michael Horowitz was quite clear on this point in the report, which reviewed the FBI’s handling of both the Clinton email investigation and the early stages of the Trump-Russia probe. “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed,” Horowitz concluded.

Trump did eventually confront this uncomfortable fact during the interview. He claimed the no bias conclusion was irresponsible, a throwaway line at the end of the report.

Lie 2: the IG “blew it” by concluding the FBI wasn’t biased
“It was a pretty good report, and then I say the IG blew it at the end,” Trump told Fox’s Steve Doocy. The IG report was a horror show. I thought that one sentence of conclusion was ridiculous.”

The conclusion said that the FBI wasn’t biased was not a throwaway conclusion at the end of the report, but a conclusion that’s examined in-depth and repeated with some frequency throughout the report. Chapters five and 12 of the more than 500-page report, for example, look at anti-Trump text messages sent by Peter Strzok, the FBI’s deputy director for counterintelligence, to see if Strzok had allowed his anti-Trump sentiments to affect the investigation.

Investigators took a deep look at Strzok’s conduct after they came across the texts that seemingly threatened the Trump campaign and examined internal FBI records of the meetings concerning Trump that Strzok was involved in. According to Horowitz, they found that “Strzok was not the sole decisionmaker for any of the specific investigative decisions examined,” nor was there any evidence that he exercised inappropriate influence over any investigative decisions.

The conclusion that there was no bias, in short, wasn’t “one line” — it was a conclusion they arrived at after examining a tremendous amount of evidence, and a major focus of the report.

Lie 3: Trump says the IG report says he did nothing wrong
The third Trump lie is that the IG report somehow exonerated him on the question of collusion with Russia during the campaign. “I did nothing wrong, there was no collusion, there was no obstruction. The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that,” Trump said. “I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited.”

This is actually a number of different lies packed into three short sentences; a Russian nesting doll of lies, if you’ll pardon the metaphor.

The IG report did not come to any conclusions about the true nature of Trump-Russia ties. It only covered the appropriateness of the FBI’s conduct in 2016. It couldn’t come to any conclusions about obstruction of justice because Trump didn’t become president until 2017. Likewise, it couldn’t discredit the Mueller investigation because Mueller didn’t take over the investigation until President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey last May.

Lie 4: James Comey is a criminal
And that brings us to our final lie. Fox’s Doocy asked Trump a leading question — “Should James Comey be locked up?” — and the president responded as expected:

Certainly, they just seem like very criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal. What he did was so bad in terms of our Constitution, in terms of the well-being of our country.

Once again, Horowitz’s report closely examined questions raised by Comey’s conduct. He was harshly critical of the former FBI director — “In key moments, then Director Comey chose to deviate from the FBI’s and the Department’s established procedures and norms and instead engaged in his own subjective, ad hoc decisionmaking” — but there’s no evidence in the report that Comey violated any kind of criminal statute, let alone acted unconstitutionally.

In fact, the report concludes, Comey’s decisions during the Clinton email investigation, while questionable, came from his professional judgment and were not the result of any malign intent.

“Comey’s decision was the result of his consideration of the evidence that the FBI had collected during the course of the investigation and his understanding of the proof required to pursue a prosecution under the relevant statutes,” as Horowitz puts it when discussing his closing of the Clinton email case.

So yes, he’s a liar. But his followers will never know it. And if they do, they don’t care.

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2,000 kids and counting…

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

2,000 kids and counting…


by digby

Jeff Sessions and the rest of the fascistic nativists of the Trump administration, including the president, have made it clear that they are separating families to punish children so that people will stop coming to the US to work or to seek asylum. He calls it “deterrence” and says that it’s not his fault if the kids are traumatized. Apparently, it’s their fault because they picked the wrong parents or made the mistake of being born in a “shithole country” that is overwhelmed by violence. (If these kids were any good they’d have been born American, amirite?)

The news is that nearly 2,000 kids have been forcibly separate from parents in the month of May. Who knows how many more since then. We do know that they are running out of space and are talking about setting up some concentration camps at military bases to house them all.

The addled president keeps blathering on about how the Democrats are to blame  and have to pass a new bill but all he has to do is change the policy back to what it was before his neo-confederate punching bag decided to change it. Republicans have a bill they are trying to get passed but the dotard said this morning that he won’t sign it because well, nobody knows. He obviously was doing his elaborate hairstyle while they talked about it on Fox and Friends this morning so he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to think.

Anyway, here’s the run down on the GOP bill from NBC. It’s not good.

And here’s Jeff Sessions smirking his way through a despicable statement on the issue quoting the Bible verses that were last used in American public discourse to justify slavery.

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Is Manafort the worst liar in the world?

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

Is Manafort the worst liar in the world?

by digby

The evidence suggests he is …

He’s going to jail today for trying to tamper with a witness in a federal trial. Big, big no-no.

But, like so many of Trump’s thuggish associates, he just couldn’t seem to help acting like a mobster.

Update: Jesus


In one of his most forceful attacks on the special counsel yet, Rudy Giuliani on Friday claimed the Russia investigation could get “cleaned up” with pardons from President Trump in light Paul Manafort being sent to jail. 

“When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons,” the former New York mayor told the Daily News. 

Giuliani’s stunning remark came hours after a Washington, D.C., judge revoked Manafort’s bail and ordered him to remain behind bars while awaiting his September trial. The ruling came after Robert Mueller’s investigators alleged Manafort had attempted to tamper with witnesses in the Russia investigation.  

Giuliani, who worked as a federal prosecutor for nearly a decade, claimed he had seen no evidence to warrant Manafort being sent to jail. 

“I don’t understand the justification for putting him in jail,” Giuliani, 74, said. “You put a guy in jail if he’s trying to kill witnesses, not just talking to witnesses.”

That’s good news for a whole lot of people under federal indictment. Who knew? 

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Trump really, really loves and envies Kim Jong Un

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

Trump really, really loves and envies Kim Jong Un

by digby

He is also a cretinous moron:

“Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

He said to a reporter later that he was being sarcastic. Bullshit. You tell me if he sounds like he’s being sarcastic:

Earlier this week:

“You know you call people sometimes killers, he is a killer. He’s clearly executing people,” Fox News’ Bret Baier told Mr. Trump.

“He’s a tough guy,” the president responded.

“Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have,” the president continued. “If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy, he’s a great negotiator. But I think we understand each other.”

Baier paused, before pressing, “But he’s still done some really bad things.”

Mr. Trump downplayed Kim’s actions, suggesting Kim isn’t alone in that.

“Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things,” Mr. Trump said. “I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done. Now look, with all of that being said, the answer is yes.”

That 400 pound guy in his bed did some bad things too.

He also signals to every nuclear armed dictator that they have carte blanche to kill as many of their own people as they wish.

Every damn day he proves what an unfit, corrupt imbecile he is. And Repubican love him more than ever.

That economic anxiety is quite a drug.

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Poor Comey was scared to death of Fox News

Published by digby on June 15, 2018

Poor Comey was scared to death of Fox News

 by digby

My Salon column today about the DOJ Inspector General report:

One of the longstanding tropes in the modern conservative movement is that the mainstream media is liberal to its core and incurably biased against them, a charge they hurl relentlessly at the press in all its permutations. This has been going on since at least the 1960s and continues to this day. It is not a sincerely held belief, at least not on the part of the professional political operatives who push this disingenuous conceit. It is a cynical tactic to pressure the media into taking a jaundiced view of their political enemies lest they be accused of being biased in their favor. And in the process they almost always end up giving the conservatives the benefit of the doubt for the same reasons. It’s called “working the refs” and it’s been extremely effective for them.

I have written about this phenomenon many times but it was most perfectly demonstrated in 2016 when the inanely trivial Clinton email server issue was elevated to a major scandal that consumed the campaign and served to make the overwhelming corrupt ineptitude of Donald Trump appear to be no worse. The press had already partnered with right wing operatives Peter Schweizer, and Steve Bannon on hit jobs like “Clinton Cash” and were well primed by years of character assassination from the likes of Citizen United’s David Bossie, who later became Trump’s deputy campaign manager. Hillary Clinton had been the Great White Whale for both the press and the Republicans for many years. The refs did not need much working.

The overheated coverage was lethal for the Clinton campaign and very likely made more than a few people feel vaguely ill with the knowledge that such trumped up scandals as Benghazi would be the norm if Clinton were elected, as was the intention all along. Indeed, on the cusp of the election November 3, the Washington Post reported this:

Chairmen of two congressional committees said in media interviews this week they believe Clinton committed impeachable offenses in setting up and using a private email server for official State Department business.

And a third senior Republican, the chairman of a House Judiciary subcommittee, told The Washington Post he is personally convinced Clinton should be impeached for influence peddling involving her family foundation. He favors further congressional investigation into that matter.

Donald Trump’s rally-goers had been deliriously chanting “lock her up” for months and Trump was insistent that the election had been rigged, saying outright that he would accept the results of the election —only if he won.

This was “working the refs” on a scale we have never seen before. And according to the Department of Justice’s long awaited Inspector General’s report on how the FBI handled the investigation into Clinton’s email server management, it was incredibly successful. All that hectoring, threatening and accusing terrified poor FBI director James Comey so much that he threw out the normal rule book and defied his bosses so these bullies wouldn’t accuse him of being biased if Clinton happened to win.

Silly Comey didn’t understand how this works at all. They would never forgive him for failing to lock her up and nothing he did or said was going to help him.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report makes it clear:

Instead of referring to and being guided by longstanding Department and FBI policies and precedent, Comey conducted an ad hoc comparison of the risks and outcomes associated with each option. He described the potential consequences “concealing” the existence of the emails as “catastrophic” to the FBI and the Department, because it would subject the FBI and the Department to allegations that they had acted for political reasons to protect Hillary Clinton. Instead, Comey said he chose the option that he assessed as being just “really bad.”

Horowitz notes that Comey didn’t see the risk of being seen to put his thumb on the scale in favor of Trump to be much of a problem and posits this was because Comey assumed Clinton would win. But that doesn’t really explain it. Comey had been “worked” into believing that he had to push the envelope on Clinton or risk being called a partisan by the Republicans — no matter how it came out. We know this because at the very same time he did this, he had no problem “concealing” the much more serious investigation into Russian involvement in the Trump campaign.

Remember, Comey is a Republican and had been around this block before. He was counsel to Senator Alphonse D’Amato’s Whitewater investigations back in the 1990s. Indeed, I suspected at the time that he may have been harboring some leftover animosity toward Clinton from his work during that era. But I’ve since concluded that he’s much too vain and self-righteous to be a mere partisan. He simply couldn’t bear being called unfair or biased so he fell for the oldest GOP dirty trick in the book: he got played.

Not that it did him any good. He was fired by Trump who fatuously declared it was because he was unfair to Clinton and then immediately admitted that it was really because of the Russia investigation. What a fool.

The report notes once more that the two indiscreet DOJ employees involved in the case and then fired from the Russia probe by Robert Mueller wrote some emails showing bias against Trump but could find no evidence that they’d misdirected the investigation to help Clinton. Indeed, the opposite was true. They had wanted to go much harder on her as did the now disgraced Andrew McCabe who was fired for leaking damaging information about Clinton to the press and lying about it. But the report confirms the finding of the original investigation into Clinton’s email server scandal which was that she committed no crime.

The right wingers are screaming bloody murder, of course.  Trey Gowdy, the scourge of Benghazi, is upset because the FBI didn’t use the kind of hard core tactics in the server investigation they have used in the Russia probe.  Evidently he’s lost the ability to see the difference between an investigation into the use of private email, a practice used by previous Secretaries of State with no concerns, and a suspected conspiracy between the president of the United States and a foreign adversary. (And the fact that the right’s allegedly villainous FBI lovers and Andrew McCabe wanted to use harder tactics complicates Gowdy’s narrative just a bit.)

On Friday morning, Trump made his first comment on the Horowitz report, which largely consisted of self-congratulation:

But Trump’s mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani — whose own involvement in leaks from the New York FBI office apparently remains under investigation — had a lot to say on Fox News Thursday night, and was not nearly as restrained:

Trump’s defenders are trying to push their manufactured crisis to Defcon One. This should be an interesting weekend.

One-trick phony by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 15, 2018

One-trick phony
by Tom Sullivan

(with apologies to Oompa Loompas and their lyricists.)

Trumpster bluster bully and bray
Tweet til the WITCH HUNT withers away
One-trick phony Pepé Le Pew

Ga-ga, MAGA, Putin, lock her up too

Trumpster bluster bully and bray,
Nothing is true, whatever you say
Trumpster bluster build a hotel
Plenty of suckers left you can sell
What do you get from a glut of TV?
A pain in the neck and an IQ of three
Why don’t you try simply reading a book?
Are you too busy being … a … crook?
Calling into Fox and Friends

Trumpster bluster charity fraud
Wannabe tyrant isn’t that odd?
Trumpster bluster Nuremberg hate
Better hope Mueller isn’t too late
Who do you blame when your pres is a brat
Pampered and spoiled like a siamese cat

Nobody dares risk a Twitter tirade
Give him his military parade
And another Playmate

Trumpster bluster bully and bray
Snatch mothers’ little children away
Lies and spies and cell with a view
Ga-ga, MAGA, Putin, lock him up too

When Donald Trump said Kim Jong-un was talented, loved by his people, with a “great personality and very smart,” you didn’t think he was talking about Kim, did you? He was projecting himself onto Kim.

“Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it and run it tough. I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000 could not do it.”

That was Trump talking about himself, another kid who inherited his position in the world from his father. He is anything but self-made. He is a virtual tyrant who aspires to be a real one, but doesn’t have the talent for it.

Brian Karem’s outburst aside, the problem, writes Lili Loofbourow at Slate, is a Trump-weary press has begun adopting Trumpian language in covering him. Using “cracking down,” “hard line”, “hard bargains,” etc. gives him just what he wants:

So: Infectious though his formulations can be, it’s time to break the habit. Don’t use his language outside quotation marks. Take particular care to avoid words that confuse cruelty with strength. Avoid warlike metaphors. No taking aim, no battles, no doubling down. No punching metaphors. No deals. Deny him the framing he wants. There are, after all, other words.

Arbitrary. Confused. Crabby. Ignorant.

That’s not going to happen, of course, but she makes a larger point:

A president’s lack of basic competence is worth accurately reporting on. And it must be reported on when there is nothing else of value worth reporting.

His every utterance, I’d add, is not news. “Simply repeating his fantastical claims makes them seem less fantastical,” Loofbourow warns. Don’t wait for the seventh paragraph to correct his factual mistakes.

Me? I like messaging that includes strong visuals as much as strong language. Visual imagery is sticky.

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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.

At long last Sarah, have you decency?

Published by digby on June 14, 2018

At long last Sarah, have you decency?

by digby

The answer is no. This was an odious display of dishonesty and pure, unadulterated malevolence:

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a disastrous attempt to defend the White House’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border during Thursday’s press briefing.

CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Sanders to explain Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ comments earlier in the day about how the White House’s family separation policy is consistent with the teachings of the Bible.

Sanders said she couldn’t speak to Sessions’ specific comments, but added, “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law.”

But family separation is not a law. It is a policy that the Trump administration implemented in April and could end at any time.

When Acosta pointed this out to Sanders, she replied by calling him stupid.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences, I guess,” she said. “Please don’t take my words out of context, but the separation of illegal alien families is the product of the same legal loopholes that Democrats refuse to close.”

The next reporter Sanders called on again tried to impress upon her that the Trump administration’s policy of separating families is not a law, and could be revisited at any time. But Sanders didn’t want to hear it.

“Our administration has had the same position since we started on day one, that we we’re going to enforce the law,” she said. “We’re a country of law and order, and we’re enforcing the law, and protecting our borders. If Democrats wans to get serious about it instead of playing political games, they are welcome to come here and sit down the president and actually do something about it.”

At that point, something extraordinary happened. Brian Karem, the White House reporter for Playboy, jumped in without being called upon, and yelled to Sanders, “You’re a parent! Don’t you have any empathy for what these people are going through?”

“Come on, Sarah, you’re a parent,” Karem continued. “They have less than you do. Seriously. Seriously.”

“I’m trying to be serious, but I’m not going to have you yell out of turn,” Sanders replied.

“It’s a serious question,” Karem responded. “These people have nothing. They come to the border with nothing and you throw their children in cages. You’re a parent. You’re a parent of young children! Don’t you have any empathy for they go through?”

Sanders then called upon another reporter who asked her a question about Russia.

I just don’t know what to say about this except I suspect that by her own religious belief system she has consigned herself to hell.

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