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Month: December 2019

An unhinged gangster in Florida

An unhinged gangster in Florida

In case you were blessedly off twitter this weekend, you missed this display of presidential insanity from Mar-a-lago:

Sheer lunacy. But it wasn’t all just a display of Trump’s id running wild. There was also this stuff:

He also tweeted out the alleged name of the whistleblower, which also contained a litany of lies. They’ve removed the tweet now. I have a screenshot but I won’t share it. It was up for hours.

David Frum at the Atlantic wrote about this today:

Amid a two-day binge of post-Christmas rage-tweeting, President Donald Trump retweeted the name of the CIA employee widely presumed to be the whistle-blower in the Ukraine scandal. On Thursday night, December 26, Trump retweeted his campaign account, which had tweeted a link to a Washington Examiner article that printed the name in the headline. Then, in the early hours of Friday morning, December 27, Trump retweeted a supporter who named the presumed whistle-blower in the text of the tweet.
[…]
Lawyers debate whether the naming of the federal whistle-blower is in itself illegal. Federal law forbids inspectors general to disclose the names of whistle-blowers, but the law isn’t explicit about disclosure by anybody else in government.What the law does forbid is retaliation against a whistle-blower. And a coordinated campaign of vilification by the president’s allies—and the president himself—surely amounts to “retaliation” in any reasonable understanding of the term.

While the presumed whistle-blower reportedly remains employed by the government, he is also reportedly subject to regular death threats, including at least implicit threat by Trump himself. Trump was recorded in September telling U.S. diplomats in New York:

“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call—heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw—they’re almost a spy. I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

He ends the piece making the case that Trump is a gangster president who heads a gangster White House. It’s true. Frum doesn’t mention that he does all his gangster activity right out in the open, but he does. He’s used his twitter feed to threaten his domestic enemies, dangle pardons and intimidate witnesses. And far too many people have accepted the idea that if he isn’t trying to hide it he can’t be doing something wrong.

That’s not true. Gangsters know that you have to demonstrate your power publicly or no one will believe you will use it. Sure, sometimes they just quietly wack a rival and throw him in the garbage dump. But often they hit them in the streets and make sure that everyone knows they were the one’s who did it.

Outing the whistleblower is witness intimidation, plain and simple.  The Intelligence Community and federal law enforcement have seen what he and his henchmen did to Peter Strzok. They’ve now seen him out the whistleblower. He fired Comey, Yovanovich and McCabe. Whether high level appointees or low level employees, everyone in government is aware that if they cross him he will try to publicly destroy them — or worse.

That’s what gangsters do.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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The tariffs have backfired. Do his voters care?

The tariffs have backfired. Do his voters care?

I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that Trump doesn’t know anything about economics. Considering his history, it’s clear that he’s really only good at inheriting money, self-promotion and running con-games. He liked to present himself as a trade “expert” but his understanding of that is really just a puerile xenophobia in which wily foreigners are screwing America and all you have to do is be “strong” and “make them pay” and America will make the world bend to its will. It is a 6th grade understanding of how the world actually works.

Here’s how well that’s worked out for him:


President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper…

“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said.

Tit-for-tat trade retaliation is an idea best relegated to the past, given the presence of globally interconnected supply chains, the Fed researchers found.

The top ten manufacturing industries hit by foreign retaliatory tariffs were producers of: magnetic and optical media, leather goods, aluminum sheet, iron and steel, motor vehicles, household appliances, sawmills, audio and video equipment, pesticide, and computer equipment.

The top ten industries hit by higher prices were: aluminum sheet, steel product, boilers, forging, primary aluminum production, secondary aluminum smelting, architectural metals, transportation equipment, general purpose machinery and household appliances.

The researchers don’t measure the effects on business confidence resulting from the uncertainty regarding U.S. international trade policy. Many economists see this doubt about future government policy as a primary driver in the decline in business investment this year.

He and the Republicans have juiced the economy to the max with massive military spending and tax cuts in the middle of an expansion and it’s worked well for them in the short term. I suspect that the Great Recession was so deep and affected people so profoundly that inflation has been kept in check because workers are still risk averse and employers know it.

I think Trump is oblivious to all that. He’s just lucky and has been enabled by the shameless Republican party which is happy to give their rich patrons an enormous payday regardless of the consequences.

You would think the results of this trade war would show some erosion in his base. But there doesn’t seem to be any. I guess all that “economic anxiety” doesn’t really have anything to do with economics after all. Go figure.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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If you wondered about Democratic strategy…

If you wondered about Democratic strategy…


this goes a long way to explain why Pelosi and Schumer are giving McConnell heartburn and making Trump twist in the wind:

A growing number of Republicans are privately warning of increasing fears of a total wipeout in 2020: House, Senate, and White House. 

All of this is unfolding while the economy still looks strong, and before public impeachment proceedings have officially begun.

House Republicans in swing districts are retiring at a very fast pace, especially in the suburbs of Texas and elsewhere. (Republicans talk grimly of the “Texodus.”) Rep. Greg Walden — the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the only Republican in Oregon’s congressional delegation — yesterday shocked the party by becoming the 19th GOP House member to not seek re-election.

[…] 
Scott Reed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior political strategist, tells me that third-quarter fundraising reports showing three Republican senators being out-raised by Democratic challengers (in Arizona, Iowa and Maine) “are a three-alarm fire.”

“The party was shaken by that,” Reed said. “We’re all worried.”
[…]
Republican strategists and campaign staffers said that with the polarization of the Trump era, key House and Senate races will depend even more than usual on the presidential race.

Senate races look so tight that control could be decided by a January 2021 runoff in Georgia.

I think the impeachment has always been about the Senate as much as it is about Trump. Putting those swing state GOPers on the hot seat is important going into the election. The Democrats have them in a terrible squeeze.

It is as important to get rid of McConnell, the “gravedigger of democracy”, as it is to get rid of Trump. Nothing good can ever happen as long as he is in control of the Senate. It would be nice to defeat him at the ballot box but that’s a tall order. Taking away his majority is doable.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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The descent of Economic Man by @BloggersRUs

The descent of Economic Man
by Tom Sullivan

Thomas O. Buford chaired the philosophy department during my first pass through college. Not only a fine academic, but a good, wise man. He died last year. I attended his memorial. Something Tom said in his office one afternoon decades ago never left me.

It didn’t matter how logical a system of thought was, he said, if it left you with a world you couldn’t live in.

The world we inhabit today is built on such a system. A set of assumptions about human beings. Bad ones so ubiquitous now that we accept them as just the way things are. A lot of us are struggling to live in that world now, even before climate changes renders it uninhabitable. Earlier this month, a review of books in the Times Literary Supplement examined the origins of our economic model and just where it has led us.

Economic Man conjured by economists of the 1950s is a base creature: greedy, lazy, selfish. “Only greedy, lazy and selfish,” writes Paul Collier. Economic man is a “travesty” of a human being who cannot be trusted:

He will only work if incentivized by material benefit, so his behaviour must be watched like a hawk, and his rewards linked to the observed performance of contract-specified actions. “Eat what you kill”, the phrase used in the investment banks to describe their system of monitored rewards, is implicitly normative: you get what you deserve, and you deserve what you get.

Such behavior would get one ostracized in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunters share their catch. Economic Man hordes his. “[I]n well-functioning societies,” Collier explains, “humans construct and abide by a vast web of kindness and mutual obligations of which Economic Man would be incapable.” Homo sapiens is a social animal. Economic Man fancies himself a rock and an island.

Yet, humans are today compelled by the economy we have constructed and an ecumenical faith in “The Market” to conform our existence around a theoretical model at odds with our nature. How did we come to this?

Behavior spreads through the pressure of opinion, writes Damon Centola in “How Behavior Spreads: The science of complex contagions.” Typically, the most prestigious members of a group are modest and generous. Others emulate those traits. But those norms can and sometimes do go wrong, Collier adds:

Economic and technological shocks, combined with a culture of “you deserve what you get”, have created big winners whose behaviour is disproportionately influential. As these winners turn into Economic Man, bad behaviour becomes prominent: they buy yachts; they dump their families; they brag. In consequence of being disproportionately influential, these people spread immodesty and selfishness: their repellent norms become more prevalent.

So prevalent, in fact, that Americans in 2016 elevated corruption incarnate to the White House. With the Jeffrey Epstein and college admissions scandals, with the inequality created by the drive to “maximize shareholder value” whatever the cost to communities, and with climate change threatening species including our own, only now has it become clear that Economic Man has led humanity into a societal cul-de-sac.

Citing Anand Giridharadas’s “Winners Take All: The elite charade of changing the world,” what is new, Collier adds, “is not so much the selfishness of this elite, as its brazen assertion of moral superiority, signalling its detachment by espousing values that alienate many of its fellow citizens.”

In “Licence To Be Bad,” Jonathan Aldred sees rationality used to excuse selfish and greed. In our economics, they become praiseworthy. (Michael Douglas put it more colorfully in the 1980s.) The idea that cooperative action via government is the problem spread like a contagion, at times like a game of telephone, from Friedrich von Hayek to Milton Friedman (with John von Neumann, John Nash, Gary Becker, and others contributing their own rational flourishes). Building an economy on faith in Economic Man’s pursuit of narrow self-interest led to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, to the financial crisis of 2008 and, indirectly, to the unsettled political and physical climate in which growing numbers of humans struggle.

People are reduced to human resources, economic inputs. Decades of this economic logic enriches an investor class that refuses to share its catch. Our organizing model satisfies theoreticians by factoring out humanity. The needs of business come first. Humans serve the economy. It no longer serves them.

Citing Colin Mayer’s “Prosperity: Better business makes the greater good,” Collier continues, “Societies get the form of capitalism that public policy enables and encourages. We need business to be socially purposive: to find profitable solutions to society’s problems. Too often, what we have currently got is the conflation of purpose with profit.” Mayer wants to see changes to corporate governance that broaden ownership, encourage longer investment horizons, and better align the company’s purpose with the public interest.

What is hopeful in these analyses is they show speaking out against the madness is no longer taboo. The Great Recession, gaping inequality, and climate change have opened people’s eyes to how the design of this economy has mutilated our society and our democracy.

Danielle Allen, director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, examines the flaws in our prevailing economic theory in the Washington Post:

… there are three fundamental blind spots in our most recent paradigms of political economy. The first is a description of human beings as “rational actors,” whose decisions rest on essentially utilitarian forms of calculation. The second is a depiction of society as consisting of millions of Robinson Crusoes, all wholly independent of one another. The third is a failure to recognize the value in forms of coordination achieved other than through the price mechanism.

We are a social species, dependent on one another in ways spreadsheets cannot comprehend.* “Social cohesion is an efficiency mechanism ― transactions, institution-building and the like all move forward more easily, and in a less costly fashion, when fueled by interpersonal trust ― and the same is true of well-functioning political institutions. Neither of these can be achieved through market mechanisms alone,” Allen states bluntly.

Cooperation, interdependence, and trust are foundational and must be nurtured through the pressure of opinion again. “[E]mulation amplifies the prosocial instincts with which we are hardwired,” Collier writes. “Animals seek and respect dominance, but humans put more value on prestige – good opinion rather than fear – which tends to confer the greater reproductive advantage.” Or at least, it once did.

Several years ago, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey observed that compassion carries evolutionary advantage:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

The death of Economic Man “will be balm to the soul,” Collier concludes. “Only the economists will mourn him.” An economy in which “you get what you deserve, and you deserve what you get” cuts across the grain of millions of years of social evolution. We may be just now awakening from the spell cast by a mere three quarters of a century of economic theory that has led to unimaginable wealth for a few at the risk of planetary ruin for all. Whatever its seeming logic, is it a world we can live in?

* Riley Howell, 21, sacrificed his life earlier this year to stop a shooter at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Lucasfilm recently honored the Star Wars fan by naming a Jedi Master after him.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — digby

Friday Night Soother

Friday Night Soother

Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium is proud to announce the birth of two Snow Leopard cubs

Snow leopard cubs!

When they were one month old, the male and female cubs weighed just over five pounds. The cubs’ parents are Rosemary and Pasha. Rosemary is 5-years-old, weighs approximately 78 pounds, and has lived at the Zoo since 2015. Pasha is 10-years-old, weighs approximately 106 pounds, and arrived at the Zoo in 2012.

Dad can currently be seen by guests in the Asian Highlands exhibit. This pair also had a cub named Victoria in 2017. Victoria recently went to live at the Binder Park Zoo near Battle Creek, Michigan.

Snow Leopards are listed as “Vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. There are only an estimated 2,700 – 3,300 Snow Leopards left in the world. The main threats facing them include loss of habitat, retaliatory killing from predation on livestock, and illegal trade in furs, bones and other body parts.

Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium is a dedicated member of the Snow Leopard Species Survival Plan (SSP), a program that works to maintain a genetically stable assurance population of Snow Leopards in zoos. Research conducted by the Zoo’s nutrition and reproductive physiology departments has provided valuable information to the Snow Leopard SSP that is helping to improve the care and management of these amazing cats around the world.

In addition to efforts taking place on Zoo grounds, Omaha’s Zoo and Aquarium supports the Snow Leopard Trust, an organization working out in the field within Snow Leopard habitat. Snow Leopard Trust focuses primarily on community education directed toward improving the relationships between herders and big cats by creating incentives for the community to protect Snow Leopards and their ecosystem. To learn more about Snow Leopard Trust’s mission, visit: www.snowleopard.org

If I lived in Omaha, I would get myself a six-pack of these:


Through the use of traditional ingredients (bitter orange peel, chamomile and coriander), Snow Leopard Wit combines floral and spice aromas with bright citrus to create a delicately balanced wheat ale…

Proceeds generated from Snow Leopard Wit will directly support the Zoo’s conservation efforts to help Mongolia’s population of snow leopards, an endangered species to be part of Asian Highlands opening at the Zoo in May. Specifically, proceeds from the brew will help support the development of snow leopard protected areas to reduce poaching, mining and unsustainable land development.

Cheers!

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

Watch your step Trumpie. That gender gap is a chasm.

Watch your step Trumpie. That gender gap is a chasm.

Harry Enten at CNN takes a look:

If President Donald Trump loses in 2020, it will be at the hands of women…

An examination of recent CNN polls reveal that we could be looking at a record gender gap in the 2020 presidential election. For simplicity’s sake, I’m comparing Former Vice President Joe Biden (the leader in the Democratic primary polls) to Trump. In general election matchups against all the leading Democratic candidates, a greater than 25-point gender gap existed.

Biden has held a 60% to 36% lead over Trump among women in an average of our last two (October and December) CNN/SSRS polls. The same polling put Trump up 52% to 42% among men voters. When you combine Biden’s 24-point lead among women and Trump’s 10 point lead among men, this makes for a 34-point gender gap.

Gender gaps have been getting larger in recent years. From 1952 to about 1980, there really wasn’t a gender gap in presidential elections. So this isn’t just about Trump.

Still, this 34-point gender gap would be a significant increase from what we saw in 2016. In that election, the gender gap was 25 points. This, itself, was a record gender gap for any presidential election dating back to 1952. In fact, no presidential election had previously featured a gender gap of even greater than 20 points.

The gender gap in 2018 was also larger than in any previous midterm. 
Why is this happening? Every day of Trump is turning more and more women Democratic. And I would venture to guess that this is not just because of Trump himself. It’s the servile, sycophantic boot-licking of the GOP establishment and the deplorable behavior of his followers. They are all a bunch of cowards and bullies. 

The Democratic margin among women is now 24 points, 10 points more than it was in 2016. The Republican margin among men remains unchanged at about 10 points.  Non-white women support the Democrat by a whopping 50 point margin and white women with a college degree by 28.

The big shift however, comes from white women without a college degree. They have shifted allegiance for Trump from 23 points to just 4 — a 19 point difference. 

The white non-college men still love him, of course.  But with this shift among the women the gender gap among whites without a college degree is now 39 points 

He observes that in order to win, Trump will either have to find away to win back some women or expand his base among men. And I’d say he’s probably right about this:

Knowing Trump loves a base first strategy, it wouldn’t be surprising if he chooses the latter and the gender gap ends up even larger than being polled right now.

Get ready for more war criminals on the campaign trail, I guess.

Honestly, I don’t know what he could do to win back women who voted for him before. The reason he’s lost them is because they can now see what he is.

Once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. It’s horrible.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

Another Ukrainian shoe drops

Another Ukrainian shoe drops

Reuters dropped a little report that nobody noticed but could end up being important:


Andrew Favorov, the No. 2 at Ukraine’s state-run gas company Naftogaz, says he sat on a red leather bench seat and listened wide-eyed as the men boasted of their connections to President Donald Trump and proposed a deal to sell large quantities of liquefied natural gas from Texas to Ukraine.

But first, Favorov says, they told him they would have to remove two obstacles: Favorov’s boss and the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
[…]
What he didn’t know as he sipped whiskey that evening was that high-ranking officials in the Ukrainian government were already taking steps to topple his boss, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. And two months later, Trump recalled U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat with a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader.

The gas deal sought by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman never came to pass. But their efforts to profit from contacts with GOP luminaries are now part of a broad federal criminal investigation into the two men and their close associate, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.

Giuliani’s out there giving drunken interviews calling the Southern District federal prosecutors a bunch of “liberal”, “idiots” while Bill Barr is running an official cover-up for the president. It’s hard to say where that case will end up.

We are in the middle of a presidential impeachment process and every single day new evidence emerges that shows this abuse of power for political purposes was being gamed by payoffs and business deals to sweeten the pot. It’s much, much dirtier than just that phone call or Gordon Sondland’s efforts. Rudy’s end of this scheme was criminal and the president was almost certainly in the loop. He and Rudy are thick as thieves.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

The Doral Debacle was based on a lie. Of course.

The Doral Debacle was based on a lie


by digby

ABC News

CREW got the records about Trump’s Doral gambit. It’s as we thought — a torrent of lies to cover a con.  Of course:

CREW received records from the United States Secret Service that, along with emails from Doral city officials, undermine President Trump’s dubious claim that members of the Secret Service wanted the 2020 G-7 Summit to be hosted at Trump’s Doral resort in Miami. The reality appears to be quite different, with the Secret Service instead expressing reluctance, saying “the property does present[] some challenges,” followed by a redaction that implies security concerns. The records also seem to show that Doral was added for consideration at the last minute, saying “[b]y departure, they had already cut two (California and North Carolina) and added Miami on the back end.” Taken together, the records that CREW obtained call into question nearly every aspect of Trump’s justification of his choice. 

Trump leaned heavily on a claim that after an exhaustive search, members of the government preferred Doral, saying “When my people came back…They went to places all over the country. And they came back and they said, ‘This [Doral] is where we would like to be.’ Now we had military people doing it. We had Secret Service people doing it.” 

[…]The email that was ultimately provided suggests a disjointed process, where Doral was added on as an afterthought. Signed by a member of Dignitary Protective Division’s Special Events team, the email suggests the Secret Service wasn’t able to make it down to Doral until a month after the original itinerary concluded. “Yesterday was the first time we put eyes on this property,” the email, dated July 12, says, apparently referring to Doral.

Doral is going broke.  They desperately needed the money and the free promotion.

Somebody managed to talk him out of doing it while the Democrats were contemplating impeachment articles. I’m sure they told him that the place would come under serious scrutiny, which he clearly does not want. And there was some talk that the foreign leaders would be in conflict with some of their own ethics rules that would preclude them from putting money directly into Trump’s pockets. Duh.

The RNC is making it up to him as best they can, however. They’re holding their winter meetings there ensuring that GOP donors can get hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Trump family coffers.

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Remember the decades of tax fraud? Yeah whatever …

Remember the decades of tax fraud? Yeah.


by digby

I’d honestly forgotten about this.

President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

The author of that tweet added:

One of the hardest things to convey to future generations will be the fact that we once had a president who just had so many scandals—any one of which would have ended previous presidencies—that none of them actually stuck because they were so hard to keep track of.

This is a key observation. The tsunami of information is tough enough. But Trump has an overwhelming number of scandals and they serve to make the public and even many critics just throw up their hands.

He was impeached for using taxpayer money to bribe the Ukrainian president to sabotage the election for him. That’s very bad, to be sure. And the echoes of the 2016 election and the Russian interference that lend it the gravitas it has. But it’s the tip of he iceberg. The outright graft and public corruption, the nepotism, the cronyism, the history of tax fraud and money laundering as well as the long list of sexual assaults and other grotesque personal behavior are all now pretty much just secondary concerns.

I think many people believe that all this will come out in the wash in the election and we’ll look back on this as some sort of temporary tear in the matrix. The problem is that this tear has permanently weakened the matrix. We may not see another president with the unique combination of Trump’s personal flaws. But from now on, any corrupt authoritarian knows how he can manipulate the system to enhance his own power.

Unless Trump is held accountable in a much more meaningful way than this impeachment and a small loss in those electoral college states I’m afraid that we will not put this genie back in the bottle. We simply haven’t grasped the magnitude of the damage he’s done.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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“This guy is freaking evil”

“This guy is freaking evil”

The New York Times has a long, blockbuster piece out this morning about the psychopathic war criminal Eddie Gallagher and it is stunning. In fact,  it is enough to make you sick.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.

“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”

Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.

They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.

“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

Such dire descriptions of Chief Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.”

The article goes on to describe the impulsive killing of the half conscious teenager, after which he held “an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy.”

“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.

Gallagher’s Trumpian response?

“My first reaction to seeing the videos was surprise and disgust that they would make up blatant lies about me, but I quickly realized that they were scared that the truth would come out of how cowardly they acted on deployment,” Chief Gallagher said in a statement issued through his lawyer.

“I felt sorry for them that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be. As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. Their lies and N.C.I.S.’s refusal to ask hard questions or corroborate their stories strengthened my resolve to go to trial and clear my name.”

The videos and text messages do not in any way appear to support that. If anything it’s the opposite.

Gallagher was acquitted because one of the most important witnesses got immunity and then changed his story on the stand. I don’t know if we’ll ever find out the whole story about that.

The Navy Secretary just resigned when the president insisted on full exonerations of Gallagher and two other war criminals. He just partied with Gallagher down in Mar-a-lago and appeared on stage with another one. And all of this based upon the word of one disturbed right wing commentator on Fox News and his own depraved character.

The people who defend Trump on the basis of his isolationism had better hope that there is no national security emergency during this or any subsequent term because this demonstrates that his love of war crimes is no idle campaign rhetoric. If you liked Dick Cheney’s torture program you’re going to love it when Trump takes off the gloves.

 We’ve been lucky so far. All he’s done is make some impulsive decisions to abandon allies and dry up foreign aid and military support because of “the cost” even as he’s created the most bloated, excessive military budget in history. He’s celebrating war criminals and endorsing a breakdown of military discipline that could be catastrophic. And he’s getting away with all of it.

We’d better hope that’s the extent of the damage. If a real national security threat presents itself I honestly don’t know what will happen.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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