Month: August 2018

Never say they won’t impeach

by digby

Dana Milbank reports on the House GOP’s determined oversight of … Rod Rosenstein:

Finally, Rep. Devin Nunes has given Americans a reason to reelect Republicans. 

They want to have an impeachment! 

No, not that impeachment. 

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee told donors that “most” Republicans are on board with impeaching Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, according to a recording broadcast this week by MSNBC. They just don’t have time “right before the election.” Hence the need to retain a GOP majority. 

Rosenstein must have done something truly and utterly horrible, because these guys don’t impeach just anybody. In fact, they impeach nobody. Until now they hadn’t given a moment’s thought to impeaching a single member of the Trump administration: 

Not Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who, Forbes reports, has been accused by former associates of siphoning or outright stealing roughly $120 million. 

Not former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, who, while in office, got a bargain condo rental from a lobbyist’s wife, used his job to find work for his wife and had taxpayers procure for him everything from a soundproof phone booth to a trip to find moisturizing lotion. 

Not the former national security adviser who admitted to lying to the FBI, not the former White House staff secretary accused of domestic violence, not the presidential son-in-law who had White House meetings with his family’s lenders, not the housing secretary accused of potentially helping his son’s business, not the many Cabinet secretaries who traveled for pleasure at taxpayer expense, not the former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director who bought tobacco stock while in office. 

And certainly not the president, whose most recent emolument bath was poured by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince: Bookings by his highness’s entourage spurred a spike in the quarterly revenue at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan. 

What Rosenstein has done must be worse than all that, and worse than the behaviors of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that inspire no curiosity among House Republican investigators.
So what grave act of corruption has finally stirred them? 

Well, according to impeachment articles filed last month , Rosenstein “repeatedly failed to produce documents” that House Republicans demanded as part of their ongoing effort to discredit the Russia probe and revive investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

Now that is pure evil. But it gets worse! Some of the documents Rosenstein provided “were heavily and unnecessarily redacted.” 

This is nigh unto treason. 

Among the allegations in the impeachment articles: “The Department of Justice, under the supervision of Mr. Rosenstein, unnecessarily redacted the price of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s $70,000 conference table.” 

Has there ever been a higher crime committed? 

The House Republicans are ideally positioned to sit in judgment of Rosenstein because of their own unimpeachable conduct. So above reproach are they that one of their first votes after swearing in was an attempt to kill the House ethics office. 

But I quibble with Nunes (Calif.) on the timing of Rosenstein’s impeachment. It must be immediate, even if it postpones confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, for one reason: House Republicans are running out of prospective impeachment managers. 

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), an obvious candidate, resigned over his use of public funds to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit. 

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-Pa.), another ideal choice, resigned after word got out of a sexual-harassment settlement with a staffer the married congressman called his “soul mate.”
Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) also can’t be of use. He resigned over allegations that he urged his mistress to seek an abortion. 

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) likewise won’t be available. He quit when a former aide alleged that he offered her $5 million to have his child as a surrogate.

That’s just the beginning. He has more.

I was on with Seder on the Majority Report yesterday and we talked at length about how the greed and corruption of the Trump administration is so petty and grasping. Of course that’s just a reflection of the man at the top. He slapped his name on any snake oil he could find to make himself a dollar. This is his party …

The art of the Trump Tower deal

by digby

David Atkins at the Washington Monthly makes an astute observation about the Trump Tower meeting that I’m not sure everyone has totally understood:

If the Trump Tower meeting had just been about the Magnitsky Act, it would be an untoward and unethical but not a significant violation. A foreign government can try to lobby a electoral campaign if it wants. If the Trump Tower meeting had just been about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton, it would have been (and was) a serious campaign finance violation, albeit one that the nation might or might not forgive from a fly-by-night rookie campaign team if it had produced no real results. Though even then, of course, Paul Manafort was no rookie, and the conspiracy to break campaign finance laws and the lies to cover it up are very serious matters.

But it’s the combination of the two that is most damning. The one interesting hitch of the campaign finance violation argument is that the Russians did not in fact deliver the stolen campaign documents directly to the Trump campaign. As we know, the Russians instead released the material to Wikileaks, who proceeded to drop it at a time and in a fashion most advantageous to the Trump campaign.

Why would the Russians do this if no deal had in fact been struck with Trump? Why, when Trump asked (and later claimed he was joking) if Russia could find Hillary Clinton’s emails, did the Russians proceed to attempt to hack her system that very night if there was no quid pro quo?

That’s the obvious question isn’t it? They must have received some indication at some point that their “help” would be rewarded. Whether they knew this because they were blackmailing him or because it was a “deal” is unknown. But it certainly does appear that an agreement of some kind existed.

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Nunes is an accomplice not a patriot

by digby

From Congressman Nunes’ hometown paper:

Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to levy taxes, borrow money, regulate commerce and declare war.

It has lesser responsibilities as well. Among them are to create post offices, to promote science and the arts, and to punish treason and offenses on the high seas.

A review of the Constitution, which all House members are sworn to uphold when they take the oath of office, shows there is no requirement that legislators protect the president of the United States. In fact, the legislative branch is meant to act as a check on the executive branch, with the judiciary being the third arm of government.

And yet protecting President Donald Trump seems to be the strict role Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, has made for himself. That came into new relief this week with the leak of audio captured at a fundraiser in Washington state at which Nunes was a speaker. It was made crystal clear that Nunes is choosing the role of party leader over his constitutional role of legislative oversight. That’s not right.

In the audio, taken by a member of a progressive group who attended the fundraiser for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Nunes discusses how important it is for the Republican Party to maintain majorities in both the House and Senate in the November election.

But he goes beyond making it simply a political statement. Nunes links majority control to protecting President Donald Trump from the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“If Sessions (Attorney General Jeff Sessions) won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones,” Nunes said. The context: “We” means congressional Republicans.

When it comes to the oversight role regarding Russian meddling, the scorecard does not look favorable to Nunes.

By virtue of his longevity in Congress, Nunes now chairs the House Intelligence Committee, a plum assignment. His committee investigated the matter of Russian interference, and under protest by member Democrats, released a report in April that concluded there was no evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russian operatives.

Democrats on that House committee followed up with their own report that disputed the conclusion and said the full committee did not press hard enough for evidence.

The Senate Intelligence Committee also looked into Russian activities, and its members — Republicans and Democrats — found there was concrete evidence to show Russia did in fact interfere with the election to the detriment of Hillary Clinton. That conclusion backed what U.S. intelligence agencies — which Nunes oversees — had told Congress.

So, on one side of the ledger are House Democrats, Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats from the intelligence committees, as well as U.S. intelligence agencies themselves. On the other side are Nunes and GOP members of the House committee.

Which brings us back to the Constitution. It is not Nunes’ job to protect Trump from anything. However, it is expressly Nunes’ duty to act as a check on the executive branch. That was the role the Senate played during the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office. That is how the founders of our country designed our government to work.

Devin Nunes needs to uphold our system of checks and balances. Far from being a “true American patriot,” as Trump called Nunes, he is actually acting against our very form of government.

“Acting against” is one way of putting it. He is aiding and abetting Trump’s crimes.

I wish I believed that Nunes’ voters in the central valley would read this and kick him out of office but they are basically accomplices too. They don’t care what Trump did to get elected. They have no ethics either. I’m sorry to say that but it’s quite obvious at this point that a majority of Republicans will march with Trump in lockstep no matter what he does and Devin Nunes in one of people leading that parade.

The only thing that will stop this madness is Democrats, Independents and the small minority of Republicans who still have some sense and morals standing up and saying no. I don’t think there are enough of those in Nunes’ district. But you never know …

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Yes, he’s still a racist

by digby

The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 11, 2018

For some reason the press is interpreting that tweet to mean he has reformed in some way. Don’t they realize that when he says “all types of racism” and “ALL Americans” he’s including those who carried those torches last year and who claim they are suffering from reverse racism?

This is no different than his statement last year that “both sides” were equally violent and that some of the Nazis who marched were very fine people.

What’s it going to take to understand who this man is?

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They don’t think domestic violence is a problem

by digby

This is not MS-13:

Xiomara started dating him when she was 17. He was different then, not yet the man who pushed drugs and ran with a gang. Not the man who she says berated and raped her, who roused her out of bed some mornings only to beat her.

Not the man who choked her with an electrical cord, or put a gun to her head while she screamed, then begged, “‘Please, please don’t kill me — I love you.’”

Fleeing El Salvador with their daughter, then 4, the 23-year-old mother pleaded for help at a port of entry in El Paso on a chilly day in December 2016.

After nearly two years, her petition for asylum remains caught in a backlog of more than 310,000 other claims. But while she has waited for a ruling, her chance of success has plunged.

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in June issued a decision meant to block most victims of domestic abuse and gang violence from winning asylum, saying that “private criminal acts” generally are not grounds to seek refuge in the U.S. Already, that ruling has narrowed the path for legal refuge for tens of thousands of people attempting to flee strife and poverty in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

“You can tell there is something happening,” said longtime immigration attorney Carlos A. García, who in mid-July spoke to more than 70 women in one cellblock at a family detention center in Texas. Most had received denials of their claims that they have what the law deems a “credible fear of persecution.”

“More than I’ve ever seen before,” he said.

In North Carolina, wher3e federal immigration agents sparked criticism last month when they arrested two domestic-violence survivors at a courthouse, some immigration judges are refusing to hear any asylum claims based on allegations of domestic abuse. Other immigration judges are asking for more detailed evidence of abuse at the outset of a case, a problem for victims who often leave their homes with few written records.

Under the Refugee Act of 1980, judges can only grant asylum, which allows a person to stay in the U.S. legally, to people escaping persecution based on religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in “a particular social group.”

As drug-war violence escalated over the last two decades in Mexico and Central America, fueled by a U.S demand for drugs and waged by gangs partly grown on American streets, human rights lawyers pushed to have victims of domestic violence or gang crime considered part of such a social group when their governments won’t protect them. After years of argument, they won a major victory in 2014 when the country’s highest immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals, ruled in favor of a woman from Guatemala who fled a husband who had beaten and raped her with impunity.

Sessions, in June, used his legal authority over the immigration system to reverse that decision, deciding a case brought by a woman identified in court as A.B.

“Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems — even all serious problems — that people face every day all over the world,” he said, ruling that in most cases asylum should be limited to those who can show they were directly persecuted by the government, not victims of “private violence.”

Trump is a marital rapist himself so he certainly has no pity for these people and he and Jeff Sessions don’t care about it in any case because they believe that these mothers and their children are all animals from shithole countries.

By the way, this is one area in which Trump, Sessions and Vladimir Putin are very much in agreement.

Les misérables riche
by Tom Sullivan

Justice was never blind here. But if any administration could make justice more of a sham, it is this one.

President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant shock troops have branched out from targeting the undocumented. US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna in June established a “denaturalization task force” to reexamine the applications of naturalized citizens for discrepancies that might justify stripping Americans of their citizenship and deporting them.

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller has drafted a plan for limiting on the pettiest of pretexts the number of immigrants allowed legal status each year:

Details of the rulemaking proposal are still being finalized, but based on a recent draft seen last week and described to NBC News, immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children’s health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S.

Franklin Foer’s September article in The Atlantic precipitated his “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross this week. Beginning with its impact on a community of Mauritanian transplants clustered along the fatefully named Refugee Road in Columbus, Ohio, “How Trump Radicalized ICE” focuses on Immigration and Customs Emforcement’s culture, its mission, and its un-American-sounding mandate.

“It’s one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets,” Foer writes. “It’s another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty.”

A 2009 appropriations provision added by the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia required ICE to “maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” ICE treated the mandate for beds as a prisoner quota during the Obama administration until Congress removed it last year. The sitting president’s Justice Department in its xenophobic zeal has nonetheless outstripped the limits of the previous “quota.”

Under the Trump regime, undocumented immigrants like the Mauritanians of Refugee Road face a crackdown. Their presence for nearly two decades was overlooked or (in Gross’s phrasing) given a pass:

FOER: So it’s – in 1986, Ronald Reagan passed an amnesty. There had been millions of undocumented immigrants in the country, and he gave them a pathway to citizenship. And since 1986, both political parties have professed faith in their belief in something called comprehensive immigration reform where they would enter into a grand bargain where they would trade tougher immigration enforcement in exchange for amnesty of the large and growing population of undocumented immigrants in the country. But despite that consensus, our political system has been broken. And it has been unable to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And so the number of undocumented immigrants just built up over time.

The Congress basically expressed its hope that they would become citizens by passing these measures but never getting them to the president’s desk for signature. And we just kind of let this population drift. Some of them had orders for deportation. Some of them never went through an immigration court. But we gave them our tacit approval. And so now you have 11 million undocumented people in this country. Two-thirds of them have been here for over a decade.

And so, yes, we’ve given them tacit permission, and that’s what makes the Trump administration so disturbing. There had been this consensus that they could stay. They rooted themselves within our communities. They made long-term investments in becoming Americans. They opened up businesses. They bought houses. They amassed 401(k)s. They raised children who are U.S. citizens. And so they felt like they were Americans. By all measures, they were Americans. They are Americans.

GROSS: And now they’re outlaws.

The irony drips.

These refugees, these asylum seekers who fled to these shores took risks, started businesses, paid taxes and salaries, contributed to their communities, and invested themselves and in this country what fortunes they gleaned from their labors. Yet Trump, Miller, and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Department of Justice target them for slow-motion ethnic cleansing over statutory infractions that victimize no one, or for the crime of obtaining a few dollars worth of subsidized food and medicine.

Let’s contrast their taste of American justice with that accorded others whose predations touched the entire planet.

I speak of the mortgage-backed securities wizards who brought the world economy to its knees in 2008.

Their fraud and reckless greed destroyed household wealth estimated in the trillions and put millions of Americans out of work. In response, American taxpayers subsidized bailouts to the tune of trillions more. Bank CEOs and executives received taxpayer-subsidized seven- and eight-figure golden parachutes and bonuses.

Their banks then turned around and committed serial perjury and fraud in court proceedings foreclosing on homes to which they lacked clear title. The banks used fraudulent, robo-signed affidavits to foreclose on millions of homeowners and throw families into the streets.

Not one Wall Street CEO went to jail for the devastation their companies’ illegal actions caused. At most, the companies paid fines.

But refugees who received a subsidized loaf of bread or fudged asylum applications? Trump’s America sics Inspector Javert on them with extreme prejudice.

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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.

Common Sense from a Politician

by tristero

Ocasio-Cortez did exactly the right thing:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old democratic socialist from New York who scored a shocking primary victory over Representative Joseph Crowley in June, has since become a lightning rod for attacks from conservative circles. 

The conservative scrutiny on Ms. Ocasio-Cortez took a strange turn this week when a popular conservative commentator and speaker, Ben Shapiro, challenged Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to a debate and offered to pay her campaign $10,000 in return.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who trounced Mr. Crowley, a longtime and powerful member of Congress from Queens, likened the offer to catcalling — the practice of whistling or making unwanted comments to women who pass by on the street. 

In a Twitter post on Thursday night, she roundly rejected his proposal. “I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions,” she said. “And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.”

You have to look at this way. When he was alive Stephen Jay Gould never debated the shape of Earth with a flat-earther. Why? Because a flat-earther has nothing intelligent to add to any serious scientific discussion. It would be a waste of Gould’s time. Likewise, it’s a waste of Ocasio-Cortez’s time to bother talking to someone like Shapiro.

I hope she continues to refuse. Ocasio-Cortez can, should, and will, debate many women and men who have intelligent things to say about tackling the numerous problems this country’s people face. Shapiro is not among them and I hope she continues to refuse.

By the way, note the snarky tone of the article. I omitted the lede, which was simply stupid. And the article implies that Ocasio-Cortez starts “Twitter tussles.”

By contrast, the article noted Shapiro’s Harvard Law degree and his religiosity but failed to note his transphobia, his homophobia, his support of tax cuts for the rich, his opposition to reproductive rights, his opposition to Social Security, and to health care, all of which are reported here.  And note how kind that article is to Shapiro (money quote: “He takes apart arguments in ways that makes the conservative conclusion seem utterly logical, like putting a key in a locked door.” ). Dollars to donuts, we’ll never see such a one-sided profile by the Times on Ocasio-Cortez.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Animals in the heat:

TREATWAVE: A zoo in China is giving popsicles to animals dealing with scorching summer weather. pic.twitter.com/ZqonZ94Wb5

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 5, 2018

Here’s a good news story from the California fire:

A young black bear whose paws were burned raw in the Carr Fire is recuperating with special care from a wildlife veterinary team.

The yearling bear cub was found Thursday licking her burned paws beside Crystal Creek in the mountains west of Whiskeytown Lake during the massive Northern California wildfire that’s so far burned over 172,000 acres.

A crew working to fix damaged utility poles came across the injured animal late in the day and got ahold of wildlife experts right away. One of the workers took a short video of the bundle of black fur near the creek.

“She sure is cute. She’s a beautiful creature,” said Kirsten Macintyre, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The field workers, under contract to Pacific Gas and Electric, found the 50-pound animal sitting near ash and unable to walk, Macintyre said. The crew got in touch with a Lake Tahoe wildlife rehabilitation center, which in turn contacted the state agency.

“The workers said the bear was crying. We don’t know if she was really crying or just being defensive,” said Jeff Stoddard, a DFW environmental program manager who helped carry the bear to safety and delivered her to a state wildlife lab in Rancho Cordova on Friday morning.

Stoddard and co-worker Eric Haney met up with DFW wildlife officers Lt. Peter Blake and warden Monty Cervelli and got permission to go behind the fire lines at the barricaded Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.

They used directions from PG&E and followed the utility workers’ footprints to the spot near the former Crystal Creek Boys Ranch detention center.

“It took a little while but we found the bear,” Stoddard said.

He said the bear was holding her hind foot up in pain and cleaning her paws with her tongue.

“A rock was burned within two feet of her. She was in a little patch of green,” Stoddard said. “Being a small bear, she was hidden pretty well.”

He thinks she either burned her paws walking in hot ash or on hot rocks. The top of one paw is singed, indicating she may have stepped directly into flames.

The bear couldn’t stand or walk and, considering fire still was raging nearby, the rescuers decided she shouldn’t be left alone.

Haney tranquilized the bear with darts and the group carried her out through brush and trees. They texted the DFW’s Dr. Deana Clifford and sent her photos so she could evaluate the bear’s condition.

Once they determined the bear had a chance to survive, the DFW kept her overnight in an air-conditioned enclosure and gave her some watermelon.

On Friday morning Stoddard drove the bear for three and a half hours to the Rancho Cordova facility to begin treatment.

The bear is angry and aggressive toward the staff, which Stoddard says is an encouraging sign that shows the bear’s wild nature. “She’s really unhappy when people come by,” he said.

Wildlife officials don’t want her to feel domesticated because the goal is to release her back into the forest.

“The goal is 100 percent to relocate it back into the wild,” Stoddard said. “We don’t want a captive animal.”

At the wildlife center, staff members put salve on the red, wounded paws, applied an antibiotic ointment and gave her anesthesia.

“The good news is she’s in really good shape. She’s got good body weight and wasn’t too dehydrated,” Clifford said.

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Recruiting Space Cadets

by digby

Via TPM:

Shortly after the White House’s Thursday announcement of the creation of a new U.S. Space Force by 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign signaled its mission to commemorate the “groundbreaking endeavor” with a logo for their “new line of gear.”

In an email sent Thursday to Planet Earth’s pro-Trump residents, the Trump campaign asked supporters to vote on one of six logos.

Below are the galaxy of options to choose from:

Clearly they are aiming at Jetsons fans and people who went to Tomorrowland back in the 1960s. In other words, the old white people of the GOP base who want to relive their childhoods.

Seriously, this is what Trump is thinking:

Even Bolton is sane by comparison

by digby

They have to do a lot of work behind the scenes to keep the giant toddler from having a tantrum that destroys the world:

Senior American national security officials, seeking to prevent President Trump from upending a formal policy agreement at last month’s NATO meeting, pushed the military alliance’s ambassadors to complete it before the forum even began.

The work to preserve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreement, which is usually subject to intense 11th-hour negotiations, came just weeks after Mr. Trump refused to sign off on a communiqué from the June meeting of the Group of 7 in Canada.

The rushed machinations to get the policy done, as demanded by John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, have not been previously reported. Described by European diplomats and American officials, the efforts are a sign of the lengths to which the president’s top advisers will go to protect a key and longstanding international alliance from Mr. Trump’s unpredictable antipathy.

Allied ambassadors said the American officials’ plan worked — to a degree.

Mr. Trump did almost blow up the two-day meeting in Brussels that began on July 11. He issued a vague threat that the United States could go its own way if allies resisted his demands for additional military spending. After the gathering, he also questioned a pillar of the alliance: that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all.

But the approval of the communiqué — renamed for the meeting as a declaration — was critical for the alliance. It ensured that, despite Mr. Trump’s rhetorical fireworks, NATO diplomats could push through initiatives, including critical Pentagon priorities to improve allied defenses against Russia.

“The president’s national security team did a good job of salvaging a minimally successful outcome to the NATO summit,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral who also once served as the supreme allied commander for Europe.

But, he added, “it is unfortunate that the president’s apparent personal animus continues to create friction in an alliance that has stood the test of time.”

When John Bolton is the only one standing between us and Armageddon we are so far down the rabbit hole we’re never going to be able to climb out.