Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker ivyceltress: "If you could start a charitable foundation what would be its mission?"
Schumer Will Filibuster Gorsuch
In a statement on the Senate floor today, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he will force a cloture vote (triggering a requirement of 60 votes) on Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.
It is with all this in mind that I have come to a decision about the current nominee: After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.Damn straight.
His nomination will have a cloture vote. He will have to earn sixty votes for confirmation. My vote will be no, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
To my Republican friends who think that, if Judge Gorsuch fails to reach sixty votes, we oughta change the rules, I say: If this nominee cannot earn sixty votes, a bar met by each of President Obama's nominees and George Bush's last two nominees, the answer isn't to change the rules. It's to change the nominee.
Schumer also said that Gorsuch "was unable to sufficiently convince me that he'd be an independent check" on Trump, and that he is "not a neutral legal mind but someone with a deep-seated conservative ideology. He was groomed by the Federalist Society and has shown not one inch of difference between his views and theirs."
Right on. Thank you, Senator Schumer. Whether you ultimately succeed or fail in blocking Gorsuch, this is the right thing to do. And I am grateful that you are taking this stand.
Healthcare Vote Canceled!
Rachael Bade, Kyle Cheney, and John Bresnahan at Politico: Thursday Vote on Health Care Bill Canceled. Bloop!
Donald Trump and conservative House Freedom Caucus members failed to strike a deal on the GOP Obamacare replacement Thursday, endangering the prospects of passage and all but assuring any immediate vote on the measure would fail.This, of course, does not preclude some surprise, middle-of-the-night chicanery. But, at the moment, Republicans' failure to make their replacement plan terrible enough for the hardliners in their caucus have stalled what dubious momentum they had.
Hours later, House leaders canceled a planned Thursday night vote on the legislation. There was no immediate word when a vote might occur.
7 years of the ACA
— Nick Merrill (@NickMerrill) March 23, 2017
Millions Covered
2,557 days of GOP railing against it
Trump, "master negotiator," said he'd get it done
Couldn't do it.
That about sums it up.
Meanwhile, Trump seems real broken up about it.
As health care vote gets scrapped for tonight, here's Trump in a big rig on the White House driveway honking the horn & pretending to drive pic.twitter.com/vTkNnJkrrc
— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) March 23, 2017
The video is precisely as described: Trump gets into the cab of a truck with a big, stupid grin on his face and honks the horn. He closes the door and waves through the window at a crowd of almost all white men, who laugh with delight at the Big Boy President.
* * *
UPDATE: Well, that was fast. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy says that the House "will vote tonight on a rule that will allow us to vote tomorrow." That means: Keep calling. If they press ahead and vote tomorrow, it needs to FAIL.
The Long Slog of Progress
.@HillaryClinton backstage in Portsmouth, NH. Photo: @barb_kinney Words: @Shakestweetz pic.twitter.com/g1tXNszBYH
— Hillary In Pictures (@HillaryPix) March 23, 2017
Hillary in Pictures memed this beautiful photo from the campaign trail, taken by Barbara Kinney, about which I wrote a short piece, which ended up being widely shared.
When I saw their tweet this morning, it was perfectly timed, as I happened to be thinking about some of the erroneously characterized "populist" rhetoric currently in fashion, designed to appeal primarily to the resentments of straight, white, able-bodied, cis men, who are not wealthy.
Specifically, I was thinking about how that rhetoric functions to perfectly serve the entitlement that underwrites that resentment. The entitlement that is, for instance, evident in articles like this one at the conservative Federalist, which argues that the the Alt-Right is "what happens" when (privileged) men are expected to participate on a level playing field.
Or this one at the New York Times, in which a professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School posits that one of the "reasons that men may be reluctant to take jobs in the growing service sector" is because "many service sector jobs involve 'serving' people of higher social status. I think women are more willing to do this—for cultural or genetic reasons, who knows."
Who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To a large extent, much of this "populist" rhetoric centers, though not explicitly, the idea that highly privileged people have the luxury of being lazy about politics, and that they want to keep being lazy.
"Populist" rhetoric of a certain sort assures them that they can be: It doesn't demand that anyone make sacrifices, or show up, or even do their homework to learn the basics of how politics and governance actually work.
It's sweeping promises that suggest all it takes to get things done is making lots of noise and showing up to vote once in awhile.
I recently wrote: "[Many voters] still haven't learned the most important lesson about themselves: That they eagerly preferred to listen to men who told them what they wanted to hear than a woman who told them the truth."
One of the truths Hillary Clinton told us, if not explicitly, is that progress doesn't happen instantaneously. Politics is rarely grand gestures and explosive moments; it is measured in frustratingly small increments, and many of the "biggest" moments consist of work that is not even visible. A phrase removed from, or inserted into, a piece of legislation can be a triumph. It can affect millions of lives, and the decades of advocacy and hours of last-minute negotiations can yet go virtually unseen.
What a horrible reality for people who are used to getting everything they want on demand. Who have become accustomed to instant gratification.
That thing about Hillary that so many of us admired, and which strongly resonated with us—that she works so hard—was probably a huge turn-off to lots of people.
People who did not like hearing that effective governance is an extremely deliberative process.
That progress is a long slog.
She represented, she embodied, the notion that politics and progress are incremental and take lots of grit and determination and patience and work. That made me admire her. I'm sure it made lots of people resent her, because she was communicating the last thing they wanted to hear.
They wanted someone who would give them things now. And here we are, with a president who wants to make things happen fast, and it's a fucking disaster. Because fast is anathema to good governance.
And I suspect that it mattered—a lot—that it was a woman modeling for us what the incremental, deliberative, difficult work of progress really looks like.
Every pundit who groused that she reminded them of a nagging wife. Every internet commenter who complained that she reminded them of their nagging mothers. Resentful of those women who had the temerity to expect them to participate in household or emotional maintenance. In each of these bitter complaints was embedded a hostility to the notion of women doing and expecting hard work.
And a resentment that very privileged people are now facing a world in which they might be expected to work as hard as marginalized people have always had to work. A world in which very privileged people might have to earn that to which they feel entitled.
Some of them have already begun to discover that which people without their privileges have known for a very long time: Sometimes all the hard work one's body can give won't provide what one needs, no less that to which one feels entitled.
The only effective response to that is committing oneself to the hard work the long slog of progress demands. But many of them refuse to do that hard work, preferring instead the gossamer promises of men who vow to restore their privilege.
I look at that picture of Hillary Clinton and I see an invitation to join her in the hard work that needs to be done, not a figure of contempt who expects of me something I'm unwilling to give.
Progress demands our participation. Anyone who has had the luxury of not understanding that until this moment must greet it with fervor for the work that needs to be done. Because they've long been exploiting the work of others, who lacked such luxury for their whole lives.
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelda is a mutt's mutt: One of her parents was a Shar Pei-Australian Cattle Dog mix. The other one of her parents was a Siberian Husky-Alaskan Klee Kai mix. (A Klee Kai is basically a mini-husky.)
Her coat, however, is 100% husky.
Which means that she blows her coat in the spring, and OH MY GOD is it quite the dramatic event, lol. THERE IS SO MUCH FUR! I mean, if you've ever seen a photo of a husky blowing its coat after it's been groomed, you get the picture.
Zelly hates being groomed, so it's quite a production. Days and days of trying to cajole her to let me brush her or hand-strip her or remove the hair in any conceivable fashion. Fur piles larger than you would believe. Lots of frustration. Even more laughter. The most cuddles.
Did I mention lots of fur? LOTS OF FUR.
* * *
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 63
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Here are some things in the news today:
Today is the day the GOP House Caucus wants to vote on their garbage healthcare proposal which would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. CALL YOUR REPS TODAY AND TELL THEM YOU DO NOT WANT THEM TO VOTE FOR THE GOP PLAN.
This is not a drill: Flood your lawmakers offices with calls to demand they #ProtectOurCare & #StandWithPP→https://t.co/Y1RTuYVSrc pic.twitter.com/T1cBhuPNju
— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) March 23, 2017
Caitlin MacNeal at TPM: Freedom Caucus Chair 'Optimistic' About Deal on Obamacare Repeal Bill. "With the Thursday vote on the legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act fast approaching, members of the House Freedom Caucus said earlier on Wednesday that they still had enough votes to block the bill's passage. This prompted Republican leaders to promise conservative House members that the Senate would accommodate one of their demands: removing Obamacare's Essential Health Benefits (EHB) rule. The EHB rule requires insurers to offer plans that cover a list of basic services like emergency room care and maternity care."
#SaveTheACA. We cannot allow this travesty to pass.
* * *
[Content Note covering the entire section below: Terrorism; Islamophobia; racism.]
In case you'd managed to forget for two seconds that Donald Trump's children are just as disgusting as he is... Sam Levin at the Guardian: Donald Trump Jr Called 'a Disgrace' for Tweet Goading London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Donald Trump Jr is facing a backlash for criticizing London mayor Sadiq Khan with a scornful tweet sent hours after an attack at the Houses of Parliament left four dead, including a police officer.I don't suppose I need to point out that Trump Jr's target, Mayor Khan, is Muslim.
The US president's eldest son tweeted a link to a September 2016 story in the Independent, which quoted Khan saying terror attacks were "part and parcel of living in a big city," and "I want to be reassured that every single agency and individual involved in protecting our city has the resources and expertise they need to respond in the event that London is attacked."
"You have to be kidding me?!" Trump Jr tweeted, quoting the headline: "Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan."
It's unclear if the president's son read the article or understood that the quote was from six months ago and not a response to the Wednesday attack, which police are treating as a terrorist incident.
...The tweet earned strong criticisms in the US and the UK, including from Wes Streeting, the MP for Ilford North and former president of the National Union of Students.
"You use a terrorist attack on our city to attack London's Mayor for your own political gain. You're a disgrace," Streeting wrote.
...Others on Twitter pointed Trump Jr to Khan's actual response to the attack on Wednesday, in which he said: "Londoners will never be cowed by terrorism."
"I want to reassure all Londoners and all our visitors not to be alarmed. Our city remains one of the safest in the world. London is the greatest city in the world. And we stand together in the face of those who seek to harm us and destroy our way of life. We always have and we always will," the mayor said.
Meanwhile, his father the president tweeted his sympathies for an American killed in yesterday's attack. That was a decent thing to do. However, as Clark Gregg noted, Trump failed to acknowledge the American who was killed by a terrorist in his hometown.
Another American was murdered in a terror attack in your hometown yesterday. Because he was black. #SpeakUp #NYC #StrongerTogether https://t.co/i3e93Shq10
— Clark Gregg (@clarkgregg) March 23, 2017
Gregg is referring to Timothy Caughman, a Black man who was viciously murdered by James Harris Jackson, a white U.S. Army veteran who traveled from Baltimore to New York City "to target black men," for whom "he had harbored feelings of hatred...for at least 10 years."
He repeatedly stabbed Caughman in the chest, then turned himself into police. According to Assistant Chief William Aubry, Jackson chose NYC "because it's the media capital of the world and he wanted to make a statement."
Additionally: "Police said Jackson is a member of a known hate group in Maryland but did not identify the group."
White supremacy doesn't exist in a vacuum. And Trump's silence speaks volumes.
* * *
Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz, and Jim Sciutto at CNN: U.S. officials: Info Suggests Trump Associates May Have Coordinated with Russians. "One law enforcement official said the information in hand suggests 'people connected to the campaign were in contact and it appeared they were giving the thumbs up to release information when it was ready.' ...The FBI cannot yet prove that collusion took place, but the information suggesting collusion is now a large focus of the investigation, the officials said."
Cameron Norsworthy at Romper: How Will the WIC Program Be Affected by Trump's Budget Proposal? Cuts Are Expected. "Cutting $200 million from the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, Trump would be taking away funds from vital familial health initiatives, such as efforts 'reducing infant and maternal mortality and morbidity,' should his proposed budget be passed in its current state (that likely won't happen, but whether WIC programs will remain on the table following congressional debate is yet to be seen). It would also cut initiatives that '[provide] food vouchers for low-income pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children under five years old,' as well as preexisting programs offering venues for 'breastfeeding support and nutrition education.' In other words, low-income women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or have children under 5 years old would have to go elsewhere for the support and services they've come to depend on."
[CN: Homophobia] I'm not going to link to this directly, because FUCK THAT.
Incredible. The United States Secretary of Energy took the time to write an op-ed humiliating a gay student leader. https://t.co/ANqkLih2tF
— Teddy Goff (@teddygoff) March 22, 2017
[CN: Othering] Paul McLeod at BuzzFeed: A Top Trump Health Care Appointee Thinks Tattoos Are Linked to Drug Abuse. "If you've got questions about penis phobias, the link from goth culture to drug abuse, and how opioids are evidence of the existence of God, a top Trump appointee has answers. Those and other subjects were touched on in a 2006 book by John Fleming, the former congressman who was just appointed by President Trump as assistant secretary for health technology at the Department of Health and Human Services." Some of the shit he's spewing is indistinguishable from the thinking that railroaded the West Memphis Three.
Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death. "At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy's rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear."
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
His Extremely Presidential Voice
[Content Note: Description of sexual assault; misogyny.]
Via Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair (emphasis added):
"Trump's one brief moment of acting presidential—when he read off a teleprompter for 60 minutes and 10 seconds during his address to Congress—served only to show just how low the bar for presidential behavior has plummeted since January. Watching TV commentators applaud him for containing himself for a little over an hour was like hearing a parent praise a difficult child for not pooping in his pants during a pre-school interview. Besides, vintage Trump is not going anywhere anytime soon. A couple of weeks earlier, during a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator's breasts—although he expressed this in his own, fragrant fashion."I know we have a seemingly never-ending cascade of items to resist with respect to Donald Trump and his Republican administration.
But, I will never forget that, at 70 years of age, misogyny and imagined male supremacy are inextricably embedded within the fabric of the man's deplorable personality.
As such, even though some media elites might fawn over his ability to, from time to time, read from a teleprompter without pulling out his penis and plopping it onto the podium for all to admire, at his core he is a misogynist who has admitted on tape to grabbing women's genitals without their consent. Many people voted for him, not in spite of what having a misogynist as president symbolizes in terms of gender dynamics, but precisely because of it.
Now, I think that after all that has transpired in the past couple of months, we can drop the pretense that those "lock her up" chants were actually about a concern for criminal wrongdoing or treason and instead admit that maybe, just maybe, they were about something else entirely.
Putin Critic Killed in Kiev
[Content Note: Assassination.]
Shaun Walker at the Guardian reports that Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian MP who was critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and fled to Ukraine, has been fatally shot by an unidentified gunman in Kiev.
My condolences to his family and friends, in particular his wife Maria Maksakova, who is also a former MP.
Voronenkov, 45, who had given "a number of interviews after his defection that were sharply critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Kremlin policy in Ukraine," was on his way to meet another former Russian MP who had also fled, Ilya Ponomarev, when he was killed.
Ukraine's president, Petro Poroshenko, summoned the head of the security services to brief him on the killing. He later released a statement calling the attack an "act of Russian state terrorism."Emphasis mine.
"Voronenkov was one of the main witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and, in particular, the role of Yanukovich regarding the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine," he said.
That would be Viktor Yanukovych, who featured prominently in my lengthy piece yesterday about 2016 election ties to Russia and Ukraine.
One of the main witnesses who was to testify against an ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader, for whom Donald Trump's campaign chief Paul Manafort and Bernie Sanders' chief strategist Tad Devine both worked, has been murdered in the street.
Presumably on the orders of Putin, whose habit of killing his political opponents the U.S. president shrugged off by saying: "There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?"
[H/T to Eastsidekate.]
This Man Is the President of the United States
Time magazine's latest cover story is about Donald Trump being a liar. That's not the way they're putting it, but it's the way they should be—and it's definitely the way I'm putting it. They way they put it is "the way he has handled truth and falsehood in his career." Sure.
In conjunction with their cover story, [CN: video may autoplay at link] their Washington Bureau Chief, Michael Scherer, did an interview with Trump. It is...something.
Throughout the entirety of the interview, Trump is exactly who we already know him to be, and yet simultaneously somehow even worse.
He brags relentlessly about being "right," even about things he was not even remotely right about. (Was he getting paid $5 by Nigel Farage every time he said the word Brexit?) And naturally he never admits to being wrong about anything.
Which is why I wonder: What is the point of giving him this platform? You know he's never going to admit to being wrong, so, going in, you know what you're handing him is a visible platform for more lying.
The decision to do and publish this interview strikes me primarily as evidence that the media continues to believe there's something "more" to Trump. No, there isn't. There's even less.
Anyway. Three pieces I want to highlight (the interviewer's words are in bold):
1. Trump is always right, the media is garbage, everything is a competition, and he is going to win.
I tend to be right. I'm an instinctual person, I happen to be a person that knows how life works. I said I was going to win the election, I won the election, in fact I was number one the entire route, in the primaries, from the day I announced, I was number one. And the New York Times and CNN and all of them, they did these polls, which were extremely bad and they turned out to be totally wrong, and my polls showed I was going to win. We thought we were going to win the night of the election.Kudos to Scherer for that dig which Trump didn't even recognize. But here is another reason to ask whyyyyyyy even indulge this guy? Every media outlet, aside from Fox News and Breitbart, has to know by now he'll talk shit about them and they'll be obliged to print it. And that he'll tell enormous lies and they'll be obliged to print them. This isn't actually helpful.
So when you…
And then TIME magazine, which treats me horribly, but obviously I sell, I assume this is going to be a cover too, have I set the record? I guess, right? Covers, nobody's had more covers.
I think Richard Nixon still has you beat. But he was in office for longer, so give yourself time.
Okay good. I'm sure I'll win.
2. Trump won, so nothing else matters.
Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can't be doing so badly, because I'm president, and you're not. You know. Say hello to everybody okay?That's how the interview ends—with Trump declaring that he's the president and you're not. Fuck off. Which is not the first time he's used "I won" to end a conversation about accountabililty.
Thank you very much, Mr. President.
3. As promised, Trump is going to put in "his own people" and fix all this business of people trying to hold him accountable.
But isn't there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility. If the intelligence community came out and said, we have determined that so and so is the leaker here, but you are saying to me now, that you don't believe the intelligence community when they say your tweet was wrong.This is just the President of the United States saying that he's installing intelligence officials whose primary qualification is loyalty, in order to "straighten out" the problem of being investigated for potentially treasonous activities. Cool.
I'm not saying—no, I'm not blaming. First of all, I put Mike Pompeo in. I put Senator Dan Coats in. These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out.
And such breathtakingly despotic behavior has already become so routine in 60 days that it won't even warrant major headlines.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker RachelB: "To what unanswerable question do you most want an answer?"
The Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by ravioli.
Recommended Reading:
Kate: Women Saving the Planet: Kayla DeVault of Navajo Nation
Ari: The False Comfort of Neil Gorsuch's Constitutional 'Originalism'
Ragen: [Content Note: Fat hatred] Charging Fat Folks Extra for a Pedicure?
Deepa: [CN: Islamophobia] New San Francisco Ordinance Keeps the City from Cooperating with Any Religion-Based Registry
Nicole: There's No One Way to Be a Social Worker
TLC: [CN: Trans hatred] Transgender Community Pushes Back as Anti-Transgender Bills Advance in State Legislatures Nationwide
Rae: NASA Experiment Could Solve a Mystery About DNA in Space
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Rep. Devin Nunes Is Why We Need an Independent Investigation of the Trump Administration
As you may recall my saying once or twice or three zillion times, Congressional investigations into the Trump administration's ties to Russia are insufficient. We need an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate, because otherwise the Republican majority on any investigating committee will control the process.
Proving the most troubling case in point, today Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who ran interference for Trump during his committee's hearing this week, held an impromptu press conference at which he asserted "that the intelligence community 'incidentally collected' information about members of [Mr.] Trump's transition team outside of its investigation into Russia's interference in the U.S. election." Further:
Nunes claimed that the information was "widely disseminated" among intelligence agencies and that the identities of Trump staffers were "unmasked."And then, in an extraordinary move, he briefed the White House about his claims, in a desperate bid to give Trump cover on his totally unjustified and unsubstantiable claim that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
Nunes said he was "alarmed" by these reports from the intelligence community, though he repeatedly noted that staffers' communications appeared to be collected "legally" in the course of "normal, foreign surveillance." He said they took place in November, December and January, following the election.
Nunes left many other details hazy, citing the classified nature of the reports he said were brought to his attention "by sources who thought we should know it" following Monday's open hearing on Russia's involvement in the 2016 election.
Most notably, he first affirmed and then hedged his answers to questions about whether Trump's personal communications were caught up in the incidental collection.
Asked by CNN's Manu Raju if the President was "also part of that incidental collection," Nunes said yes and nodded.
He was cagier when MSNBC's Kasie Hunt followed up, asking whether Trump's "personal communication" were part of the incidental collection.
"It's possible," Nunes said. "We won't know until we get the information on Friday."
The California Republican said that the White House had not been briefed on any of that information, to his knowledge. He said he planned to speak to Trump about it Wednesday afternoon, arguing "they need to see it."
Which, naturally resulted in Trump saying he felt somewhat vindicated: "I somewhat do [feel vindicated]. I must tell you, I somewhat do. I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found, but I somewhat do."
Meanwhile, Trump is already fundraising off of Nunes' wildly inappropriate mischaracterization.
Nunes then held a second press conference, during which he doubled-down on this extraordinary bullshit:
Reporters asked him if it was "appropriate" for him to discuss details of classified surveillance reports with Trump and the press, particularly without first consulting his committee's ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), about the content of these reports.This is genuinely unprecedented behavior. The Chair of a Congressional committee tasked with investigating the White House publicly did an end-run around his committee members, debriefed the president they're investigating, and then made a public statement about the president's right to know and right to be concerned.
Nunes defended his conduct, claiming the intelligence reports he has seen have "nothing to do with the Russian investigation" and that he had a "duty" to tell the President about "possible surveillance activities."
The California lawmaker left the door wide open when asked if the surveillance he was referring to was politically motivated.
"What I have read bothers me and I think it should bother the President himself and his team because I think some of it seems to be inappropriate," he said.
He also said the President "is concerned, and he should be."
Asked if he could "rule out" that former President Barack Obama or officials in his administration were involved, he replied, "No, I cannot."
What. The. Fuck.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking Democratic member on the committee, released a statement excoriating Nunes:
This afternoon, Chairman Devin Nunes announced he had some form of intercepts revealing that lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials included information on U.S. Persons, potentially including those associated with President Trump or the President himself. If accurate, this information should have been shared with members of the committee, but it has not been. Indeed, it appears that committee members only learned about this when the Chairman discussed the matter this afternoon with the press. The Chairman also shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity, given that the matter is currently under investigation. I have expressed my grave concerns with the Chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way.Nunes, who was a member of Trump's executive transition committee, should have recused himself from this investigation in the first place. His very involvement is inappropriate, for the exact reasons that such recusals are standard procedure: Because often people who have a conflict of interest cannot remain partial.
As to the substance of what the Chairman has alleged, if the information was lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials, that would mean that U.S. Persons would not have been the subject of surveillance. In my conversation late this afternoon, the Chairman informed me that most of the names in the intercepted communications were in fact masked, but that he could still figure out the probable identity of the parties. Again, this does not indicate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agencies. Moreover, the unmasking of a U.S. Person's name is fully appropriate when is it necessary to understand the context of collected foreign intelligence information.
Because the committee has still not been provided the intercepts in the possession of the Chairman, it is impossible to evaluate the Chairman's claims. It certainly does not suggest—in any way—that the President was wiretapped by his predecessor.
Nunes isn't even pretending to be impartial.
He is Exhibit A in why we need a special investigation, and Reason #1 why we'll never get it.
The More Information About Manafort We Get, the More Questions I Have About the 2016 Election
This is a long one, but it's important, so settle in...
The AP's Jeff Horowitz and Chad Day have reported on a major story regarding Donald Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort, who has long been at the center of questions about ties to Russia. I strongly encourage you to read the entire thing, as I'm just going to focus on a few pieces of the much more comprehensive article.
This is the central piece of the reporting:
Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned. The work appears to contradict assertions by the Trump administration and Manafort himself that he never worked for Russian interests.Okay. So, three important notes.
Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings, and news coverage inside the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse. Manafort pitched the plans to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.
"We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success," Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, "will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government."
First, this is indeed a contradiction of Manafort's previous claims that he never worked for Russian interests. Manafort needs to be questioned about his ties to Russia, under oath, in Congressional hearings immediately.
Secondly, 2006, the year Manafort signed the $10 million annual contract, was also the year that Manafort started living in Trump Tower.
Third, Deripaska was a supporter and financial backer of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Putin then-prime minister of Ukraine, for whom Manafort also worked for nearly a decade. Yesterday, as I mentioned, the Washington Post's Andrew Roth reported on new documents reportedly showing that Manafort "laundered payments from the party of a disgraced ex-leader of Ukraine using offshore accounts in Belize and Kyrgyzstan." That disgraced ex-leader is Viktor Yanukovych.
(I'll come back to that.)
Naturally, Manafort continues to deny that his work for Deripaska had to do with anything but some business and personal consulting.
In a statement to the AP, Manafort confirmed that he worked for Deripaska in various countries but said the work was being unfairly cast as "inappropriate or nefarious" as part of a "smear campaign."Except. As the AP story also notes, "One strategy memo to Deripaska was written by Manafort and Rick Davis, his business partner at the time. In written responses to the AP, Davis said he did not know that his firm had proposed a plan to covertly promote the interests of the Russian government. ...He took a leave of absence from the firm in late 2006 to work on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign."
"I worked with Oleg Deripaska almost a decade ago representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments," Manafort said. "My work for Mr. Deripaska did not involve representing Russia's political interests."
Which brings us to something about which I wrote last July:
In April, Franklin Foer wrote an extensive profile of Manafort, in which Foer details Manafort's decades-long relationship with Trump, which has spanned the former's career of advising some of the most despicable tyrants around the globe. In the piece, he recalls the time that Manafort "snookered" John McCain into aiding him in "undermining American policy."The first point in recounting this history is to underline that Manafort's claim his "work for Mr. Deripaska did not involve representing Russia's political interests" is utterly false.
Manafort's business partner, lobbyist Rick Davis, was one of McCain's top advisers. Manafort's and Davis' work in Ukraine was so concerning that, in 2008, a staffer on the National Security Council called McCain to ask him to help "dial back" Manafort and Davis, because: "By promoting enemies of the Orange Revolution, they were undermining American policy." But McCain had already been taken in by them.
That year, the pair had consulted on behalf of pro-independence forces in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which wanted to exit Serbia and become its own sovereign republic. On the surface, this sounded noble enough, so noble that McCain called Montenegro's independence the "greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War."Got that? Manafort and Davis (who was running McCain's campaign) manipulated the Republican nominee to lend his support, under the auspices of "yay freedom," to a geopolitical event designed to enrich Putin and his allies.
A report in the Nation, however, showed that the Montenegrin campaign wasn't remotely what McCain described. The independence initiative was championed by a fantastically wealthy Russian mogul called Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had parochial reasons for promoting independence. He had just purchased Montenegro's aluminum industry and intended to buy broader swaths of its economy. But he was also doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, on whose good graces the fate of all Russian business ultimately hangs. The Nation quoted Deripaska boasting that "the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean."
And that was hardly the end of it.
Manafort and Davis didn't just snooker McCain into trumpeting their client's cause; they endangered him politically, by arranging a series of meetings with Deripaska, who the U.S. had barred from entering the country because of his ties to organized crime. In 2006, they steered McCain to attend a dinner with the oligarch at a chalet near Davos, where Deripaska speechified for the 40 or so guests. (The Washington Post reported that the oligarch sent Davis and Manafort a thank-you note for arranging to see the senator in "such an intimate setting.") Seven months later, Manafort and Davis took McCain to celebrate his 70th birthday with Deripaska on a yacht moored in the Adriatic.And now, two presidential cycles later, Manafort is running Donald Trump's campaign.
The second point is to note that the 2016 cycle was not even the first time Manafort has tried to entangle a U.S. presidential candidate in pro-Russian policy. He tried it before, with John McCain, way back in 2006.
When, I will note, it was presumed that the Democratic nominee that year would be—you guessed it—Hillary Clinton.
Vladimir Putin's hatred of Hillary Clinton is well-known. As I've previously observed:
Russia's meddling wasn't just intended to try to install Trump as a puppet, but also to seek vengeance on Hillary Clinton:Much of Putin's animosity toward Clinton stems from her time as Secretary of State—but his animus extends back beyond her tenure at State, for the same reasons Obama wanted her as his Secretary of State. By that time, she was already well-established as a diplomatic powerhouse, having, for example, played a crucial role in the Irish peace process.
When mass protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin erupted in Moscow in December 2011, Putin made clear who he thought was really behind them: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.That history is important—because it explains why Putin orchestrated election interference on behalf of Clinton's opponent, even if Trump himself wasn't aware of it. (He was aware of it.)
With the protesters accusing Putin of having rigged recent elections, the Russian leader pointed an angry finger at Clinton, who had issued a statement sharply critical of the voting results. "She said they were dishonest and unfair," Putin fumed in public remarks, saying that Clinton gave "a signal" to demonstrators working "with the support of the U.S. State Department" to undermine his power. "We need to safeguard ourselves from this interference in our internal affairs," Putin declared.
Putin had good reason not to want Hillary Clinton as the United States president, because she was a clear threat to his empiric aspirations. Further, Putin believes the Bill Clinton administration exploited the political weakness that resulted from the fall of the Soviet Union. That grudge is as old as Kosovo. As a result, he almost certainly wanted to prevent a second Clinton presidency.
That is not to suggest that Putin wasn't motivated by the oft-cited subversion of U.S. democracy to destabilize a key player on the global stage, keen to keep him in check. To the absolute contrary, Putin's campaign against Hillary Clinton was a central part of that.
After all, Putin knows she's the most qualified candidate ever to run for the U.S. presidency, too.
Earlier this week, FBI James Comey and Admiral Mike Rogers both confirmed during Congressional testimony that Putin's goal was not just to undermine faith in our democracy, and not just to help Trump win, but to hurt Clinton. Here is Comey explicitly confirming that:
Here's Comey on video explicitly confirming Russia wanted to hurt Clinton & help Trump pic.twitter.com/66lyRhTugq
— T. R. Ramachandran (@yottapoint) March 20, 2017
REP. MIKE CONAWAY: The conclusion that active measures were taken specifically to help [Donald] Trump's campaign—you had that by early December? You already had that conclusion?One of their chief strategies was hacking. According to the assessment of U.S. intelligence, Russians were responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee, and for dissimating hacked DNC emails via WikiLeaks. U.S. intelligence agencies and cybersecurity experts also believe that Russian intelligence was behind the hacking and release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails.
COMEY: Correct. That they wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her, help him. I think all three we were confident in, at least as early as December.
A second primary strategy was propaganda: "Russia's increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery—including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human 'trolls,' and networks of websites and social-media accounts—echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers."
The anti-Clinton propaganda that proliferated social media during the campaign was not just pro-Trump, but also pro-Bernie Sanders.
Just 11 days ago, Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis at the Huffington Post detailed the "fake news tsunami" that infected pro-Sanders Facebook groups.
Bev Cowling, 64, saw a sudden deluge of requests to join the Sanders Facebook groups she administered from her home in Toney, Alabama. All of a sudden, they were getting 80 to 100 requests to join each day. She and the other administrators couldn't vet everyone, and the posts started getting bizarre. "It came in like a wave, like a tsunami," she said. "It was like a flood of misinformation."There were countless people who were primed by three decades of right-wing attacks on Clinton (and of course the all-too familiar misogyny incessantly wielded against her) to hate her, and they ate up every crumb of the avalanche of mendacious garbage being served up by Russian ratfuckers.
Cowling, a retired postal worker, said some of her Facebook group members were ready to believe the bogus news links. "People were so anti-Hillary that no matter what you said, they were willing to share it and spread it," she said. "At first I would just laugh about it. I would say, 'C'mon, this is beyond ridiculous.' I created a word called 'ridiculosity.' I would say, 'This reeks of ridiculosity.'"
But Cowling got pushback. She was called a "Hillbot" and a Trump supporter. She ended up removing dozens of members who refused to stop pushing conspiracy theories. "I lost quite a few friends," she said.
Now, this is where things get even more complicated, and I want to just state plainly that I am not trying to insinuate anything. If I intend to say something, I will state it plainly. The information that follows are facts, about which I have questions, but not conclusions.
Donald Trump was not Clinton's only 2016 opponent whose campaign was being run by a former adviser to the pro-Putin former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych.
At the same time Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was working for Yanukovych, so was Sanders chief strategist Tad Devine. In fact, Devine and Manafort were collaborating, including during the period were Manafort's aforementioned money-laundering for Yanukovych took place. (To be abundantly clear: Devine is not implicated in that at all.)
Devine, who convinced Sanders to run as a Democrat, reached out to Manafort at least once that we know of during the 2016 U.S. presidential election: To try to arrange the ill-fated debate proposed between Trump and Sanders.
Devine knows campaign chairman Paul Manafort from, among other things, their collaboration on the campaign of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. According to campaign aides, the morning after Trump was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Weaver asked Devine to give Manafort a call to see if they could actually make the debate happen. They were already fielding offers from most of the networks—including a producer for Stephen Colbert, who wanted to host the debate on his own late night show.To be clear, as I noted at the time, the entire charade was an exercise in trying to make Hillary Clinton look bad, because she refused to agree to a debate with Sanders in California. So, the one time we know that Devine and Manafort communicated, it was to orchestrate something that was explicitly to harm Clinton.
Manafort laughed, said it was a joke, but then again, Trump was on his plane, and he had no idea what the candidate would do. The answer turned out to be a statement killing the speculation. Manafort left a voicemail for Devine saying he'd won over Trump. Devine never called him back.
At this point, I expect some people are wondering if I'm going to acknowledge that the Podesta Group, a lobbying and public affairs firm founded by brothers Anthony Podesta and John Podesta—the latter of whom was, as mentioned above, Clinton's campaign chair—also did work for Yanukovych. They did indeed. But: John Podesta was working for the Obama administration at that time, not as a consultant.
Notably, there was another member of the Clinton campaign who did consulting in Ukraine: Chief strategist Joel Benenson. Except he did not work for Yanukovych, but Yanukovych's rival, former Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who became Prime Minister of Ukraine after Yanukovych was ousted in 2014.
To recap: Both Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chair, and Tad Devine, Sanders' chief strategist, worked for the pro-Putin Viktor Yanukovych. Joel Benenson, Clinton's chief strategist, worked for Yanukovych's anti-Putin rival Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Yanukovych was ousted in 2014, at which time Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister, the same year that Devine goes to work for Sanders. (Manafort onboarded with the Trump campaign later.)
So, two U.S. strategists worked for a pro-Putin Ukrainian, then each went to work for U.S. presidential campaigns whose chief opponent, in both cases, was Hillary Clinton, who is virulently hated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then both of those campaigns are given a huge assist by Russian hacking and a massive disinformation campaign orchestrated by Russian intelligence.
Now, just to be extremely clear that I'm not suggesting a straight-up equivalence between the two campaigns, let me point out a couple of major differences.
1. Tad Devine has not been accused of any illegal activities in association with his work for Yanukovych, unlike Paul Manafort.
2. Bernie Sanders, who has visited Russia, has not been, to my knowledge, suspected of being vulnerable by Russian kompromat cultivated on his visits, unlike Donald Trump.
But, as I said above, if I intend to say something, I will state it plainly, and here I am plainly stating that I do believe these connections warrant more scrutiny.
Manafort is one piece of a bigger puzzle. Maybe there is nothing more to find, but the only way to know that with certainty is to look.
I am concerned by the questions that are raised by a long-time target of Putin's ire facing two opponents whose key campaign staff both worked for a Putin ally, and whose campaigns were given a direct assist by Russian interference that intelligence agencies have concluded was, in part, explicitly to derail her.
I am concerned that both of those opponents ran on major-party tickets that were a departure from their previous party affiliations. Sanders was elected as an independent, and identified as an independent for 26 years in Congress, then ran as a Democrat at Devine's urging, and immediately returned to being an independent after the election. Trump used to be a Democrat, but switched to donating heavily to Republicans after Obama was elected—in that same election in which Manafort convinced McCain to sing the praises of Oleg Deripaska's independence initiative in Montenegro.
I am concerned that the facts compiled here make me suspicious that something much bigger than we've even begun to comprehend went on during the 2016 presidential election, and that I don't have enough insight into what happened to quell those suspicions, because the people ostensibly tasked with protecting the integrity of our elections and democratic institutions aren't interested in meaningful investigation of what happened. Or didn't.
I don't want to be suspicious. I don't want to sound or feel like a conspiracy theorist, just for compiling and reporting facts. What I want is answers.
[My thanks to the other contributors who offered valuable input on this piece.]
Attack at UK Houses of Parliament
[Content Note: Violence; death.]
The Guardian: Houses of Parliament Attack: Four Dead Including Police Officer.
Four people have died, including a police officer, and at least 20 people were injured in a major terror attack outside the Houses of Parliament, the Metropolitan police have confirmed.My condolences to the families, friends, and colleagues of those who died. My thoughts are with the people who were injured; those who escaped without physical harm but have been traumatized by the attack; and with the whole community.
Mark Rowley, the head of counter-terrorism at the Met, said a police officer had been killed after being stabbed by a lone attacker attempting to enter the House of Commons. The suspect was shot and killed.
Two other people died moments earlier, when the attacker drove a vehicle at speed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, near parliament, at about 2.40pm on Wednesday.
Rowley said at least 20 people, including three officers, were hurt in the attack on the bridge.
[A diplomatic source told Reuters:] "The attack started when a car was driven over Westminster Bridge hitting and injuring a number of members of the public, also including three police officers on their way back from a commendation ceremony. The car then crashed near to parliament and at least one man armed with a knife continued the attack and tried to enter parliament."
"Sadly, I can confirm that four people have died. That includes the police officer protecting parliament and one man we believe to be the attacker, who was shot by a police firearms officer. The officer's family have been made aware. At least 20 people have been injured."
Although I have seen the attack described as a terrorist attack, there is no official information I've yet seen that details the nature of the terrorism. I've also, as of this writing, not seen any information about the attackers or their motives.
The Guardian has live updates here.
Please feel welcome to use this thread to share updates, and, as always, let's keep it an image-free thread. Thanks.
Daily Dose of Cute
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 62
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Here are some things in the news today:
There is more news about former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his ties to Russia. I will have a dedicated piece on that news later today.
[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk at ABC News: Russian Mafia Boss Still at Large after FBI Wiretap at Trump Tower. The key takeaway here, however, is: "For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York. The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world's most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov."
[CN: Injury] Mike Hayes at BuzzFeed: A Russian Lawyer Involved in a U.S. Prosecution Mysteriously Plunged from His Apartment Window. "A Russian lawyer who was a witness in a US federal court case connected to the largest money-laundering scheme in Russian history was hospitalized after plunging four stories on Tuesday in Moscow, a spokesman said. There are conflicting reports about what happened to the lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov. His spokesman, William Browder—who was an alleged victim in the money-laundering scheme—says he was 'thrown from the fourth floor of his apartment building.' Russian media, often controlled by the state, says he 'fell while he and workers were trying to lift a Jacuzzi into his apartment.' ...Last week, after plenty of drama, Trump fired Preet Bharara, the high-profile US attorney who was handling the case."
[CN: Death] CBS News: Possible U.S. Strike Allegedly Kills 33 Civilians in School. "The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which relies on an extensive network of contacts on the ground in Syria and which generally proves a reliable source of information on the war, said coalition aircraft 'most likely' carried out the strike but did not explain how it reached that conclusion. ...The reports about the strike in Mansoura come less than a month after the same monitoring groups said a U.S.-led coalition aircraft had hit a village just east of Raqqa, killing at least 20 civilians."
Ju-min Park at Reuters: North Korea Missile Test Fails, U.S. and South Say, as Tensions Simmer. "A North Korean missile appeared to have exploded on Wednesday just after it was launched, the U.S. and South Korean militaries said after detecting the latest in a series of weapons tests by the nuclear-armed state that have alarmed the region. ...The increasing frequency of the missile tests has fueled a growing sense of urgency over how to respond to the isolated, unpredictable state. North Korea launched four ballistic missiles from near its west coast on March 6 and this week conducted a rocket engine test that its leader, Kim Jong Un, said opened 'a new birth' of its rocket industry."
The Editors at the Wall Street Journal: A President's Credibility. "If [Donald] Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We're not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods. ...Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump's approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn't show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he's a fake President."
Susan E. Rice at the Washington Post: When the White House Twists the Truth, We Are All Less Safe. "The foundation of the United States' unrivaled global leadership rests only in part on our military might, the strength of our economy and the power of our ideals. It is also grounded in the perception that the United States is steady, rational, and fact-based. To lead effectively, the United States must maintain respect and trust. So, when a White House deliberately dissembles and serially contorts the facts, its actions pose a serious risk to America's global leadership, among friends and adversaries alike."
Hey, remember when Judge Gorsuch insisted he was a fair judge? Well, he gave away the game today.
Gorsuch's use of “Democrat” as an adjective is more of a red flag than any ruling he’s been questioned on so far. https://t.co/r106IVzvAn
— Jesse Wegman (@jessewegman) March 21, 2017
Whoooooooooooooops!
Speaking of Gorsuch... Glenn Thrush at the New York Times: 'I'll Criticize Judges,' Trump Says, Hours After a Scolding for Doing Just That. "Hours after Mr. Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court declared during Senate confirmation hearings that he was 'disheartened' about Mr. Trump's unrestrained attacks on the judicial branch, the president was at it again, calling out the federal judges who have halted his second executive order banning travel from certain predominantly Muslim nations. 'Somebody said I should not criticize judges. O.K. I'll criticize judges,' Mr. Trump said on Tuesday night at a fund-raising dinner for the National Republican Congressional Committee—reiterating his pique at a federal court judge in Hawaii who last week placed a stay on his second travel order."
Nik DeCosta-Klipa at Boston.com: Boston and 4 Other Massachusetts Cities Included on ICE's First Sanctuary City List. "Five Massachusetts cities, including Boston, are among the jurisdictions listed as uncooperative in a new public list released by federal immigration officials Monday. ...It is unclear whether there are any immediate policy implications of being included on the federal list. [Mr.] Trump has pledged to defund sanctuary cities—a tactic that would appear to run into legal roadblocks, if not widespread challenges."
K.K. Rebecca Lai, Troy Griggs, Max Fisher, and Audrey Carlsen at the New York Times: Is America's Military Big Enough? "Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which he said would be 'one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.' ...Trump has not articulated a new mission that would require a military spending increase. This has left analysts wondering what goals he has in mind. ...Gordon Adams, a former senior White House national security budget officer, said, 'Unless you decide you're going to war—and going to war soon—nobody keeps a large military.'"
[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Blair Miller at ABC Denver: Former Colorado GOP Chair Steven Curtis Charged with Voter Fraud. "The former chair of the Colorado Republican Party is charged with forgery and voter fraud for allegedly forging his wife's mail-in ballot from last year's election, according to court records and sources. ...Curtis spoke about voter fraud ahead of last year's election. 'It seems to be, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats,' he told KLZ 560. ...The Colorado Secretary of State's Office says this is the only voter fraud case that has ended in charges stemming from last year's election."
[CN: LGBT erasure] Zack Ford at Think Progress: Trump Administration Erases LGBT People from Survey of Older Adults. "This week, the Department of Health and Human Services arbitrarily decided to just stop counting LGBT people in two critical surveys, eliminating vital data collection that could be used to help address the health disparities that LGBT people are known to experience."
Charles Ornstein at ProPublica: We Fact-Checked Lawmakers' Letters to Constituents on Health Care. "As the debate to repeal the law heats up in Congress, constituents are flooding their representatives with notes of support or concern, and the lawmakers are responding, sometimes with form letters that are misleading. A review of more than 200 such letters by ProPublica and its partners at Kaiser Health News, Stat, and Vox, found dozens of errors and mischaracterizations about the ACA and its proposed replacement. The legislators have cited wrong statistics, conflated health care terms, and made statements that don't stand up to verification."
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Shaker Gourmet
Whatcha been cooking up in your kitchen lately, Shakers?
Share your favorite recipes, solicit good recipes, share recipes you've recently tried, want to try, are trying to perfect, whatever! Whether they're your own creation, or something you found elsewhere, share away.
Also welcome: Recipes you've seen recently that you'd love to try, but haven't yet!
It's Past Time for Dems to Get Serious About Propaganda
[Content Note: References to sexual assault]
One of the major stories this election was "fake news," or more properly, propaganda. The latest round of revelations on the Russia investigations reveals a probe into whether Breitbart, InfoWars, and other American conservative propaganda sites were actively assisting Russian bots and operatives. This, on top of Ben Shreckinger's terrific piece at Politico, World War Meme, offers a frightening look into how twisted and intense the coordinated propaganda efforts against Hillary Clinton really were.
4¢han's Gamergaters received open support from Breitbart as they spread vicious hate against Clinton and her supporters, driving us underground via the harassment they've perfected from years of anti-feminist harassment. Their propaganda network—memes made by 4¢han, spread across social media, repeated at Breitbart and by hundreds of Russian-linked fake news sites—may not have been sophisticated, but it provided repetition and enlargement, powerful propaganda weapons that make sure no one escapes the barrage of negative narratives.
And yet, it's striking to me how little of this seems to be seeping into the postmortems of 2016 and the discussions of rebuilding the Democratic party. The influence of Russian and conservative propaganda, along with James Comey's FBI investigation were problems, is acknowledged. But the "real" is constantly defined as Hillary was a "terrible," candidate, a "flawed" candidate, etc. If only we'd nominated somebody else, anybody else—Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders! BernieWouldaWon! The problem is the corrupt, out-of-touch, wealthy Democratic Party, and so on, and so forth.
The fantasy that Clinton was a terrible candidate masks the reality that she was actually a very good candidate. One whom propaganda managed to almost totally destroy.
And it will happen with the next very good candidate too.
"Better candidates" won't solve this.
Now, that is not to deny mis-steps from the Clinton campaign—and there were some, though not the kind that sink elections. That is not to deny that Clinton's policies didn't please everyone—but no candidate I have ever voted for has done that. And it's most certainly not to deny the role that misogyny played in making people willing to believe the propaganda, nor to deny the Democrats have a very thin bench, and need to work hard to identify strong new candidates for the national as well as state and local scenes.
But consider what Liss was saying to me earlier (and which I share with her permission):
The thing about Hillary Clinton that everyone fucking ignores is that all those investigations which were used to create the illusion of corruption ALL FOUND that she had done nothing wrong. They were partisan witch hunts that turned up nothing. Which absolutely hurt her, but also made her the most thoroughly vetted candidate in history. They didn't turn up anything "new" on her during the entire 18 month campaign.
We aren't going to get a candidate like that again. Not one who is so well-vetted. Not one who is so clean. Not one who is so well-known. Think of how well-known and well-vetted she was, and what propaganda was STILL able to do to her. Now imagine what they can do to someone with legit skeletons in their closet who doesn't have the global recognition she has.
This is new territory, and yet the American left generally, so far as I can see, is reluctant to face this reality.
To be clear: The Republican Smear Machine is nothing new. And it's helpful to remember that they don't shy away at making shit up, nor at attacking strengths in order to turn them into weaknesses. The despicable purple Band-aids used to mock John Kerry's war wounds and the smears against the Clinton Foundation (despite its financial transparency) are two examples. But the intense coordination of the GOP smears with propaganda outlets, Russian bots and trolls, and the Gamergate meme element is something new. I doubt the GOP would have come up with the notion that Hillary Clinton was a predator of children without the 4¢han gang, who, according to the Politico story, made up the pizza-Hillary-child-predator attacks because they themselves call child p0rnography "cheese pizza."
The perfect candidate will not save us. Because, remember the goal: It's not just to defeat a candidate, but to weaken him or her. For the Russians, it's to weaken faith in the democratic process itself.
Consider this: If Clinton had managed to pull it out somehow, think how the propaganda could have been parlayed into a "cloud of doubt." The GOP were already planning to press forward with their FBI investigations. She'd have been dealing with child p0rn accusations and other rumors designed to make her not just disliked, but utterly despised, demonized, discredited, much as Obama was for 8 years on the far right. The Tea Party would have been galvanized again.
As it was, how many people stayed home or voted 3rd Party because "they were the same"? That, in itself, is a Russian triumph: Managing to convince American voters that a lifelong public servant with a solid record of helping women and children was the same as a multiple-bankruptcy real estate developer/reality star whose past—by his own confession—is littered with harassment and assault.
Consider the claim that BernieWouldaWon. This is based on many things, but there's a base assumption that he wasn't "flawed" or "tarnished" or whatever word we are using today. That Clinton's "flaws" brought her down.
Now, let's grant that Sanders, or any other Hypothetical Perfect Dem, has not been the target of GOP lies for a quarter century. That helps.
But let's also recognize that Sanders enjoyed an easy primary. For all the claims of how vicious the Clinton campaign was, the fact is that they remembered the rule: Never harm a primary opponent so badly it will wound them in the general. The GOP would have no such compunction—nor would the Russians, the propaganda "news," or the meme-makers.
And yes, they would have had plenty of material. Remember, the goal isn't just to defeat the Democrat. It's to discredit him or her and democracy itself.
Don't believe me? Okay. Let's play Bernie Woulda Been Flawed. How would that go down? Well, here's a few samples.
