Month: December 2018

Friday Night Soother

by digby

Red panda cubs!

Belfast Zoo is celebrating the birth of endangered twin Red Panda cubs! The pair was born to parents, Chris and Vixen. Chris arrived at Belfast Zoo, from Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands, in 2013. As part of a collaborative breeding programme, he was joined by Vixen (who arrived from Dresden Zoo in April 2017). The pair hit it off straight away and after a gestation period of approximately 135 days, Vixen gave birth to two healthy female cubs on 19 June 2018.

Zoo curator, Julie Mansell, said, “Red Panda cubs are born blind and develop quite slowly. They therefore spend the first few months in the den. It is for this reason that, despite being born back in June, the twins have only recently started to venture outside. Over the last few weeks the twins have become more adventurous and visitors will hopefully get the chance to spot our colourful little arrivals as they start exploring their habitat!”

Red Pandas are also known as ‘lesser’ panda or ‘firefox’. It is believed that their name comes from the Nepalese term for the species ‘nigalya ponya’ which translates as ‘bamboo footed’ and refers to their bamboo diet. It was originally thought that this species was related to the raccoon family or even the other bamboo eater, the Giant Panda. They have since been classified as a unique species in their own family, called Ailuridae. Red Panda spend most of their time in the trees. Their sharp claws make them agile climbers and they use their long, striped tails for balance.

Zoo manager, Alyn Cairns, said, “Red Panda are native to the Himalayas in Bhutan, Southern China, Pakistan, India, Laos, Nepal and Burma. However, Red Panda numbers are declining dramatically due to habitat loss and illegal hunting for their fur, in particular their long bushy tail, which is highly prized as a good luck charm for Chinese newlyweds. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature believes that the Red Panda is facing a very high risk of extinction and they are listed as the 20th most globally threatened species by the Edge of Existence Programme.”

Alyn continues “Our mission is to be a major force in conserving and safeguarding habitats and wildlife to make a significant contribution to their survival in the future. Our Red Pandas are part of a collaborative breeding programme to ensure a viable safety net population in captivity. The twins are therefore not only a cause for celebration for the Belfast Zoo team but for the species as a whole. One of our roles is also to create conservation links between captive populations of endangered species being managed ex situ and wild populations being managed in situ. We support a number of in situ conservation campaigns including the Red Panda Network. This organisation is committed to the conservation of wild Red Pandas and their habitat through the education and empowerment of local communities.”

You can also support the vital work that Belfast Zoo carries out by adopting a Red Panda. Find out more at www.belfastzoo.co.uk/adoption

There’s more!

Four-month-old Red Panda kits, Pokhara and Shimla, have begun to venture outside and try out their newfound climbing skills at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s Highland Wildlife Park.

Born in July, the brothers first began spending time outside their den under the watchful eye of mum Kitty.

There are many, many cute animals on this beautiful planet. But red pandas are definitely in the top five.

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All those people standing by Trump even after all this time never fails to depress me.

“The base is solidified, but that doesn’t get you more than that,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll.

The polarized views on the special counsel persist amid a recent flurry of developments in the Russia probe, following relative quiet around the midterms. In federal courts on Friday, Mueller’s team is expected to detail how former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort allegedly breached his plea deal and to provide sentencing recommendations for ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who admitted last week to lying to Congress.

In the poll, for the first time, more Americans said they view Mueller more negatively than positively, 29 percent favorable, 33 percent unfavorable. That’s a net 7-point decline from the summer, when Mueller was 33 percent positive and 30 percent negative.

Mueller’s decline is fueled by Republicans — 58 percent have an unfavorable view of him in the most recent polling, up from 46 percent in July. (Just 8 percent have a favorable opinion of him, down from 15 percent in July.)

(The slight bump in March 2018 in the chart above followed several developments in late February in the Mueller investigation timeline. They included financial charges against Manafort and a guilty plea from Manafort’s former business partner Rick Gates.)

The overall movement on views of Mueller, however, is within the poll’s margin of error, and — perhaps more remarkably — the former FBI director remains not very well known or defined. Despite withering attacks from Trump, the plurality of Americans (39 percent) continue to say they are unsure of their feelings toward Mueller or have never heard of him.

That’s very different from views of Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Back then, almost 6 in 10 Americans (56 percent) had an unfavorable view of Starr, according to a Time/CNN Poll in September 1998. Only 13 percent said they were either not familiar or not sure.

“Trump does very well when he has a target that he can put characteristics on, that he can make it clear in terms of why they should like or dislike someone,” Miringoff said. “When it comes to Mueller, that’s not occurring. [Mueller is] largely unknown, but the investigation is known. … That stymies the president and his handlers in terms of how they like to deal with an opponent.”

The investigation is also insulated to a degree — 67 percent said they think Mueller should be allowed to finish, including 51 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of independents; and three-quarters (76 percent) believe that Mueller’s final report should be made public in its entirety. That includes 68 percent of Republicans.

“The issue of transparency is big,” Miringoff said. “The only thing that’s stuck with the base is the notion of the ‘witch hunt,’ but people are supportive of letting the investigation go to its conclusion. … And they want to see the results. If you don’t get to see the sausage at the end, people are not going to be very happy about that.”

Trump’s approval rating in the poll remains essentially unchanged at 42 percent, and fewer — just 36 percent — think the country is headed in the right direction.

Obviously, liberals saying anything would fall on deaf ears to GOpers and right leaning Indies, but I think Never Trumpers ought to start making the argument that Trump is showing how weak he is by not being able to compartmentalize this scandal the way Clinton did. His obsessiveness should start to be uncomfortable at some point. He supposedly has a job to do.

He needs simple metrics

by digby

This is an interesting little observation:

The booming economy suddenly looks vulnerable. An unpredictable trade war with China is injecting huge amounts of volatility into an already volatile system. Sharp stock market plunges affect Trump’s psyche, sources close to Trump say. He often asks aides: “What’s the Dow doing today?” A former administration official told Axios that Trump always needs a simple metric to use to brag about his performance. During the 2016 primaries it was the polls. When polls were no longer good for him, he replaced them with the booming stock market. Now that previously trusty measure of success is no longer boast-worthy. Trump still has impressive GDP and employment numbers to call on, but forecasters see trouble ahead.

It’s a perfect illustration of how he thinks. When those numbers are up he takes credit. When they are down they are someone else’s fault.

I’ve got a simple metric for him:

33 indictments or guilty pleas from the Office of Special Counsel. And more to come.

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Stat o’ the day

by digby

Payroll growth scorecard: Obama’s last 23 months vs Trump’s first 23 months
Total hired: 4.85 mln vs. 4.46 mln
Avg m/m gain: 211k vs.194k pic.twitter.com/mS0IILH8Pg— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) December 7, 2018

Trump should be grateful despite his innumerable screw-ups the economy has maintained its recovery from the Great Recession. So far.

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“It’s like ‘Jesus take the wheel’ only scarier”

by digby

It has been incorrectly reported that Rudy Giuliani and others will not be doing a counter to the Mueller Report. That is Fake News. Already 87 pages done, but obviously cannot complete until we see the final Witch Hunt Report.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

The “fake news” includes direct quotes from his lawyer. (I suppose Rudy probably told him they were made up too but…)

When the report will hit is the question. That it will hit, and that it will contain at least some new problems for President Donald Trump and those close to him—especially as House Democrats take the majority—seem certain.

But while most organizations, political or otherwise, might take the time to prepare for this kind of slow-moving train, the Trump White House is all but winging it. According to a half-dozen current and former White House officials, the administration has no plans in place for responding to the special counsel’s findings—save for expecting a Twitter spree.

The one thing they do know, Rudy Giuliani told me, is that they’re going to fight.

If Robert Mueller’s team tries to subpoena the president, “we’re ready to resist that,” Trump’s attorney said.

Giuliani said it’s been difficult in the past few months to even consider drafting response plans, or devote time to the “counter-report” he claimed they were working on this summer as he and Trump confronted Mueller’s written questions about the 2016 campaign.

“Answering those questions was a nightmare,” he told me. “It took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days.”

There are numerous other reasons no response plan has been produced, White House sources said, including the futility of crafting a strategy that Trump will likely ignore anyway. There have also been few frank conversations within the White House about the potential costs of Mueller’s findings, which could include impeachment of the president or the incrimination of his inner circle. Those close to Trump have either doubled down on the “witch hunt” narrative, they said—refusing to entertain the possibility of wrongdoing—or decided to focus on other issues entirely. Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer has even taken to treating the probe like a game: On Wednesday he tweeted a (quickly deleted) link where followers could place bets on “how many tweets containing #mueller” the president will send “before the investigation is up.”

Attempting to plan “would mean you would have to have an honest conversation about what might be coming,” a former senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told me.

Read: What exactly is Rudy Giuliani’s role?

The lack of planning for potential outcomes of one of the highest-stakes investigations of the past two years illuminates many of the key operating principles of this White House—a follow-the-leader approach, a frequent resort to denial, and a staff constantly in flux. Many of those tactics have allowed Trump to maintain favor with his base, but Mueller’s report will represent the biggest test yet of how they fare against legal, rather than political, challenges. And that test was likely sharpened on Tuesday night, when Mueller revealed in a court filing that former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn had cooperated extensively with his investigation.

It’s not that White House officials are altogether unwilling to confront the topic. But many current and former White House staffers I spoke to stressed the problem that has plagued them since the beginning of Trump’s presidency: making plans and sticking to them when the “communicator in chief” will, inevitably, prefer his own approach.

“We would always put together plans with the knowledge that he wouldn’t use them or they’d go off the rails,” one recently departed official told me. “And at this point, with Mueller, they’ve decided they’re not even going to do that.”

“It’s like, ‘Jesus, take the wheel,’” the source added, “but scarier.”

Nevertheless, the thinking is that it’s “safer to follow potus’s lead,” the former senior official said. This has allowed staffers to “focus on other pressing matters,” the official allowed, “but leaves you naked when it comes to the final scene of this play.”

Giuliani initially pushed back on the prediction that Trump would take center stage after the report drops. “I don’t think following his lead is the right thing. He’s the client,” he told me. “The more controlled a person is, the more intelligent they are, the more they can make the decision. But he’s just like every other client. He’s not more … you know, controlled than any other client. In fact, he’s a little less.”

For Giuliani, letting Trump guide the response post-report may not be ideal, but “I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that can stop Donald Trump from tweeting,” he acknowledged. “I’ve tried.”

Of course Trump is going to “guide the response.” And we know how he’s going to do it. He already is:

FAKE NEWS – THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2018

WITCH HUNT!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2018

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Trump’s Karl Rove

by digby

As I write this the rumor is that Trump is imminently firing chief of staff John Kelly and replacing him with Pence’s brain Nick Ayres. We’ve been hearing this rumor for along time so who knows? But if you want to know who Nick Ayres is, this piece by the Huffington Post remains the best profile out there. This guy is a real piece of work.

Here is just one short excerpt:

Despite his age, Ayers is solicitous in the manner of a courtly older gentleman. Sometimes, he will ask permission from reporters to remove his coat or tie with an elaborate politeness. He is given to grandiloquent declarations of integrity. “One thing I am not, is I am not a liar,” was an example recalled by a Republican consultant who has spoken with him often. “I am always truthful. People can call me a lot of things, but one thing I am is a truthful person.” This “Southern Baptist preacher schtick” is the sort of thing GOP donors “swoon over,” the consultant told me, but it doesn’t always go over so well with Ayers’ peers. “Almost every operative that comes across Nick just absolutely cannot stand the guy,” the consultant added. Still, while Ayers’ affect may be cloying, it does place his principal guiding motive—himself—disarmingly in plain sight at all times.

It is a central tenet of politics that you can have money or power, but not the two at the same time. Ayers is a rare exception. He is not shy about showing his wealth—issuing gracious invitations to hunting parties on his estate on Georgia’s Flint River; sending Christmas cards that are fatter than most and wrapped in a bow. He has occasionally been known to lease a private jet—unusual among a crowd of strategists-for-hire who are accustomed to Marriotts and economy class.

When he joined the administration, Ayers’ White House financial disclosure attached some hard numbers to his high-roller image. After less than seven years of working as a political consultant and a partner in a media buying firm, Ayers reported a personal net worth between $12 million and just over $54 million. (For context, one leading strategist told me that a top-level consultant could expect to make $1 million in an election year and about a third of that in the off year.) And his business arrangements can be difficult to track. In the 2016 election cycle, Ayers spearheaded the Missouri gubernatorial campaign for Eric Greitens, who is now under indictment for invasion of privacy. In addition to the consulting fee of $220,000 paid to Ayers’ firm, he was paid over what appears to be a very similar time period by at least two different entities involved in the race.

Astonishingly, when Ayers entered the White House, he didn’t immediately sell his lucrative business, C5 Creative Consulting, as previous administrations would have required. He also obtained a broad waiver permitting him to talk to former clients. His ownership of C5 turned his White House job into a minefield of possible conflicts of interest. As chief of staff to the vice president, Ayers’ duties can include advising Pence on which candidates to support—decisions that can have a huge influence on fundraising and, hence, political advertising. In addition, in his private work for the Pence PAC, he is in a position to steer donor dollars into races where the company could potentially benefit. “That’s staggering,” one seasoned Republican operative told me.

He has cultivated all the young Trump dullards (he is an avid animal killer for fun, like the two boys)and is particularly close to Ivanka and Jared who have promoted him heavily.

He is supposedly saving Pence’s reputation for his future run as successor to Trump but he’s far too savvy to believe that Pence hasn’t destroyed himself with his supine adoring-gaze performace as VP. (This profile is interesting in that respect. Pence is a real dolt — almost as dumb as Trump, although far more malleable.) And this piece makes it clear that Ayers is about Ayers. He’s stab Pence in the back without a second thought if he thinks he can gain a benefit. Trump’s feral instincts undoubtedly draw him to such a man.

Anyway, this guy is a real operator.

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Trump the instinctive tyrant

by digby

It’s interesting to see Rex Tillerson speak out on Trump’s criminal instincts on the day he nominates William Barr as Attorney General, a man who claimed that a president can order his DOJ to investigate his political rivals and that the Mueller probe is tainted by Democrats:

Nearly nine months after his unceremonious firing by tweet, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is breaking his silence on his time in the Trump administration, venting that he had to repeatedly tell President Donald Trump that what he wanted to do would violate the law.

The former ExxonMobil CEO appeared at a fundraiser in Houston on Thursday evening where he sat for a conversation with CBS reporter Bob Schieffer and outlined how Trump had a “starkly different” style from Tillerson, who said the two also did not share a “common value system.”

Tillerson said his relationship with Trump took off quickly — the first time he met the future president was the day he asked Tillerson to serve as the nation’s top diplomat — and that impulsiveness marked the rest of his tenure in the White House.

“He acts on his instincts and some respects that looks like impulsiveness. But it’s not intent to act on impulse. I think he’s trying to act on his instincts,” said Tillerson, who claimed that Trump’s chaotic leadership style was a departure from what he was used to at ExxonMobil.

“It was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil Corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t — doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t — doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things but rather just kind of says, look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you’re not going to do that.”

The two continued to clash when Trump would test the limits of his executive power and would grow frustrated when Tillerson would inform him that he didn’t have unilateral authority to do something. Tillerson, who once reportedly referred to Trump as a “moron” behind his back, said his downfall may have been his directness with the president in such instances.

“When the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I’d have to say to him, ‘Well, Mr. President, I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law, it violates the treaty, you know,’” Tillerson explained.

“I didn’t know how to conduct my affairs with him any other way than in a very straightforward fashion. And I think he grew tired of me being the guy every day that told him, ‘You can’t do that, and let’s talk about what we can do.’”

When Trump would suggest policies that were barred by law, Tillerson said he would tell the president that he was willing to advocate for the president on Capitol Hill if he wanted Congress to change something, saying he told Trump “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Trump is an instinctive tyrant. But it’s even worse. He is also a fucking moron. Tillerson was right about that.

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Is this really America?
by Tom Sullivan

We anticipate sentencing documents for Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort this evening from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. Our sitting president anticipates them too. His nervous, flying thumbs unleashed a burst of evening angry last night. But he did ask one good question.

Exceptions none!!

Donald Trump tweets have always been disjointed. But lately they have begun to echo a certain … familiar … cadence. What was it?

1st: If I’m not for me, who am I? Nobody!

Those that did not suffer from persecution remained short-sighted, small!

Win victory and all stand by you; give up? All deny you!

All-One or none!

Of course, God, faith, peace, and morality are not Trump’s vision. And certainly not a higher minimum wage. Perhaps he’s Dr. Bronner’s evil twin and just as “off.” Dr. Emmanuel Bronner escaped from the Elgin State Insane Asylum before building his soap empire.

Ralph Bronner, the good doctor’s son, explained to National Public Radio in 2007, “Well, Dad was obsessed and impossible to work with until God blessed him with Parkinson’s. And I don’t mean that cruelly …”

One wonders if Trump’s next venture will be selling peppermint castile soap decorated with his Twitter-wisdom.

Label’s too blue.

Needs more gold.

All-One Trump-Faith!!!

Bizarroworld dispatch

by digby

As distasteful as it is, I think it’s important for people to know just how nuts Fox News is right now so they can understand why the Trump cult is so deluded. They only watch Fox and read Breitbart and their siloed Facebook pages. This is how they see what’s going on with Trump:

Both Hannity and Gingrich were set off by the Michael Flynn sentencing memo that became public last night. Hannity repeatedly expressed how offended he is that Mueller is going after someone with Flynn’s record for a “process crime.”

Gingrich told him, “Mueller is not involved in a investigation. Mueller has a Trump destruction project. He brought on a team, all of them dedicated to destroying Trump. They have done everything they could to destroy Trump.”

He remarked that the Mueller investigation will be looked back on by historians as “one of the most extraordinary efforts to undo the will of the American people by an established bureaucracy and its establishment friends that we’ve seen in all of American history.”

After Hannity brought up a piece by The Hill’s John Solomon on an FBI email chain reportedly showing FISA abuse, Gingrich said, “You had the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation actively trying to destroy a presidential candidate. You have the former head of the FBI, Bob Mueller, actively trying to destroy the President of the United States. And I know it’s frustrating but the fact is, this is a clear cut drama. They hate him, they want to destroy him, it has nothing to do with the truth and nothing to do with the law.”

This is the man who oversaw the impeachment trial of President Clinton that was based upon him allegedly lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky in a civil deposition. It’s doesn’t get any more “process” than that.

I’ve taken a lot of grief for writing about Newt Gingrich over the years from lefties who felt I wasn’t hard enough on Obama and other Democrats. (I was, by the way, but that’s another story.) I have followed him because he’s is the man who brought this particular brand of fascist politics into the mainstream of American politics and I watched his influence taking hold over the course of three decades. He is an extremely malevolent force in our society. Ignoring him doesn’t make him go away.

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He owns the libs so it’s all good

by digby

This is your "Christian" evangelical president. pic.twitter.com/u0478FoSyR— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) December 5, 2018

Honestly, it wouldn’t be so galling if we didn’t know they would excoriate any Democrat for disrespecting their religion in a house of worship.

But they love him, pussy grabbing and all.

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