Month: January 2019

What you watched on TV yesterday was all fake

by digby

Yesterday:

The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong! When I became President Iran was making trouble all over the Middle East, and beyond. Since ending the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, they are MUCH different, but….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2019

….a source of potential danger and conflict. They are testing Rockets (last week) and more, and are coming very close to the edge. There economy is now crashing, which is the only thing holding them back. Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2019

Earlier today:

‘They said they were totally misquoted and totally taken out of context. What I do, I suggested you call them. They said it was fake news, which, frankly, didn’t surprise me at all,’ Trump told reporters at the White House after being asked if he’d spoken to them about their testimony to a Senate panel earlier this week.

So he called them into the oval office and made them get their picture taken bowing down to Dear Leader. And they did:

….I would suggest you read the COMPLETE testimony from Tuesday. A false narrative is so bad for our Country. I value our intelligence community. Happily, we had a very good meeting, and we are all on the same page!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2019

Keep in mind that the testimony was on live television. And the report from which they were all reading was submitted to the president before they testified. He admits that he hadn’t read it.

 “So I didn’t see the report from the intelligence. When you read it, it’s a lot different than it was covered on in the news.”

I think there’s a 100% chance that he still hasn’t read it. And he can tell his followers to read it knowing they won’t do it either.

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Trouble in the Senate?

by digby

I don’t know how meaningful this is but if it reflects a general discontent it could have important reverberations.

Frustrated Republicans say it’s time for the Senate to reclaim more power over foreign policy and are planning to move a measure Thursday that would be a stunning rebuke to a president of their own party.

GOP lawmakers are deeply concerned over President Trump’s reluctance to listen to his senior military and intelligence advisers, fearing it could erode national security. They say the Senate has lost too much of its constitutional power over shaping the nation’s foreign policy and argue that it’s time to begin clawing some of it back.

“Power over foreign policy has shifted to the executive branch over the last 30 years. Many of us in the Senate want to start taking it back,” said a Republican senator closely allied with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

They plan to send Trump a stern admonishment by voting Thursday afternoon on an amendment sponsored by McConnell warning “the precipitous withdrawal” of U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan “could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security.”

The resolution also expresses a sense of the Senate that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al Qaeda pose a “continuing threat to the homeland and our allies” and maintain an “ability to operate in Syria and Afghanistan.”

It’s a pointed rebuttal to the claim Trump made on Twitter in December that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria.”

Speaking on the Senate floor, McConnell said his amendment “simply re-emphasizes the expertise and counsel offered by experts who have served presidents of both parties,” a subtle rebuff of Trump’s tweets from earlier in the day mocking his intelligence advisers as “naive.”

Keep in mind that the Senate is where an impeachment trial will be held.

“Thank me for making the sun come up this morning”

by digby

There is nothing he won’t take credit for.

Trump takes credit for America being “the number one economy in the whole world” — something that has been the case for the last 70+ years pic.twitter.com/9jEatfaG3o

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2019

I think the obnoxious, dishonest bragging is the single characteristic I find most unbearable about listening to him. (The blaming and whining is a close second.) Bragging about things he had nothing to do with and the inane assertions of his own brilliance and prowess go way beyond the current cultural demands for self-promotion. It reaches a level of such extreme delusion that it makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind. It’s way beyond gaslighting. It’s a straight up dominance play — “I’m blatantly lying and cheating and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Five plus years of this are going to have an extreme effect on our culture, I’m afraid. I worry about the lingering effects of such a powerfully ignorant, narcissistic, phony constantly being in our faces for years on end. Unless he is brought low and completely repudiated, I can’t see how the negative consequences of his overwhelming daily presence in our national consciousness won’t be profound.

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Schultz’s little white slip slips

by digby

I’m beginning to rethink the idea that this asshole will take Democratic voters. It appears he’s not only spending all his time criticizing liberal ideas, he’s also competing with Trump for his racist sexist base:

Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO who has floated an independent run at the White House, deleted a tweet Wednesday in which he praised a column that insulted other 2020 contenders. 

In the now-deleted tweet, Schultz linked to a piece that called Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) “shrill” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) “Fauxcahontas,” a reference to her claims of Native American heritage. 

“Thank you @Rogerlsimon for a thoughtful analysis of what’s possible. #ReimagineUS,” Schultz tweeted, along with a link to “Howard Schultz Could Actually Win the Presidency,” from PJ Media. 

“Current frontrunner Kamala Harris is far from reassuring,” Roger L. Simon writes in the column. “She’s a shrill (see the Kavanaugh hearings) quasi-socialist promising pie in the sky — Medicare-for-all, debt-free college, guaranteed pre-K, minimum basic income, confiscatory taxes — and she’s just getting started. Bernie and others will soon be following suit. Fauxcahontas already has, competing in a game of socialist one-upmanship.”

He’s deleted the retweet. But it shows that he’s reading PJ Media, which nobody but wingnuts read. And, at best, he didn’t think calling a woman “shrill” or using a racial slur was off-putting. (At worst he agreed with the sentiments.)

Fox News is kissing his feet as they, like everyone else, clearly believes he is the bigger threat to Democrats. They love to own the libs. But maybe they’re being too clever by half …

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Wishing for Another 9/11 

by tristero

Holy moly, there is something seriously wrong with this man (not that that’s news, but it bears repeating over and over). It takes a very bizarre human being to wish out loud for a second 9/11:

“I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity,” Trump said. “Without a major event where people pull together, that’s hard to do. But I would like to do it without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing.”

Something more to make you shiver
by Tom Sullivan

Live cam outside National Sports Center, Blaine, Minnesota, 7:38 a.m. CST.

Celsius or Fahrenheit, it doesn’t matter in International Falls, Minnesota as I write this. Outside it is -40 on both temperature scales. But there’s no wind. Small blessings.

Good thing U.S. adversaries are not feeling an itch to disrupt the power and gas infrastructure across the Midwest just now. A Russian cyberattack in Ukraine turned off the power for a quarter million people in Kiev for hours in December 2015 and again in 2016. The U.S. is not immune.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats released on Tuesday his annual Worldwide Threat Assessment this week. In its summary, the report issues warnings that the U.S. utility infrastructure is similarly vulnerable.

“China has the ability to launch cyber attacks that cause localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure—such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks—in the United States.” (pg. 5)

“Russia has the ability to execute cyber attacks in the United States that generate localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure—such as disrupting an electrical distribution network for at least a few hours—similar to those demonstrated in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016. Moscow is mapping our critical infrastructure with the long-term goal of being able to cause substantial damage.” (pg. 6)

Iran, too. (pg. 6)

The Intelligence Community this year has dropped language about the threat being theoretical, the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith told “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday.

“No longer is the federal government describing these things as a hypothetical,” Smith said. “Now they are saying the Russians and the Chinese are in our networks and they can shut things down if they wish to.”

Moreover, “Moscow and Beijing are working together now than they have in decades,” Smith said of Dan Coats’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

Need more? Discussion with FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats included the growing threat of videos generated “by machine-learning programs that seem to depict something that didn’t actually happen,” also known as “deepfakes.”

Imagine if Orson Wells’ Mercury Theatre on the Air used real-seeming video from Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Congress and states are now considering laws against AI-altered videos and audio.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) has jumped in early with proposed legislation, Axios reports, “to criminalize the malicious creation and distribution of deepfakes.” Expect the 1st Amendment and civil liberties challenges to be knotty:

But, but, but: Some are less convinced that Congress should step in. David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says making malicious deepfakes a federal crime may hamper protected speech — like the creation of parody videos.

Reality check: New laws would be a last line of defense against deepfakes, as legislation can’t easily prevent their spread. Once the law gets involved, “the harm is so out of the bag and it’s viral,” [University of Maryland law professor Danielle] Citron says. The holy grail, a system that can automatically detect forgeries, is still well out of reach.

Keeping the Russians out of our power grids, social media, or the White House is still out of reach. For that matter, so is keeping an emotionally stunted, deeply uninformed, career con man out of the White House.

One good thing to come out of the shutdown

by digby

The AP reports:

A colony of elephant seals took over a beach in Northern California during the government shutdown when there was no staff to discourage the animals from congregating in the popular tourist area, an official said.

About 60 adult seals that have birthed 35 pups took over a beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, knocking down a fence and moving into the parking lot, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday.

The park north of San Francisco is home to a colony of about 1,500 elephant seals that tend to frequent another beach with 100-foot-tall (30 meters) cliffs that keep the animals protected and mostly hidden from the public, said park spokesman John Dell’Osso.

Dell’Osso said it’s likely the recent storms and high tides inundated the animal’s normal habitat with water and so they sought a wider swath of dry land around the corner.

“Sometimes you go out with tarps and you shake the tarps and it annoys them and they move the other direction,” he said.

But since nobody was at work to address the seal migration, the animals took over. One seal even adventured under a picnic table near a cafe, the newspaper reported.

The elephant seals were lounging in the sand after the park reopened Sunday, leading staff to temporarily close the road to the beach.

Officials have no plans to move the animals while some of the elephant seals nurse their pups.

Staff is considering offering guided tours of the elephant colony, Dell’Osso said.

Personally, I think they should shake the tarps at humans and make them move along.

We have had these seals come up on our beach in Santa Monica from time to time and they always put out signs telling people that they are just resting and to leave them alone. And I have inevitably come upon assholes pestering them, poking them with sticks, kicking them, kids throwing sand on them etc.

It is infuriating. They need to do whatever it takes to keep humans away from them. They cannot be trusted. My personal tactic is to run up and tell these idiots that the seals are carrying a rare disease that is contagious and if they stand too close they’ll catch it. Since most of the monsters who are messing with them are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, they’ll often take off.

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Mmmmm, Trump’s boots taste sooo delicious

by digby

This guy …

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham wants the FBI to explain why President Donald Trump’s longtime associate, Roger Stone, was arrested in the early morning hours last week and whether the media was tipped off beforehand.

In a letter sent to FBI director Christopher Wray Wednesday, Graham (R-S.C.) to explain whether the arrest was consistent with arrests of “similarly charged individuals.” He also asked why the FBI arrested Stone at his home instead of working through his lawyers “to permit him to surrender voluntary.”

“The American public has had enough of the media circus that surrounds the Special Counsel’s investigation,” Graham wrote, referring to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Yet, the manner of this arrest appears to have only added to the spectacle. Accordingly, I write to seek justification for the tactics used and the timing of the arrest of Mr. Stone.”

Roger Stone is a professional liar and self-proclaimed dirty trickster who is caught up in a possible plot with a foreign power. That Graham is advancing the story that this miscreant should have been handled differently than anyone else in a similar situation tells you everything you need to know about the GOP’s recent conversion to civil liberties.

Graham is going to be a real piece of work these next two years.

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“An election like we have never seen before”

by digby

The blue line indicates support for a Democrat in  2020

That is from the new Democracy Corps poll about where the 2020 election looks like at this moment:

The despair with politicians and their handling of the shutdown … is not producing despair with politics. Exactly the opposite. This first national poll looking at the 2020 General Election finds an electorate that is even more polarized, politicized, and determined to vote at levels we have never seen before in our polling. Just months after the midterm, voters look set to finish the job. Voters on both sides of the political spectrum are putting their heads down and pushing ahead to join what all hope is the last battle.

President Trump has the support of 40 percent of the country no matter what. In our poll, 42 percent approve of his performance in the midst of the shutdown, and that has been in his default number in nearly all of our polls from the beginning of his presidency. The Republicans base of the Tea Party, Evangelicals and conservative Catholics know that the President is their last hope in the war against PC-thinking and a multicultural, immigrant America. If a wall with Mexico is what he wants, then get out of the way, they say.

They are determined to vote to defend their President in 2020: an amazing 81 percent of those voting for Donald Trump in 2020 put their level of interest at the highest point on the one-to-ten ladder scale, 6 points more than for those voting for the Democrat in 2020.

But the bigger bloc of voters is determined to resist Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and they seem set on disrupting electoral politics in their own way, accelerating the trends that were so evident in the 2018 blue wave. That disruption is clear even now in these powerful developments:

• The Democratic margin is growing. Democrats prevailed by 8.6 points nationally in 2018, and in this first poll of 2019, the Democratic candidate for President is ahead by 10 points, 51 to 41 percent, with 5 percent volunteering third party candidates. (Just 3 percent are undecided in a generic presidential ballot against Trump.) That leaves the Trump vote 5 points short of 2016, which would push him back dramatically back behind the Electoral College blue wall. He is losing independents by 11 points and is losing a quarter of moderate Republicans.

• Voters are nationalized politically. Fully 92 percent of those who voted for Democrats in 2018 are voting for a Democratic presidential candidate, and 90 percent of those who voted Republican in 2018 are voting for Donald Trump in 2020. All voters of both camps have fully polarized and translating their preferences nationally.

• The re-alignment continues. The Democratic candidate is winning Hispanics 62 to 32 percent, millennials 64 to 26 percent, millennial women by a daunting 79 to 16 percent, unmarried women 71 to 22 percent, and even white unmarried women by a two-to-one margin (62 to 30 percent). Every one of those numbers in the Rising American Electorate pushes the 2018 blue wave a step further.

• White working class women are sending a message. They currently give the Democrat a 3-point lead over Donald Trump, 49 to 46 percent.

• Historic level of engagement already. The most stunning development is the historic level of voter engagement in the first month of the election of the cycle. The percentage who say they are following the election at the highest possible level is already higher than in the last months of 2018 midterms that produced historic levels of off-year turnout. The high level of engagement recorded here for registered voters exceeds what we received for likely voters in 2016. So, by our standard definition of likely voters in a presidential election, we show virtually all registered voters as likely voters. This suggests an historic level of turnout in 2020.

Based on the results of this first survey of 2019, the battle of 2018 will carry forward with an even more engaged, more re-aligned and politicized country, to produce an election like
nothing we have seen before.

The election is a long way away. Anything can happen. But this is a very good starting position for the Democrats.

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Newly minted civil libertarians


by digby

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: Right, and we talked about that on radio as well at the time. Now, are there any, is — look, we all forget things. But these are pretty — given the nature of this investigation, might you have forgotten other things?

ROGER STONE, FMR. TRUMP ADVISOR: To the extent that I made mistakes of memory, they would be without intent, and it would be inconsequential. They would not be material under the law.

For any legal expert to look at these little excerpts without reading four and a half hours of testimony to see the context, the questions before and the questions after, would be irresponsible. But you can watch CNN and see the indictment is a slam dunk. My attorneys don’t think so.

INGRAHAM: A former FBI assistant director, Frank Figliuzzi, was talking about your only hope now being a pardon. Let’s watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRANK FIGLIUZZI, FORMER ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AT THE FBI: I’m a strong advocate of the theory that stone is positioning himself for a pardon and that it’s likely the only hope he has. He seems driven and motivated merely by absolute publicity, absolute being in the center of things, regardless of whether it’s bad publicity or good publicity. He needs to be there and he seems to be shaded toward the negative.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Is that it? Is — your only path outcome according to these characters on TV?

STONE: You know, I don’t know —

INGRAHAM: You’re appearing to talk to the president through our show to get a pardon?

STONE: I don’t know many FBI agents who know much about politicians, public relations, or the law in many cases. The truth of the matter is, if you read my book, “Stone’s Rules,” I believe when you’re falsely accused of something, and you say nothing, you say no comment, or Roger Stone was unavailable, most Americans assume you are guilty.

The whole purpose of this over-the-top raid on my house, in which they sent in more men then were used to protect our compound in Benghazi, was to paint a picture of me coming to poison a jury pool —

INGRAHAM: It was so ridiculous.

STONE: — as public enemy number one.

INGRAHAM: I — it was one of the more ridiculous things. And it was offensive. It’s offensive to me.

Regardless of what goes down here, that — it was like Elian Gonzalez times 29 or times 28. It was absurd.

It’s great to see these Republicans all become civil libertarians, worried about the overreach of America’s police apparatus.  Still, and all this handwringing is little bit weird coming from people who hysterically scream the words “lock her up!” every time they are in the presence of their Dear Leader is just a tad incongruous. But who knows,  maybe someday they’ll be as concerned about the civil liberties of their political rivals and people of color as they are of rich, white right-wing political operatives.

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