Month: November 2017

I’m pretty sure that I am working harder over this holiday weekend than the president of the United States.

(I wrote a reply to a comment that yastreblyansky made on Booman’s recent post A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight. It grew, and I am now submitting it as a stand-alone piece.)

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From yastreblyansky:

That complaint about calling Putin a “Nazi” is a bit of a misdirection: of course Putin doesn’t subscribe to an ideology founded on the idea of Germans as a “master race”. More useful to map the Russian Federation government against one of the classic definitions of fascism in general, such as Lawrence Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fascism. It’s pretty startling how tight the fit is.

My reply:

It is also startling how close a fit those 14 characteristics are to the U.S., yastreblyansky. And not just recently…over the past 50+ years…since the JFK/RFK/MLK Jr. assassination years.

Particularly these:

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

I can look out of my Bronx window and see four flags without searching. Watched any mass media sports events recently? Seen what has happened to the football players who had the temerity to publicly protest the state of this country by taking a knee during the Star Mangled…errr, ahhh, I meant Star Spangled…Banner festivities?

Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights

Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

C’mon…were Fallujah and Abu Ghraib so long ago? Drone strikes on non-combatants during our lovely “Peace President” years? The U.S. has the single highest percentage of it citizens in prison of any country on earth.

In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause

The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

I repeat:” racial , ethnic or religious minorities.”

National incarceration rate (per 100,000 of all ages)

African-Americans are incarcerated at the rate of 2,306 per 100,000 African-American U.S. citizens.

Latinos are incarcerated at the rate of 831 per 100,000 Latino U.S. citizens.

Whites are incarcerated at the rate of 450 per 100,000 White U.S. citizens.

Do the math.

Supremacy of the Military

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next eight countries combined.

U.S.-$611 billion (And that’s not counting the dark money that goes to agencies like the CIA…multiple billions and billions more. Bet on it.)

The next eight countries? China, Russia, Saudi Arabia (!!!), India, France, the U.K., Japan and Germany? $595 billion.

Controlled Mass Media

Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

Witness the…now almost three years old…resolutely anti-Trump media barrage of the major mass media. Witness the buildup to the Shock and Awe attack on Iraq under Bush II. Do you think that the anti-Trump thing is because he’s such a bad man??? I call bullshit. Of course he is, but if he was playing ball with the establishment instead of trying to essentially take over, they’d be praising him to the skies. Bet on that as well.

I could go on, but I’ll just include the relevant titles of Britt’s 14 Characteristics of Fasicsm. Anyone wth half a brain could provide examples of these points in mainstream U.S. policy over the past 50 years or so.

Read on:

Obsession with National Security

Religion and Government are Intertwined

Corporate Power is Protected

Labor Power is Suppressed

Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts

Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

Fraudulent Elections

The only one of that I leave out from Britt’s list is “Rampant Sexism.” Why? As has been obvious in the headlines of recent months, there is most certainly a culture of rampant sexism in place in the U.S., but it is more subtly promulgated than in other…call them “Neofascist” for want of a better word…major powers like Russia. Less mainstream sexual choices are actually being supported by the centrist controllers and their media. In part this is due to political necessities…votes count here more than they do in more rigidly controlled systems…but also (as I have said elsewhere on this site) I think that birth control and homosexuality are gradually being recognized by the controllers as necessary parts of a depopulation movement. Too many people, not enough earth. Not enough work either, mostly due to the tech revolution combined with multinational corporations choosing to have their manufacturing done as cheaply as possible, thus sending work out the U.S. to more poverty-stricken areas of the world. Ross Perot quite accurately predicted what was about to happen during his 1992 debates with the two early neocentrists Bush I and Clinton I. (From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates):

Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.

PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.

He was right on the money except for the “12 to 15 years” thing. It’s taking longer, but we are well on our way to wage parity with the poorer countries of the world.

Well on our way.

Look around.

AG

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Red Canyon painting.  The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ve concentrated my efforts on the rocks for this week’s cycle.  They now appear with more refined cracks and highlights.  Note that the remaining portions appear with a mottled overpaint of the prior week’s solid red-orange.  I’ve now gotten things to a state where I can concentrate on the other elements.  That will be for next week’s cycle.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

At about 11:14pm on November 6th, 2012, enough states were called for President Obama that he was declared the winner of the election by NBC News. That was quickly followed up by a similar call on Fox News and finally by CNN. At 11:29pm, Donald Trump blasted out the following defiant tweet:

We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

Somewhere in Russia, Konstantin Rykov saw Trump’s tweet pop up in his Twitter feed.

Almost exactly four years later, on November 12th, 2016, Mr. Rykov explained what happened next in a pair of Facebook posts. In the first post, Rykov explained how he first made contact with Trump:

[Trump] lifted his plane to the sky and flew between New York and DC, calling the whole world through his twitter — to start a march on Washington!

Without a moment’s thought, I wrote him a reply, which sounded like this in Russian: “I’m ready. What should I do?”

Suddenly! There was a thin squeak of warning in the DM.

It was a message from Donald Trump. More precisely a picture. In the picture he was sitting in the armchair of his jet, smiling cheerfully and showing me the thumb of his right hand.

 

In the second post, Rykov explained how things went from there:

What was our idea with Donald Trump?

For four years and two days .. it was necessary to get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality. Ensure the victory of Donald in the election of the US President. Then create a political alliance between the United States, France, Russia (and a number of other states) and establish a new world order.

Our idea was insane, but realizable.

In order to understand everything for the beginning, it was necessary to “digitize” all possible types of modern man.

Donald decided to invite for this task — the special scientific department of the “Cambridge University.”

British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes — the “ideal image” of a possible Trump supporter. Then .. put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone.

Then it was only necessary to upload this data to information flows and social networks. And we began to look for those who would have coped with this task better than others.

At the very beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev.

The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.

Keep in mind that this was all written just four days after Trump was elected. It was before people started asking questions about Cambridge Analytica or targeted social media ads. Mr. Rykov might have been boasting as he spiked the football in the end zone, perhaps even elevating or exaggerating his role. What he didn’t think at that point, however, is that he had any reason to hide what he’d done.

You probably want to know who this guy is, and that’s understandable. If he’s just some dude on the internet, then his claims are of some interest but maybe hard to gauge as to their importance.

Let’s flash-forward to October 2015, just after the very first debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. In a piece David Drucker wrote for the conservative Washington Examiner called Putin Loves Donald Trump, Mr. Rykov plays a lead role:

Kremlin mouthpiece Konstantin Rykov said Wednesday in a Twitter post that Trump won the first Democratic presidential debate, held Tuesday in Las Vegas. In that tweet, Rykov linked to a Russian language, pro-Trump website with a Russian domain, www.Trump2016.ru, that he is likely behind. Until a few weeks ago, Rykov’s Twitter home page featured Trump and his 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Western sources who monitor Russian politics told the Washington Examiner that Rykov is a propagandist arm of the Putin government machine. “Rykov is considered to be one of the leading pro-Kremlin bloggers in Russia,” said Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Obama who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank. “As you can see from his Twitter feed, he is very active. And he loves Trump.”

One source told Drucker that Rykov was a “chief voice and troll for the Kremlin on Twitter.” His Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the first professional Russian Internet producers” who began working in 2002 as the “head of the Internet department of the First Channel of the state television.” In addition to that, he actually served in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, as a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party. But this is what most concerns me:

Rykov has created a series of websites, similar to Trump2016.ru, or used his Twitter page to post opinions on international politics. He often promotes rightwing political figures; for instance, he has previous promoted the National Front, a French nationalist political party, and its leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his daughter, Marine Le Pen. Rykov also uses events to draw favorable comparisons to Kremlin policy, such as likening Scotland’s independence movement to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

The international political figures that Rykov plays up, said the source, “tend to express views that are more friendly to the Kremlin,” at least as far as Moscow is concerned. These figures also tend to be “supportive of engagement” with Russia, if not outright apologists for what others describe as Putin’s aggressive foreign policy and repressive measures at home.

I recommend approaching the work of Nafeez Ahmed with some skepticism, but I do have to give him credit for the comprehensiveness with which his crowdsourced INSURGE Intelligence group investigated Vladimir Putin’s ties to Europe’s far-right and neo-nazi political parties. There’s an absolute correspondence between those who Putin favors (and Mr. Rykov promotes) and the parties and figures that got chummy with the Trump campaign. In addition to Marine Le Pen who showed up at Trump Tower in January to raise money with fascist fixer George “Guido” Lombardi, there’s Nigel Farage of Britain’s UKIP party, who dined with Steve Bannon in the White House in late February before meeting in early March with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. There’s Viktor Orbán in Hungary who was paid special attention during the campaign by Trump associates Carter Page and J.D. Gordon. There’s the Austrian Freedom Party that boasted of meeting with Michael Flynn. This excerpt was published on December 20th, 2016:

On Monday, the leaders of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party traveled to Moscow and signed a “working agreement” with Russia’s ruling United Russia party. In announcing the pact, Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache mentioned that he also met with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s designated national security adviser, in Trump Tower a few weeks ago. “Internationally, the Freedom Party continues to gain in influence,” he wrote. Norbert Hofer, the Freedom Party candidate who recently lost his bid for Austria’s presidency, traveled to Moscow with Strache.

The Freedom Party, founded by ex-Nazis in the 1950s, is one of several far-right, anti-immigrant parties gaining popularity throughout Europe. After signing the cooperative agreement, Strache offered to act as “a neutral and reliable intermediary and partner” between the incoming Trump administration and the Kremlin.

I recently had a commenter at my blog scoff at the idea that Vladimir Putin would want to promote Naziism in Europe after all that Russian suffered from the fascists in the 20th Century. It may seen counterintuitive, but the facts are indisputable. Putin has been buddying up to Europe’s far right, loaning them money, hacking their political opponents, providing clandestine assistance of all kinds, and promoting them quite openly in Russia media. Russia encouraged the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom, and they obviously sided with Trump.

The far right in Europe is uncontroversially working hand in glove with Russian intelligence, so it’s highly relevant that the far right in Europe has increasingly close ties to the far right in the United States. A prime example of this is Frank Gaffney who served as the chief foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and then went on to enthusiastically stump for Trump.

Konstantin Rykov has been a key player in all of this, so when he says that he partnered with Trump beginning back on election night in 2012 and that together they came up with a plan to pay Cambridge Analytica to create “5,000 existing human psychotypes — the ‘ideal image’ of a possible Trump supporter and then  “put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone,” I think we ought to take it seriously.

When Rykov made these statements, we didn’t know how Cambridge Analytica had been utilized or how they targeted users on Facebook in key districts in swing states in order to maximize Trump’s support.  In retrospect, what Rykov was saying now makes a lot of sense and fits in with what we know.

Even Fox News recently reported that Cambridge Analytica sought to work with WikiLeaks in obtaining and releasing illegally hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s server. In Rykov’s telling, the initial conspiracy also involved “a pair of hacker groups” (presumably Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear) and a political strategist named Mikhail Kovalev. I can’t find much online about this Mr. Kovalev except a little fragment from a paywalled January Economist article about Moscow power players toasting President Trump’s inauguration: “We hope that Marine Le Pen will win next,” said Mikhail Kovalev, one of the party’s organisers, sporting a Trump-Pence baseball cap.

What it looks like to me is that on November 12th, 2016, Konstantin Rykov posted pretty close to a full confession in Facebook. We’ve spent over a year since then trying to piece together what happened, but there’s a strong sense in which he already told us.

Could he possibly have made such boasts without having any knowledge of what would soon be divulged or discovered about Russian hacking and collusion between Wikileaks and Cambridge Analytica or the work that was done by Cambridge Analytica and how it was utilized on social media?

Of course not.  His boasts were rooted in facts and inside knowledge.

Trump is no different from far right European stooges like Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage. They’re all in league together and we now have a nice roadmap for laying out the entire conspiracy.

 

In the mood for some fall foliage?

Autumn is arguably my favorite season. Although an unusual pattern of weather made this year’s season a bit of a disappointment in my locale, there were some nice photos to be had. I was glad to get out and get a few photos during when the trees in our area parks were at their peak for fall colors.
Please note that this is a reboot of a series that went to seed a few years ago. I know that there are some photo hobbyists like me who post here already. Hoping to incite a bit more “community behavior” in our community blog. AndiF and BobX used to curate the old foto flog. Others contributed quite regularly, and I suspect I’d miss way too many people if I tried to name them all.  

I don’t use anything especially fancy. Right now my Samsung Galaxy 6 keeps humming along, and it continues to serve me well for most general photography purposes. Unless that phone goes bad, I plan on keeping it for at least the next couple years. Some of our regulars have actual professional equipment, and before Photobucket turned into such a drag, we were graced by some absolutely stunning landscape shots, close-ups of flowers and insects, and some abstract photography.

I’ll have a new one up in a few weeks. I am planning to do this a bit earlier in December, so expect to see me back at it once more. Remember, a foto flog is not just for Fridays. Or perhaps I should say Friday is a state of mind.

It was nice to see David Leonhardt of the New York Times single out the Washington Monthly this morning as his solitary recommendation for readers to go to for policy. Here’s the explanation for his piece:

Holiday shopping. As you read this, people are jostling each other in stores across the land. I have a different suggestion for holiday shopping: Buy a subscription — for yourself or as a gift — to a publication that does great work and that needs more help than, say, The New York Times.

The Times is thriving, as I explained yesterday, but not all publications have the financial advantages we do. And some of these publications do vital work that a democracy needs. They provide local and regional coverage. Or they focus on a specific subject. Or they write about the world from a particular perspective.

Below is a list of publications I recommend that you consider. It includes some reader recommendations, too, and of course this isn’t intended to be a complete list. (Readers sent in more 1,000 recommendations this week, and I plan to check out many more than I’ve listed here.)

We’d love it if you followed Leonhardt’s advice and bought a subscription to our magazine as part of your holiday shopping. We also have a special offer running right now that allows you to get more bang for your tax-deductible charitable contribution to the magazine. For a limited time, every dollar you donate will be matched thanks to a generous challenge grant we’ve received from three respected foundations: the Democracy Fund and the Knight and MacArthur Foundations. So, whether you want to buy a subscription for yourself or a loved one, or you’d like to make a donation of $10, $20, $30, $50, $100, $1000 or whatever you can give, now’s a great time to do it. As Leonhardt noted, he don’t have the same financial advantages of the New York Times but we do vital work that our democracy needs.

Thank you in advance for your support and for making what we do possible.

Drew Harwell has a piece in the Washington Post that looks at the unusual behavior of Donald Trump Jr. Here’s the key takeaway:

Presidential children traditionally serve to soften and humanize their fathers, reminding voters that the nation’s leader can be a family man, too. But Trump Jr. has sharpened his father’s ­already-pointed edges, often amplifying the president’s grudges.

On Twitter, he regularly jabs at the president’s antagonists, from liberal media personalities to Republican politicians to kneeling football players…

…He often retweets or references far-right voices, as well as websites aimed at conservatives, such as Gateway Pundit, the Federalist and Breitbart News. Earlier this month, he retweeted a comment that the Clintons were “an unscrupulous gang of thugs” and alluded to a fringe-right conspiracy theory alleging that the couple covered up a murder.

As Harwell details quite well, this isn’t a change in strategy or reaction to current events. Trump Jr. has been fulfilling this role since the beginning of his father’s campaign for the presidency. However, the behavior is more suspect now that Trump Jr. and his father’s administration are under so much scrutiny. What might have worked as a political matter could well be ill-advised as a legal one. Trump Jr. hasn’t been arrested yet, but he still should be advised of his right to remain silent and that any Tweet can be used against him in a court of law.

It appears to be deeply ingrained in the Trump family that the best defense is an obnoxious offense, and that may be true when you’re a well-financed privately-held business that regularly defaults on contracts and engages in fraud. It’s a way of bullying your way through life that can be very effective in normal litigation. It seems needlessly risky in a case where you’re giving sworn statements to federal law officers and members of Congress.

With the news that Michael Flynn has probably turned state’s witness against the president, it might be understandable that the Trump family would go to time-tested strategies. For example, why not first make sure that the base is reassured?

“[Trump Jr. is] very smart to be in the spotlight,” said Charlie Kirk, a friend and the founder of the conservative college and high school group Turning Point USA. “Would they stop the investigation if he stopped tweeting? He’s in a situation where either you defend yourself, reassure the base, reassure the supporters, or stay silent. And if you’re totally silent, it only increases suspicion.”

The Trump base is with him, Kirk added: “Most people can’t even keep up with this stuff, anyway.”

This is why the president is attacking the father of a black basketball player and black athletes from the National Football League. He’s trying to distract people from focusing on his collapsing defense against the Russia allegations. He doesn’t want his supporters looking at the man he hired to be his first National Security Adviser or the man he tapped to guide him through the Republican convention and then chair his national campaign.

The special counsel is also eyeing Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn Jr., for offenses far more severe. Last December, the Flynns allegedly took a meeting with agents of the Turkish government, in which they discussed arranging the extrajudicial rendition (a.k.a. kidnapping) of a legal U.S. resident in exchange for $15 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. That resident was Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish cleric turned American charter-school founder whom Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed for the failed coup attempt against his regime in July 2016.

At the time the coup was in motion, Flynn praised it. Erdogan might have been democratically elected, but he was also an Islamist with authoritarian tendencies, and thus, Flynn reasoned, his ouster would be “worth clapping for.” Then, the coup failed — and Flynn Intel Group won a lucrative contract with allies of the Erdogan regime. On Election Day, Flynn wrote an op-ed calling for Gülen’s extradition. Months later, as the incoming national security adviser, he was allegedly considering extraditing the Pennsylvania resident himself, with the aid of his son.

Political guru Paul Manafort took at least 18 trips to Moscow and was in frequent contact with Vladimir Putin’s allies for nearly a decade as a consultant in Russia and Ukraine for oligarchs and pro-Kremlin parties.

Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who won office with the help of a Manafort-engineered image makeover, the American consultant flew to Kiev another 19 times over the next 20 months while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party. Manafort went so far as to suggest the party take an anti-NATO stance, an Oppo Bloc architect has said. A key ally of that party leader, oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, was identified by an earlier Ukrainian president as a former Russian intelligence agent, “100 percent.”

Rather than mount some kind of defense against these revelations, the president is currently engaged in race-baiting and excusing pedophilia and child molestation. Trump’s dirty bag of tricks has proven remarkably, shockingly effective in the political sphere, but it seems wholly inadequate for his present legal challenges.

Yet, in the end, impeachment is a political matter and he’ll need to retain his political support to survive.  That might make his behavior and the behavior of his son seem more rational, but it’s certainly not helping in the short term. The president and vice-president are the only ones who have some kind of built-in immunity from immediate criminal prosecution. Donald Trump Jr.’s legal problems can’t be shielded by a partisan Congress any more than Michael Flynn Jr.’s problems can.

I think, too, that Trump is making a mistake if he thinks he can pardon his way out of this mess. Firing Robert Mueller would be difficult and involve mass resignations and a revolt from law enforcement and the intelligence community.  It wouldn’t end the investigation necessarily, either, or make it possible to govern going forward.  Trump may attempt to do these things, especially because his son and son-in-law seem to be in real jeopardy, but that’s the kind of thing that works at the end of a presidency rather than the beginning.

In the end, Nixon tried to wall off the Watergate conspiracy and might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for those dastardly tape recordings. But it’s easier to fire Haldeman and Erlichmann than the father of your grandkids. Trump has no way of plausibly distancing himself and the people he needs to throw under the bus are too close to him.

Still, Trump will eventually need to say that he was a victim of his aides and advisers, and that requires some kind of pivot. He hasn’t pivoted, yet, and so his strategy makes little sense. He and his son are following it because they’re in a trap and it’s the only way they’ve ever known to fight.

Front-page story – Can Trump Survive Star Witness Michael Flynn? …

Kidnap is called “rendition” in the Clinton – Bush – Obama years of presidency. No offense

It’s a favorite procedure by the Mossad of our BIG ally Israel.

 
[Meant as a comment, but just to avoid the jerks blogging here @Booman with their troll ratings]

There’s a real sense in which it is a crime to obstruct justice even if no underlining crime is ever proven, but it’s certainly a more serious thing to deliberately undermine an investigation if the crime that is the prime focus is discovered and prosecutable. For this reason, it matters a lot whether or not Michael Flynn is charged with criminal offenses because the president of the United States asked the director of the FBI to drop his inquiry into Flynn and then fired the director when he would not.

Were Michael Flynn to be cleared of all wrongdoing, we might not consider Trump’s interference a high crime or misdemeanor even if it is a crime of some sort. On the other hand, if it looks like Trump tried to prevent justice from being obtained for actual crimes, that’s obstruction however you want to define it.

Therefore, the worse things are for Flynn, the worse they will be for Trump. If he can say that he was right all along that Flynn is innocent and shouldn’t be harassed, that will benefit him politically and in the eyes of Congress. But if Flynn is slapped with a long list of indictments, it’s going to make Trump look like a coconspirator. His best defense at that point will be that he is actually a dope and a fool rather than a witting participant in a series of criminal acts. And that’s not a great look for a president.

But, of course, there’s a third possibility that’s even worse for the president, and that seems to be what we’re about to see unfold.

Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case — an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating a deal.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.

The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.

Still, the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating.

Michael Flynn has so much criminal exposure it’s almost ridiculous, including things as potentially serious as conspiracy to kidnap, perjury, and obstruction of justice. He has to worry about those charges, plus a long list of problems with disclosure forms involving his lobbying work, background checks, and compliance with military rules and regulations. And he’s reportedly worried that his son will wind up with a lengthy jail term, as well. To significantly reduce all that exposure, he’s going to have to tell a pretty compelling story to Robert Mueller’s prosecutors.

It’s true that plea negotiations could still break down, but they’ve almost certainly begun. The chances are now very high that Flynn will be testifying against the president of the United States and that his testimony will be the basis for a criminal referral of some sort to Congress from the office of the special counsel.

This also has to be of concern to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, because they’re missing the chance to be the first cooperating witnesses, and are therefore losing the opportunity to reduce the amount of time they’ll be spending in prison.

The floodgates could now open, but even if they don’t it’s beginning to look like a worst-case scenario for Trump. It would be hard enough to try to explain why he fired an FBI director for refusing to drop an investigation of a man now facing a dozen or more indictments. But if that man becomes the star witness against Trump, it will be impossible to defend against the central obstruction of justice charge.

Impeachment is by design a political process with a political definition of what constitutes a removable offense. For that reason, Trump can survive some pretty serious charges, just as Bill Clinton did in the late 1990s. But there are still limits, and a guilty Flynn presents a serious problem. A guilty testifying Flynn could be fatal.

I have one more Emmy winner to post that features a President, one that covered a town hall with then President Obama.  Stay tuned.

That’s what I promised my readers at the end of ‘Trump University Fraud’ wins Outstanding Business, Consumer, Economic Report.  Watch Clarissa Ward announce the winner for Outstanding News Special and notice how many of the nominees would have fulfilled that promise.

ABC News has the trailer for the winner, America in Black and White: The President and the People.

President Obama took on the issue of race and policing in a town hall moderated by ABC News’ David Muir.

Just as I did for Frontline’s ‘The Choice 2016’ wins Outstanding Politics & Government Documentary, I am sharing the entire special — President Obama and the People Town Hall: A National Conversation.

President Barack Obama has a national conversation with the people of the United States on race relations, justice, policing and equality by the members of the community. ESPN’s Jemele Hill will join David Muir as the host of this ABC News special.

This show demonstrates some of the many reasons I miss Barack Obama as President.  His calmness, reasonableness, and compassion helped to manage the conversation in order to bridge the two sides.  That’s not happening now.  America badly needs to examine the intersection of racism and what I grew up calling police brutality (back then, that referred as much or more to beatings and other forms of “unnecessary roughness” than police shooting and killing suspects, but that was before the militarization of police).  Unfortunately, the election of Trump has derailed the conversation.  Hillary Clinton might have been better able to manage it, but she will never have the chance.  Americans will have to wait, most likely until the next decade, for someone else at the highest levels of government to resume a productive conversation.  Sigh.

That’s it for the News and Documentary Emmy winners for now.  Stay tuned for John Oliver asking “how is voting on Tuesday still a thing?“

Modified from the original post on Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.