Month: December 2017

Thanks to Paul Waldman at the Washington Post, we now know what it looks like if you delete everything Trump said in his recent interview with the New York Times except for his references to collusion.

“Frankly there is absolutely no collusion…Virtually every Democrat has said there is no collusion. There is no collusion…I think it’s been proven that there is no collusion…I can only tell you that there is absolutely no collusion…There’s been no collusion…There was no collusion. None whatsoever…everybody knows that there was no collusion. I saw Dianne Feinstein the other day on television saying there is no collusion [note: not true]…The Republicans, in terms of the House committees, they come out, they’re so angry because there is no collusion…there was collusion on behalf of the Democrats. There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion…There was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats. There was no collusion with respect to my campaign…But there is tremendous collusion with the Russians and with the Democratic Party…I watched Alan Dershowitz the other day, he said, No. 1, there is no collusion, No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion. And he said that very strongly. He said there was no collusion…There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime. But there’s no collusion…when you look at all of the tremendous, ah, real problems [Democrats] had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion.“

If you’re counting, that’s 23 mentions of collusion in thirty minutes. That number is almost as big as the total number of lies he told. Why did the president spend so much time trying to debunk the idea that there is evidence of collusion?

To me, there is abundant evidence already in the record that the Trump campaign sought to gain information from the Russians that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. Trump actually asked the Russians to hack into Clinton’s private server, which would be a crime, and retrieve the 33,000 emails she failed to turn over because, she says, they were not work-related. Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner had a meeting with the Russians where they were promised dirt on Clinton. The head of Cambridge Analytica, a contractor for the Trump campaign, actually contacted WikiLeaks and requested access to Clinton’s deleted mails. Roger Stone and Randy Credico actually communicated with Guccifer 2.0 and Julian Assange to get advanced warning about what kinds of information would be forthcoming in each batch of leaks.

Let’s start with the essential point that hacking into the computer systems of the DNC and the DCCC are crimes. Using a phishing attack to steal John Podesta’s email password is a crime. Seeking to gain access stolen goods makes you an accessory to the crime and perhaps also a co-conspirator or conspirator after the fact. I’ll leave it to lawyers and prosecutors to define the exact statutes that might be implicated, but if what the Russians did was criminal, and it was, then what Trump’s team was doing was also criminal.

We don’t need to establish that any particular outcome was changed by this behavior. I’ve never met anyone who thinks that George McGovern would have won the 1972 presidential election, if only the Nixon administration hadn’t bugged a couple of phones in the DNC’s Watergate headquarters.

Now, it’s true that nation-states spy on each other and hack into each other’s computer networks. It’s still criminal behavior. And if you work with a foreign power that has hacked into your own nation’s government computers, that could violate additional statutes. If you offer things of value (like a relaxation in sanctions, for example) for stolen goods, that’s another crime.

It’s also wrong, by the way. The president has said that collusion isn’t a crime, and what he means is that it could be wrong and still not a prosecutable offense. But even he is conceding there that the behavior is wrong. It’s just that he’s incorrect in thinking that you can negotiate with a thief for access to their stolen goods and say that this is not a crime. If you know the goods are stolen, you’re breaking the law.

So, yes, there’s a big theory of the case that seeks to explain why Trump is so friendly with Vladimir Putin and eager to lift the sanctions on Russia. There’s also a big theory of Watergate that the break-in was done to protect against the revelation that Howard Hughes made a big pay-off to Richard Nixon’s best friend Bebe Rebozo. Neither of those theories needs or needed to be proven for dozens of people to go to jail for various crimes related to the underlying crimes and the cover-ups.

There’s a big collusion story and there’s a small one, too. The small one is already proven. Team Trump asked for stolen documents while knowing they were stolen. They made good faith offerings (a change in the Republican Party platform, for example) and dangled sanctions relief in order to entice the Russians to share illegally obtained dirt on Hillary Clinton. These are crimes. That’s collusion.

Trump knows that Michael Flynn is talking to the Feds. He knows that Sam Clovis is talking to the Feds. He knows George Papadapolous is talking to the Feds. But even without all that, he should know that he can’t beat a collusion case just by repeating his dishonest and misleading denials over and over again.

The Toronto Star identified twenty-five lies that President Trump told in a thirty minute softball interview with Michael Schmidt of the New York Times. Some of these lies are fairly innocuous, like claiming that Sen. Diane Feinstein heads a committee when she actually serves as the senior member for the minority, i.e., the Ranking Member. Some are more serious, like his claim that millions of Americans are joining health care associations that don’t yet exist. My favorite lie is somewhere in-between.

16) “I know more about the big bills. … (Inaudible.) … Than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes.”

There is no way to conclusively demonstrate that this false, but it’s so ridiculous that we are going to take a rare liberty and declare it false anyway. Trump has consistently misstated the details of major bills, spoken only in generalities about the health bill (“fantastic health-care”), and brushed off almost all specific questions. Whatever one thinks of Obamacare, Barack Obama demonstrated a vastly greater understanding of the nuances of his bill than Trump did about any version of the Republicans’ proposed replacement bills.

It bothers me when newspaper fact checkers contort themselves into pretzels in an effort to find any grain of truth in the president’s pronouncements, so it’s a relief to see an example where the benefit of the doubt is boldly abandoned. What Trump said here is a lie. It’s a giant, “ridiculous” lie. And there’s nothing wrong with saying so even though it’s obviously a subjective judgment. There’s really no need to try to explain how we know that Barack Obama “demonstrated a vastly greater understanding of the nuances of his [health] bill than Trump did about any version of [his own].” We just know.

Yes, it is generally better to be able to demonstrate how something is not factual by pointing to some statistics or a map or the historical record. But we don’t need some academic paper that tries to scientifically analyze the degree of understanding presidents have of their own legislation. There’s simply no effing way that Trump knows more about “the big bills” than Obama or Clinton or either of the two Bushes or even Ronald Reagan. Saying so is foolish and stupid.

And, frankly, we don’t write things in newspapers to convince every skeptic. We write for an informed audience that presumably cares about facts enough to spend part of their day seeking them out. They don’t deserve to be treated like infants. When Trump says something spit-out-your-drink false, the correct thing to do is to call it a lie.

Sock It To Me??? Nixon on “Laugh-In” 1968 –

Nixon was too humorless to get the joke, but being game enough to display it (unlike HHH who declined the invitation) made him more likeable to some people.  Perhaps swing voters who didn’t get the joke either.

A fine sense of humor is an asset for presidential candidates and Presidents.  Standouts on this qualifty are Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.  Thick-skinned enough to take and make jokes.  Those in the second tier– better at making than taking — include Truman, Reagan, and Obama.

With the exception of Bernie, the 2016 presidential election was dour.  (Despite the efforts of the Clinton comedy writers.)  Even mild chiding of Clinton or Trump instantly became another verbal war with accusations of “fake news,” sexism, etc. by the candidates and/or his/her supporters.  They not only can’t take a joke, they don’t even get it.

Hillbots have completely lost their cookies over a VF humor video — mostly mild chiding and not LOL funny that any losing presidential candidate gets, particularly if she/he appears to be considering another run.  (Wasn’t there similar ha-ha jokes about Romney after the 2012 election?)

Six New Year’s Resolutions for Hillary Clinton

As I try to avoid as much filth as possible, I’ll take GG’s word for the worst of the hillbot responses to the VF video (but the ones I’ve seen are similarly unhinged):

[Frm GG] One of the reporters for the “don’t-run-again-Hillary” video has locked her account after being subjected to the most foul vitriol and abuse, endlessly, over several days.

(Hillbots also fail to comprehend that their abusive behavior is straight out of the McCarthy playbook.)

What seems to have raised the ire of hillbots and their standard, go-to charge of “sexism” is the suggestion that Clinton take up knitting.  As if that were an off-the-wall recommendation to engage in a sterotypical form of ‘women’s work.’   It was a joke — their very own symbol — and they totally failed to get it.

How To Knit: The Pussy Hat Project

How demeaning to suggest that Hillary actually engage in making one of the approved symbol of her Resistance, tm

I don’t know that Paul Ryan will even serve out his term let alone run for reelection, but you’ll have to find something other than a primary defeat to hope for if you’re rooting for Ryan’s political career to end soon.

A Wisconsin businessman challenging House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in next year’s congressional primaries denounced “globalists from both parties” Wednesday, after his anti-Semitic tweets prompted Breitbart News to distance itself from his campaign.

Paul Nehlen, who is challenging Ryan for the second time, responded to the accusations of anti-Semitism by saying he was “pro-white” and opposed to double standards.

“Allow me to answer with this question: If pro-White is White supremacy, what is pro-Jewish?” Nehlen told The Washington Post in a text message. “I reject being called a White Supremacist, because clearly Pro-White isn’t White Supremacy unless Pro-Jewish is Jewish Supremacy.”

Some arguments are too stupid to merit rebuttal, and this is one of them. Anyone who thinks that you necessarily believe in the innate superiority of your race, religion, or favorite baseball team just because you take an interest in them is not someone you want to debate.

It’s kind of funny that this guy is suddenly too toxic for Breitbart, though.

The hands-off approach to Nehlen’s campaign was a major shift; in 2016, Breitbart had sent reporters to Ryan’s congressional district to cover Nehlen’s challenge, running as many as 30 stories a week. Julia Hahn, one of the Breitbart reporters on the ground for the Nehlen race, followed Bannon into the White House when he became President Trump’s chief strategist. After Nehlen was defeated, taking just 16 percent of the vote, he contributed some commentary to Breitbart. His archive on the site has been deleted.

I guess I wish these folks would decide where they stand on the whole white supremacy thing and stick with it. We’re getting whiplash trying to follow their positions. At this point, we’re not even certain about where they stand on molesting kids.

NY Times:

TRUMP, THE INSURGENT, BREAKS WITH 70 YEARS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

No need to read the story…it’s just another boilerplate neocentrist attack on Trump. If you’ve read one you’ve read them all.

But the word!!!

“Insurgent”…popularly used these days to designate violent revolutionaries pitted against a powerful central government.

That sound that you hear? It’s the neocentrists’ gloves dropping. Watch. The U.S. supports any number of satrap regimes in their fight against them dirty insurgents, by fair means or by foul.

Cain’t have none ‘a them insurgents gettin’ inna way of real business, now can we?

Nope.

Watch.

And now…the beginnings of a new domestic insurgency to worry the controllers:

Cruz Agrees With Bernie on Tax Cuts, Asks Him to Cosponsor Legislation

UH oh!!!

What happens if the “NeverTrump” Republicans ally with the “NeverHRC” Democrats!!!

Hoo boy!!!

Hell to pay!!!

What has happened militarily when the U.S. has had to fight too many “insurgencies” simultaneously?

Failure, that’s what.

The political Neos gonna have their hands full this year!!!

Watch.

AG

P.S. I have been predicting this (admittedly uneasy) political meeting of the fairly far right and the fairly far left in the U.S. for several years now. Will it happen?

Could be…

The center will have yet another battle to fight in order to stop it from happening, that’s for sure.

Lieutenant General In Charge of Media Horseshit!!!

Get on this!!!

Get alla them horseshit shovelers ‘a’workin’!!!

Now!!!

Watch.

Vladimir Putin would obviously like to know who the sources are who talked to Christopher Steele. For example, the first thing we see in the Steele Dossier is an account of comments Source A (“a senior Russian foreign ministry officer”) made in confidence to Source B (“a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”). It was Source B who supplied Steele with the information that the Russians had been cultivating Trump for five years and it was source A that said Putin had personally approved a plan to supply Trump with information on his opponents, including Hillary Clinton.

Now, some people already know the identity of these sources. The first thing the FBI wanted to know from Steele after they saw his earliest memos was how reliable his information was, and Steele supplied his sources to them in an effort the get them to take his intelligence seriously. There’s someone else who claims to know the sources, and that’s a man named David Kramer who works as a senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.

Kramer traveled to London in late-Novemeber 2016 to meet with Steele in person. He took a copy of the dossier back to the United States where he handed it off to Sen. John McCain. McCain, in turn, gave the dossier directly to FBI Director James Comey. But, of course, the FBI had been receiving Steele’s dispatches since July so they didn’t need McCain’s package.

Kramer testified on December 19th before the House Intelligence Committee. He asserted that he knew Steele’s sources, but he refused to provide their identities. As a result, House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes has slapped a subpoena on Prof. Kramer in the hope that he will spill what he knows.

Chairman Nunes supposedly recused himself from the Russia investigation but he’s still issuing subpoenas. That’s a concern, but it’s more troubling that he’s asking for information that would help Putin liquidate the people who talked to Steele.

This is lost on Byron York who is much more concerned with running interference for the president and his congressional enablers than he is in getting to the truth:

Knowing Steele’s sources is a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation, for both sides. If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical.

That argument is 151 proof bullshit. Devin Nunes cannot estimate the quality of intelligence provided by Source A or Source B by knowing their identities. He can perhaps prove or disprove some of what they alleged, but that wouldn’t involve knowing their names. What Devin Nunes can do is leak their names and get them killed.

The Kremlin seems to think that FSB Officer Major Gen. Dmitry Dokuchayev was a source to the Americans, and they’ve arrested him for treason. There’s a Russian hacker in prison over there who says he worked for Dokuchayev and that together they’re responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s servers. The Americans want Dokuchayev, too. Along with folks like fellow FSB officer Igor Sushchin and Alexsey Belan, he’s been indicted for hacking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing passwords and committing other identity thefts.

Here’s a fun fact. Igor Sushchin worked undercover for the FSB as the security director for Mikhail Prokhorov’s Renaissance Capital. He was fired the day after he was indicted. Mr. Prokhorov owns the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclay Center they call home. He also owns an island in the Seychelles which served as a convenient place for former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince to meet an emissary from Vladimir Putin named Kirill Dmitriev.

In any case, it’s interesting that there’s a hacker in Russian custody who is saying that he was ordered to break into the DNC headquarters by Dmitry Dokuchayev. Mr. Dokuchayev served under Sergei Mikhailov, who was the deputy chief of the FSB security agency’s Centre for Information Security. Mr. Mikhailov has been arrested for treason, too.

Two of Moscow’s top cybersecurity officials are facing treason charges for cooperating with the CIA, according to a Russian news report.

The accusations add further intrigue to a mysterious scandal that has had the Moscow rumour mill working in overdrive for the past week, and come not long after US intelligence accused Russia of interfering in the US election and hacking the Democratic party’s servers.

Sergei Mikhailov was deputy head of the FSB security agency’s Centre for Information Security. His arrest was reported in a series of leaks over the past week, along with that of his deputy and several civilians, but Tuesday’s news went much further.

“Sergei Mikhailov and his deputy, Dmitry Dokuchayev, are accused of betraying their oath and working with the CIA,” Interfax said, quoting a source familiar with the investigation.

If this all seems like a hopeless web of criminality and espionage, perhaps there is still hope for getting to the bottom of it.

In written answers from jail made public Wednesday by RAIN TV, a Moscow-based independent TV station that has repeatedly run afoul of the Kremlin, [Konstantin] Kozlovsky said he feared his minders might turn on him and planted a “poison pill” during the DNC hack. He placed a string of numbers that are his Russian passport number and the number of his visa to visit the Caribbean island of St. Martin in a hidden .dat file, which is a generic data file.

That allegation is difficult to prove, partly because of the limited universe of people who have seen the details of the hack. The DNC initially did not share information with the FBI, instead hiring a tech firm called CrowdStrike, run by a former FBI cyber leader. That company has said it discovered the Russian hand in the hacking, but had no immediate comment on the claim by Kozlovsky that he planted an identifier.

Maybe Devin Nunes could run down that lead. It’s a better use of his time than trying to out Steele’s sources and it won’t obviously get anyone killed or help Putin and Trump cover their tracks.

We don’t belong to his tribe.

What an unbelievable bull-shit from anyone pretending to possess some intelligence, empathy and humanity.

As he/she has demonstrated so many times of being narrow-minded as many Americans have become. There was no way an imposter as Trump could/should have been elected.

The Ugly American has returned from the shadows and has many distinct forms. Just keep cuddling the beast.

Definitely, I and many others here @BooMan don’t belong to your tribe!  🙂

[Update-1]

To Don Durito: I’ve tried all available options within my reach. E-mail correspondence included!
I’ve strongly voiced my opinion on the abuse of troll ratings. See FAQ on topic.

My latest diary @EuroTrib …

Christian Zionists Collude with Alt-right Trump

[Note: Trump’s appreciation for support to get elected was rewarded with his gift of Jerusalem to the “Jewish” State of Israel]

○ Trump’s Jerusalem decision is a victory for Evangelical politics | Brookings Institute |
○ Netanyahu Expects Demise of Non-Orthodox Jewry in Two Generations | Tikun Olam |

The rise of the alt-right in Western politics due to Middle-East wars [neocon policy] and the refugee crisis in its aftermath. Also the effects of Anglo-American banking, financial institutions, off-shore deposits, stock market, corporate might in capitals and political parties causing wealth accumulation by the 0.1%. The rich getting richer, turning the dials of tax reform, promising trickle-down cents for the working majority. Instead inequality is on the rise in the last 50 years and people’s revolutions are managed for regime change in the mirror of American capitalism while undermining labor rights. Welcome to the new year 2018, more of the same?

Attacking church sermons on Christmas Day ….

I wanted to continue along the theme of soundtrack music to political films (that Neon Vincent started two weeks ago), although I am sticking to fiction. This track was part of the Children of Men soundtrack.
Note that I am posting via Firefox and not using the standard embed feature, as Sucuri is still blocking that. To see how I managed an embed I used some old code. You can figure out what I did by using your browser to go to the page source. The code I used begins with and ends with . It is not ideal, but at least it works. And be careful – the same eleven digit video code has to go in two separate locations within that source code, otherwise you’ll end up with something you don’t quite want. Where there is a will, there is a way. Many thanks to Frank Schnittger at Eurotrib (and here) for the tip!

So, hopefully we can get the jukebox going and the bar restocked! Virtual drinks (adult and non-alcoholic) are on me.

If your family is anything like mine, you can’t get everyone together on Christmas, so the grandparents and uncles and nieces and cousins have to enter into protracted negotiations until a date acceptable to all can be found. Today is that day and we’re hosting, so pretty soon our log cabin will be brimming with kin.

I hopefully will find some time to write in the late afternoon, but for now I need to be brief. I expect you will enjoy this chuckle, at least if you have any sense of humor:

Yes, that is an actual New York Times article. My favorite response did not come from an historian, however:

“Sure. Churchill served his country 55 years in parliament, 31 years as a minister and 9 as pm,” Kristian Tonning Riise, a member of Norway’s Parliament, wrote in a tweet liked more than 19,000 times. “He was present in 15 battles and received 14 medals of bravery. He was one of history’s most gifted orators and won the Nobel Literature Prize for his writing. Totally same thing.”

Mike Huckabee likes everything in the Old Testament except the ban on pork, and he plays the bass guitar. He says dumb stuff and it merits a whole write-up in the Gray Lady.

Happy New Year.

Dedicated to the grandson of a former New York mayor …  😉  

The Watergate hearings did not delve into the depth of the Deep State, it just scratched the surface. Even the Church Committee report could not uncover the dark state of America as it too had been lied to by persons from the Intelligence Community (IC). Politics in Washington DC is just kabuki theater for the insane. The US Supreme Court determines the outcome of not so democratic elections and will step in to determine the election of a president. Its nine members determine the cultural landscape of the US population for decades to come. Money talks, the essence of pure capitalism. Bribery and corruption to the n^th scale.

○ The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru | NY Times – May 2016 |

I too would rather be considered an activist!

More below the fold …

Jeremy Scahill: the man exposing the US Dirty War | The Guardian – Nov. 2013 |

Jeremy Scahill, whose provocative documentary Dirty Wars is released in the UK this week, has been described as a “progressive journalist” and an activist in the same mould as Glenn Greenwald. Is “progressive” a word he is comfortable with? “It’s not a term I would reject in terms of my personal politics,” he says, “but I see myself as an independent journalist and my mission is to try to tell stories about real people.”

Scahill’s critics write him off as an activist or an advocate, but he argues that all journalists have a point of view. “Oftentimes the ones who are activists on behalf of the state don’t get labelled as activists. People who accept the state’s version of events are considered objective journalists. People who question the state’s version of events, particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence that the state is either lying or involved in extra-legal activity, are tarred with the brush of being activists. There is a systematic smearing of anyone who questions the state, while people who are slavishly devoted to advocacy for the state somehow wear the crown of objectivity. “

The real people in the film – and the book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which accompanies it – are the victims of what are, in effect, US hit squads operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places where the American government is waging its “war on terror”.

…
I wanted to make a film that my uncle, who’s a construction contractor and never pays attention to these issues at all, would be able to watch, absorb and feel like he walked away understanding something about this extraordinary moment that we’re in in this post 9/11 world.”

On those terms, Dirty Wars succeeds. The extent of the US military’s covert operations and the amount of “collateral damage” are shocking; the film shows that even US citizens have been the victims of non-judicial executions; and the argument that the war on terror is ultimately unwinnable because indiscriminate killings radicalise whole populations is persuasive. “Somehow, in front of our eyes, undeclared wars have been launched in countries across the globe; foreigners and citizens alike assassinated by presidential decree; the war on terror transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Scahill laments at the end of the film. “How does a war like this ever end, and what happens to us when we realise what was hidden in plain sight?”

…
In the late 1990s he worked on TV shows with radical film-maker Michael Moore, whom he calls a “master communicator”, before moving on to the Nation magazine, where he became national security correspondent, reporting on a succession of wars and writing the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

[About Jeremy Scahill:  

Who’s Afraid of the Alt-Deep State?

Does Donald Trump want to make 1980s Reagan-era covert wars great again? This week on Intercepted: Matthew Cole joins Jeremy for a discussion about their explosive report in The Intercept that Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former CIA officer and Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame have been pitching a private spy operation to the White House and CIA to counter the “deep state” attempting to undermine Trump’s presidency.

See my recent diaries on topic …

○ Geheimdienste Amyntor – Victor In Chains
○ Holland Heritage: Hoekstra – DeVos – Erik Prince

There Is No Deep State | The New Yorker – March 2017 |

… But he kept in touch with his friend, seeing him as a kind of career counsellor and, not without guile, as a potential source. Soon, the F.B.I. man confided in the reporter, telling him that he believed that the Nixon Administration was corrupt, paranoid, and trying to infringe on the independence of the Bureau.

In the summer of 1971, both men were promoted, one to the No. 3 job at the F.B.I., the other to the metropolitan staff of the Post. Within a year, their friendship became the most important reporter-source relationship in modern history. The reporter was Bob Woodward, who, with Carl Bernstein, led the coverage of the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard Nixon. The F.B.I. man was Mark Felt, who, until he was in his nineties and revealed himself as Woodward’s source, was known to the world only as Deep Throat.

Contrary to the opinion of Arthur Gilroy here, the “deep state” was established on the ashes of Worl War II during the Eisenhower/Nixon years of McCarthyism …

○ Reorganising OSI – ONI – G2
○ Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government