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Month: November 2018

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on November 10, 2018

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Boy do we need it this week or what? Here are some adorable little devils to make you smile:

With Tasmanian Devil numbers in the wild currently dwindling to between 15,000 and 50,000 individuals, every birth is significant. The mainland breeding program of which the Zoo is a part could play an important role in helping to re-establish healthy wild populations of the species in Tasmania if needed in future.

The Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae. It was once native to mainland Australia, but it is now found only in the wild on the island state of Tasmania, including tiny east coast Maria Island where there is a conservation project with disease-free animals.

The Tasmanian Devil is the size of a small dog and became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the Thylacine in 1936. It is related to Quolls and distantly related to the Thylacine.

It is characterized by its stocky and muscular build, black fur, pungent odor, extremely loud and disturbing screech, keen sense of smell, and ferocity when feeding. The Tasmanian Devil’s large head and neck allow it to generate among the strongest bites per unit body mass of any extant mammal land predator, and it hunts prey and scavenges carrion as well as eating household products if humans are living nearby.

A breeding Tasmanian Devil female can produce up to 50 young that are about the size of a grain of rice. Competition for survival is fierce, and only the first four joeys are able to latch onto the mother’s teats.

In 2008, the Tasmanian Devil was assessed and classified as “Endangered” by the IUCN. In 2009, the Australian Government also listed the species as “Endangered”, under national environmental law.

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A Little Thing That Says It All by tristero

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

A Little Thing That Says It All 

by tristero

Representative-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from the great city of New York:

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the transition period will be “very unusual, because I can’t really take a salary. I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.” She said she saved money before leaving her job at the restaurant, and planned accordingly with her partner. “We’re kind of just dealing with the logistics of it day by day, but I’ve really been just kind of squirreling away and then hoping that gets me to January.”

Two things strike me about this amazing quote.

The .01% is about to meet the 99.99%. Nearly anyone who works for a living in this country would have trouble moving to the DC area. The inequality really is that bad.

May Ocasio-Cortez continue to remain as decent and as honest as this quote reveals her to be. There are a lot of ways she could have “found” the money to finance her move. I guarantee you that a very wealthy New Yorker who moved to Washington back in January 2017 discovered numerous ways to get the taxpayer to foot the bill.  To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez apparently never thought of them.

Pick up the clue phone, Huckleberry

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

Pick up the clue phone, Huckleberry

by digby


You can’t make this stuff up:

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday called on his fellow Republicans to address weaknesses with suburban female voters.

“We’ve got to address the suburban women problem, because it’s real,” the South Carolina Republican said on Fox News, after the network projected that Democrats would take the House.

Hmmm. Why do you think that is, asshole?

The scene: a Senate hearing into allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when the two were in high school. Graham sat behind a curved dais, his finger darting through the air, his jowls trembling with rage.

“Would you say you’ve been through hell?” he asked Kavanaugh, leaving the judge — who has known Graham since they worked together to impeach President Bill Clinton — momentarily flabbergasted.

“I’ve been through . . . uhhh,” Kavanaugh said, quickly wiping a half-smile off his face. “Hell and then some.”

“This is not a job interview,” Graham shouted. “This is hell!”

Fuck off Huckleberry. You’ve lost those “problem” women with your feral misogynistic behavior. We see you. We know exactly what you are.

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He’s crispier than usual

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

He’s crispier than usual

by digby

He’s openly demeaning the press even more vociferously than usual. Just today he personally went after April Ryan and Abby Phillips. On Wednesday he went after Yamiche Alcindor and they banned Jim Acosta. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the three women are black and Acosta is Latino.

And he pretty much spoke in gibberish at his press avail this morning, starting with this:

Does this seem like a stable person to you?

What’s up with him? Is it just because he lost the House and doesn’t know how to spin it as a win so he’s frustrated? Is he worried about what’s going to happen to him when they take the reins in January or is it Mueller? Is he just coming apart at the seams?

I don’t’ know. But he’s going even beyond his usual obstreperousness.

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That time one of them admitted they stole the 2000 election

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

That time one of them admitted they stole the 2000 election

by digby

Florida 2000 was being investigated when 9/11 happened and we never really went back and settled how it happened. (There is a great book on the subject if you’re interested, by Rick Hasen.)There was ample evidence however, that they stole it.

This comment comes from big shot Republican lawyer Michael Carvin who worked on the recount. He argued the Bush case before the Florida Supreme Court:

He admitted that they cheated:

The new deadline for all recounts to be submitted to Katherine Harris was 5 p.m. Sunday, November 26. Now, that Sunday afternoon you could watch any of the television coverage and see that Palm Beach was still counting. And by late afternoon you heard various officials in Palm Beach acknowledging that they were not going to be finished by five. Now, we maintain that was completely illegal, because the law said you had to manually recount all ballots.

But as five o’clock approached, we heard that the secretary of state was going to accept the Palm Beach partial recount — even though the Palm Beach partial recount was blatantly illegal. We were told that the secretary of state’s view was that unless Palm Beach actually informed her — in writing or otherwise — that the returns were only a partial recount, she could not infer that on her own.

So we made some calls to a few Republicans overseeing the Palm Beach recount. We told them to gently suggest to the canvassing board that it might as well put PARTIAL RETURN on the front of the returns that were to be faxed up in time for the deadline. The reason we gave was clarity — that the words PARTIAL RETURN would distinguish those returns from the full count that would be coming in later that night. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think the Palm Beach board did in the end write PARTIAL RECOUNT on the returns. We all know that the Secretary of State, in the end, rejected them.

I think the board members probably agreed to write the PARTIAL RECOUNT notation for two reasons. First of all, I think they hadn’t slept in 48 hours, so I think they’d sort of do anything. Second of all, I don’t think they or anybody else would have suspected that it would actually make any difference. Who would imagine that without the simple notation of PARTIAL RETURN the partial count would have been accepted as a complete count by the secretary of state? Even while the television showed them still counting?

But I don’t think it was Machiavellian to suggest to the board that it write PARTIAL RECOUNT, because that is what it was. I think it would have been sort of Machiavellian to suggest to pretend they were not partial returns. [Talk Magazine, March 2001, p. 172]

The GOP hack running the election recount made up an arbitrary ruling trap which the GOP hacks stealing the election then manipulated the sleep deprived election officials into unknowingly falling into.

This is just one example of the kind of thing they did every step of the way. It’s what they do.

By the way, that picture up top is, of course, John Bolton. He’s the guy who famously ran into the room after the majority of the Supreme Court ruled for their party and yelled “Stop the Count!”

The Republicans should make that their new slogan.

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Is Whittaker the latest Scaramucci?

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

Is Whittaker the latest Scaramucci?


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Less than 24 hours after the polls had closed —  and immediately after President Trump delivered one of his most petulant press conference tantrums — the word went forth that he had finally rid himself of hated Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the man whose crime against him was to follow the rules. It’s been obvious since the day Sessions showed that he held to the old-fashioned notion that in order to function as the highest law enforcement official in the country, his personal reputation and appearance of integrity were more important than fealty to the president, that his days were numbered.

Trump tried hard to get him to quit but Sessions refused to leave his dream job until he’d remade the country into Alabama circa 1952. He made a good stab at it, (even gratuitously granting police even more power as one last slap in the face to civil libertarians on his way out the door.) But Trump’s ego just couldn’t allow him to continue no matter how skillfully and efficiently he was carrying out the president’s agenda.

Trump didn’t do the normal thing and put the Deputy Attorney general in charge until a new person could be confirmed by the Senate. Of course he didn’t. He named a completely unqualified toady by the name of Matthew Whittaker who had been serving as Jeff Sessions’ Chief of staff for the past year. Nobody seems to know exactly how he came to have that particular job, but what is known is that he was a small time political player from Iowa who once served as a US Attorney and more recently was a crony of Sam Clovis, the Iowa politico who worked Trump campaign and got himself all caught up in the Russia investigation and had to resign his sinecure at the Department of Agriculture. Clovis reportedly advised him to go to New York and become a TV Trump defender and get noticed by the president so he could get a judicial appointment.

He had been working as a sole practitioner for a far right dark money funded organization called Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust aka FACT where he disseminated “legal opinions” in the media in support of Republican politics. He is, in other words, a political hack and he didn’t operate at a very high level. But he did apparently impress the president with his extreme sycophancy so he went directly from guest hits on CNN to Chief of Staff to the Attorney General. And now he is the Acting Attorney General himself.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, really. Recall that Trump wanted to make his personal pilot the head of the FAA. He brought in his totally inexperience son-in-law to run his middle east policy and much else. His daughter is a senior staffer. That’s how things work in Trumpworld.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Whittaker spent his time in the media during the summer of 2017 vociferously defending Trump against the Mueller investigation which he is now overseeing. Among his greatest hits:

David Corn of Mother Jones reported on a radio interview in which he claimed that the president has unlimited power over the Justice Department:

“There is no case for obstruction of justice because the president has all the power of the executive and delegates that to people like the FBI director and the attorney general…The president could and has in our nation’s history said stop investigating this person or please investigate this other person.”

Referring to the Comey firing, he said “There’s really nothing here…This is power that is completely vested in the president…If he wanted to he could have told Jim [Comey] to stop investigating former [Defense Intelligence Agency] director Flynn. And he didn’t…I’m sure he made his preference known. Quite frankly, he’s president of the United States. He can do that.”

The Daily Beast reported that he stated unequivocally that there was no collusion:

“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign. There was interference by the Russians into the election, but that was not collusion with the campaign. That’s where the left seems to be combining those two issues.The last thing they want right now is for the truth to come out, and for the fact that there’s not a single piece of evidence that demonstrates that the Trump campaign had any illegal or any improper relationships with the Russians. It’s that simple…The real Russian ties were with Hillary Clinton.

According to CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who gathered many of these quotes, he has already concluded there was no obstruction of justice either:

Let’s assume that the President asked him to stop investigating Flynn. That doesn’t rise to the level of obstruction of justice and it doesn’t sound to me, based on what’s been reported, that Jim Comey, as he sat there, believed that the President was telling him to stop the investigation.

 Let’s just say that his position on the Mueller probe couldn’t be any clearer.

The Washington Post reported that two people close to Whitaker said he does not plan to take himself off the Russia case. They also said he likely won’t approve any presidential subpoena which undoubtedly made Rudy Giuliani very happy. Who needs the aggravation?

But perhaps Whittaker might be persuaded to rethink that by someone he trusts, himself:

That may be the most sensible thing he’s said about this entire matter.

CNN reported late on Thursday that the White House is surprised by all the blowback and they are starting to get worried. They had no idea he was nothing more than a cheap flak who’d been flapping his lips all over the media about the Mueller investigation for months before he mysteriously became Jeff Sessions’ right-hand man:

It was not widely known among White House staff that he’d commented repeatedly on the special counsel’s investigation in interviews and on television — which is ironic given that this is what drew President Donald Trump to him and raises continued questions over the depth of the administration’s vetting process.

That machine is as well-oiled as ever.

There has been much anticipation that the Mueller investigation is coming to a head. Something may have even happened already. Things are moving very fast. But you have to wonder if this man Whittaker is going to end up going the Scaramucci route. It kind of feels like it.

The question is how much damage he can do before he exits the scene. (He already got to work issuing a new, probably unlawful, order to require asylum seekers to only apply through authorized ports of entry.) If nothing else he will have been briefed on all the details of the Mueller investigation and he has undoubtedly already shared every single one of them with Donald Trump. That’s what he’s there for. It’s all right out in the open.

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This is NOT Normal by tristero

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

This is NOT Normal 

by tristero

I’d like to highlight something in Tom Sullivan’s earlier post here.

Tom linked to this WaPo article about now acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, whose past includes a paid position on the advisory board of an organization better described as a conspiracy of grifters and scam artists than as a legitimate business.

The article says that “the FTC filed a complaint against Miami-based World Patent Marketing, accusing it of misleading investors and falsely promising that it would help them patent and profit from their inventions, according to court filings.” Earlier this year, a Florida federal court ordered the company to close its doors and pay a settlement of over $25 million. And Whitaker did more than merely advise. He also appeared in videos touting the company.

Below are excerpts from that article. I want to make it very clear that it is a nearly unheard of occurrence for a top official at the Justice Department, let alone an acting Attorney General, to have such a close association with such a corrupt business.

This is NOT normal. To imagine that the country would stand for someone like Whitaker overseeing, for crissakes, the Justice Department, reveals a deep cynicism not only about government but about the American people. Whitaker, regardless of his oft-stated public opinions about the Mueller investigation, should not be working at the Justice Department in the first place.

One more thing. My guess is that the investigation into Whitaker’s past association with con artists, criminals and the like has just begun. I suspect Trump himself may think there’s more sleaze in Whitaker’s past as he’s going out of his way to lie about how well he knows Whitaker.

Whitaker has to go. Now.

It’s really upsetting to know that guy will be attorney general,” said Ryan Masti, 26, who lost $77,000 after paying World Patent Marketing to help him bring to market his idea for a social media app to help the disabled. “It’s so offensive. It’s like a stab in the back.”

 ***

Whitaker was paid at least $10,000 by the company, according to court filings.

***

“As a former U.S. Attorney, I would only align myself with a first class organization,” Whitaker said in a 2014 company news release. “World Patent Marketing goes beyond making statements about doing business ‘ethically’ and translate those words into action.” 

According to the FTC, however, the company falsely promised clients it would patent and market their ideas in exchange for hefty fees — and then pocketed the money.
“For the last three years, Defendants have operated an invention-promotion scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars,” the agency alleged in a recently unsealed court filing. “In truth and in fact, Defendants fail to fulfill almost every promise they make to consumers.” 

***

World Patent Marketing salespeople would persuade prospective clients to sign a confidentiality agreement and then ask them to explain their idea, according to court documents. 

Whatever the concept, no matter how banal or improbable, investigators found, the salesperson would pronounce the idea fantastic and encourage the customer to pay for a package to market and patent the idea, documents show. 

Many people ended up in debt or lost their life savings, according to the FTC.
Promotional material highlighted the meaty résumés of board members like Whitaker, which seemed to be a key component of the business operation. The company said the board would help review inventors’ ideas to maximize their ability to get rich. 

“Innovators are today’s revolutionaries — forward-thinking visionaries that have come together to form the powerful and influential World Patent Marketing advisory board,” the narrator of one promotional video intoned, as photos of Whitaker and other board members filled the screen. 

Masti, who said he struggled with ADHD as a child and hoped his invention would help others like him, said in an interview that he trusted the company in part because he was told that advisory board members, including Whitaker, had reviewed his idea and thought it would be successful. 

“They said he’s very high up. He’s a professional. He’s got a lot of power,” said Masti, a resident of Cameron, N.Y., who said he voted for Trump in 2016. “That’s how they sold you.” 

Now, Masti said he is living with his parents and facing crushing debt from loans he took out to pay the company. 

Another former customer, Penn Mason, an airline employee from Nashville, said he paid World Patent Marketing $21,000 to help him patent and market a real estate app he had invented. 

The company failed to patent his product and quickly stopped returning his phone calls, he said. 

Mason said he believes that paid advisory board members like Whitaker essentially pocketed money from unsuspecting victims. 

“That was our money,” said Mason, 52. Of Whitaker’s selection as acting attorney general, he said, “It makes me sick to my stomach . . . It’s like a punch in the gut.” 

Europe joins the arms race

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

Europe joins the arms race

by digby

Fitting that this comes on the 100th anniversary of WWI. It looks like it’s time to get out that old tattered copy of “The Guns of August.”

Here we go:

French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for the formation of a “real European army” to protect the continent “with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.”

Agence France-Presse reports that while on a tour of World War I memorials Tuesday, Macron said: “We will not protect the Europeans unless we decide to have a true European army.”

Macron has advocated for the mobilization of a collective European force since his election last year. But those calls may be received with more urgency after President Trump announced last month that the U.S. would pull out of a Cold War era nuclear weapons treaty with Russia. Trump has also displayed a tepid attitude in the past towards NATO’s mutual defense commitments.

“When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty, who is the main victim? Europe and its security,” Macron said on a visit to Verdun, a French city that was the site of a major battle in 1916.

Europe needs to be prepared to “[defend] itself better alone, without just depending on the United States,” the French president added.

The E.U. launched an annual €5.5 billion ($6.3 billion) joint defense fund last year, and added another €13 billion ($14.8 billion) in defense spending in June to support development of new military technology. France has also led the formation of a nine-country rapid deployment force to respond to crises like evacuations or natural disasters.

Macron is preparing to host dozens of world leaders, including Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Sunday to mark the 100th anniversary of the World War I armistice.

But ahead of that anniversary, the French president has spoken of modern threats to European peace, including the reemergence of “authoritarianpowers” and “intrusion attempts in cyber-space” seeking to derail democratic elections in Europe. (Russia has been accused of intervening in elections in France as well as supporting far-right parties in Germany and elsewhere.)

“Peace in Europe is precarious,” Macron said.

Thank Trump for putting the US on the enemies list. Now everyone will be building big new toys that go boom. What could go wrong?

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A law unto himself by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 9, 2018

A law unto himself
by Tom Sullivan

The sitting president “treats the Constitution like a tax code, something he can loophole this way or that,” Neal Katyal told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Thursday night. In a New York Times op-ed written jointly with attorney George Conway, the former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama branded Donald Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general both unconstitutional and illegal.

“This really underscores the wisdom of our founders,” Katyal said. “This is something actually that Justice Thomas, who is the president’s favorite justice, wrote about 3 years ago. He said the founders said we distrusted the idea that any one president, no matter how wise, wouldn’t abuse his powers and nominate people or install people to department heads like the Attorney General and abuse their authority.”

Hayes added that Fox News legal commentator Andrew Napolitano agreed Whitaker “does not qualify under the law” for the job. The post must go to someone confirmed by the Senate.

Whitaker’s installation over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is seen as a clear move by the president to have a toady oversee and/or quash the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. News sources have spread a lot of pixels detailing Whitaker’s shady business dealings and kissing up before joining the Trump administration as former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff. A more quintessential Trump administration resume would be hard to find.

Unconstitutionality is the central question before Whitaker’s other blemishes come into focus. Whitaker reportedly will not recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation even “given that he has written opinion pieces about the investigation and is a friend and political ally of a grand jury witness,” reports the Washington Post. Eighteen Attorneys General have sent a letter to Whitaker at the U.S. Department of Justice asking him to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation, as Sessions did under federal rules.

Lawfare blog cites chapter and verse:

Whitaker may be obligated to recuse himself from the Mueller investigation. The relevant Justice Department guideline is Section 45.2 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which states that “no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with” either “any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution” or “any person or organization which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.”

What captures the imagination is the ham-fistedness of Trump’s attempt to run the Department of Justice from the White House puts in question every other prosecution underway. “Every litigant in this country who is facing the Justice Department can make these arguments,” Katyal said. “Hey, you’re trying to put me in jail, Justice Department? You don’t have the authority. You have a fake attorney general.”

Trump, who sometimes tweets about his exploits in the third person, has always considered He Trump a law unto himself. One still marvels he was able somehow to raise his right hand and place the other on a Bible with his fingers crossed behind his back.

They’re still hounding Christine Blasey Ford

Published by digby on November 9, 2018

They’re still hounding Christine Blasey Ford

by digby


This is just sad:

More than a month after testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Christine Blasey Ford is still getting death threats.

Ford told the committee that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in the 1980s. Now, her lawyers said in a statement to NPR on Thursday, “Justice Kavanaugh ascended to the Supreme Court, but the threats to Dr. Ford continue.”

Because of the abuse she’s receiving, Ford has had to move four times. She can’t go to work as a professor at Palo Alto University, and it’s unclear when she’ll be able to return, according to NPR. She needs a private security detail.

Like so much about the hearings and their aftermath, the threats send a message to survivors, especially if they are women: If you speak up, you will be punished. It’s an old message, but one that’s just as powerful in the #MeToo era as it was for years before. The only thing more powerful might be the voices of survivors themselves.

[…]
Threats like those Ford received — especially those posted publicly online — aren’t just a crime against her. They also serve to keep other survivors quiet. In some ways, they resemble the Gamergate campaigns against women who spoke out about sexism in video games — public harassment directed at those who challenge the established order can be a way of discouraging future challengers and keeping that order in place.

In the case of Gamergate, to some degree, it worked — Brianna Wu, a game developer who was targeted by Gamergate harassers and later ran for Congress, told me in September that many women in the video game industry chose not to speak publicly about Gamergate for fear that their children would be targeted for harassment. Threats like the ones Ford is getting, then, are not only a way of punishing her for the past — they’re also about ensuring the future the threateners want.

The threats are just one way Ford was made to suffer for coming forward with her allegation against Kavanaugh. She had to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing that pitted her against Kavanaugh with no additional witnesses or FBI investigation — and the investigation that followed the hearing was so limited in scope that it was essentially doomed from the beginning. She was mocked by the president in front of an audience of thousands. Before, during, and after the hearing, Senate Republicans essentially erased Ford, spinning her allegations as a plot by Democrats.

Before going public with her allegations, Ford said she asked herself, “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?”

The question has become famous, in part because it was so prescient — in many ways, Ford was annihilated, and in many ways, it didn’t matter.

The threats, the mockery, the way Republicans treated Ford as though she didn’t even exist, the fact that Kavanaugh sits in a mahogany chair at the Supreme Court while Ford can’t even go to work — all send a message to other survivors that if they come forward, they risk being annihilated too.
[…]
To some degree, the threats Ford is receiving now are a grisly reminder of how consequential her testimony actually was. It came very close to keeping a powerful man from becoming even more powerful.

If Ford had truly been annihilated, if she’d had no impact, then she might be allowed to fade into obscurity. But those threatening her likely know that, even with Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, Ford has set an enduring example to survivors, who stand with her even now.

That’s a very positive spin. In reality, it seems to me that it’s more of the same old same old.

I’m reminded of this harrowing story about a girl who reported her rape and was tortured by her community for it.

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