Month: December 2018

Depends on what the meaning of the words “Trump Tower Moscow” is

by digby

.@GStephanopoulos: "Did Donald Trump know that Michael Cohen was pursuing the Trump Tower in Moscow into the summer of 2016?"

Rudy Giuliani: "According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to… November of 2016." https://t.co/kEzanELn3I pic.twitter.com/kxSUAXFhtk— ABC News (@ABC) December 16, 2018

The Daily Beast:

Rudy Giuliani claimed in an ABC interview that President Donald Trump knew that his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal “all the way up to…November of 2016.” Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress over his role in pushing for the Moscow project, told a federal judge that the discussions stopped in June 2016. The President’s personal lawyer, who also just said that President Trump would be interviewed in person by the Special Counsel’s Office “over his dead body,” made the statement during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on This Week ABC. Stephanopoulos asked Giuliani “Did Donald Trump know that Michael Cohen was pursuing the Trump Tower in Moscow into the summer of 2016?” Giuliani replied “according to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to… November of 2016” apparently in reference to Trump’s written answers to Robert Mueller’s questions about potential Russian collusion in the election.

Yeah, Rudy’s a tremendous lawyer.

Here’s some more of Rudy’s trainwreck of an appearance:

GIULIANI: "[Cohen] will say whatever he has to say. He has changed his story 4 or 5 times."

ABC: "So has the president."

GIULIANI: "The president is not under oath." pic.twitter.com/MBVkvoaSsE— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2018

🚨 ABC: "Did Roger Stone give the president a heads up on WikiLeaks' leaks concerning Clinton & the DNC?"

GIULIANI: "No he didn't… uh, *I don't believe so*. But again, if he did, it's not a crime." 🚨 pic.twitter.com/nHd1uTtNCL— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2018

GIULIANI on hush payments: "The amount of $ is consistent w/harassment, not truth…when it's true & you have kind of money that the president has, it's a $1m settlement. When it's not true, you give $130k or $150k. They went away for so little $, it indicates their case is weak" pic.twitter.com/BmY8SoIri2— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2018

You can watch the whole thing here if you can stand it.

It’s very ironic that Trump now says Cohen was just a PR guy and a lousy lawyer. That might be true but if so, Giuliani proves that Trump is continuing the practice.

If stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

The third insurgency
by Tom Sullivan

Antelope Wells border station. Photo by wbaron via Wikimedia Commons.

They do not build. Not much since Eisenhower, anyway. Republicans break things. Now they have broken The Weekly Standard, Beltway conservatives’ favorite bathroom reading. As the mouthpiece for Never Trump conservatives, Bill Kristol’s little magazine had to die. Philip Anschutz, Colorado billionaire and reported Christian conservative, through his Clarity Media CEO announced he is shutting it down.

A conservative media outlet losing money for a couple of decades is expected. Criticizing Donald Trump is intolerable, especially while shedding readers.

Franklin Foer reviews the publication in his eulogy for The Atlantic:

The magazine itself combined high intellectual seriousness with the crass mentality of a political operative. A single edition of the Standard might contain gonzo reportage, erudite cultural essays, and op-eds filled with gross clichés that made you want to force the whole thing down the garbage disposal.

Clarity Media will flush the troublesome anti-Trump Standard down the corporate Hobart after its final issue on December 17.

Also on Friday, a conservative federal judge in Texas ruled that as congressionally disfigured — sans its original individual tax penalty for failure to carry insurance — the Affordable Care Act is no longer a valid exercise of Congress’ taxing authority and thus unconstitutional. Legal scholars who support the ACA as well as conservative critics found the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor, dare we say, deplorable.

“He effectively repealed the entire Affordable Care Act when the 2017 Congress decided not to do so,” Yale law professor Abbe Gluck told the Washington Post. Ted Frank, a lawyer and ACA critic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, called the decision “embarrassingly bad.”

O’Connor issued a declaratory judgment against the Act but no injunction. He means to break it, preexisting condition protections and all, but stayed his hand for now. Obamacare will continue, the White House said, “pending the appeal process.” Tens of millions of Americans shuddered.

George Packer believes the Republican party bent on eradicating Obamacare has become “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

Packer presumably completed his essay for The Atlantic before reports of the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal. The child died of dehydration, shock and liver failure after hours in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol.

“This child’s death was the inevitable result of this administration’s cruel and inhumane border enforcement policies,” said Peter Simonson, executive director of New Mexico’s American Civil Liberties Union. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held up the child’s death as an object lesson to desperate migrants who would cross the border illegally: Keep Out.*

The product of “a series of insurgencies against the established order,” Nielsen’s Republican party is by now thoroughly corrupt, Packer explains. “The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them.”

An America that once celebrated the peaceful transfer of power after elections now sees Republican-controlled legislatures moving in state after state to lock in their power and lock out opponents after losing ground to the will of the voters. That is, to refute the will of displeased voters and to ensure popular democracy cannot undo what Republicans have done to them.

Packer chronicles the march of movement conservatism from Goldwater to the New Right’s embracing “mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas” and the opening of the movement to “extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.” If Goldwater marked the first insurgency, Newt Gingrich led the second, demonizing opponents and announcing there could be no compromises.

Even after Gingrich was driven from power, the victim of his own guillotine, he regularly churned out books that warned of imminent doom—unless America turned to a leader like him (he once called himself “teacher of the rules of civilization,” among other exalted epithets). Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

Then came September 11, the Great Recession, and the election of Barack Obama.

In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence. The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, liberals failed to see it coming and couldn’t grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in democracy.

The party’s present condition was a long time coming, Packer concludes, “In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.” Power now trumps principle. Bow or perish.

Civil rights leader Rev. William J. Barber II sees a need for a counter-movement to this extremist “whitelash.” The movement must be “indigenously led, state-based, state-government focused, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, and transformative.” Donald Trump’s movement, Barber argues, sees “the possibility of a Third Reconstruction, which is why they’re working so hard this time to strangle it in its cradle.” The third insurgency wants to roll America back to after the first Reconstruction.

* New Mexico’s Antelope Wells Port of Entry is an official border crossing in the Chihuahuan Desert 120 miles west of El Paso, TX. It closes at 4 p.m. The Associated Press reports after being dropped off a 90-min walk from the border, seven-year-old Jakelin Caal, her father, and 161 other migrants crossed at Antelope Wells and approached U.S. Border agents to turn themselves in about 10 p.m.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

*This post will stay pinned at the top for a while. Please scroll down for new material. Thanks — digby

Holiday Fundraiser Time!

by digby

Holiday soother: a Scottish wildcat kitten

Yes, it’s that time again. It’s the holiday season and I’m asking for your support to keep this rickety old blog afloat for another year. How time flies when the world has turned upside down. It seems like only yesterday that I was lying in bed with the covers pulled up over my head wondering how the country had finally gone completely mad and elected Donald Trump to be president of the United States. Actually, that was yesterday.

The last few years have been as tumultuous as I can remember in my lifetime and I’ve been around a while. I think if I weren’t writing seven days a week researching, observing, analyzing and producing this blog I might just lose my mind. I hope that somehow my therapeutic ramblings every day give some of you a little way to cope and maybe a little hope that you aren’t alone out there.

And for me, I can only say that your support means the world to me. I thank each and every one of you for contributing to this little project over the years. It’s not just the money, although that makes it possible to keep going. It’s the validation that what we do here is meaningful. I can’t express how grateful I am for that.

The world has changed since I started blogging but maybe not quite as much as we think. Back then we were all still reeling from 9/11 and observing our government leaders lose their ethical moorings and decide to invade a country that didn’t attack us. The president of the United States had been installed in a dubious electoral process manipulated by his own brother and a partisan Supreme Court majority. And that was on the heels of a dada-esque impeachment trial that ended giving the president a 60% approval rating.  And then there was the financial crisis. Oh man.

Let’s just say we’ve been nuts for quite a while. But as wild as the last two decades have been, none of it really prepared us for the Trump era. This is unprecedented lunacy — everything corrupt, decadent, ignorant and ugly about our politics congealed into one giant ball of daily rage tweets and overwhelming ineptitude. It’s the last 20 years condensed into two on steroids.

People will say to me from time to time that Trump, at least, isn’t a war president. And I wonder what they’re talking about. Even aside from the fact that he’s escalated tensions all over the planet, and poured money into the military, his coddling of Saudi Arabia has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the war we have been engaged in for a decade and a half in Afghanistan shows no sign ending.

And the fact is that he’s started another war, a big one. It’s here in the United States, dividing the nation into his friends and foes and stoking every primitive hatred that exists in our culture.  And the major front in that battle is at the border with Mexico where the government has put babies in cages and just yesterday we learned that this week our border patrol let a 7 year old girl die for lack of food and water.

He is a war president and the war is right here on American soil.

We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.

The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Holiday Shopping Night at the Movies 


Blu Xmas: Best BD reissues of 2018, pt. 2

By Dennis Hartley

‘Tis the season, so I thought I’d toss out gift ideas, with more of my picks for the best Blu-ray reissues of 2018. Most titles are released concurrent with an SD edition, so if you don’t have a Blu-ray player, don’t despair. Any reviews based on Region “B” editions (which require a multi-region Blu-ray player) are noted as such; the good news is that multi-region players are now more affordable! So here you go, in alphabetical order…

Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood (Criterion Collection; box set) – I picked up this box set with trepidation. Previously, I’d only seen two collaborations between director Josef von Sternberg and leading lady Marlene Dietrich (The Blue Angel and Shanghai Express). While I found both quite watchable, they struck me as creaky and melodramatic; it seemed “enough” at the time to get the gist of their creative partnership.

After watching all six films in this Criterion set (and being older and wiser this time around), I “get it” now. Viewing them as a unique film cycle reveals that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; this is Dietrich and Sternberg’s idiosyncratic cinematic universe; a romantic, glamorous, adventurous, exotic world-and you’re just soaking in it. Once you have given yourself over to Dietrich’s mesmerizing allure… plots don’t matter.

The films in the set were all made for Paramount in the early to mid-1930s. Included are: the romantic drama Morocco (1930), spy thriller Dishonored (1931), adventure-romance Shanghai Express (1932), romantic drama Blonde Venus (1932), costume drama The Scarlet Empress (1934), and the comedy-drama-romance The Devil is a Woman (1935).

The films have all been restored and boast new scans (some 2K, others 4K), rendering them as clean and sparkly as they can possibly be for 80+ year-old prints. This visual clarity accentuates Sternberg’s flair for composition and filmic language. Extras include documentaries, video essays, archival interviews, and an 80-page book. Buffs will love it.

Escape From New York (Studio Canal; Region “B”) – John Carpenter directed this 1981 action-thriller set in the dystopian near-future of 1997 (ah, those were the days). N.Y.C. has been converted into a penal colony. Air Force One has been downed by terrorists, but not before the POTUS (Donald Pleasence) bails in his escape pod, which lands in Manhattan, where he is kidnapped by “inmates”. The police commissioner (ever squinty-eyed Lee van Cleef) enlists the help of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a fellow war vet who is now one of America’s most notorious criminals.

Imaginative, darkly funny and entertaining, despite an obviously limited budget. Carpenter and co-writer Nick Castle even slip in a little subtext of Nixonian paranoia. Also with Ernest Borgnine, Adrienne Barbeau, Isaac Hayes (the Duke of N.Y.!), and Harry Dean Stanton (stealing all his scenes as “Brain”). Carpenter also composed the memorable theme song.

Boy, is this new sharp 4K scan ever a wondrous gift to fans of the film! This is probably the 3rd (or 4th?) dip I’ve made over the years; all previous DVD and Blu-ray editions have suffered from transfers so dark and murky that I’ve spent every screening squinting like Lee Van Cleef as I attempt to make out details. Granted, it’s nearly all night shots for the exteriors, but I have never seen the film looking so…film-like (outside a theater). Cinematographer Dean Cundey approved the restoration and color grading, and it shows.

Studio Canal’s new edition features 3 audio commentaries to choose from, and several featurettes and interviews with cast members. I haven’t been able to track down any information on a domestic (Region “A”) Blu-ray release; but given the popularity of the film I’m sure one is in the pipeline (this review is based on the Region “B” version only).

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC; Original 1981 UK TV series) – I’m not sure if it’s possible to “wear out” a DVD, but I’ve probably come closest to doing so with my copy of the original BBC-TV version of Douglas Adams’ sci-fi comedy cult classic.

In a nutshell, the Earth is obliterated to make way for a hyperspace bypass by a Vogon construction fleet (as the result of bureaucratic oversight the requisite public notice was posted in a basement-on a different planet). One member of humanity survives-Arthur Dent, a neurotic Englishman who “hitches” a ride on a Vogon vessel just before the Earth-shattering “ka-boom”, thanks to his friend Ford Prefect, whom Arthur never suspected was an alien doing field research for the eponymous “guide”. Zany interstellar misadventures ensue, with a quest to find the answer to life, the Universe, and everything.

While the 2005 theatrical remake was a hoot, it lacked the endearing cheesiness of the 1981 series. As it was originally shot on video and 16mm, the very idea of a “restored” Blu-ray edition is a bit silly, really…but it actually is an upgrade, particularly in audio quality (it’s mostly about the wonderfully cheeky dialog anyway). And with 5½ hours of extras, Adams geeks will be in 7th heaven (or at least somewhere near Alpha Centauri!).

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema (Criterion Collection; box set) – One of my favorite exchanges from Barry Levinson’s infinitely quotable 1981 film Diner occurs between two friends sitting in a theater watching the Ingmar Bergman classic The Seventh Seal:

Edward ‘Eddie’ Simmons: Who’s that?
William ‘Billy’ Howard: That’s ‘Death’ walking on the beach.
Edward ‘Eddie’ Simmons: I’ve been to Atlantic City a hundred times. I never saw Death walking on the beach.

Speaking for myself, I saw Death walking on the beach just the other day, in a restored 4K print. It’s one of the 39 films included in Criterion’s exhaustive, bicep-building box set. I have previously seen approximately half of the films in this collection; several I have never even heard of (18 of these titles have never before been released by Criterion).

My plan of attack is to watch the films in chronological order of original release dates. OK, full disclosure: I watched the first two (neither of which I had previously seen, from the late 1940s) but then cheated by skipping ahead to The Seventh Seal (couldn’t wait to see the restored version). So…36 to go (is mid-winter a bad time of year to plow through a boxful of Bergman films? Discuss). From what I’ve seen so far, the prints are gorgeous.

Extras. Where to start? There are 5 hours of interviews with Bergman and some key collaborators. There are 2 rare documentary shorts by the director, extensive programs about Bergman’s work, “making of” featurettes, video essays by critics and film scholars, a 248-page hardbound book…everything short of a collectable Death action figure. Discs are mounted in numbered slots on cardboard flip-through “pages” (kind of like an oversized coin collection) and curated as a “film festival”. Of course, you can watch them in any order that you wish (especially at this price). A treasure trove for art house fans!

King of Hearts (Cohen Film Collection/Sony) – The utter madness of war has rarely been conveyed in such a succinct (or oddly endearing) manner as in Philippe de Broca’s absurdist adult fable. Alan Bates stars as a WW1 Scottish army private sent ahead of his advancing company to a rural French village, where he is to locate and disarm a bomb that has been set by retreating Germans. His mission is interrupted when he is suddenly set upon by a coterie of loopy and highly theatrical residents who (literally) sweep him off his feet and jovially inform him he is now their “king”. These happy-go-lucky folks are, in fact, inmates of the local asylum, who have occupied the town since the residents fled. The battle-weary private decides to humor them, in the meantime brainstorming how he can coax them out of harm’s way before the war inevitably intrudes once again.

It’s wonderful to have a newly-restored 4K scan of this cult favorite, which has been previously difficult to track down on home video. Extras include a feature-length commentary track by film critic Wade Major, a new conversation with the film’s leading lady Genevieve Bujold, and a new conversation with cinematographer Pierre Lhomme.

Little Murders (Indicator; Region “B”) – This dark, dark comedy from 1971 is one of my all-time favorite films. It was directed by Alan Arkin and adapted by Jules Feiffer from his own self-described “post-assassination play” (referring to the then-relatively recent murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy). That said, it is not wholly political; but it is sociopolitical (I see it as the pre-cursor to Paddy Chayefsky’s Network).

Elliot Gould is at the peak of his Elliot Gould-ness as a nihilistic (and seemingly brain-dead) free-lance photographer who is essentially browbeaten into a love affair with an effervescent sunny side-up young woman (Marcia Rodd) who is bound and determined to snap him out of his torpor. The story follows the travails of this oil and water couple as they slog through a dystopic New York City chock full o’ nuts, urban blight, indifference and random shocking acts of senseless violence (you know…New York City in the 70s).

There are so many memorable vignettes, and nearly every cast member gets a Howard Beale-worthy monologue on how fucked-up American society is (and remember…this was 1971). Disturbingly, it remains relevant as ever. But it is very funny. No, seriously. The cast includes Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Doris Roberts, Lou Jacobi (who has the best monolog) and Donald Sutherland. Arkin is a riot as a homicide investigator.

Indicator’s limited-edition Blu-ray features a gorgeous high-definition remaster (please note that it is a Region ‘B’ locked disc that requires a multi-region player). A plethora of extras includes a 2004 audio commentary with Gould and Feiffer, an alternate commentary track from 2018 by film journalist Samm Deighan, new and archival featurettes, interviews, and critical re-appraisals, a 40-page booklet of essays, and more.

The Magnificent Ambersons (Criterion Collection) – It’s sad that the late great Orson Welles has (unfairly) become the perennial poster boy for “squandered talent” in the film industry. Granted, he was a rapscallion who loved to push people’s buttons; unfortunately, some of those “people” were powerful producers and studio heads who didn’t get the joke back in those days when “maverick” and “genius” were dirty words in Hollywood. But he was a maverick, and he was a genius…he just wanted to make the movies he wanted to make, precisely the way he wanted to make them. But alas, the “boy genius” became enslaved by his own legend soon after making Citizen Kane at age 25.

Welles’ disillusionment with the studio system began with the release of The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, as what hit theaters was essentially a butchered version of how he had envisioned the film. Unfortunately, he had conceded final cut in a deal made with RKO (a decision he came to regret). Adding insult to the injury of the 50 excised minutes from Welles’ original rough cut, studio heads ordered that the negatives of that footage be destroyed as well. Regardless, the film is still heralded as one of Welles’ finest efforts.

Welles adapted the script from Booth Tarkington’s eponymous novel. It’s the story of a well-to-do family whose “magnificence” (as Welles’ stentorian voiceover narration informs us) “…began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their midland town spread and darken into a city.” This sets the tone for what ensues, which is the rotting of that “splendor” from the inside out; not only the decline of a family dynasty, but of a mannered, measured way of life whose destruction was assured by the onslaught of the Second Industrial Revolution (the price of Progress can be steep).

Criterion’s new 4K restoration is a real showcase for Stanley Cortez’s striking chiaroscuro photography, and a testament to Welles’ mastery of visual storytelling. Extras include two commentary tracks by film scholars and critics, new video essays by film historians and scholars, an excerpt from the 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons, written essays, and more. It’s another must-have for film buffs.

The Man Who Cheated Himself (Flicker Alley) – This marks the third collaboration between releasing studio Flicker Alley, the Film Noir Foundation, and UCLA Film and Television Archive in their mission to unearth and restore forgotten film noir gems from the classic noir cycle (it was preceded by Too Late for Tears and Woman on the Run).

The ever-gruff Lee J. Cobb stars as a bad, bad cop (a noir staple) who gets in the middle of a kerfuffle between his girlfriend (Jane Wyatt, cast against type as a femme fatale) and her estranged husband. The incident ends badly for hubby, and love-struck Cobb scrambles a cover-up. Adherent to the Rules of Noir, the more he tries to cover it, the deeper the hole gets. Having his straight-arrow rookie homicide detective brother (John Dall) by his side working so enthusiastically to solve the case does not quell his anxiety.

While I wouldn’t call this 1950 effort from prolific director Felix E. Feist (perhaps best-known for his noir cult pic The Devil Thumbs a Ride) a classic genre entry, it’s still quite involving, the performances are solid, and it’s always noble to rescue a forgotten noir. The real star is ever-cinematic San Francisco; some of its most iconic locations are used to great effect by DP Russell Harlan (especially the Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Point).

Extras include a mini-documentary about the original production, a “then and now” virtual tour around contemporary San Francisco scouting out original locations for the film, and a nifty souvenir booklet. The noir completest on your Xmas list will be pleased!

Shampoo (Criterion Collection) – Sex, politics, and the shallow SoCal lifestyle are mercilessly skewered in Hal Ashby’s classic 1975 satire. Warren Beatty (who co-scripted with Robert Towne) plays a restless, over-sexed hairdresser with commitment issues regarding the three major women in his life (excellent performances from Lee Grant, Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie). Beatty allegedly based his character on his close friend, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring (one of the victims of the infamous 1969 Tate-LaBianca slayings). The most memorable scene takes place at an election night event.

This was one of the first films to satirize the 1960s zeitgeist with some degree of historical detachment. The late great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs infuses the L.A. backdrop with a gauziness that appropriately mirrors the protagonist’s fuzzy way of dealing with adult responsibilities.

Criterion’s Blu-ray features a 4K restoration (previous DVDs have been less than stellar in picture and sound quality). Extras include a conversation between critics Mark Harris and Frank Rich and a 1998 TV interview with Warren Beatty from The South Bank Show.

True Stories (Criterion Collection) – Musician/raconteur David Byrne enters the Lone Star state of mind with this subtly satirical Texas travelogue from 1986. It’s not easy to pigeonhole; part social satire, part long-form music video, part mockumentary. The episodic vignettes about the quirky but generally likable inhabitants of sleepy Virgil, Texas should hold your fascination once you buy into “tour-guide” Byrne’s bemused anthropological detachment.

Among the town’s residents: John Goodman, “Pops” Staples, Swoosie Kurtz and the late Spalding Gray. The outstanding cinematography is by Edward Lachman. Byrne’s fellow Heads have cameos performing “Wild Wild Life”. Not everyone’s cup of tea, perhaps- but for some reason, I have an emotional attachment to this film that I can’t even explain.

Finally… “someone” (in this case, Criterion) has done justice to Lachman’s lovely cinematography by giving this film a properly matted transfer (for years, the only version available on home video was a dismal “pan and scan” DVD). The newly restored 4K transfer was supervised by Byrne and Lachman, and it’s gorgeous. The 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio also lends a crucial upgrade to the soundtrack quality (all those great Talking Heads songs really pop now!). Extras include a CD of the complete music soundtrack, deleted scenes, written essays, and documentary shorts (new and archival).

12 Monkeys(Arrow Video) – Another wild ride from the vivid imagination of Terry Gilliam, this 1995 sci-fi thriller (inspired by Chris Marker’s classic 1962 short film, La Jetee) has become a cult favorite.

Set in the year 2035, it’s the story of a prison inmate (Bruce Willis) who is “volunteered” to be sent back to the year 1996 to detect the origin of a mystery virus that wiped out 99% of the human race. Fate and circumstance land Willis in a psych ward for observation, where he meets two people who may be instrumental in helping him solve the mystery-a psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) and a fellow mental patient (Brad Pitt, in an entertainingly demented performance).

I like the way the film plays with “reality” and perception. Is Willis really a time traveler from 2035…or is he what the psychiatrist is telling him-a delusional schizophrenic actually living in 1996? There are many more surprises up Gilliam’s sleeve here.

Arrow Films’ 4K restoration is a marked improvement over Universal’s previous Blu-ray; picture and audio quality are outstanding. The commentary track (by Gilliam and Charles Roven) and an 87-minute documentary (The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys) have been ported over from the Universal edition, but Arrow adds several new features-including a video appreciation by Ian Christie and an image gallery.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Warner Brothers) – The mathematician/cryptologist I.J. Good (an Alan Turing associate) once famously postulated:

Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man…however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Good raised this warning in 1965, about the same time director Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke were formulating the narrative that would evolve into both the novel and film versions of 2001: a Space Odyssey. And it’s no coincidence that the “heavy” in 2001 was an ultra-intelligent machine that wreaks havoc once its human overseers lose “control” …Good was a consultant on the film.

Good was but one of the experts that Kubrick consulted, before and during production of this meticulously constructed masterpiece. Not only did he pick the brains of top futurists and NASA engineers, but enlisted some of the best primatologists, anthropologists, and uh, mimes of his day, to ensure that every detail, from the physicality of pre-historic humans living on the plains of Africa to the design of a moon base, passed with veracity.

Earlier this year, for the 50th anniversary, Christopher Nolan supervised a theatrical 70mm re-release of the “unrestored” version that presents it as audiences experienced it in 1968. And, not missing an opportunity to make me re-purchase it for the 6th time (VHS, DVD, “remastered” DVD, Blu-ray, and “remastered” Blu-ray) Warner has released a “restored” Blu-ray (as well as a pricier 3-disc set that adds a 4K-UHD version).

This review is based on the 2-disc Blu-ray set (one disc is for the extras). There are no technical notes included; so I can’t confirm this is a 4K scan, but after an A/B comparison with my copy of the 2007 Warner Blu-ray, I can tell you the new scan is spectacular. I can’t imagine the film looking any more crystalline, with vibrant color grading, rich deep blacks and sharp contrast. Audio has also been noticeably upgraded. Extras are identical to the 2007 version (Warner is historically stingy with those) but it’s worth the dip for those who want the best possible home viewing experience of the film.

Previous posts with related themes:

Summertime Blus: Best BD reissues of 2018, pt. 1

More reviews at Den of Cinema
On Facebook
On Twitter

–Dennis Hartley

We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.


The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.


As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.


And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!


cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

What’s So Wrong With Peace, Love, and Understanding? 

by tristero

“Imagine your elementary school child coming home one night and explaining the actions that their teacher asked them to do that day—to close their eyes and obey an audio recording that tells them to clear their minds, to watch their memories and emotions float away on clouds, and to feel the love and warmth from their connection to the universe. How would you react if this same audio recording is telling your child to look inside themselves to reach inner-goodness and peace? “

Sounds pretty anodyne to me. But not to a Pat Robertson-founded radical religious front organization which sees the spread of mindfulness in schools as an insidious menace. What kind of problem? Well, according to the blogpost on the Robertson-associated site (I’m not naming or linking to them), mindfulness is Buddhism and Buddhism is a religion. And therefore (this is taken directly from their blog post):

Generally, any involvement at all by public school officials in religious activity during the school day is unconstitutional under Establishment Clause jurisprudence. School officials violate the Establishment Clause if an “objective observer” would perceive the activity or instruction as a state endorsement of religious belief. Santa Fe Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290, 308 (2000).

But elsewhere on their site, they seem to have a major problem with the Establishment Clause:

Two Christian schools were barred from praying at a high school football championship game. Now they’re banning Christian school prayer? 

The government’s state athletic association banned the prayer simply because of its Christian message. A pep talk would have been fine, but a Christian prayer – by two Christian schools – was banned. Even worse, a federal judge agreed. 

This type of blatant anti-Christian discrimination on campus is spreading like a virus.

What makes this even more amusing is that the mindfulness program, Inner Explorer, is an explicitly secular program that mentions Buddhism nowhere (as far as I can tell) on their Web site (and in fact mindfulness techniques are found both in many religious traditions and also in entirely secular programs like Inner Explorer).  So…

Robertson’s group is (1) seeking to ban a non-religious program using the Establishment Clause while simultaneously (2) seeking to promote overtly religious rituals by opposing the Establishment Clause.

BTW, at the time of this writing, 51,663 outraged christianists had already signed a petition on the Robertson Web site calling for the banning of mindfulness from public schools.

Huckleberry and all that “process stuff”

by digby

Unless video emerges of Trump speaking Russian and doing the Cossack dance, Lindsey Graham’s not interested:

On Fox News, @LindseyGrahamSC downplays Flynn lying to FBI: “This is all post-election intrigue. I don’t know why it’s a crime to talk to the Russians when you are in transition… if I’m the Trump people, I’m thinking this is all process stuff.” pic.twitter.com/ERsZFQH7sd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 14, 2018

He used to be a tad more … concerned about the integrity of the presidency:

Lindsey Graham on removing Bill Clinton from office: “You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role.” pic.twitter.com/u0t9PC5BTP

— Simon Hedlin (@simonhedlin) December 14, 2018

Back in the day, House impeachment manager Graham was especially strident on this particular sexual “process”

… God knows he’s a polarizing figure. God only knows what’s in his heart. I’m having to judge Bill Clinton based on evidence. And I would like to speak a few minutes to what I believe is the unshakable, undeniable truth. And much of it is about sex.

This idea that the President of the United States when he testified in Paula Jones’ deposition, a lady who brought a case against him for sexual harassment, that he gave testimony that was legally accurate is a total falsehood. The idea that the definition of sex did not include oral sex and they did not ask right questions and if they did he would have told the truth offends me. This idea of what “sex” meant came up after this blue dress, in my opinion.

Why I believe the definition of “sex” as being propounded by the president to this very day is a lie is based on the conduct he exhibited after the deposition. On January the 17th he would have us to believe they did not ask the right question and the definition excluded oral sex. I would suggest to you that’s a fabricated tale. Then on January the 24th we have a talking point paper from the White House telling people how to respond about the allegations against the president, and one of those questions was “Does sexual relations include oral sex?” The answer was yes…

What I believe is that his press accounts to Mr. Layer (sp) and to Roll Call indicate that improper relationships, there was no artificial definition, this is — oral sex is not included. I believe that’s a falsehood, that’s a fraud…

Should he be impeached? Very quickly; the hardest decision I think I will ever make. Learning that the president lied to the grand jury about sex, I still believe that every president of the United States, regardless of the matter they called to testify about before a grand jury should testify truthfully and if they don’t they should be subject to losing their job.

I believe that about Bill Clinton and I’ll believe that about the next president. If it had been a Republican, I would have still believed that and I would hope that if a Republican person had done all this that some of us would’ve went (sic) over and told him, You need to leave office. I understand that the dilemma that all of us are in about that. His fate is in his own hands.

Right quickly, Mr. Chairman. Thirty years from now they’re going to judge what we’ve done and how partisan it’s been and whether or not this made any sense. I just want you to know as you look back and look at these tapes and find out what we’re doing, there’s one member of Congress, there’s a lot of us here, believe the president has lied to us to this very day, that we can’t reconcile ourself with that, that it was in a lawsuit with an average, everyday citizen’s legal rights at stake.

And the most chilling of all things, to me, was the episode after he left the deposition, he told Mr. Blumenthal that the — Monica Lewinsky was basically coming on to him, he had to fight her off. He told Betty Currie, She wanted to have sex with me and I couldn’t do that. The most chilling thing was, for a period of time, the president was setting stories in motion that were lies. Those stories found themselves in the press to attack a young lady who could potentially be a witness against him.

To me, that is very much like Watergate. That shows character inconsistent with being president, and every member of Congress should look at that episode and decide, is this truly about sex? Is Bill Clinton doing the right thing by continuing to make us have to pursue this, have to prove to a legal certainty he lied? The president’s fate is in his own hands. Mr. President, you have one more chance. Don’t bite your lip; reconcile yourself with the law.

He had been one of a handful of Republicans who wanted to release some additional “evidence” to the public about whether or not Lewinsky orgasmed in the encounters so that the “definition” of sex, which included “intent to arouse” could be proven:

Sources said that the documents covered by the committee’s action included statements by Lewinsky to the FBI and grand jury, some of her letters and e-mail, Secret Service records relating to the president’s and Lewinsky’s movements on certain days, a chart detailing Lewinsky’s trips to the White House and public events, memos, telephone records, White House logs and news clippings.

Before convening the committee Thursday, Hyde and ranking Democrat John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) had agreed to 155 deletions in the printed material, under guidelines aimed at protecting the privacy of innocent third parties, removing redundant or irrelevant sexual references and striking material being used in ongoing criminal cases, and anything relating to official duties of the Secret Service.

But GOP members, who outnumber Democrats on the committee 21 to 16, rejected an attempt by the minority to delete 25 additional references, according to committee records. Among these were more explicit material relating to sexual interaction between Clinton and Lewinsky, the manner in which Clinton undressed her, and details about their telephone sex, according to sources in both parties.

Republicans on the committee approved, 20 to 16, a motion by Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) to restore three deleted references to a cigar in Lewinsky’s sworn testimony to the grand jury, according to information provided by the committee and other sources. One Republican, Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) joined the Democrats in opposing the Barr motions…

Republican sources said that material related, for example, to Lewinsky’s orgasms, was left in specifically to address the question of whether Clinton aimed to arouse Lewinsky — a key component of the definition of sexual relations at testimony by Clinton in the sexual harassment suit brought against him by Paula Jones.

One sign of GOP nervousness came after Judiciary Committee Republican Bob Inglis (S.C.) proposed that the generic description of one deleted item — which was not included in Starr’s published report — be changed to indicate more specifically the form of sexual contact that it dealt with. Only five other Republican members, Barr, Ed Bryant (Tenn.), Edward A. Pease (Ind.), James E. Rogan (Calif.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) joined Inglis in pushing for the disclosure. The tally defeating the motion was 28 to 6, according to the committee.

He was obsessed with the orgasms, couldn’t stop talking about them. His whole cornpone Hamlet act, which went on interminably, was based on the question of whether or not Clinton and Lewinsky had actually had sex. 

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

The 2020 campaign is going to be so ugly

by digby

Ed Kilgore wrote an interesting piece on Trump’s (non) strategy. He points out that the normal approaches would be to try to expand his 40% by doing some outreach to the more moderate factions of the GOP to try to broaden his appeal. But he simply won’t (or can’t) do that so they are stuck trying to recreate a 2016 style victory through cheating, enabling foreign help and a full blown character assault on the opposition.

He concludes with this:

The more you think it through, the likely Trump strategy will be to do everything imaginable to drive down the positive sentiments associated with their Democratic opponent, perhaps enlisting those hated godless liberal news media assets who are driven by “fairness” to reinforce negative narratives about the candidate they are presumed to favor. The virtual certainty of a Trump campaign that exceeds in sheer savagery anything this country has ever seen before should serve as a warning to Democrats about how they think about their own nominating process. I argued earlier this year that Democrats should look for an unbreakable nominee — one with no obvious vulnerabilities in age, background, ideology or character that an absolutely unprincipled Trump campaign might exploit to drag her or him down to his level of unpopularity. Breaking his opponent by any means necessary looks to be Trump’s only avenue for extending his unlikely and heinous hold on the presidency.

He’s right. In order for Trump to wage a campaign at all he’s going to have to try to bring the Democratic opposition down to his level. And he will. Joyfully. I don’t think anyone’s unbreakable by the right wing. When they set their minds to it they can degrade anyone’s reputation. These days they have a fully operational propaganda machine dedicated to false narratives.

But the Democrats can try to find someone who doesn’t have the years and years of baggage that someone like Clinton brought to the table. I don’t know how much it will help but it might around the edges. If they are a strong candidate it might not be quite as easy to give the mushy middle such qualms about voting for the Democrats.

But no matter who it is, they’re going to have to have a very, very thick skin. The GOP has been deft in the dark arts of dirty tricks and personal destruction for decades (can you say Canuck letter? Willie Horton?) and they’ve rached a new level of simple crude character assasination with Trump and the vast army of bots deployed to spread it far and wide. No one will be immune.

We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

Just don’t ask them to bake a cake for a gay couple

by digby

That would offend their moral sensibilities.

I’m just going to dump this out here to let you see what pusillanimous liars Republican officials have all become. And I mean all of them:

A reporter hadn’t even finished asking about President Trump and the sentencing of his former lawyer Michael Cohen when Republican Sen. James E. Risch indicated he would have none of it.

“Oh, I don’t do interviews on any of that stuff,” Risch said when questioned about Trump’s shifting explanations on efforts to buy the silence of women who claimed sexual dalliances with him.

Well, why not?

“I don’t do any interviews on anything to do with Trump and that sort of thing, okay?” Risch (Idaho) responded curtly before quickly slipping into the Senate chamber.

As Trump’s legal woes — rooted in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe and the Southern District of New York’s investigation into the hush payments — continued to spiral this past week with new revelations and fresh presidential denials, congressional Republicans found themselves in a familiar position: struggling to account for Trump’s behavior and not-so-consistent statements about his personal controversies.

This week, Republicans responded to the latest chapter in Trump’s saga by rationalizing his actions of those of someone who didn’t know any better, carefully rebuking his Cohen-induced reactions while praising his policies, or putting full faith in his explanations — even as they’ve changed over time.

Or — as Risch showed — by not answering the question altogether.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that,” Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said, as a reporter tried to ask him about Trump denying that he directed Cohen to pay women in exchange for keeping quiet about their sexual encounters with the now-president. “I don’t know anything except what I hear and read about all that.”

“Stop,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said. “I have not heard what you told me he said. Until I read, actually read, what the president said, I won’t comment on it.”

“Honestly, I don’t think that’s a fair question,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), when asked if he believed Trump’s explanation. “I wasn’t there. I don’t have any way of assessing that.”

[Cohen says Trump knew hush-money payments were wrong, contradicting his former boss]

Throughout his presidency, Trump has kept congressional Republicans on edge, throwing them off with a single tweet or surprise utterance at a news conference — be it on the legislative agenda, his executive decisions or the daily ups and downs of his chaotic administration.

But particularly regarding the legal matters, which continue to unfold by the day in both New York and Washington, many senior Republicans have learned the best answer is one that just tells everyone: wait. Be patient. Let Mueller’s team — as well as the other investigators — finish their job.

“Until we have a full picture, until the full evidence is presented by the Southern District or charges filed or that sort of thing, I just think it’s really hard to react or draw any hard and fast conclusions,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who will be the second-ranking Senate Republican come January, said in an interview this week.

Slightly chuckling, Thune continued: “I’m sure that he, again, coming out of his private life, sort of views this as not something that was done to impact or affect a campaign — that it’s something that he was trying to deal with in the way that he perhaps has dealt with those issues in the past.”

His fellow South Dakotan, Sen. Mike Rounds (R), was similarly gentle, acknowledging some sympathy for Trump wanting what he believes to be a private matter to be as obscured as possible.

“I think this president means very well. I think he has the best interests of our country at heart,” Rounds said. “Sometimes, I think many of us would probably approach and share messages in a different manner in which this president has.”

Does Rounds wish Trump would stop tweeting?

“I really wish he’d stop tweeting,” Rounds responded.

Indeed, Trump has been a veritable font of falsehoods, with dozens of his inaccurate claims spread through his Twitter account. As of Oct. 30, Trump has made 6,420 false or misleading claims since he took office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker database.

Of those, 1,098 were delivered through Trump’s favorite social media platform.

[Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again]

Despite that very spotty track record, Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill still have put their trust in him. In particular, they say Cohen — who was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for a litany of offenses, including lying — is an untrustworthy source.

When he was asked this week whether he believed Trump’s claims that he didn’t personally direct the hush-money payments, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) responded: “I’ll accept his word.”

Hatch used to thunder at Clinton over his immorality, by the way, as did all those Republicans (and many Democrats) 20 years ago. Now he’s a freewheeling “love the one you’re with” kind of guy. Groovy.

As I’ve said before, the bright spot in all this is that we can now laugh in every so-called conservative leader’s face when they try to pull their sanctimonious peal clutching over personal foibles. Trump has done us all a great favor in that regard. We simply don’t ever have to pretend that because they espouse conservative religious beliefs that they are arbiters of anyone’s personal morals. They have no standing to say a word, ever again.

We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

The new zombie lie
by Tom Sullivan

Yes, it’s satire.

The Washington Post’s fact-checker this week rolled out a new translation of something the left has long known as the zombie lie, “lies that just won’t die, no matter what the facts are.” The Post’s Glenn Kessler dubs it the “Bottomless Pinocchio,” explaining the extension of its Pinocchio rating system:

Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

The Bottomless Pinocchio recognizes repeated statements deployed as weapons in “campaigns of disinformation.”

The sitting president is the most prominent purveyor of zombie lies. Russian president Vladimir Putin, if not Trump’s soulmate might be Trump’s mentor. More subtle than his protégé, Putin employs programmers, scammers, and bots to do such dirty work on his behalf. Trump is too cheap to pay Fox News celebrities for doing what state employees do for Putin. The Washington Post explains in “Agents of Doubt“:

Intelligence agencies have tracked at least a half-dozen such distortion campaigns since 2014, each aimed, officials say, at undermining Western and international investigative bodies and making it harder for ordinary citizens to separate fact from falsehood. They say such disinformation operations are now an integral part of Russia’s arsenal — both foreign policy tool and asymmetrical weapon, one that Western institutions and technology companies are struggling to counter.

“Dismissing it as fake news misses the point,” said a Western security official who requested anonymity in discussing ongoing investigations into the Russian campaign. “It’s about undermining key pillars of democracy and the rule of law.”

[…]

“The mission seems to be to confuse, to muddy the waters,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian-television producer and author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a memoir that describes the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate the news. The ultimate aim, he said, is to foster an environment in which “people begin giving up on the facts.”

Many Americans have given up, willingly if not as the result of conditioning, the Post finds in an unusual new poll. Pollsters set out to uncover whether Americans could separate truths from lies told by Trump:

The survey included 18 pairs of opposing statements – one true, one false – without identifying who made the statement. Eleven questions gauging belief in false claims by Trump were mixed among four false claims by Democrats, a true claim by Trump and two probing other factual statements.

Only among a pool of strong Trump approvers – about 1 in 6 adults in the survey – did majorities accept several, though not all, of his falsehoods as true.

That news is not exactly cause for celebration. No surprise, where people get their news influences what they believe. Fox News is tops again in misinforming its audience. Pollsters found 33 percent of adults for whom Fox News is one of their top news sources accepted the false claims. People who rely on NPR or newspapers were the least likely to accept the false claims, at 16 percent and 17 percent respectively, on average:

The Post poll also suggests Republicans have grown less concerned about presidents being honest than they were a decade ago. In 2007, an Associated Press-Yahoo poll found 71 percent of Republicans saying it is “extremely important” for presidential candidates to be honest, similar to 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents. The new Post poll shows identical shares of Democrats and independents prioritizing honesty in presidential candidates, but the share of Republicans who say honesty is extremely important has fallen to 49 percent, 22 points lower than in the AP-Yahoo poll.

It is no wonder then that the sitting president has such an affinity with the Russian strongman. His attraction is to Putin’s money and power, naturally, but also to Putin’s facility with disinformation for bending reality to suit him. Dissolving external reality is a goal shared by both the White House and the Kremlin, even if the president’s attorney, Rudi Giuliani, declaring, “Truth isn’t truth,” showed less finesse.

When Stephen Colbert’s character announced in 2005, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” he thought he was “being farcical.” Now the joke is on us. For #Cult45 , truthiness is all that matters. The Post poll may have data, but data from the liberal press is tainted.

Dictionary.com selected “misinformation” as its word of the year. The choice of “mis” rather than “dis” was deliberate, linguist-in-residence Jane Solomon told the Guardian:

“Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation.

Solomon allows that misinformation can be spread unwittingly. Thus, “mis” versus “dis” is like the difference between dupes and duplicitous?

How reassuring.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Your wingnut uncle Mikie Flynn

by digby

There is no mystery about what happened to General Michael Flynn. He suffers from a certain type of mental rot that inflicts millions of Americans every year. It comes from falling headfirst into the right wing fever swamp:

His friends and critics agree that after winning a reputation as a master intelligence officer on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, Flynn broke with lifelong patterns of behavior. Once discreet and apolitical, he morphed into a highly partisan alarm ringer. A man once trusted to cautiously analyze information began touting wild hearsay as fact.

Flynn, 60, is expected to be sentenced in federal court Tuesday after having given prosecutors 19 interviews as part of their investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. Whatever punishment the court imposes, the mystery of Flynn’s transformation endures.

More than two dozen of Flynn’s friends, superiors and colleagues — including some who see him as a heroic truth teller and others who wonder how he went off the rails — agreed in interviews that Flynn’s public persona shifted dramatically. They remain at odds over why it happened.

Did he gradually absorb a new, conspiracy-minded worldview, in part inspired by his son Michael Jr.’s embrace of fringy ideas? Did he discard lifelong habits because he’d been enraged to his core when President Barack Obama’s administration in 2014 removed him as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), his last and most senior military assignment? Or had Flynn, who retired as a lieutenant general, long harbored extreme views, successfully shielding his real opinions from those around him?

Although the explanations vary, the pivot is undeniable:

Flynn was, for many years, notably tough on Russia, saying that it and Iran were “the most active and powerful members of the enemy alliance” against the United States.

But over the past three years, Flynn took a fee from the Russian government-supported TV outlet, RT; sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at an RT-sponsored dinner; and spoke with Russia’s ambassador before Trump took office — and then lied about those conversations to Vice President Pence and the FBI.

For years, Flynn was a social media skeptic, writing that Facebook and Twitter must become “more socially responsible,” adding “positive messaging campaigns about the betterment of humankind.”

Then, after the 2016 election, Flynn insisted that social media were the key to building a pro-Trump, conservative “army of digital soldiers . . . irregular warfare at its finest.” He said he’d seen proof on social media that Trump had actually won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college, which is false.

Throughout his career, those who had close contact with Flynn agree with remarkable unanimity, he strictly adhered to the military’s standard of avoiding expressing partisan views. He praised superiors publicly for not tolerating criticism of American politicians by officers.

“He was as conforming to the tradition of nonpartisanship as anyone,” said retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who worked with Flynn for many years.

“The saw you hear all the time that people in the military and intelligence don’t know each other’s politics turns out to be surprisingly true,” said Daniel Benjamin, coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department under Obama and now a scholar at Dartmouth College. “I had no idea what Mike Flynn’s politics might be.”

President-elect Donald Trump, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus walk out to speak to members of the media at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 21, 2016. Departing president Barack Obama had warned Trump against the hiring of just one person: Flynn. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Soon after he was fired as head of the DIA, Flynn became a very political actor, even if he was “not a political sophisticate,” said Michael Ledeen, co-author of “The Field of Fight,” Flynn’s best-selling book on the American failure to confront radical Islamists.

Flynn called Milo Yiannopoulos, the incendiary writer and speaker who marketed himself as a right-wing provocateur, “one of the most brave people I’ve met.” Flynn went on Breitbart radio to claim that he had seen signs in Arabic along the U.S.-Mexico border that had been posted to guide “radicalized Muslims” into the United States — a false assertion.

Flynn has traced his leap into partisan politics to his first meeting with Trump, in 2015. A 30-minute appointment turned into an hour and a half, and, as Flynn told The Washington Post in 2016, “I got the impression this was not a guy who was worried about Donald Trump, but a guy worried about the country.”

“I was sold,” Flynn said in a later speech. “From that moment on, my direction in life completely changed.”

And in July 2016, at the Republican convention in Cleveland, he used his prime-time speech embracing Trump to lead the crowd in a lusty shout aimed at Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“Lock her up!” Flynn cried, over and over, clapping along as the crowd’s chant crescendoed. “Lock her up! You guys are good. Damn right! Exactly right! There is nothing wrong with that. . . . Crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!”

Mullen had long found Flynn “extraordinarily capable, thoughtful — an out[side]-the-box thinker. People wanted to be around him. In the field, I saw a balanced guy.”

Then Mullen watched Flynn at the convention. “I was as stunned as anybody else to see him on the stage and see him latch onto conspiracy theories,” he said. “I didn’t recognize the guy.”

The episode at the convention was embarrassing, perhaps, but understandable, friends say.

“He was caught up in the moment,” Ledeen said. “Hard to resist. I mean, I would have said, ‘Calm down, calm down,’ but if you’re going to be on the campaign with Trump, you’re going to say things that support him. And he’s angry. He has reason to be angry.”

The change in Flynn had been evident to some people for at least a year before the convention.

“I thought he was a really upbeat, can-do kind of guy — totally likable,” Benjamin said. In 2015, he invited Flynn to speak at Dartmouth. In such appearances, the retired general railed against negotiating with Iran. He slammed Obama for touting the killing of Osama bin Laden as a turning point in the war against terrorism. He alleged that top U.S. officials were in league with Islamist extremists, trying to make sharia law part of U.S. legal codes.

“The Michael Flynn who showed up here was a very different person from the one I had seen in Afghanistan,” Benjamin said. “He was saying stranger and stranger things. He seemed like he was becoming a bit unhinged.”

And, by the way, I think he still is. He may have had enough sense to save his own skin, but that little gambit about the FBI agents trapping him into lying was right out of Hannity. I dont know if his lawyers are watching the same shows or if he insisted they put that in there but it’s directly tied to the wingnut narrative they’ve been pushing since the whole Russia investigation began. (He may come to regret that. They thought that since the Judge is a known skeptic of government power he might rule with them in some way. We’ll see, but it’s doubtful in this case. Flynn was the National Security Adviser not some naive citizen who didn’t know not to lie to the feds.)

And keep in mind that while he kept his head down this past year the one time he came out in public was to stump for the right wing freakshow who was running against Maxine Waters — as did Joe Arpaio and Roger Stone. He’s still one of them. Bet on it. Whether he can redeem himself enough to get some of that sweet wingnut welfare is yet to be decided.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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