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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 5:42:20 GMT -5
On the same day this week that President Donald Trump was tweeting about the F.B.I.’s fictional SPYGATE “scandal” and the special counsel’s WITCH HUNT into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia—lies that were splashed across the country’s television and mobile screens in short order—Senate Democrats held a photo-op at the most expensive Exxon station on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was joined by three other suit-wearing Democrats to make the case that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal would drive up gas prices. It was a definitional middle-class “pocketbook” argument, one that Democrats hope to make part of their 2018 economic message. Schumer, waving a sheaf of paper, stood behind a sign that proclaimed, rather impotently, “Senate Democrats Demand Lower Gas Prices.” “Senate Democrats look for traction on gas prices,” was the headline of The Hill’s perfunctory write-up of the event. Did you hear anything about it? Most likely you didn’t. Traction, in the Trump era, is a mighty difficult thing to obtain. This is always true for the party out of power, forced to reckon with its ideological cleavages, personality conflicts, and the lack of a singular leader who can compete head-to-head with the bully pulpit of a president. But Trump, our first celebrity president, has made the challenge even more difficult for his foes. We are supposed to be living in a time of historic media fragmentation, when the competition for fickle eyeballs is the chief priority for businesses, media companies, and politicians. Only Trump, an old-school media hound who still cares about things like magazine covers and leathery faced 90s-era TV personalities, has figured it out. He dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. It is as depressing as it is remarkable. And it’s no wonder people don’t quite know what Democrats stand for. We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that over 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at. On Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton won, we might just be watching the N.B.A. Playoffs or The Americans while browsing recipes on our second screen. But we live on a planet where Trump comes at us from every angle. In Trump’s world, you see something about Trump on television, while a push alert about Trump surfaces on your phone, prompting you to text your friends about Trump and post something about whatever happened on your chosen social-media account. Trump has mastered attention capture. As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.” So when Trump claims that he is the victim of a DEEP STATE conspiracy designed to undercut his presidency—#SPYGATE!—our political conversation suddenly becomes premised on a lie, but his lies are nevertheless the terms of the debate. The conservative echo chamber falls in line behind Trump to amplify the noise, repeating his claims without scrutiny. Even the mainstream press slips and muddies the waters, as when The New York Times blithely repeated Rudy Giuliani’s one-sided claim that Robert Mueller plans to wrap up his investigation into whether Trump obstructed the Russia investigation by September 1. How can Democrats possibly compete with this information overload? “The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.” The Democratic consultant class in Washington would like you to know, thank you very much, that their candidates running for office this year aren’t focused on Trump’s scandals, or the Russia investigation, or Stormy Daniels, or the latest indictment-of-the-week. The national media is fixated on that stuff! Regular people don’t care! Trump, Trump, Trump. Russia, Russia, Russia. It’s all you see on cable news and Twitter, tiny pockets of conversation occupied by a small class of opinion elites and thin-skinned reporters. But no, Democratic professionals are fond of tweeting, Americans are more preoccupied with day-to-day concerns like health care, gas prices, and access to affordable education. Sure, polling bears these Democrats out. Health care costs, the economy, and national security routinely top the list of voters’ most pressing concerns this year. Trump’s personality and conduct in office lag well behind. In last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and in subsequent special elections for local and federal seats, Democrats have been winning by talking about local issues like transportation and education. But the undercurrent to all of this Democratic energy is Trump, and it would be folly to ignore the mounting evidence of crimes by Trump’s allies and the ongoing investigation into the president’s own conduct. It is the biggest story in the world! Democrats are showing up in primaries and special elections in numbers that well outpace their performance in previous midterm elections. Talk to any Democrat you know in real life: they are ready to crawl over broken glass to vote in November. You don’t need a poll to tell you this. And it’s because of Trump—his policies, his recklessness, his personality, and yes, his scandals. “Anti-Trump sentiment is what’s going to drive the midterms for Democrats, in part because Trump will own the news cycle and in part because we are the opposition party,” said Tom Perriello, the former Virginia congressman and progressive activist. “That’s just how it works.” Still, that Trump “owns the news cycle” is almost taken for granted at this point—and that’s a source of vulnerability for Democrats. The Russia investigation isn’t going anywhere, and most Americans still support it, but Trump has been ruthless about framing it the way he wants. It’s starting to have an impact, and Democrats are letting him get away with it. A poll out this week from Navigator Research, a Democratic firm, found that Americans are having a tough time seeing through the fog. While a vast majority of Americans were familiar with the investigations into Trump and his associates, a full 59 percent of Americans said they weren’t aware of the investigation uncovering any crimes. Remember: a total of 19 people and three companies have either been indicted or have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. In other words, the poll suggests that people are having a hard time making sense of the investigation. www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/democrats-are-losing-the-only-fight-that-mattersAnd this is why people say the dems have no ideas. It's not that they don't; it's simply too hard to pay attention. It requires effort. Easier to sit back and throw shit at the wall instead. |
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Post by Deleted on May 28, 2018 6:11:10 GMT -5
Memorial Day!
Thank you, troops!
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Post by foggyisback on May 28, 2018 6:15:45 GMT -5
On the same day this week that President Donald Trump was tweeting about the F.B.I.’s fictional SPYGATE “scandal” and the special counsel’s WITCH HUNT into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia—lies that were splashed across the country’s television and mobile screens in short order—Senate Democrats held a photo-op at the most expensive Exxon station on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was joined by three other suit-wearing Democrats to make the case that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal would drive up gas prices. It was a definitional middle-class “pocketbook” argument, one that Democrats hope to make part of their 2018 economic message. Schumer, waving a sheaf of paper, stood behind a sign that proclaimed, rather impotently, “Senate Democrats Demand Lower Gas Prices.” “Senate Democrats look for traction on gas prices,” was the headline of The Hill’s perfunctory write-up of the event. Did you hear anything about it? Most likely you didn’t. Traction, in the Trump era, is a mighty difficult thing to obtain. This is always true for the party out of power, forced to reckon with its ideological cleavages, personality conflicts, and the lack of a singular leader who can compete head-to-head with the bully pulpit of a president. But Trump, our first celebrity president, has made the challenge even more difficult for his foes. We are supposed to be living in a time of historic media fragmentation, when the competition for fickle eyeballs is the chief priority for businesses, media companies, and politicians. Only Trump, an old-school media hound who still cares about things like magazine covers and leathery faced 90s-era TV personalities, has figured it out. He dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. It is as depressing as it is remarkable. And it’s no wonder people don’t quite know what Democrats stand for. We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that over 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at. On Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton won, we might just be watching the N.B.A. Playoffs or The Americans while browsing recipes on our second screen. But we live on a planet where Trump comes at us from every angle. In Trump’s world, you see something about Trump on television, while a push alert about Trump surfaces on your phone, prompting you to text your friends about Trump and post something about whatever happened on your chosen social-media account. Trump has mastered attention capture. As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.” So when Trump claims that he is the victim of a DEEP STATE conspiracy designed to undercut his presidency—#SPYGATE!—our political conversation suddenly becomes premised on a lie, but his lies are nevertheless the terms of the debate. The conservative echo chamber falls in line behind Trump to amplify the noise, repeating his claims without scrutiny. Even the mainstream press slips and muddies the waters, as when The New York Times blithely repeated Rudy Giuliani’s one-sided claim that Robert Mueller plans to wrap up his investigation into whether Trump obstructed the Russia investigation by September 1. How can Democrats possibly compete with this information overload? “The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.” The Democratic consultant class in Washington would like you to know, thank you very much, that their candidates running for office this year aren’t focused on Trump’s scandals, or the Russia investigation, or Stormy Daniels, or the latest indictment-of-the-week. The national media is fixated on that stuff! Regular people don’t care! Trump, Trump, Trump. Russia, Russia, Russia. It’s all you see on cable news and Twitter, tiny pockets of conversation occupied by a small class of opinion elites and thin-skinned reporters. But no, Democratic professionals are fond of tweeting, Americans are more preoccupied with day-to-day concerns like health care, gas prices, and access to affordable education. Sure, polling bears these Democrats out. Health care costs, the economy, and national security routinely top the list of voters’ most pressing concerns this year. Trump’s personality and conduct in office lag well behind. In last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and in subsequent special elections for local and federal seats, Democrats have been winning by talking about local issues like transportation and education. But the undercurrent to all of this Democratic energy is Trump, and it would be folly to ignore the mounting evidence of crimes by Trump’s allies and the ongoing investigation into the president’s own conduct. It is the biggest story in the world! Democrats are showing up in primaries and special elections in numbers that well outpace their performance in previous midterm elections. Talk to any Democrat you know in real life: they are ready to crawl over broken glass to vote in November. You don’t need a poll to tell you this. And it’s because of Trump—his policies, his recklessness, his personality, and yes, his scandals. “Anti-Trump sentiment is what’s going to drive the midterms for Democrats, in part because Trump will own the news cycle and in part because we are the opposition party,” said Tom Perriello, the former Virginia congressman and progressive activist. “That’s just how it works.” Still, that Trump “owns the news cycle” is almost taken for granted at this point—and that’s a source of vulnerability for Democrats. The Russia investigation isn’t going anywhere, and most Americans still support it, but Trump has been ruthless about framing it the way he wants. It’s starting to have an impact, and Democrats are letting him get away with it. A poll out this week from Navigator Research, a Democratic firm, found that Americans are having a tough time seeing through the fog. While a vast majority of Americans were familiar with the investigations into Trump and his associates, a full 59 percent of Americans said they weren’t aware of the investigation uncovering any crimes. Remember: a total of 19 people and three companies have either been indicted or have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. In other words, the poll suggests that people are having a hard time making sense of the investigation. www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/democrats-are-losing-the-only-fight-that-mattersAnd this is why people say the dems have no ideas. It's not that they don't; it's simply too hard to pay attention. It requires effort. Easier to sit back and throw shit at the wall instead. Critics said Dems didn't have ideas when They had control of the White House, ergo they lost congressional seats. Dems never have a consistent message according to the MSM, a question never posed to Republicals when they lose. Wonder why. |
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Post by foggyisback on May 28, 2018 6:27:14 GMT -5
I'm guessing the 'openly gah' part referred to his Catholic schooling 🤔
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 6:32:10 GMT -5
On the same day this week that President Donald Trump was tweeting about the F.B.I.’s fictional SPYGATE “scandal” and the special counsel’s WITCH HUNT into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia—lies that were splashed across the country’s television and mobile screens in short order—Senate Democrats held a photo-op at the most expensive Exxon station on Capitol Hill. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was joined by three other suit-wearing Democrats to make the case that Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal would drive up gas prices. It was a definitional middle-class “pocketbook” argument, one that Democrats hope to make part of their 2018 economic message. Schumer, waving a sheaf of paper, stood behind a sign that proclaimed, rather impotently, “Senate Democrats Demand Lower Gas Prices.” Still, that Trump “owns the news cycle” is almost taken for granted at this point—and that’s a source of vulnerability for Democrats. The Russia investigation isn’t going anywhere, and most Americans still support it, but Trump has been ruthless about framing it the way he wants. It’s starting to have an impact, and Democrats are letting him get away with it. A poll out this week from Navigator Research, a Democratic firm, found that Americans are having a tough time seeing through the fog. While a vast majority of Americans were familiar with the investigations into Trump and his associates, a full 59 percent of Americans said they weren’t aware of the investigation uncovering any crimes. Remember: a total of 19 people and three companies have either been indicted or have pleaded guilty to criminal charges. In other words, the poll suggests that people are having a hard time making sense of the investigation. www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/democrats-are-losing-the-only-fight-that-mattersAnd this is why people say the dems have no ideas. It's not that they don't; it's simply too hard to pay attention. It requires effort. Easier to sit back and throw shit at the wall instead. Critics said Dems didn't have ideas when They had control of the White House, ergo they lost congressional seats. Dems never have a consistent message according to the MSM, a question never posed to Republicals when they lose. Wonder why. Well, they did pass the first meaningful health insurance reforem. But hey, that messes with the narrative, so it's inconvenient. So is a split congress. But facts are details that are too hard to factor in when you're trying to be negative. Easier to spout off some bullshit than do any critical thinking. |
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 6:34:48 GMT -5
 Our Presidential Politics Have Always Been Nasty. President Trump Is Something New. We’ve bounced back from previous lows. We’re hitting a new record low now; the question is if there’s any correction coming. The negativity, hostility and incivility of the Trump presidency makes it easy to say that he, and he alone, has degraded American political discourse and this coarseness has, thereby, endangered our nation and our democracy. But saying that is to both miss the point and give him too much credit. We romanticize and misremember our past, creating a mythology that is more Hollywood than real, when we assume a golden age of civility in American political life. As most American historians know, politics has always been a competitive sport and American presidents have always expressed crude and often negative opinions about opponents. The difference between then and now is that they usually kept these thoughts and sayings private. We can hear them voice these thoughts to aides, colleagues, and staff in the White House tapes of JFK, LBJ and Nixon. But, they were careful to keep those thoughts out of the public realm (and their White House staffs rarely leaked), and to speak publicly in what could be best called a presidential voice. There was, in a sense a difference between the public and private sphere of being president. One key difference today is the erasure of the private. Everything is public, as we are all witnesses as everything is leaked, tweeted, posted and published, in more or less real time. What we are witnessing is the unveiling of an old American secret — that politics is nasty business. From the founding through much of the 19th century, ambitious men (and they were all men) used surrogates to pursue political office as the physical act of just running was seen as a demeaning, dirty act. Politics was above the American statesman. Active campaigning and embracing the active politics of life is a 20th century device, but let’s not forget that negative campaigning is age-old. The masters of politics (wizards and manipulators) always existed, if hidden behind the curtain, held at a distance and never fully in the inner circle. They were most certainly never public figures. They were feared and reviled as much as they were needed. Take the 1800 presidential election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as an example. Supporters of Adams called Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." That was in response to Jefferson’s supporters calling Adams a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Neither man publically campaigned, let alone cast such loaded terms around; they battled through proxies in the belief that politics was by its nature is ugly and petty, thatt it could soil better men. Leaders needed to insulate themselves from politics as best they could to appear as statesmen rather than mere politicians. Statesmen needed to be above politics. What we are witnessing now is the final toppling of the American statesman, as those in politics realize they are at their core politicians and therefore must embrace the realities of the business. The facade or gloss of statesmanship, of the walls between private and public life for American politicians is dead. . Sure, there are still those in politics who try to cling to the old notions, trying to stay above the fray, trying to maintain the dignity of statesmanship (in its genderless meaning). They are a declining bunch these days and seem to be going the way of the dodo bird. Let’s look at presidential communication as a case in point. Historian David Greenberg has explained the role of political communications in The Republic of Spin, his important book on presidential and political communications. Presidents and their White House staff have always tried to manipulate the message, to change the discussion and influence discourse. How else could you govern or get anything done after all? To do that effectively, presidents needed to seem to be above politics, all the while being skilled political animals. Publicly they were statesmen; privately they were Machiavellian to the core. To succeed, White Houses needed a light-touch approach, as civilized discourse and plausible deniability were the rules. To overreach was to be publicly rebuffed. Therefore, they tried to avoid the appearance of direct manipulation, the appearance of scandal or anything that might change focus away from desired policy outcomes. Sure, there are a few moments in history that pushed past the norms. The corruption of Ulysses Grant for instance, and more recently Richard Nixon and Watergate, but each of these low points led to what we might call a correction in the norms and expectations to which he held our presidents. We recommited to the statesman model of leadership. Today, our political and social norms are again being pushed and it’s not clear we’ve yet hit whatever deep new bottom. The nastiness is nothing new. The abandonment of any veneer of politeness and civility, however, is very new—and suggests that the long-established unwritten rules of American politics have now been torn up. The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue got there by breaking all the old rules of decent discourse, and — despite his plank promises that 'I'm gonna be so presidential that you people will be so bored” — has continued to viciously insult women, immigrants, rival politicians and anyone else who inspires his anger since coming to office. He won it by being a politician— and truly our first celebrity president, as John McCain, a subject of many of Trump’s insults, accused Barack Obama of being in 2008 — and shows no interest in becoming a statesman now. Trump understands the entertainment value of politics and seems to have approached the campaign and his presidency as he would a reality show — the nasty characters always stay the longest. The nicest contestants leave first. We are all witnesses to his utterances and will find out soon if there is any clawing back of our old political rules this time. Will one insult finally be the line in the sand that Americans will not accept him crossing? Is a moment coming similar to when chief counsel for the army Joseph N. Welsh confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy (advised by future Trump adviser Roy Cohn) with the line: "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” and thereby loosened the grip of McCarthyism on the U.S. Historians will, no doubt, look back on this moment as a critical time when our political rules were redefined. It remains to be seen if it is marked also as the moment of democratic decline. www.thedailybeast.com/our-presidential-politics-have-always-been-nasty-president-trump-is-something-new?ref=home |
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 6:37:49 GMT -5
Week 53: Trump Goes Spy Hunting and Gets Skunked Even some of his staunchest supporters couldn’t manage to applaud his performance. Master table-turner Donald Trump is at it again, spinning the latest damning news from the Russia investigation and flinging it back at his critics to make him look like a victim, not a perp. This week’s twirl of the table had Trump spinning his interpretive energies into “SPYGATE,” his racy label for the alleged “Criminal Deep State” conspiracy against him. Why call it Spygate? Trump, who lives for catchy buzz-phrases and slogans, told an ally he wanted “to brand” the informant as a spy, and that such language would leave a more lasting impression on the media and public. On Sunday, the president issued his pompous “I hereby demand” decree on Twitter that the Department of Justice investigate his suspicions that the Obama administration had “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign. According to Trump’s theory, the FBI wasn’t investigating the possible penetration of his 2016 presidential campaign by Russian intelligence when it assigned an informant to speak to three members of his campaign staff. It was embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes, resulting in a scandalous affair that could be “bigger than Watergate!“ “Illegal!” he tweeted, all designed to “frame“ him for crimes he didn’t commit. The president raised such a fuss that he instigated two mini-briefings on Capitol Hill about the FBI’s tactics so that select members of Congress could judge for themselves. The “spy” in question turns out to be Stefan A. Halper, Republican stalwart and University of Cambridge professor emeritus who worked for the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and George H.W. Bush’s campaign. (If this be the Deep State, maybe it’s not as dark and mysterious as we thought.) He allegedly spied on President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign for Reagan, and some say he used former CIA agents to gather his information. As much as Trump would like you to believe that Halper was a spy and not a legitimate informant working on an investigation, he can’t get independent voices with clout (outside of Kimberley A. Strassel of the Wall Street Journal editorial page) to echo his opinions. This week, a leading member of the president’s party, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina (who didn’t attend the briefings), declined an invitation to endorse the Trump view. “A confidential informant is not a spy,” Graham said succinctly. Republicans who attended the briefing were mum, ducking out without speaking to reporters. Democrats who attended—Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Mark Warner—were adamant in insisting that no “spying” had occurred. Even Rudy Giuliani, who had asserted his boss’ right to know if Halper had gathered exculpatory evidence in his conversations with George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, didn’t suggest afterward that anything like that had emerged. One of the many problems with Trump’s SPYGATE theory is the idea that the nefarious FBI and the “Criminal Deep State” would go to all that trouble penetrating his campaign with a “spy” and then not use what they had gleaned to destroy his chances of winning the election? It’s a strange bit of sabotage when the saboteur sets the charges under the bridge and then doesn’t strike the fuse. Like the similar table-turning by Trump’s supporters who advocated for the release of the Nunes memo, or Trump’s insistence that the real Russia scandal was the Uranium One deal, or his claim that the Obama administration had “tapped“ his phones, or the business about “unmasking,” his new harping about a government spy infiltrating his campaign is just another obfuscating slow-simmer idea to leap out of his mental Crock-Pot. Trump barks, Mueller’s caravan moves on. This week we learned of yet another previously undisclosed contact between a powerful Russian and a member of the Trump court. On Friday, the New York Times reported that oligarch Viktor Vekselberg met with Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen in his Trump Tower office just 11 days before the inauguration. A few days after Trump took the oath of office, Cohen won a $1 million consulting contract from Columbus Nova, which is an affiliate of Vekselberg’s Renova Group—both of which landed on the Treasury Department sanctions list last month. (Cohen ended up only collecting $580,000 of the contract.) Also attending the meeting was Columbus Nova head Andrew Intrater, Vekselberg’s cousin, who later donated $250,000 to the Trump inaugural committee. Both Intrater and Vekselberg have been interviewed by Mueller’s team. The Intrater and Vekselberg arrival was captured by the C-SPAN camera positioned in the Trump Tower lobby. Isn’t it lovely that C-SPAN has ended up being the operator of the national security security-cam? “Mr. Trump was in the building that day, and his office was just doors down from Mr. Cohen’s, though Mr. Intrater said they did not see the president-elect,” the Times reports. So many meetings between foreigners and Trumpies in the Trump Tower! Let’s count! Long before Vekselberg and Intrater came calling on Cohen, the president’s gilded edifice on 5th Avenue had hosted several interesting meetings. In January 2015, Trump met with Emin Agalarov, son of Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, and his publicist, Rob Goldstone in his office. More famously, the top brass of the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort—met with a bevy of Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. In August 2016, as the New York Times has just reported, emissaries for two Arab princes met with Donald Trump Jr. and informed him that the wealthy princes wanted to help Trump win the November election. (“The interactions are a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel,” the Times reports.) The two emissaries, Blackwater founder Erik Prince and international fixer George Nader, later met with Putin-linked financier Kirill Dmitriev in Seychelles in January 2017. A third attendee at the meeting, Joel Zamel, a “specialist in social media manipulation,” had previously worked for Putin-allied oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev. Deripaska, as is well known, was once a business partner of Manafort’s. Roger Stone, longtime Trump supporter, self-proclaimed dirty-tricks artist, and author of the famous tweet that promised John Podesta that he would soon be enjoying his "time in the barrel," may soon have a ticket to the big wooden tub. This week, the Wall Street Journal published Stone emails that indicate that he might not have been on the complete level in his interview with the House Intelligence Committee in September about his solicitation of materials from Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. It now appears that despite earlier denials, he was actively seeking additional emails by Hillary Clinton. “Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30—particularly on August 20, 2011,” Stone wrote to his go-between. Stone tells the Journal that his testimony was truthful, but it’s hard to square with this email. Appearing on Meet the Press last Sunday, Stone said he was “prepared” to be indicted in Mueller’s investigation for some “extraneous crime pertaining to my business.” Evidence that the awfulness of prison life is weighing on him came two days later in an interview with Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM. Stone said former CIA Director John Brennan would end up going to jail for his deep state crimes against Trump, so he “should pop the glass capsule and take the cyanide now.” Will Stone take cyanide if he’s sent up the river? My guess is he’d find a way to wash it down with some contraband Champagne. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/26/swamp-diary-trump-spy-hunter-218545 |
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Post by Deleted on May 28, 2018 6:49:08 GMT -5
PS: @outsider is again traveling in time: he is posting from the 29th!
;-)
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Post by LA_Randy on May 28, 2018 7:10:08 GMT -5
PS: @outsider is again traveling in time: he is posting from the 29th! ;-) Still flying Solo! |
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Post by LA_Randy on May 28, 2018 7:25:56 GMT -5
Photos: Remembering Trump’s Russia Probe Martyrs We thought that President Trump had exhausted every angle to attack Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling. He has accepted Vladimir Putin’s innocent plea; pretended that the probe is staffed only by Democrats in an effort to prove its partisan bias; accused Hillary Clinton of being the real colluder; and, most recently, tried to make “Spygate” happen. But one tactic he hadn’t attempted until Sunday: painting the many people in his administration who have cultivated shady ties with Russia as a bunch of guileless greenhorns whose dreams of making America great again were stomped out by a ruthless special counsel: Trump - Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt? They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation...They went back home in tatters! At first blush, this line of thinking seems farcical. But maybe Trump has a point here. Because when you actually take a look — a long, hard look — at some of the men caught up in the Russia probe, their good-heartedness really comes through and you begin to understand the real damage Mueller has wrought on a group of innocent dreamers. Their only crime, other than actual crimes, was to believe they could make a difference: nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/photos-remembering-trumps-russia-probe-martyrs.html |
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 7:26:42 GMT -5
PS: @outsider is again traveling in time: he is posting from the 29th! ;-) Still flying Solo! Fixed! |
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 7:47:23 GMT -5
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 8:37:03 GMT -5
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 8:44:57 GMT -5
On average, the CRA disciplines one employee each business day for misconduct. The plurality of these cases (~40%) are failure to sufficient protect taxpayer's personal information which I actually see as a good sign rather than a bad one: I know that I do not protect private data as well as I'm supposed to but have never been disciplined for it because nobody paid attention or audited it. www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cra-misconduct-discipline-employees-1.4679116 |
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 8:58:38 GMT -5
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Post by LA_Randy on May 28, 2018 9:29:06 GMT -5
IT’S TIME FOR SOME GAME THEORY! I don’t find proposed “grand bargains” in which Democrats trade spending cuts for tax increases very appealing even in the abstract. But in the current partisan context, they’re transparently indefensible because they fail even on their own terms: you can’t actually make deficit reduction deals with a party that doesn’t care about deficits. Any deal will be immediately blown up by the next unified Republican government, which will inevitably pass defense increases and a massive upper-class and corporate tax cut, all almost entirely debt-funded. Unilateral fiscal responsibility is just being a massive sucker — a more generously subsidized ACA would have been more immediately popular, for example, and having it pay for itself did not actually gain any political rewards, and the deficit has now been completely blown up anyway. Fortunately, some of our Democrats is learning: More of this, please. Democrats cannot let their agenda be constrained by Republican bad faith. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/05/time-game-theory |
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DocDrama
Hive Whisperer
A Musical Note or a Shark Fin
Posts: 6,927 
Likes: 16,423
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Post by DocDrama on May 28, 2018 9:35:44 GMT -5
Memorial Day! Thank you, troops! And here's hoping they don't have to go fight another phony WAR in the Middle East! |
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Post by foggyisback on May 28, 2018 10:33:14 GMT -5
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 10:39:53 GMT -5
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Post by doddeb on May 28, 2018 10:47:39 GMT -5
When even your own idiot fans school you on your narcissistic need for self promotion
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Post by doddeb on May 28, 2018 10:58:58 GMT -5
Can she get the account number changed today? A big pain, I know, but better safe. |
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Post by forgottenlord on May 28, 2018 11:09:43 GMT -5
Can she get the account number changed today? A big pain, I know, but better safe. Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, she's not going to be able to talk to them until this evening |
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Post by doddeb on May 28, 2018 11:13:43 GMT -5
Italian politics in turmoil as president won't confirm a finance minister who wants to get rid of the euro. ROME — Italy fell into political chaos Sunday after the presidential veto of a euroskeptical finance minister caused the apparent collapse of an attempt to form Western Europe’s first fully populist government. Italians had entered the weekend thinking such a government might be just days away from taking power. What they have received instead is what one major paper, la Repubblica, is calling “an unprecedented institutional clash.” President Sergio Mattarella — given referee-like powers to oversee the formation of governments — refused to approve as finance minister 81-year-old Paolo Savona. In a new book, Savona, described Italy’s adoption of the euro as a “historic error,” according to media accounts. Mattarella is more pro-European than the two populist parties asking for his mandate, analysts say. His veto of Savona infuriated the leaders of those parties, who on Sunday evening were talking not about presenting fresh proposals to Mattarella, but rather calling for new elections. After meeting Sunday with prime minister-designate Giuseppe Conte, Mattarella said he was protecting Italy’s best interests with his rejection and had asked the parties — the far-right League and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement — for a nominee who wouldn’t provoke “Italy’s exiting of the euro.” “The adhesion to the euro is a choice of fundamental importance for the perspectives of our country and our youth,” Mattarella said. “If you want to talk about it, we need to do it openly and with a serious, in-depth analysis.” During recent days, Italian bonds have slumped, raising the country’s borrowing costs, and Mattarella said this represented “concrete risks for the savings of our fellow citizens and of Italian families.” www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/italy-in-chaos-as-effort-to-form-western-europes-first-populist-government-collapses/2018/05/27/15438a9a-61e1-11e8-81ca-bb14593acaa6_story.html?utm_term=.5091355e5539 |
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 11:32:10 GMT -5
Outlier poll that showed GOP lead in the race for Congress abruptly shifts back to the Democrats Many conservatives cited the poll as a sign that the blue wave would hit a wall this fall, but now it has adjusted A poll that helps survey the generic Congressional ballot no longer shows a dramatic lead for the GOP, a drastic shift that will crush conservatives looking for evidence of a feeble blue wave this upcoming November. The Reuters/Ipsos poll indicated last week that Republicans attained a five-point lead in the ballot, a seismic bump considering Democrats had a plus-three margin in the previous two polls. Right-wing pundits were absolutely giddy over the turn of events, as they shared the new poll on social media to their then-disheartened audience. That same poll Hannity was referencing released new numbers on Sunday. It now conveys a seven-point lead for Democrats. Hannity was not alone in celebrating the previous shift in the generic Congressional ballot, which measures national support for either of the two major parties in the upcoming midterm elections. Supporters of the Republican Party have been whispering for months of a possible let down for Democrats this upcoming fall. They pointed to President Trump's tax cuts and his diplomacy abroad as victories for the administration and the party as a whole. When the Reuters/Ipsos poll came out last Monday, Fox News pundits were whipped into a frenzy, relieved to see evidence of a GOP comeback. It turns out the supposed Republican resurgence was mostly due to the volatility of the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Charles Franklin, a pollster for the Huffington Post and the director of the Marquette Law School poll, explained that the short-lived erosion of Democratic support could be attributed to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, which detected a shift that no other poll had registered. Franklin wrote on Twitter that the Reuters/Ipsos poll's sampling had dramatically shifted beginning on May 1, as more Republicans were surveyed than usual. This shift accounted for the large bump reported on earlier this week. Since the poll on Monday, however, the Reuters/Ipsos party identification sampling had moved to a plus-4.1 margin in favor of Democrats, Franklin reported, and the new generic ballot shifted accordingly. Republicans who championed the previous Reuters/Ipsos poll seemed to have made the classic mistake of putting too much stock on a single survey. In his article for Townhall, Guy Benson did hedge his optimism. "Color me a bit skeptical, and these numbers will bounce around regardless," he wrote of the shifting ballot. At the same time, Benson could not hide his rejuvenated positivity. "Republicans haven't led on this question in any major in roughly two years, so it's worth flagging," he added. Benson proposed that the source of the GOP bump began and ended with the economy. "What explains this see-saw back toward Republicans?" he asked rhetorically. "As someone once said, it's the economy, stupid." Now that the Reuters/Ipsos poll has recalibrated, Republicans have to face the potential reality of a Democratic victory in November. National Journal editor and Fox News contributor Josh Kraushaar attempted to temper the right's confidence in a piece Sunday, titled, "Why Democrats are still favorites to win the House." While Kraushaar failed to note the change in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, he did concede that a blue wave was likely approaching. "Despite encouraging economic news for Republicans, and GOP gains in national polling, I’m not quite as confident about the prospects of a GOP comeback," he wrote. "It’s impossible to ignore the consistently supercharged Democratic turnout in election after election, from swing districts to those fought on conservative turf," he added. "Even if you look to the larger contests (like last year’s governor’s races) as a stronger indicator, the results are highly encouraging for the Democratic Party. If in our polarized times, Democrats simply win most GOP-held Clinton seats and pick off competitive open-seat races where Republicans retired, they’re well on their way to a narrow majority." Again, Kraushaar did conveniently ignore the shifting numbers of the generic Congressional ballot; nevertheless, even he realized that GOP chances are rather slim this November. Don't expect Hannity to offer any insights on the Democratic uptick in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. He and Trump have the propensity to share polling numbers that reflect well on the administration and the Republican Party. But 95 percent of the time, when the polls show Trump at historic lows, the White House and his sycophants act as if polling numbers are an extension of fake news. For Democrats to retake the House, the party needs a popular vote margin of between three and four points, according to Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist and contributor for the University of Virginia Center for Politics. As it stands, Democrats maintain a six-point margin, according to a composition of polls made by FiveThirtyEight. The stakes this November could not be any higher. Trump and his legal team clearly fear that the Robert Mueller investigation may yield evidence or information that might support impeachment. Because impeachment proceedings are entirely political, as opposed to legal, Democrats will need to retake the House if it hopes to hold Trump and his campaign accountable. www.salon.com/2018/05/27/outlier-poll-that-showed-gop-lead-in-the-race-for-congress-abruptly-shifts-back-to-the-democrats/ |
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Post by doddeb on May 28, 2018 11:33:08 GMT -5
Can she get the account number changed today? A big pain, I know, but better safe. Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, she's not going to be able to talk to them until this evening It is a huge pain, especially if she has auto deposits or auto bill pay attached to that number. Last time we ordered checks for my mom, the check printing company "lost" two books, and caught it in quality control prior to mailing. My credit union called and told me they were changing the account number. They were pretty adamant about it. They also provided a list of auto deposits/ withdrawals that I needed to change. |
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Post by LA_Randy on May 28, 2018 11:40:03 GMT -5
Important: Missing Children Announcement They aren't missing. That's the announcement. This is one of those awful things floating around the Internet spreading rage and distress in its wake that just isn't true. It is not the case that the government has lost 1,475 children. The story is, rather, that on 26 April 2018 Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of the HHS Administration for Children and Families (and you can see by the "acting" that it's another job Trump hasn't managed to fill, so this is a professional you can trust) was testifying to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on Office of Refugee Responsibility care and placement of "unaccompanied alien children" (UAC), that is children who surrendered to immigration authorities at the border when they were unaccompanied by their parents or adult family members (so the government did not separate them from their families; these children, in contrast to the ones violently mistreated by the new Jeff Sessions policy, were already separated when they got here). The ORR takes children referred to them by DHS, nearly all of them from from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and keeps them in shelters, which are probably not ideal, until they can place them in "foster care or whatever" as General Kelly said, but actually reunited with parents or close family members in 90% of cases. The average shelter stay is 50 or 60 days, while the office evaluates potential sponsors and their ability to provide for the child's physical and mental well-being, with interviews, background checks, and in some cases an on-site home study. In March 2016, this vetting was made stricter, requiring home studies for the sponsors of all children 12 and under, and recommending case managers to consider a home study in cases where it wasn't required. Also in March 2016, the ORR instituted a program of safety and well-being calls to check up on children, 30 days after their release to the sponsor, in addition to expanding the 24/7 National Calling Center UAC kids can call in case of any kind of trouble. These were good ideas. It's the position of HHS that the ORR has no legal responsibility for the children once they've been released, but Wagner isn't satisfied with that, and is looking to change the regulation. In the meantime, as he was explaining to the subcommittee, they make these calls, and that's what the story of the missing kids is about: The 1,475 children were those whose sponsors wouldn't pick up the phone. They are not missing. They are mostly with their parents or close relatives; it is only the government that can't be 100% sure where they are. Given that the current government loudly denounces these children as "illegals", "gang members", and "animals", I wouldn't say they are wrong to be shy, even though it's evidently not the ORR that's persecuting them. That doesn't mean you shouldn't believe any horrible stories you hear from parents who have been cut off from their kids at a border crossing and may be unable to contact them even if they know where they are, like this reported in The New York Times: But understand that these are not the same kids: they were accompanied when they got here, and victimized by the Trump-Sessions policy attempting to make their lives as bleak and frightening as possible, in the hopes that kids in Guatemala and Honduras will hear about it and decide it's better to stay in deep poverty and streets ruled by MS-13 members exported from southern California. They too are being put in shelters, but the way they work is different from the ORR ones: The purpose of the ORR program is to see that children are adequately cared for. The purpose of the new Sessions program is to make sure everybody knows Trump is worse than MS-13. So now you know, it's true. yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2018/05/important-missing-children-announcement.html |
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Post by phillippatUK on May 28, 2018 11:40:38 GMT -5
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Post by Outsider on May 28, 2018 11:40:51 GMT -5
Millennials take on Trump in the midterms Younger candidates are flooding Democratic congressional primaries — and winning. DALLAS — When Colin Allred, a 35-year-old former NFL linebacker-turned-congressional candidate, addressed two dozen student volunteers at a rooftop restaurant last week, he promised them that he knows millennials are more than avocado toast-eating social media obsessives. “People think millennials just tweet … and complain, but you all are living proof that that’s not true,” Allred said. “You are the best part of this party.” Allred — the newly minted Democratic nominee for a competitive House seat here— is part of a swell of young Democratic House candidates hoping to inspire higher turnout among fellow millennials in the midterm elections, when youth voting rates typically decline. At least 20 millennial Democratic candidates are running in battleground districts, a leap over previous cycles that could remake the party’s generational divide. “I don’t recall a cycle with anything close to this number of younger candidates in recent times,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Notably, younger candidates who actually have a good shot at winning – raising money, running professional campaigns.” Currently, the average age of a member of 115th Congress — nearly 58 years old in the House and nearly 62 years old in the Senate — is among the oldest of any Congress in recent history, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), will turn 34 in July. Stefanik was first elected at age 30. No woman has ever been elected to Congress in her 20s, but two 20-something Democrats — Sara Jacobs in Southern California and Abby Finkenauer in eastern Iowa — are serious contenders running in competitive districts. Illinois' Lauren Underwood, 31, and Ohio's Aftab Pureval, 35, have already won primaries to take on sitting GOP incumbents this fall. “In my almost-decade as a pollster, I’ve had almost no clients younger than me," said Zac McCrary, a 37-year-old Democratic consultant. "Now I’ve got several this cycle." “Right now, the instinct is to look for the antithesis of [President] Donald Trump, and so Democratic primary voters are defaulting toward women, younger rather than older,” McCrary added. “And those young candidates are more difficult targets because they don’t have decades’ worth of opposition research racked up.” Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), the 33-year-old former Marine who won a March special election against 60-year-old Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone in Western Pennsylvania, often deployed the state legislator’s long voting record against him. Earlier this month, Saccone lost a GOP primary in a different, redrawn district to Guy Reschenthaler, a 35-year-old Republican. “With youth, the advantage is not being a part of the traditional political system,” said Mike DeVanney, a Republican consultant based in Pennsylvania. “All of this points to unease that the current political officeholders are not getting the job done, and voters are looking for someone different who’s not part of the system and can bring new ideas to the table.” While the candidates gladly tout the experience they do have — Allred’s path has already taken him from the Tennessee Titans to law school and the Obama administration — they say the last election taught them not to be afraid to take an early leap into the political arena. “It’s a mistake for us to pretend that this is going to be a battle of resumes,” Allred said at his campaign headquarters last week, with his dog, Scarlet, snoozing nearby. “We saw in 2016 that that’s not the case. There’s much more to getting people inspired and elected than the number of years you’ve been in a certain job.” In Texas, Allred’s youth and personal story appear to have made up for an initial lack of traditional campaign resources. Allred lagged behind his Democratic opponents in cash for a year and didn’t air a single TV ad before finishing ahead of them all in the first-round primary in March. Allred — who blasted Drake's "Started from the Bottom" in the car en route to his primary-night victory party — is a local high school football star who was raised by a single mom and made it to the pros before becoming a civil rights attorney. That makes him the “kind of candidate who has a compelling story that can meet the experience threshold” to defuse attacks on his credentials, said McCrary. Indeed, Allred’s story reminded some supporters of another upstart candidate who made an early leap for office: former President Barack Obama. “I want anyone who brings that kind of understated cool back to the office,” said Lori Folz, a retired CPA who voted for Allred at a local library last week. Mary Reid-Douglas, a 37-year-old counselor who also voted early, said Allred’s youth meant he’d “help shake up the status quo.” Allred went on to win 69 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary runoff against Lillian Salerno, another Obama administration veteran who attacked him as “unvetted and untested” in an interview with POLITICO before the runoff. Like the rest of his Democratic millennial cohort, Allred faces an uphill battle in November. He and others are running in tough districts that haven’t elected Democrats in years; GOP Rep. Pete Sessions has served in Congress since the 1996 elections. Millennial candidates often face opponents who question their readiness for Congress, accusing them of resume inflation and dredging up social media posts to drive the point home. Last year in Georgia, Jon Ossoff, now 31, watched as his college antics — footage of him dressed up as Han Solo — resurfaced in an attack ad during a closely watched special election. The spot accused him of “fighting against restrictions on keg parties” because he was “just a college kid.” “Social media is an oppo researcher’s dream, and it creates an instant lasting record. If I was a millennial, I’d delete everything I said and did online. Jon Ossoff forgot to do that,” said Corry Bliss, executive director of Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP super PAC that aired the ads against Ossoff. Bliss added: "You can be 30 and be a good, qualified candidate — but it just depends on what you did during those 30 years.” Like Ossoff, Jacobs has already faced criticisms over resume inflation. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that though Jacobs called herself a “policy maker” while she worked in the State Department during the Obama administration, her former supervisor said she “did not create policy.” In California, Jacobs does not have a Republican incumbent in her way since Rep. Darrell Issa decided not to seek reelection. But Jacobs is still battling with three other Democrats — veteran Doug Applegate, the 2016 nominee; attorney Mike Levin; and real estate investor Paul Kerr — and even more Republicans in the top-two, all-party primary. (Some Democrats fear that the jumbled vote could lead to two Republicans advancing to the general election for the seat.) Young voters could make the difference in Jacobs' race. According to a measure developed by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, California's 49th District is ranked 13th among districts nationwide in terms of races around the country "where young people have the highest potential to have a decisive impact on the result." Allred's race is ranked 38th on the Youth Electoral Significance Index, while Finkenauer's bid to take on GOP Rep. Rod Blum in Iowa is ranked first. Jacobs is using young people to power her campaign — even if they can’t vote for her yet. Annika Shamachari, a 17-year-old senior at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego, joined three friends to canvass for her Sunday in Solana Beach, chattering over clipboards and campaign mailers stamped with Jacobs’ face. When the group knocks on doors, “people are really inspired by what we’re doing because we’re so young, and that our generation isn’t waiting,” said Shamachari, who along with her friends won’t be able to vote for Jacobs in the June 5 primary. “Darrell Issa was here for such a long time, and people tell us that we need a new person, someone who isn’t involved with all of the corruption that goes on.” But Jacobs believes her path to victory is lined by “women and young people,” who are “turning out to vote this year in numbers that are unexpected, and we’ve seen that in all the races this year,” she said in an interview just after sending out two dozen volunteers to knock on doors. “A lot of people are looking at the activism around gun violence prevention and seeing that when young people get involved, it’s possible to change the narrative,” Jacobs said. American voters, she added, have previously elected “122 men who were in their twenties in Congress.” www.politico.com/story/2018/05/28/democrats-millennials-midterm-elections-610024 |
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Post by doddeb on May 28, 2018 11:50:21 GMT -5
Economic dislocation In Southern Ohio. In mid-November of 2016, a few days after the election of Donald Trump, the president of Local 175, Greg Adams, called Arnett with news: Dayton Power & Light, which had been bought in 2011 by the global energy company AES Corp., had notified the state that it intended to close Stuart and Killen in June 2018. The plants were by far the largest employer and taxpayer in Adams County, population 28,000, which by one measure of median family income is the poorest county in Ohio. The announcement left the county with just a year and change to figure out how it was going to make do without them. And it provided just a year and change for Arnett and hundreds of other workers—there were more than 10 0 management employees and 300 contractors in addition to the 380 union workers—to answer the question being asked in other deindustrializing places all over the country: Stay or go? It was a hard question to confront, one the workers would be left to answer almost entirely on their own. Ohio was facing more retirements of coal-fired power plants than anywhere else in the country. Yet nobody in government—not in the state, not in Washington—was doing anything to grapple comprehensively with the challenge that Adams County and other areas were facing. It wasn’t just the economy that was leaving so many places behind.... For policymakers, the low rates of migration to opportunity present a conundrum. Should there be a wholesale effort to revitalize places that have lost their original economic rationale? Or should the emphasis be on making it easier for people in these places to move elsewhere? The country has a long tradition of place-based investment, most notably the New Deal, which, through the Tennessee Valley Authority and similar grand-scale projects, sought to raise up Appalachia and the South. Yet there’s strikingly little support these days for similar efforts, anywhere on the political spectrum. Kevin Williamson put it most caustically in a March 2016 essay in National Review. “So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be,” he wrote. “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” Paul Krugman was more charitable, but hardly effusive, in a blog post last year. “There are arguably social costs involved in letting small cities implode, so that there’s a case for regional development policies that try to preserve their viability,” he wrote. “But it’s going to be an uphill struggle.” Some calls are easier than others. It’s hard to argue that, say, a town that sprang up for a decade around a silver mine in Nevada in the 1870s needed to be sustained forever once the silver was gone. Where does one draw the line, though? If all of southern Ohio is lagging behind an ever-more-vibrant Columbus, should people there be encouraged to seek their fortunes in the capital? What would it look like to write off an entire swath of a state? www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/the-coal-industry-is-dying-and-its-leaving-communities-like-this-one-to-pick-up-the-pieces/ |
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Post by LA_Randy on May 28, 2018 11:57:54 GMT -5
Here’s How the FBI Investigation Into Russia and Trump Campaign Actually Started No story is hotter across America this Memorial Day weekend than what the Federal Bureau of Investigation did—and did not do—in 2016 about Russian connections to Donald J. Trump. As the summer enjoys its unofficial kickoff, headlines and social media are overflowing with accusations, of varying degrees of veracity, regarding FBI counterintelligence operations around President Trump two years ago, as he was campaigning to take the White House. Of late, the president has taken to Twitter even more manically than usual, hurling invective at the FBI for its alleged illegalities toward him and his entourage. Over the weekend, “executive time” has birthed batches of presidential rage-tweets about the alleged “Spygate,” complete with Trump’s trademark unusual capitalizations and quotations. “With Spies, or ‘Informants’ as the Democrats like to call them because it sounds less sinister (but it’s not), all over my campaign, even from a very early date, why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?” the president asked on Saturday, adding that “This whole Russia Probe is Rigged.” Trump piled on three more angry tweets on Sunday, including the bizarre question, “Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt?” Although it’s now evident that in mid-2016 the FBI used one or more informants to sniff around the Trump campaign, inquiring discreetly about connections to the Kremlin—a major concern for the Bureau when people with documented and troubling ties to Russia and its spy agencies like Carter Page and Michael Flynn appeared in Trump’s orbit—there was nothing untoward or disturbing about this. This is the FBI’s standard operating procedure in counterintelligence cases. Although Trump and his defenders have frequently stated that employing informants was illegal and scandalously inappropriate, that’s just one more Trumpian falsehood. That particular lie was blown apart this weekend by Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, who has led the minority on the House Intelligence Committee in its doomed investigative efforts over the last year to get to the bottom of Trump’s Kremlin ties. These have been systematically stymied by that committee’s obstructionist and highly partisan Republican majority. “There is no evidence to support that spy theory,” Schiff stated, adding, “This is just … a piece of propaganda the president wants to put out and repeat.” Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, was equally blunt in his weekend comments on “Spygate,” explaining in an acid-etched interview that he has seen “no evidence” that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Since Rubio sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is less plagued by partisanship than its House counterpart, his comments deserve an airing. “What I have seen is evidence that they were investigating individuals with a history of links to Russia that were concerning,” Rubio explained, continuing, “It appears that there was an investigation not of the campaign, but of certain individuals who have a history that we should be suspicious of, that predate the presidential campaign of 2015, 2016. And when individuals like that are in the orbit of a major political campaign in America, the FBI, who is in charge of counterintelligence investigations, should look at people like that.” Trump’s aggressive propaganda against any public airing of his secret Kremlin ties has taken many mendacious forms since his inauguration. In early 2017, the president claimed that he had been “wiretapped.” When that lie (which, coincidentally or not, was of Russian origin) fell apart, he tried out the accusation that members of his campaign had been improperly “unmasked” in top-secret intelligence documents. That lie likewise withered away under its own dishonesty, so now the White House insists it was “spied” on illegally by the FBI. This noxious myth is slowly dying as well outside the feverish swamps of Trump bitter-enders—as it deserves to. Nevertheless, the question lingers about what motivated the FBI to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Moscow—for the Bureau, a highly sensitive matter given its proximity to partisan politics. For months, the White House, including President Trump himself, insisted that a private dossier complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, was the real origin of the inquiry. That is simply not true. Trumpian suspicion has also fallen on a drunken conversation in June 2016 between George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, and the Australian ambassador to London. The FBI did indeed get wind of that boozy chat and was troubled by Papadopoulos’ claim that Moscow had dirt on Hillary Clinton from her hacked emails—but that shocking assertion wasn’t actually news to the Bureau. Determining when “Spygate” started has become a parlor game among Trump’s increasingly panicky fanbase, not to mention a welcome distraction from the truth, which asserts that there was a political “witch hunt” (to use the presidentially preferred term) led by the Obama White House, using the FBI as its proxy, to attack the Trump campaign. Its most polished telling comes from Andrew McCarthy, who mendaciously explained that the Department of Justice needs to reveal the evidence that got the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of candidate Trump going. Since McCarthy is a former DoJ prosecutor who worked national security cases, he knows that his former employer isn’t going to reveal such highly classified information. Here we have yet another Trumpian shell game-cum-deception. Given his background, McCarthy is surely aware that a high percentage of counterintelligence inquiries begin with signals intelligence (SIGINT), in other words an electronic intercept (or several) which sparks FBI interest. Wanting to know more, Bureau agents start digging—doing research, thumbing through intelligence reports, asking judges for wiretaps, dispatching informants to get information—in other words, all the things which the FBI actually did in 2016, as it tried to understand why so many Trump associates were so chummy and chatty with Kremlin officials. It bears noting that the most successful counterintelligence operation in American history worked just like this, with bombshell SIGINT reports leading to close collaboration between the National Security Agency and the FBI to slowly, carefully unmask Kremlin spies in the United States. I know something about how that plays out in practice, since I worked for NSA both as a civilian analyst and as a military officer, and I was technical director of NSA’s biggest operational division. I also worked extensively in counterintelligence, including collaboration with the FBI in cases just like what unfolded, in secret, in 2016 around candidate Trump. Therefore, I speak of the intersection of SIGINT and counterintelligence from the vantage point of what my friend Tom Nichols might call an expert. Let me put my cards on the table: The counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump was kicked off by not one, not two, but multiple SIGINT reports which set off alarm bells inside our Intelligence Community. This has been publicly known, in a general way, for some time. A little over a year ago, the Guardian reported, based on multiple intelligence sources, that the lead was taken by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ – Britain’s NSA), which “first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the U.S. as part of a routine exchange of information.” NSA isn’t just the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, it’s the hub of the whole Western spy system. In late 2015, based on GCHQ reports, the word went out to NSA’s close friends and partners to be on the lookout for any intercepts touching on Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign. They found plenty. As the Guardian explained, in the first half of 2016, as Trump’s presidential bid gained unexpected steam, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland all had SIGINT hits that indicated a troubling relationship between Trump and Moscow. So, too, did the French and the Dutch—the latter being an especially savvy SIGINT partner of NSA’s. As the Guardian tactfully phrased the matter, “GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the U.S.” In other words, Western intelligence agencies that were eavesdropping on the Kremlin and its spies—not Trump or any of his retinue—heard numerous conversations about Trump and his secret Russian connections. As I’ve told you previously, senior Kremlin officials got very chatty about Trump beginning in late 2014, on the heels of his infamous Moscow trip, and NSA knew about this. In truth, NSA understood quite a bit about Trump’s connections to Moscow, and by mid-2016 it had increased its efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery regarding the candidate’s Russian ties. In response to urgent FBI requests for more information, NSA rose to the occasion, and by the time that Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination in mid-July 2016, “We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands,” as a senior NSA official put it to me recently. The official went on: “We had several reports in late 2015 and early 2016, mostly from Second and Third Party”—that being spy-speak for NSA’s foreign friends—“but by the spring of 2016 we had plenty of our own collection.” These reports, based on multiple intercepts, were tightly compartmented, that is, restricted to a small group of counterintelligence officials, given their obvious sensitivity, but they painted an indelible picture of a compromised GOP nominee. “The Kremlin talked about Trump like he was their boy, and their comments weren’t always flattering.” The NSA official stated that those above-top-secret reports left no doubt that the Russians were subverting our democracy in 2016—and that Team Trump was a witting participant in the Kremlin’s criminal conspiracy: “Trump and his kids knew what they were doing, and who they were doing it with,” the official explained. This information helps explain why James Clapper, our country’s most experienced spy-boss, recently amplified his previous statement that our president was Vladimir Putin’s “asset” by explaining that he has “no doubt” that Russian spies “swung the election to a Trump win.” This weekend, Clapper stated that he was “absolutely” unaware of the FBI’s use of informants to gain information about the Trump campaign in 2016. Tellingly, Clapper said nothing about top-secret-plus intelligence which might have spurred the Bureau to rustle up some informants in this case—and, like any veteran spook with a half-century in the spy business, Clapper isn’t likely to blab about high-grade SIGINT anytime soon, particularly when it implicates the president in espionage and worse. observer.com/2018/05/what-did-the-fbi-do-in-2016-about-russian-connections-to-donald-trump/ |
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