Month: November 2018

Why does Jerry Falwell Jr. love pornography?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the old double-turreted Victorian.  The photo that I am using is seen directly below.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×10 inch canvas.

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

I didn’t get much done but managed to paint the preliminary paint layers of both the sky and lawn.  I’ll have much more 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.

 

The Critics’ Choice Documentary awards are tonight, so I am sharing an entry on the nominees.  I begin a with a video listing all of the nominees from Brian Sanchez: Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2018.

See what the Critics nominated for the Best in Documentary film. RBG? Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Free Solo? Making a Murder?

For today’s entry, I am focusing on the nominees for Best Political Documentary.  Here they are from the Critics’ Choice Awards website.

BEST POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY

RBG – Directors: Julie Cohen, Betsy West (Magnolia Pictures, Participant Media)
Dark Money – Director: Kimberly Reed (PBS)
Fahrenheit 11/9 – Director: Michael Moore (Briarcliff Entertainment)
Flint Town – Directors: Zackary Canepari, Drea Cooper, Jessica Dimmock (Netflix)
Hitler’s Hollywood – Director: Rüdiger Suchsland (Kino Lorber)
John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls – Directors: George Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt (HBO)
The Fourth Estate – Directors: Liz Garbus, Jenny Carchman (Showtime Networks)

Out of this field, the most nominated entries are “Dark Money” and “Hitler’s Hollywood” with four nominations each. “Dark Money” earned nominations for Best Documentary, Best Director for Kimberly Reed, and Best Editing in addition to Best Political Documentary.  The nominations for “Hitler’s Hollywood” are Best Documentary, Best Political Documentary, Best Director for Rüdiger Suchsland, and Most Innovative Documentary.  For this award, I suspect the contest will end up being between these two and “RBG,” which is the third nominee for Best Political Documentary also nominated for Best Documentary.

The other nominees for Best Political Documentary with a second nomination are “Flint Town” and “The Fourth Estate,” both of which earned nominations for Best Limited Documentary Series.  I doubt two nominations will be enough to put either in the role of favorite for that award.  That distinction goes to Wild Wild Country, which won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.  The series has nods for Best Documentary, Best Director for Chapman Way and Maclain Way, Most Innovative Documentary, Best Cinematography, and Best Limited Documentary Series.  As for “Fahrenheit 11/9” and “John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls,” each has only the one nomination for Best Political Documentary.

Meanwhile, “RBG” has already earned an award for Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary in addition to the film’s nominations for Best Documentary and Best Political Documentary.  Also, “The Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association (BTJA) have named Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore as the recipient of the Critics’ Choice Lifetime Achievement Award.”  Congratulations to both of them in addition to all the others who will be honored for Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary.

Scotty Bowers – Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich Entertainment)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg – RBG (Magnolia Pictures, Participant Media)
Alex Honnold – Free Solo (National Geographic Documentary Film)
Joan Jett – Bad Reputation (Magnolia Pictures)
Quincy Jones – Quincy (Netflix)
David Kellman and Bobby Shafran – Three Identical Strangers (Neon, CNN Films)
John McEnroe – John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Leon Vitali – Filmworker (Kino Lorber)

Follow over the jump for my takes on some of the other categories in which these films earned nominations plus the other nominees I think will be of interest to fans of political films.

Four of the entries I’ve mentioned also earned nominations for Best Documentary, so I’ll begin with the top category.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Crime + Punishment – Director: Stephen Maing (Hulu)
Dark Money – Director: Kimberly Reed (PBS)
Free Solo – Directors: Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (National Geographic Documentary Films)
Hal – Director: Amy Scott (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Hitler’s Hollywood – Director: Rüdiger Suchsland (Kino Lorber)
Minding the Gap – Director: Bing Liu (Hulu)
RBG – Directors: Julie Cohen, Betsy West (Magnolia Pictures, Participant Media)
Three Identical Strangers – Director: Tim Wardle (Neon, CNN Films)
Wild Wild Country – Directors: Chapman Way, Maclain Way (Netflix)
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? – Director: Morgan Neville (Focus Features)

I’ll quote from the press release about the more nominated entries in this category.

Free Solo leads this year with six nominations and one honor, including Best Documentary, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi for Best Directors, Best Sports Documentary, Most Innovative Documentary, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and a Most Compelling Living Subject of a Documentary honor for Alex Honnold.
…
The nominations for Minding the Gap are Best Documentary, Best Sports Documentary, Bing Liu for Best Director and for Best First Time Director, and Best Cinematography.
…
The nominations for Won’t You Be My Neighbor? are Best Documentary, Morgan Neville for Best Director, Most Innovative Documentary and Best Editing.

Three Identical Strangers received three nominations and an honor, including Best Documentary, Tim Wardle for Best Director, Best Editing and an honor for David Kellman and Bobby Shafran for Most Compelling Living Subjects of a Documentary.

In addition, “Hal” earned a nomination for Best First Time Director, while “Crime + Punishment” only garnered a Best Documentary nomination.

Based on the number of nominations, “Free Solo” looks like the favorite for this award.  However, Box Office Mojo identifies the three most popular based on ticket receipts.  “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” the biography of Fred Rogers, earned $22,609,437 to be the top grossing documentary of 2018 so far.  “RBG” is currently in second among documentaries with $14,017,361, while “Three Identical Strangers” is close behind at $12,320,845.  “Free Solo” with $7,346,873 is currently in fourth.*  Because of that, I think the contest is really among these four movies plus “Minding the Gap,” which is on Hulu, so it doesn’t have a box office to compare, unless the winner of the next category sneaks past them.

BEST LIMITED DOCUMENTARY SERIES

America to Me (Starz)
Dirty Money (Netflix)
Elvis Presley: The Searcher (HBO Documentary Films, Sony Pictures Television)
Flint Town (Netflix)
One Strange Rock (National Geographic)
The Fourth Estate (Showtime Networks)
The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO)
Wild Wild Country (Netflix)

I’ve already written that “Flint Town” and “The Fourth Estate” are unlikely to prevail over Emmy winner “Wild Wild Country,” but I also have to add that all three are competing against another Emmy winner, “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.”  The only good news for either is that journalists are voting for this award, not show business professionals, so the electorate might respond better to good reporting, which the first three nominees showcase, over the portrayal of a popular dead entertainer, which the Emmy electorate rewarded.  That’s the one hope I have for Emmy nominee “The Fourth Estate,” an inside look at the New York Times’ coverage of the first year of the Trump Administration.

Two other nominees might be of interest to fans of political documentaries, “America to Me,” which examines “one of Chicago’s most progressive public schools, located in suburban Oak Park,” and “Dirty Money,” “an American documentary television series which tells stories of corporate corruption.”  Public schools are a function of government and corporate corruption is one of the issues Coffee Party USA, of which I am a director, has as one of its top five reform priorities.

I am also a scientist, so I have a personal interest in “One Strange Rock,” which IMDB calls “The extraordinary story of Earth and why it is special and uniquely brimming with life among a largely unknown but harsh cosmic arena; astronauts tell the story of Earth through unique perspective.”  I don’t think it has a chance of winning, but that doesn’t mean I won’t watch it.

BEST ONGOING DOCUMENTARY SERIES

30 for 30 (ESPN)
American Masters (PBS)
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (CNN)
Frontline (PBS)
Independent Lens (PBS)
Making a Murderer (Netflix)
POV (PBS)
The History of Comedy (CNN)

Continuing on with television, this category features a clash of winners between the two Emmy Awards that I cover, the Creative Arts and Primetime Emmys on one hand and the News and Documentary Emmy Awards on the other.  “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” won six posthumous Creative Arts Emmy Awards, while “Frontline” and “Independent Lens” won two awards each at the News and Documentary Emmys including one for “Tower.”  I suspect the sympathy vote for Bourdain is likely to continue, so I consider his show to be the favorite.  The upset might go to “American Masters,” last year’s winner.

BEST DIRECTOR

Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi – Free Solo (National Geographic Documentary Films)
Bing Liu – Minding the Gap (Hulu)
Morgan Neville – Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (Focus Features)
Kimberly Reed – Dark Money (PBS)
Rüdiger Suchsland – Hitler’s Hollywood (Kino Lorber)
Tim Wardle – Three Identical Strangers (Neon, CNN Films)
Chapman Way and Maclain Way – Wild Wild Country (Netflix)

Based on the number of nominations and type of nominations, I think this will be among Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi for “Free Solo,” Bing Liu for “Minding the Gap,” and Chapman Way and Maclain Way for “Wild Wild Country” with Chin and Vasarhelyi favored.  The Ways might have an issue for directing a television series while Bing is likely to be the favorite for the next award.

BEST FIRST TIME DIRECTOR

Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster – Science Fair (National Geographic Documentary Films)
Heather Lenz – Kusama – Infinity (Magnolia Pictures)
Bing Liu – Minding the Gap (Hulu)
Stephen Nomura Schible – Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (MUBI)
Amy Scott – Hal (Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Rudy Valdez – The Sentence (HBO Documentary Films)

Bing is the only one of this field also nominated for Best Director, so I think he’s the clear favorite.  With that out of the way, I am calling my readers’ attention to two other nominees, “Science Fair” and “The Sentence.”  I like the first because I teach science, while the second is a more serious film that examines the effects of mandatory minimum sentencing.  Both public education and prisons are functions of government and the laws that govern both are political issues.

I see one final category that includes a new nominee that examines politics, government, or science, so I will conclude with it.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

306 Hollywood – Cinematographers: Elan Bogarin, Jonathan Bogarin, Alejandro Mejía (PBS, El Tigre)
The Dawn Wall – Cinematographer: Brett Lowell (The Orchard)
Free Solo – Cinematographers: Jimmy Chin, Clair Popkin, Mikey Schaefer (National Geographic Documentary Film)
Minding the Gap – Cinematographer: Bing Liu (Hulu)
Pandas – Cinematographer: David Douglas (Warner Bros., IMAX)
Wild Wild Country – Cinematographer: Adam Stone (Netflix)

The nominee is “Pandas,” which qualifies under science for being a nature documentary.  This is its only nomination, so I don’t think it has much of a chance.  Instead, I think the favorite is “Free Solo.”

As I wrote, the awards will be given out on November 10th, so expect a post about the winners on the 11th at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.  I’ll repost it here, but only after I post a diary entry about the Best Music Documentary nominees and winner for this week’s midweek cafe and lounge.  Stay tuned.

*Despite the press release stating that “‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ is one of the year’s top grossing documentaries,” it sits far behind the top three in fifth with $6,352,306.  Maybe compared to “Whitney” (nominated for Best Music Documentary) at sixth with $3,026,351 and “Pandas” (nominated for Best Cinematography) in seventh with $2,892,597, it could be considered top grossing, but not compared to the four movies ahead of it.

There are a lot of committees in the U.S. House of Representatives. Some are very prestigious. The Ways & Means Committee handles taxes and entitlements. The Finance Committee oversees Wall Street. The Judiciary Committee has a wide mandate and is responsible for looking into impeachable offenses. Obviously, there are weighty responsibilities involved with serving on the Armed Services Committee. In normal times, there isn’t much prestige or even advantage associated with serving on the House Administration Committee.

They spend most of their time overseeing management of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and National Zoo, the Clerk of the House, the Sergeant at Arms and Capitol Police, the Government Publishing Office, the Architect of the Capitol, and the Office of Congressional Accessibility Services. In addition to that, they’re also responsible for providing the funding to other committees and individual members of Congress.

But they have one other responsibility that is periodically a very big deal.

The Committee’s jurisdiction over federal elections requires it to consider proposals to amend federal election law and to monitor congressional elections across the United States. The Committee was instrumental in the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter called the most meaningful improvement in election laws and voting safeguards in a generation. This law provided more than $3 billion dollars for the upgrades of voting equipment and procedures to make the voting process more accessible and to guard against fraud.

The current chairman of the committee is Republican Gregg Harper of Mississippi, a state with possibly the worst and most violent historical record on voting and civil rights in the country. A former chairman of the Rankin County, Mississippi Republican Party, Harper was assigned as an observer during the 2000 Florida presidential recount. He’s only served as chairman since the beginning of this Congress in January 2017. On the Democratic side, former chairman and current ranking member Bob Brady of Philadelphia is retiring. As next in seniority, it’s likely that Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California will serve as the chairperson of the committee when the next Congress convenes in January 2019. Fortunately, she has plenty of experience and has been overseeing implementation of the Help America Vote Act for over fifteen years.

That is likely to come in handy as Florida heads to a reprise of the 2000 debacle, this time with numerous offices on the line, including the seats for governor and U.S. Senate. Just north, in Georgia, all manner of shenanigans have been employed by Secretary of State Brian Kemp in his effort to win the governorship. And in Arizona, and several congressional races around the country, we could be headed to recounts that expose flaws and injustices and security breaches in our voting systems.

Even before it became clear that we are headed for the same kind of controversies that surrounded the Bush v. Gore race in 2000, the House Democratic leadership was expressing a desire to use their new majority status to make a priority out of outlawing “gerrymandering of congressional districts and restoring key enforcement provisions to the Voting Rights Act.” It appears that Rep. Lofgren will spearhead that effort.

She is uniquely placed for the job because in addition to having the gavel on the House Administration Committee, she’s also a senior member of the Judiciary Committee which has jurisdiction on the Voting Rights Act.

You may see her play other prominent roles. The House Administration Committee oversees sexual harassment rules and training and can even determine things like the number of changing tables that are installed in the Capitol complex’s bathrooms. As the likely chairperson of the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Control, she will surely have some hearings on the Trump administration’s child separation policy and other criminal acts related to shoring up their support with white nationalists.  But it’s on voting issues that she’s going to be perhaps the most influential and important member of Congress.

It has been a long climb. Lofgren was first elected to Congress nearly a quarter century ago, in 1994.  Back in September, I wrote A Good Progressive With Seniority Beats a Good Progressive Without It to make the point that people are putting too much faith in the freshman class of newly elected congresspeople to bring about change. I was thinking at the time about the ouster of Massachusetts representative Michael Capuano in a primary, but I was also thinking about people like Zoe Lofgren.

There are a lot of exciting people who will be entering Congress for the first time in January, but they will struggle to have much influence because that’s the nature of how Congress works.  Rep. Lofgren put in 24 years of work to get to the point where she can drive American policy on elections and voting rights. She’s been working on these issues in an oversight role for decades now and has a wealth of knowledge and experience to work with.  Would it have been better to vote her out in a primary just so we can have new blood or someone who is perhaps better on this or that issue important to progressives?

There is something at least a few of the freshmen congresspeople can do though. Because no one really wants to serve on the House Administration Committee since it doesn’t directly serve a home district or attract a lot of political lobbyist money, there will be a few slots available for anyone wise enough to ask.  We have freshmen members from South Florida like Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Lucy McBath was just elected in Georgia’s 6th District in the Atlanta suburbs.  Maybe they’d like a seat at the table when the House convenes and gets to work on reforming our electoral system once again.

Rep. Lofgren can use their help and I’m sure she’ll make a good mentor.

Thank God that at least someone with a logically viable, optimistic point of view has something good to say about the recent election.

Not a Blue Wave, But Perhaps a Foreshock – Dave Lindorff

Read on. (Emphases mine.)

The 2018 election looks at first glance like a wash: Republicans gained seats in the Senate and Democrats regained control of the House with enough of a margin to ensure that they can put some limits on presidential power.

But longer term impacts of 2018 are, I believe, more significant. In this election, with President Trump as party leader pushing a rabidly racist claim that immigrants fleeing from the largely US-caused poverty, chaos and violence in Honduras hoping for a better life for their kids in the US were actually an “invasion” of the US that would bring across the border everything from disease to Arab terrorists, gangs and dark-skinned rapists, and with his claiming that Democrats were behind what he labeled a “caravan” of tens of thousands (it is really just several thousand mostly young people and parents with children and babies), Republicans have hit bottom.

By having accepted Trump’s malignant campaign assistance and his anti-semitic and evidence-free hints that the Jewish immigrant investor George Soros has been funding the Honduran march, Republicans are now clearly self-identified as the party of paranoid racist and sexist white older and often evangelical Christian males (and their wives), of people with a limited education, and of rural voters with little knowledge of or interest in the larger world. Democrats by default, are the party of educated white people who oppose racism, of non-whites, and increasingly, of the young or all races, and clearly too of women, as the large number of women elected to office in this latest election dramatically attests.

—snip—

Clarifying how loathsome the already awful Republican Party has become is a good thing. But on the downside, the Nov. 6 election also showed that the percentage of Americans who will reflexively respond to racist dog-whistle campaigns is frighteningly high. President Trump’s bald-faced lie about Hondurans heading north through Mexico being “invaders” may be ludicrous to rational beings, but it was believed by millions of credulous and irrational racist, anti-semitic, anti-Latino and white supremacist Republicans and independents who flocked to the polls to “defend America” from this pathetic “invasion.”

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the positive news for progressive Democrats is that candidates who openly professed to being “socialist” like the victorious new Congressmember from a Bronx-Queens district, Anastasia Osario-Cortez, or who advocated socialist-style reforms like a Medicare-for-all health care system similar to what people in Canada have had now since 1971, as did the narrowly defeated candidate for Senator in Texas, Beto O’Rourke, did well and in many cases won their races. Openly leftist Democratic candidates helped flip control of the House and also of six state legislatures from Republican to Democratic, including New York State. They also took away at least one of two houses in another dozen or so state legislatures. In others, they ended Republican super majorities needed to override Democratic governors’ vetos of their most pernicious legislation. All this, and the replacement of several Republican governors by Democrats, is hugely important because it is state governments that will redraw congressional and state legislative district lines after the 2020 census.
Divided governments prevent gerrymandering of district lines — something Republican-only state governments did after the 2010 census with enormous impact on a decade of subsequent elections.

O’Rourke’s dramatic success in coming out of nowhere as a first-term congressman from El Paso with no money and eschewing PACs and professional campaign managers, and then almost knocking out the well-funded far-right Tea-Party Republican incumbent Senator Ted Cruz, is a harbinger of a coming tidal change in US politics. The electrifying O’Rourke-Cruz race, which caught national attention, boosted turnout in Texas beyond the 2012 presidential race total. It provides dramatic evidence that an unapologetic progressive — someone who questioned the rationale for the US’s $717-billion military budget and its myriad endless wars around the globe, and who called for Medicaid-for-all, while denouncing Trump for his Mexico border wall and his demonization of immigrants — has a shot at winning even in Texas. In the end, O’Rourke came up 2.6% short of defeating Cruz, but he clearly captured the hearts of many of that state’s voters. It should be noted that in Republican-governed Texas, all the stops were pulled out in using voter suppression methods to keep young people and especially Latinos from voting this year. Efforts were made in college towns to make student voting hard, voting places and machines were limited in Latino neighborhoods and there were even widespread reports of voting machines that were automatically switching votes.

—snip—

Already the largest minority in Texas, Latinos — overwhelmingly Mexican-Americans — are projected to become the majority in Texas in 2020. That, of course, happens to be a presidential election year when Trump (unless his appetite for Big Macs does him in first), will presumably be running for a second term and will need to win Texas. The Mexican-American population in Texas is growing by about 200,000-250,000 a year in Texas, which is roughly double the 213,000 margin by which Cruz just bested O’Rourke.

—snip—

Republican dominance of Texas is going to end, probably sooner than later. And when the Lone Star State flips, it will, like California before it, be for good. And when the country’s second most populous state, with a population already 75% as great as California’s, goes Democratic, it will have profound impact on national politics.

Of course, the US political system is hopelessly corrupted and will for some time continue to be so. Corporate money will continue to fund both parties. Third parties will continue to be blocked from growing by an ongoing conspiracy of the two existing parties to keep them off of ballots and out of the media and publicly broadcast debates. And the national electoral system will remain rigged the way our aristocratic and slave-owning founding fathers intended, with a Senate that gives equal power to states with populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands and states with populations in the tens of millions, and an Electoral College that does the same thing in the selection of presidents.

That said, as Latinos have become major parts of state electorates, we can observe that the politics of those states inexorably shift to the left. This has already happened in California and Colorado, both now reliably Democratic and progressive. It’s happening increasingly in New Mexico and Nevada too, and it’s starting to happen in Arizona and Texas.

As younger voters become a bigger part of state electorates, such shifts are happening too in what have long been hard-right Republican states. Look at Oklahoma, a state where Latinos only represent 11% of a population that’s 72% white. Oklahoma just elected Kendra Horn, a Democrat, to Congress, the first Democrat elected to a national office in that state since the 1970s. And then there’s Kansas, long characterized as the “reddest of red” states in the US. Its voters just handed a win to Democrat Laura Kelly, who defeated that Darth Vader of voter suppression, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, for the governorship. Kobach is the racist creep who conceived of and promoted the insidious scheme — adopted by many Republican-led states — to minimize black voting by erasing from voter lists all names that even remotely resembled names on a national list of convicted felons.

—snip—

There are limits to what we on the left can expect from a Democratic Party that remains as deeply corrupted by corporate cash (legal bribes) as the Republicans, but on the margins these progressive victories and near victories, and the rise of Latino and young voters as significant voting blocs, both groups being quite interested in or at least open to socialist or progressive ideas, are bound to have a profound influence on the Democrats going forward, particularly as their favored candidates start winning.

—snip—

Meanwhile, contemplating the usual list of sorry Democratic presidential prospects (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, or perhaps Amy Klobuchar or an aging Bernie Sanders), the idea percolating among progressive Democrats looking for someone more exciting is Beto O’Rourke as a presidential candidate in 2020. Beto would be like Bernie with a straight spine, youthful energy and a bracing willingness to condemn US militarism and to question military spending (in both fluent English and Spanish).

We’ve got an interesting next two years ahead of us.

I repeat…”We’ve got an interesting next two years ahead of us.”

Yes, we certainly do.

The very first hurdle that will need to be cleared will be the current leadership of the DNC…aka the Democratic NeoConservative wing. As long as the dinosaurs that have foisted so-called “neoliberalism” on the Democratic Party for nearly 30 years continue to be in power, any and all O’Rourke-like newcomers will be Bernie Sandersed right out of contention, at which point the best possible outcome that could be hoped for in 2020 would be another cosmetic shift of power from one party to the other, both parties being owned and controlled by the same corporate monies that dumped us into our current sewer in the name of “globalization” in the late ’70s.

Resist!!!

Please.

Thank you…

AG

Back on October 10, Matt Zapotosky and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that President Trump was in discussions with Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff Matt Whitaker about possibly replacing his boss as Attorney General on either an interim basis or perhaps even a permanent capacity. When the president appeared that day on Fox News, Steve Doocy asked him about the article in the Post.

Trump wasn’t particularly forthcoming but he did clearly vouch for Whitaker’s character based on the fact that he knew him. Yet, when reporters asked him about Whitaker today at the White House, Trump said, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker.”

So, here we have two quotes from the president. They are both short and succinct and as uncomplicated as statements can be:

“I know Matt Whitaker.” –October 10, 2018
“I don’t know Matt Whitaker.” –November 9, 2018

Those two statements would not necessarily contradict each other if they came in reverse chronological order. After all, when you spend some time with someone you had not previously met, then it’s no longer true that you do not know them, but it remains true that you didn’t know them at an earlier period of time. But you can’t know someone in October and no longer know them in November.

Trump was telling the truth the first time, which is well-documented and can be verified all over the internet.

Trump, contra what he’s saying right now, does know Whitaker. Many meetings in Oval. One reason he picked him was because he liked him so much, per several Trump aides. (And saw him as skeptical of Mueller probe.)

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) November 9, 2018

There are a lot of people discussing the constitutionality of putting Whitaker in charge of the Department of Justice and speculating about why it was done and what it might mean. Those are all interesting angles on this story which should be discussed. But I just want to pause for one second to point at those two conflicting statements from the president of the United States.

“I know Matt Whitaker.”
“I don’t know Matt Whitaker.”

He has absolutely no conscience or shame, no pangs of guilt or any possibility of feeling remorse when he contradicts himself like this. Say what you want, but this isn’t normal.

There is something broken in Donald Trump and because almost half the country is in his corner and taking his side for whatever self-interested reasons they may have, the entire country is breaking as a result.

So…

Here is this “Hottest Thing Ever!!!” news that the Washingtoon Post…a now wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA, by the way (instead of partially owned, as it was in the good ol’ Katherine Graham days)…actually took down its paid gateway so that everybody could be frightened.

Manchin: Ousting Sessions was `a big mistake’ that puts the country on verge of a constitutional crisis

Don’t these (bezos]…errr, ahhh…of course I meant bozos… know anything!!!???

This wasn’t a “mistake.”

Trump wants a constitutional crisis.

The sooner, the better. For him, anyway. And…bet on it…he is the only human being about whom he truly cares.

That’s the goal behind every move he’s made since he was nominated over those ineffectual, weak-kneed RatPublican fools and tools.

He wants to make the U.S. just another Trump-owned casino, skim the profits until it tanks and then take his winnings to whatever outlaw country will have him.

Watch.

Y’jes’ cain’t make this shit up.

Fiction is dead, out-fictioned by the whole Post-Truth era. When generally accepted “reality” is almost all lies…who needs fiction?

Sigh…

AG

P.S. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi is counseling “bipartisanship and common ground” while Rome burns and other, Dem bozos…even on this so-called “progressive” website…are fighting a rear guard action against the next generation of real progressives.

P.P.S. Manchin was the only DemRat that voted for Sessions’s placement in the oh so highly esteemed chair of U.S. Attorney General that was once honored by the rancid ass of that lying son of a bitch, John Mitchell.

Sigh twice!!!

If you will indulge me a little in my parochialism, I do want to highlight just what it means that Democrat Chrissy Houlahan was just elected to serve as the representative in Congress for Chester County (and a little slice of Berks County), Pennsylvania.  This is from my local paper:

The last Democrat to be elected to represent Chester County in Washington, D.C., was the West Bradford native John Hickman, who interestingly came to national politics at a an earlier time of great strife and divide in American — a fight that would eventually lead to secession of the South and a bloody war.

A former county district attorney, Hickman, a Quaker, ran on the party ticket in 1855 and was elected to three more terms, first as a Democrat, then as a so-called Anti-Lecompton Democrat opposed to slavery, and finally as a Republican in 1861 when that party led the charge against slavery and elected Abraham Lincoln president. Hickman did not seek a new term in 1863, and the GOP has been winning elections for Congress in the county since, even as it has been split into halves and sometimes thirds because of redistricting.

Even Mr. Hickman didn’t feel like he could remain a Democrat in Chester County. But things have certainly changed, and not only in which party shows a concern for the plight of our country’s African-American community.

In unofficial and partial results, Houlahan had 160,199 votes to Republican Greg McCauley’s 110,678 votes, or 59 percent to 41 percent.

In Chester County, she led with 59 percent, or 123,512, to McCauley’s 40 percent, or 84,536 votes, with 92 percent of the precincts reporting.

In Berks County, the northern tip of the district, with all of the county’s 101 precincts in the district tallied, Houlahan had 36,687 votes to McCauley’s 26,142 votes, or 58 percent to 42 percent…

…Houlahan won in the north of Chester County, the central area, the south, the west and the east. She won in traditional Democratic strongholds such as West Chester, Phoenixville, and Coatesville, but also in Republican bastions such as East Goshen and Uwchlan.

She even swept McCauley in his home township of Pennsbury, in one precinct by the unheard of total of 79 percent to his 20 percent. Turnout across Chester County exceeded 67 percent, far above recent midterm election totals.

Exactly one year ago, I wrote about the shattering realignment that had occurred in our off-year elections here in Chester County and also in bordering Delaware County.

Here in the Philly suburbs, the realignment definitely came, and it came with historic force. Nowhere was that clearer than in Chester and Delaware Counties. In Chester County, the Democrats won races for four so-called “row office” positions, with a general massacre of Republican officeholders throughout the county that extended even to magisterial district judges. For perspective, since Chester County was incorporated in the 18th century, no Democrat had ever been elected to any of the nine row office positions.

In Delaware County, the Democrats won two county Council seats and took all three of the row offices that were on the ballot. Amazingly, this is the first time in history that any Democrat has won a competitive countywide election there.

These results for the local GOP are equivalent to what happened to the Democratic Party in the South over the last couple of decades.

The alignment continued this year, with just as much force. This is from a Delaware County paper.

The GOP suffered historic losses. [In the U.S. congressional race] Pearl Kim, with little or no support from the national [Republican] party, came up short vs. [Mary Gay] Scanlon.

Even more shocking were losses in state House and Senate races.

Incumbent Tom McGarrigle, R-26 of Springfield, lost his battle vs. Democratic mayor of Swarthmore Tim Kearney. It was not a good night for the Springfield GOP. State Rep. Alex Charlton, R-165, was upended by Democrat challenger Jenn O’Mara.

In Upper Darby, popular incumbent Rep. Jamie Santora, R-163, was ousted by Democrat Mike Zabel.

In the 162nd, where Democrat labor leader Dave Delloso and former Republican county sheriff Mary Hopper were battling to fill the seat being vacated by Rep. Nick Miccarelli, Delloso came out on top.

You have to go back to the post-Watergate backlash in 1974 to find a similar rebuke for the Delco GOP.

Ironically, incumbent Middletown Rep. Chris Quinn, R-168, who was under intense heat from groups opposed to Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 pipeline plan, appears to have survived, clinging to a narrow lead over Democrat challenger Kristin Seale.

The only GOP holdover to post a convincing win was stalwart Rep. Steve Barrar, R-160, whose district covers parts of both western Delaware County and Chester County. The Delco delegation in Harrisburg has been transformed, now dominated by Democrats where once this was the solid turf of the GOP.

Of course, Steve Barrar was the Republican I chose to profile before the election, but I wouldn’t call his victory “convincing.” He did win 57-43 in the Delaware County portion of the district, but he lost 42-58 in the Chester County portion. He’s just lucky that Delaware makes up the greater half. In the end, Barrar won by less than a thousand votes with a 51-49 advantage.

So far, this does not necessarily portend greater strength for the Democrats in statewide elections, because rural Pennsylvanians have been moving in the opposite direction. But it is most definitely a major, historic realignment that is at least as dramatic as the loss of the Democratic South.  These areas were every bit as unfriendly to Democrats as Alabama was to Republicans for most of the 20th Century, and without the advantage of Jim Crow laws to protect the one-party system.  Trump has put what was a slow, faltering process on turbocharged greased skids.

Unfortunately, he’s also maintaining and in places growing the support that put him in the Oval Office. The Democrats need a plan for addressing that half of the equation or the Philly suburbs ain’t gonna save us.

What does the meteoric rise of Matthew Whitaker to the position of acting Attorney General mean for the Russia investigation? That’s still unclear, but Charlie Savage at the New York Times does a good job of spelling out the possibilities:

The acting attorney general establishes the special counsel’s jurisdiction and budget. He could tell Mr. Mueller to stop investigating a particular matter or could refuse any requests by Mr. Mueller to expand his investigation. He could also curtail resources to the Office of the Special Counsel, requiring Mr. Mueller to downsize his staff or resources.

Moreover, Mr. Whitaker could block Mr. Mueller from pursuing investigative steps, like subpoenaing Mr. Trump or issuing new indictments. When Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, he decreed that the Justice Department’s regulations for special counsels would apply to the Russia investigation.

Among other things, that regulation says that while the special counsel operates with day-to-day independence, the attorney general for the inquiry can require him to explain “any investigative or prosecutorial step,” and may overrule any moves that he decides are “inappropriate or unwarranted under established department practices.”

Under the regulation, if Mr. Whitaker were to block any of Mr. Mueller’s steps, Congress must be notified.

The last point there is a critical one. If there is any check on what steps Whitaker can take to obstruct justice, it’s the requirement that he notify Congress when he blocks a request from Robert Mueller. While there’s certainly no reason to assume Whitaker would comply with this requirement, he knows that Mueller could easily tell Congress on his own. That raises the price of every obstructive step, because ultimately those choices cannot be made in the dark.

We should be clear that Whitaker was chosen for a reason. He’s not in the natural line of succession at the Department of Justice. He was Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff. The deputy is Rod Rosenstein, and he was already overseeing the Russia investigation. In fact, he was the one who authorized it in the first place. Rosenstein should take over the DOJ now that that Sessions has resigned, but Trump circumvented that possibility.

Whitaker is expected to do what Jeff Sessions could not once he recused himself, which is to protect the president from Robert Mueller. We don’t know how he plans to do this, but we can be sure that he has a plan and that it has been developed over a period of time.

At the Washington Post, Philip Allen Lacovara, a former president of the District of Columbia Bar and counsel to the Watergate special prosecutors, is raising alarm bells and blaming Mueller for taking too long and missing his chance to have any impact with his investigation. I agree with most of what Mr. Lacovara has to say, but I think he’s too certain in a couple of areas. For example, the following isn’t really solid analysis. We don’t know what Mueller has uncovered, so we can’t say whether it could reach the admittedly high threshold that would force a significant fraction of Republican senators to tell the president he would lose an impeachment trial.

It is almost inconceivable that Mueller would be able to uncover the kind of smoking-gun evidence that, in 1974, led key Republican senators to warn President Richard M. Nixon that he would lose an impeachment trial in the Senate, thus forcing his resignation. Even an incriminating recording such as the one that helped bring down Nixon would not suffice. Recall how Trump, during the presidential campaign, finessed the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape revealing his bragging about groping women — his imaginative suggestion that the voice on the tape might not be his seems to have been accepted by many of his credulous supporters.

Given Senate Republicans’ ardent support for Trump, and their fortified majority, House Democrats likely would face an impossible task in pursuing an effective impeachment, no matter what Mueller uncovers.

There’s a lack of imagination in asserting that it’s “almost inconceivable that Mueller would be able to uncover…smoking-gun evidence.” He’s been at this investigation for a long time and has had tremendous investigatory resources at his disposal. In Mueller’s July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian GRU officers, it became obvious that he’d gained insight into the key strokes of Russian military intelligence officers who were working at computers at Unit 26165 in their offices at 20 Komsomolskiy Prospekt Street in Moscow. He has not been playing tiddlywinks.

Where Mr. Lacovara is on more solid ground is in asserting that the bar just got higher after the midterm elections failed to turn control of the Senate over to the Democrats and, in fact, increased the Republicans’ majority instead.    He’s also correct when he says that the current crop of Republicans would not have forced Nixon out.  But what Trump is suspected of having done is several orders of magnitude more serious than what Nixon did, so this isn’t an apples to apples comparison.  It is indeed possible that Mueller will produce a report that absolutely warrants impeachment and removal from office, essentially a totally convincing and compelling proof of the conspiracy complete with firsthand testimony from participants and substantial corroborating technical and electronic evidence, and that the Republican spin machine will shrug and say it was just politics.  They may swat away an additional rock-solid obstruction of justice case. But it’s hardly inconceivable that Mueller could clear the bar and force a substantial number of Republican senators to admit that what Trump has been accused of all along is true and that he cannot remain in office.

Whitaker’s job isn’t to spin Mueller’s report but to prevent him from completing it to his satisfaction or from sharing it with Congress or the world.  But the problem here, in additional to the congressional disclosure requirement mentioned above, is that Mueller could just leak the document and destroy all Whitaker’s plans in an instant. In fact, once the public has read the report, no amount of complaining about foul play would help, and it would actually make matters worse as it would bolster the impression that the administration was guilty of all the charges and intent on covering the whole thing up.

It would take much stronger measures to keep this cat in the bag, like a pre-dawn raid of Mueller’s offices to confiscate all his materials, probably accompanied by Mueller’s arrest along with his members of his investigatory team. But, even there, it’s not safe to assume that Mueller hasn’t taken measures to protect and preserve his evidence and provide for its dissemination in case of emergency.  Some of his evidence is in the possession of judges who have it under seal.  I don’t think it would be possible to quash his investigation without taking measures that would amount to a military coup.

What Whitaker absolutely can do with almost no difficulty is to get a full briefing on the state of the investigation and report back on it to the president and his legal team.  He can also force Mueller to take actions that are legally questionable, like leaking to Congress or the public, which could be used to undermine his credibility or justify his termination.  Something like this is likely to happen now, because the gloves have come off.

The word is that Donald Trump Jr. expects to be indicted for lying to Congress and to Mueller’s investigators, and that would create an unprecedented spectacle. It would completely reshape the political landscape and reshuffle people’s assumptions, but it is no longer “almost inconceivable.”

Whitaker is in place to deal with these kinds of coming events but it’s very conceivable that his actions will do less to cover them up than to make them worse.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions just resigned at the president’s request and, no, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is not making any kind of fuss about it:

Thx to AG Jeff Sessions for his service to our country both leading the DOJ & in the US Senate serving the ppl of Alabama I‘ve enjoyed working with him for decades. He is a true public servant + I appreciate his friendship

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) November 7, 2018

Any hope the Senate Democrats had of blocking or setting conditions for his replacement vanished on Election Night when the Republicans wiped out Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Claire McCaskill and (probably) Bill Nelson. As an interim replacement, Trump has appointed Sessions’s chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker.

We are pleased to announce that Matthew G. Whitaker, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, will become our new Acting Attorney General of the United States. He will serve our Country well….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2018

No doubt, Trump will expect Whitaker to do what his boss wouldn’t, which is to protect him from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.  He can do this in a variety of ways, although it will probably cause mass resignations at the Department of Justice and possibly at the FBI, too.

Chuck Grassley doesn’t care. He’s like the honey badger.

Mueller promised to hold off on making any major announcements between Labor Day when he flipped Manafort and Election Day. I don’t know when Election Day really ends though, since there will be a Senate runoff election in Mississippi and possibly a runoff election in the Georgia governor’s race.