Month: June 2019

An Obvious Answer to an Absurd Question  

by tristero

The New York Times published an op-ed by someone whose church traumatized her when she was a child. Her ministers were obsessed with a sexual fetish, their particular kink being a hyper-Puritanical “purity” obsession:

One piece of youth-group folklore was a “game” in which a cup would be passed around a circle. At each turn, someone would spit in the cup, until the last person had a cup full of spit. “Would you want to drink this?” the youth pastor intoned. “No. And that’s how others will see you if you sleep around.” 

And now, as an adult, she is plagued by doubts and worries about what she can and can’t do when it comes to sex. She can’t fully grasp what was done to her and how to let go/move on. The title of the op-ed succinctly summarizes her present confusion over physical intimacy:

How Should Christians Have Sex?

What an absurd question. How should Christians have sex? Any way Christians want to, as long as everyone’s comfortable doing whatever it is they want to do.

Y’know, it’s a free country, and people are entitled to worship (or not) however they see fit. But I’m finding it hard be tolerant of what was done to her and to so many other children. It’s the American  equivalent of female genital mutilation.

I hope she can continue to recover.

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”
by Tom Sullivan

Political satire sometimes leaves a mark that lingers. I would have sworn the old joke involved an eye-rolling Al Gore debating George W. Bush in 2000. In fact, it was “Saturday Night Live” in 1988. Jon Lovitz played Gov. Michael Dukakis to Dana Carvey’s platitude-spouting George H.W. Bush (“Stay the course, a thousand points of light … stay the course”). Future former Sen. Al Franken wrote the Dukakis line, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

Democrats Dukakis and Gore both lost to a George Bush.

NBC News just announced the lineups for the two-nights of debate among Democratic candidates for president. Ten each night, beginning Wednesday, June 26. Barring any unforeseen accidents, resignations or removals from office, one of those Democrats will face off against Donald J. Trump. Unless Trump decides he doesn’t want to, like he decides which laws he’ll obey.

Democrats might remember that old joke when taking on Trump. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s got an animal cunning that his whole life has helped him evade accountability before the law. It may yet serve to prevent accountability before voters in 2020.

The New York Times revealed on Saturday that U.S. cyber warriors have pre-positioned “potentially crippling malware” inside Russia’s electrical grid “and other targets.” Unnamed officials in three months of interviews told the Times the code is there “partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.” The commander of United States Cyber Command, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, describes such efforts as meeting the need to “defend forward.”

A 2018 military authorization bill and a classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 signed by Trump last summer provide authorization for such actions without presidential approval.

Now, back to Trump not being too sharp:

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Good call. The Times report Saturday night set him off:

So to recap: it’s treasonous that the New York Times reported on U.S. cyberstrategies that according to you are… not true? pic.twitter.com/0YfRCt7lUu— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) June 16, 2019

The Times responded it had described the article to “the government” prior to publication and “President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns.”

Trump has told so many lies, he can’t tell what the truth is when he hears it from someone else about an operation he himself authorized. Or Donald simply considers it treason to report information that might upset Vladimir and that Trump Tower Moscow deal he still dreams of. While his thumbs yammer about “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”, Trump’s own people worry he’ll give away secrets to America’s enemies.

And still, he could win reelection in 2020.

For his part, Dubya had trouble putting together a coherent sentence without turning it into a Bushism. Yet he managed to launch the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam after relentlessly selling it to America with lies. For all its undermanned incompetence, a Trump White House staffed by family members may do it again.

The 2020 Democratic candidate for president (and there are some very, very smart ones) cannot afford to find themselves in a position of saying, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” Already, they are planning to make foreign policy and issue. But it is not attention to issues that made Trump a survivor, and certainly not intelligence. Beating him will take more than smarts. It will take political savvy and an ability to connect with voters on a personal level that, for all their intelligence, Dukakis and Gore could not.

Oh, Jared

by digby

This piece by Anne Applebaum in the WaPo says it all:

Imagine there was a completely secret, perfectly legal way to bribe a government official. Well, let’s not say “bribe”: Let’s imagine that you could channel money to this official — large amounts of money — and never have to reveal your name. Imagine that this official could accept this money, and then use it to make more money, without ever revealing that fact to the public.

Actually, there is no need to imagine such a thing, because it already exists. The thing is called an “opaque offshore vehicle.” Although that sounds like a motorboat with blackout curtains, this one is in fact a kind of bank account, based in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven where business deals are legally shrouded in secrecy. According to a report this week in the British newspaper the Guardian, the investment bank Goldman Sachs uses an account like this to funnel money from unnamed investors to a company called Cadre. Cadre, to oversimplify slightly, pools investments in real estate. One of Cadre’s co-founders is Jared Kushner; another co-founder is Kushner’s brother. Cadre’s headquarters are in a building in Manhattan owned by Kushner’s family real estate company.

Kushner — the United States’ prime envoy to the Middle East, to Mexico and to much else — seems to be nervous about Cadre. When he joined the White House, he resigned from the board and reduced his stake to less than 25 percent, though his holding is, according to the Guardian, now worth between $25 million and $50 million. When he filled out his first disclosure form, he somehow forgot to list Cadre, though later, under pressure, he added the company’s name. His forgetfulness is unsurprising: Other investors in the company include George Soros, a hate figure of the right. The company is already the subject of a conflict-of-interest complaint because it benefits from “Opportunity Zones,” part of a new tax law — a program that was specifically advocated by Ivanka Trump.

Now the Guardian reports that $90 million has come into Cadre via the opaque offshore vehicle. But from where? According to the report, which has not had much of an echo in the United States, at least $1 million has come from an unnamed Saudi investor. Other investments have arrived from an anonymous fund based in the Virgin Islands, another tax haven where business deals are shrouded in secrecy. Who is the real owner of this fund? We don’t know.

We don’t know and, thanks to the extraordinary system of tax havens and shell companies that we have allowed to flourish all around the world, we may never know. Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can’t identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily. As Oliver Bullough puts it in his book, “Moneyland,” “You can wrap a paper chain of paper people around the world in an afternoon, but it will take investigators years of patient detective work to unpick it, and years more to prosecute.”

It’s perfectly possible that Kushner, who has not commented on the Guardian report, himself has no idea who put this large sum of money in his company’s opaque offshore vehicle, which is what Goldman Sachs is claiming. But it’s also possible that, privately, he has a pretty good idea. [Of course he does — d] 

The fact that we don’t know, and may never know, points to yet another deep conflict of interest inside the Trump administration. More important, it points to a major flaw in Western capitalism.

By some calculations, more than 10 percent of the world’s wealth is held offshore, in places such as the Cayman Islands. Some of this money is obtained illegally, which is why it is hidden; some of it is just money that is not taxed to pay for the schools that educated its owners or the infrastructure that was used to build their companies. This is money that can be used for political purposes or simply for the excessive spending — on yachts, mansions, jewelry — that has contributed to so much anger and ill will around the world.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments. Not only that, my guess is that the politician who decides to do so will discover that this is a popular cause, among not only those fighting inequality on the center-left but also those promoting entrepreneurship on the center-right. There is no reason a completely secret, perfectly legal way to channel money to a government official, or anybody else, needs to exist at all. The fact that we have come to accept this as “normal” is one of the symptoms of a deeper democratic diseas

Apropos of nothing, it is widely rumored that Vladimir Putin is the richest man on earth.

This is the era of the oligarch. Ending it must be a top priority but it encompasses not only domestic legal policies, but foreign policy and international banking. It’s a big topic that the next Democratic president is going to have to be committed to dealing with.

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The global order has shifted and we don’t know yet what will replace it

by digby

Brett McGurk, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford, Foreign Affairs Analyst, Former Presidential Envoy who served under Bush, Obama, Trump posted this series of tweets about the Iran situation:

The US seems to have embarked on its “maximum pressure” campaign with few allies and little forethought as to unintended consequences or how to respond if key assumptions — e.g., that Iran will implode or succumb and enter talks on US terms — prove false.

Those assumptions are now highly questionable at best, which means the entire policy foundation as articulated by Trump has eroded. Iran appears to have made the strategic decision (not surprising) to resist economic pressure and respond asymmetrically, not directly against us.

I suspect Iran’s aim is to draw the US in deeper to the Middle East and heighten US rifts with allies or force removal of new sanctions as a pre-condition to talks. Those are likely goals behind reckless acts. They have also likely prepared responses should we respond militarily.

Thus, any US military response would need to be decisive and sustained over a period of months. That is not where a maximum pressure policy was supposed to lead. It was supposed to set the table for a “new and more comprehensive” deal. That’s now highly unlikely. So what now?

Strategy 101: when assumptions underlying a policy prove false, it’s critical to immediately review the policy and adjust course. Failure to do so doubles down on risk. Here, Trump may soon be boxed in: either back down or resort to military tools (as economic tools have failed).

In my view, targeting tankers in int’l waterways warrants a rallied international response with military measures to deter future incidents. If Washington had developed a policy with allies, it could rally the world to isolate Iran and reinforce economic with diplomatic pressure.

Unfortunately, our great comparative advantage as a nation — building and working with alliances — has eroded, particularly with respect to Iran. Key western allies warned of this very circumstance and sequence of events when the US began its maximum pressure campaign a year ago.

Our regional partners are now divided amongst themselves, lack confidence in the White House, and do not want an escalation given risks of an uncontrollable spiral. This is not 1988 where the “tanker war” was limited in time, scope, and geography. More risk and uncertainty today.

Moreover, Trump has made clear he does not want a military confrontation and hopes to drawdown from the Middle East. On Iran, this means a policy that appears to be executed without the full buy-in from the president or at least his personal consideration of downside risks.

On multiple fronts now, the national security team is pursuing maximalist policy aims backed by a minimalist president. Iran is just the latest example of this problem. Consider the last two weeks alone on Iran policy:

In Japan, Trump said he opposes regime change & only wants to talk about the nuclear file (albeit after leaving the table where that file is discussed). Pompeo in Switzerland floats talks without preconditions. Bolton then tweets Iran must “first end its 40-year reign of terror.”

Worse, Trump asked a key ally @AbeShinzo to carry a message to Tehran and float dialogue but less than one week before Abe visits, Trump’s national security team announces significant new sanctions against Iran. This is how Bolton set up the Abe trip:

Iran is spending its money to fund & conduct terrorism, resulting in serious economic problems that will only get worse. The President has given Iran the opportunity to pursue a better future, but first the regime must end its 40-year reign of terror.

Was that a coherent sequence and plan? Did Trump know about it? Did Abe? Did anyone think such an announcement would help the visit of our key ally, made at the behest of Trump himself? Was it intended to sabotage the visit? In any event, it’s peculiar diplomacy/sequencing.

This incoherence has ramifications beyond Iran; it’s weakening our position globally. Iran is a 5th-rate power. Its economy is smaller than our poorest state. Its defense budget a fraction of our regional allies. China & Russia are our near-peer rivals — and now sense advantage.

If you focus on the signal and not the noise as @JoeNBC has been saying, here’s what happened last week alone (some broader strategic trend-lines worth noting when considering the issue of Iran and US strategy)

1) China’s President Xi completes a historic three-day visit to Moscow and hails strategic ties with Putin.

2) Chinese and Russian military commands meet to discuss deepening strategic partnerships.

Today, both Putin and Xi met with Iranian President Rouhani and expressed their full support for Iran even in the wake of smoking tankers and US evidence that Iran was unquestionably behind the attack.

This trend threatens to reverse a signal achievement of the Cold War and runs totally contrary to Trump’s own national security strategy with emphasis on great power competition, and needlessly avoiding Chinese-Russian convergence.

Our intelligence community similarly warned earlier this year that “China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the 1950s” and the tend is likely to grow due to “perceived US unilateralism and interventionism.”

China and Russia have also made a decision with respect to US policies in the Middle East. They believe our zero-sum objectives on Iran as well as Syria cannot be achieved (given incoherence in resourcing, Trump’s aversion to more investment, mixed messages, and basic reality).

China has now afforded highest diplomatic status to Iran — and also Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt — positioning itself for the next 50 years on four pillars. I wroteabout this trend-line in @TheAtlantic after a @CarnegieBeijing seminar theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

With smoking tankers attributable to Iran, this would be an opportune time to bring China and even Russia into a diplomatic coalition given that threats in the Gulf impact their own economies. Not unthinkable before. Now impossible: thus advantaging Iran, and limiting US options.

Bottom line: Iran is a real problem. But this policy is piling on strategic risk with little reward. It’s driving allies away & peer-competitors together. It’s not leading to talks but increasing risk of conflict. It’s ramifications go beyond the Middle East. Worth reassessing.

Yeah, it’s worth reassessing.

There is no strategy. There is only impulse and infighting leading to chaos and incoherence.

Our best hope is that Trump’s luck holds up.

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Marsha Blackburn, a very, very good little soldier

by digby

It looks like Mitch has found a new henchman more than willing to do the dirty work.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) blocked an effort by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to pass a bill via unanimous consent requiring campaigns to report any offers of foreign assistance to the FBI.
“We are all for free and fair and honest elections. … These reporting requirements are overbroad. Presidential campaigns would have to worry about disclosure at a variety of levels. So many different levels. Consider this: vendors that work for a campaign, people that are supplying some kind of voter service to a campaign. … It would apply to door knockers, it would apply to phone bankers, down to any person who shares their views with a candidate.”

Warner then countered that Blackburn’s reading of the legislation is “not accurate .., The only thing that would have to be reported is if the agent of a foreign government or national offered that something that was already prohibited.”

The big picture: President Trump’s comments on Wednesday that he would consider accepting intelligence on a political opponent from a foreign entity set off immediate outrage from Democrats, who see it as an invitation for foreign adversaries to interfere in future U.S. elections. Lawmakers in both the Senate and the House have renewed calls to pass election security measures, with some going as far as to call Trump’s comments “anti-American” and grounds for impeachment.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, responding to Blackburn’s objection, said on the Senate floor: “How disgraceful it is that our Republican friends cower before this president when they know that the things he does severely damage democracy.”

I knew she was going to be bad in the Senate. And she is already fulfilling every expectation.

They are accomplices, every single one of them. This must never be forgotten. Ever.

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I Don’t Believe a Thing the Trump Administration Says About the Oil Tanker Attack 

by tristero

And no one else should, either. These guys have less credibility than an 80’s infomercial hawking baldness cures.

An independent international commission is needed.

Tips for Dems when they roll out Trump’s Impeachment

by Spocko

I believe there is already a group planning the impeachment roll out. I’ll call them the Impeach The MFer Already (ITMFA) group.  I’ll call the woman in charge of the media strategy the Media Strategist for Impeach the MFer Already or (MS for ITMFA). She probably already has her staff lining up the experts on emoluments, obstruction of justice, money laundering and other crimes from the Mueller Report.

Her goal is to show the crimes and/or treasonous activity of Trump AND HIS INNER CIRCLE and push new parts of it out to the public every single day, using multiple methods on multiple platforms to multiple audiences.

The Democrats need to tell a story to the American people that will convince them to act in a certain way.  Impeachment will require figuring out the best ways to deliver the news, images and video from the hearings to the multiple audiences that have to be reached.  How? My first tip:

1) Recreate conclusions from the Mueller Report in a way the American people can absorb.

That involves first getting experts to explain the crimes, second providing video of the criminals talking about doing those crimes and third, getting more experts to refute the excuses from Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney or Donald Trump that the crimes aren’t really crimes. They need to be shown they are are wrong, wrong, wrong. 10,000 times wrong.

The Captain, Spocko and the late great Joel Silberman discussing ways to show the American people how to take down a penny-ante operator like Trump

[If my friend, the late great Joel Silberman, were alive I’m sure he would be an adviser to this group.  He would explain to them the importance of telling a story with emotional beats, backed up by hard facts, political and legal analysis all topped off with damning video clips. ]

The Trump White House is fighting hard to keep any Mueller witnesses off camera.  If I wasn’t a polite Vulcan I would scream, “STOP LETTING THEM WIN BY GIVING DON JR. A CLOSED HEARING!”

But a modern media strategist doesn’t have to only use hearings and they don’t have to just work with what the MSM clips at hearings and uses. Rachel Maddow can bring on all the experts, but not everyone sees them. My next tip.

2) Create your own clips and get the story out directly to the world via Social Media.

I’m sure the MS of ITMFA already knows this, but I want to remind Democratic activists to not count on the MSM to show why Trump is a criminal and should be removed from office.  We need to use our own platforms, social media and connections to help the process.

I’ll admit I’m no expert on Social Media but I know a lot about how it has been used and how it can be manipulated by bots to amplify messages. If you read the Mueller report, you would know who the the Russian government controlled Internet Research Agency was and what they did to influence people’s opinions. Here’s a clip on them from the report.

The ITMFA should hire the American equivalent of the Internet Research Agency to get the impeachment story out. The IRA used actual people pushing a specific message and used bots to amplify them. ITMFA shouldn’t hide the use of bots either. Just explain the new battleground, “We are using the same methods and bots as the IRA. It worked for Putin and got us Trump, so we are learning from our enemies.” That story alone will educate people on bots and social media manipulation.

Other social media ideas for ITMFA:

• Hire YouTube stars to create explainer videos on obstruction of justice, money laundering or the history of foreign influence on politics
• Hire comedians & smart writers to help politicians with clever, retweet-able tweets and vicious sub-tweets. (Hire my friends Jeff Tiedrich
  @itsJeffTiedrich and Frank Conniff @FrankConniff.)
• Bring Instagram Influencers to the hearings and pair them with someone who can explain the impeachment story to their audience
• Bumperstickers!

The MS of ITMFA can suggest that committee members at hearings ask the kind of questions that will create video clips of the people talking about what they heard, what crimes they committed, or the obstruction orders they got from the President but didn’t carry out. The media will use them but that leads me to my third tip.

3) DON’T TRUST THE MEDIA!


The Media will water down the story that Trump is a criminal and should be removed from office.

It appears to me that certain news producers, journalists and hosts want to believe rational Republicans exist. They keep providing Trump with “to be fair” comments about his lawlessness and keep bringing on Giuliani types to explain away crimes and treasonous activities.  The GOP today are extremists. But some mainstream media and Democrats STILL think the Republicans will reach a point where “The Fever Will Break.” once Trump is out of office, and things will go back to normal.

NEWSFLASH for Joe BIDEN: Today’s GOP IS the fever, and it’s coursing through Trump’s plaque-clogged veins.

I understand people who don’t follow politics want the Republican party to stop being insane. But the insanity has worked for the GOP extremists. They have gotten what they wanted, conservative supreme court judges, multiple federal judges, huge tax cuts, cut backs on regulations, no action on the climate emergency and nativist attacks on immigrants. Why would they change? What’s in it for them? Respect from people on the left? HA!

The ITMFA group can arrange the right video clips for the MSM, but they can’t fix the media’s attitude of giving the benefit of the doubt to the GOP’s bad faith actions in support of Trumps’s lies and criminality. Many are still stuck playing along believing a President wouldn’t be a traitor to his country and Republicans wouldn’t support him if only they knew the truth.

We need to help Democrats successfully Impeach Trump for his crimes and treasonous activity.  Pick an area you are interested in, learn the story, then learn how the Trump people are trying to quash that story. Then explain to the people who mostly listen to NPR, watch the NewsHour or see a few headlines, what is happening, why Trump’s excuses are invalid and why it matters. Even if they think they can predict the future and say, “But the current GOP senate won’t act!” They don’t know the future. Only time travelers like me do, and even then things can change.

I’m just a brain in a box and not even from this planet, but I’m half-human and I want a better future for my friends in this time in this timeline.  I’ve learned that we are not alone in this fight. There are people who ARE working to ensure impeachment and the removal of Trump. Give them a signal boost when you can. Your nudge might be the one to move us out of the darkest timeline.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain 

Giving democracy the finger
by Tom Sullivan

Trump administration salutes the separation of powers.

If Donald Trump were from America’s other major political party, the host of offenses both criminal and ethical he has committed would have launched a fusillade of congressional investigations, Fox News special reports with screaming chyrons on criminality in the White House, and at the very least, an impeachment inquiry. But IOKIYAR, right?

This week, President “NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION – NO OBSTRUCTION!” drew a public rebuke from the chair of the Federal Elections Commission for declaring to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he would accept “dirt” on his political opponents offered by foreign agents. Donald Trump shrugged off the idea there was anything wrong in a little collusion between him and geopolitical adversaries.

Donny, how many times have we told you not to accept candy from strangers?

I would not have thought that I needed to say this. pic.twitter.com/T743CsXq79— Ellen L Weintraub (@EllenLWeintraub) June 13, 2019

The Office of Special Counsel’s Henry Kerner in another rare public rebuke recommewnded White House counselor Kellyanne Conway be removed for multiple violations of the Hatch Act. This, after Conway responded snidely two weeks ago to challenges from reporters about those violations, saying, “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

Trump refused to remove her.

Trump now has the U.S. attorney general and the Department of Justice running interference for him. The department on Friday issued a 33-page opinion supporting Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s refusal to comply with a House subpoena for six years of Trump’s taxes. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) invoked “a little-known provision of the tax code” that requires the IRS to furnish tax returns of any individual upon request. Mnuchin refused to comply with “black-letter law” on the matter. Thus, Mnuchin is defying the law with the backing of the Justice Department and the Trump White House.

All the president’s men give the rule of law the middle finger.

Who could have foreseen this turn of events? For one, Dave Neiwert, author of “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” (2017). In November 2015, the veteran observer of the violent far-right wrote at Orcinus:

Trump is the logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come home to roost.

The fascist fringe has been with us for decades, Neiwert wrote, but it has existed for the most part on the fringes, subsumed by the larger culture save for areas where the Ku Klux Klan exercised power in the shadows. What’s been missing to galvanize an open fascist movement in America has been a charismatic leader to front it. Enter Donald Trump, “merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even without being himself an overt fascist.”

Neiwert wrote:

The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so, because it disguises the swastika looming in the shadow of the flamboyant orange hair. It camouflages the throng of ravening wolves he’s riding in upon.

Speaking this week with Brad Friedman, Neiwert explained one of the key fascist traits of Trump’s movement (from his 2015 post):

The palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”

That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis – that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.

That he lacks the paramilitary is our luck. His only real ideology is “the Worship of the Donald.” What he attracts instead of militant thugs are lots of Florida retirees flying Trump flags from their scooters and patio homes.

Neiwert concluded:

America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies – with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter – that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.

Right-wing populism may yet reach its high-water mark with Trump, and recede after him. Only, it has risen higher than Neiwert expected in November 2015, and at risk of breaching the dikes holding back plutocratic authoritarianism. If those fail-safes have not already failed.

As for Neiwert, he’s been “temporarily suspended” from Twitter for violating its “sensitive media policy” with the illustration from his 2017 book cover. Neiwert writes at Daily Kos that he refuses to remove it:

And I’m fighting it because the reductio ad absurdum of Twitter’s reasoning for the suspension would leave not just me, but any reporter who works to monitor and expose the activities of far-right extremists, exposed to the constant threat of being banned simply for doing our mainstream jobs as journalists.

“Maybe all this misery is resolved by way of free and fair elections in 2020,” writes Dahlia Lithwick. “The problem is that maybe there won’t be free and fair elections in 2020 … A year and a half is a long time.”

Friday Night Soother

by digby

A Bengal tiger gave birth to four adorable cubs, including a rare mutant white tiger, in a wildlife park in China. Staff ensured the cubs were in good health, caring for and feeding them, as their mother left them almost immediately after they were born. https://t.co/44CKnWUsBH pic.twitter.com/tfliFUo7gb

— ABC News (@ABC) June 11, 2019

Inside Edition:

Four brand-new little Bengal tiger cubs, including a rare white tiger, were abandoned by their mother after she gave birth to them at China’s Rongcheng Shendiaoshan Wildlife Park.

Meng Qingjia, a veterinarian at the park, noticed the mother tiger just leave the babies. So Meng decided to step in and become their caregiver.

“After the four cubs were born, the mother tiger went away without caring at all. The baby tigers were just shaking, with their cries getting weaker and weaker. We saw it and therefore decided to bring them out for artificial feeding,” Meng told Reuters.

Park staffers also brought in a breeder specifically to help care for the cubs.

“We feed them goat milk once every four hours on a daily basis. When they were first born, they would only need a little bit of milk each time, like 10 to 20 milliliters. We kept adjusting the amount and added more little by little. Now, it’s 60 milliliters for each of them at a time,” said Meng.

Staffers have been adding nutrients to the milk, watching the little tigers get stronger and stronger.

“We mix some vitamins and electrolytes with the milk powder. We also used to add substances such as digestive enzymes and probiotics when they were younger and tended to get diarrhea,” Meng added.

The sole white tiger in the bunch is also making great strides. Meng said that cub’s color is due to a genetic mutation.

“White tigers are quite rare in the Bengal tiger population. It’s not albinism but a result of genetic mutation. Around one in 10,000 Bengal tigers would turn out to be white,” he said.

Here are some rare, endangered snow tiger cubs.

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Oh Ivanka

by digby

Sure, this is fine:

Ivanka Trump made $4 million from her investment in her father’s Washington hotel last year, according to a disclosure released by the White House on Friday.

She also made at least $1 million from her line of branded apparel, jewelry and other merchandise, down from at least $5 million in the previous year. Trump, 37, announced in July that she was closing her fashion businesses amid controversies over her role in the White House and after some big-name department stores dropped the brand.

Together, Trump and husband Jared Kushner earned between $28.8 million and $135.1 million in outside income while working as unpaid senior advisers to her father, President Donald Trump, their disclosures, which covers 2018, show.

The reports, which list the assets and sources of income for Ivanka Trump, her husband and dependent children, have yet to be approved by the White House counsel’s office. They will also be reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics.

Administration officials have to file financial disclosure forms annually with their agencies by May 15. They report their incomes and the value of their assets in broad ranges.

Kushner, 38, disclosed at least $27 million and as much as $135 million in debt, the same amount he disclosed last year. The form shows his purchase of PV Bungalow LLC, a boutique hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, for between $1 million and $5 million, plus the purchase of the liquor license for the property, which cost at least $15,000 more.

Kushner also spent between $1.5 million and $3 million on residential real estate in Brooklyn. The form lists 132 transactions made in 2018, though the actual total is higher because some entries lumped together multiple sales of condo units made in a single property.

His wife lists assets and income worth between $187.6 million and $786.3 million, the document shows. She provided no value for her shuttered fashion brands, compared with $50 million the year before. The company still holds trademarks in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the European Union and 23 other countries.

Like her father, Ivanka Trump and her husband retained their ownership in their private businesses when they became White House advisers, a decision that critics say has left them open to conflicts of interest and influence by foreign countries.

I think it’s pretty clear that the Trump clan is unconcerned about conflicts of interest and corruption. Well, “unconcerned is probably not right. They are very concerned — with making the most out of all of it.

I can already see that I’m going to spend the rest of my life screaming “but look what Trump got away with and everybody just let it happen !!!! Arghhhghhhgh!!!!”

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