Month: January 2019

Ultimate Troll

by digby

Trump family friend Emin Agalarov announces he’s canceling his US tour (“due to circumstances beyond my control”) while standing in front of a schematic of the development that the Agalarovs were planning to build w/Trump at Crocus Center in Moscow. pic.twitter.com/62KplBMimP

— Seth Hettena (@seth_hettena) January 21, 2019

I can’t imagine that this is sending any kind of message is it? Like, for instance, that this Russia investigation is starting to get out of hand and they are losing patience?

I mean, they wouldn’t do that, would they?

Update: Evidently, he says he canceled because he couldn’t make a deal with Mueller. Recall that he’s one of the people who set up the Trump Tower meeting…

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Thanks, Gaga, and Thank God

by tristero

For years and years, far-right political operatives have hid behind the skirts of priests to advance an agenda of intolerance, bigotry, and ignorance. In fact, Christian practice in the US is highly diverse. Most Christians I know are tolerant, have no problem understanding what women’s rights are about, and think it’s ridiculous to deny the facts of evolution and global warming.

But for some reason, many people who take their Christian faith seriously have decided not to take a national position against the extremists. That may be starting to change.

Lady Gaga weighed in on the nation’s current state of affairs during her “Enigma” show in Las Vegas on Saturday, joining an ever-growing list of celebrities to voice their disapproval of the Trump administration.  

The Grammy winner singled out Vice President Mike Pence, slamming him for thinking “it’s acceptable that his wife work at a school that bans LGBTQ.” 

The vice president has defended Karen Pence’s decision to teach at the Immanuel Christian School, which bans LGBTQ employees, students and families. In an interview with Eternal World Television Network, Mike Pence likened the uproar over his wife’s decision to an attack on Christianity.  

“You are wrong,” the singer said, before speaking of her own Christian faith: 

“You said we should not discriminate against Christianity. You are the worst representation of what it means to be a Christian. I am a Christian woman, and what I do know about Christianity is that we bear no prejudice and everybody is welcome. So you can take all that disgrace Mr. Pence and you can look yourself in the mirror and you’ll find it right there.”

A display of pure hate

by digby

If you read nothing else on your day off, take the time to read this piece about the long campaign against George Soros. It’s mind-bogglingly awful in a dozen different ways.

The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media.

The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always negative, some of it obviously driven by networks of bots. Soros is pure evil. A drug smuggler. Profiteer. Extremist. Conspiracist. Nazi. Jew. It’s a display of pure hate.

The demonization of Soros is one of the defining features of contemporary global politics, and it is, with a couple of exceptions, a pack of lies. Soros is indeed Jewish. He was an aggressive currency trader. He has backed Democrats in the US and Karl Popper’s notion of an “open society” in the former communist bloc. But the many wild and proliferating theories, which include the suggestion that he helped bring down the Soviet Union in order to clear a path to Europe for Africans and Arabs, are so crazy as to be laughable — if they weren’t so virulent.

Soros and his aides have spent long hours wondering: Where did this all come from?

Only a handful of people know the answer.

I’ve written a lot about Arthur Funkenstein over the years — a truly malevolent character. This campaign, though, is something else.

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Two years in
Tom Sullivan

MLK Day. Two years into the Trump presidency. Is it hump day or halfway to hell? David Faris summarizes the president’s first two years in one paragraph for The Week:

We know that President Trump has, perhaps permanently, transformed the presidency with his malevolence, ineptitude, and divisiveness. Donald Trump is by far the laziest and least informed person ever to inhabit the White House. In two years, he has defined deviance so far down that he may have forever altered the expectations of the office of the presidency itself. As we have learned from a thousand anonymously sourced news analyses, the president’s time is largely unstructured, filled mostly with blocks of compulsive Fox News watching, an activity that he telegraphs to the public by live tweeting it. America’s voters are constantly being told, by the president of the United States, to watch particular Fox programs and to applaud quotes by right-wing gadflies uttered without any serious pushback from other guests on what is now effectively Republican state television.

Actually, Faris was just getting warmed up, but you get the idea. It ain’t pretty. But you knew that.

Like other federal holidays, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a secular feast day celebrated with speeches and community events, but also with pro forma marches and other trappings of a civil rights era that is atrophied but still sorely needed. It is year three of The Resistance, the weekend marked with women’s marches across the country (and one with near-single-digit wind chill here).

2019 Women’s March, Asheville, NC.

So far, none of the street actions have moved the needle on removing Trump or getting furloughed federal employess back to work and paychecks. The sitting president spent Day 30 of the Trump shutdown tweeting instead of making deals. The self-proclaimed consummate deal maker is consummately terrible at it.

“It’s like McDonald’s not being able to make a hamburger,” Republican strategist and Trump critic Mike Murphy told the Washington Post. Mr. “I alone can fix it” cannot, but he can screw things up royally.

Russ Buettner and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times offer a major reason why:

His lack of public empathy for unpaid federal workers echoes his treatment of some construction workers, contractors and lawyers whom he refused to pay for their work on his real estate projects. The plight of the farmers and small-business owners wilting without the financial support pledged by his administration harks back to the multiple lenders and investors who financed Mr. Trump’s business ventures only to come up shortchanged.

And his ever-changing positions (I’ll own the shutdown; you own the shutdown; the wall could be steel; it must be concrete; then again, it could be steel) have left heads in both parties spinning. Even after his televised proposal on Saturday to break the deadlock, Mr. Trump has no progress to show.

Trump cares about one thing: portraying himself as a winner. And he doesn’t care who he screws in the process.

David Leonhardt reports the small scale of protests over the Trump shutdown baffle Europeans “shocked that Americans have not begun protesting the shutdown in large numbers.” Leonhardt continues, “If this were happening in Europe, as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago told me, people would be pouring into the streets.” In the U.S., only scattered rallies.

Two years in, perhaps it is Trump fatigue. Watching the nation decay from behind a screen makes it worse.

Counties between Charlotte and Fayetteville, NC along the South Carolina border will have no representation in Congress for the foreseeable future. A decision on holding a new election is pending completion of an election fraud investigation by a state Board of Elections that will not be sworn in until January 31. But the prospect of having a new election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District brings with it the likelihood the contest could make Jon Ossoff’s 2017 race for GA-6 look penny ante. It would be a four-ring media circus. For field operatives, it would be just what the doctor ordered to treat Trump fatigue.

“Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?”

PSA: Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse

by digby

That’s a mouthful, but let’s break it down. January’s full moon is a supermoon, meaning that the moon is at the point in its orbit where it is nearest to Earth. This is called perigee. The average distance from Earth to the moon is 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers). At perigee this January, the distance will shrink to 222,043 miles (357,344 km). At the moon’s next apogee in February, when the moon is farthest from Earth, it will be 252,622 miles (406,555 km) away from Earth.

Practically speaking, perigee is hard to detect with the naked eye. As the editor of Sky & Telescope magazine Alan MacRobert noted in advance of a 2016 supermoon, the moon looks about 25 percent brighter and around 15 percent greater in area at perigee — “not enough to notice unless you’re a very careful moon-watcher,” he said. [Here’s How to Watch Sunday’s Lunar Eclipse]

Blood and wolves
The “wolf” part of this month’s moon moniker is simply a reference to the month of January. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, each month’s full moon has a name, supposedly cobbled together from traditional Native American or old Anglo-Saxon names. No one knows the precise origin of “wolf moon,” but that’s the name typically assigned to January. [Photos: The Adventure Behind Eclipse Chasing]

The rest of the name is all about planetary geometry. This month, as the moon swings closest to Earth, the moon will also undergo a total lunar eclipse. Lunar eclipses happen when Earth is between the sun and the moon, and the moon passes into Earth’s shadow.

“Not just any part of the shadow,” said Paul Hayne, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, “but the deepest, darkest part of the shadow, called the umbra.”

Despite the moon’s position in this deep shadow, it won’t entirely vanish from Earthlings’ sight. A little bit of sunlight sneaks through Earth’s atmosphere, bent and scattered by the thin sheen of gases blanketing our planet. Red wavelengths of light pass through, creating an eerie vermilion hue on the moon’s face for viewers on Earth. From the moon, it would look as if Earth were surrounded by an orange ring of fire.

“It’s like seeing a sunset all the way around the Earth,” Hayne told Live Science. Because of the color, lunar eclipses are also known as “blood moons.”

The total eclipse of the moon will last an hour and 2 minutes, according to NASA, with the partial phase stretching out over 2 hours and 17 minutes. The show starts subtly at 9:36 p.m. EST (6:36 p.m. PST) with a penumbral eclipse, when the outer edge of Earth’s shadow will very slightly darken the moon’s face. Things will get a little more interesting around 10:34 p.m. EST (7:34 PST), when the moon enters the main, darker portion of Earth’s shadow, the umbra. This marks the start of the partial lunar eclipse.

At 11:41 p.m. EST (8:41 PST), the total eclipse begins. At this point, the moon will be entirely within the umbra, and the whole surface should appear dusky red. The total eclipse will last until 12:43 a.m. EST (9:43 p.m. PST), and the partial eclipse will end at 1:51 a.m. EST (10:51 p.m. PST). The final, subtle darkening of the penumbral eclipse will pass at 2:48 a.m. EST (11:48 p.m. PST). Weather permitting, most of the United States — except for Hawaii and some of the Aleutian Islands — will have a great view, Hayne said.

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Rats overboard

by digby

Somebody sees the writing on the wall:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to meet with veteran Republican strategist Ward Baker on Sunday afternoon to discuss a possible 2020 run for the vacant Kansas Senate seat, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Pompeo, a former congressman and ex-CIA director who in April 2018 was confirmed as secretary of State, is considering a Senate bid, though he has yet to make a final decision. Yet party leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are aggressively wooing him. McConnell (R-Ky.) and Pompeo spoke shortly after Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts announced his retirement.

Pompeo and Baker are expected to talk about what a Senate campaign would entail. Baker has deep political experience, having served as National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director during the 2016 election cycle. During the 2018 midterms, he helped to spearhead Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn’s successful Senate bid. He is also close to McConnell.

A Pompeo departure would be a blow to the Trump administration, which has suffered an array of high-profile departures in recent months. In December, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned after breaking with the president over his decision to withdraw troops from Syria.

Several Cabinet departments — including Interior and Defense — are being run by acting secretaries. Should Pompeo leave, it would create another opening for Trump to fill.

Yeah, good luck. Maybe Pompeo can become a Senator from Kansas. They have a recent history of electing wingnut freaks like Sam Brownback so Pompeo wouldn’t be an anomaly. But he will never, ever be president if that’s what he has in mind. But unlike Nikki Haley, who deftly managed to keep a little bit of distance between herselTrump stench will be on him for the rest of his life, especially the utter crapola he’s been spinning in the Middle East.

And his wife is a bit of a problem too.

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When the “I” word gets serious

by digby

Marcy Wheeler on another interesting admission from Rudy this morning:

In this post, I suggested that Rod Rosenstein’s call to Mueller’s office to see if they were going to release a statement pushing back against Buzzfeed’s story on Michael Cohen’s testimony might be a violation of SCO regulations protecting against “day-to-day supervision” by DOJ.

In his appearance on Jake Tapper’s show today, Rudy Giuliani (starting at 14:25) appears to take credit for SCO’s statement. After agreeing with Tapper that the NYT had corrected their claim that Paul Manafort had shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik with the intent that it in turn get shared with two Ukrainian oligarchs he worked for, he noted that the NYT had not issued the correction on their own. He then said that the Special Counsel’s office had not, either.

Rudy: Originally the NYTimes ran with the story [about Paul Manafort sharing polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik] — again, fake news — that he shared it with a Russian, not true. [note: actually it is true, because Kilimnik himself is a Russian citizen] 

Tapper: They corrected that. They corrected that. 

Rudy: They did correct that. They didn’t correct that — my friend, they didn’t correct that, they didn’t correct that just completely on their own by the way. The same thing with Special Counsel. That didn’t happen spontaneously.

At the very least, this undermines WaPo’s claim that Mueller already had a correction of Buzzfeed in the works before Rosenstein’s office called.
[…]
The WaPo story suggested that the statement was issued because Democrats were discussing impeachment.
[…]

I thought that was odd as well. With all the talk about the Mueller case being sealed off from politics, one would have thought the last thing they would ever get involved in would be discussions of impeachment. Supposedly, Mueller isn’t Ken Starr.

Of course the Democrats are going to be talking impeachment, for any number of things, some of which may end up being investigated, some not, and some they may end up being wrong about. It’s a process that hasn’t even been started yet. There is no way that anyone thought this story, inaccurate or not, was going to be the lynchpin of an impeachment trial. There’s a whole lot of material that’s going to be included in any impeachment inquiry and this would have been just one of them even if there was too much loose talk about “smoking guns” about that Buzzfeed scoop. As Marcy says in her piece, “it is not the function of the Deputy Attorney General’s office to suppress perfectly legitimate discussions of impeachment.” It’s not the function of the Special Counsel either.

Marcy concludes:

But if the White House or Trump’s personal lawyer demanded that DOJ interfere in the day-to-day supervision of Mueller’s office with the specific goal of silencing talk about impeachment, as Rudy seems to suggest, that is a far more egregious intervention. That would mean Rosenstein’s office (either with or without the intervention of Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matt Whitaker) did what they did because Trump demanded it, which led them to take action that is arguably outside their permissible role with Mueller, all for the political purpose of squelching legitimate congressional discussion about impeachment.

It sure sounded like that’s what Rudy was saying and it’s what makes the most sense. Marcy’s original
theory that this was done to protect Cohen’s credibility makes sense. But if Rudy is spilling the beans as he’s apt to do, it’s hard to see why the DOJ or the OSC would think this was an unusually damning accusation considering everything else that’s out there unless the White House was raising a fuss because impeachment was being discussed more seriously.

They’d better get used to it. It’s on the table and it isn’t going away.

By the way —Rosenstein has played politics with this thing before. I think I’ve always assumed (hoped?) it was because he, like Lindsey Graham, thinks it’s the only way to keep the lunaticTrump from losing it altogether. So it’s possible that he knew Trump was going to freak out and acted upon that knowledge. You know, like Michael Cohen knew what Trump wanted him to do and so he did it. Psychos like Trump often have people trying to pre-empt their wrath.

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Nobody believes in their love affair

by digby

The Media is not giving us credit for the tremendous progress we have made with North Korea. Think of where we were at the end of the Obama Administration compared to now. Great meeting this week with top Reps. Looking forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at end of February!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2019

Ok…

A Pentagon report released Thursday described North Korea’s missile and nuclear program as an “extraordinary threat” to the United States, warning that the U.S. must “remain vigilant” despite ongoing diplomatic engagement with the North.

The Missile Defense Review report, introduced by President Donald Trump during a speech at the Pentagon, was released just hours ahead of a top North Korean envoy’s arrival in Washington to discuss a potential second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“While a possible new avenue to peace now exists with North Korea, it continues to pose an extraordinary threat and the United States must remain vigilant,” the report said.

Trump mentioned North Korea only in passing in his remarks, but the report emphasized that Pyongyang has invested considerable resources and undertaken extensive nuclear and missile testing “in order to realize the capability to threaten the U.S. homeland with missile attack.”

“As a result, North Korea has neared the time when it could credibly do so,” the report concluded.

Reminder:

Remember, he’s taken private advice from Vladimir Putin on North Korea, to the benefit of Russia.

Donald Trump left this week’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un having granted a huge last-minute concession: promising to stop what he called “war games” with South Korea.

The move reportedly blindsided both Seoul and US military officials.

Trump may have got that idea from an unusual source, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywall):

Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un’s behavior.

That discussion between Putin and Trump reportedly happened in summer 2017. The pair have only met twice themselves, on the sidelines of diplomatic gatherings in Germany in July 2017 and in Vietnam that November.

Russia has encouraged de-escalation talks between the US and North Korea. Today, the Kremlin publicly congratulated itself for supporting the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore, Reuters reported. “Putin was right,” a spokesman said. “The only possible path is one of direct dialogue.”

Using the military exercises as a massive negotiating chip in exchange for the North denuclearizing is a pretty orthodox policy proposal, but it stunned almost everybody that Trump seemed to be giving this away for free after his meeting.

The Great Negotiator strikes again …

Deep State

by digby

Uhhhhhhh….Fmr FBI Assistant Director just said "When I first got into the FBI one of the missions of the FBI in its counterintelligence efforts was to try to keep" progressives out of government pic.twitter.com/l1KqQMO914— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 19, 2019

Yes. DOJ and federal law enforcement are almost all populated with right wing Republicans. The political appointees are Democrats when Democrats are in the White House but even they tend to be conservative.

This is why the Trump scandal is so scary. If THEY were alarmed by a cop-lovin, racist Republican president then something is definitely wrong. Its just not in their DNA.

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He’s a dirty liar but he was telling the truth that one time when it made Trump look good

by digby

Rudy Giuliani: “(President Trump) had conversations with Michael Cohen, but it was Michael Cohen driving the project … Do not think that just because he’s pleaded guilty to something that Michael Cohen’s telling the truth” pic.twitter.com/jk4LOiX9OD— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 20, 2019

Well, ok then.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, acknowledged during an appearance on CNN on Sunday that it’s possible the president spoke with Michael Cohen prior to Cohen’s congressional testimony, but questioned why it matters.

“I don’t know if it happened or didn’t happen,” Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And it might be attorney-client privilege if it happened where I can’t acknowledge it. But I have no knowledge that he spoke to him. But I’m telling you, I wasn’t there then.”

Rudy Giuliani: “(President Trump) had conversations with Michael Cohen, but it was Michael Cohen driving the project … Do not think that just because he’s pleaded guilty to something that Michael Cohen’s telling the truth”

“I don’t know if it happened or if it didn’t happen. … I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” Giuliani says on whether President Trump and Michael Cohen discussed Cohen’s congressional testimony, before adding, “So what if he talked to him about it?” #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/11V2SDsmMg

Pressed again as to whether or not the president might have had a conversation with Cohen about his testimony, Giuliani said: “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

Gosh, that doesn’t seem very good, does it? But this certainly is convincing:

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s attorney, said Sunday he is “100 percent certain” that Trump never asked Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

Speaking about the president to Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Giuliani said “to answer your question, categorically, I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was: ‘Tell the truth.’ We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress.“

If there’s one thing we know about the president it’s that he is a stickler for the truth. And MJichel Cohen is a dirty liar and you can’t believe a word he said but he told the truth this one time.

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