I’m still taking it easy and ignoring the news as best I can. Good thing, too, or I might have to write about this wee problem.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
That’s ok. Democratic congress members wouldn’t want to rush anything.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-impeachment-democrats-235184
Yeah, it would be bad if they tried and failed. You know like they did for decades with the Clintons.
I think the idea is that if you are going to pull the trigger, better make sure it’s a kill shot. Otherwise you end up like the recall effort in Wisconsin, where Walker was in a much stronger position after…the only way impeachment would work anyway is if the Republicans are on board. Dems can keep up the protests, keep the brakes on in the Senate, and keep pointing out the outrages but they can’t do much more without Repub support that isn’t there , not yet.
Not me. I would go after him, if I could. Unfortunately we have almost zero chance of doing it.
This is a story that will not be going away anytime too soon. And for good reason.
Good reason.
Yes indeed.
Our crooks don’r want to lose to their crooks.
End of story.
AG
I like my crooks i have some relationship to, to win, rather than the crooks that dont give a fuck about me, since i “belong” with my cooks.
Yes.
I believe you do.
A;little honesty goes a long way.
I personally do not “belong” to them, myself.
We all have to make our choices, I guess.
You?
AG
You do to their crooks.
Oh you think this is about choice?
Wake up AG, you are not that naive.
No.
I am not that naive.
Hustled from both sides?
I refuse to be hustled.
You?
AG
I know i am hustled at any moment.
But i know that not every hustle is equal, and not every crook is equally bad for me.
I may want to refuse to play, but i know i have to play something.
I dont have the illusion that i can somehow escape it all, assuming that i want to live somehow.
And i think all that goes for you too, feel free to correct me before i make any wrong assumptions.
I am under no illusions about how things operate, bazzz.
You say:
You have a lot of company.
I refuse to live that way, myself.
Gandhi said it best.
Easy to say, hard to do.
I am doing my best…
To the death, if necessary.
You doubt that?
Feel free.
I do.
Bet on it.
Someone with whom I studied once suggested that we…his students…”Live in the City but not of it. Like a spy.”
That’s my solution.
Still breathing, 35 years after he said that.
Still not surrendering.
You?
ASG
What do you think i mean when i say that you cant escape it, and how do you refuse to not make that impossible escape?
Doesnt it sound like we are about completely different things? And wouldnt you be interested in what i am trying to say?
I do feel like you dont trust me much, and that you reflexively have to stab at me, like you seem to do to everything you dont trust.
Now be the change that you would like to see, thats a powerful thought. I am somewhat to the left politically of where Ghandi was, apparently, and i try to live by that rule too.
I would be interested what exact change you like to see, and how you are living that rule, without all the usual fluff. You do use so much filler that the box often seems empty.
But before i interpret your behavior too much, i know you dont care about what i think of you any more than what you think of me, so that would only be counterproductive.
I will resp[ond to this one question:
The change that I would like to see…on a political level…is a movement towards what you might call “humanism.” That is, human lives first, before all else. I call it “human ecology,” myself. That would mean, among other things:
1-An educational system that gives every child…children of privilege as well and children of poverty and everywhere in between…an equal shot at a truly good education. This would be very expensive, andc it would mean coming off of the permanent war footing on which this country has been functioning since the Cold War.
2-Equal opportunity for advancement in the educational and working elements of society with no regard for anything except achievement. In two or three generations racism would be a thing of the past in the U.S. if this were to happen.
3-A change in our military system. The Department of Defense has been functioning as a Department of Offense for well over 60 years now. This must change if we are to be able to fix our educational system and other parts…physical and social…of this country’s infrastructure. The arms industry needs to be rearmed as an industry producing the machinery and technology that is necessary if we are to recover from the societal downward slide that we are seeing.
What am I doing about all of this?
Well…one, I am teaching and playing the music of this great country as hard and at as high a level as I can do so, worldwide. 50 years and counting. That’s my gig, and I do it well. Preserve the culture and you preserve the society. Let it be denatured into mechanistic, mass-produced bullshit and you can kiss the whole society goodbye.
Two…with what energies I have left, I have been writing on the web for almost 15 years about the rotted-out two party system of this country and its media apologists/enablers. One mind at a time, if need be. Either one of the parties must have a real internal revolution or a thjrd party needs to come forward…and win. As long as the corporate world owns the White House and Congress, nothing whatsoever is going to change except the names of the frontmen and frontwomen.
You asked; I answered. I have been on the bad-guy lists of the U.S. government since the late ’60s, when I wrote for Rat Newspaper in NYC. I know this for a fact because when one of my brothers went for a security clearance in the Air Force several years later…sometime in the ’70s, I believe…the very first thing they asked him was about me.
If you were to see me on the street or in any other public place, you would see just another white, woking-class Joe.
I pass as normal.
But I do not believe.
AG
Arthur, to achieve each of these goals for the United States, it would require a strong central government which created and enforced a broad set of civil rights which are much better than the ones we have now. This would be necessary to accomplish each of the policy aims you lay down here, but it would be particularly true of your worthwhile aim to create true equal opportunity for advancement.
Unfortunately, you want these things while keeping yourself trapped in the Ron Paul rabbit hole. You have spent many, many words here railing against a strong central government, and you have made elaborate claims that human nature makes it futile to defend civil rights for all Americans. Most tragically, you have opposed a strong defense of voting rights here, even though broader access to the vote is by far the easiest way to create the electorate which would vote in politicians who support your three policy aims.
Your ideology stands firmly in the way of your desired objectives.
You write:
And your “ideology” has gotten us…where, exactly?
A Trump presidency?
So it goes.
There has to be a better way.
AG
AG, you’re a funny, funny guy.
Thinking that somehow, you’re singularly free from control by the owners of our country. As if it really isn’t a choice of which cabal of billionaires own and control the country.
As if by not -making- a choice, you’re really not choosing. When in fact, by not making a choice, you’re just choosing the status quo.
Perhaps you should read about “acts of omission” and “acts of commission”.
I’m sure you realize that your schtick is far past its sell-by date, yes? I mean, pure unadulterated cynicism about -everything- ….. well, it’s pretty boring after a while.
Oh, God, please go away and don’t come back.
Your adolescent “I invented stoicism” posturing (as well as your Mr. Rogers delivery) is so tiresome, as is your indiscriminate disrespect for other commenters, who apparently exist only to give you straight lines.
In what ways do these two tweets conflict with each other? Discuss:
Senator Ben Sasse
@SenSasse
18 Dec 2016
Why federalism? Because Nebraska & Vermont are different places with different people who have different values and different problems.
Senator Ben Sasse
@SenSasse
25 Nov 2016
Today we face a crisis of cultural catechesis. If the next generation doesn’t understand the American idea, then freedom will slip away.
The second one made me look up the meaning of catechesis. I still don’t get it.
I can’t speak for centerfielddj, but I took him/her to mean that we teach children our national ideology in the same way that children receive religious instruction. Our civic values include equality, tolerance, freedoms in the Bill of Rights, pride in our role as a beacon for the world. Those values are getting lost.
I agree with Senator Sasse that American civic values are getting lost. But that is because Sasse and his movement have run a decades-long campaign to propagandize against American civic values. This campaign has now entered our public school systems, frequently reducing the amount of civic studies time and perverting the content of civic studies on offer, elevating the powerful and eliminating concern for the less powerful in American history and social studies textbooks.
There have been assertions against a strong Federal government throughout our history, from the crafting of the Articles of Confederation and Constitution to the President Jefferson’s response to Marbury v. Madison to the Civil War and beyond. In the wake of each of these civic battles, limits on federalism and the reaffirmation of a central Federal government with rights, responsibilities and, when necessary, coercive power has survived.
Senator Sasse’s claim that “…Nebraska & Vermont are different places with different people who have different values…” is a direct attack on American values. This is the argument the Confederate States of America made. It’s offensive and culturally treasonous. Just because we’ve been propagandized to accept this John Birch Society version of reality does not make it so.
Oh, teh funny! teh funny!
Sasse might be right. Only in a way he doesn’t fully comprehend. That American catechism …. right from George Washington and the cherry tree, thru 1776, the Constitution, the 3/5 compromise, Lincoln, and on and on, -is- a religious thing for …. wait for it … wait for it …. IMMIGRANTS and other minorities.
Because for us, there is nothing else. We know that we will live or die, our children will live or die, by the rule of law and the rights enshrined in the “holy books” of our nation.
Senator Sasse, the problem isn’t with the people who voted for Hillary, and are now protesting against Lord Dampnut. You know where the problem is.
Oh, maybe he means me because I wasn’t up to his overwrought, obscurantist word usage. I’ll run for my life. A real put on, this man, I was forced to do the RC catechism to my eternal grief.
The joke is that Sasse’s “federalism”–conservative-speak for anti-federalism, the view that each state is a unique place and therefore the federal government should abstain from environmental and health regulation and support of education–is pretty shallow, since he also claims there’s this one-size-fits-all American ideology that we all must rigidly follow.
The old dilemma of the libertarian authoritarian (don’t regulate me, just let me tell all the poors what to do) in Tweet format.
Well, we knew there was a deal coming before long. Putin has to collect his debt. This could be it. Good for Russia and good for the US of A. Corruption never ends with this guy. But OTOH this seems a little too soon and arrives amid a month of Trump disasters.
This is aimed right at McCain. The donald is in charge and this will prove that he is in charge and there is nothing McCain can do to stop him. Time for McCain to fall in line with the rest of the GOP. Like R Maddow likes to say “Watch this space”.
A terrible tragedy that we will never remember because it never happened.
Trump is parroting garbage he’s heard from the Breitbart and Co. noise machine, but there was something last summer, a spate of car burnings in suburbs heavily populated by immigrants. The thing is, nobody knows who was doing it, and while the right wing says it’s obvious, Sweden’s neo-Nazis promised that they were going to make 2016 a “year of violence“. Maybe by sneaking into the neighborhoods in the small hours and torching the residents’ cars?
SoHo Project Florida – Tevfik Arif – Bayrock Group – Haim Felix Sater [NYT – 2007] – Alex Sapir, president of the Sapir Organization, a partner in Trump SoHo.
Mr. Sater was born in the Soviet Union, the son of Rachel and Mikhail Sater. [Aka “Satter”]
Along the way he became embroiled in a plan to buy antiaircraft missiles on the black market for the Central Intelligence Agency in either Russia or Afghanistan, depending on which of his former associates is telling the story.
A federal complaint brought against him in a 1998 money laundering and stock manipulation case was filed in secret and remains under seal.
See my post with earlier link to SoHo and Alex Sapir – links to Israel’s PM Bibi Netanyahu …. perhaps recent visit wasn’t a social call at the White House. Netanyahu seems to be facing some criminal charges at home, trying to put blame on Sara.
○ Netanyahu’s ‘list of millionaires’ – Nr. 1 Sheldon Adelson nr. 2 Ronald Perelman nr. 3 Stephen Wynn nr. 4 Ronald Lauder nr. 5 Tamir Sapir
Looks as if Alex Sapir runs the super-organization but Felix Sater runs Bayrock in particular?
Based on a NYT article, Martin Longman wrote an excellent front page diary, put the info in context and added the latest additional sources …
○ Trump’s SoHo Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence by BooMan on Feb. 20, 2017
Added key words: Georgia – black market – stinger missiles – CIA intelligence – FBI sting
I just read Frank Bruni in the NYT to waste some time, and what it comes down to is: There are no words for Trump. So what does anyone do next: repeat that every day for nearly eight more years? Evidently. Until someone comes up with something better.
Don’t worry, Lindsay Graham has let us known that 2017 is the year of kicking Russia’s ass in Congress. Really hot man, that Lindsay.
What was Cohen thinking (or not thinking) in disclosing this bombshell to the NYT?
Logan Act violations, anyone? Of course just theoretical under the geek AG we have.
I had to look it up …
○ Don’t Call It Treason
Times seems to think it’s perfectly legal, as it would be unless it was payment for services rendered.
Cohen’s story is that they’re just nice guys.
Holy smokes, had no idea about some of the histories you chronicled here. You make a persuasive argument.
Josh Marshall joins you in noting the presence of Sater in the Times story, and he is expressing a somewhat similar view of the importance of that reporting detail. Today, Josh places attention on Michael Cohen’s attempt to put this malevolent genie back in the bottle.
In other news, spiritual vampire Milo Yiannopoulos is beginning to show an inability to survive his voluntary episode in daylight. Thank goodness, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
I remain very unhappy about Maher’s poor judgement in giving Milo a platform on Friday, but good things came out of it. Here’s another good thing, heavy on the catharsis:
Wilmore starts fighting on the battle field Milo lays out around 2:15 on the video.
Milo is such a sad nihilistic contrarian fuck feeling sorry for himself.
And most of these asses dont start to having a clue, or are playing pretend, Wilmore seems to be the only one bright enough to understand what is happening.
This is my new favorite thing:
Trump’s Pick for National Security Adviser Thinks Notorious Alt-Right Troll Milo Yiannopoulos Is `Phenomenal’
By Claire Landsbaum
November 29, 2016
2:55 p.m.
Because OF COURSE FLYNN DOES. Chris Hayes tweeted the link to this story with the comment “Simpler times…”.
All is well!