Month: November 2019

Romania on the grifter radar

by digby

Trump’s EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland is quite a guy.  He has been credibly accused of some disgusting sexual harassment (which doesn’t surprise me at all) and it appears that his dirty work for Trump in Ukraine wasn’t his only messy involvement in things he didn’t understand:

Even before Gordon Sondland’s work in Ukraine set off alarm bells, senior U.S. officials were raising concerns about his communications with officials from Romania—including his efforts to get White House access for a politician with a history of pushing back against anti-corruption reforms.

That’s according to two individuals with knowledge of the situation who say that Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union who is now a major figure in the House impeachment inquiry, often hosted meetings with Romanian officials without consulting the National Security Council (NSC). His increasingly close relationship with one of those officials, former deputy prime minister Ana Birchall, generated significant concerns within the NSC, according to those same sources.

Birchall graduated from Yale Law School and has long had ties to the U.S.. Her husband, Martyn Birchall, is an investment banker who has held positions at international financial firms in New York, London and Hong Kong. In Romania, Ana Birchall has a history of opposing anti-corruption measures in her country and for years supported Liviu Dragnea, a Romanian politician who was recently convicted of corruption, according to two senior U.S. officials. Dragnea served as the head of Romania’s Social Democratic Party (PSD)—a party known to publicly fight back against western pressure for corruption crackdowns—before being indicted for procuring fake jobs at a child protection agency for two members of his party. He was also barred from becoming prime minister because of a 2016 conviction for vote-rigging.

Rudy GIuliani to Sean Hannity: “I want you to keep your eye on Romania. Just watch Romania.” pic.twitter.com/DtcOsdQrjg

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 10, 2019

TPM:

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani just added another country — and possibly two! — to the list of places where he’s possibly drumming up bogus allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. 

During a segment on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show Thursday night, Giuliani sounded off on the Ukraine scandal spurred by Trump’s now-infamous July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump pressured Ukraine into manufacturing dirt against the Bidens. 

Then Giuliani pivoted to an entirely new country. The former New York mayor urged Hannity to keep an eye out on Romania.

“Sean, I want to keep your eye not just on China,” Giuliani said. “I want you to keep your eye on Romania. Just watch Romania.” 

Last week, Trump called on China to investigate Biden, in addition to his Ukraine pressure campaign.

Giuliani’s latest Fox News appearance comes a day after the White House issued a letter to House Democratic leaders rejecting Congress’ impeachment inquiry.

On Thursday, TPM reported that two Giuliani associates who were tied to the Ukraine pressure campaign were arrested Wednesday on campaign finance charges. 

At the end of his appearance Wednesday, Giuliani teased that he’s “got another country” on “the list” to keep an eye on.

“We go to China, told you about Romania, I got another country that we have on the list and then we go back to all the stealing [Biden] did when he went back to the Senate,” Giuliani said.

By the way, Rudy has his own Romanian scandal. And yes, it has to do with the same corrupt Romanians that Sondland is mixed up with:

President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is pushing a debunked conspiracy theory about former Vice President Joe Biden. But he himself appears to have intervened in a foreign anti-corruption effort while being paid by Trump… 

The Washington Post reported last August that Giuliani intervened in an anti-corruption push in Romania, possibly on behalf of a party whose leader is now in prison for corruption.

Giuliani sent a letter to the country’s leaders criticizing their anti-corruption efforts, accusing them of “excesses” under the “pretext of law enforcement.”

Giuliani’s letter came in direct opposition to the State Department, which joined with 11 other countries just months earlier to warn Romania not to take any measures that would hurt its “ability to fight crime or corruption.” 

The letter “surprised” the White House, the Post reported. After Giuliani’s letter, the State Department quickly issued a statement praising Romania for “considerable progress in combating corruption and building the effective rule of law” and urged leaders to “continue on this path.” 

“Rudy Giuliani does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy,” a State Department official told the Post.

I am sure that nobody overseas believes that. He has been Trump’s closest confidante. Here’s that same crook Sondland’s pal is accused of backing, extolling Giuliani:

Liviu Dragnea, chief of Romania’s ruling Social Democratic Party, fought hard to have anti-corruption chief Kövesi fired. The party leader has been barred from serving as prime minister due to a suspended jail sentence for an attempt to rig a referendum in 2012. 

Dragnea publicly welcomed the letter, portraying Giuliani as a representative of the U.S. “The bitter conclusion of this letter is that trust in the Romanian justice system is seriously shaken when it comes to foreign partners and foreign investors,” he wrote in a statement. But the letter has drawn sharp pushback from officials in both Romania and the U.S.

I know it’s hard to keep all this straight. But really the only thing you have to keep in mind is the fact that this greedy lunatic was going around the world meddling in both foreign and domestic politics selling access to the highest reaches of the American government while working on behalf of his “client” Donald Trump.

And apparently he’s not the only one. The corruption in this administration is overwhelming. They’ve turned the worlds only superpower into a full fledged, third-world, banana republic-style low-rent kleptocracy. The leaders of the rest of the world have got to be meeting privately to work up some contingency plans to contain this rogue military behemoth.

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Trump is a skilled cheater

by digby

And not just at golf.

 LOLGOP at Electablog has an interesting piece about Trump’s motives on the Ukraine scandal:

Donald Trump’s central insight is that almost no one follows American politics closely, not even the press.

Look at this chart from Dr. Rachel Bitecofer:

If you are reading this now, on a Thanksgiving weekend especially, you are highly engaged with politics. You probably know that Trump went to Afghanistan because he’s suddenly trying to follow the Bill Clinton model for avoiding removal after impeachment. You probably know that Trump has insisted more than once that Stealth fighters are literally invisible. And you probably know that several Republican groups, including the RNC, bought thousands of books by Donald Trump Jr. to game the bestseller list, because that’s how much Republicans care about a son profiting off his dad’s name.

Most people don’t know any of this and they probably don’t care. They’re too busy with their lives or sports or what Fox News tells them is news to confront these or any telling facts.

The media understands that their audience mostly has no idea what happened yesterday and is constantly in search of stories that bring the context with them or make their own context. Things like hurricanes, arrests, or wars. There are exceptions, but mostly on public TV or cable news programs that cater to the highly engaged.

Fore the rest of America, politics is akin to pro wrestling or a soap opera. They get the broad strokes and are comforted when they tune in and generally understand what’s going on.

This is how Trump can lie thousands of times in one term or try to make an election about email security or corruption, when he is one the most irresponsible, corrupt people on earth. This is how your party can pretend to be enraged about the debt when unemployment is near 10% and then add trillions more to the debt when unemployment is around 4%. This is why Trump repeats himself hundreds of times and trains his audience to do the same.

But it’s the events and narratives that break through and inform the 95% of barely-to-somewhat engaged that generally decide elections, which leads us to this chart:

This is the “But her emails” chart by Jonathan Ladd from data included in the new book Words That Matter.

It tracks what people remembered about Hillary Clinton as the election unfolded. You’ll see that Republicans and the press successfully kept the “email” story — which a Trump State Department review recently noted was effectively a non-story — in about 10% of people’s minds following the debates.

The Wikileaks releases awakened it again, generally by conflating two stories that involved emails. But it was the James Comey memo at the end of October that spiked the story to its highest level of the election and the second highest spike came days later as the former FBI Director “cleared” Clinton and effectively tore open the wound hours before voting.

The Comey memo decimated Clinton because it offered the closest thing to unbiased proof for a narrative Trump had been selling all campaign. And like the Ukraine story, it has strange ties to Rudy Giuliani.

As a marketer, Trump gets the power of “social proof” and Comey’s memo was essentially an endorsement of his ridiculous claims. As a con man, he also recognizes the appeal to authority as the sleight of hand that helped make him president.

We know this for sure by looking at what may be the closest thing to a smoking gun that has come out of the impeachment hearings. (If you know the smoking gun I’m referring to, you are definitely in the top 1% of most politically engaged Americans.)

From the Just Security blog:

Multiple witnesses also testified that EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland had told them that, in his conversations with the president, Trump had described his requirement for Zelenskyy to publicly announce the investigations into Biden and 2016. 

An announcement by the Prosecutor General was not good enough for Trump. 

Sondland has been evasive about whether he was directly told this by the president — probably because he’s still lying. But it was clear “President Zelenskyy had to make the statement,” as Tim Morrison, former Trump national security official, said. And the statement had to be public because this was about projecting the appearance of corruption on Joe Biden not any actual investigation, though further statements would likely had been demanded later to reignite the narrative.

There’s more at the link.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? He wanted a Comey emails moment. Trump understands the power of a “but-her-emails” scandal and was trying to bump Biden off in the primaries. (That also, by the way, tracks with Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters bumping off Edmund Muskie in 1972 with the phony “Canuck Letter.” Those two are real book-ends.)

Anyway, as LOLGOP points out, this shows that Trump should not be underestimated. He and his team of ratfuckers have a unique instinct for this stuff. They understand how the media falls for this crap and how it filters into the greater culture. And they have no scruples.

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Why Can’t Progressives Be More Like Conservatives? Chapter 1,245


by tristero

Wow, don’t they ever get tired of writing this article?

An influential analysis of national polling data by Professors Ellis and Stimson suggests that the most effective candidate in a national election would combine the most popular feature of the Democratic Party, progressive economic policies, with the most popular feature of the Republican Party: the invocation of conservative ideology and values like patriotism, family and the “American dream…”

To investigate these questions we conducted two experiments, one using a nationally representative sample of Americans, in which we looked at Americans’ support for “Scott Miller,” a hypothetical 2020 Democratic nominee. The participants in our studies were presented with excerpts from Scott Miller’s speeches — but we systematically varied the content of the speeches to analyze the effects of policy platform and symbolic politics. 

We found that the most effective Democratic candidate would speak in terms of conservative values while proposing progressive economic policies — with some of our evidence suggesting that endorsing highly progressive policies would be best. 

This is so misbegotten that it doesn’t even rise to the level of being wrong. For starters, there’s a whopping false dichotomy on display.

“Patriotism, family and the ‘American dream’ are not conservative ideology or values. I’ve not met a single American liberal who wasn’t proud that s/he was a citizen of a country that produced or welcomed geniuses Coltrane, Toni Morrison, Einstein, Feynman, Robert Johnson, Lincoln, Dickinson, Glass, and (make up your own list). I have yet to meet any liberal who didn’t, in some way, both adore his/her family and express it. As for the American Dream… to progress in your life… that is an explicitly liberal dream (although tragically, honored more in the breach). As Trump and every other conservative alive makes clear every day, they value inherited wealth and believe that the wealthy deserve to be treated with kid gloves.

But they make a worse mistake: A canned rhetorical strategy is as appetizing as canned green beans.

What a liberal or progressive has to do is simple: Speak directly, clearly, intelligently, passionately, and authentically about the carefully thought-through programs that are important to her. What she also has to do is to ground her programs in a well-articulated expression of liberal (i.e., American) values.

I wish I knew why this was so hard for nearly every Democratic politician out there. Maybe it’s because they really think that listening to simplistic ideas like blending conservative and progressive messages is a good strategy.

Moscow Mitch sacrifices Kentucky coal-miners to help out Oleg Deripaska

by digby

In the recent Kentucky Governor’s election, the Democrat did surprisingly well in coal country. Mitch McConnell may have some problems there as well:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a measure that would have funded pensions and health care for coal miners in his home state of Kentucky, not long after steering almost the same Treasury Department funds to an aluminum plant linked to a Russian oligarch.

The Kentucky Republican doesn’t like the “Moscow Mitch” nickname that’s been stuck to him, but these latest revelations might make it difficult to shed, reported The Daily Beast.

McConell voted in January to lift sanctions on Rusal, a Russian aluminum company formerly headed by Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, and just days after the Treasury Department officially de-listed the company — it announced a $200 million investment in an aluminum plant in northeastern Kentucky.

Democrats have raised questions about how much McConnell knew about the investment before he voted to lift sanctions, but a Braidy Industries spokesperson told The Daily Beast the company never lobbied Congress about sanctions, and said no employee or director of the company ever spoke to McConell about Rusal, the only outside investor in the plant.

But, the website reported, McConnell’s connection to the Rusal-Braidy deal is deeper than previously understood.

While Rusal was lobbying the Trump administration to remove sanctions, the Kentucky Republican was pushing for federal funds to be used to help build the Braidy plant near Ashland, back in his home state.

The federal government has been giving Appalachian states millions of dollars since 2016 to help clean up abandoned coal mining land, and to assist in economic development there.

But McConnell and other Kentucky lawmakers, including Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY), helped steer $4 million away from sewer and road repair in October 2018 to preparing for construction on the aluminum plant.

It’s not clear when Braidy Industries and Rusal began, but two sources with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast that McConnell was instrumental in helping them secure the federal funding that had been earmarked for community development in his state.

McConnell then blocked a bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that would have pumped $4 million federal money into miner pensions.

He says the funding should be part of a different bill and is whining that this criticism is just terribly unfair. But McConnell is well-known to be the most powerful man in the US Congress and excuses don’t really fly.

And, by the way, the so-called “do nothing” congress that Trump goes on about day after day, is really the “do-nothing GOP Senate.”

The House has passed almost 400 bills the vast majority of which are sitting in the Senate going nowhere:

There’s a pervasive sense of legislative paralysis gripping Capitol Hill. And it’s been there long before the impeachment inquiry began.

For months, President Donald Trump has fired off tweet missives accusing House Democrats of “getting nothing done in Congress,” and being consumed with impeachment.

Trump may want to look to the Republican-controlled Senate instead. Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. 

But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is prioritizing confirming judges over passing bills.

Congress has passed just 70 bills into law this year. Granted, it still has one more year in its term, but the number pales in comparison to recent past sessions of Congress, which typically see 300-500 bills passed in two years (and that is even a diminished number from the 700-800 bills passed in the 1970s and 1980s). 

Ten of those 70 bills this year have been renaming federal post offices or Veterans Affairs facilities, and many others are related to appropriations or extending programs like the National Flood Insurance Program or the 9/11 victim compensation fund.

This has led to House Democrats decrying McConnell’s so-called “legislative graveyard,” a moniker the Senate majority leader has proudly adopted. McConnell calls himself the “grim reaper” of Democratic legislation he derides as socialist, but many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. 

“From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”

McConnell is focused on transforming the federal judiciary instead, with the Senate confirming over 150 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench. And he has refused to bring Democratic bills to the Senate floor in part to protect vulnerable Republican senators from having to take tough votes that could divide the GOP ahead of the 2020 election. 

Still, some Senate Republicans fear inaction could make them just as vulnerable.

“I’m very eager to turn from nominations to legislation,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) recently told the New York Times’s Carl Hulse. “There are important issues that are pending, and I think we could produce some terrific bills that would be signed into law.”

Since the judges, no matter how unqualified and extreme, are just passed in pro-forma votes, the Senators are literally being paid to do nothing. At least impeachment will require them to show up.

It isn’t just Trump, people. The whole government has seized up under GOP rule and McConnell. along with Trump’s sycophantic defenders in the House, are as responsible for it as he is. They see their only obligation at this point is to defend this miscreant in the White House.

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Quote of the week

by digby

By the way, if I didn’t fire Comey, I would have been in some trouble right now. Because they were coming after me and I wouldn’t known that he was a phony. And that Strzok and Page and all of these people — McCabe — the whole gang of them. We wouldn’t have been able to find it out. Turned out to be the best move I ever made, firing Comey, because they were looking to take down the president of the United States. — Donald Trump, Fox and Friends, confessing to obstruction of justice. 

I hate to tell him, but he is in some trouble right now, largely because he is so stupid he keeps committing crimes in public and talking about it. For instance, he released a transcript of his phone call bribing the president of Ukraine and then told everyone to read it. Why he did that I will never, ever understand.

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We love America. It’s Americans we can’t stand.
by Tom Sullivan

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently argued that people’s lives are not commodities. Why do we treat them as though they are? “That is what makes the price of medicine different than the price of an iPhone,” the New York Democrat insists.

“people’s lives are not commodities” pic.twitter.com/BSPEmlb2HO— mike casca (@cascamike) November 27, 2019

Responding to AOC’s statement, progressive messaging maven Anat Shenker-Osorio tweeted, “And *this* is why we must immediately stop framing #Medicare4All as the cheaper option. When we do, we reinforce the opposition’s worldview and undermine the truth that life and health can not be sales items.”

How we think about money is a muddled mess. An old experiment in mental accounting illustrates this using a choice between purchasing a jacket and a calculator (image):

The choice is the same: Would you drive 20 minutes to save $5? All else being equal, over two-thirds of test subjects would make the trip to save on the lower-priced item. Less than a third would for the higher priced item. For the same $5.

Our thinking on who benefits from tax spending is equally convoluted. It’s driving Pete Buttigieg’s* latest ad on funding free college. We shouldn’t be offering free college to the kids of millionaires, he suggests:

New Pete ad in Iowa taking aim at Warren and Bernie over college affordability/debt (but not by name), arguing they’d alienate half the country by insisting it be “free even for the kids of millionaires”. H/t @McCormickJohn
pic.twitter.com/SEAcOdHcAq— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) November 29, 2019

It’s the same argument made by Americans who argue, sure they’d like universal health coverage, but not if the Somali family down the street gets it too.

The sun rises each day on the evil and the good, Jesus says. And the rain falls on the just and the unjust. But dammit, the “undeserving” people across the street better not get a cent of my tax dollars! Sure, they get fire and police protection. They get public schools and publicly funded retirement and senior health care. The most powerful military in the world defends them 24/7/365. But giving the rich free college (as though they’d use it) or the poor treatment when they fall ill, well, that crosses a line. AOC doesn’t think so. But a lot of us do, including smart guys like Mayor Pete.

Brian Beutler tweets that Mayor Pete’s logic would lead him to means testing Medicare and Social Security to keep taxes low. The Net had a field day with Buttigieg:

Next-up from Pete:

No more Social Security for those making over $100K
No more K-12 for families making over $100K
No more fire dept's for those making over $100K
No more roads for those making over $100K
No more public libraries for those making over $100K = Nothing for anyone https://t.co/pvkIUuVZDC— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) November 30, 2019

We judge our national security priceless. That’s why the U.S. spends as much as the “next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.” We waste hundreds of billions on boondoggle weapons. Nobody asks how we are going to pay for them. But universal health care? Free college? Hell, no.

We love America. It’s Americans we can’t stand.

What makes national programs politically viable is their very universality. Start means-testing them, offer them to some and not to others and support declines. That’s why conservatives insist on means-testing. To wedge this group against the next. Divide and conquer. Democrats should not play that game.

What we do as a country is what makes America great as a country. Your personal achievements don’t, not matter how proud you are of them. Sen. Elizabeth Warren taught contract law before running for office. She understands social ones:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

For all the “values” talk that gets thrown around during election campaigns, our are pretty screwed up. How we think about money is a big part of it.

* Sullivan is a name insufficiently exotic enough for the times, isn’t it?

Friday Night Soother

by digby

A little T-Day feast for the critters:

Thanksgiving has gone to dogs at one North Carolina animal shelter. The New Hanover Sheriff’s Office Animal Services Unit shared photos of a very special Thanksgiving meal prepared just for the animals at the shelter. 

“Today every shelter animal also got a little bit of holiday cheer and happiness in their bowl!” the shelter said. “Shelter animals deserve a turkey dinner too and they loved theirs today!” 

The shelter reminds pet owners to make sure any food you give your pets is safe for them.

For example, the ASPCA reports pets should only have boneless, well-cooked turkey. Do not serve your pets raw yeast bread dough, which can cause potentially life-threatening bloating.

And here’s a cute little otter showing that perseverance is a key to success:

I’m so proud of him. pic.twitter.com/6yl1FqseJg

— In Otter News (@Otter_News) November 28, 2019

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The little cover-up that got exposed


by digby

This piece at Just Security is making the rounds today and it’s quite intriguing. It appears that Gordon Sondland and Trump have created a little cover-up. You know that phone call where he supposedly said “I want nothing, I want nothing! There is no quid pro quo!” ?  Well, the evidence suggests that the call actually took place two days earlier and outlined the quid pro quo:

At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early September—with the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating.

The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was “no quid pro quo” with Ukraine, but he then went on to outline his preconditions for releasing the security assistance and granting a White House visit. The call was so alarming that when John Bolton learned of it, he ordered his’ deputy Tim Morrison to immediately report it to the National Security Council lawyers.

Sondland has testified there was a call on September 9th in which Trump said there was “no quid pro quo,” but that he wanted President Zelenskyy “to do” the right thing. A close reading of the publicly available evidence shows that the latter call was actually the very one that sent Morrison to the lawyers, and that Ambassador Bill Taylor foregrounded in his written deposition to inform Congress of the quid pro quo.

As this article was in the publication process at Just Security, the Washington Post published a report raising doubts about the existence of the September 9 call. The analysis that follows is consistent with the Post’s report and, among other points, shows why Sondland’s “no quid pro quo” call is in fact the same as the September 7th call that Morrison reported to NSC lawyers on September 7th.

Here’s the upshot:

[T]he White House and House Republicans have been forced to retreat to their current defense: that President Trump himself has not been proven to have done anything wrong, because there was no witness who testified to having personally heard the President announce that he was seeking a quid pro quo from Ukraine, in exchange for release of the security assistance. 

This “defense,” it should be noted, is hardly a defense at all. There is no dispute that the President used the powers of his office to coerce a foreign state into investigating a domestic political rival, nor is there any dispute that the Ukrainians were informed by the Trump administration that the hold on security assistance would not be lifted until these investigation were publicly announced. 

Multiple witnesses also testified that EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland had told them that, in his conversations with the president, Trump had described his requirement for Zelenskyy to publicly announce the investigations into Biden and 2016. However, to the extent that no witness testified to having personally heard Trump request a quid pro quo in regards to the security assistance, there are two reasons for this. 

The first is that, with a single exception, every individual who interacted directly with President Trump refused to comply with House subpoenas for their testimony. 

The second is that the single exception who did testify,  Ambassador Sondland, did not testify accurately when he said that President Trump had never asked him for a quid pro quo from Ukraine. In fact, President Trump had personally informed Sondland of his specific demands for a quid pro quo from Ukraine – and the White House National Security Council is sitting on documents that confirm it. 

This is a complicated story but it’s extremely interesting, if true. If you are of a mind to dig deeply into the testimony last week I encourage you to read it. Sondland seems to have left himself enough wriggle room to avoid a perjury charge by saying that he doesn’t remember specific dates and that he doesn’t dispute what all the other witnesses are saying he said because he doesn’t recall the conversations. Whether they will charge Trump with more obstruction is unknown.

I would also suggest you read this post by Marcy Wheeler in which she deconstructs how this little cover-up happened and how it got exposed. If her surmise is correct, there are others involved in this as well.

Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House–the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand. — Deep Throat, All the President’s Men

Don’t blame Trump for this one. (Well, actually you can blame him for making this sort of thing so acutely dangerous with his appointment of hundreds of brain dead wingnut to the federal courts, including the Supremes):

A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”. 

This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible. 

The move comes amid a wave of increasingly severe anti-abortion bills introduced across much of the country as conservative Republican politicians seek to ban abortion and force a legal showdown on abortion with the supreme court. 

Ohio’s move on ectopic pregnancies – where an embryo implants on the mother’s fallopian tube rather than her uterus rendering the pregnancy unviable – is one of the most extreme bills to date. 

“I don’t believe I’m typing this again but, that’s impossible,” wrote Ohio obstetrician and gynecologist Dr David Hackney on Twitter. “We’ll all be going to jail,” he said. 

An ectopic pregnancy is a life-threatening condition, which can kill a woman if the embryonic tissue grows unchecked.

Basically, the idea is that if a doctor doesn’t attempt an impossible medical procedure rather than save a woman’s life the woman must die and he must go to jail.

There’s more:

In addition to ordering doctors to do the impossible or face criminal charges, House Bill 413 bans abortion outright and defines a fertilized egg as an “unborn child”. 

It also appears to punish doctors, women and children as young as 13 with “abortion murder” if they “perform or have an abortion”. This crime is punishable by life in prison. 

 Another new crime, “aggravated abortion murder”, is punishable by death, according to the bill.

At least they’re now making it clear that they want to kill or imprison women for having abortions. It’s clarifying.

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No, Whole Foods Market didn’t honor Mitch McConnell

by digby

This is a good example of one of those times people don’t use their common sense:

Hi there. Whole Foods Market is not affiliated with Whole Foods Magazine.

— Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) November 28, 2019

WholeFoods has been publishing since 1984. According to its site, it’s the “longest-tenured media outlet of its kind in the natural products industry.”

It is not affiliated with the Whole Foods Market Inc., the popular multinational supermarket, which has sent a number of tweets reiterating that point in response to outrage over the decision.

One might have asked why Whole Foods Market would consider it a smart thing to honor someone the vast majority of its customers loathe. Yes, it is owned by Amazon, which makes it a corporate villain, but McConnell is no friend of Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, either.

That should have made people at least take a second look before deciding that they should boycott Whole Foods over this.

Here’s the story of why WholeFoods magazine did what it did. They should have thought twice as well:

WholeFoods Magazine has been publishing since 1984. According to its site, it’s the “longest-tenured media outlet of its kind in the natural products industry.”

It is not affiliated with the Whole Foods Market Inc., the popular multinational supermarket, which has sent a number of tweets reiterating that point in response to outrage over the decision. 

McConnell worked with Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to introduce a bipartisan bill to legalize the cultivation of industrial hemp. The legislation was later included in a farm bill that was signed into law by President Trump last year in an effort to boost the agriculture industry.

On a page announcing the monthly national trade magazine’s decision to name McConnell “Natural Products Person of the Year,” editor-in-chief Maggie Jaqua said “the end of ‘hemp prohibition’ has been a boon for many in the industry.”

All of us have to make sure our bullshit detectors are turned up to 11 these days.

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