Month: December 2019

Sorting hat
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Friday’s jobs numbers were particularly good for a president running for reelection. Nonfarm payrolls surged by 266,000 in November, running far ahead of expectations, and a 50-year low in unemployment.

But who can trust them? Not Donald J. Trump. During the Obama administration, he and other Obama opponents regularly claimed the unemployment numbers released were grossly and deliberately understated for political purposes. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Friday night reminded viewers (using video) that at various points during Obama’s presidency Trump claimed the real unemployment rate was 25 percent, 30 percent, 35 — as high as 42 percent. Nearly half the country was unemployed, Trump implied, far more than at the height of the Great Depression.

In December 2016, Hayes added, 67 percent of Trumpers believed the unemployment rate went up under Barack Obama. It did not.

Commenting on this disconnect from reality, Hayes observed:

It’s phenomenally dangerous. But the most dangerous part is that President Donald Trump is as much a symptom of this as he is the cause. I mean, the man is first and foremost a Fox News viewer. That’s his central identity. That’s what’s going on in the brain.

There is an entire ecosystem built around the alternate reality that is untethered from fact. The same one that tells them that the jobs numbers are made up. That same ecosystem is now telling people that the Deep State is out to get Donald Trump; that Ukraine actually meddled in the election, not Russia; that there are imaginary servers somewhere in a vault in Kiev that will blow the whole thing open.

And all this is being told to hide what really happened. And those people and that ecosystem that is almost hermetically sealed off from this touch to reality has a purchase on 40 percent of the country. And in the real world in which the rest of the country resides, the jobs numbers are the jobs numbers. And Russia sabotage our election, not Ukraine.

But Trumpworld has completely, in some cases, cut themselves off from these facts and knowledge of them. That is the danger of having this guy as president. It’s the danger of the ecosystem that produced him. and it’s the danger of this political moment, because this is where we are.

But there is more.

David Frum writes at The Atlantic that it is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration that he seems to attract criminals to him. Beginning with the first members of Congress to endorse him, Frum observes, plus those in his orbit already convicted of federal crimes. Frum concludes, “The attraction of such people—and so many like them—to Donald Trump tells us something important about who Trump is: a man who appeals to crooks because they recognize him as one of their own.”

Hayes’ speech Friday night echoed events in another alternate reality: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There is that OMG moment in Captain America: The Winter Soldier when fans realize S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated. Later, Steve Rogers announces that to friends and allies who have not “turned.”

In our reality, his speech might have sounded something like this: “… I think it’s time you know the truth. The Republican Party is not what we thought it was. It has been taken over by HYDRA. Donald Trump is their leader.”

In the alternate reality of Harry Potter, the sorting hat has placed them in Slytherin. But their own desires contributed to that choice.

It is certainly not true of every voter wearing a scarlet “R.” At a Democratic event weeks ago, I overheard a recent “convert” tell another about the relief he felt waking up in the morning as a Democrat. The stress of being a Republican in this political environment had been tremendous. I remember the tears in the eyes of a former Republican woman 1) at the warm welcome she received when she changed parties, and 2) that local Democrats didn’t spend all their time badmouthing opponents. “You actually want to do something” positive, she said.

There are others out there who are leaving the Party of Trump for the real world. They gravitated in their youth to a different party with a different set of values and principles they thought the party actually believed in. Their families were Republican. They started in college. But over time, the truth sank in. The Republican Party was not what they thought it was.

Welcome them when you meet them.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

THE “HAPPIEST ANIMAL in the world” may be happiest on the golf course.

The quokka, a teddy bear-sized marsupial found only in southwestern Australia, is struggling on the mainland, where it has to contend with invasive predators and habitat loss. But on Rottnest Island, just off the coast of Perth, the quokka population has exploded.

A big helping hand arrived in 2012—and it was holding a smartphone. A man visiting the island took a selfie with a quokka, whose unusual mouth made it appear to be smiling. The photo quickly went viral.

Soon more people arrived in pursuit of a quokka selfie, and visitation to the island has reached record numbers. New or expanded facilities to accommodate the influx of tourists quickly followed. And as visitation has increased, so has the quokka population.

The island quokkas first encountered people back in 1658, when Dutch explorers mistook them for large rats (“rottnest” is Dutch for “rat’s nest”). Today, in the settlement areas, they’re beginning to act as if they are rats.

“They’re meant to be nocturnal, but they’ve altered their activity patterns so that they’re awake during the day to be around tourists and scavenge food from tourists,” says wildlife biologist Veronica Phillips.

In a 2016 study published in the Italian journal Hystrix, Phillips found that quokkas in areas of the island that are highly developed for tourism were in significantly better condition compared to those from less disturbed habitat types, such as dunes, woodlands, or heaths. Quokka offspring were also more likely to survive in the developed areas.

The year-round lawn buffet and crumbs tossed by tourists help quokkas make it through the lean, dry summer months, Phillips found.

Unfortunately, development on the mainland has not been so kind to the quokka. Urban expansion and agriculture have cornered the species into scraps of habitat in the Jarrah Forest south of Perth and a larger block in the Southern Forest below it.

The species has lost 50 percent of its habitat in the past 200 years on the mainland, according to a 2014 study led by John Woinarski of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO.

“A lot of people don’t even realize there are quokkas on the mainland, and they’re really suffering,” says Cassyanna Gray, a conservation officer with the Rottnest Island Authority. Even with the boom on Rottnest, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature considers quokkas vulnerable to extinction, as does the Australian Department of Environment and Conservation.

Along with the abundance of food and protected habitat across the island, the Rottnest quokkas have another distinct advantage. On the mainland, quokkas are vulnerable not just to fragmented habitat, but also to continued habitat destruction due to logging and feral pigs, as well as predation from invasive European red foxes and feral cats.

On Rottnest, wildlife managers wiped out the last of the feral cats—the island’s sole invasive predators—in the 2000s.

But while the island’s spike in quokkas is encouraging, it’s brought its own set of problems.

Take the golf course, for example. About 13 to 20 percent of the island’s quokkas live around the country club, depending on the time of year. Managers there are not happy about having to fix the damage quokkas can cause to the links, which have to be maintained at a uniform height.

Even the quokkas might not be happy there for long. If too many animals become concentrated in one area, they could end up competing for food, and any disease that hits the group could spread more rapidly.

More visitors to the island mean more cars and a higher risk of quokka road casualties. The animals may also become a little too used to humans: There are risks from tourists feeding quokkas, trying to pet them, or even tossing them in the ocean.

The Rottnest Island Authority is working with Phillips and other scientists, tourism operators, and local businesses to make sure tourism stays on the right side of conservation. The authority imposes hefty fines for touching or feeding quokkas. Volunteer guides keep an eye out for trouble, and officials have installed new warning signs around the island, including some encouraging the use of selfie sticks to keep photo-hunters at a healthy distance from the animals.

The authority is even considering fencing off the golf course. It’s just too risky to have so many animals in one place, and they’re becoming too dependent on an artificial food source, Gray says.

“We’re always looking at that balance in terms of protection,” she says.

In the long run, the real threat is one that wildlife managers can’t easily control. Quokkas depend on lush vegetation for food and hideouts from predators, and researcher Karlene Bain with the University of Western Australia has found that quokkas are increasingly relying on the wettest areas of their range. If rainfall decreases in southwest Australia, as climate scientists expect, that wetland and streamside vegetation will wither.

A 2010 study found that if global temperatures rise four degrees above pre-industrial levels—well within the range of possibility, unless fossil fuel emissions come down quickly—quokkas will likely go extinct by 2070.

“I’m not too worried about tourism,” Phillips says. “I am very worried about climate change.”

Indeed … 

by digby

I don’t think this has the negative effect the Trump people think it does:

Nancy Pelosi is taking her hatred of impeachment questions a little too far… pic.twitter.com/yQV9fIyhBo

— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) December 6, 2019

They usually go with the stereotypical screeching witch on a broom image for her. Promoting her to the ultimate Sith Lord shows she’s got them a little scared …

By the way, who does this sound like?

If an Empire cannot protect its Emperor then that Empire must be deemed a failure. It collapses not only because its central figure is gone, but because it must not be allowed to remain!
— Palpatine, in Aftermath: Empire’s End

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No, both sides are not equally corrupt


by digby

There are 71 current members of congress who were there for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.  It was party line vote (although there were some who didn’t vote yes on all the articles.)  Today the tables are turned and Republicans are on record defending Trump and the Democrats are prepared to impeach him.

It’s tempting to say that this shows it’s all partisanship so a pox on both their houses. But it’s not. This president is corrupt in every way and his corruption is affecting the national security of the United States and endangering the separation of powers that gives the country its only defense against authoritarian autocracy. 

Here was the argument for Clinton’s impeachment, courtesy of Lindsey Graham. Obviously, the issues are much worse than today’s — bribing a foreign leader to rig the upcoming election in your favor or using the power of your office to cover up your previous collusion with a different foreign country to rig your first election:

LINDSEY: I’m having to judge Bill Clinton based on evidence, and I would like to speak a few minutes to what I believe is the unshakeable, undeniable truth. And much of it is about sex. This idea that the president of the United States when he testified in Paula Jones’ deposition, a lady who brought a case against him for sexual harassment, that he gave testimony that was legally accurate is a total falsehood. The idea that the definition of sex did not include oral sex and they did not ask the right questions, and if they did, he would have told the truth offends me.

This idea of what sex meant came up after this blue dress, in my opinion. The reason I say that on January 17 when he was asked to testify about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he knew she had provided an affidavit denying any improper relationship of any kind whatsoever. He believed himself to be covered. He did not know of the tapes.

Whether you like the tapes or not, he did not know of them, and without them he would have lied with Monica Lewinsky to the prejudice of a citizen who was suing him for conduct, if true, should be enough to impeach him. We shall never know what happened in that room in Arkansas or that hotel room. Two people know and God knows.

Why I believe the definition of sex as being propounded by the president to this very day is a lie is based on the conduct he exhibited after the deposition. On January 17, he would have us to believe they did not ask the right question and the definition excluded oral sex. I would suggest to you that’s a fabricated tale.

LINDSEY: That on January 24, we have a talking point paper from the White House telling people how to respond about the allegations against the president. And one of those questions was: Does sexual relations include oral sex? The answer was yes.

HYDE: The gentleman’s time has expired.

UNIDENTIFIED CONGRESSMAN: I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman be given two additional minutes.

HYDE: Without objection, so ordered.

LINDSEY: Thank you. I’m talking in 30-second soundbites so long, I’ve never had this much time. Thank you very much.

(LAUGHTER)

I can’t believe 10 minutes went by so quick.

What I believe is that his press accounts to Mr. Lehrer and to Roll Call indicate that improper relationships — there was no artificial definition. This is — oral sex is not included. I believe that’s a falsehood. That’s a fraud.

I believe that he knew Ms. Lewinsky’s affidavit was false and that when the discussion with Mr. Bennett came up in the deposition, he was following intently what happened, and that he was not surprised, and that he did in fact lie to the grand jury on numerous occasions.

Should he be impeached? Very quickly. The hardest decision I think I will ever make, knowing that the president lied to a grand jury about sex, I still believe that every president of the United States regardless of the matter they are called to testify about before a grand jury should testify truthfully, and if they don’t, they should be subject to losing their job.

I believe that about Bill Clinton. I’ll believe that about the next president. If it had been a Republican, I would have still believed that. I would hope that if a Republican president had done all this, that some of us had went over and told him: You need to leave office.

I understand the dilemma that all of us are in about that. His fate is in his own hands. Right quickly, Mr. Chairman, 30 years from now, they’re going to judge what we’ve done and how partisan it’s been and whether or not we — this made any sense.

I just want you to know, as you look back and look at these tapes and find out what we’re doing, there’s one member of Congress — there’s a lot of us here who believe the president has lied to us to this very day; that we can’t reconcile ourself with that; that it was in a lawsuit with an average every day citizen; legal rights at stake.

And the most chilling of all things to me was the episode after he left the deposition. He told Mr. Blumenthal that the Monica Lewinsky was basically coming on to him; he had to fight her off. He told Betty Currie “she wanted to have sex with me and I couldn’t do that.” The most chilling was for a period of time, the president was setting stories in motion that were lies. Those stories found themselves in the press, to attack a young lady who could potentially be a witness against him. To me, that is very much like Watergate. That shows character inconsistent with being president, and every member of Congress should look at that episode and decide: Is this truly about sex? Is Bill Clinton doing the right thing by continuing to make us have to pursue this — have to prove to a legal certainty he lied?

The president’s fate is in his own hands. Mr. President, you have one more chance. Don’t bite your lip. Reconcile yourself with the law.

Yes, he’s always been a sanctimonious blowhard.

That colloquy was also rife with lies. For one thing, there was never any evidence that Clinton personally sicced the media on Lewinsky even if one of his defenders (Blumenthal) stupidly freelanced to the drunken Christopher Hitchens. Indeed Clinton went out of his way not to insult her because, unlike Trump, he was smart enough to know that angering the witnesses against you is a bad idea. Her testimony was actually key to his survival.

Looking back, the whole thing was awful. Clinton exploited an employee and should have known better even if she did not. It’s classic #MeToo behavior. If that had been all there was to this, he should have resigned and let Al Gore coast to a victory in 2000. But it’s also the case that the predicate for the impeachment, that Clinton lied under oath and obstructed justice, was a set-up by a bunch of  right wing political assassins pretending to be lawyers (including the newly esteemed George Conway) working with dirty trickster Lucianne Goldberg and the odious Linda Tripp.  After years of non-stop investigations into Clinton’s past and trumping up ridiculous charges (like “passport-gate”) this was what they ended up with and it was an exercise in prurient tabloid smearing of both Lewinsky and Clinton.

The American people didn’t like what Clinton did at all and if the Republicans had agreed to censure, the Democrats would have voted for it and the people would have applauded. Democrat after Democrat took to the floor and the airwaves condemning Clinton’s behavior. He gave speeches apologizing for what he did.

But Americans also saw through what the phony, hypocritical, partisan Republican hit men were doing with impeachment and rejected it. They knew it was not what the constitution called for in this circumstance.

Graham is now defending a man credibly accused of rape and there are dozens of examples of sexual assault and harassment even paying off his accusers from the White House. And that is considered such a minor offense compared to all the others that it isn’t being considered as part of the impeachment. Trump is corrupt from top to bottom, personally profiting from the office, empowering his children like a banana republic dictator, colluding with foreign governments to smear his domestic political rivals and obstructing justice at every turn, including publicly threatening and intimidating witnesses and dangling pardons to anyone who might harm him.

Yet Republicans are willing to not only go on record against impeachment, they are going on the record defending that conduct as a perfectly normal use of presidential power. They will not even say a word against him.

That is the essential difference. Democrats are no angels, as Trump would say. They are as compromised, weak and unfocused as most politicians. But they have not yet descended into total political nihilism as the Republicans have done.

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by digby

Here are @AndriyUkraineTe and @RudyGiuliani here in Kyiv, #Ukraine. At midnight, they are in lounge bar of the Premier Palace Hotel, owned by close Putin ally, Russian oligarch Alexander Babakov. Hotel known as den for Kremlin agents & Babakov is alleged Russian intel himself. https://t.co/Ieqff7GjP3

— Jack Laurenson (@JackLaurenson) December 5, 2019

Greg Sargent’s piece about Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre behavior the last couple of days is the best one you’ll read about the implications of what they are doing:

Rudolph W. Giuliani just confessed to the crime in broad daylight — or, more precisely, in broad cyber-daylight. Yet he did so defiantly, with a middle finger unfurled in our faces, without the slightest concern that it would harm him or his “client,” as he describes President Trump.

How is this possible? Because of the power of disinformation, which has the capacity to convert the most flagrantly corrupt misconduct into virtue.

We don’t talk enough about how central disinformation is to the Ukraine scandal. The extortion of Ukraine was at bottom an effort to enlist a foreign power’s help in waging disinformation warfare in the 2020 election, to Trump’s benefit. Disinformation was central to the 2016 Russian attack on our political system, which Trump eagerly embraced. Now disinformation is being employed to escape accountability for all of it.

Two new developments attest to this point: a remarkable pair of revelatory tweets from Giuliani, and a tour de force of reporting in The Post, which reveals that Trump routinely communicated throughout the whole saga with Giuliani on unsecured devices, which may have been vulnerable to monitoring by Russia.

Giuliani’s tweets are revealing, and not in a good way

“The conversation about corruption in Ukraine was based on compelling evidence of criminal conduct by then VP Biden,” Giuliani tweeted, referring to Joe Biden, the intended target of “investigations” Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to announce.

To empirically grounded observers, this will blow up a key Trump defense: that in conditioning official acts on getting Ukraine to announce the investigations he wanted, he was correctly concerned with cleaning up corruption there.

After all, Giuliani just confirmed that in pressuring Ukraine, “investigate corruption” actually meant, “smear Trump’s political rival.” We already knew this — Giuliani and Trump have said it publicly for months — but that’s an unusually stark way to admit it.

Yet Giuliani doesn’t view this as an admission at all. Why not? Because he also stated that Biden was, in fact, guilty of unstated “criminal conduct,” that Biden and other Democrats had conspired with Ukrainian corruption, and that Giuliani would produce proof.

The Biden corruption narrative Giuliani has worked to validate has been thoroughly debunked. But Giuliani can make it true by saying it, and by producing fake “evidence” backing it up.

This amounts to more than conventional political lying. You see this in Giuliani’s crucial next step: the creation of a disinformational narrative hermetically sealed off from outside facts can magically transform even a demand for investigations into Biden from a corrupt demand that a foreign power help rig our election by smearing a political opponent into a virtuous demand for investigations into “corruption.”

This scandal is all about disinformation. 

Making this narrative “true,” via the triumph of disinformation, is at the core of this entire scandal. It is why the White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid were conditioned on getting Ukraine to release statements validating that narrative with disinformation, along with another fictional narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in 2016, in collusion with Democrats.

Meanwhile, Giuliani is literally producing a fake “documentary” that will “prove” these theories. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, is traveling the world to try to validate parts of the Ukraine-2016 lie, and he’s even preparing to dispute the Justice Department inspector general’s conclusion that it’s nonsense. 

I think this is an important point.  This collusion between domestic political players and a foreign disinformation campaign continues. Indeed, one wonders if the Mueller report had been allowed to continue if it would have found an actual ongoing conspiracy between Giuliani and Trump and various pro-Russian Ukrainian actors. Certainly, the Manafort case provided certain clues in that regard with which the Mueller team was obviously familiar.

Sargent observes that the President and his men, House Republicans and their Fox news handlers like Hannity are all promoting these conspiracy theories as if they are fact, which shows how integrated the GOP and the Russian disinformation campaign has become. It’s impossible to tell where one begins and the other one ends.  The Ukraine lie is Exhibit One.

He notes the reporting from yesterday that shows Trump is still using his unsecured cell phone to speak to Giuliani and god-knows-who-else. The fact that the Russians and others are almost certainly listening to these calls gives them insight’s into the president’s thinking and plans that make it much easier to manipulate him (not that it’s that hard anyway.)

Trump’s team is using the “Trump is just a paranoid moron, so no harm no foul”  excuse by explaining that he doesn’t trust his own staff.  And Sargent  makes it very clear that he’s not saying Trump is a Russian asset. I agree that it’s likely that he is the worlds greatest useful idiot but this excuse gets harder and harder to swallow as time goes on.

He concludes:

But what we can say is that the disinformation employed by Giuliani, Trump and his GOP defenders in many ways overlaps with Russian disinformation. They share tropes and narratives, and some common goals. 

And it’s evident that Trump may not care if we’re more vulnerable to Russian disinformation, since he benefited from it so extensively last time, and is now heavily trafficking in its offshoots himself. As Giuliani’s latest confession shows, their commitment to employing and benefiting from it is only escalating.

I would suggest that the Republican party is in exactly the same position. Remember, in 2016 Russian hacking and disinformation benefited members of congress as well, one of whom was a huge Trump supporter who staged a surprise win for Florida Governor in 2018 — Ron DeSantis. The more these foreign actors have honed their methods the more likely they will be even more involved in those races in 2020.

Until now, as I’ve written on this subject, I’ve always wondered why they are so sure that the Russian cyber campaigns would always benefit them. Maybe I’ve been naive about that …

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“What’s said in the family stays in the family”

by digby

I beg you all to read the full transcript again!

This conversation is infamous for McCarthy’s stupid (but true) line.

But PLEASE note the conversation is REALLY about how much Republican leaders had just learned about the extent of Russia’s propaganda wars against Ukraine! https://t.co/t3zfbyX8Yf

— David Waldman-1, of Yorktown LLC™ (@KagroX) December 6, 2019

Here it is. Can you believe it?

(UI: Unidentified individual)

What does a successful post-impeachment election look like?

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

After deliberating with the members of her caucus and reading the House Select Committee on Intelligence report on the Ukraine bribery scandal, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday morning that she has directed the chairs of the Judiciary, Intelligence, Oversight and Reform, Financial Services and Ways and Means committees to begin writing articles of impeachment against President Trump.

Her speech was quite moving, offering up pertinent quotes from the founders and laying out her reasoning for going ahead after having been notably reluctant to do so.

PELOSI: “In America no one is above the law … the facts are uncontested: POTUS abused his power for his own political benefit, at the expense of our natl security … [his] actions have seriously violated the Constitution … POTUS leaves us no choice but to act.” pic.twitter.com/96AAGBdANw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 5, 2019

It is unclear whether any of those committees other than the Intelligence Committee will offer evidence of impeachable offenses at this point. Pelosi made it clear that they did not plan to impeach the president over government policy, no matter how grotesque that may be, because the coming election will settle those differences. Impeachment, in her mind, is instead about the president’s abuse of power and his nefarious plan to corrupt the democratic process for his political benefit.

She and the Democrats seem to think that impeaching the president quickly — and then seeing him quickly acquitted in the Senate — will somehow prevent him from doing that, which strikes me as unlikely. If experience is any guide, Trump will claim “total exoneration” and see it as license to do the same thing all over again. After all, the day after Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee, Trump got on the horn and tried to bribe the Ukrainian president to do what Mueller proved the Russians did on his behalf in 2016 — interfere in the presidential election.

There is some talk that the Democrats will include the Volume II charges in the Mueller Report in an impeachment article on obstruction of justice, which makes sense. The Mueller team obviously wrote that part of the report as a quasi-impeachment referral and handed it to the House practically tied up in a big red bow. It’s full of testimony given under oath by dozens of Trump associates, flunkeys and administration officials that tells the story of a presidential campaign to defeat and undermine the Russia investigation. These two crimes, the Russian interference and the attempted Ukrainian bribery, are like bookends, with the first informing the second.

Whatever the Democrats decide to do about the specific charges, Trump is going to be impeached. I would think dragging that out and keeping him tied down and off-balance would be the better way to ensure that he doesn’t use his office for personal political gain again. But that ship is rapidly sailing out of the harbor.

According to CNN, the White House and Republican senators are planning a “defense” in which they attack Joe Biden and his son. They don’t want to waste the opportunity to smear the former veep some more while the whole world is watching. But regardless of their sleazy tactics, the outcome of the whole thing is preordained. Trump will not be convicted and will undoubtedly strut around the country afterward, bragging that he beat the rap.

So it’s probably time to start thinking about a post-impeachment election campaign. Trump will certainly be on the ticket next year, barring something totally unpredictable. Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were in their second terms when they faced impeachment. Andrew Johnson failed to win his own party’s nomination in the 1868 election, following his impeachment, so this will be a first.

But there are some clues about how to deal with this since we’ve had a couple of elections following impeachment or resignation in the fairly recent past. CNN’s Ron Brownstein has written about how the presidential successors in those two impeachments ran their campaigns, and how surprisingly similar they were. Despite the fact that running against Trump is like running against an alien from outer space, there are some lessons to be taken from those two examples:

In each case, the president’s party lost the White House to a candidate — Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 — who played off lingering public unease about the scandal that had precipitated the impeachment process against their predecessor. In each instance, impeachment functioned like a leak that corroded the foundation under the president’s party in the next election.

Brownstein looks back at those campaigns, starting with the fact that public opinion was very different in both cases, with Nixon being remarkably unpopular and Clinton enjoying a 60% job approval throughout. But the opposing party’s nominee in the following elections ran campaigns with the same subtext. Neither Carter or Bush dwelled on the scandals, but they both presented themselves as the antidote to the ugliness they exposed.

Carter said people had heard enough about Watergate but famously pledged “I will never lie to you” and promised to give the country “a government as good as its people.” Brownstein says it was enough to put him over the top with an electorate that was exhausted by Watergate. George W. Bush likewise didn’t talk about the impeachment directly but called himself “a uniter not a divider” and promised to “restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office,” which everyone understood to mean that he wouldn’t befoul it with sexual rendezvous in the hallway.

Brownstein grants that this situation is different. After all, Trump himself will be on the ballot and will no doubt wear the impeachment as a badge of honor to rile up his rabid following, declaring himself a martyr to the cause of Making America Great Again. But most analysts agree that impeachment will also have the effect of hardening opposition to Trump, making it even more difficult for him to reach beyond his hardcore base.

The only way Trump can change that dynamic is by sullying the opposition so that he is seen as the lesser of two evils by just enough people to win. On some subconscious level, he obviously knew that all along, which explains his desire to project his own corruption onto Joe Biden, his own pathological lying onto Elizabeth Warren and his own craziness onto Bernie Sanders. Trump has no analytical skills but he does possess a feral survival instinct which tells him that his only hope is to turn his opponents into mirror images of himself and then attack them for it.

Perhaps this will be successful. But it is far more likely that any of the Democrats running, regardless of their various attributes and skills, will be seen as the decent, honest alternative to Trump regardless of how much he verbally assaults them in the campaign. Impeachment brands Trump in a way that he will never be able to escape. As he himself admitted to House Republicans, “You don’t want it on your résumé.”

It’s going to be worse than that. It will be in the first paragraph of his obituary. We can only hope the words “Donald J. Trump, one-term president …” will be there too.

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What’s heard in Moscow stays in Moscow
by Tom Sullivan

Pullman House, former site of the Soviet Embassy, 16th St. NW. (Source: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey).

The acting president of the United States damned sure doesn’t want anyone examining his tax records. He’s fought tooth-and-nail in court to keep investigators from seeing what he promised repeatedly during his 2016 campaign he would share with the public.

But secure his telephone conversations? Nah! From the Washington Post:

President Trump has routinely communicated with his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and other individuals speaking on cellphones vulnerable to monitoring by Russian and other foreign intelligence services, current and former U.S. officials said.

Phone records released this week by the House Intelligence Committee revealed extensive communications between Giuliani, unidentified people at the White House and others involved in the campaign to pressure Ukraine, with no indication that those calls were encrypted or otherwise shielded from foreign surveillance.

The revelations raise the possibility that Moscow was able to learn about aspects of Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine to investigate a political rival months before that effort was exposed by a whistleblower report and the impeachment inquiry, officials said.

But, hey, it’s not like the Deep State is listening in, right?

Trump is not identified by name in the House phone records, but investigators said they suspect he may be a person with a blocked number listed as “-1” in the files. And administration officials said separately that Trump has communicated regularly with Giuliani on unsecured lines.

“It happened all the time,” said one former senior aide, who noted that Giuliani had a range of foreign clients.

The disclosures provide fresh evidence suggesting that the president continues to defy the security guidance urged by his aides and followed by previous incumbents — a stance that is particularly remarkable given Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign for her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state.

Weakness is a cardinal sin for conservatives, as it was for Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn. Attack, counterattack and never apologize. A consistent criticism Republicans level against Democrats is they are weak. Weak on crime. Weak on defense, etc. Donald Trump fixates on projecting strongliness. It’s one of his many tells.

Thus, it is stunning that Trump-the-paranoid is so slack about his communications. Fellow trust-fund baby, Jared Kushner, proposed using a secure room at the Russian embassy to shield his communications from prying ears. Of course, those were American prying ears.

An indelible childhood memory from my first visit to Washington, D.C. was seeing the top of the Soviet embassy bristling with antennae (similar to above). The Russian embassy’s new digs on Wisconsin Avenue are more discreet about their communications gear.

Embassy of Russia in Washington DC. Russia. Photo: Aaron Siirila via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.5).

Seeing as prominent GOP leaders now parrot Russian talking points, perhaps, as David Rothkopf told Greg Sargent, “Trump, his administration and the GOP have made a conscious choice to align themselves with Putinism … It is not unwitting.”

“Putinism,” Sargent writes, is a worldwide movement “that allies various ethno-nationalist and illiberal authoritarian leaders against Western liberal democracy, the rule of law, international institutions and the commitment to empiricism in the face of disinformation.”

When I first set eyes on the Soviet embassy, Pete Seeger was singing “Which Side Are You On?” about unions and G.O.P. hawks were warning us about Russian propaganda. Now they’re trafficking in it, and it’s less clear which side they are on.

The Fox brainwashed Trump supporters are bad. The non-Fox brainwashed Trump supporters are even worse.

 by digby

Via 538:

Our survey also suggests that one of Trump’s defenders’ key arguments isn’t really landing. Throughout the hearings, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly floated an inaccurate theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, using the idea as a justification for why Trump would want to ask Ukraine for investigations in the first place.

But according to our survey, the idea that Ukraine interfered isn’t gaining much traction with the public. Only 30 percent of Americans believe that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. By contrast, 71 percent of Americans believe that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. And the theory isn’t even resonating broadly among Trump’s supporters: Republicans aren’t any likelier than Democrats to think that Ukraine meddled in 2016.

There is one group, though, where a substantial chunk of respondents do believe Ukraine interfered in 2016: Fox News viewers. More than 4 in 10 respondents who say they predominantly watch Fox News say that Ukraine did interfere in the 2016 election, a higher share than among respondents who get their news from other networks. Fox News viewers were also less likely than other respondents to believe that Russia interfered with the last presidential election. 

Fox viewers are most likely to believe Ukraine interfered

Share of respondents in an Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll who said they think Ukraine or Russia interfered in the 2016 election, by the TV news network they predominantly watched

I’m frankly more concerned about the Republicans who know Trump is full of shit but support him anyway. The brainwashed are one thing. But these people support Trump knowing that he’s a liar and a criminal. In other words, they are just like Trump.

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The “Ukraine was the real meddler” excuse has fallen apart

 by digby

Look who’s feeling a little stupid:

Sen. John Kennedy has long been known as a folksy, straight shooter on Capitol Hill. But now his legacy may be something else altogether: The guy who spread a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine.

As the House moves forward with its impeachment inquiry, President Donald Trump’s staunch allies have attempted to shift the focus to Ukraine. And Kennedy has emerged as the most prominent senator in this process, making Sunday show appearances that have perplexed his Senate colleagues by offering some level of equivalency between Russian and Ukrainian influence in 2016.

“I draw a completely different conclusion from his,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said. “And it’s my understanding he has now changed his mind a bit. But as a member of the Intelligence Committee I have seen no evidence at all that the Ukrainians were involved. And indeed it is more likely that this is part of Russian disinformation campaign, in my judgment.”

“Kennedy’s allegation that President Poroshenko was interfering in the 2016 election is a knowing fabrication,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who traveled to Ukraine this year. “Using the Senate as a platform to invent lies about foreign governments’ involvement in American elections I don’t think is terribly becoming of the institution.”

The controversy surrounding Kennedy’s remarks began when he suggested in an interview on Fox News last month that Ukraine could have been responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016, a discredited conspiracy theory. Kennedy later walked back his comments, saying he misheard the question. But this past weekend, Kennedy reiterated his opinion when he said on “Meet the Press,” saying “both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.”

Kennedy, a former Democrat who endorsed John Kerry for president,often takes questions from reporters, huddling for 10 minutes or more, delivering colorful lines like comparing John McCain to a “boiled owl” or describing a spending bill as a “Great Dane-sized whiz down the leg” of taxpayers. But on Tuesday he appeared to finally have grown tired of talking.

“I gave two press conferences yesterday. I’ve done two interviews today. I’ve said all I want to say,” Kennedy said in an interview. “I believe what I believe. I showed everybody the articles. And reasonable people disagree sometimes.”

While Kennedy’s comments earned him a shout-out from Trump on Twitter Monday, lawmakers have only raised more questions. One Senate Republican, summing up the mood in the conference, put it this way: “I watched it on Meet the Press and I was like: Huh?

“I don’t know what he’s saying. I don’t know if he’s purposefully confusing the issue. I know he’s defending the president and that’s part of what he’s doing,” the senator said.

The Louisiana Republican’s plunge into the world of Trump-backed conspiracy theories stands in stark contrast to previous situations as he’s toed a less partisan line.

He recently skewered Steven Menashi, Trump’s nominee to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, for declining to answer questions from senators during his confirmation hearing, though he ended up supporting Menashi. He also helped sink Matthew Petersen, Trump’s judiciary nominee to the District Court for the District of Columbia, after grilling him over his lack of courtroom experience. Kennedy was also the deciding vote on a measure to restore net neutrality, joining Senate Democrats, and was critical of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s takedown of a Trump nominee.

Senate Republicans have largely accepted reports from intelligence officials that Russia interfered in 2016. Kennedy also endorses that view. But his contention that Ukrainian’s preference for Hillary Clinton amounted to election interference is now cleaving what was once a consensus on Capitol Hill.

Those who disagree include senior State Department officials, who reiterated Tuesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there is no proof that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. The No. 3 State Department official, David Hale, told senators that he’s seen “no credible evidence about these allegations of Ukraine.”

“Our focus at the State department has been, and as it should be, on the proven Russian interference in the 2016 elections and plans to do so in 2020,” Hale said.

Kennedy told reporters this week that he’s simply citing reporting from news organizations like the Financial Times, the Washington Examiner, The Economist, The New York Times and POLITICO.
[…]
Many Senate Republicans won’t criticize Kennedy directly, though they made clear that Russia, not Ukraine, presents the actual threat to the United States. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) cited testimony from State Department officials.

“They said there’s no evidence that Ukraine interfered in our election,” the Utah Republican said. “Of course leaders in other countries are pulling for one candidate or another. That’s to be expected but there’s a big difference between pulling for someone … and interfering in the way Russia did.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed that it’s common for countries to prefer one presidential candidate over another.

“I think it’s important to distinguish op-eds… from the systemic effort to undermine our election systems,” Rubio said. “There’s no way to compare any other efforts to what Russia did in 2016. … There’s nothing that compares not even in the same universe.”

The Senate will determine Trump’s fate if the House impeaches the president. Most Senate Republicans will likely defend Trump and vote to acquit him in an impeachment trial, but joining Kennedy’s Ukraine theories is a bridge too far for them.

“Everything I’ve seen from the intelligence community and our Intelligence Committee puts it squarely on Russia.” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 GOP senator. “Maybe he’s seen something I haven’t … I haven’t seen any evidence.”

When it’s too ridiculous for those guys you know it’s a dead letter. They also can’t say “the president was wrong but it’s not impeachable” because Trump won’t let them. So, they are down to “The president did nothing wrong, he’s just a crusader against corruption, it’s nothing but a witch hunt.”

Weak sauce, but it’s all they’ve got.

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