Month: February 2019

A Facebook fact-checker speaks

by digby

I’ve never been a Facebook user. I have a page where I’ll share my posts sometimes but other than that it’s largely ignored. It’s just not my thing. (Twitter is my social media jones, so I’m not saying that I’m immune from the social media hellscape.)

Anyway, I know that Facebook is a huge resource for tens of millions of people across the world. And this should scare the hell out of us in terms of how propaganda is disseminated on this platform:

Facebook has always struggled to comprehend the scale of its fake news and propaganda problem. Now, it’s struggling to retain the fact-checkers it paid to try and deal with the crisis. Last week both Snopes and the Associated Press ended their partnerships with the social network, after a tense couple of years trying, without success, to tackle the epidemic.

But those partnerships should never have existed in the first place, and I say this as the former managing editor of Snopes, who Facebook first made contact with in 2016. When they first emailed me about a potential partnership, I knew it would bring much more attention to the work of our small newsroom — and much more scrutiny.

But what I didn’t realize was that we were entering a full-blown crisis, not just of “fake news,” but of journalism, democracy, and the nature of reality itself — one we’re all still trying to sort out in 2019, and which had more twists and turns than I’d ever thought possible. Looking back, my overwhelming impression of the years since 2016 is how surreal everything became.

It turned out that trying to fact-check a social media service that is used by a huge chunk of the world’s population is no easy task. We tried to make it easier by showing where disinformation would originate, but there were just too many stories. Trying to stem the tsunami of hoaxes, scams, and outright fake stories was like playing the world’s most doomed game of whack-a-mole, or like battling the Hydra of Greek myth. Every time we cut off a virtual head, two more would grow in its place. My excellent but exhausted and overworked team did as much as we could, but soon felt like we were floating around in a beat-up old skiff, trying to bail out the ocean with a leaky bucket.

Things soon got worse. Because of my own history reporting on refugee rights, I had contacts with groups all over the world working on migration and humanitarian crises. Since early 2015, I’d been hearing bits and pieces about Myanmar and the Rohingya Muslims, and how activists on the ground — exhausted, dispirited activists who were begging any reporter they could find to help spread the word — were saying the crisis had been fueled and spread by social media. The people of Myanmar had only experienced unfettered access to the internet since around 2012, and now Facebook, through its Internet.org program that provided free mobile internet access to its site, had quickly become the only source for news for a large portion of the population. Newsfeeds in Myanmar were pushing a narrative that helped justify ethnic cleansing and other human rights violations on a massive scale. I took it to my editorial team and we put out some stories, and then I took it to Facebook.

Nothing happened, and I came to see Myanmar as something of a model for the damage algorithms and disinformation could do to our world. That’s when the migraines started. I became obsessed with this connection — I dreamed about it at night, woke up thinking about it, and felt responsible for stopping a problem that few others even knew existed.

In case you’re curious, here’s what it was like to be an official Facebook fact-checker. We were given access to a tool that hooked into our personal Facebook accounts and was accessed that way (strike one, as far as I was concerned) and it spat out a long list of stories that had been flagged for checks. We were free to ignore the list, or mark stories as “true,” “false,” or “mixture.” (Facebook later added a “satire” category after what I like to call “the Babylon Bee incident“, where a satirical piece was incorrectly labeled false.)

It was clear from the start that that this list was generated via algorithm. It contained headlines and URLs, and a graph showing their popularity and how much time they had been on the site. There were puzzling aspects to it, though. We would often get the same story over and over again from different sites, which is to be expected to a certain degree because many of the most lingering stories have been recycled again and again. This is what Facebook likes to call “engagement.”

But no matter how many times we marked them “false,” stories would keep resurfacing with nothing more than a word or two changed. This happened often enough to make it clear that our efforts weren’t really helping, and that we were being directed toward a certain type of story — and, we presumed, away from others.

What were the algorithmic criteria that generated the lists of articles for us to check? We never knew, and no one ever told us.

Read the whole thing because it’s clear we have a major problem that nobody has yet figured out how to solve short of simply shutting down the platform — at which point something equally bad, or worse, will take its place.

This is one of the major challenges of our time and I don’t think anyone has a clue about what to do about it.

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The Unbearable Denialism of the Center 

by tristero

Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner wrote gawd-knows-how-many words for the Sunday Times asserting that the Republican party may abandon Trump. Even they know it’s bullshit:

Being sane, we understand why the prospect of Mr. Trump’s being forced to resign or face impeachment and conviction before the end of his term is unlikely.

So why did they type up such utterly dishonest nonsense? Perhaps it was merely to advance one of the most beloved of all centrist myths. The problem with the Republicans today, according to “moderates” like these fine fellows, begins with Trump and therefore will end when he is gone:

The most troubling — and from our point of view the most disappointing — development of the Trump era is not the president’s own election and subsequent behavior; it is the institutional corruption, weakness and self-betrayal of the Republican Party. The party has abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency. It has allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality television star who is a pathological liar, emotionally unsteady and accountable only to himself. 

Rauch and Wehner actually believe that the decent men (and the few women) of the GOP have allowed themselves to be “hijacked” by Trump and then the Republican party “abandoned its core commitments to constitutional norms, to conservative principles and even to basic decency.”

This is so delusional as to border upon the psychotic. One counter- example: Mitch McConnell’s refusal to permit a vote on Merrick Garland. I can think of thousands of other times over the past 40 years when the non-Trump members of the GOP have exhibited institutional corruption, weakness, and blatantly betrayed their own values.

Sorry, boys. Trump never “hijacked” the modern Republican party. Trump embodies modern Republican values.

We are zapping ourselves into exhaustion

by digby

This piece by Jennifer Senior in the NY Times addressing an interesting and disturbing phenomenon in the Trump era: the addiction to stimulating news. I know I feel it all the time and it’s different than anything I’ve ever experienced before:

Many evolutionary biologists are fond of pointing out that the human body is not adapted to modern life, which often involves sitting for hours at a time and toiling in artificial light and consuming mounds of processed sugar (“There’s no food in your food,” as the Joan Cusack character says in “Say Anything”). But the same design problem, it could be argued, is true of the human brain: It was not engineered to process the volume of information we’re getting, and at the rate we’re getting it.

“Our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime,” writes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.”

Recently, I phoned Levitin. He told me he suspects that humans during the Trump era are unwittingly re-enacting the rat experiments that James Olds and Peter Milner did in the 1950s, wherein the creatures repeatedly pressed a lever to feel an electric jolt to their reward centers. The poor subjects became such hostages to gratification that they stopped eating, drinking, even having sex. Eventually, they died of exhaustion.

Many evolutionary biologists are fond of pointing out that the human body is not adapted to modern life, which often involves sitting for hours at a time and toiling in artificial light and consuming mounds of processed sugar (“There’s no food in your food,” as the Joan Cusack character says in “Say Anything”). But the same design problem, it could be argued, is true of the human brain: It was not engineered to process the volume of information we’re getting, and at the rate we’re getting it.

“Our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime,” writes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.”

Recently, I phoned Levitin. He told me he suspects that humans during the Trump era are unwittingly re-enacting the rat experiments that James Olds and Peter Milner did in the 1950s, wherein the creatures repeatedly pressed a lever to feel an electric jolt to their reward centers. The poor subjects became such hostages to gratification that they stopped eating, drinking, even having sex. Eventually, they died of exhaustion.

The business I’m in self-selects for those with a pretty high threshold for those jolts. I stare at my colleagues sometimes and marvel at what a different breed they are, the true exotics of the species: They’re like bugs with eyes all over their heads, evolved to take in several streams of information simultaneously. Walk by their desks, and it looks something like Norad. They’re staring at multiple screens fringed with multiple tabs, while Twitter, email and texts cascade down their phones.

Whereas me? I’m a Cyclops. I tend to see one thing at a time. Before Trump, I could go days without looking at the newspaper. I’m partial to 19th-century novels, and I envy their heroines, who spend their days reading and needlepointing and playing piano. I find it far easier to tolerate the whistling emptiness of boredom than the casino rattle of too much stimulation.

But to opt out of this clanging multiverse is to live in mild estrangement. It’s to feel one’s self become a permanent spectator; to live with the persistent sense that something is always happening elsewhere; to feel old, outlasted, outmatched by the bizarre physics of your own lifetime: The great spinning world has toppled off its axis and rolled away.

It cannot be an accident that the lions of Silicon Valley, who live and die by the information whorl, are bullish on meditation. Bill Gates wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about it, praising the practice for focusing his busy mind. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey meditates, as we all learned from a string of insensitive tweets he recently unleashed from Myanmar. (It’s a fine line between mindfulness and mindlessness, apparently.) When the world’s coming at you in great clouds of 280-character Frisbees, naturally it’s tempting to vanish into the forest dark of your own mind.

Of course, complaints about the unmanageable velocity of the world have been with us since industrialization, if not before. I once joked to my husband that I feared napping because I might miss an indictment. Turns out Henry David Thoreau made a similar complaint in the age of the telegraph. “Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner,” he wrote, “but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”

I’m not convinced, as some people are, that the Twitter fusillades from the White House are part of a larger strategy of distraction, specifically intended to divert us from this particular administration’s malfeasance and failures. I think our president’s attention span is genuinely scattershot. (“Post-literate,” Michael Wolff called him in “Fire and Fury.” Seems about right.) When I imagine his brain, I imagine a bug zapper in a drizzle. Bzzzzzzzzzzt. Fzzzz. Bzzz fzzz bzzzzzzzzzzt.

But Trump chaos, both intentional and otherwise, has proved a great de facto political strategy, precisely because we are neurologically incapable of handling it. The one thing we know about any interrupted activity is that it takes an awful lot of energy to return to whatever last had our attention.

I am one of those rats zapping myself for stimulation and I think it’s possible that I will, in fact, die of exhaustion.

I realize that I’m not a normal American in this instance. I am immersed in this stuff 24/7 and have been for many years. But there is something different now. It’s much, much more intense but I’d guess that many millions of normal people are feeling this more than they used to as well.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone other than Trump creates this sort of chaos so the danger is that the media will create ways to keep up the intensity. I think we can all guess how that will go.

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Another tell

by digby

Plenty of people, including yours truly, noticed the similarity of tone when Trump knows he’s been caught dead to rights in a lie about a possible criminal act. Instead of his normal defiance, he takes the posture of total innocence that sounds completely inauthentic.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago:

Remember when Trump denied that he knew anything about the Stormy payment?



Note the tone of voice. Well, in that NY Times interview he adopts exactly the same tone when he says this:

HABERMAN: “Did you ever talked to him about Wikileaks?

TRUMP: “No. No. I didn’t. I never did.”

HABERMAN: “Did you ever tell him or other people to get in touch with him?”

TRUMP: “Never did.”

This is a tell. It’s the tone of voice you hear from a five-year-old with chocolate all over his face denying that he ate the candy.  All innocence, brief and breezy as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

Listen to the at 12:10. It’s uncanny.

He told him.

Check out the tone when he said this:

BAKER: Has Attorney General [Matthew] Whitaker given you any indication of whether you face any exposure in this investigation?

TRUMP: No.

HABERMAN: Or your family?

TRUMP: I don’t even talk to him about it.

HABERMAN: You never talk to Matt Whitaker?

TRUMP: I don’t talk to him about it. How can you have exposure when you haven’t done anything? I had nothing to do with any of this, other than that I was a good candidate that won an election.

HABERMAN: Has Rod Rosenstein given you any sense over the course of the last year about whether you have any exposure, either in — or there’s any concerns, or whether you’re a target of the Mueller report?

TRUMP: Well he told the attorneys that I’m not a subject, I’m not a target.

HABERMAN: He told your attorneys?

TRUMP: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

HABERMAN: Did he say that about the S.D.N.Y. [Southern District of New York] investigation, too?

TRUMP: About which?

HABERMAN: The S.D.N.Y. investigation. Because there’s two. There’s Mueller, and then there’s the Cohen investigation.

TRUMP: I don’t know about that. That I don’t know about.

HABERMAN: Rod has never said anything to you about whether you’re a target at all in terms of what they were looking for on Cohen? Has that ever come up?

TRUMP: No. I don’t. We didn’t discuss it.

It’s right at the beginning of this segment:

He talked to Whitaker, not Rosenstein…

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The Bezos theory of the case

by digby

Marc Fisher, Washington Post senior editor said this on MSNBC yesterday:

This is the part of the Bezos theory of the case. They argue that the reason the National Enquirer went ahead and did what they see as a hit job on Jeff Bezos by exposing his affair was because of this connection with the Saudis. The president having a good relationship with the Saudi leader and the National Enquirer having an enormous debt of more than 800 million dollars. The Bezos story is that the president arranged for the National Enquirer’s executives to go to Saudi Arabia and meet with people there. He came back and said that part of the debt of the National Enquirer had been lifted and had been taken care of  they were no longer in deep trouble. 

Meanwhile, the National Enquirer was putting out this hundred page glossy magazine that was distributed in Walmarts across the country, extolling the virtues of the new Saudi Arabia under the very same leader who had Jamal Khasshoggi killed. So this is where Trump and the Enquirer are working in cahoots and that Bezos is a target for them for that reason.

They don’t have any documentary evidence of this. It’s a series of circumstantial pieces of evidence. But it does fit with the idea that the National Enquirer was deeply upset at the idea that all these news outlets would be reporting that they had political motivations for this story about Bezos.

Maybe I haven’t been following this closely enough but I hadn’t heard that Trump set up the Saudi meeting before.

Who knows if any of this is true? Maybe Pecker just wanted to shake down Bezos for his own reasons. But that seems unlikely…

Update: Go over to twitter and read this thread …

Here’s a thread about the @JeffBezos hack, AMI, and the Saudi connection. Also what ties this together – The @washingtonpost. Apologies in advance, I wrote this in a rush, but thought I’d rather post it now than not post it.

— İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي (@iyad_elbaghdadi) February 8, 2019

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Fighting lies and the lying liars
by Tom Sullivan

Image via bpnews.net

A study published this month finds that roughly “one third of all subjects are dishonest” if others in their group are too. “Having only one dishonest group member makes the vast majority of these conditional liars switch from being honest to being dishonest,” conclude researchers from the University of Cologne. The study on how dishonesty spreads in business settings finds “other people’s dishonesty is the key factor for one’s own decision whether to be dishonest.” Moreover, for both conditional liars and always liars, “the size of a lie increases with the number of dishonest group members that one faces.”

Discuss among yourselves the name-brand family business now under federal investigation and what the one-third figure suggests about its associates, its fans, and the sitting president’s poll numbers.

In testimony last week before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform Committee, Rudy Mehrbani, Spitzer Fellow and Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice told members, “We have long assumed that all presidential administrations would follow longstanding ethics practices and ideals that aren’t required by law,” said Mehrbani. “Unfortunately, these commonsense practices that presidents from both parties followed for decades can no longer be taken for granted. This means that new laws are needed to compel a commitment to ethics and ensure accountability.”

Mehrbani was testifying on H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, a 571-page voting rights and anti-corruption bill introduced as the first piece of legislation from the new Democrat-led House. Key provisions of that bill address voting rights many Americans have never been able to take for granted.

“Let’s be clear. Voter suppression is real,” former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said in the Democrats’ State of the Union response. “From making it harder to register and staying on the rolls, to moving and closing polling places, to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.”

To that end, H.R. 1 includes a host of provisions to strengthen voting rights, writes Rick Hasen:

Among the provisions affecting voting and voting rights are those requiring online voter registration, automatic voter registration, and same-day registration for voting in federal elections; a requirement to use independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts in each state; limitations on voter purges; an end to felon disenfranchisement for federal elections; protection against intimidation and false information surrounding elections; improved access to voting by persons with disabilities; a set of improved cybersecurity standards around voting and voting systems, including a requirement that all voting systems produce a paper trail for auditing and checking results; and a ban on a state’s chief election officer engaging in political activities connected to federal offices.

In this post-truth, post-ethics administration, as much as it once seemed superfluous, it is now incumbent upon Congress to spell out in law rules of common decency we once took for granted people learned to abide by at their parents’ knees, if not from replica stone tablets the religious right insists be installed in courthouses.

The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb observes that a president renowned for lying has not only assaulted the free press, the judiciary, and the U.S. intelligence communities, but basic mathematics. Roughly three million more voters cast ballots in 2016 for his female opponent, the same number of non-citizens the sitting president alleges without evidence voted illegally. Nearly two million fewer African-Americans voted in 2016 than in 2012, Cobb notes, perhaps because Barack Obama was not on the ballot. But it also could be those two million went missing because of an assortment of voter suppression measures passed in states since the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder voided portions of the Voting Rights Act. “The equation here is: reality minus delusion equals three million,” Cobb concludes.

How many assert the delusion because the boss does?

Saturday Night at the Movies … and Sunday Morning

Stop that train: R.I.P. Albert Finney

By Dennis Hartley

Albert Finney died yesterday, and more people should have cared. I almost missed it myself, which is odd considering how much time I fritter and waste in an offhand way online these days. It didn’t even trend on Twitter, for fuck’s sake. No, I learned of his passing the old-fashioned way: a perfunctory mention on a nightly network TV newscast.

A file photo of Finney popped up (rarely a good sign), and the blow-dried anchor mustered all the teleprompter-fed solemnity extant in his soul to sadly inform me that “the actor who played Daddy Warbucks in the movie version of Annie has died” before moving on to “a video you have got to see”. The actor who played Daddy Warbucks in the film version of Annie? Really? That’s all you got? I wouldn’t call that his most memorable performance; I wouldn’t even consider Annie to be a particularly good movie.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre-trained Finney’s film career spanned over 50 years, and in the course of that time he proved over and over that he had chops to spare for both drama and comedy. Innately charismatic onscreen, he could effortlessly hold your attention as the dashing leading man, or just as easily embed himself into a character role.

Finney never strayed too far from his working-class roots in his off-screen demeanor. He shunned interviews and the trappings of stardom; he was all about the work. He declined the offer of a CBE (as well as a knighthood) and once compared an actor’s job to that of a bricklayer. So let’s get to work here, shall we? My picks for Finney’s top 10 film roles…

The Dresser- Peter Yates directed this tale of a fiercely devoted “dresser” (Tom Courtenay) who tends to the mercurial lead player (Finney) of a traveling company’s production of King Lear. The story is set against the backdrop of London during the blitz, but it’s a tossup as to who is producing more Sturm and Drang…the German bombers, the raging king, or the backstage terror who portrays him and is to be addressed by all as “Sir”. Courtenay and Finney deliver brilliant performances. Ronald Harwood adapted the script from his own play. In the most memorable scene, Sir literally halts a locomotive in its tracks at a noisy railway station with his commanding bellow to “STOP. That. Train!”

Gumshoe– This relatively obscure U.K. gem from 1971 was produced by Finney and marked the feature film directing debut for Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, The Grifters, High Fidelity, et. al.). Finney is wonderful as an emcee who works in a seedy Liverpool nightclub and models himself after Philip Marlowe. He decides to indulge his long-time fantasy of becoming a private detective by placing a newspaper ad offering his services-and gets more than he bargains for with his first “case. Screenwriter Neville Smith’s clever dialog is infused with just enough shadings of Chandler and Hammet to deflect suspicion of plagiarism (and Finney thankfully doesn’t overdo his Bogey impression-which isn’t half-bad). Nice supporting turn from Billie Whitelaw, and Frears’ use of the gritty Liverpool milieu lends an appropriate “noir” vibe.

Miller’s Crossing– This 1990 gangster flick could only come from the unique mind-meld of Joel and Ethan Coen. Finney is excellent as an Irish mob boss engaging in a power struggle with the local Italian mob during the Prohibition era. Gabriel Byrne (who is the central character of the film) portrays his advisor, who attempts to broker peace by playing both sides against the middle. This form of diplomacy does carry a certain degree of personal risk (don’t try this at home). You do have to pay attention in order to keep up with the constantly shifting alliances and betrayals and such; but as with most Coen Brothers movies, if you lose track of the narrative you always have plenty of twisty performances, stylish flourishes, and mordant humor to chew on until you catch up again.

Orphans– There is sometimes a fine line between “intense drama” and “overcooked ham”, and while I will admit that this 1987 Alan J. Pakula adaptation of Lyle Kessler’s stage play toddles dangerously close to that line, it is still well worth your time. Matthew Modine and Kevin Anderson are two fringe-dwelling brothers who live on their own in a decrepit house. Finney is a low-rent Chicago gangster who gets blotto at a New Jersey bar, and upon waking up discovers he’s been “kidnapped” by Modine, who has a hold over his brother reminiscent of the dynamic between the sisters in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The story becomes even stranger when Finney decides then and there to move in with and impose himself as a father figure. It’s “stagey”, but the acting is superb.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning– This 1960 Karel Reisz drama gave the 24-year-old Finney his first major starring role and is one of the seminal entries of the “British New Wave” film movement. Finney delivers an explosive Brando-esque performance as a womanizing young man stuck in a dreary factory job. Allen Sillitoe adapted the screenplay from his own novel. A gritty slice of life steeped in “kitchen sink” realism.

Shoot the Moon– Be forewarned: Alan Parker’s 1982 drama about the deterioration of a marriage pulls no punches (it is right out as a “date night” movie). Finney co-stars with Diane Keaton as a couple with four kids whose marriage is about to go kaput. As in Kramer vs. Kramer, the film essentially opens with the split, and then focuses on the immediate emotional aftershocks and its profound impact on all family members. Absolutely heartbreaking, but beautifully acted by a skilled cast that includes Karen Allen, Peter Weller, and Dana Hill. Bo Goldman scripted, and Michael Seresin’s cinematography is lovely (the Marin County environs almost becomes a character itself).

Tom Jones- The film that made Finney an international star, Tony Richardson’s 1963 romantic comedy-drama is based on the Henry Fielding novel about the eponymous character’s amorous exploits in 18th-Century England. Tom (Finney) is raised as the bastard son of a prosperous squire. He is a bit on the rakish side, but wholly lovable and possesses a good heart. It’s the “lovable” part that gets him in trouble time and again, and fate and circumstance put young Tom on the road, where various duplicitous parties await to prey upon his naivety. Will he triumph? Of course, he will…the entertainment lies in how he gets there. John Osborne adapted the Oscar-winning script; the film also won for Best Picture, Director, and Music Score (Finney was nominated for Best Actor).

Lessons from the Whitaker hearing

by digby

From Natasha Bertrand at the Atlantic:

It took about five minutes of questioning for the acting attorney general to provoke gasps and jeers in the congressional hearing room. “Your five minutes is up,” Matthew Whitaker, an ex–U.S. attorney turned toilet salesman, told the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic chairman, Jerry Nadler. Nadler cracked a smile, but from that point on, the rules of engagement seemed clear: Whitaker, with just days remaining in his legally dubious role as the interim head of the Justice Department, appeared to be playing to an audience of one.

President Donald Trump appointed Whitaker late last year to replace Jeff Sessions, whose recusal from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in early 2017 was viewed by the president as an unforgivable betrayal. But Whitaker was not the obvious replacement—he served for a few years as a U.S. attorney in Iowa, but spent far longer in private practice and partisan politics. He also served as a paid advisory-board member of a fraudulent invention-promotion firm. Later, he was the executive director of a conservative nonprofit funded by dark money. And then came his stint as a CNN commentator in 2017, during which he blasted Mueller and opined that his probe had “gone too far.” All of this received heavy scrutiny as the constitutional basis of his appointment was challenged in the courts.

But Friday marked his first oversight hearing on Capitol Hill.

“I’m confused, I really am,” Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries told Whitaker at one point. “We’re all trying figure out: Who are you, where did you come from, and how the heck did you become the head of the Department of Justice?”

Despite the lingering questions about his resume and suspicions about why he was appointed over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would have been Sessions’s natural replacement, Whitaker presented himself to Nadler, a 13-term congressman, with the same aloofness and disdain for tradition that often seems typical of the Trump White House. And that may have been on purpose. Whitaker, whose tenure ends when Bill Barr is confirmed as attorney general next week, will need a new job. He has reportedly been considered for the role of Trump’s chief of staff. And though he testified under oath that he had “not interfered in any way with the special counsel’s investigation,” he repeatedly declined to contradict Trump’s claims that Mueller is on a “witch hunt.”

Chuck Rosenberg, a former senior Justice Department official who resigned in 2017, said it would have been “easy” for Whitaker to say that Mueller’s investigation is legitimate, as Barr did during his recent confirmation hearings. “I don’t know how somebody could be that cowardly,” he added. But doing so would have undermined what is arguably his boss’s most important talking point—and that would not have been a good move for Whitaker if he was, in fact, auditioning for his next position

I hear he wants to be chief of staff when Mulvaney abandons ship (as he’s rumored to be desperate to do.)

It’s looking good for him. Last night he thumbed his nose at all the ethics snobs by running over to the Trump hotel to show his fealty to his criminal boss and put some money in his pocket.

And the boss is pleased:

President Trump watched live cable coverage of yesterday’s chippy Hill testimony by acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, and liked what he saw.

The big picture: “He liked the combative approach,” said an outside West Wing adviser familiar with Trump’s thinking. “He thought the Democrats were grandstanding.” Inside the White House, according to the adviser, here were the lessons learned: Do not give an inch, push back, resist, delay, deflect.

The officials recognize a key flaw in this strategy: Some Trump Cabinet members, likely bound for the witness chair, don’t have the experience or agility to pull a Whitaker.

Longtime Hill watchers struggled to remember a time when an administration witness had treated a committee with such disdain: 

• In the most memorable moment, Whitaker sassed House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.): “Mr. Chairman, I see that your five minutes is up,” using the committee’s rules to bat away a question. 
• MSNBC host Ari Melber called Whitaker “remarkably rude … at times a jerk” to members who were asking straightforward questions. 
• Remember: The Senate is expected to confirm Bill Barr as attorney general as soon as next week. So Whitaker’s performance is mainly a window into Whitaker.

A House Democratic leadership aide familiar with the new majority’s investigation strategy told me after yesterday’s hearing: 

“We watched Dems, having been frustrated for two years with little to no oversight from the Republicans, demanding answers from a top administration official — the first under this new Congress — who came in belligerent and unwilling to cooperate is even the smallest ways.” 

“This is no means the end.”

The GOP’s gamble: The White House recognizes that it can do little to resist the House Dems’ demands for testimony. Republicans just hope that over time, they can argue to their base that Dems have been guilty of overreach and “show trials.” 

A Republican political operative and Capitol Hill veteran told me: “It doesn’t take long for ordinary voters — who are very different from people in Washington — to start seeing participating committee members as pompous, rude and belittling, and begin to side with whoever is sitting in the hot seat.”

If I had to guess,  the press will go along with the Republican plan. I’ve seen pearl-clutching today about Democratic rudeness in the hearing so I’m guessing that unless they lay down and let Trump’s cronies walk all over them, the media will end up siding with the Trumpies.

Remember folks, many members of the media are yearning to be able to blame both sides for the political mess we are in. It’s very uncomfortable for them to have to report that the Republicans are batshit crazy. (Keep an eye on the NY Times and CNN’s biggest stars…)  They know that half the country sees telling the truth as political bias so they reach for anything to prove they are “just as hard on Democrats.”

As the Dems exert their power to thwart the Republicans they will go above and beyond to portray that as the same as GOP lunacy.

Just be aware. It’s coming.

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What is this Magnitsky Act you speak of?

by digby

So, Trump is just openly defying the Magnitsky Act requirements. You know, the Act that Putin and all the global oligarchs want rescinded? The reason the Russians interfered on Trump’s behalf? Yeah, that one:

President Trump refused to provide Congress a report on Friday determining who killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, defying a demand by lawmakers intent on establishing whether the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was behind the grisly assassination.

Mr. Trump effectively bypassed a deadline set by law as his administration argued that Congress could not impose its will on the president. Critics charged that he was seeking to cover up Saudi complicity in the death of Mr. Khashoggi, an American resident and a columnist for The Washington Post.

“Consistent with the previous administration’s position and the constitutional separation of powers, the president maintains his discretion to decline to act on congressional committee requests when appropriate,” the Trump administration said in a statement. The statement said the administration had taken action against the killers and would consult with Congress.

But Democrats said Mr. Trump was violating a law known as the Magnitsky Act. It required him to respond 120 days after a request submitted in the fall by committee leaders — including Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — a period that expired Friday.

“The law is clear,” said Juan Pachón, a spokesman for Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “It requires a determination and report in response to the letter we sent with Corker. The president has no discretion here. He’s either complying with the law or breaking it.”

The Trump administration imposed sanctions in November against 17 Saudis accused of being involved in the killing, but has refused to blame Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a key ally and the country’s de facto ruler, despite a C.I.A. conclusion that the crown prince ordered it.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent letters to the committee leaders describing actions taken against individuals without offering the determination of who was responsible as demanded by the lawmakers.

“I anticipate a more detailed briefing from the administration on this issue and look forward to working with them and the members of my committee in our ongoing effort to address the killing of Jamal Khashoggi,” said Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, who succeeded Mr. Corker as chairman.

The Saudi government on Friday rebutted a report that Prince Mohammed told a top aide in 2017 that he would use “a bullet” on Mr. Khashoggi if he did not return to the kingdom and cease his criticism of the Saudi government.

They’re calling it a “rogue operation.”

It sounds as though the Trump administration is a rogue operation too.

The top Virginia GOPer is a racist? Say it ain’t so!


by digby

Good lord:

Last weekend, Virginia state Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment (R) joined other legislative leaders in calling on Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to resign over revelations that his medical school yearbook page featured a photo of two people — one in blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan uniform.

On Thursday, the Virginian Pilot revealed that Norment himself had been managing editor of a college yearbook of his own that featured racial slurs and images of people in blackface.

Now former students in a college course Norment taught at the William & Mary say that he routinely made racially insensitive and transphobic comments, forced students of color to defend Confederate iconography, and even defended the university’s defunct Brafferton Indian School that educated Native American kids — often without their family’s consent — in the 1700s.

Virginia has a part-time legislature. While Norment’s principal outside job is working “of counsel” for the law firm of Kaufman & Canoles. He also reportedly gets $60,000 a year to teach at William & Mary.

After the news broke on Thursday, one former student who took Norment’s class in the fall of 2016 tweeted that the state senator had “spent 20 minutes fondly remembering how a fraternity on campus dressed as confederates and chained a student in blackface to a tree for the Homecoming Parade.”

Sen. Norment taught a once-a-week Senimar at my college that I took my junior year.

One class, he spent 20 minutes fondly remembering how a fraternity on campus dressed as confederates and chained a student in blackface to a tree for the Homecoming Parade. https://t.co/6zLUFQwO7V

— Greg (@greg_akerman) February 7, 2019

ThinkProgress spoke with Akerman and various other William & Mary alums who said they took the course and were deeply offended by their former professor’s racist tone and the content of the course.

“I assumed it was kind of an open secret,” Akerman, who graduated in 2018, said of Norment’s racial insensitivity. “I got the sense that he wasn’t very in touch on race issues.”

The syllabus for the course — titled “You are now a legislator: Politics, Public Policy and Law” — is quite revealing.

A significant part of the course consisted of students being assigned into two teams: One side argued in favor of Confederate flag license plates, William & Mary’s traditional pro-Confederate campus imagery, and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Norment’s own Confederate-linked alma mater; the other side argued against. Students of color were often assigned to defend the Confederate side, which various students described as deeply uncomfortable.

Even the phrasing of the issues betrayed a clear bias toward Confederate images — a bias students say was evident from Norment’s lectures and his hostile treatment of students assigned to defend the opposite side during the in-class debate.

After William & Mary removed a plaque honoring students who left to fight for the Confederate Army and a ceremonial mace that featured Confederate images in 2015, one question listed for debate was: “Did the innocuous plaque and ring on the Mace really offend our community and make them feel unwelcome, or was it just a cause du jure?”

Another asked, “Is the removal of the plaque and ring on the Mace being deferential to a very small minority to the exclusion of the majority?” The phrases “innocuous” and “very small minority” conveyed a clear bias that students said arose repeatedly during the course.

Another student recalled that during the debate portion, “Sen. Norment held out his VMI ring which has an emblem of the Confederate flag on it and asked the [student] speaker, who was arguing for removal, ‘Are you offended?’ repeatedly.” 

A third student told ThinkProgress that in addition to pro-Confederate remarks, Norment demonstrated insensitivity to Native American and transgender people.

The student noted that Norment defended the Brafferton Indian School, where Native American kids were once taken from their parents to be re-educated. 

Norment praised the removals and claimed that today “there are no Native American students at William & Mary.” The president of the university’s American Indian Student Association was in the class and had to correct him.

In another incident, Norment denounced and deliberately misgendered Gavin Grimm, the transgender high school student who sued the Gloucester, Virginia school board for his right to use the boy’s restroom. “One class,” the student recalled, “he used the phrase ‘There is some girl who thinks she’s a boy in Gloucester County who’s mad she can’t use the boy’s restroom.’”

ThinkProgress reached out to Norment’s office for comment on Friday. Jeff Ryer, press secretary for the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus, responded with an email that read: “Thank you for your inquiry. The Virginia Senate Republican Caucus does not recognize ThinkProgress as a professional news organization.”

The Daily Press reported that in 2017, Norment was the “highest paid adjunct professor” at the university by a wide margin in a field that “typically pays less than $10,000.”

As co-chair of the Virginia Senate Finance Committee and majority leader, Norment has an outsize role in setting funding levels for state schools like William & Mary. In 2009, the Virginia Pilot reported that Norment was receiving $160,000 a year to teach two courses and do legal work for the school — a cozy arrangement that the paper noted would allow him to “qualify for a significantly bigger pension when he retires.”

One student recalled that the final assignment for Norment’s course was to write what they had learned. Their three-sentence answer included the phrase, “I learned you are a racist and you don’t care who knows it.”

Republicans have been sanctimoniously wringing their hands over the terrible racism of the Democratic party ever since this story broke. It is, of course, insane but they all have the temperaments of smirking adolescent bully boys and nasty mean girls so it’s to be expected.

This fellow is probably a standard representative of the GOP in Virginia. He’s not someone who was racist 35 years ago. He’s a stone cold racist today and doesn’t try to hide it. And he’s teaching a new generation to be as racist as he is.

It’ will be interesting to see what develops with this, what with all the GOP calls for Northam and Herring to resign. I’m not going to hold my breath. These people don’t feel the need to be consistent. Adolescent bully boys just do what they want in the given moment. Look at Trump.

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