Month: August 2018

Politics and Reality Radio: Zephyr Teachout Plans to Wield the Rule of Law as a “Sword” Against Trump’s Corruption

with Joshua Holland

This week, we kick off the show with a double-segment with Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham University legal scholar running to become the next Attorney General of New York. Teachout explains that because the Trump Organization is headquartered in The Empire State, the NYAG’s office has a unique capacity to police the Trump crime family’s potential abuses of power and its labrynthian web of foreign business entanglements.

Then we’re joined by Washington Monthly contributor John Stoehr to talk about a week in which more shoes dropped in the sprawling Kremlingate scandal than Imelda Marcos ever had in her closet.

Playlist:
Lil Troy: “Wanna Be a Baller”
Thievery Corporation: “Shadows of Ourselves”
Manu Chao: “Clandestino”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

A dark place

by digby

Via the AP:

One of the president’s confidants deemed Trump in “a dark place,” seething about the long-lasting probe and the media’s depiction of his White House under siege. Though long antagonistic toward the press, Trump’s anger toward the media has only grown over the past month, as he has berated coverage of his Singapore and Helsinki summits, the possible prosecutorial cooperation of his former legal “fixer” Michael Cohen and the Mueller probe. 

After complaining about the tough questions he received from American reporters in Finland, Trump has largely steered clear of the mainstream media, instead opting for safer spaces like an interview with ally Rush Limbaugh this week. From the White House briefing room podium on Wednesday, Sanders declined to denounce the harassment of a CNN reporter during a Trump rally in Florida on Tuesday.

Josh Marshall has been speculating that something specific has happened in the past couple of weeks that’s set Trump off on his latest rampage. I wrote something similar a few days ago. Maybe it’s just the confluence of Cohen’s talk about Trump knowing about the Trump Tower meeting with new discussions about the interview and Manafort’s trial. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. But something’s happening.

About that collusion thing

by digby

Ryan Goodman at Just security points out something pertinent:

I’ll make this short. President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani are now trying to claim that “collusion is not a crime.” Several months ago, I wrote a New York Times Op-ed about the misuse of the term “collusion,” and earlier this summer I testified before Congress and very purposefully never once used the word “collusion” in my written testimony which outlined possible crimes for working with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. I stuck instead to the terms one finds in the U.S. federal code such as conspiracy and federal campaign finance law violations.

That said, the acts we would ordinarily associate with collusion could easily amount to a crime. We could have a detailed discussion of which acts and which crimes exactly. But here I want to just make one point. Any discussion in this space should include an understanding that the U.S. Justice Department has set out explicitly that acts of collusion can amount to a federal crime, and has done so specifically with respect to the jurisdiction of special counsel, Robert Mueller.

An Aug. 2, 2017 Justice Department memorandum—signed by Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and titled “The Scope of Investigation and Definition of Authority”—details the individuals and activities that fall within the Order appointing the special counsel.

The August 2017 memorandum states:

The following allegations were within the scope of the Investigation at the time of your appointment and are within the scope of the Order:

[REDACTED]

Allegations that Paul Manafort:

Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States in violation of United States law.

End.

Sigh …

.

Saving Democrats from themselves?
by Tom Sullivan

Tom Steyer has set himself up as the biggest bogeyman for the right-wing since George Soros. But while Soros hes kept a low-profile (I’m still waiting for my street protesting check.), Steyer is out collecting headlines. Politico asks if he isn’t setting up a parallel party:

Steyer is building out an operation that’s bigger than anyone’s other than the Koch brothers’ — and the billionaire and his aides believe the reservoir of nontraditional voters he’s already activated could become the overriding factor in House and other races across the country.

Yet Steyer’s oversize role also stands to position him squarely against Democratic Party leadership, which has shown little appetite this fall for pursuing one of his signature causes: impeachment.

Unlike the $80 million being spent by Michael Bloomberg, Steyer will put his cash toward building out NextGen America and Need to Impeach, his two growing political organizations, as well as funding clean-energy ballot initiatives in Arizona and Nevada. Steyer has already doubled his initial $20 million investment in Need to Impeach to $40 million and has not ruled out adding more.

The biggest upside is between NextGen America and Need to Impeach he’ll be employing upwards of 1,000 activists, giving them paid organizing experience that in many lefty circles tends to run on “psychic income” and cold pizza.

Need to Impeach is rolling out an extensive electoral plan, from having its most committed volunteers write postcards to other voters (which they are tracking through Smart Codes) to going in hard on field organizing, emails and phone calls. Steyer will also continue to air ads through November pressing the issue in an organization where the expectation is that each buy is at least $1 million.

Meanwhile, NextGen America is expected to hit 750 people on staff, with a heavy concentration on 400 college campuses, completely focused on turning out young voters, many of whom haven’t voted before and don’t tend to get as much attention as more regular and reliable voters. After a separate set of polling identified “strength in numbers” as the most effective message for voters under 40 (both those who identified themselves as pessimistic and optimistic about the future of the country), the organization has invested in digital ads and peer-to-peer messaging to press that point.

Affiliated groups getting people to promise to vote is terrific. Once they arrive at the polls, however, getting them to vote for all the less-than-marquee candidates they’ve never heard of, offices that build a party’s farm team (school board, for example), involves more than messaging, canvassing, and phone banking for headliners ahead of time. That takes volunteers, planning and support at the county party level that’s typically and chronically under-resourced.

Hey @TomSteyer, spare some change?

* * * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Get a room you two

by digby

A bizarroworld lovefest:

THE PRESIDENT: So, Rush, I just wanted to congratulate you on 30 years.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: This is your favorite president, and I think you are fantastic.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: I heard about it, and today’s the big day, 30 years. I wanted to call personally and congratulate you.

RUSH: I am floored. I… (laughing) I thought there was nothing anybody could do to surprise me today. I’ve been preparing for anything. Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT: You’re a very special man, Rush, and you have people that love you. I’m one of them. But you’re a very, very special guy. What you do for this country, people have no idea how important your voice is. So I just wanted to personally make this one and I said, “I’ll even dial the number myself if I have to.”

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: But I just want to congratulate you. Thirty years in that tough business is incredible — and you’re stronger now than ever before.

RUSH: Well, I — I thank you so much. It’s such a thrill to hear from you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s a thrill to be on.

RUSH: I told you, any time you want to appear here, you are more than welcome. I don’t want to hound you by asking you because everybody’s doing that, trying to get you. But, man, this is great. I’m so flattered. While I have you, can I say something back at you here?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, go ahead, Rush. Go ahead.

RUSH: Are you aware…? I have to think you are when you go to your rallies.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

RUSH: Are you aware of what you mean to everybody who voted for you and I think a bunch of who didn’t who want to the next time around? People have invested their hopes and their futures in this country being made great again and saved in you. Are you…? When you’re alone — which you may not ever be. But when you’re alone in the White House, do you think about that? Do you ponder what you’ve come to mean to people?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I love these people. And, you know, you probably saw last night I was in Florida and we had 9,000 seats in the auditorium.

RUSH: Oh, yeah.

THE PRESIDENT: That was packed, and we had thousands outside and in these rooms all over the place. I guess they had at least 15,000, 18,000 people that couldn’t get in last night — which I hate. So we’re actually starting to put up big screens. I must tell you, it’s such an honor to me to see this. This love! I don’t know if you were able to see it last night, any of them. I mean, there’s such tremendous love. I’m going to Ohio on Saturday, and tomorrow I’m going to Pennsylvania, and it’s the same thing.

It’s like the enthusiasm — and part of it is that they’ve really been mistreated for so many years by the politicians. The country’s been mistreated. The trade deals were so bad. The taxes were so high. The tax cuts are so good; they’ve been so appreciated by so many people. The cut in regulations maybe is just as important as the tax cuts because businesses are hiring like they haven’t, like they’ve never hired before. And, you know, we have a more interesting stat: We have more people working in the United States today than at any time in our history. And it’s been so many different things are happening. So there’s a tremendous amount of love in the room, and I am aware of it; there’s no question about it.

RUSH: Mr. President, it was just a little over year and a half ago where your predecessor said that what is happening now couldn’t happen again, that those days were gone, that those jobs that were lost were not coming back. And he would tell audiences this. And look at what you’ve done with the entirety — seemingly the entirety — of Washington’s political class opposed to you. In a year and a half, you have reversed the direction the country was going. We have 4.1% economic growth. When you promised that, they accused you of misleading people because it couldn’t happen.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s right, Rush. You have a lot of bad people in Washington. You knew that a long time ago. Frankly, before I knew it. I had no idea how evil some of them are, but you have a lot of great people too. And outside of Washington you have the greatest people in the world. And you’re right. You know, I’ve been saying 4%, but it should be much higher than that. You know, if you do good trade deals — which I will. You see what’s going on with China. You look at what’s going on.

I will tell you, NAFTA? They want to make a deal very badly. And, you know, we’re putting ’em back in shape. They’re horrible deals, the worst deals ever made by any country. You do that; you start lifting your GDP numbers way up also. Nobody ever ever talks about that. We’re doing 4.1% with bad trade deals. We have horrible trade deals. And our farmers, we’re gonna open up markets for them. You know, but they’re great patriots. They’re… I watch them all the time where they’re saying, “We trust our president.”

And, you know, they may take a short-term hit. But you look at farm and farming, it’s been going down for 15 years. Soybeans, five years before the election, was cut in half! The price was cut in half. I wasn’t there. So it’s going to… A lot of things are happening that are very exciting. And, you know, you look at the job numbers. You look at African-American, best ever. Hispanic, Asian, women, best ever! And it’s been a lot of fun for me, but I see the happiness and the faces.

Like last night in Florida with that, you know, really massive crowd, you see the happiness and the love — and nobody left. It’s like you. Nobody turns off your show. It’s like you can’t. Nobody leaves. You know, I’ll speak for an hour and 10 minutes, hour and 20 minutes. There wasn’t a person that left that room. It was just… It was an absolute love fest, and it’s going on all over the country, and a lot of it’s the same message. Most of it, I think — probably all of it — is the same message that you give out so well every day, better than anybody.

RUSH: Well, but your key… You know, I do understand it. I understand the bond that those people attending your rallies have with you and you with them. I’ve seen it. I know why it exists. And you are consistent. Things you said during the campaign are things you still say today. You haven’t given anybody reason to doubt you. You haven’t betrayed anybody or made them think that you’re going to. An example: Here you are suggesting that you’d be willing to maybe — you’d talk about — shutting down the government if that’s what it took to get this wall built.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.

RUSH: Now the traditional Republican says, “Oh, no! No! Don’t say that!” There you are saying, “Oh, yeah. I’ll be glad to do it if that’s what it takes.”

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I actually think it would be positive.

RUSH: People don’t understand your voters rally to you for that.

THE PRESIDENT: We had Obamacare repealed and replaced, and a man — I won’t mention his name. But a man at 2 o’clock in the morning went thumbs down, and he campaigned for years on repeal and replace. We had the chance. Nobody even spoke to him about it, because it was something that was unthinkable what he did, and because of that… But still, I have just about ended Obamacare. We have great health care. We have a lot of great things happening right now. New programs are coming out.

We got rid of the individual mandate. But that was very disappointing to me that night — and he did it because of me, probably. But that was very disappointing. That was a horrible thing he did to our country. And, frankly, it cost $1 trillion because we would have saved $1 trillion, on top of which we would have had good health care. But we’re doing it a different way. We have to go a different route. But he cost us a trillion dollars. And the other thing is the wall. We’ve started it. It’s like pulling teeth, though, getting these guys to get it done is. You have no idea how tough I’ve been.

I say, “Hey, if you have a shutdown, you have a shutdown.”

Now, the shutdown could also take place after the election. I happen to think it’s a great political thing, because people want border security. It’s not just the wall, Rush, as you know. It’s border security. It’s getting rid of catch-and-release, where you catch somebody, he can be a criminal of the highest order, and you have to release him! You catch him, you take his name, and you release him. And then you have the visa lottery. It’s a lottery system where you pick people out of a lottery. Well, the countries aren’t giving us their best people. They’re giving us people that they don’t want. So we’re taking people out of a lottery that the country doesn’t want. We’re getting some beauties.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: And then you have, you know, so many other things.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: We have to change the laws. We have the worst laws! How about chain migration? One person comes in and you end up with 32 people. The person that ran down 18 people on the West Side Highway, he’s allowed to have — and I think eight died. He has 22 members of his family in the United States because of chain migration. So we have to change this stuff, Rush. And we’ll get it done, but we have to change it, Rush. If we don’t change it, it will just go down, down, down. And it will get done. One way or the other, it’s getting done. But I’d be willing to do it. And you could do it before the election or after the election.

RUSH: Well, speaking of before, as a campaign issue, I saw a couple consultants say… I don’t need to mention their names. They’re Washington, D.C., professionals.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

RUSH: They said that you need to drop this immigration stuff, Mr. President. You’re cruising for defeat if you base the midterms on this.

THE PRESIDENT: I know. I’ve heard that. (chuckles)

RUSH: You need to pivot back onto the economy, start telling people what a great economy we have, ’cause that’s the only way the Republicans can have a chance of holding the House in the midterms. What do you think about that advice?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’ve heard them. Probably different people than you, but I’ve heard a lot of people saying, “Oh, don’t do it before the election, we’ll upset the applecart,” and because we are doing so well economically we should do well — and, you know, the polls are okay. It’s very interesting. My polls are great, but the question is, “Is it transferable?” Now, it certainly was in Florida because you saw Ron DeSantis, who’s gotten a tremendous — you know, many, many, many points. The governor of Georgia where he was down by five and he won by 40 after I endorsed him. (chuckling) That was pretty good. That was almost like your endorsement.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: But, you know, we’ve had tremendous —

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: If you take a look at Congressman Donovan from Staten Island where he was down by 10 and he wins by 24. So we’ve had a lot of impact. And that’s why I’m going around. But I have to say that I have heard this theory. I happen to think it’s a good thing politically. I’m not doing it for politics. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do. So I’m not looking at politics. But I happen to think that border security would be a good thing before the election, but there are many people within our party that are good people that are like you that agree with you on everything you say. But they’d rather do it after. They don’t agree on doing it before, and I accept their opinion, but I happen to think it would be a good thing to do before. I actually think we’d get more and there’d be more pressure on the other side, because we’re doing it because the Democrats are not giving us the votes.

RUSH: I think immigration is the largest reason you got elected, your consistency on that.

THE PRESIDENT: Well…

RUSH: I mean, it reverberates all across the country. There are people that the media, the inside-the-Beltway denizens are never gonna understand about this issue that you do. You’ve just articulated it, and you have articulated the thinking of what I think is a vast majority of people in this country. It’d be silly for you to abandon this issue now, going into the midterms.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, if you do it before, there’s a lot more pressure to get a great solution. But it’s riskier. If you do it afterwards, there’s less pressure; there’s less risk. I’m just not sure you’d make as good a deal. I will say a lot of people — good people — you know, would ask me in the nicest of ways, “Could we do it after the election?” So —

RUSH: I’ll bet. (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, and they’ve been good to me. I’ve had a lot of good support within the Republican Party, and you saw the poll numbers in the Republican Party. They like me so I have to keep them a little bit happy. But whether it’s before or after? But I actually think it’s a great campaign issue. I think it would be great before. But I don’t want to disappoint a lot of very good people that are working with me — and, Rush, I have to tell you, I’ve got some really good support within the Republican Party, too.

RUSH: Well, you do, and you have your staff. Are you basically…? Are you still following your gut, your instinct, or are you relying more and more on the circle of advisers you trust?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think it’s largely instinct. I have some great people. I really do. You know, you heard me tell the story last night maybe where, you know, I’ve been in Washington 17 times. In my whole, life I never stayed here. Now all of a sudden, I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue and I’m president. So I don’t know a lot of people. Now I think I know everybody in Washington. I never stayed a night in Washington, I don’t believe. And, you know, I’ve probably been here 17, 18 times.

I’m from New York. But very rarely. And all of a sudden, I’m president. And like Mike Pompeo. What a change that was. Mike is doing an incredible job. What a terrific guy — and I know you like him and he likes you. But we have some great people, and I’ve made some changes. But we’re really close to getting a fantastic — really just a fantastic group of people. We have some really great ones, and I think that’s reflective on the success that we’re having as an administration.

RUSH: Well, I thank you again for calling me today. This is the pinnacle, the greatest thing that could happen today. The last thing I expected was to hear from anybody ’cause I’ve given orders not to do anything unusual, and here you are. You’ve made the day for me. I can’t thank you enough, and God bless you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you. You know, people don’t realize what a great achievement 30 years is in that cutthroat business that you happen to be in. You know, you might not find that ’cause you’re so good at what you do. But that is a cutthroat business, and for you to do this for 30 years is truly an amazing accomplishment, and there’s no voice like it. Even your friend Hannity agrees with that.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: He said, “There’s nobody like this man.”

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: So I said, “Oh, gee, I guess. I thought you two would be competitors.” He said, “Nope. He’s the dean.”

RUSH: No way!

THE PRESIDENT: He calls you “the dean.”

RUSH: No way. He was a guest host. He guest hosted for me when we first started. Absolutely.

THE PRESIDENT: No, he’s great. He’s a tremendous fan of yours. They all are. Everybody is. So I just want to congratulate you. Thirty years of… Just do it for another 30 years. After that, you can take it easy, okay?

RUSH: I will do that. Just that. I will stay around as long as you do.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay. You have a deal.

RUSH: Thank you, Mr. President.

THE PRESIDENT: And thank you very much, Rush. So important what you do. Thank you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, again, very much.

THE PRESIDENT: Take care of yourself. Good-bye.

RUSH: President Trump. We went a little long there, but that’s okay.

And then they both smoked a cigarette and drank a long drink of water.

.

Trump keeps talking about Al Capone. He mentioned him again today. And maybe there’s a reason. 


Dennis wrote the following post last summer… — digby

They can always get him on tax evasion

by Dennis Hartley

I’ve been trying to process President Trump’s insane “impromptu” press conference yesterday, in which the leader of the free world obstinately stood his ground in tacit support of the odious ideology that fueled the tragedy in Charlottesville. I have never witnessed any presidential press conference quite like this one in my lifetime:




You know who he’s really beginning to remind me of? I know what you’re thinking…but Hitler and Mussolini are too easy; I’m thinking in terms of form, over content. I think he’s modelling himself (consciously or subconsciously) after underworld kingpin Al Capone.

Think about it. Trump, like fellow native New Yorker Capone was wont to do, revels in public attention, and the more outrageous and/or egregious his misdeeds, the more unapologetic his public stance. Granted, Trump hasn’t murdered anyone (that we know of), but shares a gangster’s intuition for opportunistic profiteering.

That’s why Trump’s base loves him. He’s a natural-born outlaw:



As the historian notes in the clip, regarding Capone’s bluster:

“…he’s not going to deny that he’s a bootlegger; he’s not ashamed of being a criminal.”

And as “Capone” himself confides to the viewer:

“Those twits kept trying to nail me, and came up with squat. Of course, they didn’t have enough evidence to bring me to trial.”

Remind you of anyone else who calls impromptu press conferences, ostensibly to strut about and tout their ill-gained prestige, amazing accomplishments, and gloat over the inability of the law to nail ’em?

General Kelly? Sir, we feel you. We really do.

They seem so nice

by digby

Just don’t call them deplorable. They are very sensitive:

In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.

“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms. De La Rosa said in a recent interview. Each time they have moved, online fabulists stalking the family have published their whereabouts.

“With the speed of light,” she said. “They have their own community, and they have the ear of some very powerful people.”

That’s because of Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory that the Newtown massacre was staged. The same Alex Jones on whose show Trump has appeared and his long-time pal Roger Stone is a regular.

The story is about a trial in which these people are suing Jones for defamation. Unfortunately, even if they win, Jones is not the only one. A bunch of weirdos showed up at the Trump rally with the letter “Q” on their shirt and holding signs with the letter on them:

The thread invited “requests to Q,” an anonymous user claiming to be a government agent with top security clearance, waging war against the so-called deep state in service to the 45th president. “Q” feeds disciples, or “bakers,” scraps of intelligence, or “bread crumbs,” that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the “storm” — the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to “the calm before the storm” — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs.

What Tuesday’s rally in Tampa made apparent is that devotees of these falsehoods — some of which are specific to faith in the president, others garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones — don’t just exist in the far reaches of the Web.

Believers in “QAnon,” as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. “We are Q,” it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a “Q” pattern: “Where we go one we go all.”

The symbol appeared on clothing, too. A man and a woman wore matching white T-shirts with the YouTube logo encircled in a blue “Q.” The video-sharing website came under criticism this week for unwittingly becoming a platform for baseless claims, first promoted on Twitter and Reddit by QAnon believers, that certain Hollywood celebrities are pedophiles. A search for the name of one of those celebrities on Monday returned videos purporting to show his victims sharing their stories.

The prominence of the “Q” symbol turned parts of the audience into a tableau of delusion and paranoia — and offered evidence that QAnon, an outgrowth of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led a gunman to open fire in a D.C. restaurant last year, has leaped from Internet message boards to the president’s “Make America Great Again” tour through America.

“Pray Trump mentions Q!” one user wrote on 8chan. He didn’t need to. As hazy corners of the Internet buzzed about the president’s speech, his appearance became a real-life show of force for the community that has mostly operated behind the veil of anonymity on subreddits.

What do they believe?

[I]t’s clear that QAnon crosses a new frontier. In the black hole of conspiracy in which “Q” has plunged its followers, Trump only feigned collusion to create a pretense for the hiring of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is actually working as a “white hat,” or hero, to expose the Democrats. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros are planning a coup — and traffic children in their spare time. J.P. Morgan, the American financier, sank the Titanic.

In the world in which QAnon believers live, Trump’s detractors, such as Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, wear ankle monitors that track their whereabouts. Press reports are dismissed as “Operation Mockingbird,” the name given to the alleged midcentury infiltration of the American media by the CIA. The Illuminati looms large in QAnon, as do the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family vilified by the conspiracy theorists as the leaders of a satanic cult. Among the world leaders wise to satanic influences, the theory holds, is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a “Great Awakening” will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip-fed to them by “Q,” they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.

The implication is that resolving the clues left by “Q” would not just explain Trump’s planned countercoup. It would also explain the whole universe.

When “Q” is absent for long stretches of time, followers take note.

“Please tell me where to go,” one wrote last month. “I feel lost without Q.”

Some big names have bought into the fantasy. Roseanne Barr, the disgraced star of the canceled ABC revival that bore her name, has posted messages on Twitter that appear to endorse the QAnon worldview, fixating on child sex abuse. She has sought to make contact with “Q” on social media and has retweeted messages summarizing the philosophy built around the online persona. Among QAnon’s promoters are also Curt Schilling, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher, and Cheryl Sullenger, the antiabortion activist.

They must have a whole lot of economic anxiety.

Just like these fine folks, also at the Trump rally last night:

Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

.

Kevin Drum writes:

In a recent interview, Steve Bannon declared that “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump decided to check this out, and it turns out that Bannon is right:

Working-class white men support Trump, but they’ve returned to reality a bit from the election and now support him by a net of about 28 points. Working-class white women and college-educated white men are bouncing around in the middle. But college-educated white women? They support Democrats by a net of nearly 50 points. And it shows no signs of bouncing back and forth. The more they see and hear of Trump, the more they hate him. Maybe this is this reason. I don’t know. But thanks to Trump, college-educated white women would apparently be pretty happy to see the Republican Party annihilated and replaced with something else.

I endorse that sentiment wholeheartedly.

Dear Mr. Mueller 

by tristero

Dear Mr. Mueller,

A certain POTUS is starting to panic and may (will) try to shut down your investigation very soon. It probably has to do with the start of trial of your former campaign manager (never trust anyone who buys an ostrich jacket) but who knows?  Anyway, I assume you’ve already thought of this but just in case you haven’t…

Please put in place contingency plans to ensure that — regardless of the fate of the formal investigation — the verified evidence you have of the conspiracies Trump and his cronies have participated in becomes public knowledge.

Quite literally, the future of democracy depends upon it. And not just here in the US.

Love,

tristero

Trump must be repudiated

by digby

… and November may be our last chance. George Packer in the New Yorker lays it out starkly:

In the haze of summer, with books still to be read, weeds pulled, kids retrieved from camp, it’s a little hard to fathom that, three months from now, American democracy will be on the line. The midterm elections in November are the last remaining obstacle to President Trump’s consolidation of power. None of the other forces that might have checked the rise of a corrupt homegrown oligarchy can stop or even slow it. The institutional clout that ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon no longer exists. The honest press, for all its success in exposing daily scandals, won’t persuade the unpersuadable or shame the shameless, while the dishonest press is Trump’s personal amplifier. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are rapidly becoming instruments of partisan advocacy, as reliably conservative as elected legislatures. It’s impossible to imagine the Roberts Court voting unanimously against the President, as the Burger Court, including five Republican appointees, did in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. (Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Anthony Kennedy, has even suggested that the decision was wrong.) Congress has readily submitted to the President’s will, as if legislation and oversight were burdens to be relinquished. And, when the independent counsel finally releases his report, it will have only the potency that the guardians of the law and the Constitution give it.

Behind these institutions lies public opinion, and we are quickly learning that it matters more than laws, more than the Constitution, more than the country’s supposedly inviolable founding principles. “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it,” George Orwell wrote, in “Freedom of the Park.” “If public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.” During 1973, the year Watergate became a national scandal, facts changed the political views of millions of Americans, Nixon’s approval rating fell from sixty-seven per cent to less than thirty per cent, and his fate was sealed. In our time, large blocs of public opinion are barely movable: Trump’s performance in Helsinki—declaring himself on the side of Russia, against his own intelligence agencies and the integrity of American elections—received favorable reviews from eighty per cent of Republicans. Yet public opinion still plays a central role in safeguarding democracy, and it becomes decisive through voting. Demonstrations can capture attention and build solidarity, books can provide arguments, social media can organize resistance. But if the Republicans don’t suffer a serious defeat in November, Trump will go into 2020 with every structural advantage.

They always say “it’s all about turnout.” This time it’s a matter of survival.

I have a couple of young 20 somethings in my family. I just got them signed up for absentee ballots for the November election. I will make sure they fill them out and put them in the mail. It may seem to be stupidly remedial but we all need to do everything they can to see that people vote.

Volunteer to GOTV this year. It may be your last chance.

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